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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That latter requirement became clear in years past; originally, some parents would take the kids’ clothes, get a refund, and turn around and spend the money on cigarettes and booze (true story). The system is considerably less exploitable now, but attempts to work around the limits still get made, every year.

This year, “my” kid was a boy of about eight. It started off well; he seemed amiable and not particularly shy, and picked out some shirts, undies, shoes, and other necessities. Then came the moment all the kids love: The troll down the toy aisle.

The rules are fairly clear. The majority of the budget is to be spent on clothing, with only ten to fifteen dollars or so spent on the gewgaws. “My” kid, who seemed at first to have such a good operational grasp of the procedure, quickly lost track of what we were doing.

He wanted a Nerf dart gun, one of the high-end ones that ran about $40. Well, no, too expensive. All right then, how about this MP3 player? $30. No, sorry, still over the budget. Okay, well, here’s a radio-controlled Humvee. $40, and we’re back up to way over the line.

Back to the electronics, where he confided that his dad had asked that he pick up a CD boombox for his and his sister’s bedroom. In addition to the cost — yes, again over the allowance — it became clear that he was now operating under a parent’s instruction, which is a no-no for the shopping day.

I worked with him a little about budgets, explaining that the toy allowance was only so large. He could have one thing that was just that large, or two smaller things that, added together, were that large; or three littler things that added up, and so on. Explained in those terms, he seemed to get what I was saying, and made a counter-offer: If we put back some of the clothes, can we get the radio or the Humvee then?

Clever lad. He lacked foresight, but he understood the idea of bargaining.

In the end I was able to convince him that his wheedling wouldn’t get him anywhere. After several aimless turns around the toy aisle he came to rest before a tall, wide shelf festooned with toys that fit his budget; and there he stopped dead.

He was faced with a bewildering array of brightly-colored goodies, all clamoring for his attention; yet none of them were actually the things he wanted. He was numbed by the wealth of choices lavished before him, and dissatisfied with all. It caused a kind of paralysis. He did eventually settle on something, and it seemed to satisfy him in the end.

Meanwhile, my fiancée was shopping with his older sister (we didn’t know that at the time). The girl was slightly better behaved, to the point of getting a fairly good wardrobe; but their journey began with her declaration that Dad wanted her to get a DVD player for her and her brother’s bedroom.¹

That, of course, didn’t happen; and as my fiancée and I waited for the kids’ mother to come and collect them, we learned that she couldn’t be there immediately because she was at Radio Shack, getting a cellular phone for their older brother while her kids were buying clothes on charity.

This is not typical of the Code 3/Clothe the Kids experience; if it were, the entire project would have been abandoned years ago. But it is representative, in no small way, of how many of us live our lives. We want the glittery things, the fun things, the exciting things. We aren’t as interested in the necessities, and may be willing to exchange them for a moment of pleasure. Sometimes we even want the fun things so badly that we’re willing to take advantage of others. Why do we get so hooked? What is the source of our difficulty?

Nonattachment is one of the core tenets of Buddhism. Essentially, nonattachment means more or less what you’d expect: No cravings, no obsessions, no unhealthy focus, no stalking, and so on. I don’t think Buddhism is unique in this regard; Christianity reminds us that the love of money is the root of all evil, and what is the love of money if not attachment?

What’s different in Buddhism is the reasoning behind the principle of nonattachment. It’s not rejection of worldly temptations or distractions; that is an outward manifestation of nonattachment, but the true reason has to do with an insight into the second Noble Truth and the nature of impermanence.

The second Noble Truth tells us what the nature of suffering is: Attachment, also called dukkha. (It can also mean clinging or unskillful thought, depending on context.) When we cling to things, particularly things that won’t last,² we end up suffering. This is partly because we want to freeze that thing, to make it permanent, to act as though it’s fixed in time and will never change.

Even a cursory glance at the world around us shows what nonsense it is to believe anything will ever be permanent and unchanging. A cloud is a cloud, to be sure; but we don’t gaze upon clouds and believe that they’ve always been shaped and scattered as they are now; nor do we believe that they’ll always appear in the sky as they do right at this moment. Why would we then believe that anything else is ultimately any more permanent than a cloud?

Yet we behave otherwise, every day. You ever get a brand-new car? Remember how it felt the first time you noticed a ding in the paint, due to someone’s door or a windblown shopping cart? That moment of irritation is a manifestation of dukkha — in essence, suffering.

Why are we so irritated? We knew the car’s finish and sheet metal would not remain pristine. We knew it would be scratched, dented, scuffed. Yet that first dimple always seems to hurt. What it really comes down to is that we don’t want to be reminded that the things we like are not permanent. (To put it more optimistically, the things we dislike won’t go on forever.)

In some schools of Buddhist psychology, it’s believed that our ego — our sense of self — is actually offended by these reminders of impermanence. Subconsciously, we’re reminded that we ourselves are impermanent, that we’re subject to illness, old age, and death; and we don’t like to be reminded of those facts. It’s never particularly comfortable to imagine one’s own dissolution and cessation, after all.

As a result, the ego, in order to distract itself from these basic truths of existence, tries to surround itself with diversions. These diversions can take the form of music, entertainment, drugs, sex partners, books, toys, and other such games.

But none of these diversions ultimately satisfy; in the end, they get dented, they get scuffed. The music becomes jejune. The lover becomes pedestrian. The batteries wear out. So we go on, starting out on another quest for something exciting, interesting, thrilling, distracting — forgetting that it won’t be any more fulfilling than what we’ve abandoned.

I don’t know how valid this school of thought is in an objective sense, but it does seem to explain quite a lot of our behavior.

Beneath that psychology is a deeper recognition of impermanence in all things, what some Buddhist traditions call emptiness; others call it unsatisfactoriness. The Heart Sutra, a brief but pithy exposé of Buddhist thought, says in part:³

The five levels of awareness
(thought, feeling, perception, conceptualization, and consciousness)
are impermanent; they are empty of independent reality.

Form is impermanence and emptiness;
emptiness and impermanence are form.

There is no form, no feeling, no recognition, no volition, no consciousness;
no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no visible form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no tangible thing, no concept.

This is fairly deep stuff, but in essence what it’s telling us is that nothing lasts, and when we behave to the contrary, we’re already mired in a somewhat delusional state. We can end up so believing in the reality of our momentary craving that we’re even willing to bargain away the things we need, in order to obtain something we both cannot afford, and have no real use for.

“My” kid wanted a Humvee so badly that he was willing to exchange clothing for one. What toys do we all crave to the point that we trade what’s necessary for what’s ultimately unsatisfactory?

It is my wish that we can step back, take a breath, and analyze our wants and desires. Perhaps we’ll be able to see past them and grasp the ultimate impermanence of our objects of desire; and, in so doing, we’ll be able to apply a little nonattachment to our decisions.

==

1. Apparently “clothe the kids” means “get the kids a bunch of electronics” to some people. ^

2. Which is everything. ^

3. This is my interpretation of a Sanskrit passage, which is translated into English in myriad ways. It’s not representative of canonical Buddhist thought, at least in part because I removed a lot of the buzzwords and special terms that only Buddhists are probably familiar with.

The title of this post is a loose translation of the Sanskrit word parasamgate, which is a portion of the mantra introduced in the Heart Sutra:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha

…which means Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond; enlightenment! — aha.

The Heart Sutra then goes on to declare that the dharma itself — all of Buddhist thought — is every bit as impermanent as anything else. It confirms its own nonreality. As I said, this is deep stuff. ^

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To turn our attention to the latter argument first, Arizona has been cutting its state budget, steadily, for some time now. It’s cut so completely that recently, AHCCCS terminated paying for organ transplants and, incidentally, the lives of a few of its own citizens. (Death panel, indeed.) Large portions of state-mandated systems, such as the courts, have found themselves reduced to less than a bare-bones budget, with only a few officials being forced to handle the caseloads of entire counties.

We’ve also done away with rest stops, and for a while the DPS terminated its helicopter service in the Kingman area, essentially leaving all of Mohave County without any kind of aerial search-and-rescue or law-enforcement ability.

However, it’s worth noting that cutting these services has not, in fact, led to a reduction in taxes — so where has the money disappeared to? Is it really possible that the state is running at such a deficit that years of systematic budget and service cuts have had no effect at all on its operation? If so, it might be practical to suggest that no amount of budget cutting will actually do anything to keep the state’s balance in the black.

This conclusion seemingly leaves us with two choices: Raising taxes, or privatizing.

The problem with raising taxes is obvious, and has nothing to do with voter outcry.¹ Arizona citizens’ median income — particularly outside of Coconino, Pima, and Maricopa counties — is surprisingly low.² Our citizens are cash-strapped, and a general rise in taxes could effectively push many of the full-time employed perilously close to poverty. It would seem that privatizing is the only way to keep essential services in place, while at the same time relieving tax stress — or at least damming the worst of the leaks.

Furthermore, it’s argued, a for-profit industry will operate more efficiently and fluidly than a government-run one can. Efficiency often manifests itself as lower costs for consumers. Thus, privatization gives us lower costs.³ While this may or may not actually be the case, it’s easy to argue that paying taxes into support of a service I’ll never personally need seems like a waste of my money.⁴

Hence, we might be able to significantly reduce Arizona’s budget woes by privatizing out some things that many of us rarely (if ever) use, charging fees to those who actually do use those services, instead of having all of us carry the tax burden.

Perhaps with a rest stop, this makes some sense. I expect that if I had to pay a dollar to use a toilet, I’d be less likely to vandalize that toilet; why cough up a buck to scrawl a tag on a wall that few are likely to see? The fees collected could go to better maintenance and cleanliness.⁵ At the very least, installation of vending machines could give travelers a chance to refresh themselves, while at the same time providing an extra source of revenue for rest-stop upkeep.⁶ Finally, in the era of cellular phones, who actually needs a rest-stop telephone?⁷ Why ever would we want to offer free roadside conveniences to travelers?

With a state park, though, I’m not sure it’s quite so easy. One of the things we’re proud of in Kingman — at least, I think we are — is the Hualapai Mountain range. Just a twenty-minute trip from almost anywhere in town brings you to a completely different landscape, one filled with fresh, bracing air; tall, whispering trees; and a landscape that is made of a balance of tumbling boulders, fecund soil, and myriad animal life.

Settled in that range is Hualapai Mountain State Park. I hope you’ve been there. If you haven’t, try to go. You can spend a very pleasant day hiking, picnicking, barbecuing, or just sitting and enjoying the atmosphere. And because it’s a state park, it’s paid for by your tax dollars, mine, and every other Arizona resident’s.

Now imagine if you had to pay a fee to gain entry. How much would you be willing to pony up? Five dollars? Ten? A buck? A quarter? Would you be willing to pay $15 for a six-visit pass? How about $30 for an annual pass, with unlimited visits? That’s just $2.50 per month. Not too shabby.

The problem is that it’s not a bargain. When you do the math, you discover that it costs the median Arizona taxpayer a dime per month to maintain all 27 parks in the entire Arizona state park system.⁸ There is no way at all that privatizing the parks will result in a significant reduction in state taxes, nor is it likely to make up for the collateral revenues that our parks bring in as tourist dollars.

These numbers are not a mystery. It only takes an hour or so of research to discover everything. Yet the drumbeat for privatization of parks is rising — so who is leading the march? Who stands to gain from privatization?

When we consider privatizing prisons, these questions only become more pertinent. Since we’ve already seen that handing parks to for-profit concerns won’t significantly lower taxes, and probably won’t increase state revenues, we can justifiably make the inference that the same is so of prisons. There is a well-known link between our state politicians and the corporations that run prisons here; the conclusion is so self-evident that it’s baffling anyone could believe prison-privatization is of benefit to anyone but a select few.

There’s another, subtler danger in running prisons for profit: It reduces the desirability of rehabilitation, and increases the desirability of imprisoning criminals for relatively petty acts.

Rehabilitation is ostensibly ideal, since it (hopefully) reduces recidivism and allows former convicts to find productive, non-criminal livelihood. But if a prison gets money for each prisoner it keeps, and especially if its philosophy is about maintaining the value of the bottom line, there’s little incentive to reduce recidivism. And since, again, more criminals equals more revenue, it’s plausible that pressure is applied to lawmakers to pass more legislation favoring jailable offenses.

Crime actually does pay, if you happen to own a prison.

Most insidious to my mind, though, is that for-profit prisons essentially earn their money from human suffering. In Christianity, this is known as filthy lucre. It should come as no surprise that Buddhism has something to say on the subject as well.

Part of Buddhism’s core philosophy is the Noble Eightfold Path, a set of precepts to keep in order to be a better person, and to help oneself along on the way to enlightenment. The fifth step on this path is Right (or skillful, or appropriate) Livelihood, and it governs how we make a living. If we manufacture or trade in weapons, or if we trade in killing, we’re not maintaining right livelihood. More subtly, if we earn our wages by increasing or profiting from suffering, we’re also not engaged in right livelihood.

As with most things in Buddhism, these precepts are flexible. Strictly speaking, if you work for Glock, you’re not engaged in right livelihood — but on the other hand, if a Glock pistol is used to protect a person from a crime, that would seem to cancel out the objection. To understand the wider ramifications of our jobs, we have to look at these things and balance what we’re doing against its intent. Glock does not manufacture weapons for criminals to purchase and use; that criminals do so is evidence of a larger ill in society, as is our unfortunate need to own a pistol for protection.

Similarly, Lockheed-Martin does not manufacture warbirds to kill innocents or press unjust warfare. Certainly their aircraft have been used to do both, but can we really condemn Lockheed-Martin because of the choices we — and our elected officials — make?

My sense is that this also applies to prisons being run for profit. While we cannot be personally responsible for the actions of a criminal — the criminal has made his own choices — we do have the ability to choose how we respond. It seems to me that making money off of a criminal’s sentence isn’t too far removed from actually profiting from his crime. Furthermore, if we allow our laws to be set up in such a way as to guarantee a higher prison population, it can be argued that we are actively seeking to increase human suffering in prisons for the sake of turning a profit.

For a Christian, the truism the love of money is the root of all evil may come to mind here. While it’s undeniable that capitalism is capable of producing astonishing innovations in the fields of medicine, technology, and industry, it is equally undeniable that unfettered, rapacious capitalism contributes to misery, both for humans and for the other life we share this planet with. A concrete example in BP immediately springs to mind. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is just the most recent in a series of debacles that have caused unguessable amounts of environmental damage and cost dozens of human lives.

Nevertheless, there are those who continue to agitate for reduced regulation over for-profit ventures, which seems odd, since most of those who agitate for this relaxation of the laws don’t actually stand to gain anything from it. Again, who is beating the drums, and who is leading the march?

So what do we do? Regulate corporations to death, socialize everything, and boost taxes to 50% or more for everyone? Or do we deregulate all business, privatize all governmental institutions, and reduce taxes to zero?

I don’t think there are any easy answers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either omniscient, duped, or operating with an agenda. As with most things, the greatest merit is likely to be found somewhere in the middle. It’s up to each of us to consider what we believe, what our motives are, and what the motives might be in others — particularly those who seem to want us to think they have the answers, or are in some way telling us what to do.⁹

Personal responsibility, taken seriously, can quickly become improved social responsibility, without a single law having to be passed. However, it is my belief that personal responsibility means not only choosing our actions based on what we believe is the wisest course for ourselves, but what is the course least likely to harm others.

It is my wish that we may all become more personally responsible, one day at a time. Perhaps we can start by analyzing our sources of livelihood.

==

1. All right, the other problem with raising taxes. ^

2. The median income in 2009 was $43,300 for a single wage-earner household. In 2000, Arizona ranked 29th in the US for median income at $47,750. This means that in the last nine years, income in Arizona dropped by $4,450 — a ten-percent reduction in actual wages. In that same time, the inflation rate has weakened the value of the US dollar by about 20%, meaning that the effective income of a wage-earner is now reduced to something in the neighborhood of $35,000. In one decade, median income has effectively dropped by approximately $14,000. See the Inflation Calculator for more information. ^

3. There are some who suggest this is so of the US Postal Service. To them I say: Have you compared the cost of sending a letter via the Post Office against the same service from Federal Express? ^

4. That’s why insurance is such a silly waste of … oh, wait. ^

5. Ignore for the moment that peeing on the side of the road has always been free, and is tremendously classy. ^

6. Ignore, again, the fact that travelers can pack their own snacks. ^

7. Please ignore the coverage maps available at cellular service providers’ websites, particularly regarding the large, blank areas over the long highways of Arizona. ^

8. According to the Arizona State Parks Foundation, the entire state park operation uses $8.2mln per year. The median Arizona tax rate in 2008 was 8.5%. Taking from our income statistics in footnote 2, that means about $3700 in taxes per person per year go to the state. In 2009, the state population was about 6.6 million. That’s about $24.2bln in tax revenues. From this we see that about .033% ($1.25) of the median tax goes into state parks. ^

9. I’m not suggesting we should be mistrustful of everyone; however, I think it’s valid for us to require that our trust be earned, especially by those who are somehow in authority, or who apparently wish to be. Contrarily, I believe that those who automatically reject all authority are dupes, every bit as much as those who blindly accept all authority. ^

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The current policy, charmingly called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, came into being during the Clinton years. It was seen as a sort of compromise at the time, but for those who wanted the ban lifted entirely on sexual orientation, it was difficult to see exactly where the compromise was. Succinctly, during enlistment, you used to be asked, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a practicing homosexual?“¹ Now, they don’t ask. You don’t have to tell. That was the compromise.

The other side of the policy is that if a soldier later reveals a nonheterosexual orientation, he or she can be tried under court martial and issued a discharge, because homosexual behavior is against the military code of conduct. However, even revealing the presence of a lover, while remaining celibate when away from that person, is also grounds for discharge. The subtle message is that merely thinking about engaging in homosexual conduct is against the rules. Freedom of thought is thus quashed. This seems unreasonable in almost any light, and arguably goes against the spirit of our national founders’ intent.

Leaving aside for a moment the question about sexual orientation, this places gays and lesbians in a tough spot. There are very good reasons to want to enlist; for instance, the military can offer a leg up and a good start in life. It can be a question of patriotism. Or it might run in the family. All of these reasons are suitable for enlistment, and they’re all laudable. However, a nonheterosexual enlistee starts her or his career at an instant disadvantage. When the others are able to talk about the lovers or spouses they’re missing, a gay or lesbian soldier cannot join in the conversation. I can’t imagine this enhances a sense of camaraderie in the ranks.

Contrarily, there surely are some soldiers who would feel uncomfortable to know they were serving, living closely, and even showering with a nonheterosexual person. I’d imagine it could be pretty awkward to have to drop your clothes in a situation where you felt you might be getting ogled. Something like that probably wouldn’t lend itself to camaraderie either.

What seems to be the case among most active-duty personnel, though, is that the only real concern they have about their fellow soldiers is how well they can handle a fight. Do they keep it together when bullets are flying and explosions are thundering? Can they hit what they’re aiming at? How far can they chuck a grenade? Do they have your back? Most soldiers seem to be of the mindset that, once you’re actually in combat, your sexual behaviors are irrelevant.

Recently, a lengthy study was published wherein survey results showed that the overwhelming majority of active-duty soldiers are comfortable with the idea of serving with gay or lesbian comrades. This is not universally so, of course, but with the Marines holding out at a maximum of 30% opposition, the voices of dissent aren’t anywhere near as loud as we might think.

Usually in our society, majority carries. This doesn’t mean we should disregard the sensibilities of our servicemen and –women, though, when they raise objections. On the other hand, we shouldn’t disregard the rights of gays and lesbians to serve, if they feel motivated to do so.

I suppose we could start by asking why the objections to homosexuality exist. I’m not sure myself. I suppose some of it has to do with social conditioning; we’re shown at an early age that nonheterosexual behavior is a subject of mockery, derision, and shame; it can lead to physical violence and even death; some nations, such as Iran, kill people for homosexuality.

Some of it may be due to sensible discomfort. I really would not feel right about stripping down in front of someone whom I believed was aroused by it, if that person’s arousal was unwelcome.

Some of it is surely due to religious upbringing. In many forms of Christianity and Islam, homosexuality is regarded as sinful. (I don’t know what the outlook is in Judaism, but it’s probably similar; I don’t think it’s as much of a problem under Hinduism.)

All of these objections have some form of merit, and they’re all completely legitimate to those who have the objections. Probably the religious one is the most difficult to address rationally, but it is worth pointing out that the US armed forces don’t discriminate based on religion. You can be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, atheist, or just about anything else, and they’ll happily enlist you. I imagine that the differences between a Christian and Muslim heterosexual are considerably greater than those between a gay and a straight Christian, yet our military seems to have managed to resolve those religious differences. Bullets don’t care whom you worship, and they don’t care whom you make love with.

The discomfort about living in close quarters could be somewhat easier to handle. There’s a stereotype — particularly of gay men — that nonheterosexual people are hedonists who will seek out sex as often as possible, make unwelcome and repeated advances, and generally behave in a way unbefitting to wearing the uniform.

The reality is somewhat different. Surely if you go to a gay bar or bathhouse, you will see open advances being made, and quite a few other things besides. However, this behavior isn’t found in places such as the office, in supermarkets, or at restaurants. What this suggests to me is that gays and lesbians know where their advances may be welcome, and where they’re out of place. That’s why you see those behaviors in gay bars and bathhouses, not at the office, in supermarkets, or at restaurants.

I think it would be fair to presume that, just as they’re circumspect with their behaviors at work, gays and lesbians are not likely to be coming on to other soldiers in the shower. They know the rules, and they know who the straight people are.

Finally, we have social conditioning. I think quite a lot of that can be defused by simple exposure. If a man is uncomfortable about the idea of gay people, his views are likely to change once he’s had a chance to actually talk with and get to know a few. He might not feel completely at ease with the idea, but at least he’ll have a chance to discover that gay and straight men really aren’t all that different, except in one significant behavior — which isn’t going to be happening in the barracks anyway.

There are plenty of people outside the military who object to gays and lesbians serving, but unless they have good, rationally-defensible reasons for it, and are planning to enlist themselves, I’m not sure they should have much weight in the discussion.² It really doesn’t affect their lives.

Sexuality and religion have a long, fraught history. I don’t know of any belief system anywhere that doesn’t have something to say, some set of rules or another, on the subject of sex and sexuality. What I find interesting is that the founders of some belief systems never actually brought up the topic. It was their followers that started putting down rules.

As an example, Abraham never mentioned sex at all, though he apparently had quite a lot of it. I don’t recall Mohammed discussing it — at least I don’t see restrictions mentioned in the Koran — and it wasn’t a subject Jesus ever spoke of either, beyond forgiving an adulteress. Siddhartha Gautama made mention of it only to the extent of warning monks away from it, but that was within a larger context.

In Buddhism, there is discussion of the ten nonvirtuous actions. These are loosely divided into categories of action in mind, action in body, and action in speech. Sexual misconduct is one of the three nonvirtuous actions of body (along with killing and stealing), and interpretation of meaning is as diverse in Buddhism as it is in any other mature belief system. That is, some Christian sects reject any kind of sex outside of marriage; some reject sexual excess; some reject homosexuality. Some even forbid masturbation. Buddhism has a similar diversity. Some sects forbid oral sex; some forbid any kind of non-marital sex; some forbid non-procreative sex.

Loosely, Buddhism’s ground is to avoid incest, rape, sex by dishonesty (“I’ll still respect you in the morning,” etc.), and sex with those still under the protection of their family.³ By and large, in the more expansive systems, that’s it. There’s no mention made of homosexuality, certainly not by Gautama, so it’s held by the more liberal-minded practitioners that same-sex intercourse isn’t regarded any differently from any other kind of sex.

However, Buddhism’s reasoning is not the same as what you’ll find in the Abrahamic religions. Under Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the proscribed forms of sex are seen as sinful, something rejected by their god. It can put your soul in peril. Buddhism has a different take: your soul won’t be in peril, but your enlightenment will.

On one level, the ten nonvirtuous actions all add to social and individual strife, which is reason enough to avoid them; but some of them can end up anchoring you in a cycle of stimulation. You may get so attached to the thrill of sex, for instance, that it dominates your mind and interferes with keeping to the path of nonattachment, preventing you from recognizing the fundamental impermanence and unsatisfactoriness of existence. Since it’s vital (in Buddhism) to see impermanence and unsatisfactoriness clearly, any excessive behavior — including sexual excess — is considered unskillful. Not precisely wrong, but certainly not ideal.

Where things can get difficult is when a practitioner feels he needs certainty in the form of rules. Some people are much more comfortable with a clear set of boundaries, with explicit injunctions against doing this, saying that, and eating the other thing. Some forms of Buddhism do have these rules, but those forms are a little hard to find in the western world.⁴ It’s not that Buddhism is particularly permissive; it’s just because Buddhism is, at its base, little more than a philosophical framework which can fit well into almost any setting. As such, its adaptability can make it hard to pin anything down with it, particularly in a liberal society.

In practice, this means that it’s up to each individual Buddhist to decide for herself where the boundaries are, what is unskillful, what interferes with her path to realization, and what qualifies as outright misconduct. Many Buddhists spend a lot of time thinking about these things, constantly putting their drives and behaviors under a microscope.

Additionally it can be argued that Buddhism is, by its very nature, plastic. This is probably a good thing. I can assure you that if the Theravada behavioral requirements for monks were strictly imposed universally, Buddhism wouldn’t have made its way to Tibet, China, Japan, and eventually the western world. No one would have wanted to get involved.

Gautama was impermanent. Societies are impermanent. Social customs and mores are impermanent. Therefore, elaborate rules based in one society are not to be attached to another. Really the only definite aspects of the Dharma — Buddhist beliefs — are the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Everything else is commentary. Similarly, the most important practice of Buddhism is meditation, particularly vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. Altars, incense, and mantras are unnecessary, and might be hindrances.

So where does this leave us in terms of Buddhism and homosexuality? My sense of it is, simply, that if you’re not engaging in obsessive behavior, and if you’re not explicitly harming another by your behavior, most sexual activity is acceptable — just as with other behaviors, such as what we eat, what we drink, what languages we speak, and so on. Furthermore, I don’t think we can ask a man or woman to serve, fight, and possibly die for this country while at the same time telling them they are not allowed to love whom they will, and are not allowed to be honest about it with their comrades-in-arms.

I don’t see a solid Buddhist reason to forbid gays and lesbians serving in the military, nor do I see any other defensible reason; and if that is the path they choose, it is my wish for them that they tread it well, with honor, and with dignity.

==

1. Witty rejoinders included, “No, I’m an expert”, and “I practice every chance I get, honey”.

2. This includes retired soldiers as well as career civilians, since the retirees are no longer on active duty and won’t be serving with anyone — gay, straight, or whatever else.

3. In addition to children, this means those who may be handicapped or otherwise incapacitated.

4. The Buddhist school that is most familiar to the western world, and that has the most rigid set of rules, is probably Zen.

As an aside, I apologize for the long delay before this post. I’ll endeavor to do better in the future.

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

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