Stories

 An anthropologist I knew once told me that humans make sense of things by telling stories. That was sort of a revelation to me.  The importance of stories later was reinforced when I read the eco-philosopher Thomas Berry who asserted that 

It's all a question of story.  We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective.  Yet we have not learned the new story.

 By old story he meant the Christian creation story. You know -- 6 days and then God rested. For a new story he proposed a spiritualized version of scientific evolution. He died in 2009 and I don't know if he had come to think that the scientific story of the earth's genesis had morphed into a futuristic environmental nightmare. 

 We don't tend to think of scientists as story tellers.  We think that they offer truth and facts. But really, when you connect the big-data-point-dots you get a story.  The resulting environmental story looks pretty apocalyptic right now. But it is just a story.

 I am not denying the science.  I accept it.  But the story is another matter. There could be a different story.  The magma lake under Yellowstone could blow taking a chunk of the USA with it and spreading a cloud of dust and ash through the atmosphere which brought on a new ice age. No global warming. Temperate places like Africa could be the new centers of human civilization. This is another scientific story.

 Zachoeje Rinpoche cautions his students about stories.  Of course he means the stories we tell ourselves about our personal realities. "If only I had this or that, then I would be happy." "That SOB at work is making my life miserable." Rinpoche asserts that 95% of the stories we tell ourselves have nothing to do with reality. I've seen the truth of this in my own life. As the Dalai Lama says, happiness and misery come from within, not without.  So the happiness our stories promise us probably is a phantom.  

 What about the apocalyptic stories scientists are telling us, or even our Christian friends' end-of-days story of the Rapture?  There were apocalyptic stories in the past.  Christians were sure that the year 1000 AD would be the last. They didn't expect the next thousand years, but here we are.

 In good Buddhist fashion Rinpoche suggested that since we cannot avoid making up stories, why not make up pleasant stories?

 Here is a story that is entertaining me these days. Five miles from my home there is a basaltic ridge whose crest is covered with hundreds of petroglyphs.  No one is sure about why they are there, other than that the patina on the basalt can be pecked away to leave images whose meanings elude us. Just below the ridge crest there is a cave which is high enough to stand in and perhaps 15 feet deep.  It has a wonderful view across the Santa Fe mesa to the Sangre de Christo Mountains. In my story ancient people came to the cave to fast, pray and seek a vision.  They each left a record of their vision by pecking away at a basaltic surface. Hundreds of petroglyphs; hundreds of holy visions.  Surely the ridge is a sacred place, though not to the teenagers who scamper over the rocks like gazelles. They have different stories than mine.  

 But I like my story.  My home now is oriented toward this cave. The basaltic rocks on all sides of it are full of presence.  They are a living earth which has embraced humans for millennia. In my story there is a future with people who once again come to the cave for visions. Their ancestors probably will have endured many tribulations.  But the cave will be waiting.  They will know that this ground is sacred, and they will come.

Growth and Decay (Part 1)

 Growth and decay are natural cycles in our world. Unfortunately, most of us in this country don't live in a "natural world". We live in human-made worlds.  Especially those of us who live in cities. It is fairly hard to see natural cycles if you live in a world of concrete, brick and glass. Some of us live in the suburbs, surrounded by trees; perhaps grass and flowers. Perhaps we have easy access to the countryside. So you would think that natural cycles would be apparent to us. But for some reason they are not.

 As I write this I am 74 years old.  It appears that old people like myself spend a bit of time looking back on their lives, which perspective certainly offers a different vista than looking forward. Looking into the future it seems like there will be a lot of winding down.  In fact, the recent past looks the same.  Why is this troubling? It seems like the natural order is to grow and then decay. So why do I feel distressed that I am in this phase of life?  It is not that all my life is winding down.  Certainly my body and finances are winding down and there does not seem to be any way to resist that.  For that matter, my mind seems to be headed in the same direction.  Yet another part of me seems to become clarified in this process, seems to be flourishing -- though growing might not be quite the right term for what I experience.

 It seems that many things are being pruned away by time.  I do not much mind having worn out cloths that sometimes are sewn together by my not-too-competent darning.  At one time I would have simply replaced the worn out sweater. It might have made a bad impression at work.  But when I work I do so from home now. What would my friends or neighbors think about my looking shabby?  I no longer care too much, though I do try to keep up some appearances.  I shave when I am going out.

 I've never been successful with money. Never could grow it or invest wisely.  I spent it on foolishness, or perhaps more wisely on meditation retreats. I invested in my inner life rather than my outer.  So has my inner investment grown while my finances decayed?  This is a critical question at this point in my life.

 I expect that it is a critical question for many in my generation. Many folks my age of course invested in family, real estate, stocks and so forth. My early life was composed of wandering through bohemia and I didn't own a house until I was 50. Children were not on my agenda. Meditating with my lama Tara Tulku in Bodhgaya was more my style, and somehow I experienced a conflict between being bourgeois and bohemian, and though I tried to reconcile that conflict in the life I now look back on, I never succeeded.  

 Yet I never entirely failed either. I own the house I am sitting in (jointly with the mortgage company). And when I sit to meditate, broad mental vistas open before me. Lifelong assurances as well as uncertainties are part of that vista; some trivial and some important. I've written about these things.

 If I am going to ponder death, then it seems that I will be pondering what that really is.  Not just physically, because I have a sense of that.  What about the non-material parts of me? That is where the questions arise. I don't have the cultural assurance about rebirth that a Tibetan might have. Nor even the assurances of a Christian who expects heaven (or worse).  I grew up with a mother who never discussed such matters as life after death and a father who bluntly considered death "the big sleep."  I am psychologist enough to know that their minds are merged with mine in some aspect of me because they raised me and I imprinted on them.  But my life of inner journeys also inclines me to a broader vista. And what is in that vista? Ambiguity seems to best describe it.

 It is clear that my rational mind can only understand so much, though it never ceases to define and box in everything. Like a hand that cannot grasp itself, my mind cannot know its source in any conventional way of understanding. This is almost axiomatic both from the perspective of modern psychology and Buddhism. But what cannot be comprehended seems to be something I can experience at times.

 Like a lotus flower, the waking world seems to emerge from something fundamental to me.  I touch it when I settle deeply into meditation.  At night when I surrender to sleep and the lotus flower world is enfolded within, I rest there. Maybe that is why my father called death "the big sleep." Maybe he, like all of us, intuited what we can only vaguely comprehend, that the part of us that exists when we sleep deeply is the root and stalk of that lotus world.

 So this brings me back to the mystery of sleep. And its partners, dream and wakefulness.  I've written about this before, and will do so again because the winding down of my life has forced this upon me.

Blood on the Rocks

  Across the valley the Sangre de Christo Mountains stretch quietly. The Blood of Christ: salvation, in the Spanish mind. For an immigrant me, they also are a refuge, wedged between the fires and smoke-filled skies of the west and the hurricanes and floods of the east. 

 The rocks beside me once flowed molten hot.  After eons their patina became a canvas for Tewa people. Their glyphs remain a mystery. What did they feel as their world wound down? They already had known drought and famine. In the end, did their eyes see demons in metal clothing, those ancestors of the enchanting Spanish accent of Santa Fe? 

 How did the Tewa face the end of their world? Did apocalypse figure in their stories?

 My friends flee fire that incinerates places I know so well. Family returns to a devastated home. Here it is peaceful before my eyes but my heart is rent as deeply as the gorge of the river that has given life to this land from a time even before humans.  It has meandered through the ages and though it will shrink and it will grow, it will not stop flowing.

 And the mountains and rocks of the mother we have treated so shamelessly? Will they remember us, as they do the Tewa who respectfully left their marks upon her? Or will they think of us as but a passing dream?

 Like the ancients, I am compelled to open my heart and inscribe my thought-images upon a canvas, but one much more fleeting than theirs.

Butter and Buddha

  Tibetan Buddhist practice is sometimes described with the terms ground, path and fruition. These are what we start with, our current situation of mind and body (the ground of practice), the process of transforming them (the path of practice) and the goal of the process, awakening or enlightenment (fruition, Buddha-hood). This is a nice schema, but for me, at least, it has had some drawbacks, such as feeling unwholesome dissatisfaction with the life of the present and frustration about whether I am progressing. And since fruition is nothing less than being a Buddha, frustration or dissatisfaction does seem inevitable.

 When I think about this problem I have to wonder whether or not I, as an achievement oriented American, actually have created the problem with my own attitude.  The Tibetan monks I've known don't seem to have the same dissatisfaction. It seems that for them life on the path is sufficient, and for whatever reason this attitude seems to actually yield greater progress toward fruition than my striving attitude.

 In Zen one does not find the terms ground, path and fruition, but teachings about transforming the present situation are abundant. Zen is also quite insistent on recognizing that one is already a Buddha, though one is ignorant of that truth. Waking up (fruition) is "just" a matter of realizing this truth.  In fact this idea is present in the Tibetan tradition as well, but seems to be obscured a bit by the emphasis on the path, as one finds in the gradualist Lam Rim (Stages of the Path) teachings. 

 In Tibet in ancient days there was a great debate between the Zen teachers and the gradualist teachers. The gradualist tradition won out, and for the most part has shaped Tibetan Buddhism ever since.  As one of my teachers, Thubten Jigme Norbu, recalling his life in Tibet explained all of this, if you have buttermilk and want to butter your toast (or tea, in his case) you need to churn the butter out of the milk. We may have Buddha nature already, but it is obscured by our mental distortions.  We need to remove the distortions (do the churning) to reveal ourselves as Buddhas. 

 Over the years as I have thought about this little story it has occurred to me that really there is not much difference between the Zen way and the stages on the path. Sitting zazen might be a matter of stillness, but a lot of mental churning takes place before one settles. Similarly, the stages of the path may require the application of a considerable number of antidotes to cleanse the deluded mind (more churning) but in my experience this is only successfully accomplished if one can settle into peace on occasion.

 This settling into peace has been key for me.  Without my having this experience fairly regularly I find that ongoing practice becomes a burden. In this sense the goal and the path are not really different.  It seems that I need to drink a glass of buttermilk once in a while to be reminded of the taste of butter.