Buddhists In Disguise?

Here at the monastery, I've been thinking about the Transformers a lot lately.

The comics, not the movies, and I've especially been thinking about them in the context of Buddhism.

Buddhism is fueled by the idea of change, of impermanence. It was born as a response to the inevitable human conditions of old age, sickness, and death.

Transformers are less vulnerable to those conditions. Individual Cybertronians measure their years in the millions. Parts can be replaced, fallen friends rebuilt.

In that context, how possible for them is any lasting change? Less bound by the positive and negative feedback of irreversible consequences, what motivation is there for real growth, for permanently ceasing hostilities, for Megatron to permanently change his ways, for the Autobots to break their dependence on Optimus Prime to come back yet again to save them, for Starscream to stop wash-rinse-repeating his cycle from ambition to self-destruction, for Hot Rod to mature and temper his recklessness?

The Transformers' situation is practically a meta-comment on comic book characters in general.

Consider Spider-Man. For over fifty years his life has been a never-ending barrage of villains, clones, costume changes, secret wars, deaths, rebirths, alternate timelines, crossovers, team-ups, and World Shaking Events...only to be eternally, inexorably reeled back by the slow gravity of the status-quo.

What would that do to a being, do you think?

Pain

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."

-Fake Buddha Quote

"Everybody hurts sometime"

-REM

I don't like suffering.

Since I practice Buddhism, you probably guessed that already. Here's something I'm even more ashamed to admit:

I don't like pain either.

I hate it. Not only do I hate being in pain myself,  I also hate to see others hurting.

It's fair to say that my particular brain dislikes pain much much more than it dislikes suffering. Certainly, it will go to great lengths to avoid it.

Having this kind of brain is normal, and it's also a creator of problems.

A brain that wants freedom from pain more than freedom from suffering makes short-sighted, selfish and sometimes counterproductive or even destructive choices. As someone with one of those brains, I get the logic behind it: Who cares about suffering? What does suffering matter so long as we don't FEEL the suffering?

 In other words, our confused mind mistakenly believes that "not hurting" equals "not being hurt."

And so it looks for ways to numb any pain, to bury past pain, and to ward off any potential future discomfort. It chases anything that might help. The obvious targets are sex, drugs, fame or wealth. But there are others, and some are even more insidious for their very social acceptability. Work. Stability. The Perfect Family. Health and/or exercise. Justice.  Making a Difference. Fine things to strive for or achieve...so long as we don't expect them to provide us with something they can't give--immunity to pain.

It pushes people away, then pulls them back, trying to find the perfect distance. It meticulously dissects the past. It worries about and tries to control every aspect of the future. It Keeps Busy.

It lies to others or makes promises it can't keep. It guards how it is really feeling to avoid hurting others. It keeps silent when speaking an uncomfortable truth might be necessary. It tries to solve others' problems so they won't feel pain anymore whether they asked for help or not. It can't bear to hear about others' hurt so it refuses to let them tell us about it. It changes the subject, or it changes the channel.

In its darkest moments, it envies those that seem able to shrug off pain or who seem to be able to do these things without feeling badly about them. It might recognize that those people are damaged, but from its perspective, those people are also not hurting, and not hurting is always the number one priority. Why can't you be more like that? it whispers. Whether the pain belongs to you or others, wouldn't it be nice to be free from caring about hurt?

I know my brain works this way.

I can't get too upset. It's doing its best to protect me, and for that, I'm grateful.  My happiness and health is its utmost concern. I'm moved by its devotion.

Plus, let's face it.  Pain-avoidance isn't a totally unreasonable strategy.  It might even work sometimes. There are situations where such an approach is absolutely necessary. Certainly, I'm glad my brain speaks up when half-awake me is about to stick my hand in the wood stove to fiddle with the kindling.

That said, for the most part, pain-avoidance isn't a sustainable long term strategy. Sometimes what we're using to kill the pain stops working, or we need more and more of it to have the same effect or we can't get it anymore or it starts having negative side effects. Sometimes our bodies fail us or more and more of the people around us start making choices of their own.

Sometimes it causes more hurt, for ourselves, yes, and also for those we care about most, and whether we intended to or not, that hurt is there and that hurt is real.

More importantly, it goes against who many of us aspire to be. I might have this type of brain, but I don't have to choose that type of life. None of us do.

I've read a couple books on anxiety. In them, the authors maintained that avoiding fear or anxiety only results in us being afraid or anxious about more things until we are boxed in by our own terror. They advocated something called "peak and pass," where we allow ourselves to experience our fears in a safe situation, and notice how they go away on their own. It sounds like a similar principle to what we do in meditation, but since I'm neither a psychologist nor a certified meditation instructor, that's speculation on my part.

In any case, I'm not writing anything new here. Few people enjoy uninvited pain, and almost everyone recognizes that pain is sometimes inevitable. I'm also sure most of us have had an experience where trying to avoid hurt caused us and/or those around us greater pain down the road. Furthermore, even as children, most of us have been taught--in theory, at least--the importance of being able to face up to painful things.

So perhaps there's a bigger question being raised here. It's not a question that I know the answer to, but I'm hoping that asking it and leaving it for all will somehow be of value. Because if it's true that pain is inevitable, and it is equally true that suffering is optional...well, it would be a handy thing to know how to make a distinction between the two, would it not? Certainly I've confused one for the other a time or two.

Put another way, boxing trainer Teddy Atlas said that to be successful a fighter "...has to know the difference between the truth and a lie. The lie is thinking that submission is an acceptable option. The truth is that if you give up, afterward you'll realize that any of those punches that you thought you couldn't deal with, or those rough moments you didn't think you would make it through were just moments."

So what helps us make that distinction?   How do we learn to distinguish between true suffering and the merely painful? Is knowing the difference even that important?

 Where, among all these 'just moments,' can we find the truth?

Just Like The Movies

"It is normal for a man, whilst sailing and observing the shore, to think that the shore is moving instead of the boat but, should he look carefully, he will find that it is the boat that is doing the actual moving: in the same way as this, it is because man observes everything from a mistaken viewpoint of his body and mind that he comes to the conclusion that they are eternal however, should he learn to observe them correctly, as a result of penetrating truth, he will discover that no form whatsoever attaches itself substantially to anything."

-Dogen, Genjo-Koan

"Yeah, It was but a moment

Yeah, Wonder where it all went"

-Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Just Like In The Movies

When I was four or five years old, at a friend's birthday party, I saw my first movie. It was magnificent! There were whirs and noises, a light at the front, and on top, two spinning wheels. It wasn't until an adult tapped me on the shoulder and directed my attention to the screen behind me where three ducklings were swimming after their mother into the sunset that I understood my mistake: I'd been watching the projector the whole time.

I sometimes wonder what Dogen, the thirteenth century Japanese monk credited as the person behind our specific Zen sect would think about the movies. Having read a lot of his work lately, I imagine it might go something like this:

"A person might say, "that movie was so realistic," while another says "it's only a movie" and that movies have nothing to do with real life. Such people are chumps. Ha! I pity the fools. Movies are not like reality, and movies are not like not-reality. A person in real life watches a movie, and a person also watches a movie in real life. People are real; movies are real; real life is real. Thus, while watching a movie is real life, real life is also watching the movie. It is also true that people are not real, movies are not real, and real life is not real."

Imaginary-Dogen raises a good point, but I'm not going there for now. I'm also not going to talk about the differences between life and movies, such as life's tendency to leave in the boring, difficult parts instead of condensing them into an inspiring montage set to an ass-kicking rock song. Instead, I'm going to talk about a couple things a think movies can teach us.

1. Nothing in a movie is real.  At the same time, everything we see and experience is due to countless people, many of whom we don't actually see.

The characters are actors pretending to be someone they aren't, delivering lines that another person wrote, wearing costumes someone else designed, sometimes enhanced with computer technology that means they are often performing with things that are not actually in front of the camera with them.

But is that so different from real life? We wear clothes other people made. We travel in vehicles that were invented, designed, and built by multitudes of others. The people we see are products of their parents genetics, mixed with their social upbringing. Even some of our most cherished ideas and favorite spoken lines and catchphrases...so many of those things we learned with others.

We think we're the stars of our own story, but there is much more than what we see in front of us.

2. Commitment

Even though movies are not real, the people making them treat them as if they are. Even if movies are simple entertainment, movie workers devote themselves to as though it were the most serious thing on Earth. Good actors, good writers, good directors, good make-up or special effects artists...all of them devote 100% to their work even if the thing they are working on is--in their opinion--stupid, pointless, boring, or unbelievable. Robert Downey Jr. doesn't look at the camera and go: "Look at me! I'm a-pretendin' to be a Super Hero!" Whether they are saving the world from aliens, involving themselves in the world's most improbable love story, growing space-potatoes on Mars, none of them are winking at the audience going, "Can you believe this here bullshit?"

But maybe my five year old self had the best lesson of all: Look at the projector, not the projection.

When things happen to us in our lives, our brains interpret those things, come up with a story about them, and very often we act on the story instead of the thing that actually happened. We forget about our brain's involvement.

Sometimes it's valuable to look at that brain and notice those stories.

When I find myself getting frustrated doing my taxes, instead of thinking the problem is the tax forms or the computer or the son-of-a-bitch government, I can take a look at that frustration. Maybe I'll notice that frustration is hiding something else--the fear of not having enough, the fear of doing things wrong, the fear of being asked for more than I believe I can afford to give.

When I find myself frustrated with the demands of monastery life, instead of thinking the problem is the schedule or the monks or my own inability to find out what people want and to deliver it to them perfectly, I can take a look at that. Maybe I'll notice that frustration is hiding something else--the fear of not having enough, the fear of doing things wrong, the fear of being asked for more than I believe I can afford to give.

Maybe I'll notice that whether I'm dealing with taxes, other people, or situations I feel beyond my control--even if they seem vastly different for one another--there are some common themes in my brain.

This doesn't need to just apply to external things like people and situations. Sometimes even my own internal reactions and behavior are based on a story that I am too distracted to notice.

For example, during an awkward moment at breakfast, instead of wondering whether the self-deprecating joke that springs to my lips is funny enough, maybe I could notice instead what combination of feeling and circumstance leads me to feeling the need to make a joke in the first place.

I can only write for myself, but what I notice when I look, is that often behind my actions, there is an impulse or plan.

When I look behind that plan or impulse, I find a thought or a belief about myself or about the way the world is or should be.

If I look behind that, then I frequently notice a feeling, often one that is barely perceptible.

And behind that?

Well. That's the question, isn't it? I don't know if I can give an answer--after all, I promised earlier to only write about my self.

Our lives are not about our stories. The beginning, middle, and end is not nearly as important as the thing that is happening right now, right in front of us. Right here, in our personal theatre of the mind.

The Level Of Our Training

"Cease from all evil whatsoever."
-Dogen

"I ain't evil, I'm just good-looking."
-Alice Cooper

Dogen, the thirteenth century Japanese monk widely-credited as the founder of our specific branch of Buddhism, opens his 'Rules for Meditation' with a series of questions. Essentially, he's asking: If the truth is always with us, why do we have to look to find it? If we believe enlightenment is part of our fundamental nature, why do we need to bother meditating?

Whether we're Buddhists or not, a version of this question has a way of cropping up in most of our lives. If we're okay/lovable/worthy just the way we are, how is it that we also have to be accountable for our shortcomings and looking for opportunities to improve?

I was thinking of Dogen's question watching a movie the other night. It was a love story about two good-looking, decent people, who had obvious chemistry and deserved the opportunity to see where it went.

Except that one partner repeatedly ignored the other person's 'no's, showed up at her work, stalked her to find her home address, and blackmailed her into going out with him.

The other partner slept with him and then didn't return his calls, alternated between doing nice things and pulling away, and when a potential issue arose, leaped into her car and drove away while he was in the shower.

It's been awhile since I've dated or written a dating column, but even from my celibate point-of-view, both sets of behaviors from a near-stranger fall into a little category I like to call Giant Red Flags.

After all, all of this was happening during the BEGINNING of the relationship, the part where you actually LIKE each other. If they're doing this kind of thing now, what happens when their relationship hits a rough patch?

I'll tell you. For them, absolutely nothing because they are Imaginary People in a love story about good-looking and fundamentally decent people that ends happily ever after. But most of the real people in my life who have exhibited or been in relationships with people that exhibited these kinds of traits...the result has often been a whole lot of suffering.

This suffering didn't necessarily happen because the people involved were bad people. It didn't happen because they didn't love each other enough. It didn't happen because they deserved to suffer.

It happened because they had practiced certain habits, and when the going got tough, they fell back on those habits, and those habits were not the sorts of habits that are helpful for building and maintaining a stable, trusting, two-way relationship.

I read a saying in a book on fear and disaster-preparedness and I think it's a great saying, because in my experience, it remains true no matter what you're talking about be it religion or romance, self-defense or social work, disaster-preparedness or dancing. The guy said something like, "In a crisis, people don't rise to the level of the occasion; they sink to the level of their training."

Or as a stand-up comic once told a bunch of us: "You do hundreds and thousands of shows as practice for the three or four that really matter."

And in our lives, which are the moments that matter? Do we know when they're coming? Do we even recognize them as they're happening?

What are we practicing? How are we practicing it? Is it the thing that is really most important?

How much time do we have to become ready?

Bid Time Return

"Time only exists as a way to measure change."
-Some SF writer I read years ago whose name I can't remember

For funzies, try this: Try and guess what you will be thinking fifteen seconds from now.

What about trying to recall exactly what was going through your mind two minutes ago?

What about even, what about what you are experiencing rrriiiiiigghhhtt  nnnowww. Now. No, now.

Did you have any luck? I never have. Not even with the present. The problem with trying to 'be in the moment' is that the moment changes even as you're reaching for it.

We tend to think of time as a road we travel, moving from the past into the future. Looking back, we can see the past. Looking forward we can see the future. Looking here, we can be in the moment, whatever that means. The idea that we are a part of time and not apart from it is tough to swallow.

Walking the monastery dog the other day, I tried an experiment similar to the one at the beginning of this post. I tried to imagine the experience of my next step.

Couldn't do it. The reality never matched the actual experience. The wind rose or died, my foot landed differently, the dog took a different direction, a bird called...something I hadn't expected always happened.

Nor, no matter how hard I tried, was I able to recreate the memory of my previous step, though it had taken place less than a second ago.

I can't perfectly plan my next footfall or predict what I was thinking twenty minutes from now. Why then, do I think I have an accurate read on the story of my life and who I am over the past forty years or any possibility of guessing what my future might bring and how much or how little happiness it will bring with it?

There is no road. There are no tomorrows on the horizon or yesterdays stretching backwards. We create our futures with each step and pull the past up behind us.

All that said, to go back to my walk on the mountain, there is a connection between my past, present, and future steps. The step I take now grows out of the one before and makes possible the one I will take next. It's this connection that leads me up the mountain, down the mountain, or wandering around in circles.

This matters.

We can plan, worry, imagine, fantasize, or predict all we want, but our minds can never show us our future. Instead, we create it with our choices.

My experience is that people who meditate every day experience change. So do people who make a commitment to healthy eating and regular exercise. So do people who drink heavily on a daily basis or who isolate themselves playing hours of computer games. And while we can't say what will happen to any one specific individual at any one specific moment, over time, patterns emerge.

Those patterns are your business, not mine, so I'll refrain from my opinion, one way or the other. I don't know you, and I'm not your mom.

At the same time, whoever you are, wherever you are, wherever you want to be, and whatever you want, no matter your level of happiness or unhappiness, ignorance or knowledge, skill or inexperience, there is only one step you really need to take. Indeed, it's the only step you CAN take--and that step is the next one.

Take it, and good luck to you. May you find happiness, meaning, and whatever else you're looking for.

Sun's Out, Monks Out

I'm not a monk, but the time I most feel like one is walking down the mountain road carrying my laundry bag over my shoulder. I find myself thinking about other spiritual seekers over the centuries who have walked tree-lined paths, through the forests of Japan or Europe, and realizing that though I'm by myself, I'm not alone.

This life is like any other life: I can't do it alone, and at the same time, no one else can do it for me.

Our culture values individuality and independence. We're not often asked to think about how much are lives have been, and continue to be, made possible by others.

Try it. It's a powerful experience.

We travel roads paved by those who have come before, and there are many even now that support our journeys in ways both obvious and subtle.

None of those people though, can take a single step for us. Only we can choose the road to our own happiness, and only we can walk it.

It's always valuable for me to be reminded that I'm not the only person in the world, and I'm not living in the only time that does, has, or ever will matter.

And at the same time, this is who I am. This is where I am. This is what I have.

How then, to make the most of it?

Snow Day

(01/15/16)

I'm standing outside the cabin. The dog is leaning against my leg.

It's snowing, but so gently.

Whichever way I turn the mountains show me something beautiful.

I wish everyone could see this. I wish I could wrap it in a beautiful package and mail it to them.

I wish I could take a picture of the quiet.