sangha

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a book a cou­ple years back on mind­ful eat­ing. It’s his take on how to han­dle the prob­lem we seem to have — in American cul­ture, any­way — con­trol­ling our weight.

Not sur­pris­ingly, for him it comes back to mind­ful­ness. Being aware of what you’re doing, as you’re doing it. Vipassana med­i­ta­tion can help with that. So can turn­ing off the TV at mealtimes.

My fiancée and I are in the midst of wed­ding plans, and are crash-​​dieting (sort of) to fit into our respec­tive out­fits a lit­tle bet­ter. (I just don’t have the hips to carry off a dress the way I used to.)

Something that has been rather forcibly demon­strated to me is that I’ve had a very poor idea of suf­fi­ciency in food for years. What I mean by that is I’ve been in the habit, for a long time, of con­sum­ing more than I need — but believ­ing that I’ve been doing all right. I didn’t think I was over­do­ing any­thing; I felt I was keep­ing things fairly well balanced.

I was, too. Fish, fruits, veg­gies, grains, nuts, cheeses. Olive oil, pasta. The stuff that’s sup­posed to be health­ier. Very few fast foods (I don’t even know what a McMenu includes any more; it’s changed that much since the last time I was in there), not many pack­aged or over-​​processed foods.

That wasn’t (and isn’t) the prob­lem. The prob­lem was the quan­tity, not the qual­ity. The choices I was mak­ing were fine, but I was snork­ing down some­thing on the order of 2000 to 2500 calo­ries per day of it.

That doesn’t work. Even a diet com­posed of the most health­ful foods imag­in­able will cause net weight gain in suf­fi­cient quantities.

At my age and activ­ity level, I seem to be in an inter­est­ing zone where the num­ber of calo­ries I con­sume, divided by ten, is a decent pre­dic­tor of my weight. So 2000 calo­ries means 200 pounds, which is well above my ideal. 1800 would be 180, 1600 160, and so on.

Well, for the last five or six weeks, we’ve been lim­it­ing our­selves to 1200 calo­ries daily, and we haven’t reduced our exer­cise lev­els. (She’s still run­ning; I’m still bik­ing.) And yes, the weight is com­ing off. That isn’t surprising.

What is sur­pris­ing, to me, is that at 1200 calo­ries per day, I don’t feel like I’m starv­ing. I have to be very con­scious of the kinds of foods I eat — more pro­teins, more ‘healthy’ fats, con­sid­er­ably fewer car­bo­hy­drates — but it’s not a star­va­tion diet, and it’s not a sub­sis­tence diet.

That was not what I expected at all. I fig­ured I’d have ter­ri­ble energy lev­els, that I’d be sugar crash­ing all the time, that I’d want to sleep for 17 hours a day (well, that part wouldn’t be new or peculiar).

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One of the ‘spokes’ on the ‘wheel of the dharma’ — which sym­bol­izes the eight­fold path — is right (ideal, skill­ful) action.

Buddhism is delib­er­ately vague about what con­sti­tutes right action. I think the rea­son for that is because there’s just no way to know, absolutely and with com­plete reli­a­bil­ity, what ‘right action’ means for dif­fer­ent peo­ple in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. I’d like to think Gotama real­ized that. It’s grat­i­fy­ing to imag­ine that, 2500 years ago, he under­stood that he couldn’t lay down solid rules which would apply uni­ver­sally to all peo­ples of all nations all through­out time.

That’s quite dif­fer­ent from a more fun­da­men­tal­ist or abso­lutist phi­los­o­phy, which tends to insist that it has all the answers to every­thing, all the time, and that any­one which doesn’t agree is wrong, end of dis­cus­sion. That’s prob­a­bly a reas­sur­ing world­view for peo­ple within it, but for the rest of us, it makes con­ver­sa­tion unnec­es­sar­ily difficult.

Right action includes some pretty obvi­ous things, such as not inten­tion­ally doing any­thing that causes harm to oth­ers; not inten­tion­ally doing any­thing that does dam­age to the places we inhabit; and not inten­tion­ally act­ing against oth­ers’ indi­vid­ual rights.

Beyond that, there aren’t too many par­tic­u­lars (unless you’re a monk or nun), though there are some sketches regard­ing sex­ual behav­ior, since that’s some­thing pretty much all soci­eties have reg­u­lated in one way or another since the begin­ning of the notion of society.

But even these sketches are just that — sketches. We’re advised to avoid vio­lat­ing oth­ers’ mar­riage con­tracts (adul­tery), advised against using untruth to get sex, advised against using our per­sonal power to get sex (both in the sense of rape and of tak­ing advan­tage of a sub­or­di­nate), advised to avoid sex­ual con­tact with those under the pro­tec­tion of their fam­ily (this includes youths, of course; but inter­est­ingly, this can be extended to include the men­tally and phys­i­cally challenged).

You’ll notice, if you’re pay­ing atten­tion, that there are some things left undis­cussed in these guidelines.

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You see things dif­fer­ently on a bike, mostly because you’re trav­el­ing more slowly, you’re not enclosed, and you’re pay­ing atten­tion to dif­fer­ent stim­uli than when you’re in a car. This morn­ing I saw, lying dis­carded on the tar­mac at an inter­sec­tion, a condom.

I don’t bring this up for the squick fac­tor. I bring it up because the first thing I thought of in response to it was that bliss is ephemeral. (Well, to the extent you can think of sex as being bliss­ful.) My next thought was, hey, at least they used a condom.

From there I began think­ing about the val­ues we seem to have as a soci­ety. It occurred to me that our entire pre­vail­ing social atti­tude toward sex can be summed up with the image of a con­dom tossed onto the side of a road: Something to be indulged briefly and imper­son­ally, then care­lessly dis­carded, because hey, we’re not even sup­posed to be doing it in the first place.

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Time is a mys­tery. It’s been defined as an increase in entropy, as the expan­sion of the cos­mos, as the prop­a­ga­tion of elec­tro­mag­netic waves from a radi­ant point. One of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of time is that it is asym­met­ri­cal. For instance, you can mix together some eggs, milk, flour, sugar, and but­ter, sub­ject it all to heat­ing, and pro­duce a lovely cake — but you def­i­nitely can­not sep­a­rate out all those ingre­di­ents into their com­po­nent parts once you’re done. You can bake a cake, but you can­not unbake one.

The thing is that there is no sin­gle inter­ac­tion of any­thing within the cake that pre­cludes this from hap­pen­ing. The mix­ing, the phys­i­cal reac­tions of the mol­e­cules — and the atoms — within the cake, even the energy imparted by the heat­ing in the oven, is all reversible within the frame­work of physics. There is no law of physics, in other words, that pre­vents you from unbak­ing the cake — yet you still can­not do it.

This is called the arrow of time. What it means is that, as far as we are con­cerned, time moves in one direc­tion only, from order into entropy, from past into future.

But the prob­lem with this is that it’s a mechan­i­cal descrip­tion. All of our def­i­n­i­tions of time express them­selves in its effects, but none of them get down to cause. Even the cos­mo­log­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of time — that it’s a bound­ary con­di­tion that was set when the uni­verse began expand­ing — just bypasses the question.

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Physics is a field that con­tin­ues to sur­prise. In the early 1900s the belief was that it was effec­tively fin­ished — apart from a few minor details, there wasn’t any­thing new left to dis­cover. Those few minor details ended up being the set of insights Einstein had which rev­o­lu­tion­ized our under­stand­ing of energy, mat­ter, space, and time.

While finess­ing what we now know as General Relativity, Einstein came across some­thing that didn’t make sense to him; actu­ally it so offended his sense of order that he chose to work around it rather than explore it. Later physi­cists, fol­low­ing up on Einstein’s work, found that it led to inde­ter­mi­nacy, which essen­tially means that we can­not simul­ta­ne­ously know a particle’s speed and its loca­tion. The physics of Quantum Mechanics devel­oped from that.

More recently, the LHC in Europe may have found traces of a sub­atomic par­ti­cle which might or might not tie together cur­rent the­o­ries in physics; or it could be a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. And else­where, devel­op­ments con­tinue in teleportation.

Not the Star Trek ver­sion of it. So far it’s only sub­atomic par­ti­cles that have been tele­ported, but it is hap­pen­ing. Essentially what hap­pens is a particle’s state is ana­lyzed, dur­ing which the par­ti­cle is dis­as­sem­bled, after which it gets reassem­bled on the other side of the room. That it’s the same par­ti­cle is con­firmed by its quan­tum state — a sort of fin­ger­print. Eventually, we can imag­ine the same hap­pen­ing for larger items such as atoms, marsh­mal­lows, miss­ing socks, and pos­si­bly even liv­ing enti­ties such as gold­fish or people.

So sup­pose you step into a tele­porter one day, and zap your­self to the other side of the planet, where you spend some time shop­ping and eat­ing inter­est­ing foods. When you’re fin­ished you tele­port your­self back home. As you step out of the booth, you’re accosted by a wild-​​eyed per­son who insists that you’re no longer you, that you’re actu­ally dead.

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I can’t say with any­thing like cer­tainty that I know what hap­pens to us when we die. To some extent I think it might be a bit like the reverse of what hap­pened at birth, only a bit more rapidly and drastically.

Of course, what hap­pens at birth is itself an inter­est­ing ques­tion; after all, fetuses are viable before birth, capa­ble of liv­ing with­out the womb. You have to go back a num­ber of weeks to find a fetus that can’t sur­vive on its own. What’s intrigu­ing is that you don’t get signs of coher­ent aware­ness, of a string­ing together of con­scious­ness into the nar­ra­tive that calls itself I, until well after the baby has come into the world.

Death, on the other hand, can be abrupt. It can just as eas­ily be a grad­ual process, one that hap­pens slowly enough for every­one to get used to the idea. I have a feel­ing that grad­ual deaths are eas­ier for the loved ones to deal with.

From another per­spec­tive, though, we’re really dying all the time, in the sense that the per­son I was a minute ago — or an hour or a day ago — is not the same as the per­son that I am now. Even rel­a­tively minor events have changed my per­spec­tive, so it can be argued that the past me is dead in one sense. However, there is his­tory, there is a con­ti­nu­ity, there is that con­tin­u­ing motion of con­scious­ness whose entire job is to join together dis­crete, dis­parate events and sen­sa­tions into a beaded string of appar­ent wholeness.

There’s a rea­son for all this phi­los­o­phy in this post.

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