Tag: Kenneth Folk

Twitter, Distraction, and Geeky Buddhists

By the autumn of 2010 I was on the last leg of my career, although I didn’t know it yet. I had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia almost six years earlier, and had been managing to maintain a full-time schedule during that time. My symptoms were frequent upper back and neck pain, headache, unreliable sleep, and “brain fog”—a sense of operating without full command of my intellectual faculties. Sitting at a computer for long hours was especially miserable. In the meantime, any time I tried to settle down to reading something I would start to nod off. The one positive outcome of the diagnosis is that it made me more likely to keep up with regular exercise, which helped enormously.

I had always had a tendency to distraction and difficulty focusing; in fact, at one point I was even diagnosed with adult ADD. The one place where I found myself completely on task was the classroom. Teaching may have been stressful in some respects, but the pleasure of interacting with students kept me feeling fulfilled in my job. What was difficult was prioritizing tasks, “juggling” (a word I have come to hate) the responsibilities of class preparation, research and writing, and committee work. The advent of technology only made things worse. I was distracted all day by email, and the entertainment potential of the Internet was a constant source of temptation. So, knowing that I was making a huge mistake, I signed up for a Twitter account. I had already been spending way too much time on Facebook and did not need another drain on my attention, but I had just taken a summer workshop on learning to navigate an iPad and got sucked in.

Twitter proved to be a greater instant-gratification device than I had ever experienced before. I pursued a number of interests, watching intently as tweets accumulated in real time. I also browsed a bit and found corners of the Internet that I would not have accessed otherwise. It was on one of these random excursions that I hit upon Buddhist Geeks. The name itself was intriguing, so I read further. There was an interview with a guy named Kenneth Folk, who claimed to be enlightened. I had never before known anyone who would say something like that so openly. He even claimed that others who followed a similar path to his could become enlightened as well, and he mentioned a book by a certain Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. It was apparently available in PDF format for free.

My prior exposure to Buddhism had left me impressed, yet unwilling to commit for a variety of reasons. Two years earlier I had briefly attended a meditation center in my town and brought home some books from their library. After reading about traditional Buddhist beliefs and cosmology, I thought, I have enough trouble with the doctrinal system of Christianity; I don’t need to get myself enmeshed in another one. But a year later I did some intensive reading for a potential new course that included units on eastern spiritual traditions, and wondered again whether I might want to pursue it further. Then when I saw the interview with Kenneth Folk and the claim that ordinary people could get enlightened, I thought, “That sounds like a cool thing to do,” but didn’t really see it applying to me. Nevertheless, I found the link to Daniel Ingram’s book and downloaded the file onto my Kindle.

It was awkward scrolling through it on that platform, but something about it intrigued me, beginning with the author’s description of himself on the title page as “The Arahant Daniel M. Ingram” (arahant being the Sankrit term for an enlightened individual). Who on earth would say such a thing? The subtitle was “An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book.” From the outset the book was direct, quirky, and borderline confrontational. The mysterious author identified himself as a gen-X emergency room doctor, clearly a highly accomplished person. I immediately began to view his life in comparison with my own, and proceeded with a mixture of fascination and jealousy.

The message of the book was simple: it is possible to experience genuine transformations by training the mind in meditation, all the way to what we call enlightenment. There is a series of stages outlined in a fifth-century Buddhist commentary, and an assortment of powerful meditation techniques (or to use the author’s term, “technologies”), which lead to awakening when taken seriously and pursued diligently, just as Kenneth Folk had said in his interview. As I continued to read, however, I reached a point where I could no longer follow the author’s meaning, and so I set it aside, once more thinking to myself that it would be intriguing to try something like that, but not for me.

Eventually, that book would change my life. To this day, whenever someone asks what is the most significant book I’ve ever read, I say it’s that one, hands down. Nothing else even comes close.

 

The Three Characteristics: Suffering

Dukkha, “suffering” (also translated as “unsatisfactoriness”), is central to the Buddha’s teaching; in fact, he reputedly said, “I teach only suffering, and the end of suffering.” We’ve already encountered the role of suffering in the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha also appears as one of the three marks or characteristics of existence, permeating our lives and our surroundings through and through. There are things that please us, beguile us, hook us in; but none of these things satisfies.

When we’re young, we are full of plans for what we want to do with our lives. For most of us, these plans might include things like a career, marriage, children, a nice place to live, money to spend on necessities and a few luxuries, travel, hobbies, good food, nice clothes, and friends. Young people are encouraged by their families and teachers to look to the future and to consider their immediate difficulties to be transitory. I recall a conversation with my mother and one of her friends, during a time in my life when I didn’t fit in. “Some day,” they told me, “none of this will matter.” They were wrong: as I became an adult, the identity I formed in adolescence proved to be remarkably tenacious.

Enter the Buddha and his teachings regarding dukkha. One of my dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, has said that “the Buddha is not your friend.” Warm, rosy predictions of a brilliant life in samsara, the turning wheel of birth and death, are entirely unfounded. Some adults in our own culture might agree with him once we hit our midlife crisis, when we realize that our fond hopes in youth have not materialized; or maybe they have, but without bringing the happiness we had expected. People may be tempted to jump ship, make a career change or look for a new partner, or buy a new house or car they can’t really afford. It might work out in the short run, but letdown is inevitable.

From time to time I imagine my life as if it had been different in some significant way. Maybe I never had the stage fright, and would be able to perform in music ensembles without stress. Maybe I had the kind of systematic focus that would allow me to work an eight-hour day, go home and relax, engage in an enjoyable hobby, and then go to sleep without difficulty. Maybe I wasn’t plagued by the grandiose illusion that I needed a big, fat career, and so would never be constantly comparing myself to others, or feeling like a failure just doing a good job day in and day out. In other words, I imagine a life without dukkha.

This Other Laurel is still a meditator, I’ve decided. She gets up early, makes herself a cup of tea, maybe takes a brisk walk around the block, and then settles down for some cushion time. After work she heads to the meditation center for a half hour sit with a group before heading home. She also volunteers in her community (because of course, she has the energy for it). She lives simply but comfortably; she is not tempted to spend more than she earns. Is she married? Sometimes I imagine her as single, but it seems like a lonely life to me, so I give her my husband, except he’s the Other Husband, also free of dukkha.

I have found a place for this paragon to live, and have even imagined her car and her wardrobe. The entire fantasy seems to be an equivalent of the dreams I had as a young person, except instead of dreaming of my imaginary future, I dream of an imaginary past. But although I can see the outer trappings of this person’s life, I am unable to make sense of what lies within. I can only try to imagine the absence of things like stress, depression, boredom, regret, negative judgments, and anxiety, all the while knowing that it is impossible.

Traveling allows us to see other places, and imagine what life might be like for us if we lived there. We read novels or watch movies and television shows in order to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. Maybe we fall in love with one of the characters—the protagonist’s love interest, most likely—or imagine ourselves working in that person’s occupation. Such experiences help us to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a human in the world, to place ourselves in another person’s skin or context, which is an essential component of a moral education. Still, they can never be more than the product of our imaginings.

I have recently longed to move somewhere else, either to the city that is an hour’s drive from here or to a warmer climate, or maybe even out of the country altogether. These longings are accompanied by imaginings of Other Laurels living in Other Places with the Other Husband. Yet several years ago I looked out the kitchen window at the trees in my neighbor’s yard, and just realized, “This is it!” I laughed. It was so simple that I might not even have noticed. This is it, just this. This is all that is it. No other, no else. Just this.