Enlightenment

Stella Doro lily doesn't know it's too late to bloom.  Note the sheltered ladybug.

Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom, which is called buddhahood or the awakened state of mind. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all . . .
Chogyam Trungpa, “The Human Realm,” in Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, page 258.

My main practice is Zen, but with an interest in other streams.  A year or so ago I bought "The Practice of Contemplative Photography," which includes some photographs by Trungpa Rinpoche, and that stimulated my interest in his work.  Like Shunryu Suzuki, he is more difficult to understand than his American followers, but worth the effort.

What these words remind me of is that I am perfectly what I am, what I was made to be by long and wide streams of karma, national, genetic, historical, environmental, and so on.  In Zen we talk about "the self," or "the conditioned self."  At one time I believed my task was to get rid of it.  I did, I believed that, because it was becoming clear to me that my histrionic hypersensitive over-responsible and bipolar self was the source of my suffering.  I remember Daniel Terragno asking me reasonably, "How could you do that?"  I thought we weren't communicating very well.

You cannot not be who you are. Your brain and your butt are the shape they are.  And you are okay.  But (as many teachers have added), you still need to work a little harder.  You may be OCD, but you can learn how to throw away a cereal box. You may be hypersensitive to criticism, but you can learn whose criticism to avoid or how to deflect it. It's bit by bit, inch by inch. There's always work to do

When I started a regular meditation practice, it was in a frenzy of fear that the cancer in my breast would kill me.  This was irrational; it had been discovered on a mammogram at stage one.  Nevertheless, I began doing a white light healing meditation you can find taught all over the world.  From there I somehow moved into just sitting following my breath, then a lot of other practices.  At this point in my life, I was also in torment with my alcoholic family, and they weren't the only people in my life driving me crazy.  That was how I saw life then: they drove me crazy.

There was some truth to that.  Some people are hard to take, and you should have a really good reason to spend time with them.  Over the next couple of years I was going to leave behind several people who just weren't good for me.  It was hard every single time.  Now I am amazed that I ever tolerated them.  But I didn't see the reality then.  My reality was governed by an idea that I should like everyone, tolerate rudeness, cultivate patience, and enjoy pool parties.  I mean, of course. 

You know what?  I like a genuine beach and a nice big body of water, as well as a creek and a waterfall.  I hate swimming pools, chlorine, cold water. It's a matter of personal preferences.  But I had to take swimming lessons and push push push myself to try and try harder - in the face of fibromyalgia pain - because, well, everyone said swimming was good for you.  And I thought I should learn to like it.  And certainly I had to go to my brother's pool parties because, well, he invited me.  Though another thing I really don't like is being around people who are devoting themselves to drinking all day.

One of the things Zen says is that when you are enlightened, you will taste a cup of tea and know for yourself whether the water is hot or cold.  It's a metaphor.  You learn you don't like Carol, and you're cold when you're cold, and hungry when you're hungry.  Other children of alcoholics may recognize the denial of ordinary needs that was enforced in my childhood.

I thought practice would teach me how to handle all the problems in my life back then. It has, including that some things can't be solved.  Also, I often see more clearly now where the problem lies, and how it can be handled.  This is hard for me to say, but there's actually nothing wrong with Carol, and I bet some people like her.  She is what she is.  I just - sorry, I just didn't like her.  And don't miss her.

In short, what I am gradually approaching with practice is not universal joy but being aware.  That includes, though it is not limited to, what you like and don't like, moment by moment.  It applies to many mundane things that can add up to STRESS.  It's very interesting how the little raft takes you far, but not where you thought it was going. 

[In looking up the hot and cold thing, I was led to a dharma talk I think must be by Shinge Roshi, for those who want to think more about this.]

Boredom Ointment

Self-portrait in orange shoelaces

The Vermont Country Catalog came today, and I was leafing through, looking at the supplements they offer us old people - this company is all about nostalgia, and easing old age.  There is a supplement for vertigo, for instance, that you smell to relax your anxiety and help you focus.  It contains lavender and some other essential oils; I approve.  It's fun to think of really old people (older than me) learning to use these hippy-dippy things that came out of the seventies.

I like aromatherapy, which is a science built on the oral tradition. I have a collection of scents I can use to bring me down a little or cheer me up or just relax me.

On the same page in the catalog I came across what I thought was Boredom Ointment.  What?  No, it's Boreoleum Ointment.  Which looks a lot like Vicks Vaporub for your nose.  But I already have a classy Ayurvedic nasal oil from Banyan Botanicals.  Ayurveda is basically another folk-wisdom tradition.

But, Boredom ointment!  If only there were a cream you could dab on and immediately feel interested in yourself and your surroundings.  I googled images for Bored student and got well over 2 million hits.  This seems like a lot, and accurately reflects what my own public schooling was like, but it's only 1% of the number of  hits for Britney.  Why Britney?  I don't know.  I didn't even know  she was the Queen of Pop until I looked her up. 

Anyway, this morning something led me to see that her Facebook page has over 2 million "likes".    Why is that number taunting me?  Because mine has 1,999,62 less, unless it's taken a huge growth spurt since this morning.  I asked why on my personal Facebook page, and haven't had any helpful answers, except that maybe I have too much time on my hands.  I think this difference is a comment on human nature, in fact. I'm a fun person (see photo above), but not as much fun as Britney, I guess.

Actually, these subjects - boredom and Britney- have found themselves side-by-side in my sprawling brain, and pulling weird, anomalous things together is what we artists do.  Britney is not an artist and Buddhist blogger, but an entertainer.  Entertainment is excitement, and seems to fill that big space of being bored or discontented with life or downright unhappy.  It pays much better than art.

Is discontentment the same as boredom?  I think it is, in a way.  There are some writings on boredom in the massive body of work left behind by Chogyam Trungpa, whose page is surprisingly small, with some 21,000 hits, though he was quite entertaining in his lifetime. 

To my surprise, there is no page for Ocean of Dharma, which sends me quotes like the one below from him.  Britney may be the Queen of Pop, but his honorific is Rinpoche, a Tibetan term for a Buddhist teacher which means "precious jewel". 

“Boredom is part of the discipline of meditation practice. This type of boredom is cool boredom, refreshing boredom. Boredom is necessary and you have to work with it. It is constantly very sane and solid, and very boring at the same time. But it’s refreshing boredom. The discipline then becomes part of one’s daily expression of life. Such boredom seems to be absolutely necessary. Cool boredom.” Chogyam Trungpa

Nothing is Ever Simple

Thinking about collage

So says my coffee mug, with a charming Boynton cartoon of a cow draped sadly over a crescent moon.  Today I looked at it and thought, "Yes, everything is complicated.  But that doesn't mean it has to be hard."  That is, you just follow one thread patiently.  Then another. 

Yes, there are a lot of threads, and boy, are there a lot of errors and problems along the way.  I am so grateful that Zen Teacher Dogen said, "My life has been a series of mistakes."  Of course it has; you're always doing something for the first time.  Even if you've done it before, be prepared to be surprised.

Then there are the bigger problems we run into with our neurosis.  I'm using that word in the way the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, used it, to refer to this kind of mixed-up conditioned self we are; psychiatry aside, we're all neurotic until we awaken fully. As I understand it, you are still you, and your neurosis will rear up at times, but if you're fully conscious and present you can invite it to go sit down in the other room while you make some tea.

When something is awfully difficult, that's your neurosis kicking up.  Or mine.  They are fond of saying that's exactly where your practice begins.  I hate that.  I'm glad I'm not a Teacher and I don't have to be nice and positive about that...............though I do believe in trying to be nice.  Last Saturday night after a funeral I was introduced to a man in a beautiful Indonesian shirt was as "The Dalai Grandma," (a first for me), which led him to quote his favorite saying of the Dalai Lama:  "Try to be nice."
Time for a breather.
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next day -
The great news from my musculo-skeletal doc is that Friday's MRI shows no compression fractures in the spine.  The unspoken news is also no tumors or cancer.  He is confident I irritated a nerve, and it will heal over time, and I won't be as limited and in pain as I am right now.  But what I have to do - are you ready? - is pamper myself.  Yes.

And next time I start to hurt while driving, stop driving.  I know exactly when the injury happened a couple of weeks ago.  I was driving the van on a highway, running late, spine hurting like crazy but I didn't want to get off and change drivers; and Tom didn't feel great anyway, and had asked me to drive.  Well, I am not yet too old to learn.  Meanwhile, no PT just now and stay as active as I can. While pampering myself.  So I'm off to do that now.

The Nirvana Fallacy

Imagine my delight when I ran across the nirvana fallacy on Wikipedia!  (There, that's my one exclamation mark for this post.)  I am not making this up - here it is, not as a Buddhist idea, but one on the list of accepted fallacies.  It is the error of  -

comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. . . . [in working any problem] the choice is not between real world solutions and utopia; it is a choice between one realistic possibility and another which is merely better.

Now, turn from Western philosophy to the Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which I did yesterday on my iPad, for a while back I bought vol. 2 of his collected writings, a big book, a great bargain. I love reading it on this thing, being able to leave notes and highlights and not bother Tom if I'm reading in bed (it is backlit). And I really enjoy his unique, colloquial voice, which has been preserved in these carefully edited talks.  I happened to have left off last time reading about work.

Strangely enough the transcendental thing, the profound thing, exists in the kitchen sink, in the factory. It may not be particularly blissful to look at; it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we read about, but somehow the actual reality exists there, in the simplicity of people and working with people and dealing with every problem that we are given. . . . The people who wrote the Vedas and the Dhammapada and all the scriptures were not intellectual, high-strung people.

Just the other day I found myself in an interesting conversation about this at brunch.  My friend, who teaches yoga, brought up the subject of nirvana, and stages of levels of bliss, or perhaps higher consciousness, that they work to attain in her discipline.  So I tried to explain how Zen teachers work to get us grounded in this. I quoted the line from Hakuin's Song of Zazen:

         This very place is the lotus land!

All this seemed to be news to the man sitting beside us, who had been talking about how bad a particular bar is to do karaoke in, and who asked a lot of questions that encouraged us, not to spar, but to explain our particular spiritual paths.

Most certainly I do not reject bliss when it comes my way, don't get me wrong. But you need to be careful with it. A well-rounded spiritual experience can leave you with your feet barely touching the ground and a disinclination to take the trash to the curb. But life is about carrying out the trash.  In fact, we are made of what was once dirt and (as the Zen Masters like to say) shit.  Trash, and these bodies will become trash again, to enter the great cycle of fertilizing life.

About Stanley in the cartoon above - what is his true self at the end of all his effort?  The guy with a briefcase and umbrella and morning news, in a suit, on his way to work.  Getting to know and be that guy through and through, or that crazy poet or politico or accountant or dog breeder that you are, that's the work.

How to search for work

Update:  Not feeling well this morning, after a busy week, maybe too stressed - I think I am getting another UTI, waiting for callback from nurse.  You know. Otherwise, physical stamina improving, pain under control, trouble getting to sleep at night, generally happy.  Not much energy to write.
~~~~~~~~~~
But this very good advice came my way this morning because I subscribe to Ocean of Dharma (a site about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's work).  I know many people are looking for work.  For the fortunate rest of us, I suppose it would also apply to other things we undertake.  There is a way that it is about not being guided solely by ambition or concepts. One of my Zen teachers, Daniel Terragno, often said to me, in response to my koan work, "Too conceptual."  Often enough that it stuck.  Have a nice weekend, everyone.

You can plan everything, if you plan in accordance with your present state. You don’t plan something in terms of what you would like to be. No one can do that. You can only plan based on what you are now. Now you need a job, therefore you are working on finding one. The real way of being without aim or object is dealing with the present situation, the completely present situation. The more you are realistic about the present situation—how much money you need, what kind of job you are capable of doing, what state of health you are in—the better your chances when you look for a job. If a person is off the track of relating with the present moment, consumed with what might be, then quite likely her job search would be disastrous.  [from Work, Sex, Money by Chogyam Trungpa.]

Recover from Your Speed

I am dumb this morning - this state began yesterday after or during nap. Or dull, the opposite of sharp, high, inspired, en-lightened. This is a matter of the senses, of feeling nothing.  Anyway, reading Trungpa this morning on Practice and Intellect, here is something I highlighted (learning how to use my phone):

. . . by providing some sense of space and openness, meditation is good preparation for reading.  If you allow yourself some gap or space to rest by sitting down and doing absolutely nothing, you recover from your speed.

Don't you like that?  Recover from your speed.  Why are we - why is Wun - so boneheaded stubborn reluctant to sit down and give up speeding around?  I have given this a lot of thought over the years, usually projecting my own reluctance on someone else, but it always comes down to this: understanding all your motivation and causation and history won't really help you act.  You have to act.  Sit down.  Breathe.  Relax.

Sitting like a frog

Being, like a frog.  Being like a frog today, in fact.  Except a frog doesn't have to worry about the kitchen floor and go get a blood draw and order calcium online.

Recently read where some Teacher reminded us how special it is to be the only creature that can build a relatively safe, comfortable shelter from the weather.  Though even at this moment one thinks of the tornadoes that have barely missed us lately, of how Hurricane Ike sent high winds all the way to Ohio, and big trees fell in our neighborhood, where we are fortunate to have big trees, and we were out of power for seven days, and everything in the freezer and refrigerator finally went bad, though I did manage to give some chicken nuggets to Barb.

Yes, that's this beautiful mind today, open.  Big day yesterday, drove to Amish country to visit with Tom's folks and Uncle Ted, had an excellent lunch, a wonderful time.  Today, I am tired, a frog without the energy to stick my tongue out and catch a fly.

Trungpa's advice to just sit was exactly the advice of Suzuki Roshi, I remember - and it was Suzuki who told his students to just sit like a frog.  I didn't "get it" as well as I do now that I am reading it in Trungpa Rinpoche's book The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handook of Buddhist Meditation.  Whew, long title.  The idea is that the path is not a journey.  The goal is not to become a perfect human being.  Not to move along the path and get somewhere so you can be a student of a higher order.  The only goal is to get on the * path.  Just get both feet on it, take one step.  No, maybe it's just sit down on it.  That's all.  No going forward. It is a wonderful thing to hit this guy at this stage in my practice. He illuminates everything from another direction at a time when I have learned too many ways to occupy my mind while in meditation.

Ah yes, I am loosened up and happy today by a wonderful day with family yesterday, all that riding through gorgeous green landscapes unmarred by big farm machines. At the produce stand, there was a team of horses waiting.  An Amish man was showing a non-Amish neighbor the hoe he just bought - handmade.  Hand riveted.

But back to sitting, I mean, meditation.  Trungpa very emphatically wants us to begin practice at the very beginning, to sit down and do nothing.  Don't focus on a candle flame or your breath or your mantra or a visualization.  You begin at the very beginning by sitting down like a tired old frog on a lily pad on a hot day, not even waiting for a fly.  We humans call it "wasting time." Letting time go by, empty.


Furthermore, he maintains that there is no verb form for meditation in his tradition.  No such word as "meditating" in Sanskrit.  It is a noun.  You be in meditation.  You don't do it.  So think of it as a nice sort of closet of cool light you step into, sit down, and don't even wait.

Anyway, I felt quite odd today after doing my meditation, oh no, not doing it, just sitting there.  It was quite different for me.  I came out of it still feeling froggy or foggy, not having any idea what to do next.  Okay, got dressed.  Have to go do labs.  I don't do them, I submit to them.  I sit like a frog and people put big needles in me and take my blood away.  Like six vials every two weeks to make sure I'm as healthy as I look. And don't even give me a * cookie.  That's life post-transplant.

Bipolar, Borderline, Enlightened

This morning my study feels more like a sanctuary than usual. It is dim and threatening rain, a relief after days of bright heat. I had eight hours of healing sleep. There is nothing on our agenda for the whole long weekend but to relax. Our grandson, and his vital energy, are gone. Tashi is relieved - cats are instinctively wary of change. I'm getting there myself.

I want to write somehow about being labeled.

Last night we watched Crazy Wisdom, a wonderful film about the life of Chogyam Trungpa, who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the West. I first knew him as the teacher of Pema Chodron, whom I have never met, but whose books and tapes taught me how to meditate.  Recently my aversion to Trungpa's famous drunkenness and sexual behavior melted away - thank God, my standards are eroding - and I have been studying his talks on my Kindle.  So here came this film, through the Tricycle film festival.

Every psychiatrist I've ever known would feel satisfied that Trungpa Rinpoche was Bipolar and Borderline. You could make that Bipolar with schizoaffective overtones, as he had visions, one famous one in the cave of an ancient Buddhist saint. Add to that Dual Diagnosis - his drinking was legendary.

It is not news to me that the very manifestations that are called Bipolar can be seen in religious terms. I once owned a book called Are you Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?  In the mid-1970's my own behavior during periods of extreme emotions/sensations was labeled "manic," but if I'd been in a knowledgeable Buddhist community it might have been recognized as the heart chakra opening, as an enlightenment experience.  Labels are strictly cultural.  Words have no intrinsic truth.

A wise Buddhist teacher might have had me eat beef, which is grounding, and kept me in dim, quiet rooms, with advanced students being with me, encouraging me to sit silent, to fall asleep, helping me come down.  Other behavior/feelings that hit later would have been labeled not depression, but despair, a spiritual condition long recognized in the Christian tradition, and prominent in Jesus's story. I would been encouraged to keep doing my daily work, to get outside and contemplate nature, to do physical forms like walking meditation, yoga, or tai chi, to sit with my feelings and recognize how they modulate and pass moment by moment. But I didn't have a religious tradition to help me.

People who are caught by the American mental health system can resist being labeled, or be grateful and hopeful that it will help. In the absence of a good community approach to extreme behavior, medications can help. Equally, they harm. Lithium cost me my kidneys. You don't know what trouble is until your kidneys start failing.  I'm sorry that a good residential training program did not exist, and sorry that very few such programs exist now.

Here is the Buddhist understanding of extreme emotions: you never "are" some thing.  You are a dance or a traffic jam, a bunch of processes that are active as long as your body is alive.  What you call "me" changes all the time.  Labels are a convenience, but we need to understand they are not reality.

Here and there are other people like me, for whom religiosity is deep experience, not "symptom". Many other people who have gone through extreme experiences and have learned how to work with their feelings, thoughts, sensations. Who use little or no medication. Who are happy and useful. I am convinced that more of us need to come forth and be willing to be labeled crazy, who know that the truth is, we have crazy wisdom.  Some frightened people will avoid us, some sick people will enjoy gossiping and feeling superior. That's life. You can't help what other people think.

Those of us who have found paths that work need to share our own experience, not the long drama of being sick and disrupted, but the important story of how we let that pass and learned to be happy.

Our Zen garden from kitchen window

Trying something

From Chogyam Trungpa's The Path is the Goal -instructions for beginning meditation:

So you keep just on the verge of your technique, with just 25 percent of your attention.  Another 25 percent is relaxing, a further 25 percent relates to making friends with oneself, and the last 25 percent connects with expectation - your mind is open to the possibility of something happening during this practice session.  The whole thing is synchronized completely.

Earlier he has said that we just "put 25% of our attention on the breathing or walking. The rest of our mental activities should be let loose, left open."  Reminds me of Suzuki talking about letting your cows have a wide field to roam. 

One of the important things I learned from Daniel Terragno was to just try things.  You don't have to make a big lifetime decision, even if you are, if you know what I mean.  Experiment.  See what works. I note that this attitude gives a certain release from craving to make it work, whatever it is  You don't have to make something work if it doesn't work. You can try something else.

As for this, I've practiced in the Japanese Zen tradition for many years, and it works for me, and has not stopped being good.  Now I feel like the Tibetan has something to offer.  We shall see.
[image: the endless knot, a Tibetan symbol]

Things are always going to hell

"In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation, for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “...When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate.” Things never happen that way."

The above quote by Chogyam Trungpa made its way to my inbox this morning, a salvation from an aggravating payment mixup on Ebay (don't you wish something would go right once in a while?).  It was titled Accept Where You Are and Work From There. It's the first two sentences I'm interested in because I just got a lot to accept. I wish they didn't keep me so busy accepting.

The title of this post is an unofficial but right-on definition of entropy I once read. It is true of all made items, or forms, and super-true of the human body.  It is running down all the time, and often you just don't know it yet.

I had the lumbar MRI a couple of weeks ago. Last Friday I talked with Chad, my physical therapist, about it, but not in detail.  I did have that underground feeling while we talked that he felt compassion for me. Yesterday, though, I met with the doctor and we talked about it, and I got a copy of the report.  Reading it over I got the message - severe degeneration of all the vertebrae down there. A mess.

For this, the doctor didn't even talk about surgery.  We did talk about why I'm not electing surgery on the rotator cuff, a decision he agrees with.  He did warn me clearly that the pain may take a long time to fall away.  (But that is also true if you get the surgery.) He is quite okay with my use of Vicodin at night, more or less said, "You can do that forever, it's fine."  I already found out I can't not do it, or I am wakened often by the pain. Yesterday evening I took one early.  The back can hurt in several places at once.  Maybe I had done too much driving (though using the left arm very little, and being cautious about how I wore the seat-belt), or maybe I was somewhat depressed by this news, and that mysteriously makes pain worse.

What is there to say?  Suzuki Roshi has summarized Zen like this:  "Things change."  When you first hear that it seems meaningless.  Yes, trees lose their leaves, nations rise and fall.  But as you go on experiencing your own life and becoming more aware, you see that it's the profound truth.  You change all the time, accidents happen, people suddenly die or leave you, most things are beyond your anxious control. If you can stay right there with what is you can work on adjusting to it - accommodating to the actual body you have.  Being aware that your good luck (being alive) can change any moment.

Hitting a wall like this one is a good example, I think, of why it is important to practice being with reality.  I've done a varied lot of spiritual practices in my time, and all have benefited me, but meditation has done the most.  And it is time to go do it now.  But I want to mention that at the bottom of this blog you will find an ancient chant called The Five Remembrances. I don't recite it in cemeteries at night, as some Buddhist monks do. But I have said it enough to learn it by heart, and it pops up at times to remind me that I knew this, I'm just experiencing it more deeply now.