On Dreams and Hidden Treasure

 What are dreams? The world's scientists have a variety of explanations, which of course means that they still are not sure. Psychotherapists have other ideas. Sigmund Freud called them "the royal road to the unconscious" and based some of his practice of psychoanalysis on the interpretation of dreams. These days Freud is out of fashion but in some quarters his ideas about dreams linger on.

 So called primal peoples have other ideas yet and lend dreams significant credibility. As for myself, I tend to think of them as something like psychological weather reports. But sometimes it seems dreams present messages that require some extra serious consideration. If I doubted this, the experience of a local psychotherapist seems pretty convincing. An ardent Hillary Clinton supporter, this very wise lady was quite sure that Hillary would win the 2016 presidential election.  A couple of months before the election she dreamed that the sky was rent open by a demon that come down to our world.  This dream puzzled her --- until she reflected on the years following the 2016 presidential election.

 I find her experience to be of significance; so much so that I pay special attention to those of my dreams which seem to stand out from the nightly crowd. Recently I dreamed that I was serving a 3 1/2 year prison term for some minor infraction.  I woke up and immediately understood the dream. Though I tried to remember the nature of the infraction that had sent me to a prison that was like something out of a Count of Monte Cristo movie, I couldn't.  But I remembered the prison: dark, stone walls, dirt floor. At the end of my sentence, before being released, I noticed a small hole in the dirt by one of the walls. Sticking my finger in the hole I pulled up a small statue of a holy person.  The statue was covered with writing.  But what really caught my attention was the palm sized cut diamond and ruby that came up with him.

 Unlike Edmond Dantes in Dumas' story I did not have a sense in the dream that I would use my new found wealth get revenge on whoever or whatever had sent me to prison.  My mind was neutral, yet filled with wonder at my good fortune, realizing that the reward for my years in prison was the wealth these three objects represented.

 I understood that the prison was my 3 1/2 years of an insomnia characterized by the mental and physical near-paralysis of getting no more than 2 hours of sleep in a night and the profound anguish of going to bed haunted by the self-fulfilling anxiety that I would not get to sleep, or that if I did, I could not stay asleep. In the last two years I have found first a sleep doctor whose drug prescription actually helped me get some sleep and then an acupuncturist whose treatments and herbs released me from the sleep drugs and brought me to what I take to be normal sleep for a person my age. 

 So now I've been released from the prison of insomnia.  And what am I to make of the treasure which accompanied my release?  Any tantric yogi will recognize the meaning of the clear and red jewels. And the holy being? Perhaps it is my aspiration. 

 Kayla has for years told me that writing down dreams helps one understand them. As I wrote this little memoir some interesting typos showed up on my computer monitor.  Whole for hole.  Psalm for palm. Read for red. The treasure I have been given is plain to see. 

 These days I have taken up writing again. I meditate on wisdom and altruism and depend on the inspiration and sustenance of my lamas. Each day is just nothing special now. I am just here doing what I do. But I am actually here.  What a treasure.

Where is the Moon? (Part 3)

 At Green Gulch Zen Center residents and visitors were called to the Zendo by the sound of the han.  It was a large slab of wood which was rhythmically struck by a mallet.  The han at Green Dragon temple was venerable: it had been struck so frequently that it had a deep depression that obscured the words inscribed on it. Do not waste time; consider the great matter of life and death.

 I've been considering this matter for much of my life.  Now that I am 74 I am watching my once muscular limbs wither and my mind get increasingly forgetful.  This "great matter" has my attention with more salience.

 In my previous essay about the finger pointing at the moon I wrote "And then of course, there is the moon itself, whose silver white light is a reflection of the sun’s light. Did the Zen masters know the source of the moon’s light? What might it mean that the luminescence of our mind is a reflection of something?" This question, in the literal sense, has occupied me for the better part of my life.  I've asked many great lamas about this. What is the relationship of our mind-streams? Or in the metaphor of the sun illuminating the moon-like mind, ultimately, are our minds the same or different?  When I asked Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, Tara Tulku Rinpoche and Denma Locho Rinpoche they all gave the same cryptic reply, "There are several answers to this question."

 For me this question is like the depression in the han.  It is the great matter. And it is intimately tied to the question of the reality of rebirth. For the Zen and Vajrayana Tibetan masters this may not have even been a question.  But I am a modern person and the question remains.  It is not only what is the relationship of my mind-stream and that of the masters, it is the question of the continuity of my mind or consciousness beyond death. I began the practice of meditation in 1966 with Thich Tien-an. Now, 54 years later, the great matter is unresolved.  In fact, over the years, the question only has become more complex.

 "There are several answers" the masters have said. How unsatisfying, in one way.  But how open at the same time. It is almost like a Zen koan.  Not "take your pick of which answer you like best" but something else I suspect.  That there are different teachings is the obvious meaning. That the mind is limited in its ability to understand that which is its own foundation strikes me as another meaning. I prefer the later, though this does not cancel the former.  In fact it almost proves the former. Perhaps the mind cannot grasp its true nature, just as a hand cannot grasp itself. Not being able to grasp itself, the mind makes up stories about itself because just as grasping is a function of a hand, story making and theorizing is a function of the mind. And as the finger on the hand points to the moon, so the mind points at its own nature through its stories.

  It seems that different people need to hear different stories, and perhaps the stories even evolve as we change and evolve. Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey replied to my question: "There are several answers to this question." That was it. He shared some answers but did not say "this is the best answer."  But when teaching in Seattle eight years earlier, he told students there that "... your own mind and the Guru's mindstream do become indivisible on your attainment of complete enlightenment." Apparently he decided I needed to hear a paradox, that I had to work on the problem.

 Curiously, reflection on this great matter brings my thoughts to the ancient Gnostic Christians.  The Church patriarchs declared the Gnostics heretical for many reasons, but Irenaeus was very specific in one of his many criticisms. You can't let people draw their own conclusions about spiritual matters. They either don't have the capacity to think and experience clearly or they might get it wrong and lose their souls. And since he was a patriarch of the Roman church there was also the power issue. 

 Buddha insisted that we not simply depend on authorities, that we figure it all out for ourselves by testing the teachings we are offered. On the one hand this is very unsatisfying.  I just want to know about the consequences of my death and the deep relationship of my mind and that of others. Please just tell me and pacify my mind, as the second Zen ancestor said.  On the other hand, the insistence that I explore and verify the truth for myself has been like the clock spring which turned the years of my life of exploration, of my questioning.  It has forced me to be honest about the ambiguities of the human condition. "There are several answers to this question."

The Arrow's Trajectory

 These days it seems pretty difficult to not fall into apocalyptic thinking. We are beset by a pandemic that is destroying global health and economies. The democracy we Americans pride ourselves on may have a dubious future.The priesthood of scientists tells us that global climate change is a certainty, that there are limits to growth and so forth. Political and economic commentators on both the left and right warn us that the world is moving in directions which are frightening. The left warns us of financial/corporate oligarchs who seem to have in mind a return to a sort of feudal society where the majority of workers are serfs who are perennially indebted to the new landed overlords.  The right warns us that our Christian values are being destroyed by the liberal forces of society and that we are headed for an ungodly future. 

 It is hard not to feel in one's bones that the world is off balance and deeply fear for the future. Powerlessness and anger seem to be the mood of the times.  Act locally and think globally may be the best ecological option, but I can't help look around my house and see the mass of non-biodegradable stuff that fills it and realize what I am willing to future generations. If there are any. No less a public intellectual than Noam Chomsky wrote that he is not sure humanity even has a future.

 How did it come to this?  Does the past even matter, or is it only the future that matters? Perhaps it is the archer in me, but I can't help but think that seeing the flight of an arrow to any point in its trajectory will tell me a lot about its future trajectory and where it is going to strike the target. 

 The thing that occurs to me about my feeling powerless these days is that a couple of consequences derive from it.  One is a sense that everything around me is in chaos, but the other is that we have arrived at this situation as a consequence of a natural process. Probably the Buddhist in me prefers the later, as the foundation of Buddha's teachings is causality: if this, then that.

 So now what?  What can I divine from the arrow's trajectory? What will I find when the pandemic is quelled? When the election has passed?

 There is no lack of commentators writing stories about the future. They fill the magazines and social media posts. But what trajectory are they mapping in their stories?  It has seemed to me that usually they see the future as an alternative to a familiar past. Occasionally a really creative mind suggests that the arrow is headed into territory unlike anything previously experienced. Nora Bateson has that sort of mind.

 As for myself, I try to avoid making up any stories about the future. My imagination is not up to creating a story about a future that does not look like a version of the past. I find I need to reject dystopian pessimism as much as naive optimism. And anyway, as Zachoeje Rinpoche has been reminding me lately, most of the stories my mind creates about the present or past  have nothing to do with reality anyway. Why would it do better with the future?  It is hard to sit with unknowing, but it seems like the only real honesty.

Hummingbirds and Geese

 This morning I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying the cool (if smokey) morning air and watching one of our local hummingbirds zoom up to the feeder. Almost immediately another hummer chased it away. Hummingbirds may look cute but they are extraordinarily territorial. I've watched two birds do loops around our property as one keeps another away from the flowers Kayla cultivates with passion -- and lots of compost.

 My mind drifted to the politics of the present and our self-gorging political system with its profound economic inequities. We humans are of course just animals in one sense, and so not much different than the hummers. It often seems that rampant individualism with its "I'll get mine and to hell with you" is what rules our society, with alpha individuals on top and the leftovers for everyone else.

 Yet there are also abundant examples of animals who cooperate and care for each other.  Perhaps humans combine both traits, and something more as well. Certainly that is also a voice in the current political discourse.

 The sense of ego, of "I" as we currently know it, does not seem to have been a longstanding human trait. Some scholars believe that it emerged about the same time as philosophers like Confucius and Shakyamuni Buddha recognized the problems it creates, the suffering for all concerned. Manicheans and some early Christians seem to have drawn the conclusion that a version of that ego, which they called a soul, was actually just a transitory dweller in the animal body with its territoriality, inclinations for forms of communal dominance, and passions (sexual and otherwise). And they were not alone.  It is not hard to find resonances of this dualistic portrait of humans in Buddhism and other presumably non-dualistic philosophies and religions.

 So sometimes it seems like altruistic teachings about loving others as oneself (Christian) or compassion toward all (bodhicitta in Buddhism) actually push against the apparently dominant human inclination toward self-aggrandizement. But where could these teachings come from if they are really alien to our natural natures?  I have often felt that they seem unnatural, contrary to our basic nature. I've felt that as a Buddhist I was sort of being asked to be unnatural, to swim upstream, while all the folks around me were just going with the natural flow of me-first and self indulgence in their pursuit of happiness.

 Buddhists like the Dalai Lama assert that if you investigate closely, though, you will find that actual happiness depends on cultivating a concern for others as well as oneself and that total self absorption only leads to misery. And it seems that there is fairly obvious evidence of that. Every day I am confronted with a magnified example of extreme selfish self concern in Donald Trump. Here is a person who cares not a whit for the country he has mendaciously sworn to protect.  And he appears to be about as miserable a person I have ever seen, seeming to prove the Dalai Lama's point.

 There is more than enough nectar in the feeder for the hummingbirds to share.  In fact, there is enough for a whole flock, though hummers do not flock. This reminds me of the migrating geese which overfly our house each year. They switch off the lead position in their V formation, which breaks the air and creates a slip stream for those that follow, making their flight easier. Cooperation and concern for the flock is as much in their nature as territoriality is for the hummingbirds.

 Maybe that is what we Buddhists are doing: breaking a path in the mental/emotional air to create a slip stream for others. Maybe, contrary to the view of the toxic individualists, our so-called "higher" nature is simply our nature when we find a way back to our full, complete self and swim upstream against the current of hypnotic individualism. Maybe we are as much goose as hummingbird.

Thoughts on Teaching Buddhism

 Several years ago a chance encounter with a member of my Oregon meditation group led to a discussion about my being a Buddhist teacher, and I would like to expand on that discussion and share it with those of you reading this. In fact it is quite relevant to why I even write about Buddhism.

 In Buddhist Asia the role of the meditation teacher is fairly well defined, though it varies by culture. In Japan the role might be inherited, as priests can marry, so a son might inherit a temple and the attendant responsibilities to the local community.  In Tibet there were times when as much as one third of the male population was monastic, so obviously not all monks would have been meditation teachers.  However, there were many kinds of teachers, and the elder monk who taught the junior monk how to read and write was considered a revered teacher. The sort of person we call a "lama" might have "inherited" his role from his previous lifetime, or might be a person who had achieved significant development in the present life.  But in the end, as Tara Tulku told me, a person is a teacher or lama (lama is Tibetan for guru) simply because they have students.

 None of this exactly fits the American situation. There are exceptions to this statement, as, for example, at San Francisco Zen Center all the priests are expected to teach at one time or another, even though they do not inherit the role. One feature of American Buddhism which is certainly unique in the larger Buddhist tradition is that of the university professor who teaches Buddhism both in the institutional context and outside of it.  Here the sometimes difficult distinction to be maintained by the professor is that of teaching about religion in the university and teaching religion outside of it. Some names come to mind when I think about this situation, such as Robert Thurman. How is it that they are in such a situation and what is the basis, or even authority, for their teaching religion, ie, Buddhist meditation? In Thurman's case he was a monk and his practice of meditation preceded his Ph.D. and his university career. But I think more to the point is the fact of his commitment to the Tibetan people and the Vajrayana path which is usually associated with Tibetan Buddhism, though historically Vajrayana was dispersed across Asia at one time or another. On this path there are many historic instances of non-monastic teachers, such as Marpa in 11th century Tibet. But the main point is that Vajrayana conveys authority to teach from master to student, who then becomes the next master.  In fact, the power to convey initiations and hence teach meditation is embedded in many of the practices and the vows.  This is important to understand because taking up certain practices comes with a commitment to at least act altruistically, to teach Dharma if one has the capacity and to transmit the Vajrayana practices if one finds "suitable vessels" who request the practices.

 So this brings us to me. I am now mostly retired from 36 years of university teaching and during those years I always taught about religion, and almost never taught meditation outside of the university. I offered hundreds of dharma talks in all sorts of situations and locations, but did not directly teach meditation to students until recently.  This is in spite of the fact that Tara Tulku authorized me to teach meditation back in the late 1980s and even told a number of people that they could come see me for instruction if they were disposed to do so. To get at the question of why I chose not to teach meditation is to get at some of the problems Americans have with the roles of both meditation student and meditation teacher as well as my own concerns about personal attainment (or more precisely, lack of it).

 Let me be illustrative. Those who have followed the history of the Dharma in the west are probably well aware of the scandals attached to a small number of teachers.  For instance Baker Roshi was given the abbacy of San Francisco Zen Center by its founder, Suzuki Roshi. He was later deposed by the community for having multiple sexual relations with students. I don't know what was on his mind or that of his students when this was going on, nor am I familiar with the details of all the pain, anger, betrayal and confusion that was later expressed. I simply am aware of the scandal. Obviously there are dangers in the teaching role connected with charisma and authority. But authority is an American problem in general. We claim not to like it, but our relations with authority figures are in fact quite complex, and those in authority are subject to a considerable amount of what psychotherapists call projection. For example, on a deep emotional level it is hard to separate one's supervisor at work from one's parents. This might sound preposterous to some people who feel perfectly adult and mature in their work lives, but many psychologists assert that a child continues to exist in our unconscious mind, and that child views all authorities in the same way it viewed its parents.  So the child within us seeks the approval of the boss, or fears his/her wrath. And then of course there is charisma.  That is something else Americans have an attraction to.  But as much as some Americans may admire movie stars, for example, others devour tabloid stories about "dark undersides." So there is American ambivalence about charisma, to say the least.

 My own concerns about teaching meditation have been rooted in two things: an awareness of the problems of projection and an awareness of my own limitations as a practitioner. In the simplest terms, and using a simple example, how can I have the audacity to teach about the virtue of restraining anger and techniques for doing so when my anger all to frequently expresses itself in coarse and subtle ways? And when that happens, what are my meditation students to think and what will they project on me?  Surely it will appear that I am not "walking my talk" and that I am a hypocrite.

 I do not claim to be a master of anything, or a lama, and I certainly am not a priest.  But I have spent the better part of a lifetime practicing Buddhism and trying to make a better person of myself. As required by my own tradition, every morning I begin my meditation practice by reciting a litany which begins with the following stanza:

In my heart I turn to the Three Jewels of Refuge.
May I free suffering beings and place them in bliss.
May the compassionate spirit of love grow within me
That I may complete the enlightening path.

Later I recite:

By means of holding both Sutra and Tantra,
May I liberate all living beings completely.

 In that spirit of compassionate concern, and probably because I have the habit of teaching, I feel the need to share my experience and what I have learned with others who are also trying to improve their inner lives and relations with others. For the most part I am no longer constrained by the teaching about religion/teaching religion distinction, and am free to share, as well as run the risks of inflation and projection. And projection runs both ways: from student to teacher and from teacher to student. In fact, I am not sure I actually have a choice in this matter of teaching. Immersion in Mahayana Buddhism comes with a price tag of sorts. It is called the Bodhisattva Vow. To fully practice Vajrayana or Zen one needs to take that vow, and having done so one will be required to assist others in whatever way best suits one's capacities (viz, By means of holding both Sutra and Tantra, May I liberate all living beings completely.) To do anything else is to reject the fundamental teaching of the Buddha that we are all deeply interconnected and that our mutual happiness and freedom depends on our mutual progress on the Buddhist path. So in that spirit of mutuality, as a Dharma friend, I teach and write this blog. 

 

 And I thank my friend who set this train of thought in motion, for that is a clear example of the mutuality implicit in the Mahayana Buddhist way.

Remembering Yvonne Rand

 Yesterday I sort of randomly (is there such a thing?) happened to notice Yvonne Rand's name in the San Francisco Zen Center weekly e-newsletter.  I thought she might be doing an internet streamed Dharma talk that I could attend.  But it was a death notice.

 I hadn't seen Yvonne for at least 25 years, but her death still grieved me. It was not that we were close in any way, but my life would not be what it is without her, and as I spent some time thinking about her I also thought about our complex connection.  Though she was a well known Buddhist priest and teacher in her time, she was not a teacher to me.  Yet the shape of my life since the mid-1980s depended on her.

 We Buddhists hear the teaching of interdependence (aka dependent origination) all the time, but we easily take it as no more than an abstract meditation theme. Now, however, as I thought about Yvonne I was reminded of the tangible reality of dependence. Nothing abstract. It was Yvonne who suggested Kayla do a grief retreat at Green Gulch Zen Center after the death of her husband.  It was Yvonne who brought my lama Tara Tulku to teach at Green Gulch while Kayla was on retreat and through that contact he became her lama. And because of Tara Tulku, Kayla and I met.  Our first date was a Christmas party at Yvonne's.  And later she married us.

Yvonne Rand. Source: Cuke video

 Without her existence what would the second half of my life have looked like? Could our intertwining and interdependence be one iota clearer? 

 I never thanked Yvonne for this life, until now, because I never really thought about how much of my life depended on her life.  

 Perhaps it would be good to reflect with gratitude on the other Yvonnes who have contributed to the shape of the life I am living.

 We all have Yvonnes in our lives. The friend who arranged a blind date with the person we married, the person who hired us for a certain job that launched our career, the person who did not run the red light and did not cripple us. We think of ourselves as independent, as creators of our lives.  But this is just a story we tell ourselves to feel in control of our world. It may be a comforting story, but that is all it is. We are not independent, but neither do our lives unfold in a completely random pattern. There was some attraction to the blind date; there was something in us that meshed with that person.  There was something in that person who hired us for that important job, something that recognized something about us that was important to them. And is there also some degree of randomness, of chance? Why didn't the red light get run? We don't even know we were spared, just as we don't know how much chance and randomness might shape our lives. If it does.  We can thank the person who arranged the blind date but can we thank the person who was paying attention to the traffic lights and stopped at that intersection we were crossing? 

 Perhaps we just need to have gratitude for our lives as they are and for all the people and animals, trees, winds and rains who brought us here, known and unknown.

Zen Silence

 This seems to be a time for me to be revisiting slices of my past.  Maybe a deep letting go is taking hold of me, or maybe there is a need to draw something valuable for the present from my past. My teacher Swami Rudrananda used to say that you can draw energy from your past experiences. I am trying to learn to do that rather than just wistfully reminisce (though I have to confess that there is a lot of that going on).

 Last week, for no obvious reason, I was drawn to Zoom into Reb Anderson's Dharma talk from Green Gulch Zen Center (just north of San Francisco). We have known each other for almost 35 years, though we have rarely met since I moved from the city. But our connection is important in many ways.  Before Kayla and I left for our long retreat in the guest house of the Dalai Lama's monastery I worked out with Reb that upon our return to the USA I would be a "visiting scholar" at Green Gulch. And upon our return that is what I was for almost two years, which gave me the opportunity to complete my book Rehearsing Enlightenment.

 Though my Buddhist practice is mainly in the Tibetan tradition, I have always had a foot in Zen. In fact my first Buddhist teacher was Thich Tien An, a refuge Vietnamese Zen monk, whom I met while a student at UCLA.

 Reb began his talk with his own reminiscence, telling us that today was 50 years since he was ordained as a priest at Tassajara Zen Center by Suzuki Roshi.  That would have been the summer of 1970.  Were it not for the Viet Nam war, I most likely would have been living at Tassajara that summer, because I'd told Thich Tien An of my interest in living at there and he had offered to introduce me to his old friend Suzuki Roshi.  But my draft board had other ideas and I never met Suzuki Roshi. 

 Perhaps in a parallel universe Reb and I would have become priests the same day. But in this universe, 25 years into his priesthood, Reb kindly offered Kayla and I refuge at Green Gulch.  It was an important time in my life for many reasons, not least of which was that although I was a visiting scholar, I was put to work in the kitchen every morning. Initially I was somewhat taken aback by that expectation, but in the Zen tradition "a day of no work is a day of no food." Yet, as it turned out, learning to cook soup for over a hundred people was a wonderful experience.  It grounded my Madhyamaka (middle way) Philosophy into the material world. It took dependent origination out of my mind and into my hands, knives, pots and carrots. And sitting zazen in the magnificent Valley of the Green Dragon, whose mouth bites the Pacific, introduced me to a deep well of silence.

 The Green Gulch bell pavilion memorializing my old friend David Lueck.

Reb exposes the silence in his heart in his wonderful talk, which is linked here. Listening to Reb that morning I thought about the way in which my own meditation on emptiness has been divorced of Zen  silence, divorced of that Zen stillness.  It has been more visual. I can see things as dependently arisen, as impermanent, and see their lack of substantial existence. But I have not been experiencing their emptiness as silence, as stillness. Or better yet, I have not been present to the silence and stillness in the world's lack of true solidity. 

 Or maybe some part of me has been.  I am waking up rather early most mornings, and I am appreciating the silence of my neighborhood. Maybe something in me is yearning for that Zen silence? Reb is hearing voices in his stillness and silence.  What might I find in mine if I pay better attention?

On Finding and Losing your Mind

 It is amazing how un-reflective, how un-self-conscious we can be. Every day we go to sleep and wake up. But we rarely think about what might be happening in the process; it just does not seem all that important. If asked, we would probably reply that the world does not disappear when I am asleep because it is still here when I wake up. So of course this means that I must disappear when I am asleep.

 Isn't that a bit odd that you disappear every day? Well of course, you think, my body did not disappear, it was still here relaxing in bed. So what did disappear?  Your mind, your consciousness or awareness of the world disappeared, you might conclude. In which case you became conscious again when you woke up. 

 Sorry; now I am making you self-reflective (perhaps unfortunately so).

 So now we have this new thing in which we believe: consciousness or mind.  What the heck is that? We only know we are conscious right now because we believe we were not conscious when we were asleep. So does this mean that experiencing consciousness depends on not being consciousness? That the existence of mind depends on its nonexistence? That is a pretty strange phenomenon.

 It is not as if this oddity is a new thing, a modern thing that only troubles over-educated elderly white guys like me. We have this 1,500 year old story from China about a conversation between the 1st and 2nd Zen ancestors:

    Huike said to Bodhidharma, "My mind is not at rest. Please pacify it."

    Bodhidharma replied, "Bring me your mind, and I will pacify it."

    Huike said, "Although I've sought it, I cannot find it."

    "There," Bodhidharma replied, "I have pacified your mind."

 What does this mean that the 2nd Zen ancestor, Huike, could not find his mind? Probably not that he was "out of his mind." So, if we cannot find our mind, do we even know what we mean by mind? I am sure some people would say that they mean "thoughts." Maybe there is no such thing as mind, there are only thoughts?

 Unfortunately no scientist has worked out how a hunk of meat can produce a thought, let alone a mind. On the whole, the philosophers are not doing much better. Rene Descartes famously stated "I think, therefore I am." He was a smart guy, but he did not write "I think, therefore I have a mind."

 So what is this mind, this consciousness, this awareness, that appears and disappears every 24 hours? Are these three even the same or are they different? We don't really know because like Huike, although we can find our thoughts, but can't find our mind.

 The philosopher Evan Thompson has some interesting ideas about all this.  I suspect that he is doing better than poor Rene on this matter.  Assuming that there is such a thing as consciousness, Thompson points out that for modern people all real knowledge is objective.  There must be a subject standing outside of an object which is what is to be known. This object then can be scientifically tested by multiple investigators.  However, this means that the investigators are conscious of what they are investigating.  But if they are investigating consciousness, then their subject-consciousness can never stand outside of the object-consciousness they are investigating (because they are both just consciousness), which makes it scientifically unknowable.

 What a mess! Is there anything more important to us than our bodies or our minds, and though we know some things about our bodies we cannot, in principle, objectively know anything about our mind.  We have to lose our mind in sleep to find it when we wake up to even know we have a mind!  

 OK, enough for the moment.  Have a good day and a peaceful night while you lose track of the mind you cannot find.

Bicycles and Aging

 Kayla tells me that one of the reasons I've been having a fairly difficult time living with myself these days is that I am resisting the fact that I am no longer getting old.  It is not that I've found the fountain of youth, rather it is simply that I AM old.  She can be pretty persuasive, but I also can be pretty resistant.

 Later in the day that she sprang that observation on me I was cleaning out our garage and pulled out the bicycle I had not ridden in the last four years.  Heck I thought, I might as well sell it.  So I posted a listing on a local electronic bulletin board and immediately received some inquires. As I started to answer the first one I looked out the window behind my computer monitor, saw the bike sitting on the front porch and felt it reaching out to me. "Riding me is such fun." 

 I cancelled my listing and looked at the bike. But what I saw was not exactly the funky green bike on my porch.  Somehow it was merged with the red bike I rode with Kayla on Sundays in Golden Gate Park. THAT was the most fun I had in San Francisco.  We lived out by the beach and would ride up to the museums to look at the art, have a Polish sausage by the band stand, and eventually glide back home as the fog rolled in overhead.  Or perhaps I might ride over to the velodrome by myself and do loops with the wonderful smelling ocean winds at my back as I rode in one direction and in my face and hair the other direction.

 All this emerged from the green bike on my porch in high desert Santa Fe as I was taken back to that wonderful time in my life (on the weekends that is). Then I spent the rest of the day and much of the night reflecting on the difference between then and now. Of course my rational Buddhist philosophical mind would remind me that the David of then is not actually the David of now.  My emotional mind would push back. "I prefer the then to the now; the me of then to the me of now; the vigorous middle aged man to the old codger." OK, reality check. These days you are studying a lot about Tsongkhapa's views on dependent origination and emptiness.  Remember?: Everything is devoid of the solid permanence I attribute to it, my body especially.  Why can't I accept that?  Well there they are, staring me in the face: delusion and attachment.  They are almost tangible right now, and worth meditating on. Maybe I should just leave the bike on the porch so I can see it every day and reflect on impermanence?

 Maybe I could just be satisfied with a memory trip back in time to a San Francisco that actually no longer exists and enjoy inhabiting the no-longer-existing self of the past instead of missing it? Maybe as Zachoeje Rinpoche says, I should just enjoy the fact that I am alive and breathing in this moment instead of remembering a past censored of frustrating jobs, buses that missed their runs and a mortgage that pretty much ate my pay check.

 As both Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama have been telling me, my ordinary self does exist, just not in the way I think I exist.  So thank you bicycles for a last gift: what am I? since the one who loves you so deeply apparently is here but not here.

Painting Parnashavari

 When Kayla finished her thangka of Shakyamuni Buddha Teaching the Lotus Sutra she began wondering about what next to paint.  A personal work? Another thangka? Was there anything she could do that would put some positive energy into the maw of the pandemic? Then she learned about Parnashavari, a form of Tara whose function was to quell pandemics.  At the time, few images of this goddess could be found, but she did locate several and determined to paint her thangka. 

Then magic. Zachoeje Rinpoche, who had been in India when the pandemic set in, notified his students that he would be giving a live-stream initiation into the sadhana of  Parnashavari.  With that initiation Kayla would be able to properly prepare to paint.

In this video she tells us more about beginning the painting.  The drawing is now complete and she has begun applying paint to paper.

Shakyamuni Buddha Teaching the Lotus Sutra

 I've been away from this blog for quite some time now and a lot has happened in our little world since my last post. In an ironic way the global pandemic has both isolated people and connected them. To the extent possible Kayla and I have quarantined ourselves.  This is perhaps desirable for everyone who can do so, but we are in high risk categories, so it is specially important for us to do so.  But the irony is that our connections with others have been magnified by our use of the internet. How astonishing that I can sit in my living room and take live teachings from the Dalai Lama -- on the other side of the planet. 

 The pandemic and quarantine has impacted all of us in our own unique ways.  For Kayla it presented an opportunity to refocus on her painting and she completed a beautiful thangka that had sat unfinished for years: Shakyamuni Buddha Teaching the Lotus Sutra. How appropriate for these times. 

 In the Sutra the Buddha tells many stories of a metaphoric nature. The one which sticks with me is about children fixated on playing with their toys in a burning house.  While the conflagration grows around them, they see and think of nothing but their toys. So it has been with most of us in this world of ours.  We have distracted ourselves with our toys, our ambitions, our disappointments, our desires and our anger. 

 But the conflagration of the pandemic is upon us, and we cannot help but pay attention to it. It has taken away so many toys (and of course lives and livelihoods) that we cannot help but look around and wake up at least a little to what really matters, to what is essential. And to look into the depth of our hearts to find what we really care about.