Putting Off Taking a Shower

I like taking showers. Sometimes very hot showers. Sometimes cold showers, that make me gasp and blow and remind me forcibly that I am alive. Sometimes showers are luxurious and sometimes they're brisk; sometimes I sing and other times I laugh at my own terribly clever jokes; at dire times of my life, the privacy afforded by streaming water was the only privacy I had, and I've been grateful to it ever since.

So it is particularly ludicrous that one of the things I have to force myself to do is -- take a shower. It's an expenditure of oomph, and oomph is a commodity I've always been a little short on. But I will put off taking a shower for hours, or even days, as if I dreaded them.

What is that thing? That resistance? In Iain McGilchrist's terms -- which are the most meaningful I've encountered for understanding this sort of thing -- it's the usurpation of the left brain. I'm engaged in something the left brain has control of: scrolling in Facebook, or solving a Rubik's cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the left brain is stubbornly clinging to power, like an elderly blowhard senator, well into his dotage, who absolutely will not yield the floor. Embarrassing for all concerned, and no good to man or beast, but by God it's got motor control and it intends to keep it.

And that affliction, of the left brain refusing to yield, is what mindfulness meditation addresses, and which for me very little else ever does. Sitting shamatha is -- especially in the early phases of a sit, when meditation is, as a newbie would view it, "not working" -- a hissing and spitting cat fight. The left brain makes bid after bid at seizing motor control, and the right brain does nothing more complicated than saying "No. You have to wait." Tantrum after tantrum, wheedle after wheedle, ingenious excuse after ingenious excuse. You just practice saying, "No, You have to wait."

The right brain is, actually, and properly, the master. It is in every sense prior. But we are in a culture that has forgotten that: which cultivates, pampers, and indulges the left brain no matter what it's set its heart on. We've forgotten that solving problems is useless -- far worse than useless, positively ruinous -- if the problems are the wrong ones. The one thing the left brain cannot do is step back and say, "is this even the right problem?"

"Everything is cut away but the Present"

Kierkegaard suggests that we're depressed, in modern times, precisely because we're trying to live in the present moment: we have emptied the past and the future of all meaning. "Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it." In these conditions McMindfulness is more likely to exacerbate depression than to relieve it. Relying on the present moment to supply all our meaning was already overloading it: piling more on is not likely to help.

I still think most people will need mindfulness practices (very broadly construed) to have a life worth living. But I've joined the rebellion against locating the present moment as the place where reality lives. There's a lot of reality. Some ways of reaching out to touch it are historical, and some are soteriological. The fact that "we look before and after" is a feature, not a bug. Sure, it can get us in trouble. What can't? Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

A quiet Fall day.

Silk

It's as if I had a silk streamer tacked to the back of my head, and every time I stop quickly, or turn to look at something, a long colorful trailer floats across my field of view. It's my own motion, but it seems alien, colorful, distracting: and how it comes to be attached to me, I can't well say.

So. It's a small thing, but it jives all too well with feeling deracinated. I am awkward, ill at ease, at once too formal and too confidential. A species of survival guilt, maybe, though I don't honestly know if I've survived, nor if anyone else has perished. And anyway, melodramatic gesturing does no good to man nor beast. What's wanted is sober work.

I suppose. One of my clients always brings me a glass of water, and she or I always place it on the same corner of the same bookshelf. Sometimes I drink it all, sometimes I forget it: but that's our place. I feel like the pieces of my life that still work are like that spot: a bit of territory marked out by time and custom, comfortable, familiar, assumed -- and yet, it could be gone forever, in one flickering shift of intention. Nothing, I feel, is very stable or very assured. I have built up my life out of these little habits, these concessions, and one by one they will drop away again. I want to memorize that shelf, photograph it, versify it. But I don't even know if my memory of the wood is to be trusted. In my mind's eye it's raw, unstained, unvarnished, unpainted, but that hardly seems likely. In what sense, then, can I think of it as mine? But I can think of nothing I own in any more convincing sense. The silk floats in front of my eyes.

I want to reach out to people, but the old people are too old, and the new people are too new. I breathe in the scent of raw wood, and of the rain-beaten vines behind the house, and of my massage oil. This is, simply, an in-between time, and no good will come of denying that. It's like that moment in meditation, when I have settled my attention on my breath, and my breathing stops, and for a moment I am fighting an absurd panic: what if it never starts again?

What to do? Easy. Wait. The breath comes again. It always does, in the space of a few heartbeats. Or anyway, it always has so far. And the panic dissolves, and the swirl slows, and the sand begins to settle at the bottom of the glass. "Wait, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing."

So I will wait, and let the folds of fabric fall into place around me. The breath will take care of itself. The love I have set in motion will rise and fall again, lifting my ribs and my collarbone. There is not, in fact, any stopping it.

Morning

I roll over, pile up a couple of pillows, and sit up on them. Lift the cardboard box that conceals the clock to get a glimpse of the time. 5:02. A little light leaks in around the curtain: dawn already? Seems too early in Spring for that.

I put my hands together. “Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the Supreme assembly of the Sangha...” My lips barely move, and I hear the murmur only in my mind's ear. I repeat the prayer three times. “...may I realize buddhahood, in order to help all sentient beings.”

I rest my hands on my thighs – I find these days that when I fold them in my lap, my shoulders tend to come up and forward, and queer my posture – and let my eyes find their place. I let my back arch, and my belly swag. I can't see at all, but my eyes come to rest in their accustomed position, somewhere around the unseen foot of the bed. Still very dark. I lay my mind, deliberately, on my breath, which falters a moment, under the weight of my attention, but rallies, and takes its way, carrying my mind with it. The breath washes in and out of my body, and my thought rolls on top of it, like a beach ball in the surf.

Sometimes there's a constriction, and I, remembering an instruction from – it must be twenty years ago now – my very first meditation teacher, I let my mind leave my body with the breath, let my whole self depart and dissolve with the out-breath. As I do the room quite suddenly is visible. Not that the light has changed; it hasn't. But I can see, the dim shapes of bed and dresser, the drapery over the little closet, the dawn light edging the curtain. As I breathe in again the room goes dark and invisible again. The light, or rather my eyes' ability to receive it, comes and goes a few times more. And it is, I think, truly getting lighter outside.

I lift the box again. 5:24. Call it a sit. Hands together again: “By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings, without exception, in this state.”

The well-worn words tumble out. My hair is tousled, my eyes sticky with sleep. A new day, a new week, a new life: but the same breath, washing in and out, whether my attention is on it or not. I get up to let Kiki in, and open the living room shades.

Morning.

Version of Repose

I clasp my hands, feel the blood knocking
at the roots of my interlaced fingers. Dawn
is still far off: the ropes cast by the summer stars
barely drawing yet. The eyes that will see morning
are not these.

And not these glass marbles, glancing into mine --
quick, opaque, inquiring; pupils wide as death --
and the deft turn, the tufted ears describing
a parabola that hangs a moment in the air --

not these, either. She is gone
before her tail has quite begun.

The old prayers come comfortably,
and the mind settles, the precipitate
of thought coming gradually to rest,
river-silt homing in the lake bottom;
old staggered ambitions and regrets --

what is wished for -- what is dreaded --
drifting down, through the water,
to a dim, rippled version of repose

Twelve Sets of Folded Bronze Wings

I found myself stumbling over my words, in my eagerness to tell a coworker about meditation. And now I am spinning in the backwash of my own enthusiasm: so much invested, so much hoped, so much that fell short. And yet. I have only twice, that I clearly recall, moved distinctly, decisively, to a new and better state of being. One of those times was when I moved away from home: the second time was the result of a regular meditation practice. That's it, in 54 years; two doorways. And the other things I have invested in – many many things, over the years – have returned far less.

But have you said anything, when you say that? As opposed to, say, fingers threaded through the hair at the nape of the neck, or the shadow of a cloud leaving the trees? So little comes into focus at one time: and memory, the neurologists tell us, is rewritten every time it's accessed, so that what we remember often is precisely what we remember worst. The more often I've told a story, the less I should believe it. That, at least, I've known since before the first door opened.

I sat shamatha this morning, taking the cushion from the back of the love seat for a zabuton, and my pillow from the bed for a zafu. After a few breaths I realized I had forgotten the prayer at the beginning, the prayer in which one sets the intention. I thrashed a moment or two between the impulse to start over properly, and the discipline of not following the thought – any thought – even the thought of the dedication prayer. You start making exceptions and the whole thing unravels: everything's an exception. So I shook free, let it go, followed my breathing: the cold air nuzzling at my nostrils on the inbreath, the faint rasp of the outbreath, the uneasy multifidi and rotatores trying to second guess this strange stillness. Sometimes you can feel the ribs hanging from your spine, like a twelve sets of folded bronze wings.

The light grew in the room as I sat. I said the dedication prayer in full morning, as full as it gets here at the withered end of the year. People forget that Icarus also flew: the line comes unbidden into my mind, and my ribs move restlessly, reminding me of the flirt of a crow's tail while it balances on a power wire in a stiff wind. Or of the twitch of a cat's ears when they're brushed by a thread. I do long to fly: or at least to jump from floor to windowsill, and peer at the open sky.

Christians

Christians come from time to time – plump, with shaven necks, from a seminary that believes in exposing them to other religions. Some are wary but intrigued; some frankly delighted. Some are horrified: they can't believe that their own teachers have sent them into a nest of devil-worshipers who bow to golden statues.

When I recognize that we have a contingent of Christians, I generally forgo my three bows, though I love them: love the physical acknowledgment, love my forehead kissing the cool clean wood of the floor, love the heart's-ease of saying, with all my body, “there is something more important than the petty parade of wishes and fears, and I remember that now” – forehead to the floor – “and now” – forehead to the floor – “and now” – forehead to the floor. But the Christians have no idea what I'm doing, that my reverence is not for the golden trinkets on the shrine, nor even for the Buddha, but for what the Buddha in turn represents: the possibility of being awake. So I would have done without, but I was late and careless. Lama Michael was already speaking, and I was anxious to get to the cushion. I did my three bows and settled down to listen. On my left, a young woman I didn't know, gingerly holding a printed liturgy, stiffened.

“Oh, shoot,” I thought. “A Christian, and now I've not only done bows right beside her: I've cut off her clear escape to the door.”

Michael gave some meditation instructions, and we mumbled and moaned our way through three repetitions of the refuge and bodhicitta prayers. Tibetan, being a tonal language, lends itself admirably to this sort of droning chant: it's always melodic, and anyway in Tibetan it's mostly written in verse. Listening to Tibetan monks or nuns chanting is in itself a lovely esthetic experience, even if you have no idea what they're saying. The imitation of it in unmetrical, toneless English is a rather dismal, drawling drone, like schoolchildren, who have given up all hope of recess, reciting their lessons. I take inspiration from it, now, and I love the prayers, awkward, clunkily-worded translations though they are. There are even particularly gifted chanters who can make them beautiful, and sometimes you're lucky enough to sit beside one. But it would take a very generous outsider to guess at the beauty we old hands are experiencing.

Finally – I sometimes suspect that Michael, knowing how very long 50 minutes of sitting is going to seem to newbies, drags out these preliminaries a bit so as to give them an easier first ride – we settle into meditation, simple following of the breath, the sensation of the air moving at the end of the nose, tickle cold on the inbreath, tickle warm on the outbreath, the strangely erratic spaces of time between each. Sometimes no interval; sometimes almost a catch, and then a fall. Sometimes the deep even breathing that I used to think ought to be usual, but now recognize as, for me, a bit of an oddity. The usual discomforts, the usual panicky thoughts – “Oh my GOD I'm sitting STILL, am I going to DIE?” – acknowledged and sent to go play quietly with their toys in the other room. I love sitting shamatha.

The young woman on my left shifts and fidgets. Her fingers twitch at the liturgy on her lap. I imagine that physical contact with it repels her. Oops! Losing my attention on the breath. Back to the tip of my nose. Such a wonderful, reliable tether, the breath. Always there, always just interesting enough and not too interesting.

More twitching on my left. I imagine that this is getting harder, not easier, for her. “You have no idea what she's experiencing, Dale,” I tell myself. “And back to the breath, bucko.”

Five minutes, maybe ten minutes, pass, and suddenly she takes the liturgy out of her lap, lays it on the zabuton in front of her, and stands. She finds her way between me and the person behind me. A moment later the door opens and closes quietly. I imagine her taking deep breaths in the clear cold air of morning.

I don't move; I haven't moved even my eyes: my physical stillness is pretty deep at this point. A little sad. A silly fantasy of trotting out after her, reassuring her, bringing her back in. The worst thing I could possibly do, no doubt. And anyway, once I've set the intention to meditate, I'd damn well better do it: nothing is more destructive to practice than letting something – anything – override the intention. And furthermore, Mr Dale, this impulse is fueled in large part by her being young and pretty, isn't it? And you're losing attention on the breath. Back to the tip of the nose.

Part of my mind is still out on the porch, and going down the stairs, guilty and overwhelmingly relieved, running from the golden idols and the weirdly painted deities, the horrible bearded old men with their droning voices and smug self-satisfaction: getting out, out into the clarity of God's morning, weaving the story of the morning this way and that. I'm with you, dear. One faith is hard enough.

Company on the Road


Paula wrote:

I cling to Graham Greene's image in Brighton Rock of the homeless, toothless crone saying the rosary in a wintry alley, glimpsed by the long lapsed Catholic anti-hero of the story, a young murderous punk who is strangely unsettled by the sight. I posit her against hierarchies of brocaded clerics, obsessively defended liturgies and the salvific claims of various personal pieties and devotions ( Morning and evening prayer from the 1979 prayer book ? I prefer the pre-Conciliar Breviarum Romanum. In Latin, of course. ). I posit her, even, against the trans-religious contemplative claims -- that union with God, that enlightenment, that realization is reserved for the handful who master all the practices, who make it through all the gates and who play by all the rules. That's simply a sophisticated version of the Rapture.

I take some deep breaths, and resolve to resume meditating and go back to my sangha -- or some meditating community -- once a week. It's been a long time, and I'm glad I stepped away from it. I had a lot to try and to settle. But it's time to go back. And these moments -- these pause-at-the-diving-board-ladder moments -- are a good time to review what the hell you think you are doing.

One thing I am not doing is seeking enlightenment, that “sophisticated version of the Rapture.” I don't believe the process of meditation has, or should have, an endpoint, and I think Paula's point is well-taken: there's a smug elitist streak in institutional Buddhism (as in all human endeavors), and it reaches its highest concentration in the notion of enlightenment and perfect masters. And while I've always been grateful for Buddhism's calm, practical recognition that a well-ordered state and a working economy make religious life easier -- that's why so many prayers express gratitude for not having been born in a border country, where life is nasty, brutish, and short -- the flip side of that is a hopeless structural confusion of secular and spiritual ambitions. If you get extraordinarily lucky, someone like the present Dalai Lama appears at the top, which could give you the impression that this whole system is guaranteed to work. It is not, and I don't endorse it. Of course I'm devoted to the Dalai Lama: who wouldn't be? But I'm not devoted to the office, nor to the structure that supports it. My Protestant background, with its radical democratic ethos, its distrust of of authority, its conviction that a lot of smug people are going to be pretty damned surprised on judgment day, won't let me be any more than a fellow-traveller with Tibetan Buddhism.

But if they're willing to have me, I'm happy to put my Canterbury pony alongside theirs, and jog along, sharing stories on the road. I could go find one of those radical Vipassana outfits, who eschew story and ritual, the modern-day puritans of Buddhist practice, and be more intellectually at ease. But intellectual ease is not what I'm looking for: I'm looking for a practice that lessens my suffering and increases my clarity. And for company on the road.

Failure Guaranteed

I touch people. I try to give relief to their suffering, solace to their grief, comfort to their loneliness.

But I am not a healer, a doctor or a teacher. Suffering, grief, and loneliness are not pathological conditions. They are not diseases to be cured. They are not caused by bad hygiene or sin or ignorance.

I study, sure. I learn techniques. I have a spiritual practice that I try to follow. But I'm offering nothing from Mt Sinai. Nobody has handed me any tablets. I lay my hands on a client as one suffering, grieving, lonely human being lays hands on another.

Suffering or joyful. I draw radiance from them: I get whispers of love, intimations of plenitude, from their skin. I am profoundly grateful to my clients. Not as in “thank you for your patronage!” As in “thank you for taking me into your home, thank you for traveling these bewildering twisty roads with me, thank you for trusting me with the shrine of your body.”

It does seem to me sacred – holy. The body. I am more in sympathy with Judaism than with Buddhism, in this regard. This body is not disposable container: it's a temple. I have the same sense, at the end of a massage, that I have at the end of a Buddhist meditation practice, of having entered a special place with special rules, a place where humility is the only attitude that makes sense, a place where my quotidian agendas fall away and become meaningless.

Some of my clients see it this way; others don't. Last night I finished a massage and murmured “thank you.”

Her eyes popped open, and she said, “What? Oh. Thank you,” in a flat, ordinary voice. It was a bit startling. Had I gone that journey alone? I don't think so; but I don't think she knew I was with her.

Which is fine. I trust massage to work. It's like meditation in this way as well: failure is guaranteed. Part of massage is, and ought to be, a failure of connection, a missed stairstep. There's always a wistfulness, a heightened sense of distance, a sense of how far we are from real communion. If we were capable of perfect communion, there would be no need for massage, just as – as you always have to tell tyro meditators – if we were capable of perfect meditative stability, there would be no need for meditation. What we are working with, in meditation, is distraction: what we are working with in massage is loneliness.

Sotto Voce

What it comes to I guess is a sense that something is very close, yet escaping. And that the everyday misery of life is in the balance.

That I could – what? Translate the Buddha into touch therapy?

My mind darts at once in two opposite directions – one, that this is the same stupid arrogance that culminates in the AMA, and two, that sense in the Vajrayana that a skillful tap can shatter a glass slab that otherwise will take a thousand years to grind through. And people do report these breakthroughs.

Are they telling the truth?

Well, probably not. It's mostly impossible to tell the truth, especially about breaking free.

But still, telling the stories. Telling the stories is crucial. Not because the stories have not yet been told – to yourself. They have. But because they have not yet been externalized. Before they have been told to someone else, or to paper, or to a recorder, their power is absolute. Because you don't know them as stories, you know them as The Truth. The only way to escape the tyranny of your stories is to tell them.

---

For a year I worked on Z's shoulder and got nowhere. He gets surgery, and the whole complex of trigger points and pain dissolves. Now, I don't believe in this surgery; I don't believe the pain was mechanical. But Z believed in it. He believed there was a family curse, a malformed shoulder, and surgery would fix it. Perhaps he was right. But I suspect that if the surgeon had simply closed the skin incision without doing another thing, the results would have been the same. No one will ever know. No controls on this experiment.

And now? Now the shoulder pain has been replaced by an equally mysterious and equally debilitating “sciatica,” and I can't say I'm surprised. I'm just watching this pain develop. Trying to treat it, of course, but it's eerie to me how it has exactly replaced the shoulder pain, in the narrative of his life – all the fears about the shoulder have transferred to the “sciatic” with ridiculous ease. This one, like that, is a harbinger of a hundred deadly diseases and conditions – it's diabetes, it's nerve degeneration, it's who knows what. And it will only get worse. And, like the shoulder, it has blossomed into a whole network of mutually reinforcing trigger points and pain. Spookiest of all is that he no longer remembers the shoulder pain. “Remember how debilitating that was, how you thought it would never go away, how it dominated your life?” He looks at me as if I was making it all up. “The shoulder? That was never much of a problem,” says the look.

My interest in treating the sciatica dwindles. It will go away or it won't, but as long as this story holds sway, I have the horrible feeling that Z will never be free of pain. What we really have to do is break the story.

The next time I see him, I will ask, when was the last time you were without pain? What was that like? Can you see it in your mind's eye, feel it in your mind's body? It's a longshot, but I have to try something. I want to back up to before the pain, and then see if I can elicit the story of how the pain came, and why it stays.

But maybe I already know. Always, always, there's the unhappiness with work, the unhappiness with love. This life is killing you, Z. There must be more to life, you keep saying. There is. But I don't know how to help you find it.

---

Well, sure, I could recommend meditation. People know I meditate, they even sort of fish for me to advise them to meditate. I don't, because I know what they'd do. They'd sit once, for five minutes. Or maybe twice. They'd find their mind full of jumpy obsessive thoughts. Then they'd conclude that they can't meditate.

Or else they'd sort of doze and fantasize and they'd love it and advertise themselves as the next thing to enlightened. Christ.

I do think that meditation is probably the single best way to change your life. But it's horribly difficult and usually it takes months, or years, before you start seeing the differences. What American is going to sit still (so to speak) for that?

I hate it when I see meditation advertised as a solution to stress. Well, yes, sort of. Meditate seriously and you'll realize that everything you know is wrong and that you have to change your life, and get out of your marriage, and quit your job, and scrape a living as a woodcarver, or as a mendicant monk. And when you've done all those (extremely stressful) things, yes, your stress levels will probably drop a notch. But the idea that you can beat stress just by adding meditation to your life is stupid. No. At first it's yet another stress, trying to find that much time, and it's hard as hell. And when meditation does lower stress, it does it by violently upending your life. Don't try it. It's not safe.

---

Though really, you know, that's nonsense too. Jon Kabat-Zinn got some good results with meditation for chronic pain. So it can be done. I just can't provide that kind of framework for it.

---

A band of brightness behind the trees: muffled gray sky above. Birds shift places on a distant telephone wire, like one of those old bead puzzles. If they get it just right, the sky will unlock, and we'll all go fluttering up to the Sun. They say it's still up there somewhere.

Waiting for Adam

Bars of light reach across the floor:

From them diagonal sheets of radiance rise
Through the air, igniting dust worlds as they go
Back to the sun.

When I turn on a lamp the walls flower
And send their desire into the wormy filament
Hovering in the glass:

Thoughts stand up from my inmost self
To walk in the garden in the cool of the evening,
And wait for an Adam to greet.

Temporarily

Woke at 3:30 this morning. Padded down to the landing, and looked out. The clouds were clearing. Orion climbing up; Sirius trotting at his heels.

Weary, weary, weary, but no sleep in me. In the massage room, I looked at the wicker trunk and shopping bags of books that Martha put there temporarily a few weeks ago. It was time for me to accept that I didn't know whether these things were more or less temporary than me, so I moved my zabuton and zafu out of the corner, and pushed them into it. Then I set my shrine up, which I took down temporarily, months ago, and had never put back up. This involved a fair amount of shifting and sorting to get everything off the top of my dresser that had accumulated there: the two volumes of the Trigger Point Manual, my leftover brochures, Fiona Robyn's book The Letters, Stephen Dunn's Poems. Then I got the candlestick and the offering bowls out, cleaned them in a cursory fashion. The mala Tori got me in Japan. The pictures of Sarah and Michael. The little battered wooden Buddha.

Where was the block of wood, covered with blue brocade, that made a higher place for the buddha? The old mirror covered with blue silk for a backdrop? No idea. I searched the room, its closet, the basement: no luck. Martha would no doubt know, but she was asleep. Anyway. The important thing was to have a shrine and to sit.

But it was clearly wrong. The little wooden buddha sitting disconsolate, dwarfed by the candlestick, loomed over by Sarah's picture. I couldn't sit in front of that. Well. Just temporarily. The box for the shoes I bought recently was there on the floor. I set it there and set the buddha on top. Filled the offering bowls. Lit the candle. Stiffly made my three prostrations, said my prayers, and meditated. The shadow of the the buddha large on the wall behind, its ears hanging low. It made me laugh, the buddha on the shoebox: it was such a perfect emblem of my rickety slapdash meditation practice.

Of course it's all temporary, all makeshift. I thought of Buddha Shakyamuni, all those years ago, dropping into the pond of humanity, and this tiny ripple from his life rocking the reeds, two and half thousand years later. He would have enjoyed the humor of this.

I said the sealing prayer. "By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings in this state." My lips twitched at the word "virtue," as they often do. It's not very often that I say that prayer without a strong sense of its irony. ("Realize enlightenment by this virtue? Good luck, man!")

Empty the offering bowls, pour the water out beside the back porch, stand a moment under the still-dark sky and breathe. Then back to blow out the candle. Darkness falls on the buddha, and on the shoebox. Morning is still a long way away.

Bobbing

Somewhere in his mammoth biography of Coleridge, Richard Holmes notes that Coleridge's emotional instability, difficult as it was for his friends, kept him curious and learning and growing into middle age. He never hardened, as Wordsworth and Southey did, into a caricature of himself. The world was always new and wonderful to him, no matter how wretched he might be at any given moment.

One way of looking at my life over the past couple years is that I've plunged back into world, and given myself up again to the rollercoaster of Samsara. My meditation practice is practically gone. I no longer peddle myself as the sage of the internet: it would be too ludicrous, even for me, to pretend to be anything but the plaything of pleasure and pain, bobbing where the wind takes me.

Still my main response to this is relief. I feel not that I've missed a chance, but that I've dodged a bullet. It made me deeply uncomfortable when people would refer to me as wise. I knew that it was not true, for one thing, and for another, I had an obscure but urgent sense that accepting that designation would land me in a blind alley that I might never escape.

And anyway, I had other work to do. It's no small thing to have established what Buddhists call "right livelihood." In addition, I've cleared my mornings for writing. I commute by bicycle now, which I love. I've fought the food thing to a draw. Love is as difficult and wonderful and upsetting as ever. The fundamental struggles of my life are all either won or in full play, which is where they ought to be.

But it's time for some serious meditation again. My clarity has been deteriorating. My eyes are clouding over. This could be a blind alley too.

---

Love in Winter

Cold clouds
Drifting over long descents of bare field,
Full, feverish faces hidden in the broad chest of God,
Tears flowing like butter over pancakes. Maudlin,
Desperate, eager, kissing like the first time or the last,
Lips and tongues swollen, heavy with love,
Charged with wanting. Yes, winter is coming,
The long dark: but chilled skin melts under hot fingers,
And blood beneath rises to meet them; the flames
Burn hotter in the cold.

How To Fix It

Well, as Sky said, I left off the paragraph about how to fix it :-)

The problem is that we still, after all these years of bad guesses and bad science, don't really know what's wrong. It's hard to know how to fix it without knowing that. It's not even certain (though I think it overwhelmingly likely) that the modern diet is to blame. But we've also introduced an extraordinary number of drugs and toxins into our environment, without having a comprehensive understanding of their effects. And we don't really know how or when the damage is done: one recent study suggested that some of it is done in utero.

Still there are some prime suspects. At the top of my list are refined sugar, white flour and salt in the diet. Kessler's recent book is good, although, like almost all modern popular nonfiction, it's actually a short essay intolerably bloated with anecdote and repetition. He notes that some people's brain chemistry responds differently to sweet and salty foods: that the dopamine spikes in all of us, but in some of us it doesn't drop again right away, unless we stop eating. Few people will stop eating, under the influence of that.

The vilified Atkins had some ideas that didn't stand up to scrutiny, but his basic idea -- that refined carbs cause blood chemistry changes that make some people unnaturally hungry -- has stood up quite well. I'm quite sure that's one piece of it.

There have a been so many red herrings. Among things I think have nothing to do with it are: dietary fat. Cholesterol intake. Meat. Eating too fast. (Remember that what we're looking for is something that is not characteristic of pre-industrial diets.)

The solution I'm currently investigating is: making my food boring. When I was Atkins-ing, I noticed most of my bingeing behaviors went away. (You just don't binge on meat and fat, not without carbs. You slather butter on a potato and wolf it down, sure. Take away the potato? No. No one simply sits down with a dish of melted butter.) But one thing I could and did still binge on, though it was on a smaller scale: the salt meats. Sausage, salami, that sort of thing.

When I read Kessler on brain chemistry responses to salt and sugar, I realized this was one of the major players. And I felt the panic I have always felt when people suggested I do with less salt. No, says some primitive part of me, anything but the salt!

It's one of those shying-aways, those wincings, that you learn to pay particular attention to in meditation. It's often the thing that seems absolutely impossible, absolutely non-negotiable, that is at the center of a knot. That's the thing that needs to be softened before the knot can be worked.

I asked myself the question: what if there was no refined sugar and no salt in the world? What would my relationship with food look like?

And there was no answer. A blank. I could not even imagine such a thing. Things with no sugar and no salt don't count in my mental world as food at all. (This in itself is fascinating.) So what if I stopped eating either one, without restricting my food intake in any other way?

Well, for one thing, I'd have to pack my lunch. There is no such thing as restaurant food without lots of salt and sugar.

But for another, if I could do it, I think my relationship with food might come to be based on hunger, rather than on seeking stimulation. I don't know, because I can't really imagine it. Just speculation. But what if, rather than constantly seeking more and more intensity and piquancy, I deliberately sought plainness?

My relationship with food has always been Ahrimanic. I used to filch beef bullion cubes, when I was a boy, and suck them, rasping away with my tongue until it was quite raw. I loved cookies and cake and such too, of course, but not with same intensity. I was quite capable of eating an entire batch of brownies at a sitting, if they happened to be there, but that wasn't what captured my imagination. I wouldn't get dressed in the middle of the night and go out to find brownies. No, what I'd do that for was potato chips. Barbecue potato chips. I would eat them until the insides of my cheeks were tender and corners of my mouth cracked. That pain was not a disincentive: it was, on the contrary, part of the attraction. I was seeking a kind of oblivion in stimulation, the same sort of trance you sometimes see people go into with video games.

I don't often eat potato chips any more. A couple times a year, maybe, if I'm especially upset or wretched. And yet, my whole response to food is essentially that same one, on a small scale: a quest to be stimulated, stimulated possibly to the point of pain. And the diet books and articles all play up to it: your food can still be delicious and various! They all say that. Don't worry, you can still eat for stimulation!

So. I just finished eating three eggs, with no salt, here at Tosi's, instead of my heavily salted eggs and bacon. Just as an experiment. Because I've never deliberately eaten a non-salty breakfast before. They tasted better than I thought they would. But it is strange -- the dietary equivalent of meditation, of sitting still and doing nothing.

Unearned Blessings

A recent comment on my last post asked if I thought my meditation practice helped me to be in the moment, and to fully experience such mundane pleasures as that of making breakfast. It was flattering and kindly meant, but red flags blossomed immediately. Don't go there, said some inner monitor.

The reaction was strong and immediate, and I've been mulling over its origins. There are a couple parts to it. One is that if it's true, it's only weakly true. Much more important are other "causes and conditions," as we Buddhists like to say: my family leaves me alone in the early mornings; my work schedule leaves me free to savor them; and my ship has glided into unexpectedly happy, calm water of late. All these have much more to do with being able to gaze wonderingly at the violet-green beads of coffee bubbles than my haphazard meditation practice.

Another comment, from Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi mourned being unable just now to access such "a state of appreciation and gratitude." Case in point. Anyone who thinks my spiritual practice more advanced than Rachel's needs their head examined, or at least needs to spend a few hours reading VR. Yet I get the blessing just now and she doesn't.

You can see where this tends to go. Immediately the thought of the blessing as something I have earned comes up, it starts burrowing grublike into the rich soil of egotism, waiting to hatch all kinds of suffering. The day will come soon enough when I'll be in a hurry and the damn coffee will take forever and its grounds will look like mud with an oil slick on top and remind me of construction sites and environmental disaster rather than gems in black sand and I'll hate being poor and wasting my time on this stuff, cooking like a drudge while other people are writing brilliant things. Shall I add to that the conviction that my unhappiness shows the poverty of my spiritual practice, and the knowledge that actually I'm a cheap charlatan who only talks the talk?

No, I think it's better to take blessings as wholly unearned and undeserved, free gifts of God (Buddha-Nature, Allah, Nature, whatever you like to call it.)

Still. On the other hand. What other motivation do we really have for practice? If we're too austere about it, we're at risk of falling into the sort of determinism that undoes our practice altogether. If it doesn't do anything for us, why do it? Why did we ever start, except from a conviction that our spiritual life was a shambles, and our suffering could somehow be mitigated, and we could grope our way towards those blessings that worldly amibitions and pleasures kept promising but signally failing to deliver?

I think it best to abandon thoughts of having earned blessings, when we're feeling blessed. (This fortunately is fairly easy to do: everything's easy to do when we're feeling blessed.) And when we're not feeling blessed, the most fruitful attitude is -- not to heroically try to manufacture a feeling of gratitude that we don't have, but to fall into the most abject and selfish attitude of petition. Please, God, help me now. Show me what to do. Help me. Traditions like mine have special deities that you can go to in this state, gods and goddesses of compassion such as Chenrezig or Green Tara, more or less equivalent to Mary in the Catholic tradition or the suffering human Jesus in some Protestant traditions. When you're miserable somehow the embodied gods that you can see, the ones who remind you of the people who have been kind to you, work better than the serene untroubled Buddhas and God-the-Fathers who appear as gems in the coffee filter.

Craving

Scholars sometimes talk -- seriously, so far as I can tell -- about a fabulous beast they call The General Reader. The non-scholarly reader who reads the books put out by the university presses. When you're writing your book about the adoption of Dantean tropes into 13th Century Lithuanian liturgical exegesis, your editor may tell you, you want to bear in mind The General Reader, who may not know all the works of Philenius the Younger, and may need to be reminded of the exact wording of the riparian statutes of Basil IX.

This harmless fantasy of a mass readership is one of the more endearing foibles of academics, whom I find an appealing lot, for the most part. But I bring it up as an introduction to our own variant of The General Reader, The Non-Blogging Blog Reader. I have one. (I had two, at one point, but I convinced one of them to start blogging, so now I have only one.) My prize possession. He signs himself "Bill." (No, no link. Haven't you been listening? He doesn't have a blog!)

Bill commented, Annihilation is my sharpest craving. Certainty that the next moment will be just like the last is something I can't abide. "Coffee, deliver me!"

And this led me to think again about craving, and to wonder whether all craving is not a craving for annihilation. I don't remember Freud's late work on thanatos and eros very well (if I ever read it: maybe I just heard the cool kids talking about it.) But in a certain frame of mind the only convincing alternative to endless continuity is death, and the hunger for change becomes the hunger for death. That death. A large death that is very like the Little Death. A gathering of all frustration and desire into one flowering: and then -- unimaginable, but deeply desired, peace.

As one gets older, one of the terms alters, and a new fear creeps into the equation. What if your frustration and desire is not great enough to flower? What if you are unable to die that death? What if the only death available is the long, slow ebb, draining away into triviality, irritability, and whining?

I used to go to strip bars and get drunk. I thought of it then as running away from death. The whole point of the dancers was that they were young and fearless, and had no part of age or death. With the help of a few beers I too could become fearless. And there we all were, having escaped from death together. I could buy them drinks and we could build towers of tavern matchbooks and tell each other stories, and I would live forever. They were lovely and they didn't give a damn and they didn't plan a thing, and I loved that about them.

That was a long time ago. I still think of them fondly. But to return to craving and death: I didn't actually want them, not to have them. I wanted to desire them, that's all. I wanted to stir desire up to its highest pitch -- and then walk away from it. Why?

After I quit drinking, I went a few times to the bars and had a club soda, but I found that without the alcohol the transaction became just weird and pointless. What on earth was I doing there? These people didn't particularly like me; I didn't particularly like them, we had nothing to talk about. I wandered away, and have not really been tempted in that direction since. The alcohol, which I had thought of as incidental to the whole experience, was in fact central to it.

I think what the alcohol did was disable my awareness that I was not, in fact, going to die that night. That I could not actually escape continuity. That this experience itself was a continuation, more of the same, just another in a series of unsuccessful debauches. (Any debauch that you live to the other side of is unsuccessful, really.) Without drinking I could not escape my own history.

Now, as a Buddhist, I have to wonder: was I closer to a true perception drunk or sober? Buddhism holds that continuity is a delusion. The world actually is new every moment. We are actually, whether we see it or not, radically free, now and always: we only imagine ourselves at 8:20.20 AM to be the same person we were at 8:20:19 AM.

I wonder if the real intention of Buddhist meditation is not to get really, truly, roaring drunk, and stay that way.

Slant Water: Meditation at the Half Moon

Sitting shamatha, my eyes unfocused;
following my breath as it leaves my body,
and appears at once again unbidden
in my pale lungs. It leaves again,
returns.

The world leans east, and the hanging sun
is edged from the window: the shadows slide away,
like clothes on the deck of a heeling clipper ship;

say some China merchant, reckoning on a killing
in tea and opium, racing for a Middle Kingdom
he can't begin to imagine.

If you think you're making no progress,
said my teacher, you're probably going backwards.

The world leans harder. The ship
labors uphill now: the sea gets steeper
by the minute. We claw for a grip on the water.

At last we can go no further, splash down
gasping in a trough of thin black fluid,
the backwash of the tilted sea, but
calm in defeat, and rocking softly, awake
at last, we look up:

Stitched loosely to a faded blue silk sky
is the broken button of the moon.