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).

I know, intellectually, that we have a problem in American culture with the notion of sufficiency, of satiety. We are saturated with messages urging us to consume, to celebrate, to ingest, to engulf, to take and take and take. That is how our economy works; it’s an economy of consumption.

That’s a terrible way to run a nation, but it works beautifully if, as a CEO, your only interest is in making as much money as you possibly can, as fast as you can. Which is another manifestation of our lack of satiety. So the problem is self-perpetuating, permeating every social stratum.

I’ve got it, we’ve all got it, everyone in the US has it to some extent, I think. We’re constantly telling ourselves that this one more thing will do, that just a little more won’t hurt. That’s not new to the human condition — Gotama noted it 2500 years ago and called it dukkha — but it’s rare, I think, for it to be so completely integral to the fabric of a society. I don’t imagine such societies can persist very long. They eventually run out of resources, and start looking elsewhere for what they think they need, such as other societies’ resources. That tends not to end well.

I really don’t know what can be done about it, at least not quickly. Somewhere in the last few generations, we seem to have moved from a footing of making things last and of making do, to a footing of wanting things right now, and not caring if they aren’t usable after just a few years.

We lost our vigilance, and became acclimated to this way of life. It’s put down roots so deep that there are some who will argue — in all seriousness, and perhaps with some merit — that reversing our course would tank us permanently, at least economically.

In an absolute sense that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but in a relative sense, that wouldn’t be helpful to millions, possibly billions, of people.

The problem should be obvious. We cannot persist, indefinitely, in mindless, increasing consumption. And for now, the only thing I think we can do is be aware of it in ourselves, individually, and see if we can bring others to the same awareness. Perhaps influence some public policies. Perhaps integrate into our lives the passé slogan, ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’.

We just don’t need anywhere near as much as we’ve been told we do, as we believe we do. From grocery lines to car lots and everywhere in between, that’s something worth trying to remember.

–

TNH’s book (also in Kindle):

http://www.amazon.com/Savor-Mindful-Eating-Life/dp/0061697702/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1337097253&sr=8–4

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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.

I bring this up because of the most recent constitutional amendment that North Carolina enacted. I’m not sure, exactly, what part of marriage was being threatened, nor am I sure what part of marriage has been protected, by NC’s decision to permanently bar same-gender marriage (as well as civil unions for everyone).

What I do know is that the definition of right action has not been taken into consideration, and I can justify that view.

I understand that some people are passionate about their beliefs, and that’s fine. I also know that those people would like to see their beliefs being upheld by all people, everywhere. I can understand that. The world would be a much less confrontational place if everyone thought alike, wouldn’t it?

But here’s the thing. The way to get others to agree with you is not, I think, to compel them to behave as you wish them to. The way to get them to agree with you is to persuade them, in discussion, that your view is the better one. If they agree, they will naturally choose to behave as you wish them to.

Of course not everyone will agree, but is that really so important? Is it truly necessary to, in effect, create boundaries that others must abide by, in the name of defending something nebulous?

Robert Frost had some ideas on this topic as well. In ‘Mending Wall’, he wrote:

‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’

This is part of a larger rumination of a neighbor’s activity in mending a wall along their property lines. The neighbor says, famously, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’, and Frost seems to take that as a suggestion of opposition to his personal freedoms, or possibly a suggestion that we, as humans, choose to impose the boundaries we put up to block one another out.

I can see both points of view, I think; the neighbor has a point. Frost is correct that his trees are not going to invade the neighbor’s and vice-versa, that walls impose limits that are both arbitrary and unnecessary — but his neighbor is correct in the suggestion that separation between one individual and another is sometimes a good thing. At the very least it’s good manners.

Compromise is the essence of any functioning society. Compromise understands that not everyone will (or can) agree all the time on everything. Compromise is about setting boundaries — social distance — between groups, boundaries that allow flexibility and separation. Compromise is, at least in part, about having good manners — and butting into the private lives of other individuals is one very solid example of poor manners.

Good manners, not fences and not walls, make good neighbors.

In choosing to erect the latest wall in an entirely-manufactured battle against basic social rights, North Carolina has essentially guaranteed that a significant minority of the population will not visit or live in its confines any more.

One could argue that those who wish to be involved in same-gender relationships can simply leave. That’s true, by and large. But is that the best choice? Would it be right of me to force a neighbor to leave because of my personal discomfort about something that’s none of my damn business in the first place?

And what of the people being born, right now, in North Carolina? What will happen to them in twenty years, when they’re caught in a social ligature that was never their choice to begin with? It won’t be all of them, but it will certainly be some. Does their guaranteed future pain not matter today?

There’s a hidden cost as well: The cost of shame that the people there must now live with, knowing that they have abrogated freedoms. That quiet shame will fester and become toxic, and undermine the openness of neighbor with neighbor. That’s unfortunate, and the more so because it never needed to be in the first place.

To intentionally encroach on the freedoms of others is not an example of right action. The aftereffects of that encroachment will persist for years, possibly generations. I feel deep empathy for the people caught in this terrible trap — and I feel pity for those who chose to spring it. They have sown their seeds, and will reap appropriately.

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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.

We emphasize sex in our entertainment, our advertising, our very culture, but we don’t seem to want too many people to actually be doing it unless they happen to be involved in a monogamous social contract that is every bit as arbitrary and unnatural as any other contract that’s ever been invented. (Marriage is fine for those who wish to undertake it, of course; but I don’t think we have the right to demand it of anyone.) We attempt to legislate sex, which is as absurd as — and will be as successful as — attempts to legislate food choices.

We don’t want teens doing it. We don’t want gays or lesbians doing it. We don’t want groups doing it. We don’t want … we don’t want … we don’t want. And it seems to me that an awful lot of these don’t-wants are rooted in personal discomfort. I don’t personally like the idea of so-and-so doing such-and-such with whomever; therefore, I will forbid it.

Well who the hell do I think I am?

We create the negativity that’s been attached to sex, and we own the results of our restrictive stance on it. The result of all our invasive nose-poking-into is that sex often becomes furtive, joyless, inconvenient, dangerous, ‘dirty’. We’re so pathologically terrified of sex that there is one state trying to ban teachers from holding hands in front of students. Holding hands!

Why? Because holding hands is a ‘gateway activity’.

Yes. The exact same language used to make pot illegal is the language being used to justify forbidding two people from holding hands in front of schoolkids. As though sex is precisely the same as methamphetamine, as though if kids see two adults holding hands, they’ll spend recess getting sweaty with each other in the janitor’s closet.

That, as much as anything else, exposes just how twisted up we get about sex. What exactly is the thought process on that one? My daughter saw her teacher holding hands with her husband, and the next afternoon she slept with the football team? Come on.

We can’t talk about sex, we can’t discuss it, we can’t treat it as any other human behavior. Our kids might get better instruction in using the toilet than they do in using their genitalia, and that is absolutely shameful. Education, intelligence, and wisdom have a pretty good track record for keeping people out of trouble; ignorance does not.

I can’t tell anyone how to raise their kids; that is none of my business. But it seems to me that the most useful stance to take with sex is to listen to what’s being asked, and the way it’s being asked, and to use context to determine just how much information a given child is ready to absorb.

But in order for that to even be possible, we have to decide for ourselves, individually, how we feel about sex. What tensions surface in the mind when we think of it? What behaviors draw us? What repels us? What values do we attach to sex, and what do those values suggest about ourselves? Where do those values come from, and why do we feel attached to them? What activities do we think are unnatural — and why?

Sex produces very intense responses in each of us, some of them organic, some of them emotional; so it can be extremely hard to be objective, to follow those responses to their sources, to see where our attractions and revulsions come from. Even more than anger or fear, I think sex is a difficult thing to process. That might be one reason why we use terms such as ‘unnatural’ to define behaviors we’re opposed to — we simply can’t see past our own neuroses, and believe them to be as concrete and inviolable as our need to breathe. Thus, some of us oppose gay or lesbian sex (or group sex, or polyamorous sex) for the same reason we oppose murder; we think it’s wrong, period, and steadfastly refuse to look any deeper than that.

Sex is rarely directly discussed in Buddhist canon, apart from generally advising against sexual impropriety. (That’s for the laity; monks and nuns have different guidelines, as would be expected; and Tantric practices are another realm entirely.) It might be a case of refraining from speaking, leaving it up to each of us in personal, social, and historical context to determine for ourselves exactly what we define as impropriety in the first place.

In vipassana and shikantaza practice, I’ve been able to unravel some of the knots in my ‘self’ pertaining to sex, but it does take quite a while to get there — not the least because exploring those threads can bring some intense distractions — so I do have an idea just how difficult a thing it is do to. What I’ve also found, though, is that many things which used to obsess me have loosened their grip (more accurately, I’ve been able to loosen my grip on some things that I used to obsess upon), and that my views of others’ choices and activities have become considerably more relaxed. To me, as long as whomever is involved is all right with whatever’s going on, by and large it’s just not my place to offer judgment.

This is reflexive, by the way, as are good manners in general. (There are times when it seems that a lot of Buddhist philosophy and worldview can be brought down to good manners. Minding one’s own business, live and let live, accepting diversity.) The need for good manners, I think, is starkly brought to light in our approach to others’ sexual behavior. I don’t want anyone poking into my business, so it would be rude of me to do the same to anyone else.

Here, I think the middle path can help us along. I think we can agree that cheap sex which results in a blown-out rubber being tossed from a car window is less than ideal; and I think we can agree that wriggling, sticky, free-for-all behavior is not only unrealistic (for some), but probably not particularly productive overall. Somewhere between those two extremes there lies a vast ground in which we can exist, perhaps a bit uneasily, with the values of our neighbors — but we should take care to keep our views from turning into demands, with sex as with anything else.

It’s all right to be repulsed by what I saw this morning, but I think there are plenty of cases where all we have to do, if we’re disturbed by someone else’s behavior, is close the blinds and get on with our own lives.

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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.

Time has been shown by Einstein to be crucial to our experience of the cosmos — so much so that it’s considered a dimension. Everything we’ve been able to do since Einstein formulated Relativity seems to show that he was right. For instance, the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time, and that’s because of the fundamental speed limit of the universe: Lightspeed.

Here’s how it works. If you’re in an airplane headed north at 100 MPH, and another person is in another plane headed northeast at 100 MPH, after one hour you will have gone 100 miles north — but your friend would have gone only fifty miles north. That’s because for every unit of energy your plane expended heading one direction, your friend’s plane was expending the same amount of energy going in two directions — north and east. (Of course, after that hour, your friend would have gone 50 miles east, while you wouldn’t have traveled east at all.)

Something analogous happens when we move through space and time. If we’re totally at rest in space (not heading east), we’re moving as fast as possible through time (heading north) — and if we’re moving fast through space (east), our motion through time (north) must be reduced. The faster we go, the slower time moves for us.

It’s not just motion. Gravity has the same effect. The closer you are to a massive body in space, the slower time goes for you. So gravity and velocity are equivalent. None of this is in doubt. When it was first proposed by Einstein in the early 20th century, it shook up the world of physics, but it’s considered a truth today.

Where it starts getting interesting is when you begin pushing up your speed (or your mass) to a very high level. If speed in space equals slowness in time, and if lightspeed is the limit, that suggests that you can move at the speed of light, and time would stop for you. (Photons, the fundamental component of light, never age.)

That’s great in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice. The reason we can’t push matter to lightspeed velocity is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do. Even the most powerful particle accelerator we’ve built so far cannot drive particles to lightspeed — though they can get pretty close — regardless of how much juice we pump into them. You’d basically need access to infinite power to propel an object to the speed of light, and of course we don’t have that sort of energy available to us. (Even more intriguing, it’s been suggested that if we move faster than light, we might move backward in time — though that leads to all sorts of conundrums, such as the one suggested by Robert Heinlein in Time Enough for Love. In that novel, Lazarus Long goes back in time and becomes his own grandfather).

I mentioned mass. We know that increased mass slows down time, and there are objects out there which make time grind to a stop. They’re commonly called black holes, and are believed to be the results of the collapse inward of supermassive objects such as stars. Basically, the gravity of the star is so intense that it pulls itself into itself, until there’s no room left for anything to be compressed further — and then it keeps right on collapsing. The outcome is an event horizon (a boundary that represents total inescapability) surrounding a singularity, which is matter compressed to a dimensionless point. The mass of that matter also compresses space and time into that point. So depending on how you look at it, everything inside the event horizon has been crammed down on top of everything else, or — perhaps — everything happening inside the event horizon is happening all at the same time, everywhere.

Black holes appear to be real. We can detect them by two means, the first being the high-energy radiation emitted near them when matter falls into them; the second being by the gravitational lensing they manifest. Gravitational lensing is an optical distortion in the actual “fabric” of the universe, caused by high gravitational sources warping both space and time. (This is another effect that’s been observed, by the way; check out the link for some astronomical photographs.) Some objects are so massive that they visually distort space around themselves — and as you might expect, they also distort time, since time is another dimension in our universe.

All of that is intriguing, but it still leaves us with our basic question. Even if time is a dimension in space,* what is it? How do we perceive it? Is it a fundamental aspect of consciousness? Does it really unfold as we seem to think it does? If the universe is expanding in three spatial dimensions, is it also expanding along a time dimension — and if so, what would that mean, and how would we even know? What is the arrow of time?

My interest in Buddhism began with Zen, as I think it often does with westerners, particularly college students. At the time I was shifting away from the beliefs of my heritage, since I’d found them to be so unsatisfying and frustrating, and since they made a specific demand of me that I could not longer meet. (That demand was that I believe in the literal existence of a literal creator god, who was literally male and, presumably, had a literal penis. Put so plainly, of course it’s an unlikely notion.) I had begun unraveling the weft of Christianity, and with it went the entire Abrahamic religious lineage (Judaism and Islam). So I looked at alternatives, including New Age stuff, Zen, and Hinduism via the vehicle of Hare Krishna teaching.

I couldn’t ultimately get into the New Age approach, because by then I was in a pretty strict “show me” frame of mind. I wanted to know exactly how psychic powers could manifest, without any apparent cause. I wanted to know exactly how a quartz crystal (or any other kind) could alter mood, even though the stones were physically inert. I wanted to know exactly how I could connect to previous lives, when there wasn’t any traceable link from the body I had then to some other body a thousand or more years dead.

Hinduism answered some of that, particularly in the arena of reincarnation, and while I don’t accept its teachings, I think there’s considerably more fairness to them than we typically find in Abrahamic systems. The Hindu theology is really more of a bureaucracy, a bit like the Catholic raft of saints, which I suppose makes sense (it’s a big universe, after all) — and the notion of reincarnation strikes me as being much more fair than the idea that you get one chance and one chance only, and you’d better get it right the first time. (Hinduism was also the only religion I found that spoke of the age of the universe in terms of billions of years.) But it still required that I believe in deities of some kind, and by then I’d more or less let go of the idea of god/s or goddess/es, because it seemed like an unnecessary elaboration, and one that could not be verifiably demonstrated to be true.

Nevertheless I felt need for some kind of philosophical orientation or framework, one that didn’t rely on belief in any deity, and Zen seemed to offer that. The problem was that Zen, as presented to me at the time, seemed unapproachable — almost slippery. The reason for that is because Zen doesn’t really want you to attach yourself to Zen. What I mean by that is Zen is a concept, a framework, a notion, a set of beliefs. But in Buddhism, the “ultimate goal” is to get away from concepts, frameworks, notions, and beliefs. So Zen seems to spend a lot of time telling you what it isn’t, and exerting little to no effort in description of what it is. That makes it hard to get a handle on.

What I liked a lot about Zen (and still do) is how it can sometimes behave as a logic puzzle or a riddle. Those kinds of games have always intrigued me. So I kept coming back to Zen because it seemed like there was something there, even if it was elusive.

The most famous kind of these puzzles is the koan (pronounced ko-ann, not cone). The koan is intended to break past conceptual barriers and give the mind a moment to exist in a space where there are no frameworks of any kind, where there is a kind of freedom from preconception, discernment, or dualistic thinking. This is a space simply of awareness, without fixation on identity, separation, or even definition.

The most commonly-known koan is probably what is the sound of one hand clapping? The question has been reduced to cliché, and has even been lampooned on The Simpsons, but it’s worth exploring nevertheless. When we think of clapping, we always think of two hands, since nothing else makes sense. The koan, then, forces us to look at our notions of clapping, of hands, even of sound — and to resolve the question, we must undergo a kind of conceptual metamorphosis.

There are quite a few other koans — hundreds, if not more — which range from the odd to the bizarre to the annoying, and many of which seem to manifest a kind of distant, Vulcan-style dry humor. Quite a lot of them were compiled in the 13th century by Eihei Dogen, who was instrumental in forming the Soto sect of Zen Buddhism in Japan. They all share the characteristic of taking on our notions of reality, and challenging them, and perhaps leading us to conclusions which can only be expressed in terms of what they aren’t, rather than what they are. Zen’s reputation for opacity is well earned.

Suppose, now, we determine a way to move faster than light, Einsteinian physics be damned. Suppose we go backward in time as a result, and end up in 13th century Japan. Suppose we bump into a Zen monk, and he asks us: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

We could present him with a question of our own: What is the arrow of time?

And he would nod and offer us tea.

==

* Gallifreyan physics doesn’t apply in this context.

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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.

On the face of it, that’s ludicrous. The flavor of your interesting meal still remains on your tongue and your stomach is still full; your arms are loaded with the goodies you bought on your long-distance journey; you’re upright, respiring, and capable of becoming irritated by strangers. So how can you be dead?

To understand this wild assertion, let’s take another look at teleportation. What’s happened to you as you activate the booth is that your entire material being is converted to energy, transmitted elsewhere, and then re-condensed from energy into matter. Well, converting something to energy is precisely the same as disintegrating it. In order for the teleporter to work, it has to actually take you apart on the subatomic level. That sounds pretty lethal, doesn’t it?

Yet, despite having been torn apart atom by atom, here you are, thinking, breathing, digesting, with a complete set of memories going back in time as far as your memories always have.

Suppose there’s a malfunction in the teleporter, and after you’re turned into the energy pattern at home, you step out at your destination — but a second version of you ends up being duplicated back home. That version of you expected to appear on the other side of the world, has not, and is furious. Meanwhile, you at your destination go off on your shopping trip.

By the time you get back home, the other you has had sufficiently different experiences that he’s separate, his own individual with his own recent memories — yet by any biometric measure you’re identical. Even your fingerprints are the same.

What happens next? How do you resolve having a copy of yourself? Which one of you steps into the teleporter to be re-absorbed — and is that even an option?

Suppose instead you’re killed in a tragic accident. As it happens, teleporters retain a copy of energy patterns they’ve processed, just in case something goes wrong on the receiving end, such as a blackout. The pattern can then be reintegrated at the departure point. Your grieving family remembers the trip you took last week, goes to the teleportation center, and asks that your pattern be retrieved from its computer’s storage. A moment later, a reassembled you appears in the teleportation booth with no memory of having been in storage, and with no memory of a fatal accident.

Is it you?

Does a teleporter kill you, or does it transmit your essence in some way, or does it make copies? Were you killed when you were disintegrated, or was the reassembly a kind of re-animation? If you were killed, how can there be a continuity of memory? Everything you know asserts its existence, you keep thinking I am alive.

If this is so, what is the seat of this thing called I? Is it an entity, a process, something separate from your body? If it’s separate, how can it be teleported along with the rest?

These are goofy science fantasy scenarios, but thinking about them can lead to some interesting results. Those who believe in souls might reject the entire idea of teleportation. Or they might insist that duplication of people is impossible, paradoxical. Or that the duplicates would be nonviable, incapable of functioning because they lack the animus necessary to survive. Or that the duplicates are soulless monsters, possibly golems or even bodies inhabited by demons.

If those concerns aren’t yours, we still have the issue of duplication — accidental or otherwise — and what it might mean. And at the core of it all, we must return to the question of what happens to you — or your consciousness — when your body is taken completely apart.

My thought on this is that as long as we’re thinking of our bodies and minds as being monolithic, contiguous entities, we’ll find ourselves baffled by these questions. However, there are other ways of looking at ourselves, and not surprisingly Buddhism offers one of these alternate ways.

In Buddhist psychology, we’re not composed of a body/mind monad, nor a simple body-mind duality. We’re composed instead of five interacting aggregates, broken down into body, sensation, perception, conceptualization, and consciousness. Out of those five aggregates comes an emergent property, awareness — or mind.

These five things are called aggregates because they cannot be broken down into discrete elements; even they are composed of other things. To see how this may be so, consider your body. What it’s made of is rather simple, chemically — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, iron, calcium, and a few other elements — derived from organic sources such as food, air, and water. Yet this aggregate of constantly-changing individual atoms nevertheless appears to retain integrity to a high degree. The same is so of the other aggregates.

Awareness (mind) is an emergent property resulting from the interaction of these aggregates, and appears to be dependent on them, since if you remove any one of those aggregates, awareness vanishes. Yet, if the aggregates are little more than processes that self-perpetuate from interaction with the world around them, and awareness is itself dependent on those aggregates for its existence, what does this suggest about awareness — and about the concept of I, which seems to be central to this awareness?

If the body, in other words, is both a body and a wave of atoms flowing through space, isn’t it valid to see the body as a pattern that continually remakes itself (almost like slow teleportation)? If awareness functions in the same way, how does the I actually function? Why is it not aware of this constant self-remaking? Does it have a blind spot, or does this suggest something else?

If it’s the responsibility of I to stitch together the variegated inputs from the five aggregates into a consistent, apparently seamless narrative, how would the I benefit from seeing where it’s discontiguous? How could it even be made aware of its discontiguous nature in the first place?

Finally, suppose the I actually is discontiguous, and becomes aware of this fact. What sort of effect would that have on the awareness which possesses the concept of I?

The next time you’re planning to teleport somewhere, this might be worth considering. Or, if teleportation isn’t in your agenda, consider instead general anesthesia or even deep sleep. Both are states that attenuate consciousness to such a degree that awareness vanishes — yet we’re able to pick up where we left off, just as soon as we waken. How is this possible, if what we perceive as I really functions as we imagine it does?

Not that you should lose any sleep over it.

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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.

If the emergence of personality is an ongoing process, logically it can be traced backward until you start unweaving the roots of that personality. I’ve done that with a couple of things in myself, specifically my intellectual curiosity and my sense of humor. There are two other things I can trace pretty readily. One is my interest in the German language and culture; the other is my love of Godzilla movies.

I went to Berlin (still West Berlin, back then) when I was five years old. I don’t recall a whole heck of a lot from that trip, as you might expect, though I was struck by the odd sounds of European sirens, the cramped bustle of the U-Bahn (Unterstrassenbahn, subway), the old world architecture, and the way that commercial products were different from their American counterparts. There’s a lot more, but it doesn’t bear repeating here. The point is that in later years these experiences and impressions would serve to fuel my interest in taking German language classes, since it is the language of my ancestry, at least on the distaff side. We went there to visit my maternal great-grandparents.

Godzilla movies, on the other hand, descended from my paternal lineage. They’re terrible, of course; not only are the dubbed voices famously awkward and hopelessly mismatched, but the effects are truly bad. The stories are thinly written morality plays cautioning humans against hubris, and usually have a dash of anti-radiation panic thrown in for seasoning. And the monsters … well. Just guys in rubber suits. But that’s the point. Imagine, just imagine, that you report for work each day, put on a goofy (if uncomfortable) costume, and spend the morning stomping the crap out of intricately detailed balsa wood miniature buildings. If that’s not a working definition of joy, I’m not sure what is.

It was my maternal grandmother who led me to Germany and a greater appreciation of my heritage there, and it was my paternal grandmother who first subjected me to Godzilla. (That was in a movie theater in Needles, California when I was eight or so; she sat beside me and cheered “Go get ’im, Godzilla”, laughing as loudly as I did, having a hell of a good time.) These discrete aspects of my personality did not exist before those two women brought them into my life, and those two women are dead now. They died within a month of each other, this year.

In neither case was it a surprise. There had been time for everyone to be aware of what was happening, and to prepare for it as best we could. In this regard, I believe we were fortunate. I don’t imagine I was better prepared than anyone else.

Buddhism has a couple of different ways of looking at death — at least, the canonical versions of Buddhism do. One view holds that there’s something remarkably akin to reincarnation. This view is prevalent with Tibetan Buddhist variants in particular. The other view uses the term rebirth instead of reincarnation. The difference is subtle; in rebirth, personality is not passed into another body, just tendencies or patterns of behavior. With reincarnation, something akin to a soul is passed along instead.

Both of these views owe their existence at least in part to where Siddhartha Gautama spent his life. The Indus River valley is the cradle of Hinduism, which teaches the doctrine of reincarnation. However, another key teaching in Buddhism is impermanence, which logically must preclude the notion of a soul. So Buddhists might have to tread a very careful line, balancing the idea of rebirth or reincarnation against a philosophy that essentially undermines the very idea.

I don’t believe in either reincarnation or rebirth. I don’t see any way by which either could be possible. So from my perspective, my grandmothers are not merely dead; they aren’t even around in essence any more, being born into another body; nor are they sitting on a cloud, harps in hands, knitting their brows and tsk-tsking at how thoroughly wrong I am. The standing waves of their lives have troughed and ebbed, leaving behind wet sand and slowly fading footprints.

Nonetheless, they persist in other ways, through my DNA, and through the tendencies and preferences they passed to me by example and instruction. This is, ultimately, all that any of us can leave behind. The extemporaneous German language instruction from one, the love for gooey butter cake from the other — these are moments we’d shared, events that continue to ripple through the froth of time into the present through my consciousness, impressions of which I pass along to others here. Eventually my own standing wave will break on the shore of time as well, and still others will recall being affected by some event or other from my own existence. This is as close to rebirth as I know how to come.

Despite my nonbelief in gods or souls, though, I find myself at ease with these deaths, recent though they both are. That’s because I was fortunate enough to encounter a philosophy that allowed me to understand something important about life — or more accurately, something about the way I perceive it. That shift in perception, encapsulated in the second noble truth*, was left behind some 2500 years ago, and continues to alter the human sphere of experience today.

And rather than fill me with a sense of hopelessness or defeat, I find myself experiencing things more keenly and more vitally now, particularly when I ponder the big questions — such as how a million-Mark banknote came into my possession; or how I continue to be filled with glee every time Godzilla flattens another pagoda.

It is my wish that we may all truly understand how ephemeral human existence is, and comport ourselves appropriately in that understanding.

* Roughly, that dissatisfaction, unhappiness and suffering are rooted in the belief that anything is eternal, permanent, or unchanging.

I was primed for Buddhism — all unawares — by the same grandmother that gave me Godzilla, by the way. Spending part of my childhood summers visiting her and my grandfather, I would watch the old TV series Kung Fu. Many years later, watching the show again, I was struck at how completely its blatantly Buddhist evangelism had saturated my consciousness. The lessons from that series are still relevant, despite the way David Carradine broke his own wave on the shore.

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Nowhere is this more obvious than with my book collection. It’ll come as a microscopic surprise that I have a fairly substantial library, probably 80% of which I’ve read. The rest is on the waiting list. When your library contains some 500 titles, that’s obviously a pretty big I’ll-get-to-it-soon stack.

Why on Earth would anyone even want that many books? I used to be asked that sometimes by classmates when I was in high school. (One even commented, in all seriousness, “I’ve never been so bored that I had to read.” It goes without saying that she and I never dated.)

To some extent, this is my father’s influence. I used to go into his study as a child and stare in utter, silent awe at the wall of books there. The collection showed a wide range of tastes, including literature, fantasy, and SF. The first time I read Dangerous Visions, I was about fourteen, and it was from his collection.¹ DV was not the kind of book you’d normally think of a young teen reading, but that was how it went in my family. As long as it was a book, and wasn’t from a porn shop, there was no censorship.

Even before I could really read, my folks had set me up with books. There was a collection of pictorial volumes on the natural world, there were story books, and there was even a dictionary — a cartoon one based on Peanuts, called The Charlie Brown Dictionary. A reasonably good start, by any standard.

Something I used to do during summer vacation was hang out downtown while my dad was working in his law office. Not every day, mind you; this was usually just half a day on Saturdays. While he was slaving over hot torts, I’d go down to the used bookstore, located where the Amtrak waiting room is now in downtown Kingman. There they sold tatty paperbacks at 25 cents each or five for a buck. One of my early purchases was Chrichton’s Andromeda Strain. It was there that I bought my first copy of The Martian Chronicles, and there that I discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Books were — as they often are, for a certain type of kid — a form of entertainment, but they were also ways to learn about other possible modes of thinking and existing, and ways to expand my options for self-expression.

The seeds, then, for a lifelong affection for books were planted early. Besides, I learned that my collection was impressive to others, even intimidating; by high school I regularly joked that my growing library was my own version of a phallic symbol.

I wasn’t really joking. In many ways, it was. My tastes were still developing; I was obsessed with Stephen King, but also loved Douglas Adams. Looking back, I can even pinpoint when my interest in the former waned; it was with the publication of It, which I shall forever regard as indisputable evidence that King really had begun publishing his laundry lists.²

Later I discovered William S. Burroughs, and eventually Philip K. Dick, and even the marvelous (though inconsistent) Discworld series. I continue picking up new authors and rounding out my collections of old favorites, and that’s why I have about 100 unread books in my possession today.

I also have some that I know I’ll never read again, and those are the ones that will end up in my sale or donation pile. Still, even that is difficult. It’s tough for me to part with something that so powerfully symbolizes an important aspect of my personality, even when it’s a book I really just couldn’t get into — or have moved beyond.

One day, Siddhartha Gautama was hanging out with his monks, chewing the fat.³ They were approached by a cowherd, who asked them if they’d seen any cattle wander past. Well, no, they hadn’t. The cowherd lamented that he’d lost track of his dozen or so cattle, and went pelting off in another direction, still looking for them.

Gautama pointed out that this is how it often was with cows. You’d start with one for milking, but then you’d get another to supplement the first; then a third, and maybe then a bull, and then you’d have a great mooing heap of cattle. And somewhere along the way, the cows would no longer be working for you; you’d be the one working for them. Beyond that comes the anxiety when your herd gets away.

Contrasted to a relatively simple existence, one that didn’t anchor itself to the acquisition of more and more cattle, the life of a monk probably looked pretty appealing. Gautama then said, in essence, that what we all needed to do was reduce the number of cows we were keeping.

This was best accomplished, he believed, by gradually letting them go, a cow at a time, and simply not replacing them after they left. I think there’s some truth to that, which makes it a little easier to sort those books into the keepers and the escapees. I hope it goes as well with my DVD collection; I guess time will tell on that.

I suppose you know, by now, that this isn’t really a post about books or cows.

It’s my wish that we can all look at the cows we’ve been so carefully herding, and find a way to let some of them go. At the very least, it’ll make packing easier to manage.

==

1. Dangerous Visions is a collection of short stories edited by Harlan Ellison, and famous for its countercultural subversiveness. Now, forty years after its publication, it seems almost quaint — though Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” still stands out as lyrically stunning. ^

2. He really lost me with It, in more or less the same way thar Rowling lost me with the fourth book in the Harry Potter series. Both King and Rowling are competent storytellers and good writers, but they also benefit most with an editor who has the spine to say, “Look, this is just too sprawling. Redact about ten thousand words from this chapter, cut out the middle third, and tweak the pacing a little, and we’ll go ahead with the printing.” Alas. ^

3. Figuratively. Gautama was a vegetarian, I believe. ^

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This hasn’t stopped an immediate and intense response from quite a lot of people, in quite a few corners, each apparently trying to simultaneously absolve themselves of guilt while assigning it to others. Ironically, the argument about incendiary language in political discourse has itself become quite incendiary. So it goes.

Rather than seek to attach blame to one “side” or another,³ I’d like to discuss the language we use regularly in discussion of any kind, which is frequently over-the-top and improper for our purposes. By “improper” I do not necessarily mean insulting, offensive, and so on; instead, I simply mean the wrong set of words.

For example, many years ago, Hostess advertised their Twinkies and other baked candies as being “wholesome”. I believe I know what wholesome means, and it is not a word that I would apply to something made almost entirely of sugar and so pumped with preservatives that, assuming its packaging remains undamaged, it has an essentially infinite shelf life. Usage of the word wholesome is, here, improper. We might call Twinkies flavorful; we might call them convenient; we might call them tasty. We would be hard-pressed to defend calling them wholesome.

This is a good example of deceptive labeling. It could be argued that, since Twinkies do not contain cyanide, they are technically wholesome; however, wholesome is not a synonym for nonlethal. Using a word that is conventionally associated with healthy cheapens the value of that word, and robs it of effective meaning — particularly if that word is being used to describe something that, eaten in anything but extreme moderation, is in no way healthy at all.

And lest you think I’m picking on Hostess, Slim-Fast used to describe their diet shakes as “delicious”. McDonald’s used to describe their breakfast hotcakes and sausages as “yummy”. Many health foods call themselves “delicious” as well. Miller Light described its taste as “great”. More than a few subpar comedies have been called “hilarious”. Kronik calls itself an “unrelenting energy supplement”. (I don’t think it’s any of those things.) The list goes on. It’s not much of a surprise that younger generations are cynical toward the claims of advertising. We all should be.

This cheapening of language for the sake of advertising is of special interest to me, since I work in advertising, was an English major, and fancy myself an acceptable writer. Of course, it’s not limited to advertising. The frequent and generally improper use of the word “awesome” sets my teeth on edge. Wow, have you tasted this coffee? It’s awesome. Really? A mass-marketed and –manufactured product, available everywhere in any supermarket, fills you with a sense of awe? Heavens, get a life. Or at the very least, a thesaurus.

Why should we care, though? Isn’t this just nitpicking? I don’t believe so. For most of us, language is the primary means we use to communicate with others, to take in information from them, and to describe our experiences. Sloppy grammar is obnoxious to some, but that’s just mechanics. The real intent of our words is not in the structure; it’s in the words we use, particularly the adjectives.

Incendiary language is used to stimulate, to draw attention, to emphasize a point. Sometimes it’s used to demonize someone, and other times it’s used to cast an entire school of thought in doubt. The same is true of fear-inspiring language. How many television news “magazines” tell us that we should be alarmed by this, worried by that, concerned with the other thing? If it’s an afternoon show, I’d wager it’s all of them. To listen to their lead-ins, you’d think the world was a terrifying, horrible place, a veritable deathtrap.

This kind of language is used because it grabs attention; however, it appeals to emotion. It does not constitute rational argument, and is not based in reason. Where we get into trouble is when we fail to parse that language, when we forget to look for the underlying rationale, responding instead to the physical tension inspired by those words. When anyone begins using an emotionally-based approach to an argument, it’s certain that he’s got an agenda. At least part of that agenda is served by making us turn off our rational judgment and work solely from the somatic response, that sense of tension, be it anger or fear.

This superficiality is an ancient means of stirring the masses. It’s been used to manipulate entire populations to war, whether just or unjust. It’s used to control thinking, to persuade with the heart rather than the mind, to effectively hypnotize intelligence. Sometimes we can be moved to heroic deeds, though more often such language appeals to our baser selves.

One of the more popular American collegiate competitions, in decades past, was debate. Teams would be given one “side” or another on an arbitrary topic, then have to develop arguments to defend that side — whether it was agreeable to them or not. Topics might have included Resolved: Communism is a potentially destructive force in the world, or Resolved: Usage of alcohol is a harmless pastime, or Resolved: The American Revolution was a destabilizing force. However the team members might have felt on these issues, they had to argue for or against the resolution.

The key was that they had to do it rationally. They had to use persuasion, facts, and evidence in support of those views. Falling back on an emotional argument was countered as such, and didn’t factor into the discussion.⁴

We’ve lost the talent for that. The ability to form rational opinions is no longer taught to students; at best, they may be shown how a given set of facts was arrived at, but there isn’t any sense of how those facts were established. This reduces education to a decanting of received truth, rather than an exposé of the means used to find those truths.

Partly, I think this is because we’ve got an education system that isn’t about teaching, so much as it’s about producing a uniform product. In recent years this has become so thoroughly emphasized that most schools are limited to teaching students what’s required to pass a nationally mandated test, rather than find meaning behind the teachings.

For example, history is reduced to a dry recitation of dates, places, and events, with little or no meaningful discussion of how those events came to pass. That the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 is a fact — but does anyone know why it was fought? Not among most high school students, I believe.⁵ This is not a good trend; history provides us with two things: a sense of context, and a way to analyze (and ideally avoid) making the same mistake twice. However, there isn’t a particularly good way to judge how well a student has absorbed that context simply by filling in a bubble form, so the quantifiable facts — place, date, event — are all we’ve got left to measure.

That is not education. It’s playing back a tape recording.

Added to the effective gutting of meaning in education is an apparent growing mistrust of education itself. Those who prefer polysyllabic phraseology are mocked as “elitists”, and of course it’s routine in American schools to bully the “nerds”, most of whom are considerably brighter than their peers. Intelligence is, in this milieu, a deficit.⁶

This trend seems out of place in a nation that prides itself on industry, technology, and achievement. The transistor was invented by an American; transistors are what your computer uses to process all the information you give them. The helical structure of DNA was co-discovered by an Englishman and an American; DNA is the key to all known life.

These developments engendered revolutions in science, medicine, biology, and engineering; yet the education required to make them is something that most American students today don’t have — and those who do are vilified. Where once we emphasized the sciences in order to outdo the Soviets, now we often regard signs of learning with open hostility.

As for philosophy — good luck finding that one even mentioned.

Maybe we could reexamine, yet again, what our goals actually are in teaching. Do we want our children to be happier, healthier, and generally better off than we are ourselves? What are we doing to make that happen? And what are we doing to prevent it?

This isn’t to say that life fifty years ago was better than it is today, or that there weren’t bizarre and horrible acts of violence being perpetrated when schools still sought to educate rather than embed. A constant reality in our world seems to be strife, but so much of it is, in the end, unnecessary.

In Buddhism, we have the eightfold path, a plan of action that, while not necessarily a direct route to enlightenment, can at least reduce the strife in one’s own life. I don’t have anywhere near the space required to discuss all eight elements, but right now a discussion of the third part, Proper Speech, seems justified.

As I said above, language is usually how we interact with the world. As such, it reflects our thoughts, and it can influence the thoughts of others, just as their language influences us. Language is a direct means to know what’s happening in our heads, but what we might not see is that it also limits us. If we don’t have a word for an idea, we probably don’t have the idea either.

A number of years back, I came to a surprising realization. There aren’t any nouns. No, I haven’t gone off the deep end. I mean the concept of a noun, as applied to language, does not match our actual experience. Grossly, a noun is anything that exists and can be pointed to. People are nouns. Trees are nouns. Cars and cities are nouns. Right?

Wrong.

The word tree is assuredly a noun, but the tree itself is not a fixed thing. Trees are part of a process. They take in carbon dioxide from everything that breathes, and we breathe the oxygen they make. They take in rain, which comes from clouds that formed over lakes and oceans, and they take in nutrients from the ground that used to be other living things. They use sunlight to grow, and the earth we all live on was made around that sun. Anything that everything is made out of came from other stars that blew up. And when a tree dies its water goes back into a river, and that goes into the ocean, and the wood turns into dirt and then more trees. The whole world is in a tree. The whole universe. Just like us. All of us.

Thus, while trees definitely exist, they represent both the tree itself and the concept of a tree. Deeper down, we see just how fundamentally interrelated trees are to everything else.

We get into trouble when we confuse the word tree (the word is a noun) with the tree itself, which has no independent existence. Our language forces us to refer to trees as permanent, fixed things, when in reality they are not.

We do this all the time, and that misunderstanding leads us down a lot of sad, terrible paths. We become so wrapped up in what we’ve convinced ourselves to be permanent that we end up missing the larger context, the one that binds us all, deeply and inextricably, to one another. I think it would be a mistake to blame all of our problems on speech, but as a great teacher once said, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” I would add, as a man speaketh, so he thinketh.

It’s my wish for all of us that we can ponder what this might mean, and come to some conclusions of our own about the words we use, how we use them, and what we think about them. Maybe we can even do it while pondering under a tree.

==

1. The journalistic convention is to use alleged and accused when writing news stories about purported criminals; however, I am not a journalist. This is an opinion piece. Furthermore, to argue that Loughner did not, in fact, shoot a number of people (which is what “allegedly” means) is to argue against all observable reality, and sanity. ^

2. And there was a reason, without a doubt, but that does not mean that the reason made any sense to anyone but Loughner. Generally, people do things that make sense to them at the time. One of the pitfalls of thinking is that we’re trapped inside it; we have no way to step beyond ourselves for an objective look at our thoughts. The best we can do is compare our own motivations to the behavior of others, and see if we’re more or less on the same plane as they are. ^

3. Describing it in terms of “sides” is divisive, and doesn’t further the discussion. We’d do well to try to see past arbitrarily-imposed polarization. ^

4. Ideally. ^

5. It had to do with accession to the English throne. One claimant for succession believed he had the right by birth; the other believed he had it by dint of extensive prior experience. ^

6. I know. I went over the top with the language in that graf on purpose. ^

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Eventually the robber confessed that stealing was an ingrained part of his personality. “Wherever I am, no matter who I’m with, when I see something, my urge is to steal it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something I need; just to see someone possessing anything makes me want it for myself. I’ve actually tried to stop stealing, but I just can’t. I know I’ll be caught one day and executed, but I simply can’t help myself. Is there anything I can do to make it stop?”

The monk pondered for a moment. “When you get the urge to steal, simply be aware of it,” he said.

The robber blinked. “That’s all?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

Bemused, the robber parted ways with the monk.

A year or so later, they met up again on the road. The monk didn’t recognize his onetime adversary; the man had converted, and was now a monk as well — no longer a robber. “Somehow,” he said, “just being aware of my urge to steal helped it to fade and lose its power over me. How did you know it would work?”

The monk shrugged. “Every lust is a thought,” he said, and in that moment the former robber was enlightened.

These stories always seem to be about wandering monks. I don’t actually recall the full thread of this one, and I can’t seem to find the reference anywhere; the monk might have been Bodhidharma, who was the itinerant Buddhist that brought the practice to China.¹ It really doesn’t matter what the particulars are, because the essence of the story is what I’m focusing on here.

This is the time of year when many of us make resolutions to change some aspect of ourselves that we don’t like. If you’re like me, a lot of those changes don’t really stick; they just end up being pavement on the road to hell. In my case, I’ve struggled most of my adult life with nicotine. That stuff is genuinely addictive — and for me, it wasn’t just the high, either. The mannerisms associated with smoking were pleasant for me.

I liked the ting my Zippo made when I flipped it open, the scent of the lighter fluid, the giddy washing buzz from the first few drags off the cigarette. I like the feeling of smoke in my lungs, and the way I could study the cherry as it glowed, the way I flicked the ash. It gave me something to do with my hands for a few minutes, gave me a way to take a break from whatever I was doing, gave me physical and psychological pleasure.

Of course it also made it harder to breathe, made me smell like an ashtray, and put me at risk for lung infections — not to mention the other, long-term side effects such as COPD, emphysema, cancer, and the possibility of setting my house on fire by falling asleep with a lit cigarette.²

Yet, like the robber, I couldn’t give up what I knew to be a genuinely unwise behavior. I tried aversion therapy; I tried nicotine replacement; I tried hypnosis. Nicotine replacement helped with the physical cravings, but the mannerisms remained — more accurately, the desire for the mannerisms remained.

I was genuinely stuck, mostly because I kept thinking about what I was rejecting. Each time I got a craving, I faced it with great inner resistance and resolve. The cravings would die down after a few minutes, but they always came back; they weren’t necessarily any stronger, but they didn’t seem to go away. After a while, they just tired me out, and I ended up with another pack of cigarettes.

I can put these events in past tense because things actually have changed, and almost all of that change was relative. That is, the way I saw things became different. With that alteration of inner perspective, a different understanding emerged. With the different understanding came a radically different response to the cravings.

This had to do with a progression of meditation practice, in which one learns to overcome thoughts or cravings that arise in the mind by patient observation of them, rather than obdurate resistance to them. Meditation isn’t just something for the cushion. It has practical effects in life.

One of the recurring themes in Buddhist thought is renunciation. I don’t like that word, because it’s not the correct one. When Buddhism started appearing in the English-speaking world, some terms were chosen that don’t translate the proper intention. Renunciation is one of those words.³

When I think of renunciation, the first image I get is of someone like Mother Teresa — a person sworn to living in abject poverty, with nothing but a couple changes of clothes, a bed, a rosary, a Bible, and that’s about all. Renunciation, to my mind, means deliberately turning away from something. Pushing it aside. Resisting it.

That takes a lot of effort, and might actually make it harder to resist whatever has been renounced. By exerting will to fight against an urge, I think we offer a kind of psychological energy to what we’re resisting. We push against it, which means — in the mind — that there’s actually something there to push against … when in fact, there isn’t.

A subtle understanding of the second noble truth⁴ lets us see what’s actually happening here. Since we’re made up of five aggregates,⁵ there really isn’t anything happening inside us that comes from elsewhere. Our cravings, then, are not an outside force; they are a part of our own bodies, minds, and consciousness. Thus, pushing against a craving is really just using one part of our internal energy (or will) to fight another part of our energy (or will).

From a Buddhist point of view, this is delusional — actually, it’s nonsensical. It’s like deciding you don’t like the shape of your nose, so you punch yourself in the face to change it. Fighting a craving is really just fighting yourself.

Rather than renunciation, I think we can apply the term letting go. The difference is subtle but crucial. When we let go of something, we don’t focus on it, cling to it, obsess over it. We just let it slide into our awareness, and just as readily let it slide away again. This doesn’t stop the craving from arising, but it does stop the feeding of energy into it. Since we’re not expending effort in dealing with it, it loses a major source of strength: Our belief that it actually exists as some sort of outside, invasive force.

During the practice of mindfulness meditation, one of the things we have to deal with is discursive thinking. The Theravada Buddhist monk, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, has advice on how to handle it. Whenever a powerful discursive thought arises, he suggests that we analyze it using these three criteria:⁶

1. What is it?
2. How intense is it?
3. How long does it last?

This is a wonderful way to separate oneself from a strong thought — or a powerful craving. We’re able to put the craving under a magnifying glass and really study it. The answers to these questions can be most interesting, because it might let us see where the craving actually arose from; and when we study the craving with the understanding that it came out of our own physical and mental responses to stimuli, we can see both that it’s ultimately sourced in no specific thing, and that it fades back into nothing with time.

Letting go is a remarkably subtle and powerful tool for handling virtually any thought or craving that we’d prefer not to have. Naturally, it requires that we have a few moments to actually look at what’s happening; this is where our monk’s advice to the thief comes into play. When you have a craving, simply be aware of it. Recognize it for what it is. In doing so, you’re already turning it into something other than a reflexive response to the world around you and within you; you’re bringing it to the level of consciousness and, ultimately, awareness. Eventually, being aware of a craving can be enough to let it fade to the point that it no longer troubles you.⁷

Letting go of a habit takes time, of course. It took time to make the habit form, and unlearning some of those responses is not usually an immediate process. Nonsmoking materials advise deep breathing, taking a short walk, munching celery, or chewing gum instead of smoking. If those things work for you in helping you to change the habit — to let go of the craving — well, then, great. As long as you’re not viewing them as a substitute for smoking, you won’t feel let down when they don’t satisfy in quite the same way as a cigarette.

There will also be setbacks. In our society, we tend to have a polar view of many things. If you’re on the road to recovery from cigarette addiction, slipping back into the habit can be crushing. You might tell yourself that you’re a failure, that the nicotine is too strong, that you don’t have what it takes.

Nonsense.

Every once in a while, everyone stumbles, no matter where they’re walking and no matter how well they know the path. To sit down and decide that one cannot walk correctly because of one slip is the height of folly. Get back up, and keep on walking. You will get there if you do that; you won’t if you stop. That’s a rock-solid guarantee.

Changing a habit takes discipline and perseverance, but it’s within the grasp of any person capable of working with his own mind. Whether you’re tossing cigarettes into the gutter, turning away from drinking or other drugs, or changing your diet or exercise routine, it is my wish that you will be aware of the poor habit’s call when it arises, and that you will be able to open your hand, let go your grasp, and allow it to drift away like so much smoke.

==

1. Bodhidharma called the practice of meditation by its Sanskrit term, dhyana. The Chinese pronounced it ch’an. When the practice crossed the Sea of Japan, the Japanese pronounced it zen. ^

2. That actually almost happened to me once, many years ago. I dozed off in bed with a cigarette, and woke up to the stench of a smoldering mattress. ^

3. There seem to be two frames of mind on this. Traditionalists seem to want to keep the poor translations and expect others to learn the subtleties of their meaning. Others prefer to drop the confusing terminology and use words that more accurately describe the intention. The root of the issue is that the first translations of Buddhist teaching and thought were performed by people with imperfect knowledge either of English, the source language, or both. ^

4. Dissatisfaction is rooted in the belief that things are permanent and unchanging. ^

5. Buddhism sees each person as a collection of five aggregates, each of which is its own collection of subsystems. Out of those aggregates — body, sensation, perception, conceptualization, and consciousness — arises awareness, as an emergent property. ^

6. This comes from Mindfulness in Plain English. The book is a superb introduction to Buddhist mindfulness meditation practice. ^

7. Much. ^

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If you recall, Hanks was on a delivery aircraft, something similar to DHL or FedEx. The plane crashed, and he was the only survivor. After the crash, he managed to make it to a small island in the middle of nowhere. He started going through the freight that washed ashore along with him, looking for anything that could help him survive. Among many things, he found a volleyball, of the Wilson brand. That volleyball turned out to be one of the most significant elements to the story, to his survival, and — I think — became a fascinating enquiry into the nature of mind.

What began happening, you may remember, was that he started talking to the volleyball. At first it was clearly something that made him feel foolish, but over time it became so regular that he was having lengthy, complicated conversations with Wilson. Rationally, we can recognize just how weird such behavior is — after all, if someone started acting that way at the office, treating a pencil sharpener as a personal confidante, we’d quickly become worried about his sanity — but in the case of one person stranded in total isolation, it might seem a bit more sensible.

We’re social animals. In one form or another, we like human contact. Sometimes the contact isn’t what we’d prefer, but by and large it’s something we need on a psychological and emotional level. One of the worst punishments that a prisoner can be subjected to is solitary confinement; we even punish our children with time-outs, isolating them briefly from interaction with all others. People locked into sensory deprivation tanks actually begin hallucinating after less than an hour, partly because the stimulus-hungry mind ends up all alone with itself and, lacking anything to keep itself occupied, it begins making things up.

So, in a mind left with total isolation and something that looks vaguely like a human face, it’s not difficult to imagine that face becoming more and more real.

Wilson turns into a companion, a friend — and even an adversary, who gets into at least one heated argument with Hanks. He pitches Wilson away, then frantically goes on a mission to save the volleyball from being lost. He has to; Wilson is incapable of self-help.

Wilson eventually becomes such a significant extension of Hanks’s personality that, when he cobbles a raft together and they set out to sea, Hanks mourns Wilson’s loss in a storm. He can barely keep himself alive, there is nothing he can do to rescue the volleyball, and yet, all he can do is sob, over and over again, that he’s sorry. “I’m sorry, Wilson, I’m so sorry…” Just as one might do with a flesh-and-blood human that one was unable to save.

If you haven’t seen the movie, all of this sounds silly. If you have seen the movie, you might remember how emotionally effective that scene was, and how believable Hanks was in his interactions with Wilson. You really did get the sense that the volleyball had a mind of its own. (Then, thinking about it, you realize just how silly it all sounds.)

What struck me when I saw that movie all those years ago, and what continues to strike me now, is how much like Hanks we are when we interact with the people around us. Sometimes it seems almost as though we’re all talking to Wilsons of our own: Hollow heads with faces on them, who have no independent thought.

We don’t consciously do that. In Castaway, Wilson’s personality was, quite literally, just an extension of Hanks’s own psyche. We know that the living people in the world around us are not the same as a volleyball; they each have their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations. But we often behave as though they do not — and when they assert their individuality, it can sometimes be quite surprising, even annoying.

Have you ever been in conversation with someone you know, and heard her say something that seemed totally out of line with your expectations of her? Maybe she expressed a political or religious belief that left you wondering where she was coming from. Maybe she related an experience that seemed completely out of character for her. Maybe she revealed a predilection for an outré food or intimate behavior, something you found difficult to imagine anyone enjoying.

It was jarring, wasn’t it? Here’s this person you thought you knew, telling you something really unexpected about herself, something that forces you to reevaluate her and your entire relationship to her. What was your sense at that time? What was your response? Was it something like, “I never imagined you’d be interested in…”?

Why?

My supposition is that we tend to have expectations of others. Expectations of behavior, belief, and outlook, expectations that allow us to categorize a person into our view of the world. I feel that, by having these expectations, we’re actually placing an extension of ourselves onto others, in the way we presume they will behave. When they then go out and behave differently than expected, we’re confronted with what feels like a surprising twist to our own personality.

What’s disrupted is not our view of the other person; what’s disrupted is our idea that he is somehow just a set player in our internal dramas. When he begins speaking and thinking for himself, it’s as though some little corner of our mind went a bit crazy and started reading lines from a completely different script. We forget that we’re not just talking to volleyballs, and we don’t like being reminded otherwise.

An accessible way to think about this is prejudice or bigotry (which are not necessarily the same thing). We all have a little bit of that. We focus on a stereotype of behavior in a person, or we see a physical difference, and we immediately make an assumption about him. It might be a negative assumption; it might be a positive one; however, what we respond to in that case is not the person. What we respond to, instead, is how we imagine he is. We respond to a construct of our own presumptions, preconceptions, and beliefs. When he then fails to act in the manner we expect, we can become quite offended.

The difficult thing to realize is that the source of our offense is not in the other person’s insistence on being an individual. Our source of offense is that the other person, by being an individual, has bruised our own ego. The ego is forced, momentarily at least, to realize that it is not in control of the world.

Prejudices are hardly new. Buddhism came into existence some 2500 years ago in the Indus River valley, roughly where Hinduism arose as well. The social structure of the region included a rigid caste system, with Brahmins (a loose priesthood) at the top of the heap. Next in line were the soldiers (Siddhartha Gautama, the putative historical Buddha, is said to have been in this caste); beneath the soldiers were the merchants; beneath the merchants were the common laborers. Underneath all of them were the outcastes, the untouchables — the cast-aways.

In this caste system, where you were depended entirely on your birth; there was no vertical mobility. A Brahmin could not become a merchant, and a soldier could not become a Brahmin. It was seen as a part of the reality of life, a part of the system that kept the world functioning smoothly; and everyone was expected to remain firmly in their pre-judged place with no grumbling. (There were cross-caste interactions — there had to be — but no one had anything to do with the untouchables.)

After his enlightenment, Gautama broke those caste lines. He didn’t care if his audience was composed entirely of soldiers or servants, and he treated Brahmins and untouchables with equal degrees of respect.¹ This was, of course, unnerving for many members of society; for some, it was probably heretical.

When he delivered talks on the dharma (Buddhist teachings), Gautama was not interacting with volleyballs; he was not addressing extensions of his own expectations. All he saw was individuals, each person with her own fears and sorrows, her own personality, her own outlook on the world. He didn’t have behavioral expectations of anyone. Nothing anyone said or did was shocking to him. It was all part of a much larger world, one that functioned in spite of human expectations, not because of them.

Ideally, we do the same today; in reality, we must realize that we do the opposite. We have our categories, our frames, our labels; we apply them to each person (or, sometimes, group) that we encounter. We all do this, partly because it’s faster than thinking of everyone we meet as an individual (unless we’ve put a lot of effort into releasing our preconceptions); partly because we’re evolved to do it;² partly because — yes — we want to think we’re in command of the world, and that it will behave according to how we believe it should.

However, when we frame others into our outlook, all we’re really doing is forcing an extension of our own personality onto them. We’re blinding ourselves to the real nature of others. Not only is this unfair to them, but it can lead to some truly vicious conflicts.

Buddhism offers a way to get past this framing, by seeing that each person around us is not an eternal, unchanging entity.³ Everyone has moods, everyone has history, everyone has hopes. What we encounter in others is not a static point of reference; it’s a mixture of many different emotional and mental states, and those states change over time.

Insight meditation is the method used to disassemble this framing. In insight meditation, we actively look for any one single element of our own selves that is permanent, unchanging, and eternal. Is it the body? Is it our physical senses? Do we find permanence in our emotional state? Do we find permanence in our ways of thinking? How about the overall consciousness that is made up of these different things, and that ties the whole package together into an apparently whole entity? Is there permanence there?⁴

When we discover the answers to these questions, it’s a short leap to apply those discoveries to others. The result is a more refined, more clear worldview, one that is conspicuously lacking in Wilsons. It’s my wish for all of us that we may remember a simple truth: No one, anywhere, is a volleyball.

==

1. Among men. His views about women were liberal for his time — he didn’t divide the sexes and, eventually, even accepted women as followers. That acceptance took a while for him to build. Women weren’t actively disrespected in the manner of untouchables; they were more often simply ignored as irrelevant. I’m not sure which is worse. ^

2. Without the ability to form quick judgments based on general criteria, I don’t imagine many of our ancestors would have survived long on a predator-rich savanna. Furthermore, we seem to have an innate xenophobia. ^

3. Ultimately, we see everyone as being fundamentally the same as ourselves, on many levels. Dissolving distinctions in this manner helps reduce our selfishness (or so I have been told). ^

4. Intellectually, of course, we know there’s no permanence in any of the five Buddhist aggregates (body, sensation, perception, conceptualizations, consciousness). It’s quite another thing to deconstruct ourselves internally, and viscerally realize the total impermanence of every aspect of our being. ^

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