Master and Commander

Martha and I went to see Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World yesterday. A deeply disappointing movie. Oh, it was fun enough to watch -- extraordinary effects, fine acting, nice cinematography. And blessedly historical. These folk acted and spoke pretty plausibly as Englishmen of Napoleonic times, except for one painful moment when Aubrey advised an officer to "find his strength within himself." But that's the only time I remember my historical sensibilities wincing. (As compared with, say, The Knight's Tale, during the viewing of which video I groaned so much -- the Black Prince, proto-democrat? -- that wife and daughter eventually exiled me from the bedroom.) It really was disappointing only because they almost made it. They almost put O'Brian on the screen. But the heart of the Aubrey-Maturin books is the play of the two characters: and Aubrey has been changed, changed utterly. Maturin is recognizably Maturin, but Aubrey -- where did Aubrey go? Where is the childlike simplicity, the man who can lead the lower deck because he's really one of them? Russell Crowe's Aubrey is calculating, full of self-knowledge and emotional self-control, a deliberate manipulator of his men, with an eye always to the effect he's making -- in effect, he out-Maturin's Maturin. In the books, when Aubrey tells the story (more than once) of his dinner with Nelson, in which Nelson asked him to pass the salt, the joke is on Aubrey: he's sublimely unconscious of the fact that intense admiration of the way a man asks for the salt is silly. But in the movie it's turned into a joke which Aubrey tells on himself. He's well aware that it's silly, and he plays it for laughs. O'Brian's Aubrey could not possibly do such a thing.

If it weren't for that, I could forgive the other minor faults -- the odd collage of plots, the occasional sentimentality, the fact that Crowe seems to have watched too much Star Trek in his youth, and is haunted by the ghost of William Shatner throughout the movie -- but a sophisticated Aubrey? No. It just won't do.



Remember, only YOU can prevent sanctimoniousness (sanctimony?)

Let me beg my friends and fellow blogophiles: if I get too preachy, please let me know. On for_sv's blog today was a quotation from Churchill: "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." Made me very uneasy. It struck me as quite a good description of me on my Buddhist rants. What I hate most about them is the way I pretend to be way up on higher ground, utterly free of doubts and second thoughts, and -- to judge by the way I talk -- meditating twelve hours a day. So please, thump me when I get to be too much.

Sidelight: one thing that fascinated me in The Varieties of Religious Experience is that while James translates all his French and Italian quotations into English as a matter of course, he quotes German verse a couple of times, with neither translation nor attribution. He apparently assumes that while some of his audience (British students and professors, I presume) might not understand simple French or Italian prose, everyone will recognize lines from Heine or Goethe. Lo, how the German language (and academic prestige) hath fallen!

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James quotes many personal narratives. One is by Tolstoy, recounting how he emerged from a time of crisis, and what James calls "divided self," with a new spiritual unity and a new faith. James remarks on this, with astonishing naivete: "and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since."

If you know anything of Tolstoy's biography (which James, to be fair, was in no position to do) this remark will make you hoot with laughter. Tolstoy never felt right and happy for more than an hour or two at a time, not in his whole life.

I don't want to poke fun at James, or at Tolstoy. But there's a lesson to be learned here. The urge to give narratives of spiritual struggle a satisfying ending is almost irresistible, and the urge to believe in these narrated endings is maybe even stronger. Few men were less given to self-deception and credulity than either James or Tolstoy, but between them here they're perpetrating a hoax comparable to the Piltdown man. This unified, spiritually content Tolstoy is a complete forgery. And knowing that this one case of spiritual unification, about which I happen to have further information, is largely spurious, I have to look at the others with a certain skepticism.

But -- turn again -- it's important to be measured about this skepticism. The insights Tolstoy reached in his struggle were real ones, important ones. The conviction that life was meaningful and worthwhile, or that at least it could be, was something that Tolstoy established for himself in this time, and so far as I know it never deserted him. The insight he came to -- to boil it down maybe to absurd simplicity -- was that the meaning of life can't be determined by thinking about it. It's created by the life that one lives. A life of brooding about the meaning of life may very well be a meaningless life, but that says nothing about the meaning of other lives we might live.

Not happily ever after, no. But once that corner was turned nothing would ever be quite the same for him. And even if the point of turning is obscure -- as most of them, really, are -- and long foreshadowed, and slow and halting in the execution -- the turns are nonetheless real.

In the cowboy Dharma vein -- someone needs to write a mournful country song: "My baby Samsara, she doan treat me right." Along with "O Samara, why cain't you be true?"

Jamgon Kongtrul, whom i quote so often, was a 19th-Century Tibetan monk who was a central figure in the Rime (ree-may) movement, the ecumenical movement in Tibetan Buddhism that came just in time for the Tibetan diaspora. If I believed in providence, which I don't (I think), I'd think he came so that when the Chinese drove the Tibetans out into the world, they would bring a unified and harmonious spiritual tradition with them, rather than a lot of petty wrangling and sectarian rancor.

His accomplishments as a meditator, a scholar, and a monastic administrator are extraordinary -- as Dudjom Rinpoche put it, when you look at his achievements in any one of those areas, you would think he had devoted his whole life to just that one. He studied and practiced in all four of the major Tibetan lineages, rescued one lineage that was in danger of extinction (the Shangpa, to which I have personal reasons for being especially grateful), wrote ninety books, and renovated or expanded monasteries all over Tibet.

And yet he retains a sort of cowboy earthiness and wit, as in his lines about a gopher in a hole, below. I don't think any other Dharma explicator so often makes me laugh aloud.

If stubborn habits of attachment and aversion are not reversed,
Then meditation is as meaningless as a gopher hibernating in a hole.

--Jamgon Kongtrul

Okay. Tonio's taught me how to make links, so here goes. First of all, Tonio's back. So if you haven't been to Savoradin yet today, go. (Silly of you to be wasting your time here, if you haven't been there.) Anne of Underabell is back too, hooray! Beth of the Cassandra Pages has been writing a wonderful narrative of the consecration of Gene Robinson that you really shouldn't miss.

Now, I made a wrong choice when I first started this blog, and made the second post in a single day come below the first. Which means, of course, that everyone will miss my later posts, because they open the window, see the same ol' same ol' at the top, and move on. If they're like me, anyway. But I haven't figured out how to undo that mistake yet: I don't see anything about it in the settings.

So while I'm jabbering on -- this is precisely the sort of post that makes me give up on a blog, so it's a good thing it's tucked under here -- I'm thinking that I really ought to change my title, since it isn't really a practice journal now. & I'm thinking I might as well go whole-hog and put comments and stats and all that sort of thing in. "Within six months he was totally corrupted." (My favorite sentence from Faulkner, slightly misquoted.) (I think I'm a little punchy. Been a long week.)

When I look back at yesterday's post, complaining about Horgan, I'm struck by how much less intelligent I become as soon as I start arguing. I went back to look at the excerpts from his book on his site, but I wasn't reading anymore: I was scanning, looking for what's there that's stupid, what's there that I already know better than he. What a stultifying way to read. When I could be reading for what's there that I don't know yet, what's there that he knows better than I. Shall I cling to my own opinions at the cost of my own intelligence? They're not worth it, be they ever so correct.

I neglected to mention that the proximate cause of my reading William James was reading a wonderful post in the Coffee Sutras (http://sainteros.com/weblog) about Zen and Pragmatism.

(You know, I could at least learn how to do links properly. You'd never guess from this slipshod blog, that I actually work as a programmer).

I awoke this morning with this poem running through my head.


A Prayer for Old Age

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?

I pray -- for word is out
And prayer comes round again --
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.

-- W. B. Yeats

One of the most delicate tasks required of guardian angels must be that of keeping their charges away from books until they're ready for them.

I've just read the first chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience. I know I've picked up the book and read a page or two before. Not just once -- several times. What could have motivated me to put it back down? Only supernatural intervention strikes me as a likely explanation. The book is enthralling, and the voice -- so humane and generous, and yet so cogent and unapologetic -- is simply wonderful.

At the other end of the spectrum of reading experiences -- I read some stuff at www.johnhorgan.com that some spirit of another variety drew me to. A simple-minded rejection of Buddhism, by someone whose brains and sensitivity would have led me to expect much better. I don't think I'm just being swayed by my own bias -- I admire many writers who think Buddhism is untenable or unacceptable. But at some points Horgan was just plain wrong about what traditional teachings about karma and enlightenment are: and taking the perception of his own monkey-mind as a refutation of the efficacy of meditation was really breathtakingly wrongheaded. Perhaps he was just very unlucky in the teachers he found?

A typical sequence is when he writes of walking in a winter landscape and thinking about it -- and then catching himself thinking and thinking that he shouldn't be thinking. And then he becomes resentful: why the hell shouldn't he be thinking? His failure of understanding here is in supposing that catching himself thinking, and thinking that he shouldn't be thinking, were things that any legitimate Buddhist teacher would encourage. Mindfulness is not engendering lots of conceptual thinking about thinking. Mindfulness is paying attention to what's present. Horgan has something of a knack for getting things exactly backwards. Of course the project of trying to loosen the grip of conceptualization can generate lots more conceptualization. But the solution at that point is simply to laugh. Make gooney faces. Scoop up the snow and dump it on your head. Didn't any of his teachers tell him that?

I'm getting a hearing aid on Saturday. Two of them, actually: one for each ear. The idea that I might really be able to hear much better than I do now is tremendously exciting. The technician who examined me was clearly braced to argue me into them, and the brochure he sent home with me dwelt mostly on overcoming one's resentment and resistance to them.

Resentment? Resistance? I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve.

I don't think most people know I have a hearing problem. It's a weird one -- the reverse of the usual curve: I don't hear low frequencies well, whereas most people lose the high frequencies. So most women I can hear distinctly, but there's only a few men whose voices I hear well. I work with a lot of Indian men, who tend to speak much more softly than American men; some of them I really can't hear at all. I see their mouths moving and guess.

I wonder whether my aversion to telephones might stem largely from my bad hearing. I never know, when I pick up a telephone, if I'm going to be able to understand the person on the other end.

We'll see. They say it takes a few weeks to learn to intepret the new range and amplitude of sound passed in by the hearing aids, so it won't be instant gratification. But I can't wait for Saturday.

This sleep has been so deep: I have been so darkened, blunted, shrunken with fear and craving. The little glimpses of light and open space -- do they come oftener now, than they used to? They came, after all, before the Dharma came to me.

It all lies in me -- the dark and the light. Michael said: what deeper clinging to self could there be, than to think that of all the sentient beings in the universe, in all the three times and the ten directions, I, only I, was born without Buddha-nature, and am incapable of enlightenment? Kalu Rinpoche hammers it home: luminous and unimpeded. The more I look at it, the more obvious it is. My mind has no limitations. Of course, that sounds at first blush like idle, stupid boasting -- what could be more hampered, beschränkt, confined and constrained, than my repetitive, obsessive thoughts? But then I push to -- well, then, what do the limits look like? Where are the edges, the walls, that I supposedly am hitting? Nowhere. There's no such thing. My mind sits in its dark shed like Lewis's dwarfs, prisoned by nothing but the walls of its own imagination, obscured by a darkness of its own creation. It's the hardest thing in the world, and the easiest thing in the world, to just step lightly through those walls, to look through that nonexistent roof and see the sun.

...all rolling up to an obscure crisis. I'm conducting a slow, meticulous, unexplained retreat. I am in a quiet, dignified panic, and I don't know why. Desperately looking for feedback that can do me no conceivable good. Surrounded by a cloud of dubious, anxious, hungry gnats.

What Andreas Angyell (does anyone read him anymore?) called an "unconfident gestalt." All options look alarming, all my deficiencies are writ in huge black smears across the sky, all my desires are furtive and unconscionable. "The weak in courage is strong in cunning": I feel very strong in cunning, just now. The only thing I feel strong in.

The only sensible thing to do is -- nothing.

Stop backing up, stop hiding, stop distracting and delaying and shunting. Stand perfectly still, and let the wave roll over me. In my end is my beginning.

Sunlight through the leaves of the plant on my bookcase, the office to myself, quiet enough to hear the whir of the fans and the buzz of the lights. It surprises me, whenever I meditate in my office, how noisy it is, even without people. The buzzes and clicks and throbs of unidentified machinery, weird surges of white noise, the dim roar of traffic from nine stories below. An ojective correlative to the anxieties and cravings washing continually back and forth, an everpresent unacknowledged noise in the background of my mind.

The office is tolerant of my meditation cushions -- zafu and zabuton -- and my occasional sits. The cushions perplex casual visitors sometimes. They speculate: is it a dog bed? Or do I nap there? But mostly it evokes the exagerated tact and forbearance of the non-religious. (Someone who prays and meditates in semi-public is probably dangerously unbalanced, and you wouldn't want to push them over the edge by referring to it in any way.) It's the other religious people, practicing Christians and Muslims, who will ask me about it; the athiests and agnostics appear to view the whole matter with superstitious dread. A man who's worked closely with me for years inadvertently revealed, not long ago, that he thought I was Muslim. "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" he added, in something of a panic.

When I'm bewildered by the political stories that my fellow-Americans will swallow, it helps some to remember how deep their ignorance of religion, and especially of non-Christian religion, is. And how much fear it inspires. People who are so nuts that they worship six-armed deities and won't eat perfectly good foods and won't swat biting mosquitos and chop people's heads off for sunbathing -- what's the point of even trying to understand them? All you can do is hope they won't go on the rampage.

Let all the quiet days
Turn and go softly away
Let the sun come when she pleases
And let her leave unstayed.

Light on the window, rain on the sill
Each thing moving, each thing still.

A recent email conversation -- reproduced by permission --

Dale,

I came across your name from posts to the "rational
buddhism" group. I hope you don't mind the intrusion.

I was interested in your comments on one particular
post (message 144) in which you say that you don't
particularly believe in reincarnation nor in the kind
of karma that "looks you up." I have an interest in
buddhism (and even attended KCC for a little while)
but I find my reluctance to believe in certain things,
namely karma and reincarnation, a major stumbling
block. Vajrayana practice, as I understand it,
involves certain "mystical" elements like meditation
deities. I remember trying to visualize chenrezig at
an all-day saturday event (that frankly totally
overwhelmed me).

Anyway, I guess my question is, how do you,
personally, reconcile your nonbelief in things like
karma and reincarnation with the mystical parts of
vajrayana and really, buddhism in general?

Thank you,

*******

-----------------------------------------------------

Hi *******

No intrusion at all, I enjoy thinking and writing
about this sort of thing.

You wrote:
> Anyway, I guess my question is, how do you,
> personally, reconcile your nonbelief in things like
> karma and reincarnation with the mystical parts of
> vajrayana and really, buddhism in general?

Actually my nonbelief in karma and reincarnation
don't clash with the mystical parts at all:
they clash with the theoretical or cosmological
parts of Buddhism. There's no legitimate way, I
think, to move karma and reincarnation out of
the center of Buddhist thought. So by some
definitions I don't qualify as a Buddhist.

If I thought of Buddhism as fundamentally a set
of beliefs about the nature of the universe and
reality, I would have a big problem. I don't,
though: I think of it as fundamentally a set of
methods for ending suffering, cultivating
compassion, and developing a more serviceable
mind.

I guess a parallel would be my attitude to
acupuncture. I think the theory behind
acupuncture is probably a lot of hooey, all
that stuff about winds and chakras and
different colored energies and what-not.
But acupuncture works, demonstrably, for
many things. The evidence for that is quite
scientific and solid. So I have no qualms
about going to an acupuncturist, even though
I know he believes in a bunch of stuff that
I don't.

Buddhist practice works. So I do it. I don't
know why it works, and I don't think anyone
else completely knows why either. (But then,
I don't think anyone knows completely how
*anything* works.)

I could say plenty more -- there's some
support for holding this point of view within
Buddhism itself, if you take the teachings on
Emptiness seriously -- but it might be more
useful if I first knew more about your
discomforts with Buddhism. I'm not sure,
for instance, that I know what you mean by
"mystical," and I suspect that you have
some unnecessary difficulties there.

regards --

Dale

-----------------------------------------------------

Dale,

Thanks for your response. I appreciated your points
about doubt in karma & reincarnation mainly
conflicting with buddhist cosmology and that it's
possible to practice buddhism strictly for its
effects.

I think some of my problems with Buddhism have to do
with wanting to see myself as a rational person, one
not easily suckered into believing silly things about
how the world works. Visualizing Chenrezig just seemed
so bizarre to me, made me fear that I was joining some
kind of cult. That is another problem I have - does
the process that you go through as a buddhist actually
give you a clear mind or does it just convince you
that you have a clear mind when you are actually still
deluded? More fundamentally, I waver on the question
of whether I am unsatisfied with "ordinary" existence
and want a radical alternative or whether I just want
to get a little better at living than I am now.

In terms of the mystical things I am averse to, the
best example might be praying to Dorje Chang (I'm not
sure if you do that or if that's another lineage). If
I don't believe that there are any such things as
deities, how can I pray to them?

Thanks again,
*******

-----------------------------------------------------

>
> I think some of my problems with Buddhism have to do
> with wanting to see myself as a rational person, one
> not easily suckered into believing silly things
> about
> how the world works.

Ah, yes. One hates to look like a chump :-)

> Visualizing Chenrezig just
> seemed
> so bizarre to me, made me fear that I was joining
> some
> kind of cult.

An all-day Chenrezig sit is probably not
a very good entry-point for someone who wants
to see himself as a rational person! I just
practiced Shamatha for a long time, many
years, before I gingerly took up vajrayana
practice. But I'll pick this point up below.

> That is another problem I have - does
> the process that you go through as a buddhist
> actually
> give you a clear mind or does it just convince you
> that you have a clear mind when you are actually
> still
> deluded?

There probably is no way to tell really, beyond
observation and experience. I had the advantage
of watching my wife practice Buddhist meditation
for years, before I ever took a stab at it. It
was plain to me that her mind was growing clearer,
not foggier. And in general the Buddhists I know
seem a bit less deluded than the non-Buddhists,
but of course there could be lots of explanations
for that.

> More fundamentally, I waver on the question
> of whether I am unsatisfied with "ordinary"
> existence
> and want a radical alternative or whether I just
> want
> to get a little better at living than I am now.
>
> In terms of the mystical things I am averse to, the
> best example might be praying to Dorje Chang (I'm
> not
> sure if you do that or if that's another lineage).
> If
> I don't believe that there are any such things as
> deities, how can I pray to them?
>

Actually, we're traditionally instructed NOT
to believe in the deities. Quite emphatically.
We are supposed to bear in mind, as we visualize
them, that they are "not there." What you are
praying to when you pray to Dorje Chang is
your own unobscured mind -- nothing more,
nothing less.

There are a couple basic goals of deity
practices. One is to produce a vision of
something that you know damn well "isn't there"
with so much clarity and vividness that you
realize -- experientially, not just
intellectually -- that your perceptions
of ordinary things are also "visions,"
that is, that your perceptions of things are
not the things themselves. (This is something
that everyone knows, but few people really
believe it, in their heart of hearts.)

The other goal is to recognize the deity
in ourselves -- that is, to try on the
persona of a being that is perfect in
wisdom and compassion. At the heart of
Vajrayana practice is the idea that the
mind can't really be permanently or
essentially corrupted, and that it's
possible (tho extrememly difficult) to
recover its purity by jump-starting it
this way.

Whether this idea is correct or not,
I don't know. I personally have found
vajrayana practice very fruitful, but
rather mysteriously so. That is, I
notice a strong correlation between
how much I'm practicing and how much I
am able to break long-standing negative
habits. Correlation is not causation,
of course. And dealing with your own
mind, you never have a control group,
so it's hard to know. A difficulty that
just goes with the territory.

Anyway, I was a member of KCC for years
before I took up any vajrayana practices.
Plain old Shamatha, "calm abiding," (what
the Zen people call "sitting Zazen"), is
probably a better entry-point for us
rationalists, and in any case it's
considered a foundation practice, sort
of a prerequisite for the vajrayana
practices.

--Dale

PS, please don't hesitate to ask more, if
you have more questions or objections. I'm
enjoying this.

-----------------------------------------------------

Dale,

> PS, please don't hesitate to ask more, if
> you have more questions or objections.

Okay, I'll take you up on that offer! One of the lines
I remember from the Dhammapada was something like,
when you have a lesser happiness and you see a greater
one, it only makes sense to put aside the lesser for
the greater. To me this is saying, ordinary life is
okay, but what you get from following the buddhist
path is so much greater that it's worth the
sacrifices. That's something I can't seem to decide
yet. I mean, why should I have to give up a beer now
and again, a glass of wine with a nice meal? When I am
attracted to a beautiful girl, why should I want to
try to focus on the disgusting or loathsome aspects of
her (advice I have come across more than once to
counteract the afflictive emotion of lust)? Why should
I not become angry when I see gross injustices causing
suffering to innocent beings?

The major competing alternative vision of happiness
for me is something along the lines of eat, drink, be
merry. I want to be as open and loving as I can. I
want to try be a positive influence on the world
around me. But I also want to have fun, to enjoy life.
Is the happiness that can be achieved through hard
work on the buddhist path truly greater than secular
happiness? Would buddhism be so effective in helping
me to become open and loving that it would be worth
the hard work and the things I would have to give up?

Lots of questions for you. I really appreciate your
willingness to field them.

-*******

-----------------------------------------------------

Ah, well, this is why you go for the Tibetan
tradition :-) This is *not* a path of
renunciation. There are a lot of wild men
in this tradition -- yogis who left monasteries
or never went into them, who broke precepts
left and right. The original Buddhist tradition,
which the Theravadins still keep up, emphasized
extinguishing desire & anger & so forth
altogether. It's a perfectly good path, and
probably a safer path. But in the vajrayana
we *don't* want to extinguish desire: we want
to harness it & transform it.

You do have to get the upper hand of your
desires, even in this tradition, which does mean
working to undo compulsive craving. If you
*have* to have a fancy new car, even though you
can't afford it, or if you *have* to try to
seduce a woman even though she's married to your
friend, or if you *have* to have a fifth of
whiskey to face the afternoon-- that sort of
thing -- then your life is simply going to be
too turbulent to allow any kind of meaningful
practice. (And you'll be miserable to boot, in
the long run.)

Sure, one of the five precepts for lay people
is that they not drink intoxicants. I have a
drink now and then and feel fine about it: I
think I understand well enough what that precept
is aimed at to know what kind of drinking it
refers to, and having a glass of wine at dinner
isn't it. (Although if I *had* to have that
glass, it probably would be it -- it's not the
object of desire, but the quality of the desire,
that's crucial.)

I don't think of it as two competing kinds of
happiness at all. I haven't made any sacrifices,
and I don't plan to make any. Giving up
compulsive cravings is not a hardship -- it's
a relief. & it opens up the world to all kinds
of unexpected pleasures.

There are unworldly pleasures too -- glimpses
of the bliss that may be at the end of the path.
Sometimes that can happen in some kinds of
practices. Sometimes it just comes down out of
nowhere as a free gift, apparently -- all my
life I've been susceptible to moments of
inexplicable, apparently unmotivated joy, when
everything I experienced was almost unbearably
beautiful. I imagine enlightenment to be like
that, but sustained, and I guess that's what I
think I'm working toward. I don't know if
anyone ever actually gets there.

I don't mean to denigrate the Dhammapada or
the Theravadin tradition at all. The path of
renunciation is a valid one, and I think for
some people it's probably the only one. There
are some people for whom worldly pleasures are
just plain toxic, and they have to get away
from them, just as a alcoholic has to get away
from alcohol, altogether, all the time. But
Tibetan lay Buddhism, as practiced at KCC, is
a quite different path.

--Dale

-----------------------------------------------------

Dale,

Thank you very much for sharing your perspective with
me. For some reason it makes me feel good to think
that a buddhist path is possible for me, which is what
your emails have convinced me of. I guess maybe I was
reading too much Theraveda stuff and maybe taking
everything a little too seriously. Your words have
also reaffirmed my sense of affinity for KCC (although
I've no plans to be in Portland anytime soon). Anyway,
thanks again and I wish you the best with your
practice and life. Or lives! ;)

-*******

-----------------------------------------------------

*******,

Glad I could help. It's easy to take things
too seriously, or too literally anyway,
especially if you come out of the
monotheistic traditions, where scriptures
are often taken to be absolutely valid all the
time in all circumstances -- it takes a while
to get used to the comparatively free-and-easy
way Buddhists often relate to their scriptures.

There's a couple books I'd recommend: "Buddhism
Without Beliefs," by Stephen Batchelor -- he was
a monk in the Tibetan tradition for many years,
but eventually broke with that tradition, which
he sees as having accumulated too much
superstition. I don't agree with everything
he says, but it's a very thoughtful book, by
someone who's earned the right to talk about it.

The other book would be "Tantra," by Lama Yeshe.
A beautiful introduction to what tantric practice
(which roughly corresponds to what we've been
calling Vajrayana practice) is all about.

Would you mind if I posted our exchange on my
blog, if I took out names & email addresses?
I think a lot of people have the same questions,
though few ask them so clearly.

warm regards -- & look me up if you do come
through Portland --

Dale

We drove up to Multnomah Falls yesterday, Martha and I, and we had a talk that cleared my head considerably.

So many things in play here. It's become clear to me, though, that I should no longer keep a "practice journal" -- not that I mean to censor my thoughts when they tend toward practice, necessarily; but that there is a certain privacy and reserve I should keep about it. Without that reserve the practice tends to escape my ownership, to move into the space of things I ought to do. And we know what happens to those :-)

We talked about teaching Dharma. I've been watching the impulse to do that, and what I see ain't pretty. An impulse to "tag," to spray-paint my name on any available surface: except in this case the surfaces are human beings.

Then there's the impulse toward contact -- how to disentangle *that* from tagging? I don't know. Clearly I can't live without it -- though I understand finally, I think, what impels hermits and yogis to head for the woods -- plain simple straightforward desperation. How can anything change in my soul when all my attention is directed to greedily watching for reflections of my ego from other people?

But of course contact is also inextricably tangled up with compassion, loving-kindness, and empathetic joy.

What this works around to in practical terms is -- no more presenting myself, in my blog, primarily as a meditator (which has been rather deceptive anyway.) Only if I do that can I safely give some breathing room to the desire to make contact with it. And that has the incidental advantage of opening the scope of what I post about.

Woke at 4:30, slid silently out of bed, and sat for a few minutes -- just shamatha, no time for ngondro -- and then we drove Tori and Ashley to the airport. So they're off to Japan.

We went out to breakfast together, Martha and Alan and I. Alan full of grief at his sister's departure. He got a vast strawberry waffle, and speared great wedges of it, secured with huge strawberries, trailing plumes of whipped cream, on his fork; and then he took large bites out of this mass.

I was embarassed; I wanted him to stop; I wanted people to know that we had in fact taught him to eat like a civilized creature. But knowing his grief, his sense of abandonment, I held my tongue. There's a time to teach table manners and a time to let them go.

My own father had no sense of that. He lived, by inclination and training (he was a science teacher), in what he thought of as the objective world, and he felt it was his duty to make us all live there, too. The subjective world was unreal and illegitimate. The quintessence of a life worth living, of a human life, was rising above subjectivity, above the tyranny of emotion, and above (what he saw as) its concomittents -- irrationality and local prejudice.

It's the common world-view of science and I owe a lot to it. It makes me uneasy to depart from it with Alan. I worry that I'm short-changing him by not holding him to that discipline -- it is good to learn that grief doesn't make you exempt from table manners.

But it's even more important, more basic, to understand and recognize your emotional responses. And Alan's sophistication there is way past what mine was at twice his age. He doesn't have the inexplicable irrational eruptions of rage and losses of control that I had at thirteen. His emotions are altogether more workable. He knows, when he's pestering his sister and her friends, why he's doing it, and he is able to curb and moderate himself. He knows what upsets him and how he responds to it. And he cuts other people slack when he recognizes that they're upset. Simple understandings, simple skills: but I acquired them much later in life and at much greater cost.

But O, what agony, to sit and watch him eat that way! Took all I had. And I'm grieving at Tori's departure too.

I am not, by the way, depressed. Far from it. Such a beautiful day. A drenching rain at noon, and then a clear blue sky moments later, and now a soft gray sky lit by the setting sun, and all the buildings warm shades of peach and apricot & all the wet trees glistening. On such a day I run up against the only thing I ever feel is missing in Buddhism -- that is, that there is nobody to thank for all this -- for the sun and the wind and the rain.

Thank you, anyway.

Depression. People who have never suffered it don't get it. You can be talking along with them, thinking you're talking about the same thing; it's all the same words -- then suddenly you realize they're just talking about being bummed out, a little sad, a little blue. They have no idea of that terrifying weight bearing down on you, of the state of mind in which suicide seems the only rational response to the world. And so when they think about anti-depressants, they imagine taking drugs so that you just don't have to feel bad, ever. A whimpy thing to do.

So: to those of you who haven't suffered depression -- no. That's not it. Oh, I have no doubt that the drug companies would love everyone to be taking anti-depressants to cure the passing griefs and sadnesses of everyday life. But everyone I know who takes anti-depressants does so simply to stay alive.

A person in a severe depression doesn't have bad feelings every once in a while. He doesn't return occasionally to despairing thoughts. He is in constant emotional pain, and every single positive thought, every single impulse to action, is met by a host of despairing thoughts. Every one. I'm not exagerating here. Every single one. The idea of brushing his teeth. The idea of eating breakfast. The idea of getting dressed. The idea of going to work. The idea of lifting the curtain to see what the weather is like. Every one of them is met by a swarm of bitter, ridiculing thoughts.

By the time a depressed person has gotten to work, he's already fought dozens of exhausting battles with his own mind. Won some, lost some. He's looking forward to the same all day.

What do anti-depressants do? Well, they don't stop you from feeling bad or having gloomy thoughts, at least none that I have taken do. What they do is stop the swarming. There's space between the despairing thoughts, there's time to lift your head and think, "maybe there are other ways to be."

There's still all the work to do. You have to undo the cognitive habits of depression. You have to change your life to avoid the things that trigger depressive episodes. You have to meditate, or pray, or whatever it is that your people do to learn to know their psychic world. You have to pay attention. You have to exercise and eat good food. If you don't do the work, anti-depressants won't do it for you. All they do is open the space for that work. You still have to do it.

Okay. Back up a bit. This is what anti-depressants do when they work. When you have the right kind, or mix of kinds, in the right dosages. The way medical care is given in America, at any rate, you will probably also have to do this work all by yourself -- establishing the right kind of drug and the right dosage. People talk about anti-depressants being overprescribed, and maybe they are; I don't know. I do know that they are under-monitored. Anyone who prescribes anti-depressants and then just sends their patient off with them should have their license to practice medicine revoked, but it's a common -- maybe the most common -- scenario. What ought to happen is several months of experimentation and close observation, till the right drugs and the right dosages are established: and unfortunately even when that's been established, it can change, probably will change. Unless you luck out (as I did) you won't get this kind of care. You'll get a randomly selected drug from the current pharmacopia, prescribed at a fairly arbitrarily chosen dosage, and be sent on your way.

So you need to do the research and experimentation. Don't, for God's sake , take unsafe doses -- if the largest usual dose doesn't work, then it's the wrong drug, that's all, or else it needs to be taken in tandem with something else. If possible, verify your results with someone who knows you well. "Have I seemed different in the last two weeks? In what ways?" And remember that many of these drugs have a long ramp-up time: it can be a month or two before they start having significant observable effects.

Last caveat. Read the damn labels and pamphlets, and pay attention to them. It's likely enough that your doctor has never read them, but you need to. If they tell you, for instance, not to suddenly stop taking the drug -- to tail off slowly, if you're going off it -- then don't stop taking it suddenly, and tail off slowly.

Listening to the Dharma leads to contemplation, contemplation to meditation, meditation to the direct experience of mind -- that's what Jamgon Kongtrul says. Then he adds a few lines specially for me:

Thus the previous stages act as causes for the arising of the latter.
When this is not the case, it is like desiring results without any cause.
You may claim that your accumulation, purification, and practice are most excellent,
Bemoaning the hardships of a practice that is merely conjectural.
This kind of experience will not lead to conviction.
Without conviction, you are stranded in doubt,
And doubt is the only supreme obstacle.

I laughed aloud when I read these lines over my slice of pizza at lunch, and kept breaking into laughter as I walked down the street back to work. "Bemoaning the hardships of a practice that is merely conjectural." Surely that's 95% of what I do in this blog.

So tired of struggling against myself, this decades-long inconclusive trench warfare, this miserable war of attrition. Sooner or later one side will run out of energy, maybe, and there will be a victory. Or, much more probably, I will simply run out of life.

The more exasperating in that I don't believe in it. I don't believe there's a wicked Dale and a good Dale struggling for dominance here. Or a good-soldier Dale and an artist Dale facing off. the whole thing's absurd, a mistake, a misunderstanding.

Why am I so often tied up in knots, immobilized? I act like a prisoner, doggedly waiting out my sentence -- passive, sullen, and given to secretive plotting. I pour my energy into mild trangressions -- writing here, for instance, when I'm supposedly working, or going to the strip clubs when I'm supposedly at the gym, or studying German over long breakfasts when I ought to be meditating -- while my "official" activities, my actual work, my dharma practice, my relations with my family, my exercise -- get squeezed into the times when my guilt has gotten the better of me and insisted I do something, for god's sake.

So it goes on.

Is it better than it used to be? Has there been any improvement over the years? Well, yes. The transgressions are less destructive. I believe in them less, they're a little less compulsive. But the basic structure of my psyche hasn't changed much. Much of my life I spend thinking like a prisoner. I'm just an older prisoner, now, less apt to kick against the pricks, cagier in my subterfuges. And in some ways it's worse: my lunges against living this way, though they were by far the most destructive phases of my life, at least reflected a determination to change things.

Ngondro seemed to be threatening to really break this open, but now it's been incorporated into the structure. Now it's part of my "official" life, the life I live for show, the life I do as little in as I can get away with. Of course, I've only managed to absorb it that way by not really doing much of it. I think it still has the potential to break things wide open.

I'm reminded of William Stafford's poem about a prisoner having locks smuggled into his cell in pies, sneaking extra fetters in past the guards, working carefully by night to fit extra bars into his cell-window. That's the sort of prisoner I am.

For the present. In some versions of the story. There are others.

Reading How the Swans came to the Lake, a history of Buddhism in America. I was struck by one passage that described a woman who had lost her temper with her kids the night before. She asked a Zen Roshi if sitting zazen would change her so that she wouldn't lose her temper with them so often. According to the book the Roshi and his friends had a big laugh about that, at the idea that sitting zazen would change someone.

Maybe I understand why they were laughing. Maybe because you can't contain Buddhist transformations, you can't predict you'll come back from a sitting-raid with a the particular change you wanted, the particular dharma-booty you had in mind. Or maybe because in a very real sense, nothing changes. Bokar Rinpoche said simply "There is nothing to do. Nothing to do." And he meant it.

But I also understand that these were single men laughing at a woman raising children. If a man had asked them if sitting zazen would allow him to have a direct perception of emptiness, which would be precisely as silly a question, for precisely the same reasons, they wouldn't have laughed. And in fact they were wrong, demonstrably, measurably wrong: in fact sitting zazen (or practicing any other version of calm abiding) does correlate with losing your temper less often.

Roshis or not -- I have more respect for a woman trying to extend the limits of her compassion than for a bunch of men (who have removed themselves from the difficulties of child-rearing) congratulating each other on the sophistication of their understanding of the Dharma.

I wonder sometimes how women can stand to practice the Dharma. Sometimes the sexism's so strong you could cut it with a knife; other times it's just a whisper. But it's almost never absent.

Carefully now. Trying to put this battered practice back together.

Three evenings in a row, going to talks by B. Alan Wallace on science, mind, and buddhism. Good talks, but doing anything in the evening breaks the fragile routine that my practice rests upon. Baffled again by how strong and how weak my practice is.

This morning -- quiet gray light -- I dusted the offering bowls and the butter lamp and my photographs of Sarah and Michael and my little wooden Buddha. 6:30 -- too late to practice and still have my leisurely breakfast -- so of course practice goes by the board.

But as I padded into the kitchen -- thinking of the fact that today's Friday, Dionna and Cassidy's day -- the thought came into my mind that there's nothing all that strange about the difficulty I have maintaining practice. I'm only intermittently convinced that Samsara won't bring me lasting happiness, and I don't think I'm ever convinced that practice will. It's just a hope. In such circumstances only the routine of a monastery or a retreat would be likely to hold me in a consistent practice.

There's a reason why the Ngondro practice always begins with the Four Thoughts. I am such a beginner, such a rude, awkward beginner. Without the Four Thoughts firmly in mind, of course I'll wander.

1. How incredibly rare it is to have come into consciousness as a human being, with access to the Dharma and the resources to practice. Winning the lottery is, by comparison, an everyday experience.

2. How fragile this existence is. Today I probably walked past a dozen bacteria that could have killed me within hours. They just happened to miss, today. The drunken bozos in their pickups happened to run down some other pedestrian today, and not me. The aneurism happened to pop up in someone else's heart today.

3. How all these pleasures, even the ones that pan out, come to an end, or go sour: they carry the seeds of anguish and loathing in them.

4. How all my habits drive on, and on, maybe even past death, past this universe. Ten billion lifetimes in a million universes frittered away in anxiety and craving, each gulp of salt water making me thirstier, each surrender to habit making the next surrender more likely. As Alan Wallace said, it's not the materialist concept of death that's scary. Non-existence, a light going out? That's a piece of cake -- all my troubles over -- whatever mess is left, somebody else will have to clean it up! No, what's scary is the thought of these habits living on, life after life.

I don't think I have the thoughts in the right order, there. Not even sure I have them separated into the right slots. But contemplating those is what will bring me to practice, if anything will.

And this is my daughter's eighteenth birthday. That may also counts as "a thought that turns the mind," I hope. Her girlfriend made a beautiful scarf for her. I can practice for them, if not for me -- always easier for me to motivate myself for others' benefit than for my own. (Not because of bodhicitta, I'm afraid, but just because I believe in others, and I don't believe in myself, not really. I don't really believe I'm a real person.)

Enough, for now. May you all be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. May you all have happiness and the causes of happiness. May you all never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering. May you all dwell in the great equanimity, impartial, free of attachment and aversion. Amen.

The Uses of Hypocrisy

I wrote the following to Anne at underabell.blogspot, a couple days ago, when she was wondering whether this was a good time to undertake practice:

It's always the wrong time, for all kinds of perfectly good reasons. You just have to practice anyway. Practice when you're not in the mood, practice when you can tell it won't do any good, practice when you don't have the time, practice when you've got no discipline, practice when you're too upset -- tired -- confused -- uninspired -- to practice.

The problem with waiting for a better time is that the only thing that's likely to make better times for it is -- practicing.

It was great advice, I think. I did have the grace, at that point, to be embarrassed by the fact that I was writing that when I hadn't practiced for four days. Embarrassed enough that I went right back to practicing, and I've been practicing daily since.

Can I just talk? Listen. Everything I do is an attempt to get attention, and to win approval. Would I do anything, I wonder, without at least an imagined audience? Would anyone?

I grow reckless, wild. I think maybe you have to be desperate to practice the Dharma.

Kalu Rinpoche said "you have to want enlightenment like a drowning man wants air. "

Push has come to shove. This is shove. Here we are. We can pretend not to be here, but we can't back out.

I want more. Always want more. To really admit that the "more" isn't there -- is that death? That's Goethe's take on it. Or are the Buddhists right? Is there a luminosity and compassion concealed by the anxiety for more? A direct perception of interconnectivity, an expansion of awareness? You could read it either way. I do read it either way, every day.

In for a penny, in for a pound... here's Sarah's answer to me:

Hi Dale,
Well, it is an interesting issue. I read your entries, since there seemed to be an invitation to do so, and quite enjoyed them myself. One thing for sure: you have to go on writing, and if journaling is the way to do it, then that's that. You have a special talent for it, and I always feel that when there's a gift there's not much choice about using it. Of course there really is a choice, but I think you know what I mean. I understand your relationship with words, and I personally think the power and beauty of expressive language stands as its own value. And in this case in particular, using a journal to reflect your practice, it may serve as a kind of mindfulness practice and an enhancement of self awareness. The real question is the purpose of making it available to others at this point. That might be an interesting aspect to investigate. Maybe try to journal without posting it and see how it feels. What's different about that? I'm not saying necessarily that you should stop posting it, but just to check it out, find out why you do it. There is a general advise from Buddhist masters in the Tibetan tradition that talking about one's practice isn't good, especially talking about one's realization. This is primarily to avoid pride and competitiveness. It's also because any realization tends to disappear as soon as one grasps onto it. So its an interesting thing to think about, to practice with. I don't know if that guideline is even applicable in your case - it's up to you... You're fortunate to have such an available teacher as Lama Michael. Reading your description of his teaching was really inspiring.

All the best, Sarah

Worth noting progress, since so often I focus on the progress not made --

I learned from my father to think of insects as goodly creatures, and not to kill them unnecessarily. And I would observe most of them with interest. But still they used to fluster me if they came upon me unawares, especially big ones. And I had almost a phobia about earwigs and carpenter ants -- I hated them, couldn't stay in a room with them, killed them in a desperate panic when I couldn't get away from them.

I've noticed the last few nights, when moths, big gray moths, have been getting into the house, and have been unexpectedly fluttering into my face, how much my responses have changed. I brush them gently out of my face, careful not to hurt them. There's no longer that rush of panic, no longer that absurd conviction that they're going to injure my eyes or crawl up my nose -- no more of those silly images that used to have so much power over me. They're just fellow sentient beings, confused by the light. They're company.

It's shamatha that has changed this. Having cultivated the ability to recognize compulsive thought sequences starting up, and to unmoor them, so that they just drift away. It's an automatic reflex now, apparently, at least sometimes. I didn't set out to change my relationship with insects. It just happened.

Die holden Wünsche blühen
Und welken wieder ab,
Und blühen und welken wieder--
So geht es bis ans Grab.

Das weiß ich und das vertrübet
Mir alle Lieb und Lust;
Mein Herz ist so klug und witzig
Und verblutet in meiner Brust.

--Heinrich Heine


By the way, if you see this with weird characters in it, you can make it look civilized, in Windows, by going to View/Encoding and selecting "Unicode".

So I'll get to see if the new blogger "draft" function works.

I'm watching the difference between writing with and writing without posting. Or, more exactly, between thinking about writing with and thinking about writing without. Certainly an element -- more than I had thought -- of "showing away" or "boasting" as the Tong Len aphorism would have it. Though I don't think it's boasting about realization so much as boasting about cleverness and "remorseless honesty." (What a tell-tale phrase THAT is, eh? Why should honesty without remorse be such an admirable thing?)

How to distinguish, though, between the simple desire for communion with other sentient beings, closely allied (I hope) with compassion and empathetic joy, and the desire to toot my own horn? & given the difficulty of making the distinction, how important is it (at this stage, when so many much grosser confusions run so much of my life?) I'm inclined to be lenient with almost any confusions that conduce to practice.

I wonder about artists, Jef Gunn for example, who did a show of prints called "Taking and Sending" -- how does that fit with his practice? Since the Western culture of art is so Promethean -- Nietzschean -- Faustian -- how do artists who also practice the Dharma deal with that? There's a lot of them, after all. I wanted to "be a writer" (another tell-tale phrase!) in my youth, not because I had anything in particular to say, but because I wanted to be a Great Man, and have admiring prefaces written about me: and the Great Man carreer paths were pretty thin on the ground for shy softspoken athletically un-gifted boys.

Odd coincidence that at precisely this point Martha and I are planning to start classes in thangka painting, every other Saturday thru February or so. First class next Saturday. Extraordinary to be able to take classes directly from Sanje Elliot. I remember having twinges of jealousy about the Paris cafes in the thirties or San Francisco at the heyday of City Lights, when people were tripping over soon-to-be-considered great poets and artists and musicians on every streetcorner. But that's what Portland and the American Dharma scene in general feels like to me right now. I get to know Michael and Sarah and Jef and Sanje. On the right streetcorner at the right time.

And of course then I paint myself in as James Boswell or Dorothy Wordsworth or Anais Nin, great at one remove. It does still have power over me, the desire to be a Great Man. Remarkable how old stuff keeps coming back. It's like a Shakespearean stage: the old confusions dart off stage left, and reappear moments later, stage right -- different costumes, playing a different roles, but the same old confusions.

I wrote this in response to a post by Tonio (www.savoradin.com), a gifted poet who has looked at the possibility of surgery that could result in aphasia:

Tonio,

I wrote a pages-long comment that haloscan (irony of ironies) seems to have lost -- so I'll attempt to repeat myself here --

I often, often find myself toning down my gratitude so as to keep it within the supposedly "normal" range. I used to view this tendency to effusion with suspicion. Now I'm more prone to think of it as an unfashionable accuracy.

The prospect of being without words terrifies me. Funny that it should, since I'm so often dissatisfied with them, disappointed in them for not be able to break me out of my solitude. But facility with words is maybe my most deeply treasured personal territory. It's only today that I've recognised that my recent crisis over whether to keep a practice journal is not a detour or a side-issue, but the main road of the dharma -- this is the deepest attachment I have. "Can't I practice the dharma and lose all my other attachments, but keep just this little one?" -- a dead give away that I've come to the central issue.

I remember vividly learning to read, the sense of triumph, of coming into my heritage. I keep learning new languages partly, I think, chasing the echo of that triumph.

A second funny thing, for someone so wrapped up in words, is that I don't really believe them. "Words, words, words... why, it says here that old men have gray beards!" Words are evasions, spins, cover-ups, weapons, substitutes. "En arxe en o logos" -- "In the beginning was the word" -- has always struck me as preposterous. Words come after.

Revealing a tendency to hypergraphia myself, here, and I'm not at all sure where I'm coming from or where I'm headed with it. I think I'm working my way around to my own obscure version of "thank you."

Dale

Practicing in the evening, now, instead of the morning. More noise in the house, but it puts practice in competition with the dead chill-out evening time rather than with the fruitful morning work time. We'll see.

I suppose I could try to translate Heine's poem, though I find Heine's simplicity daunting. He always comes into English either chirpy or nasty -- so hard to modulate that irony properly, and to make the Stimmungsbruch, the "breaking of the mood," as sharp and unexpected as he does.

The sweet wishes blossom
And then they wither away,
And blossom and wither again--
So it goes on to the grave.

I know it, and it darkens
All pleasure and all love;
My heart is so very clever
And its bleeding will not stop.

Oh well. It's really breathtaking in German, I promise, and it doesn't have pitiful rhymes such as "love/stop," either.

Lunch with Roger. He told me how he came to the dharma: driving over Santiam Pass in the snow, 55 mph, and someone made a left turn in front of him. He walked away from the collision, albeit with a circular bruise faithfully outlining the steering wheel on his breast, and a bright red seatbelt-burn baldric. But it made him realize that death might not politely wait its turn, phone ahead, and come calling in his old age: it might drop in at any time, like a tactless in-law, whether he was ready or not.

So he started reading about death, everything he could get his hands on, and eventually came to Sogyal Rinpoche's "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." Thence to Michael's community college class on "Buddhist Perspectives on Death and Dying." That was ten years ago. And now he's planning to do the three-year cloistered retreat just as soon as we can raise the money to get the retreat land put together for it.

I wonder about writing a fund-raising "article" (one needn't call it a fund-raiser, of course) just telling the stories of how the ten-some people who want to do the three-year retreat at Goldendale came to the dharma, and came to the willingness -- eagerness, in fact -- to go into retreat for three-plus years.

Of course, little mind jumps at once to imagining forgoing the written word altogether, cultivating revulsion for it, and begins generating angst about that. But -- apart from the fact that such angst is simply the same attachment turned inside out -- that's simply not the point, any more than forgoing sex and despising it is the point of undoing sexual compulsiveness.

As Sarah wrote in the intro to Creation and Completion: "The tantric approach is to use whatever we have, whatever we do already, as the method." So for instance in taking Sarah as my guru -- I'm well aware that, in a quite real sense, I'm just having a crush on another woman, doing what I've always done. The Theravadan approach would be to avert the mind, cultivate indifference or downright aversion for women -- in fact many Tibetans would do the same thing. But the tantric approach is instead of dismissing the compulsion, to hijack it. All that energy is there already, bound up in knots. It can be used, if you have the skill and strength to untie it and harness it.

But that doesn't mean that you get to keep the attachment. "Costing not less than everything" -- any real path comes to that in the end.

-- taking a little leave of presence --

Maybe back in a while, but not before September 25th. Sarah suggested, very wisely, that I go on with the journal but refrain from posting for a while, and just observe what feels different about it. I'm not incommunicado or anything, though -- feel free to email me.

So there it is. So quick bright things come to confusion.

Original sin, some Christians call it. This knack for turning kindness into contempt, communion into loneliness. And it accounts for the facts, "saves the appearances" well enough, even if it doesn't explain them very satisfyingly. A perverse, inexplicable veer into evil.

So quick bright things come to confusion. A better line now, maybe, than when Shakespeare wrote it, when "confusion" had four syllables and made a fine satisfying iambic close. Now there are four beats where there should be five: the line falters. It ends lame, awkward, plaintive.

If you believe in God the creator, you have to believe something like that. That good things can come to evil spontaneously. If you're a Buddhist you can take it differently. You don't have to believe we have ever been innocent or unconfused. The confusion last night didn't start when Michael didn't see my hand, and my will veered to evil. The confusion was already concealed in how I clutched at the communion, how I wanted to own it, make it permanent, and make it mine.

The sadness lingers. So quick bright things come to confusion.

Evening at KCC. Martha and I have come for the evening sit. It's the first Sunday of the month, so it's been already an all-day sit for many of these people. Lama Michael has been teaching since 9:00 this morning, and there is not a trace of weariness or dullness in him. Some new people are here. He gives shamatha instructions geared to newcomers -- simple, pithy, unmistakable. And entirely new: I've never heard him introduce shamatha this way: it leads me into the hour's meditation with a new spin on it. Seven years I have been taught by Michael, and every time it's new. I'm sitting right up by the shrine, and some of the flowers smell distinctly, sweet, decaying a little, an odor strangely like pumpkins. I've never used scent for my meditational tether before. So I try it.

The hour glides past. The direction I breathe -- I don't know how else to put it -- changes the scent of the flowers. I breathe in backwards and it's flowers; downward and it's pumpkins. How have I lived forty-five years without ever knowing there are different ways to pass the air over my palate, different ways to smell?

Before I have been impatient once, before it's occurred to me to long for the end of the session, comes the bell, the sweet, pure tone, lingering in the air. We murmur the dedication prayer. The bell rings again. Silence. The bell. Silence. The bell.

People stir, ease their legs, shift, stretch. Bill and I scoot back to the side of the shrine room so we can lean against the wall and face Michael. It's question-and-answer time.

The first question is a highly technical one about the eight consciousnesses. Another technical question about offerings in an unusual Tantric practice. I become anxious about the newcomers. I suspect Bill does too, for in a pause he asks, without looking up, "why do we make offerings?" Bill, of course, could speak for two hours about why we make offerings. The newcomers sit up straight and focus. Michael begins to speak.

He is "on," tonight, as Martha and I put it. Someone asks why you'd make offerings to the buddhas -- who, after all could need offerings less? Out of this question Michael shapes a beautiful teaching on perfect generosity, letting go of gifts. He is spellbinding, Every thing he says is simple, obvious, grounded in years of practice. And it turns the world on its head. Often the best offerings, he says, are the slightest ones, the ones we can give with no regrets or strings attached. The water in the offering bowls. The insubstantial gift of a rose we see and silently offer to the buddhas, multiplied into a million roses in our mind. Wherever we are there is something beautiful we can find, and give away.

I say spellbinding, but that's not right. There's no spell on this crowd. We laugh and joke like old, old friends at a reunion. But the thread of discourse never falters.

The discussion is about to end, and suddenly I am anxious. I have questions, urgent questions I want to ask before it's over. But we've left the question and answer format: everyone's chiming in, and no one's raising their hand. I raise my hand. Michael doesn't see me. I raise my hand again. Michael misses me again.

What is my question? It changes. At first it's the question about this journal. Should I be keeping it at all? Should it be public? Then as the discussion washes past my dismay grows. I don't want to ask Michael. He doesn't understand words the way I do. He's always impatient if I start to "close-read" a text. When Martha suggested that we read aloud from a text during a study group, Michael plainly thought this a waste of time. We'd already read the words -- our job now, plainly, was to grapple with the meaning. The words were just symbols: it's the meaning that counts.

I am sinking into loneliness. The love of words themselves -- that each word has its own lilt, heft, and tang, that each casts a different-shaped shadow in the mind -- the desire to loose "my" words into the world (not mine, not mine at all) -- suddenly I'm sure that Michael will see none of this. He'll tell me bluntly, plainly, to keep my practice to myself. It's not for parading on the street.

The discussion has moved to blessings, asking blessings from the buddhas, from the guru. A sort of corollary to the topic of gifts. Now I know what my question really is. Again and again I have found myself formulating questions to put to Sarah, only to realize that they're not really questions. I just yearn for contact. But her time is precious, not to be wasted on false questions. So I leave the questions unsent. I know what the real issue is: I just want her blessing. I want to stand a moment in her mind's eye, in the full light of that radiant compassion. That's all. So now I know my question for Michael. Is there some formal way that people ask for blessings from their teacher? Just a momentary request, with a quite formal response, which wouldn't unfairly eat away her time?

But now my thoughts are stumbling over each other. Is that really what I want? How might Michael feel, if he learned that I chose Sarah over him? Do I want to reveal that fact to him -- to the Sangha -- to anyone? Is this, itself, a real question, or just a similar play for the limelight? Is there a Dharma component to this desire to ask questions at all, or is it just that most heinous of felonies, in my family's culture, the high crime of "wanting attention"?

The session is ending. It's moved organically, naturally to a close. I give up on asking my question, look down at my folded hands. Kathleen says something to Michael that I can't catch. Michael says "It's just come to my attention that Dale has had a question for a while." Everyone looks at me. I feel my face going red. I feel stupid. The conviction that Michael is indulging the weakest, flabbiest, most unpromising member of his Sangha washes over me. I respond by sitting up straight and lifting my bearded chin, and saying firmly, "It can wait. It should wait." Someone says, "Now everybody's curious." Michael looks inquiring, inviting. I hate them all. "I should wait." I say decisively, dismissively.

So people are getting up. Someone asks me whether my question needs an immediate response. "Oh no," I say grimly. "It'll keep."

It'll keep all my life, I think to myself. I make for the door. Martha looks at me. "Are you all right?" she asks. "I'm fine," I say, but I don't manage to smile. I take my shoes and escape to the porch to put them on.

The night is cool and wet. I put on my shoes and walk back and forth on the sidewalk, waiting for Martha to come out. Other people come out, and I wish them good night, warmly. I'm recovering a little. Martha comes out after a while. We walk to the car, arm in arm. "Do you want to talk?" she asks gently. "We can talk, or we can be quiet, if that's better."

"I think quiet is better," I say. After a few blocks, I add, "not quiet, necessarily. But I don't think I want to talk about it right now." So we talk about other things. But I'm under the shadow, for the rest of the evening. Read aloud to Martha and the kids. Then to bed.

Woke this morning at 5:00 and did my practice. Vajradhara is coming back a little. It's all still pretty faint and ghostly. Buddha Shakyamuni turned golden and bright, though, toward the end. And I feel all the benefits of the practice returning to me. One of them, after all, was my turn of alienation last night -- not the alienation, I mean, but my clear awareness of it. I feel stronger than ever the conviction that there's no way to back out of this practice. There is only forward.

So. Back to it. Knees sore, drenched in sweat, but so much happier. A full week since I practiced last.

This last week -- well -- theme music from Star Wars -- sound of desperate space-battles -- and scrolling down on the screen:

-- Ngondro, Episode V: Samsara Strikes Back --

Temptations crowding in. Once upon a time, remembering Screwtape -- "what really delights [ the Devil ] is to gain a man's soul and give him *nothing* in return." I thought of taking as my motto, "Make the Devil pay!" As I recall I pictured it in black-letter, spelled quaintly: "Mak the Divel Paye!" I've lived under worse mottos.

But mostly, of course, the temptations are of the sort Lewis imagined: the temptation to piddle away my time in computer games, or rereading seafaring novels for the umpteenth time, curled around a bowl of ice cream, or listlessly stirring up a half-dead libido with stale pornography. Anything repetitive, hermetic, and sterile.

I focus on the livelier temptations, not because they're really more dangerous, but because they sound more like temptations, the sort of things St Anthony had to deal with. And of course they're part of the continuum: without the real delights lingering in memory the pale echoes of them wouldn't have such power. The devil does grudgingly pay, every once in a while.

But only when his back's against the wall. Which is why the cycle runs this way: when I've really been practicing, when my mind comes up out of its torpor -- that's when I become capable of real pleasure, and meet with real temptation. What I do with that temptation, actually, is not very important. So long as it doesn't draw me away from practice.

It's easy -- and absolutely fatal -- to mistake the location of the temptation. So I'm tempted to go off to the strip bar next Friday, when Cassidy and Dionna will be there. It's not actually Friday. I *can't* resist going to the bar Friday, when it's Sunday. That's not the battle: and the solution is not to resolve not to go on Friday. The battle is "who owns my mind right now?" And the solution is to turn my mind away *now*. That's all I can do. Resolutions simply fan the flames, increase my focus on Friday, and on the strip bar. Maybe the temptation will comandeer me Friday: I can't know that. But I can let Friday's temptation happen on Friday. The temptation now -- the temptation I can deal with -- is the temptation to focus on hypothetical future pleasures, rather than focusing on what's right here, right now.

The scariest thing to me is the thought that maybe in all the vicissitudes of practice, there isn't really any progress -- that maybe it's a zero-sum game, just oscillations of fruitful-looking practice and apparent backsliding, swaying around a fixed point. Because my progress in one direction -- toward the grave -- is steady. No backsliding there.

I haven't posted in a long time, for two reasons. One is that my practice has gone to pieces, and it's too embarrassing, after having presented myself as the resolute practitioner, to confess how easily the prospect of lingering an extra 45 minutes over breakfast has been trumping the aspiration to free all sentient beings from suffering. The other is that Lama Michael has emphasized a couple times lately that you should keep your practice secret.

Now, it makes all the sense in the world to keep your practice secret. When you've got a huge snarl of thoughts, and you're trying to tease out the threads of ego-attachment, who in their right mind would tie extra threads to their fingers while they worked? Isn't this job hard enough already?

So I wonder if I should be making this public. But then also I don't know how public it is: no one I see daily, or even weekly, reads it, and mostly it lives in this weird half-private half-public cyberspace, where we all prance about in our underwear with paper bags over our heads, anonymous exhibitionists all. So far I don't feel any ill-effects from it. And people have said it's useful to them. I'm still baffled by the interest people have shown -- I would think that nothing, nothing could be more boring than a personal practice journal; that it would be like listening to someone's interminable recitation of last night's dreams. Though on the other hand really what I have missed most, in reading Dharma books, is the accounts of failure and jury-rigging -- of the dogged climbs back onto the bicycle, the tiptoeing around sleeping vicious dogs, the clever use of duct tape -- the struggles of ordinary people to practice in ordinary life. There are plenty of accounts of great saints, foretold for greatness, born under multiple rainbows, flowers springing up in their footprints. Those may be inspirational -- but how useful are they for those of us whose destined greatness is a few millions lives farther down the pike?

I should just ask Michael or Sarah. I originally pretended in fact that I was writing this for Sarah, but I've never had the guts to actually mention it to her, or give her the address. I have refrained from things I knew would be bad for me -- finding out how to track "hits," or adding in "comment" software, for example. But my resistance to the idea of asking Michael or Sarah should clue me in that there may be something iffy here.

Jamgon Kongtrul, Creation and Completion:

The clear form of the deity is the luminous appearance of your own mind
And the unclear, unsatisfying experience is also your own mind!
So also, mind is the one who desires clarity and tries again,
And mind is the wisdom deity and guru.
Everything is mind's appearance, and yet mind itself is uncontrived.
The beauty of this ultimate essential point of the approach of the two stages
Is that no matter which of the many creation stages you do,
If you apply clear awareness and mindfulness that is merely undistracted,
When the meditation is clear, it arises as clarity-emptiness, and when obscure, as obscurity-emptiness!

Ay! What does that last line mean? I take it to mean that if the visualization "works" -- if you see the deity clearly and vividly -- then you are correctly perceiving its emptiness (because if you are mindful and undistracted, and yet still can create this image, you must be able to perceive its emptiness. We'll leave aside for the moment the ugly question of "how do you know if you're undistracted?") But even if the visualization doesn't "work," you are still seeing your own mind, and what's more, you're seeing its emptiness. You can't possibly mistake the unclear unstable pictures presented by your confusion as innately real things, and you have to be aware (since you're working hard and failing) that they're productions of your own mind. So you're practicing the perception of emptiness in either case.

Very, very important to bear in mind the caveat that for this to be true -- for this lovely heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation to arise -- you have to be applying clear awareness and mindfulness. Which is why the grounding in Shamatha is essential.

I hope that's what it means, because my visualizations have been so obscure lately that sometimes they're barely there. But I think I'm still pursuing them with decent meditative concentration. So if I understand this right, I still am garnering the benefit of realizing "obscurity-emptiness"!

This is an email I sent some time ago to a chance yahoo-group-acquaintance who was asking my advice (on the eve of her wedding!) about how to talk to her Christian relatives about Buddhist morality. I don't know if it really belongs here.

----------------

I see. Well, really Christianity and Buddhism are both all over the map about these issues -- we just don't hear much about the more fundamentalist Buddhists here in the West, but they exist, and they're perfectly capable of telling people they'll go to the hell realms for a zillion kalpas for stealing or having the wrong kind of sex or whatever. And of course Christianity insists, tho not all Christians listen to it, that all sins are forgiven, which means that the critical part of Christian practice is not following the DON'Ts perfectly, but opening yourself perfectly to repentence and forgiveness (tho that's probably harder, anyway :-)

But I think the DON'Ts, the precepts and commandments, usually work really differently in the two religions. In Buddhism they're basically just advice about how to how to live a life that's calm enough so that you can get down to the business of removing the confusions that obscure your Buddha-nature. But in Christianity following the commandments is itself a spiritual practice -- regardless of the outcome of following them or breaking them. By trying to follow them you discover the ways in which you resist the will of God. In a way, in Christianity, it doesn't really matter what the commandments are: they could be something like "don't climb trees" or "always wear gloves" and they'd work just as well. They'd still make reference-points you could use to identify when you wanted your own will, rather than God's will, to triumph.

Which is why it's so important for many Christians that the rules be simply rules, given by God once and for all. If they were just advice, as they are in Buddhism, they'd be useless for that kind of practice in submission to God's will.

When it comes to judging others, though -- well, that's when the Church and political power start warping the teachings of Jesus. Jesus didn't think you should spend your time on other people's transgressions -- he thought everyone had enough of their own to absorb their full attention :-) Trying to impose obedience to commandments on *other* people was something Jesus obviously had no interest in at all -- but churches and states have plenty of interest in it!

I don't know -- did I help at all with all that?

love

Dale

As Ngondro sweeps along, one of its effects has been to reveal many of my worldly defects -- weaknesses I knew I had but had never thought of in Dharma terms -- as spiritual defects. How many days of work have I lost, anxiously clicking the "Check Mail" button, waiting for some kind of validation from some woman, a "yes" to a lunch invitation or a response to an enthusiastic email?. Or fretting about a date to come? Two this week, certainly: with my mind full of anxious hopes about j, I have gotten next to nothing done.

Somehow -- the mechanism is opaque to me -- practicing Ngondro is what has pushed me to making the extremely simple and obvious connection: this is what all those old Buddhist texts are talking about, when they talk about overvaluing one's reputation and the good opinion of others. In my dull-wittedness I took that to be wanting to be a football star or to be a dazzling ace programmer or to be terribly good-looking -- took them to be talking about faults I didn't have, in other words. But this is the form it takes in me: continually lusting after the approval of women.

What's wrong with it? Well, in a way, nothing. It causes very little damage, ordinarily. What's really wrong with it is just that it absorbs my attention, keeps me riveted to worldly concerns -- so much of my time is spent in these lunges after approval -- planning them, making them, or fretting about them. It's time when I thoroughly subjugate myself to Samsara, and confine my mind to running a hamster-wheel of old, old, habitual thoughts -- thoughts so old and habitual that even to call them "thoughts" seems absurd, they have so little of newness or perception or understanding about them. And away trickles "this precious human existence" -- narrowed to the click of the "Check Mail" button and the rereading of old email.

Well. I have my practice opportunity. Lunch with j today. Plenty of spark. Fantasies start churning at once. This is exactly, exactly where I started with Marina. So this is my chance for do-overs. To be sensitive to the times of need, not in order to exploit them, but in order to back off, give room, cool down.

I want to have an affair. God, I so want to have an affair. I want *that* kind of validation, I want to be wanted, desired, thought special. And I want to be so special that someone will trangress for me, throw caution to the winds for me.

So there's two thoughts to carry carefully. The first is that this validation, which looks so solid and permanent in prospect, is in fact completely ephemeral, gone as soon as it comes. In fact I already have pretty much all the validation I would ever get from having the affair -- just in the sense of a mutual attraction. The sense that it's remotely possible. ("Oh how I ache for a part in a play I could say that I didn't want.")

The second thought to carry carefully, is that following out and having an affair would be nurturing, cultivating, the seeds of that validation's destruction. A real affair would become a matter of need and obligation and expectation -- all things that would eat out the heart of that validation, and leave me only hungry, hungry for more. To follow out would be to walk straight into the hungry ghost realm, where no food satisfies, no drink quenches.

Old enough, maybe wise enough.

Pray for steadfastness and clarity for me, O my reader.

Anger. I always take anger as a signal that there's wickedness afoot. What it really signals is that there's something about a situation that I don't understand. I had the wherewithal this week to go someone I was angry with and try to find out what I didn't understand. Within five minutes my anger had evaporated. Sure, I still thought she had acted foolishly. She thought she had acted foolishly too. But she was deeply hurt, and (as it looked to her) hitting back -- not starting something out of the blue. I already knew that the main person she was dealing with (I was just collateral damage in this) was also feeling deeply hurt. I tried to convey some of that, but I don't know if she could hear it. I suspect there's more still that I don't understand here.

Shamatha for an hour this morning, then walking meditation for a few minutes, and half an hour more of Shamatha. It was a mistake to let Ngondro absorb all my practice time. I've been missing Shamatha.

I've put myself on a program of "Ngondro conditioning." Feels weird to apply what I've learned about aerobic conditioning to a Dharma practice, but after all, the prostrations *are* an aerobic exercize. So I have a nice little system for working up to where I want to be, with a day or two of rest each week. One thing that does is quieten the little mosquito-buzz of thoughts about how many I should do in any given day, or how many I should be doing in general, when I'm practicing. I wonder how much of the precision of ritual, at which my mind is so accustomed to scoff, is there just to shut down the static of fretting about the details of ceremony. Not that it matters where the butter lamps stand in relation to the water bowls, but that it matters if your mind fidgets with the question when you want it to be contemplating the great kindness showered upon it by the sources of refuge.

Reading Demian with increasing distaste. When Demian and Sinclair are mooning about the Demian household, dabbling in various spiritual practices in an undisciplined way and basking in their self-glorification, we're clearly supposed to think they're highly evolved beings, rather than arrogant prigs. That college-aged young men should be dead serious about their mishmash of haphazard spiritual practice and superstition is of course to be expected, but that Hesse (and Demian's mother) should also take them at their own valuation is intolerable. If I were Frau Eva, I wouldn't be prompting young Sinclair to sit in his room and strain at producing triumph-of-the-will passion. Too much of that around the house already. I'd set him to changing diapers and entertaining three-year-olds for a couple years, and then to do some hospice-work: let him see a bit more about what the whole human experience is, to see what there is to learn from dealing with the blood, shit, piss and phlegm of this breeding world.

Difficulties again. I become shrill and disputatious, argue theological points I know little about against people who know less of them -- as if the doctrinal issues of Christianity were any of my business! So maybe I can win an argument. And maybe that means driving someone off of the only spiritual path open to them at the moment. Grand victory.

I should know enough by now to recognize that argumentative, letter-to-the-editor obsessiveness as one of my pet forms of procrastination. Which is one of my pet forms of anxiety. I guess it's progress that I'm now working with all three of the issues that have bedevilled me all my life -- compulsive eating, compulsive sexuality, and procrastination. (None of them at all dignified. How I wish I was tormented by spiritual doubt, or righteous indignation, by the sort of spiritual obstacles that put a worried look of respectful understanding on people's faces, rather than a snigger!)

But anyway, I'm engaged directly with all of them now. Used to be I could only begin to deal with one by giving way completely on the other two. So that's progress, maybe. Ngondro seems to keep stirring things up. I feel like a monkey who's climbed into the cab of a running pickup and inadvertently started driving. I don't know how this thing works and I don't know where it's taking me, but I do know it's faster and more powerful than anything I've ever encountered. Though I'm not at all sure that I'm not just headed for the ditch.

I need to take on all three at once, though -- as I recognize now -- because they're all the same thing. Fixing one at a time doesn't get rid of anything. It's just chasing the mouse from one hole to another. It's all anxiety, fear of emptiness, fear of failure.

"Train wholeheartedly"

-- one of the Tong Len aphorisms. Thinking about it a couple days ago, I realized that I have never trained wholeheartedly. The Dharma has always been "plan B" -- if not "plan C" -- a backup strategy in case my other strategies for obtaining clarity and peace of mind didn't pan out. It's been very fruitful -- and, surprisingly, not threatening -- to start wrap my mind around the concept of practicing wholeheartedly. Making this my main strategy, rather than a backup.

And I'm noticing how my other strategies -- besides abjectly failing most of the time -- kick up turbulence in my mind, waves of anxiety and impatience. Even when they're seeming successful. In fact, especially when they're seeming successful.

Reading Demian, and in my mind the Nietzschean emphasis on strength has merged, with strange ease, into the "divine pride" of being Vajradhara. All day I've been feeling an unusual strength, an ability to shrug off the "slave mentality" whenever it arises, and I'm walking lightly, purposefully, energetically.

Suddenly Vajradhara is gone, a blind spot in my visualization. Vajravarahi dancing in the foreground -- Kalu Rinpoche above -- Shakyamuni to my left and Chenrezig to my right -- but in the middle, nothing comes into focus and stays there. And my butter lamp went out before I was done, today. Felt empty (not in the good sense!) and ominous. I chide myself for superstition -- it's just what it is: a candle that went out.

For a while Vajradhara was the most vivid, dependable figure in the tree. Now, for the moment, he's gone. I'm trying too hard with him, for some reason. Or maybe I just need a good picture to stare at.

Mahakala is there, though, beneath the tree, in compensation. I take the protectors -- since I'm very vague about what they're doing in the whole setup -- to express the ferocity with which I need to pursue my practice and defend the time devoted to it. So easy to let the mundane world come cranking in on that time -- I feel that I have to be in some ways unreasonable in order to preserve it.

A couple days I didn't practice. It distressed me so much -- put me so much off-balance -- that now I think no extra time or mental space I might purchase by playing hookey is worth it. There's no way to back out of this -- "out" is forward, now.

Some time ago I posted about my disgruntlement at having to pour the offering water out in the flowerbeds rather than just down the sink. It's become one of my favorite moments of the practice -- taking the pitcher out to the back porch, in the early morning, pouring a glittering stream of water onto the plants below, with the sunlight filtering through our apple tree, and rippling silver and new-green in the neighbors' poplars. I just stand there a while, bare feet on the wet porch, and watch the leaves, and breathe the dew-washed air, with the world all bright and new around me. And this -- this was the moment I resented having foisted upon me.

Coming out of an extremely difficult time. When it's really difficult I don't write about it -- which is unfortunate, because it makes the written record sunnier than it should be. Practice is hard; carrying it is hard.

A kind of epiphany this morning, foreshadowed but clearer today than before -- the understanding that my difficulty in working while at work could be viewed -- should be viewed -- as a perfect, daily opportunity for practice. And that I can call on Sarah or Vajradhara to help me in it. Refuge isn't just a slogan or a party line. It really means I can turn to them for aid and comfort in my distress.

Martha and I went to Thrangu Rinpoche's weekend "seminar" last weekend, and received the Vajrasattva empowerment from him Tuesday night. I wish my visualizations were less ghostly and transient -- they're more vivid in my casual memory than they are when I'm having them, I find. There's a sort of knack I learned in stargazing of not trying to look directly at what I'm trying to see, because my peripheral vision is actually sharper, at least for things like dim stars. I suspect there's a similar knack to be learned in visualizations.

Went to the graduation at Pacific Crest. Rigel, one of the graduating seniors, thanked me in her speech for my poetry class and my War and Peace class (which, she said, left her "more morally confused than ever.") I wrestled with myself before the graduation. I wanted to give her a graduation present, an edition of Yeats, maybe: and yet it was plain to me that so much of my motivation was the intent to remind her of me, that I didn't know if I should do it. In the event I didn't have time to buy a book, anyway. Hugged her afterward. Thanked her. Then took Alan, who had been dreadfully bored by the ceremony but bore it heroically, home -- what a wonderful, catch-all excuse kids are!

An excuse, because I wanted to flee. Almost overwhelmed by the desire to somehow freeze the moment and make it real -- to make it more real -- to make it permanent -- to be always the great poetry teacher and life-changer -- the pain was almost enough to make me writhe. A year or two ago I might have mistaken the agitation for pleasure. It's not: it's about the purest suffering I ever experience. The bottomless dissatisfaction, yearning, clutching. Just about everything seriously evil I've ever done I've done in the grip of that agitation. No food could ever still that hunger: it's innately, structurally, unappeasable.

A nice Ngondro instruction session from Bill: a good reminder not to let a zeal for correctness crowd out everything that inspires me.

Rocky days. Karen asked about backlash after the sit Sunday. I said "I console myself by thinking that it's not that the resistance to practice has really gotten stronger -- it's just that my awareness of it has gotten stronger. But really -- I think that's true" And Michael said, with an impish grin, "the anaesthetic is wearing off."

Which is all fine and clever, but I'm not sure I really do think it's true. The backlash is its own thing, a surge I've recognized against virtually every commitment I've ever made. The surly teenager breaking rules because they're there. An anonymous post on mindspace ran:

-- "What are you rebelling against?"

-- "What you got?"

The inspiration I initally got from Sarah has faded somewhat -- how quickly I've become accustomed to her accepting me, and come to think of it as normal! "Having accepted me through your great kindness," as the Ngondro text says -- and it is great kindness. Michael says that "They Say" that if your accepted student doesn't attain enlightenment, you don't either. The sullen urge to pull my house down: but God knows I don't want to pull it down if Sarah's inside it.

I'm sort of saving up the prospect of journeying to Colorado to take my Bodhisattva vows from Sarah, a potential inspiration squirreled away for the future. Somewhat dangerous, to play with it like that.

It was years ago that Sarah came to Portland. Sitting in class watching her teach, I thought: "she hates teaching as much as I do: she's as nervous about speaking in public. But it doesn't get in her way. It doesn't cloud her intelligence or block her compassion." There was a sort of stillness about her. Anxiety could arise, but it couldn't take hold. And withal, that extraordinary openness, an absence of posturing. Compared with her directness, her engagement with reality and with others, everyone else in the world was a teenager posing in a mirror. & I thought -- as Michael said of first seeing Kalu Rinpoche -- not knowing what he had, but whatever it was -- "I want *that*."

How much of that did I make up? Oh, plenty, no doubt. Maybe she's not nervous about teaching at all. Who knows.