Mercurious

Citizens of 4F, March 10, 2010

2010-03-11T08:14:00.002-06:00

My walk-sprint to the bus stop is successful, and I arrive there several minutes before the bus arrives.

As I relax against the back wall of the enclosed shelter, and my mind becomes slow and receptive, a street appears in my experience of mind——as with all experiences, it is a mixture of sensory data coming in from eyes and ears and skin, plus memory, plus subjective feeling.

It is Marquette Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, between Third St. and Fourth St., at 5:33 pm on March 10, as experienced by myself.

This street that appears in my experience is utterly unique, and will never appear again. At no other time will the light and overcast weather be exactly the same; never again will the melting ice and snow create exactly the same sculptural shapes on the sidewalks; never again will my own mood and memory and outlook be exactly the same.

This street, utterly unique and temporary, appears nowhere else but in my mind. For no one else is this street exactly the same as the one I experience. The fellow standing next to me——although he might see a few details that resemble the details in my own experience of the street——is experiencing a different street than I am. Perhaps his emotional day has been such that the street seems terribly dreary and foreboding, not the mysterious and symbolic street that I am experiencing right now. Perhaps his hearing is much more acute than mine; perhaps he has more perceptive sense of color, and sees a more vibrant display in the reflected lights of the wet pavement.

Not only is my street unique to me, but in the very next moment, I will myself experience an entirely different street, as when the bus pulls up to the curb, there will be a glad urgency to get home to a warm supper followed by relaxed time spent reading or planning the spring garden. Slight differences in sight and sound and smell and memory and mood will create an entirely new experience. In fact, merely noticing what I am currently experiencing causes it to vanish and be replaced by a new experience.

This is the nature of all phenomena, all experiences. They occur only in our minds, they are utterly unique and belong to us alone, and they are instantly vanishing in the very same moment they first appear.

Depending on your outlook, this realization can be quite terrifying, or it can be jubilantly freeing.

That too, may change moment to moment.

Some Buddhist Basics

2010-03-02T12:19:00.005-06:00

In the Buddhist philosophy that I follow, it is thought that human suffering is the result of the cyclical reliving of behavior patterns. The human condition is said to be one of both quiet and overt suffering, because we are trapped into repeating the same behaviors again and again. For very fundamental Buddhists, this is believed quite literally——that the human soul/personality is actually reborn again and again in subsequent lifetimes. For Buddhists of a more symbolic bent, it's taken as a comment on our human habit of reliving the same behaviors and problems again and again within this life.

Either way, though, the driving mechanism of this literal or figurative rebirth is the energy of hunger, hatred and ignorance. The cyclical, recurring problems of our existence arise because because we don't see things as they are (ignorance), which leads to either some form of subtle or obvious longing or attachment (hunger), or some form of resistance and aversion (hatred). These three problems are very intimately connected, and making progress on one leads to progress on all three. In other words, seeing things as they are quite naturally causes a reduction in grasping or aversion, and reducing grasping will naturally lessen hatred and cause us to see things more nakedly.

The principle tool of spiritual development, for Buddhists, is meditation, and the goal of meditation is quite simple: to practice the surrender of our pulling and pushing, our hatred and hunger, and thereby see things as they are. Should we ever accomplish this permanently, the legendary result is nirvana——the escape from the dreariness of cycle repetiion. Fundamentalists believe that such a soul no longer requires rebirth; more modern believers suggest that such accomplishment will cause this life to be one of peace and happiness.

To the westerner approaching Buddhism from a different culture, all this will feel pretty alien and unnatural, but very gradually almost everyone who steadily practices will see some literal truth to it. Most of us see it only in small glimpses, especially at first, but it is surely there: surrendering aversion and grasping causes you to see things much, much differently, and the result is a peace of mind that is most definitely transcendent and can be life changing.

Buddhist practice can seem to be a bewilderingly complex system of practices and lessons, but it's important to understand that it is all really about this very simple goal of surrendering hatred and longing, and seeing phenomena as they are rather than through the filters of wanting and disliking. Although there are many different schools of Buddhist practice, they all share this goal. The practices that focus on seeing the impermanence of phenomena, for example, focus on this because it automatically shows you that there is no logic to clinging to things that will vanish in a moment. Practices that focus on non-selfish compassion for others are designed to lessens our attachment to ego. The "middle way" that is so much a part of Buddhist practice is largely about applying antidotes to the extremes of greed and hatred in an effort to find the silence that occurs when they are neutralized.

On a very practical level, I have found that there is a tangible physical sensation to this surrender of longing and aversion. At meditative moments when I momentarily know myself to be in the zone, there is an almost cellular sensation that an energy which normally grips us, like magnetic charges either attracting or repelling, suddenly falls silent. The feeling can be a bit unnerving and ungrounding, and can even frighten you at first. But if you can come to trust it, you find a delicious sensation of peace and calm within it. A frantically spinning hamster wheel suddenly falls silent. I think that my own practice, whether it involves one lifetime or many, will be to gradually trust this sensation and rest comfortably in it more and more often.

And progress doesn't require any kind of massive accomplishment, but rather just an ongoing surrender of the habits that interfere.

Obsure But Wonderful Film

2010-03-02T11:52:00.002-06:00

In our quest to see as many of the Oscar nominated films as possible, my wife and I made our way to a distant suburb to see a collection of documentary short films last night.

There's one little film that perhaps you'll run into on HBO or available through Netflix that you really owe it to yourself to see.

Music by Prudence is one of the most uplifting little pieces of 35-minute movie-making you'll ever want to see. It's about a group of very seriously handicapped young adults in Zimbabwe, who suffer from physical problems so disfiguring that initially it causes you to wince slightly. This is a part of the world where physical deformities are regarded by folk legend as signals of witchcraft, so these young men and women are quite seriously ostrocized by their culture, in a country that is among the very poorest on earth.

Yet to a man and woman, these are some of the happiest people you'll ever see, and the key to their happiness is music. The lead character, Prudence, leads a small group of musicians and singers who put together absolutely angelic performances. The interactions between these people are some of the most loving and creative moments you can imagine.

This is one of those stories that will quickly put your own minor life complaints into complete perspective. See it if you can.

Replying to Michelle....

2010-03-01T10:37:00.002-06:00

My friend Michelle, at Full Soul Ahead, asked an interesting question to my previous post: "Re the depression, how did you climb out?"

At least here among my blog friends, I've made no secret of the fact that two pretty serious bouts of depression & anxiety have visited me twice in my life. When people ask me about how exactly I beat it, though, I agonize a bit over what to say. I fear that people may take my experience as a prescription for their own course of action, for one thing. Each person's experience is different, and I worry that people will assume that my method will work for them. Everybody is different, and I most assuredly don't want anyone assuming that my way is for everyone.

But for what it's worth, I will tell you what salvaged me:

• Chemistry counts. I know people who steadfastly believe that they can and should pull themselves out of depression by their own bootstraps, without the benefit of medical help. They see it as a moral failing, and insist that moral strength is the only prescription. I"m not one of those folks. Refusing all medical help for these things is a bad as seeking medical help indiscriminately. In my case, medicines did help me both times, but I did quickly learn that I was helped by doses that were far smaller than what is normally regarded as therapeutic. Even at the smaller range of normal prescription levels of an anti-depressant, for example, I became exceedingly irritable. At one-third of that small dose, though, I found that strong feelings became muffled just enough that I could recognize and deal with what I was feeling. Beyond this, I became aware that the types of foods I ate had a dramatic effect on my mental world, and as I ate more carefully, I became less susceptible to depression and anxiety. Whether it's Prozac or garlic, I approach these substances somewhat in the spirit of alchemical elixirs that offer benefits if used carefully.

Chemistry, though, turned out to be part, but certainly not all, of my emotional well being.

• Surrender. This is certainly something I hesitate to recommend broadly, but in my own case, I eventually found that an enormous amount of my unhappiness came about because of trying desperately to avoid my own unhappiness. Turning directly into it, the path of least resistance, finally was the only option left to me, and ironically was what led me out. I'm not a traditionally religious person, but there was certainly something like "turning over to a higher power" at work here, where acknowledging the depth of misery was crucial to coming out the other side. I came to understand that these dark nights of the soul existed for a reason, and that, well "resistance is futile." Because depression can and does kill people, though, I think that one cannot go down this path unless you have some kind of good teacher or therapist watching out for you as a safety net. In some regards, my depressions were normal life events that had to extinguish themselves before I could move on, and I'm well aware that some form of higher power or buddha-nature helped me in this.

• A mystical lifestyle. That might be putting it too radically, but I did come to realize that a highly rational, scientific outlook wasn't a good fit for me in the long run. In the periods before my depressions, I was living in a pretty rigid manner, while in reality I was much better suited to a "more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in your philosophy" kind of life. When I woke up and became aware of an archetypal, symbolic style of living, I found that my depression and anxiety lifted, and that both the inner and outer world began to make sense to me. At the point where my life has become exceedingly literal/scientific again, I run the risk of more depression and anxiety. When I stay open to other interpretations, I'm far happier. So it's not Carl Sagen and Stephen Hawking that does it for me, but Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. For me, anyway, the traditional Western lifestyle feels like living in black & white, while technicolor exists in the world of Black Elk, and Tibetan Shamans, and the bhagavad gita.

Perhaps this all just makes me sound flakier than before. Still, Michelle did ask....

Regarding Andrew Koenig

2010-02-26T07:56:00.003-06:00

Depression is one of the most insidious diseases there is. It recently took the life of former actor Andrew Koenig in Vancouver. He is the son of actor Walter Koenig, better known as Chekov of Star Trek fame. Andrew had some acting credits to his own name, specifically as a minor character in a television series about teenagers some time back. When you look at photos of him over the years, you see a chameleon-like visage that changes appearances quite radically every few years. It gives you a hint that he may have been a troubled soul.

We now know that Andrew faced a lifelong battle with depression, which he finally lost up in Vancouver last week.

I fortunately don't have experience with that kind of lifelong agony, but I have twice in my life had extended episodes of very serious clinical depression, the kind that required hospitalization. The first episode lasted almost two years, the second only a couple of months. It was many years in the past, but even now it's not something I talk about other than with very close friends, because mental illness in general, and depression in particular, makes people exceedingly uncomfortable. Some people make nervous fun of people suffering from emotional disorders, which I suppose is evidence of how frightening it is to them. In many respects, our attitudes toward mental illness have barely evolved at all from the days when we viewed it as a sign of demonic possession.

I remember once at a cocktail party, though, finally getting fed up with someone who was poking fun at depressed people, defining them as emotionally weak——the Prozac nation. First, I admitted that I had myself suffered from depression 20 years earlier.

"So, tell us about it," he said, blushing just slightly but not really honestly regretful of his arrogance. "What are we missing?" He gestured to some of his friends who were listening and trying not to smile at their buddy's wit.

"Well," I said, "Did you ever have one of those days where you just wake up on the wrong side of bed, where you're a little grumpy and just "off" for the whole day? Kind of like having that mental achiness that goes with a bad cold, but without the sniffles?"

He nodded, and there was a trace of a smug smile on his face. "Yeah, I know. That's what I mean. What's the big deal with being depressed. People should just get over it. You obviously did."

"Now, think for a minute about what it would feel like if that bad day lasted not for a day or two, but three or four months at a time. And if you started to think that maybe that's really how it was going to be forever."

He kept nodding, the smug smile softening only a little bit. "Well, yes," he said. "But plenty of people have real chronic health problems, arthritis for example, and they get by just fine. Life is tough all over."

"Right. But what I've described to you is a very, very mild depression. So mild you almost wouldn't even call it that. I mention it because its the only thing you might understand. But if you took that sensation I'm talking about, made it 100 times worse, so that it felt like you were wading in thick molasses up to your neck, extended it for years at a time, then you'd have some idea about what real depression feels like. You wake up with it, you eat with it, you go to your kids' soccer game with it, you work with it, you shower with it, you sleep with it, you dream with it. Then you wake up with it again. Day after day after day. Pretty soon, it seems clear that it will never, ever change. This is now your life."

His face blanched then, visibly, and he took a tentative sip of his scotch and water. "Well, if that really happened to me, just like you describe, I'd probably blow my brains out."

"Exactly," I said. "I wonder if you'd have the courage not to."

Heavy Stuff, but Interesting

2010-02-23T15:32:00.004-06:00

I've been reading some pretty interesting material on the subject of Dzogchen buddhist practice recently.

Essentially, Dzogchen is a form of practice in which the subject for meditation isn't your breathing, or a mantra, or a candle, or anything at all like that. Instead, Dzogchen practice involves studying the nature of mind itself as the object of meditation. The concept suggests that careful, naked examination of the nature of mind-itself, all by itself, can lead to enlightenment. Here is where you come into phrases like "clear luminosity" to describe the essence of mind.

This is pretty heavy, estoteric stuff, with subtle nuances that go on, and on, and on. Dzogchen appears to be very, very old, dating back to the shamanistic days of the original Bon religion of Tibet. It was then adopted and modified by Buddhism when it migrated into Tibet from India.

The essence of the practice is that looking at the mind in a very detached, objective way allows you to see that thoughts and feelings all arise and are self liberated within the arena of mind-itself, with no real help from us, and not much burden. While all that arises in the mind is utterly temporary and without substance, the mind itself is timeless, in that it isn't born and doesn't die.

The practice is really about allowing yourself to relax into mind-itself, and simply allow thoughts and feelings to come and go as simple expressions of the mind, but without any more significance than that. As a common analogy goes, it's keeping the sky in mind, but not being distracted by the clouds.

In the context of this recent study, I came across an idea that struck me as very interesting. The commentator was observing that what we take as "reality" virtually always contains a large percentage of mental elaboration and modification. What we take to be "real" is actually merely an idea of what is real.

Life become much simpler and much pleasanter, if we keep in mind that that what we experience is almost always a large part mental ornamentation and imagination, and hence should be treated playfully.

We Are What We Eat (Oh, the Horror)

2010-02-22T12:32:00.002-06:00

For several months last year, with my physician's warnings about rising blood sugar dangers ringing in my ears, I had cleaned up my act. I'd deleted a good many carbohydrates from my diet, saw my weight begin to drop, my blood sugar return to good levels. Felt good.

A trip to China and the Christmas holidays saw me regress a bit, and the evidence was clear. My waistline and blood sugar levels began to swell again, though I didn't return entirely to the previous ghastliness.

So I cleaned up my act again a few weeks ago, saw some real progress, and felt much, much better. I always do feel a lot better when I eat well and exercise well. Long walks, cross-country skiing, meals of vegetables and Rye Crisp, and once again, presto chango, I started feeling spry again.

But today at lunch, I happened by the cafeteria at the government center while running an errand, and a provocative cheeseburger reached out, grabbed me by the neck, and forced me to eat it. I felt quite helpless about it, with a mixture of carnivorous defiance and guilty pleasure. Meat has become lessen appealing in recent years, and beef in particular is now rather rare for me. But man, that cheeseburger had my number today.

Now, an occasional cheeseburger won't kill me, it's true. But I"m quite puzzled at this common human behavior--doing things we know are bad for us, that we know will make us feel bad——despite all evidence and logic that tells us to knock it off. I suppose nearly everyone has certain self-defeating, self-repeating habits, but I sure do wish I could throw this monkey off my shoulder for good.

I knew while eating it that the burger wouldn't sit too well in my stomach this afternoon, and sure enough, a once-familiar, after-lunch grogginess is already beginning to set in.

In the spiritual world, it's known as "digestive karma," and was first mentioned in one of the Buddha's lesser known sutras, known as the " Sutra of High-Density Lipo-Proteins"" Another lesson from that sutra reads:

"Verily I say to you, Ananda, he who hides the fresh onions with melted cheese will soon find himself reincarnated into another life, where he shall once again face the choice of cheddar vs whole grain. Choose wisely, Ananda."

Reconsidering New Age

2010-02-11T12:22:00.002-06:00

I was probably 12 years old when I started reading books about spirituality and mysticism. It started with an interest in yoga philosophy, and the first descriptions I read were in the scholarly writings of Colliers Encyclopedia. It wasn't too long before I was ordering books from our local bookstore. There was no Barnes & Noble, online or otherwise in those days, and so some of the things I special-ordered took many weeks to arrive to our small town in southern Minnesota.

It's no exaggeration to say that I've read many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of books on spiritual subjects over the years. Right from the start, though, I had a very healthy skepticism of anything that reeked of too much cultural popularity. These subjects weren't all that widespread in the 1960s and early 70s——no bookstore would have a "New Age" section, for example——but I still shied away from anything that was too highly touted by celebrities. When the Beatles traveled to India to study with the Maharishi in 1968 or so, I was already quite familiar with Hindu philosophy at the age of 13, but wanted no part of anything that the Maharishi, with his fleet of Rolls Royces, was preaching. Instead I read a bit of Patanjali, and some of Krishnamurti, but you couldn't get me to sit still for the Maharishi at all.

The 1960s were the era of transcendent psychodelia, and while I might read and agree with some of what Aldous Huxley wrote, I turned off the Don Juan stories of Castanado when I came upon that silliness about parallel universes of space aliens living among us.

It seemed to me that the quickest way for a spiritual mystic to lose all credibilty was to be widely praised by popular culture, and even more, to show an eagerness to make a lot of money from one's spiritual teachings.

What this means is that for the better part of 40 years, I've eschewed the Deepak Chopras, the Robert Blyes, and always opted for the source material from which many of these people freely, and sometimes dishonestly, borrowed. Even now, I find it almnost physically painful to browse New Age, whereas the Religion sections of my local bookstores have armchairs dedicated to my patronage.

And for this reason, it's only now, with a lifestime of reading under my belt, that I just now picked up Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now.

For years I've had a quiet, arm's length distain for Tolle, based partially on the cottage industry that's grown up around him, and partly for his borrowing of the name of Meister Eckhart. I sincerely doubted that anyone among the disciples of Tolle even really knew who Meister Eckhart was, much less had read him, so how legitimate could this whole Eckhart Tolle phenomenon be, anyway?

And so it has come as quite a shock to recognize that a good deal of what Tolle says in this book has the strong ring of truth. I speak as somebody who has studied these subjects in a pretty academic and serious way for many years. Unlike most of these New Age celebrities, Tolle has me more often nodding in agreement than wincing in disbelief. If there is one criticism to be made, it might be that Tolle doesn't really credit the origins of some of this wisdom, or acknowledge that his insights were discovered long ago. For example, the idea of "Now", as espoused by Eckhart, is virtually the same concept as "suchness" or "isness" which the Tibetans were studying centuries ago.

But that's a fairly minor cricisism, as it seems entirely possible that Tolle legitimately saw some of these things afresh for himself, and didn't learn them from others. As I browse the book, I am finding myself again and again agreeing with things that I've seen for myself through years of study and meditation.

Is Tolle enlightened? Did he experience a sudden awakening that transformed his life?

I don't know for sure, but it's not something I can boldly discount, either. If it wasn't for the fact that Tolle has created enormous wealth for himself, I'd be even more likely to give his book a prominent place on my shelves.

God, I hope I'm not going to have to reconsider Carlos Castanada.

2010-02-05T16:28:00.002-06:00

I ran across this over at Grumpy Lion, and thought I'd share it here——a wind generator losing its safety brake in a storm.

Citizens of 4F, Feb. 5, 2010

2010-02-05T15:26:00.003-06:00

What has become of Donald, I wonder?

Donald has been a fixture of the morning 4F bus ride into downtown Minneapolis for nearly every single day of the last three years. He is a high-functioning adult with some form of developmental disability; a chronological age that appears to be 40-something, but a personal manner that makes him seem like 10 or 12 years of age. He carries an oversized lunch box and wears converse tennis shoes, sometimes covered with rubber over-boots. When it's cold he, wears either a Twins ball cap, or sometimes zips on the hood to his parka. Very often he plays a hand-held video game on the ride downtown. Twice, I've seen his cell phone ring during the bus ride, and it appears these calls are from some family member checking on his well-being. He is very deliberate and careful when he takes out his phone, and he talks loudly and clearly to someone who obviously knows him well.

Donald and I have never spoken. He sits near the front of the bus and has already boarded by the time I get on. There is never room for me to sit near the front, so Donald and I only meet eyes briefly in the morning as I pass by him. Though I have no specific knowledge of this, I have always imagined that Donald must be a participant in one of those social programs that pairs up people with disabilities with jobs that offer benefit to both the businesses and the workers. Minnesota is one of those places with a lot of these kinds of programs. Although our Republican governor has undermined some of these opportunities, Minnesota remains one of those places that offers many subsidies to improve life quality for people in need, and when I see these cheerful, slightly handicapped people working about town at various businesses, it always makes me optimistic for human civilization, or at least for the Minnesota version of it.

Once, I ran into Donald at the downtown Target store while running errands at lunch. He recognized me instantly from across two check-out lanes, and broke into a broad smile of recognition. His hand started to come up in a wave, but then he shyly edited himself and simply continued to grinned broadly. He was gone long before I made my way through my own line.

After two years of seeing Donald every day, I've not seen him at all the last two weeks. I wonder if the economy has taken his job, even here in compassionate, liberal Minnesota. Surely not even this economy could be that cruel. Or, perhaps is he sick, or hurt in some way. It's just not like him to miss the 4F bus.

I hope Donald is alright. I would feel much better if he were back on the bus.

10 Favorite Movies of 2009

2010-01-13T16:31:00.003-06:00

Well, there are still a couple of movies we haven't seen that stand a chance at cracking this list. Crazy Heart, with Jeff Bridges is getting great reviews. And The Bad Lieutenant, with Nicolas Cage, is getting some impressive buzz, too.

But other than these, there's not much chance of anything else cracking the top ten before Oscar time rolls around, so with that, I'll give you my own 10 favorite movies of 2009, along with encouragement to try and see them if you haven't.

But first, a couple of words about films that didn't make the list. September Issue, the documentary about the creation of a single edition of Vogue magazine is highly recommended, and nearly made the list. Other honorable mentions incliude Julia and Julie (Streep wonderful, slightly pedestrian script), District 9 (great unexpected sci-fi), and Star Trek (saw it twice, always a strong indicator of a good movie.)

Here, without further ado, is the Mercurious list of 2009's best movies:

10. Inglorious Basterds. This movie was expected to be huge, and it almost lived up to the hype. Finely crafted and wickedly funny. Could well have placed higher, but its expectations diminish its placement a bit.

9. Zombieland. Uproariously, incredibly funny. Ferris Buhler meets Night of the Living Dead. Outlandish commentary on American culture, with an incredible cameo appearance in the center of the film.

8. This is It. The documentary about Michael Jackson's farewell tour rehearsals. Unexpectedly moving and fascinating.

7. Paranormal Activity. Low budget, exceedingly effective horror. Not graphic, just tense. This made the list because I so admire the ability of a clever group's ability to do a good movie on $10,000 or $20,000.

6. Food Incorporated. Very good documentary about the American food industry. Will change how you shop for food.

5.Precious. Hard to watch, but bringing this to screen took an act of heroism on the part of many people.

4. 500 Days of Summer. A triumphant statement that a comedy need not be vulgar trash like The Hangover. Delightful, and also realistic.

3. The Informant. A sleeper of a Matt Damon film, that gradually causes you to grow more and more fascinated.

2. Up. Far better than Mr. Fox, I thought. Clever, moving, funny, visually stunning. If it doesn't vie for best picuture, it would be a shame.

1. The Hurt Locker. Almost no one knows about this documentary-style fictional story of Iraq bomb-diffusion experts. Amazing, amazing movie. Not gory, so you can see it without fear. The best movie of the year.

Citizen of 4F, Jan. 12, 2010

2010-01-12T08:12:00.005-06:00

554447Mood is a strange and fickle human quality.

After two days in a quietly gray mood, I find myself this morning in a mood that is equally quiet, but most definitely happy. How exactly did this transformation occur? I wonder. It happened very subtly.

Perhaps it began when friend called me late yesterday, excited with good career news. She has an infectious personality, and it was pleasant to listen closely to her happiness.

When I left the office for the day, though, was when I noticed a definite uptick in my mood. Part of it was that at 5:15 pm, for the first time in recent memory, the sky was still light. At these latitudes, a cloudy overcast in the days just prior to the Dec. 21 solstice will see Minnesota night lasting from 4:30 in the afternoon until the following morning at 8:30 or so. But it was clear yesterday, and we're now more than three weeks past solstice, and so paying close attention shows that the painstakingly slow crawl back to spring is already underway.

More than this, though, the sky was painted with a whole spectrum of colors thanks the setting sun, and if you paid close attention, you could see that the sky echoed every color you could see in the neon store signs reflected in the windows: blues, reds, indigos, oranges, yellows—in the far west, you could even see pale greens streaked across the sky that echoed the green of streetlights in "go" mode. The whole thing left you with a feeling of wonderful symmetry between the natural and manmade worlds.

This morning, rather than go to work in the darkness, I took a later bus, stopping first for coffee and the New York Times at the nearest Starbucks. As I read the arts section, I noticed a father and son sitting off in the corner. The son was perhaps 13 or 14 years old, and was struggling with unhappiness of some kind. It wasn't clear to me if the boy was perhaps ill——his face was slightly flushed--or if he was wrestling with some early adolescent angst of some kind. But at one point his father reached over and gripped the boy's wrist in comfort. Like most boys in early adolescence, the young man's face showed a mixed response to this public display of affection from a parent, but it pleased me to see this father ignore the rules of adolescent protocol and comfort his son in this way.

On the bus ride, one could see that the foggy night had painted the trees with a hoar frost that looked like the most delicate lace. The urban forest around the skating rink at Lyndale Farmstead park looked like something from the most fanciful set in a Tim Burton movie.

When I am in a productive stretch, I have sometimes found that a 30 or 45 minute bus ride will find 2,000- or 3,000- word business letters or blog posts composing themselves in my head between home and office, so that all I'm left with is transcribing what has mentally hatched. It's pleasant to realize, for this one morning at least, that a bit of that creativity has returned.

William James, the pioneer psychologist, wrote more than a century ago, that "the strain of attention is the fundamental act of will."

Perhaps transforming unhappiness into happiness is really just a matter of choosing what to pay attention to.

Citizens of 4F, Jan. 11, 2010

2010-01-11T12:21:00.002-06:00

When the work day promises to be especially hectic, I catch the early 4f bus at 6:15 in the morning. When it arrives at my downtown stop, the sky will be just hinting at sunrise, but the stars will still be in full force.

We're in the heart of Minneapolis winter, and although it is a relatively balmy 10 degrees this morning, the mood on the bus seems especially sober this morning. Of the six people alrady on the bus, three have their heads leaning up against the glass windows, either their eyes are shut, or they are looking forlornly at the morning night outside.

At the front of the bus behind the driver is a young man I think of as David, who looks, more than anything, like the common artistic representation of Jesus Christ, except wearing a worn hooded sweatshirt under a insulated denim jacket. He has long brownish hair and a reddish beard, and a slightly Roman nose. His eyes are closed. Logically, he is probably just fatigued after an active weekend, but there is something about him that suggests a somewhat more existential weariness.

I look at others on the bus, and I recognize one of those mornings where the gentle suffering of being human is quite evident. Not a happy face to be seen. No anguish either, but lots of very quiet borderline sorrow in the air. It's before dawn on a Monday morning after all. And it's winter. And it's MInneapolis. As more and more passengers board, the mood isn't lightened at all.

There is only one exception to this prevailing mood. Midway into downtown, two young adults get aboard at different stops. They clearly know each other, and carry on a silent smiling conversation with one another sitting across the aisle facing one another. Let's call them Luke and Heather. They look like a Luke and Heather to me. The carry identical gleaming silver coffee mugs, and smile at one another and mouth silent phrases to one another. But then Luke gets off the bus, and Heather's face falls into the same expression of quiet sorrow I see on all the other faces——myself included, I suppose.

This is all rather depressing, so I try to think up some lesson here, some encouragement with which to face the day. I think to myself, "Life isn't easy for anybody. Knowing that, we should try to be nice to one another. "

Not the pithiest motto. But for this Monday morning, it will have to do.

A Thought

2010-01-08T13:03:00.002-06:00

A thought that occurred to me last night....

Perhaps genuine freedom isn't so much about choosing either option A or option B, but more about about having both options available.

"I'm going to do B, not A," is its own form of bondage. But "A and B are both possible" is a genuine form of freedom.

This is true not only of actions, but of attitude, I think. Mired in a bad mood, merely recognizing that a good mood is a possibility has plenty of power to liberate. When angry, simply considering the possibility of friendliness is often all that's required for transformation.

Book & a Movie; January 2010

2010-01-06T16:17:00.003-06:00

This month's recommendations:

The Mind & the Brain (2002, by Jeffrey M. Schwarz, Harper Collins).

For those of us of a somewhat spiritual bent, modern science offers much to be dejected about. The premise of modern science is that all phenomenon, including human aspiration and feeling and passion, can be reduced to logical and predictable interactions between ions, electrons, amino acids, neurotransmittters. If you really listen to what science says, and believe it, you're left with the empty sensation that free will doesn't exist at all.

Schwarz, though, points out that modern behavioral science never really grew beyond Newtonian physics. All that it takes to restore the wonder about the nature of human consciousness is to learn a little bit about quantum physics, which not only make room for human consciousness and free will, but argues that nothing else really explains the way the world operates.

I can by no means do justice to the author's arguments in a few short paragraphs. Suffice it to say that this is truly exciting work that seems to offer genuine evidence that our intuition was right when we decided that human consciousness was something magical and mystical and worthy of our wonder.

My film recommendation is a bit harder this month. Not much that blew my socks off. So rather than a single recommendation, I'll simply give one-to-five star reviews of the last few I've seen:

Sherlock Holmes. Three stars. Pleasant diversion with interesting twists on the personalities of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But needlessly complicated plot line that grew tedious in hour two.

Avatar. Three stars. Startling technology that makes you want to buy the DVD for the special effects features. But James Cameron is about as deep (shallow) as George Lucas in his handling of archetypal mythologies.

It's Complicated. Two stars Delightful acting by Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin. Tedious plot and terrible written dialogue.

The Road. 3 stars. Yeah, depressing, but very finely acted. You have to be into post-apocalyptic nightmares, though.

Hello darkness my old friend.

2010-01-06T08:02:00.004-06:00

Every so often, a Black Thing comes knocking at my door, and with a wicked grin it demands to come inside for a short visit to relive the good old days. I know him well, because twice in my life he has been a long-term visitor. On one occasion, more than thirty years ago now when I was a troubled young man, the Black Thing not only dwelled with me for the better part of two years, but was a virtual bedmate. Some years later, when my mother was dying of cancer, he came for another visit that was mercifully shorter, only about two months or so in duration.

He's also popped in for spot checks at other times, and last night brought one such visit.

A panic attack for me begins quite innocently, with nothing more than an unusual and very particular sense of expectation. It's not an unpleasant feeling at first——more like the slight nervousness you might feel before speaking in front of a group, or like the prescient sensation you get if you awaken early on the day of a vacation trip to a far-off land. Last night, out of a sound sleep, I awoke to this feeling of expectation, which, even if it's been years since the last one, is instantly identifiable.

Within moments——or maybe its just a split second, because time is very hard to gauge--the feeling of expectation blossoms into an inexplicable terror. A friend once asked me to describe what a panic attack felt like, and the closest I could come to was this: it's like you're walking down a sunny street on a spring day, a song in your heart, when you step off the curb to cross a boulevard, and realize that a speeding bus is a split second away from smashing you into oblivion. The heart-in-the-throat, stomach-sickening, thought-exploding volcano is a panic attack.

Panic attacks for me can last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, and however long it might be, the doomsday bus travels at 90 miles-per-hour for the duration, and remains inches from crashing into you, never further and never closer. It defies all physical laws, as the impending doom never resolves itself, but hangs in the air eternally. Taken individually and seen in retrospect, no single panic attack is all that big a deal. It doesn't leave lasting damage, and once it's past, the feeling from moments earlier seems as distant as the moon.

In the very darkest times, though, when the Black Thing lived with me, the panic attacks were always on the long side, and I was seized by 10 or 12 each day. I awoke with them, went to sleep with them, and was roused from fitful sleep by attacks of panic. For two years in 1975 and 1976, my days consisted of panic, and the dread waiting for the next attack of panic. There was literally no room for happiness. Though not as graphic to onlookers, this kind of panic disorder is just about as debilitating as a pattern of frequent epileptic seizures.

T'was a very dark time, in other words.

That's really the horror of infrequent return visits of the Black Thing in the years since those times. An occasional panic attack isn't all that problematic, but it always does remind me of that time when panic attacks put me on the verge of madness. When they happen, even now, I wonder if it harkens a return to those days, or if at some point the doomsday bus will fail to disappear and remain forever poised inches from crushing me. I fear, in other words, that the panic won't end. There is likely an element of post tramatic stress in all this, I'm sure, since when it happens, I relive some memories that even today I haven't told people about.

When the Black Thing revisits like it did last night, there is some comfort in knowing that a drugstore a few blocks away does carry medicines that can help a bit. Long experience has taught me the very mild doses of a particular enhancer of neuro-transmitter action can help lessen the severity and frequency of panic attacks. Should they start to become frequent, that's an option. But as anyone who has lived through some kind of mood disorder——whether serious depression, OCD, or anxiety disorders——can tell you, medicines really address symptoms, not causes. A well chosen drug treats physical sensations associated with a disorder, and doesn't exactly cure or prevent them. The benefit of a drug is rather like putting on long underwear and a heavy coat when the winter night is bitterly cold. It makes you more comfortable, but it doesn't turn winter into summer.

Long experience has also told me that another part of the solution, the more real solution, is willful action that, on the face of things, seems entirely counter-intuitive. Although every impulse you have during a panic attack is to run, to flee, the truth is that if you actually try to run away from panic, the terror will continue to pursue you relentlessly. Strangely enough, though, turning directly into panic, staring it in the face, shining awareness into it, is one of the best ways to make it evaporate. If there is any one thing I can point to that caused the Black Thing to leave me alone, finally, it was this kind of meditative approach to the whole thing.

So very often the best solution is not to distract yourself, not ignore a panic attack, but to study it quite directly and objectively. In the throes of a panic attack, what I find is that gradually the observing aspect begins to come to the fore-front, while the panic itself recedes and becomes a subject for study rather than a beast that has you by the throat. The inner sensation is very much like dialing a radio tuner away from the channel playing terror, and to a frequency where a documentary narrator observes the pounding heart, the racing thoughts of horror, the wild impulses. Wes Craven becomes David Attenborough. It become evident that panic is drama, not truth, and that it carries no real long-term meaning or significance.

Last night's visit was a mild one——fifteen minutes or so——yet I admittedly feel a bit rattled today. Literally rattled, as though the nuts and bolts of my nervous system were slightly loosened, so that I clatter around a bit like the tin woodman.

It's not altogether a bad thing, though, as I find that this morning I am a little less full of myself, and a little more attuned to the people around me, wondering about what kind of quiet pain they are hiding themselves, and how they deal with their own visits from the Black Thing. It is more prevalent than we think, though it surely wears different costumes when it visits our friends, neighbors and coworkers. Perhaps it's true that some knowledge of our own pain helps us empathize with others. I also try to view it philosophically, even spiritually, and to learn something from these visits. Rilke, I think, said something like "perhaps every black thing just secretly wants to be loved." And the Buddhists have a practice called 'feeding hungry ghosts," which involves acknowledging that our spectres do truly exist and must be recognized if they are to be overcome. If the Black Thing's come back to visit, it very likely means that I've not paid close enough attention recently.

Color Me Livid

2010-01-05T16:46:00.002-06:00

Here's one for the books:

On "Fox News Sunday," Hume — the former leader of Fox News' political reporting and host of "Special Report" who now serves as an analyst for the network — said that [Tiger] Woods' recovery "depends on his faith."

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," Hume said. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

Holy crap, Batman. I'm not exactly sure you can call Tiger Woods a Buddhist, exactly, since as far as I know he simply professes to practice meditation. But to suggest that the religion that spawned Jimmy Swaggert, John Edwards, et al to be the one best suited to redeem moral sleaze....well, really folks. You can't be serious.

Seriously Brett. Buddhists aren't perfect people, but on a cosmic sinfulness scale, I would put my Buddhists against your Christians any old day of the week.

Book & a Movie for December

2009-12-23T16:04:00.003-06:00

In a pleasant surprise, I stumbled upon The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak.

Story of a young girl in Nazi Germany, so you might not think this is holiday reading, especially since the narrator is Death himself (now you know why I like it). But this is an exceedingly charming and heartwarming book that continued to surprise me in quiet ways right to the end.

Strongly recommended.

Last night we saw Clint Eastwood's movie about Nelson Mandela, Invictus. The theater was filled with slightly restless young adults who drifted in when Avatar was sold out, but to their credit they found themselves engrossed in a very good and uplifting film about one of this century's most remarkable men. Clint Eastwood has emerged as a true wonder himself, turning out a very good movie each and every year——something you never would have dreamed the Dirty Harry movie star would achieve.

Very fine movie.

(By the way, an extraordinarily good film, The Hurt Locker, has been rereleased into select theaters after getting lots of Golden Globe buzz. If you find it playing near you, see it.)

A Theory, part II

2009-12-23T13:19:00.002-06:00

A couple of posts ago, I argued (a little bombastically, I admit), that the central concern of life has has to do with those ineffable tastes of happiness and unhappiness that flavor our experiences. Understanding the maddeningly slippery nature of these qualities is really the driving motivation of our lives, I suggested. In our heart of hearts, every man and woman would like to undersstand happiness and unhappiness, and have some degree of competence at courting the one and escaping the other. Pretty much all other endeavors are slightly muddied or disguised forms of this central instinct.

And so this means, very simply, that a well-lived life becomes an honest study and appraisal of the causes of happiness and unhappiness, and testing out methods of cultivating the happy and weeding out the unhappy.

I'd submit that every religion, every spiritual practice, every cultural endeavor, all forms of science, can really be boiled down to this basic elemental wish: "I want happiness. I want to be free of unhappiness." Keeping this idea in the forefront seems essential to an understanding of self and others.

Home Again

2009-12-21T17:23:00.002-06:00

I've now recovered slightly, after the previous 24 hours have seen me on three separate flights enroute home from China. The flights themselves totaled 17 hours or so, but add another 3 hours trapped on the tarmac in a plane with two different mechanical problems, and it was not a pleasant day.

The day began at 4:00 am in Nanjng, China, where we left for the airport in the wee hours for a flight to Beijing. Not a big deal, except for the fact that I'd been struggling with the stomach disorder that plagues many visitors to China. The projectile vomiting had subsided, fortunately, but I was still dealing with (ahem) some disorder at the other end of the digestive tract, if you get my drift. I was finding it wise to be within ready reach of a toilet at all times. Mind you, a toilet in china is very often a squat affair, not the nice porcelain throne we normallythink of.

But no big deal. Planes have toilets. Chinese cab drivers are nothing if not blindingly fast. Off to the airport.

Safely into Beijing in a nice two hour flight that required only three trips to the toilet. Plenty of time for connecting flight to Beijing, and waiting lounge had a bathroom right next door. It was even a western style toilet. And it even featured toilet paper--not a common luxury in china.

The 12 hour flight from Beijing to San Francisco wasn't terrible, but it was 12 hours, after all, which is a hell of a long time to sit on a plane. I sat on the aisle, and the restroom was always at ready reach.

It was, however, an hour late getting into San Francisco, which meant we had to race frantically through the airport. Planes don't wait, even for planes for tourists with rebellious digestive systems. Because San Francisco was our port of entry back into the US, we had to clear customs, of course, and SF airport was an absolute zoo, with thousands and thousands of people, exaggerated by the fact that many east-coast bound travelers had had flights cancelled due to storms.

But really, not all that big a deal, so far. Though feeling extremely wan and pale, I was two thirds of the way home. We made the final flight, moments before the gate closed.

Then the plane pushed back from the gate. And we proceeded to sit on the tarmac for a full three hours while two different mechanical problems were addressed. Now, I normaly love to fly, but I have a peculiar claustrophobia when it comes to being confined in small spaces with lots of people. I can ride an elevator alone all day, but cram it with people and I have to count my breaths carefully on a long ride up a skyscraper. I don't have normal flyer's phobia, but rather a fear of being confined in crowds, and on a full plane, that time between the closing of an airplane's hatches and getting airborn is one that often sees me meditating quietly and struggling against panic. Once aloft, I have no problem, because I'm quite aware that if the damned thing crashes, it will break wide apart, and I'll surely be free of the crowd. Violent death doesn't trouble me at all, but God, spare me a crowded small space.

Our plane was crammed to the gills, and I found myself sitting in the very last row against the window--you know, the seat that won't even recline. And upon announcing that the plane wasn't moving for at least two hours, the crowd leaped to their feet to line up for the rest room.

And me, fighting a stupendous case Chairman Mao's revenge.

Well, no, I didn't soil myself in public, although in reality, it really wouldn't have mattered, because the plane had at least 12 infants aboard, at least 10 of which already had soiled diapers. Nobody would have spotted my transgression. After struggling with a bit of claustrophic panic for an hour or so, I found my way over the crowds and stood in the back galley area and nervously talked with the chief steward, who seemed to recognize my brand of claustrophobia. In a place where I could pace just a bit while eyeing the red emergency handle on the back escape hatch, I managed to get by okay.

To United Airline's credit, they did eventually get us back to a gate and allowed us off to use restrooms and eat, and it was a much cheerier crowd that got on board once the plane was fixed. I made it home fine, fell asleep for 20 hours, and now feel almost human.

Perhaps I'll next be able to describe a bit about China. For the moment, though, I'm simply to have survived the whole thing.

A Theory

2009-12-03T08:28:00.004-06:00

There is a rather simple model for understanding the human experience.

In our experience of the world and its phenomenon, there are are always two strains or flavors evident to us. Every "object" that enters the field of our awareness carries a kind of positive or negative magnetic charge that creates either a feeling of pleasantness in some degree, or a feeling of pain and unpleasantness in an opposite degree.

These positive and negative lenses, through which we perceive the world of the mind, pretty much inform everything we do, everything we aspire to. Virtually all of human behavior can be understood in terms of pursuing pleasantness and avoiding unpleasantness. At the end of the day, it is the basis of all science, all religion, all culture, all instinct.

In this, at least, Freud was correct when he suggested a pleasure principle as the driving motivation for human experience.

Pleasantness and unpleasantness——happiness and unhappiness---come in a thousand different degrees and flavors, and are described by thousands of different names. The experience of unpleasantness, for example, can be described as mildly as "restlessness," or as boldly as "loathing." Pleasantness can be simple "satisfaction," or as all-consuming as "bliss."

Close examination of our experience will reveal that every phenomenon born into our awareness carries some portion of a positive or negative emotional charge. The Buddhists will say that there is also feeling that is entirely neutral, but I'm not sure about this. It's true that some experiences don't really elicit much in the way of either longing or aversion, but looking closely at these moments it seems to me that the positive and negative are more or less balanced at these times——not missing altogether.

There is, I suppose, some scientific support for this, as modern physics describes negative and positive charges to the basic workings of matter & energy. Perhaps our subjective sensation of pleasantness and aversion is really nothing more than a manifestation of that truth of physics.

In any case, I think that when cavemen first recognized that faculty of awareness in themselves, it was the awareness of pleasantness vs. unpleasantness that was the primary mystery, and was probably more mysterious than life and death itself. The experience of pleasure and pain, after all, usually seems connected to our actions, at least in part, while life and death are largely outside our control altogether.

So I suggest that religion, science, culture, etc,, aren't about understanding the mystery of life, but rather the mystery of happiness and unhappiness.

All the mythologies of religion, for example, seem to me to be stories and characterizations revolving around the dance between positive and negative, happiness and unhappiness. To "God," we attribute the causes and origination of happiness, while "Evil" is the king of all that seems to be the source of unhappiness. This explains why evil is different for every person. In the experience of war, for example, nobody in the conflict ever cheerfully admits that they are serving the cause of evil. Evil always lurks in the other fellow, they guy who is compromising my happiness.

Religion is ultimately an effort to understand happiness and unhappiness, to court one and escape the other. Buddhism states this quite boldly as its intent; other religions dramatize it through elaborate mythologies.

Similarly, the working of science, government, art & culture, seems to be mostly driven by the mystery of happiness and unhappiness. Many governments, for example, use the idea of "the greatest good for the greatest number" as their driving principle. Science, at the end of the day, is about improving our health and comfort, and eliminating discomfort. Art seeks to articulate the drama of happiness and unhappiness, and ultimating to foster happiness through the creation of beauty.

Happiness and unhappiness exist nowhere but in our selves, our subjective experience. No outer physical event in the world is inherently good or bad. A terrible thunderstorm may be bad to a person caught out in the rain without any shelter, but it is good to the farmer longing for rain to quench his parched fields. It is entirely relative and subjective.

Good and bad, happy and unhappy are also slippery qualities. It's very common, for example, to pursue some activity that ostensibly seems to be happy-making, only to find that it's long-term effect is to create unhappiness. LIkewise, it's common for experiences of present unhappiness to prove to be long-term causes of greater happiness. So a well-lived life is very much about studying and evaluating the causes of genuine a happiness, nurturing those causes and weeding out the obstructions. It is a life of intelligent experimentation and observation. Hence, a man given to hedonism early in life may realize that a more genuine happiness comes about through a somewhat more ascetic approach to life.

Good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, happy and unhappy exist only in the matrix of our awareness. If a phenomenon is extricated from the context of our awareness of it, it is entirely empty of such judgments. So it is the field of awareness itself where the science and study should be aimed. God is not in his heaven, nor the devil in Hell. Neither do they exist in other people. Only within.

Part II

2009-11-20T16:39:00.003-06:00

Okay, so if you're more or less on board with the premise of the previous post——that our species' angst arises because of the dissonance between what we want (permanence and stability) and the shifting, squirming impermanence that circumstances really offer——where does that leave us?

Assuming that a happy state is what we all seek, there are two conceivable solutions. One, we can attempt to create permanence and stability in our circumstances and in our identities. We can try to make the world fit our desires. Generally speaking, I think this is human solution of choice. We try to make become permanently healthy, to solidify our level of comfort in the world. Through career, or family, or good deeds, we try to give our name and reputation some permanence, even eternity. Hence, a wealthy man builds a law school and names it after himself; an artist seeks glory; an actor, a star on the hollywood walk of fame. Nations try to establish themselves as cultures for the ages. We try to convince ourselves that we are real, in other words.

These efforts can work for a little while--at least long enough for us momentarily convince ourselves that we're succeeding. We actually can change the world to our liking, at least for a little while. We can extend the average length of a healthy life. We can send men to the moon. We convince ourselves these are momentous, fabulous victories, signifying everything. We ignore the fact that to die at 90 rather than 70 is, at the end of the day, still to die. Most every human triumph, in the final measure, is slightly hollow, as the truth is never really escaped. I'm exaggerating this for effect, but you get the idea.

Eventually, the rug gets pulled away, and illness visits, poverty descends, or reputation becomes sullied. Waistline sags, the memory grows feeble, friends forget us. And through it all, we're constantly trying rebuilding the sand castle, trying to defend the illusion against the evidence.

This is the point where disillusionment can be an important gift. To become disillusioned, after all, means to be relieved of your illusions——to forfeit your false beliefs, in others words. It's not a terrible thing to wake up and see that a lot of our ambition is rather meaningless.

The danger, though, is that we'll swing to the opposite pole. If I can't make life constantly to my liking, we think, then it automatically means that life is shit. Nihilism can set it. There are people who travel in this direction, but never come to the point where there realize that nihilism is its own form of illusion.

Rather than seeking to remake the world to match our wishes, the second option, the one much less traveled, would be to work with the wishing itself, the illusion, and see if we can't bring it more into alignment with the ways things really are.

This, I would suggest, is the more revolutionary approach, and the one that perhaps has more real potential for creating a happy life. It is a life of letting to to things as they are, and it is quite alien to us. We really can't believe such a thing is possible, and dismiss the mere idea as lazy hogwash. We defend our right to hold on to delusion.

A bit of experiment, though, can begin to convince you that there's something to different approach. Perhaps our ability to truly and wholly "let go" can only happen for a sporadic few moments at a time before the need to control things again reasserts itself. Pay attention, though, and you may realize that those few moments of utter surrender to the world is as peaceful as anything you've known.

Some people with whom I talk to about such ideas will mutter that such a life would be nothing more than laziness. A life without the attempt to control the world is no life at all, they'd say.

In point of fact, though, a life of surrender very often will mean abandoning our inaction, and allowing oneself to act with unusual strength and power in accordance with the natural flow of things.

A tiny little glimpse of this approach can be experienced through a very simple meditation exercise once taught to me.

"As you pay attention to your breath, abandon the illusion that "you" are breathing. Instead, consider the possibility that the universe is breathing you."

Part 1

2009-11-20T08:58:00.005-06:00

I don't think it takes great powers of observation or enormous insight to conclude that the human animal exists in a kind of restless condition. There are some philosophers and nihilists who would describe the human condition as one of never-ending suffering, sorrow, or original sin. I don't know that I'd go quite that far; but if you practice mere observation, it does seem logical to conclude that our species is vaguely dissatisfied with its existence, and is almost always squirming and striving for something more. Spend a day looking around, and you will see that virtually everyone seems to be longing for things to be different. It is the reason behind most everything we do.

I have a theory about why this is so, and here it is: the reason we, as a species, are unhappy is that we're not entirely sure that we exist.

There is some classic philosophy behind this, which can be found in both the occident and orient. The argument is something like this: For something to truly, concretely exist, as a phenomenon it would be concrete, definite, tangible. Moreover, as some philosophers have tried to show through logic, something that truly "exists" would not materialize or dissolve, but would have stable, non-ending existence.

Since none of these qualities can possibly be applied to the concept we call "self," we exist in a kind of nervous worry about who and what we are....or even IF we are.

Consider the evidence. In almost every circumstance, who we are changes moment to moment. One moment I'm a husband, the next a father, now a friend, later a son to an aging father. A supervisor, an underling; an intellectual, a screaming sports fan. Even in the absence of other people and changing circumstances, the self I identify in my thoughts changes every few seconds.

Our emotional view of the world, which may define us more than almost anything else, is the most shifting experience of all. Blissfully content one moment, irritated the next. Happy as a clam today; on the wrong side of the bed tomorrow. Full of wisdom and common sense....30 seconds later forgetting where I put my eyeglasses.

25 years old one minute, a second later, I'm 53 years and counting.

The reality truly is that there is a new reality with every passing moment, and that nothing whatsoever is real in the sense of being concrete and stable. In the very moment that some phenomenon occurs, it is already vanishing. No wonder we're all a bit anguished about our place in the cosmos.

That's the real nature of things: flux, change, impermanence. Unhappiness, it seems to me, arises because we don't like the real nature of things, and we're constantly fighting against it. It's not much more complicated than that.

Don't Learn....Remember

2009-11-09T16:54:00.003-06:00

The grandfather sat back in his rocker and looked at his grandson. Not for the first time, he was again amused and also flattered that the young man continued to seek his opinion, even now that he was no longer a child. Highly unusual for young adults in these times, when most had little interest in the views of old people. His grandson, though, wasn't exactly a typical twenty-something, that's true.

"Okay then, one more bit of advice before I drive you to the airport," the old man said, then paused. "Don't strive to learn anything at all. Instead, allow yourself to remember."

The grandson merely raised his eyebrows.

"What I mean is this," the old man continued. "The truest wisdom will never feel to you like something added, like something you're learning new. More often, it will be something that was already evident to common sense. It will always feel like you're remembering what you've known all along." He stood up, checking his pockets for car keys. "That's how you know it's the real thing. Wisdom will feel like something remembered."

The Philosopher and the Monk....and a middle-age guy in Minneapolis

2009-11-03T09:41:00.003-06:00

On the bus ride home the other day, a woman across the aisle was reading a book with a great title——"The Philosopher & the Monk," and yesterday I picked up a copy of my own.

I've just started reading it, but can already heartily recommend it. The book is a dialogue between a French philosopher and his son——a one-time genetic biologist who gave up a promising career to follow Tibetan Buddhism. The book follows the Socratic method, in which questions and answer gradually divulge a fully developed philosophy for living.

These guys are considerably smarter and more talented than me, but for all of that, there is something in this story that echoes a bit of my own experience in the world. This father and son dialogue is strikingly similar to my inner dialogue over the years. At one time I was a pretty typical westerner, enamored of the power of science and rationality, without much at all in the way of religious sentiment. When I was a kid, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a scientist of some kind. As a young adult, though, I became greatly disenchanted with results of science and technology in human culture, and found myself drawn to various mystical disciplines, and Tibetan Buddhism particularly resonated with me.

Although I continue to read a lot of science to this day, I'm always struck that science only manages to shift the boundaries of the unknown, and never actually eliminates the unknown at all. And no matter how much scientific knowledge gets collected, it has never had much impact whatsoever on the overall experience of genuine human happiness. Nor has science done anything whatsoever to reduce the causes of human unhappiness. Cell phones are now used to detonate roadside bombs, which can hardly be called progress.

Spiritual study, on the other hand is in some ways the study of the subjective truth of human happiness and suffering, and as such strikes me as a discipline of critical importance. Personally, I gravitated to the Buddhist model for several key reasons: First, it is non-theistic discipline which has no need for dogma or superstition. In fact, Buddhism encourages you to trust the evidence of your own experience, and never to trust anything completely on faith.

I have also found the Buddhism offers a clarity and simplicity lacking in other traditions. It is a straight-ahead philosophy with little nuance to it. Most late-arrivals to Buddhism, in fact, are surprised when they discover that the principles mean exactly what they say, and that there is no need to read between the lines.

But it now begins to sound like I'm advocating, when all I meant to do was recommend a good book, which just happens to articulate the inner questions many westerners have about the role of spirituality in a modern society.

The Philosopher & the Monk, by Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard.