sangha

If you’ve been here before, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed we have a dif­fer­ent visual approach now. Ah, such is impermanence.

Hope you like the changes, and find it eas­ier to work with overall.

The ques­tion is: Can you for­give yourself?

Probably you didn’t see it, but in the night, I qui­etly upgraded this blog from an older engine to the newer.

I’m glad it’s over. Live upgrades can be rather … tricky.

Just sent txt to my con­tacts — fam­ily, friends, etc. — telling them I’d be offline totally on 12/​25, to take a day in retreat. No phone, no email, no Twitter, no txt. It’s amaz­ing how many expla­na­tions I had to offer for that. “Why?” and “What’s wrong?” and “Do you need help?” and so on.

And a good friend won­ders why I refuse to cre­ate a Facebook account. Ah, indeed, attach­ment is suffering.

Makes me won­der why I haven’t done it more in the last year, so they’d be used to it by now. I feel a res­o­lu­tion a-​​brewin’.

There is no answer, at least not a facile one, for deal­ing with what — for want of a bet­ter term — we can call the Human Condition. Some find it in Christianity; some in Islam; some in any one of a dozen other philo­soph­i­cal or reli­gious systems.

Does Buddhism seem to work? For some peo­ple, yes. In some ways, yes. It seems to work for me, and I’m an athe­ist, Erisian Discordian, and an ordained min­is­ter. (If I seem to con­tra­dict myself, well, then, I con­tra­dict myself; I am vast, I con­tain etc.)

The day to day slog doesn’t change. Some days I’m up, oth­ers I’m down. Some days I bounce out of bed ready to face the world; oth­ers I’d rather pull the cov­ers up, roll over and nap until 3 PM. Some days I want to dress up and look nice; oth­ers I’m happy to be the worst of the Wal-​​Mart crowd. In this respect I am pre­cisely like every­one else that has ever lived on this planet, every human — and like all the oth­ers that will fol­low until H. sapi­ens is no longer rec­og­niz­able as a species.

What I think I get from Buddhism is a broader per­spec­tive. Equanimity. I have the abil­ity to rec­og­nize that these ebbs and neaps are sim­ply part of life. They come and go. Everything passes.

Well, in this respect, how is Buddhism really all that dif­fer­ent from Marcus Aurelius’s obser­va­tion that, after one’s for­ti­eth year, one has already expe­ri­enced most of what life con­tains, and shouldn’t be too sur­prised by any­thing any more? (My age at this writ­ing is 41.)

How much of this appar­ent equa­nim­ity today, in other words, is due to Buddhism in my life — ver­sus plain old expe­ri­ence and introspection?

I’m work­ing toward licen­sure to fost/​adopt par­ent — I want to be a dad. The longer it takes, the more sure I seem to be; this is one of the very few things left in the world that I think I need to try. It’s the only thing I feel I truly lack.Not really rel­e­vant; it’s just back­ground. A few months back, hang­ing out at the locally owned café, I made the acquain­tance of the week­end dish­washer, a teen kid with whom I con­nected, entirely and totally, after about nine to eleven sec­onds of con­ver­sa­tion. The inter­dig­i­ta­tion was strong and a lit­tle eerie in its depth. He’s how I hope my future son will be, very bright, very sweet and just a good kid all around.Where he works there isn’t a pair of dish­gloves that fit him — the set there is too small. So when he takes them off at the end of his shift, they wrin­kle and fold back on them­selves, and end up in a dis­or­dered heap on the rack, in a way cer­tain to irri­tate the store’s owner. He can’t help it, and being a teen is a bit scat­ter­brained, so he tends to for­get the state of the gloves.A few weeks back I was in the café, and there were the gloves, disheveled and hope­less in a rub­bery heap where he’d left them the night before. I smiled to see them, think­ing of the bun­dle of energy and life that had touched them last, think­ing of noth­ing else in par­tic­u­lar, and then real­ized that what I was see­ing was a deep les­son — that a rum­pled pair of gloves would be mean­ing­less, anony­mous, just a bit of noise to most observers; but they meant some­thing to me — they were a cipher whose code I could read — and that the world is actu­ally full of this noise. View Full Article »

In the last few months my med­i­ta­tion prac­tice has deep­ened con­sid­er­ably. In November, dur­ing a day-​​long at-​​home retreat I decided to stop pin­ing for a prac­tice group here in this lit­tle town I live in, and actu­ally inau­gu­rate one. The result, Sangha, has had mixed atten­dance. Some Sundays I have one or two peo­ple. Some Sundays I have none. (Those are what I call slow days.) Attendance is by peo­ple new to med­i­ta­tion, expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors with lit­tle or no Buddhist back­ground, and prac­tic­ing Buddhists.Lately I’ve been ret­ro­spect­ing on my prac­tice, how it’s changed me, and what parts of it I accept now that I didn’t used to — and what parts I feel much more con­fi­dent about reject­ing. A big shift for me took place in about 2002, when I finally gave up on the notion of hav­ing a soul. That was sur­pris­ingly painful, given that I was an avowed athe­ist by then, and had been for half a decade or so. It was strange to see the illu­sion, the cling­ing to a notion, and to watch it evap­o­rate as I let it go​.It wasn’t that I felt I was slid­ing into a nihilis­tic point­less life; to the con­trary, I was find­ing all sorts of new ground to explore and expe­ri­ence. It was sim­ply the idea that I missed, a sense of los­ing some­thing I’d always taken to be there, a con­stant com­pan­ion. I felt much the same way when Carl Sagan died, and again with Douglas Adams, and even Jim Henson. These peo­ple had done things that mat­tered to me, and though I’d never met them I still felt I’d lost some­thing impor­tant when their minds were at last deliquesced.Hope is a strange thing. We talk about it, we claim to have it, we put energy into it — but I don’t know how thor­oughly we actu­ally ana­lyze it. When some­one we know is sick, we say, “I hope you get well soon” — but do we, really? Or is it more likely that, thirty sec­onds later, I’ve for­got­ten all about Sylvia and her cold? How is this an expres­sion of hope for her recovery?And is it really even much of a hope? Colds are not, by and large, fatal; gen­er­ally they’re lit­tle more than incon­ve­niences. (Though the two-​​week marathon rhi­novi­ral infec­tion I just got over, which included seven full days of full sinus con­cretiza­tion, seemed a hell of a lot more than that when I was in the mid­dle of it.) So when we express the “hope” that some­one will recover soon from a cold, what are we doing apart from spout­ing vain plat­i­tudes? View Full Article »