Taking and Sending

The woman is old, nearly as old as I;
Her tongue working and making of her pleasant face
A monkey’s, moaning for the roll of deities to cease,
For the floor to hold still, for Death to open his hands:
I breathe in the fear and the confusion, I breathe out

Light and warmth, pouring from Those behind me
Whom I may not turn and see: breathe in the fear,
Breathe out the light. Give it all away. Every scrap
Of comfort. It was never mine to hold. It is not my peace.

There are others. A Protector, of sorts: dull gray.
Strangely impassible in this world of easy translucencies,
Porosities, She is up and to my right. I am forbidden
To Take and Send with her. All right. But in the corner,

That still heap of blankets (she put on her mask and pulled
The covers over at the outset, like a child, going to sleep):
A brightness has been growing there, a hidden light,
An unguessed generosity. Unto us a child is born

Again, and again. (Do you not understand?
You do not understand. Again, then. How many children
Must be born? All of them.) I contract to a tiny blue
Light, about to close its eye, to let its last ley lines fade:
The monkey’s face is mine, for a moment, and is gone.

The Dreams of Rabbits, Sleeping in my Hands

Oh Sir, I said, I have grown old dwelling in this hanker
And my hands are so empty and dry that the rabbits
Mistake them for husks, and try to build their nests in them.
Did you not say you would anoint us with the lymph of gods,
And wash us with fragrant oils, and wake us when the morning came?
He said, and how do you know that the rabbits are wrong? What did you think
They would look like, in this false and garish sun? The rabbits run
When they can, and so must you. Did you think I made a world
Without wolves? But Sir, I said, under this lamp we grow old so fast
Our nails crust with strange growths, we dig and strike sheets
Of rotten plastic in the earth. Can we ever plant or harvest here?
He laughed at me and said, so you thought I was kidding about death?
Now the seedbed of stars itself is crossed with crawling sabandijas
And night is a neon advertisement: what have you ever planted
But your own ruin? If you want to sleep, then wear yourself out with work;
If you want to work, then sleep till morning comes. What else can I say?
I have one vessel more, and I will break it open when the time comes.
But you have made their bed: now let them lie in it: dreams will come,
And you must read them as you can.

Psilocybin

Well. I certainly didn’t expect this physical exhaustion, this hangover, from psilocybin. I have been through the ringer. A mild headache; neck and shoulders all bunched up.

It was valuable. It was very much not what I expected, which is good, but it was very difficult in some ways.

One of the participants was having an intense and intermittently difficult experience, and was vocalizing a fair amount. Early on I started practicing tonglen (“taking and sending”) and I basically spent four hours doing really intense tonglen, mostly with her but with the other participant and the facilitator, too. It’s different when the taking and sending feels so palpable and literal. 

I wasn’t really tripping, in the sense of seeing pretty colors or apparitions of entities – I could see how one could go that way, I could have kept on my eye mask and turned inwards, but I felt called pretty urgently to attend to the others. So it was all about care-taking, for me. Often I felt, when “sending,” that there was something, or many somethings, behind me. Large and luminous persons. The light I was sending wasn’t emanating from me, it was coming through me. At one point I had the thought – it seemed profound at the time but now it seems faintly ridiculous – “well of course you can’t see God. You’d have to be facing the wrong way to do that.”

It was exhausting to refrain from touching people. Touch is my first language, the only real-time one I have ever been fluent in. But I supposedly didn’t know these people. So I sat in one place. Occasionally I felt an enormous constriction settling into me, and I had to breath deeply, find my hara, stay there a bit, let the thing lift. That too felt like a person, or persons: not necessarily malevolent, not necessarily intent on me at all. But I was surrounded by powers and intentions that I could just not quite hear or make intelligible. I found myself cocking my head, often, listening as hard as I could.

I am suspicious of conceptual take-aways from such experiences: they’re the probably the least useful way of responding. But one forms them no matter what, so here they are:

1. There’s a lot more going on than what I ordinarily let myself perceive. There are a lot of persons, a lot of intentions. In my ordinary state of mind I’m filtering out most of them. They are neither entirely inside me nor entirely outside me. (Are they real? I dunno. Am I? Are you?)

2. I am a caretaker, that’s “what I’m for.” 

3. But I don’t have to do all of it, or most of it. There are a lot of caretakers out there. The whole thing is just a lot more complicated than I have ever let myself imagine.

The connection with people was intense and lovely, but I was staggered by the responsibility it entailed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that so clearly before. 

I’m deeply grateful for the Buddhist practices I’ve learned: returning to the breath, letting conceptions go, inviting pain and confusion in instead of trying to fence it out. Nothing fancy. Bread and butter practice. But it was very helpful.

The Special of the Day

Baker Roshi says that the greatest obstacle to enlightenment is the desire for enlightenment. The Zen fondness of paradox approaches, maybe, a vice. But you can see what he means. Once you get firmly in your head a notion of what enlightenment is going to be like, what chance would actual enlightenment have of finding a clear space to unfold itself?

But we’re being too crude and peremptory here. I do sit down to meditate in hopes of a “special experience,” and really I don’t think I would sit at all if I didn’t have that hope. It’s all very well to knock away the crutches of a novice in a monastery who has lots of other things (rules, master, companions, a daily rice bowl) to hold him up. Kicking away the crutches of a homeless man is quite another thing.

I do want the experience again: the sunrise through the dripping twigs, each random twig picked out by the sunlight to form a perfect circle of radiance. That tree glittering in the wind, in Olympia, fifty years ago, all the leaves shivering. Of course I do. That and more. I’m a wanty little creature, and life rolls very rapidly to its drop-off.

Seriously, I don’t think I can afford to dismiss the desire for special experience. And I don’t think I have to: I think I just need to hold it lightly. I do wonder if psilocybin might give me an experience to steer by. A jolt, a reminder. Of course, you can’t order a psychedelic experience like you order your breakfast at Tom’s. You get the special of the day, Honey, and you sit there and eat it, whether you like it or not.

Nor Elephant Nor Cat

Indra’s elephant, pure white,
Has three heads, six tusks,
Except some say ten tusks,
One for each direction
(Eight, you know, plus Up and Down)
But I think it more suitable to give him
Two tusks per head, plus
A unicorn on his middle head
Threatening to split heaven, giving us
The pleasing number of seven
Cornamenta. Then picture
Indra’s famous net, flung
And settling over all that
Beautiful and deadly ivory,
Carelessly yet just so, shrugged
Back like the shawl
Of a model on the catwalk.
Elephants are not cats, except
Some say that they are: it’s just
The speed at which you perceive them
That varies, and which end
You start from. (Don’t try this at home.)
Each jewel would burn our flesh, we
Being neither elephant nor cat,
Altogether unhorned, and
Of minimal dignity; still we are
Invited to this party, slower than the cat,
Faster than the elephant, and subject
To sunburn and ulcer as we are;
Our job apparently to sing, or maybe
To clown: the instructions
Are unclear.

Three Things

1. Replacing mindless scrolling with reading. I think this has been… about halfway successful. I have to remember how little reading I was doing before the current push. I was reading, say, two pages of “hard” stuff, maybe five pages of Spanish; I think I’ve doubled that, and added in much “middle” reading, things such as Atkinson’s history, Jules Evan’s ecstatic experience book, Marshall Sahlins’ swan song. I am reading much more, and it is very rich and fertile reading. Really I think the main thing that remains to be done is not so much to increase the hard reading or the middle reading, but to swap out the scrolling (YouTube and Facebook “shorts” are particularly noxious) for music. The solutions to the other discontents, perplexities, and problems are not to be found in reading more intensely, or reading more widely. You’re doing that. It’s not going to give you people to pray with or sing with, and it’s not going to expose you to ecstatic experience. It’s just not. That’s not something it can do.

2. So there, you’ve just delineated it. You want people to sing with, people to pray with, people to dance with, and

3. You want to be inviting ecstatic experience in a responsible way (but not in a guarded way: the distinction is crucial. You can’t invite the Goddess only if she promises not to make anyone uncomfortable. I mean, you can; you do: but wondering why she doesn’t come, under those conditions, is idiotic.You know why she’s not coming. Get real.)

 

Affliction

With Christmas, as with so many afflictions, I have taken it too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously: it is not a grave injury that is done me by a brutal world. Not seriously enough: my distress is a thing I have to thoroughly understand and intelligently address.

Yes, yes, it is distressing in that it’s a last gasp of a dying Christianity that doesn’t understand itself. It’s being celebrated by people who don’t believe in it for reasons they themselves do not understand and do not process properly. Yada yada yada miserable people trying to fill a spiritual hole with mountains of crappy stuff yada yada they won’t even sing a damn Christmas carol together yada yada yeah all that. Take it as read.

But my distress has much more to do with an autistic person’s distress at interrupted routines, and in particular what feels like an intentional subversion of everything I try to build in the course of the year, every bulwark against anxiety and overeating systematically stripped away. Like the damned time-change twice a year: everything I work so hard to create is violently jolted. And the timing of the winter assault, with Thanksgiving leaving just time to semi-recover, and then Christmas (with New Year’s for a coup de grace!) wrecking everything again. It is as demoralizing as it could well be: it’s as if designed to ruin me.

It is not designed to ruin me. It is people clinging desperately to one of the last scraps of sacred time left to them. Mauled as they are by modernity, shell-shocked and stupefied by diabolically clever marketers, they’re still trying to salvage something. Wish them God speed. But I still have my own problem. I lose myself, I lose my nest, I lose all my supports, I’m naked in the wind.
First of all: remember: no one gives a fuck. No one is paying attention. You do this season however makes sense to you. They are actually looking after each other, in their fashion. You just figure out your own stance, and your own ritual. So you don’t have your breakfast cafe for two days! What that means is that you can do extended sits, both mornings. Like maybe two thirty minute and one twenty minute sit, with your little walking meditations in between. Then make your breakfast and have your coffee and face the day. Whatever else happens then, you will have done something that will feel like it’s of value, and like it’s not participating in ruination. And say a prayer, while you’re at it, for the exiled Christ-child. This can’t be fun for him either.

Fetch

30 mins sit, brief walking meditation, then 20 more mins sitting. Felt like it had some traction. I drove to Tom’s at sunrise by way of 82nd Ave: the sky was all orange fire, huge and stippled like textured plaster, and when I turned west on Division street I swear to God there was a faint rainbow in front of me. I don’t know what more of a sign I could ask for, unless I’m holding out for angels with blazing swords and loquatious shrubbery. I’m really not at all sure what the enterprise of meditation is, for a lapsed Buddhist and not-really-Christian and pilferer of hozho; but it appears to be the correct one.

Not that I imagine the show was put on for my benefit. I don’t require a monogrammed universe. I think a lot these days about how to save the enchantment while rejecting the falsehood. Maybe it is to be done by methodically inverting the Aristotelian hierarchy, and making things subordinate to -- less real than -- actions and relationships. The sunrise was not an object created by God for my edification: that's an absurdly grandiose idea. The sunrise was a movement in which She and I participated; and the sunrise as object -- as a thing that could have been photographed by third party --  is simply an artifact, a by-product of the multitude of relationships in motion between the person of the Sun and various persons here on earth. Who are ourselves by-products of multitudes of interactions among and within themselves. It becomes ponderous and absurd to try to make my language reflect that sense of what is most real, for any amount of time, but it's quite easy to see it that way. I see it that way all the time, and always have. The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That's not some advanced meditative state: it's the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it's true, but it's also normal, ordinary, regular. I don't have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

It Makes A Neater Job

Instead of sitting 50 minutes this morning, I prepped a 30 minute and a 15 minute timer on my phone. When the thirty-minute bell came I kicked off the 15 minute timer, lay back over my cushion to stretch my spine and legs a little, stood up and walked, very slowly, attending to the sensations of the floor under my feet, and dangled briefly from my chin-up bar, then walked slowly back to the cushion and resumed the sit, till the second bell. It is challenging to keep any kind of meditative attention while moving, but no more challenging than constantly bringing my awareness back from the fact that my knee hurts and my shin is going numb. I think this is how I’m going to do my longer sits from now on. There’s a not-very-clever machismo involved in white-knuckling through some kinds of physical discomfort, marching under the banner of a mind-body dualism that is no more convincing in eastern metaphysics than it is in western. Being still for a long time is obviously necessary for training the attention, but sitting so long that I can’t easily stand up afterward doesn’t demonstrate my superior spiritual craftsmanship so much as it demonstrates abusing my spiritual tools. At the end of the second sit I could stand up like a hale human being. With variations of these breaks for my legs I could do a whole morning sit, or possibly even a day-long sit: whereas sitting down again soon after a straight fifty minute sit is clearly not going to happen.

Pre- and Post-Thanksgiving

Seriously, morning and evening I should chant “Nobody fucking cares!” and “Whose fucking side are you on?” at least four times: those being the things I most need to remember and hold close. Nobody cares what I do, more than in passing (and if they do, let them inform me of it! I don’t have to guess); and I must not help media-suffused capitalism despoil my body and soul. They are not the most dignified of aspiration prayers, but they’re the ones I need.

No binge yesterday, finally. It was a struggle. But remember this is not about vanity, nor even about health: It’s about being on my own side. It’s about not betraying myself, not letting myself be suborned. It’s about not doing things that will – quite immediately, nowadays – make me feel icky.

We’ll track the weight, and we should certainly add more food if we’re dropping more than a pound per week. Two pounds is way too much. (I’m speaking not of this week, of course, which will be anomalous, even apart from being the week of Thanksgiving, but from next week on.)

----

Heya. We seem to have incurred only pound or so of damage on Thanksgiving, which we should be able to make back inside of a week. So good. Notice, señores, that eating off-regimen is NOT a binge on Thanksgiving; it’s simply observing the festival. It would be a waste of good willpower to try to white-knuckle my way through these holiday celebrations. By good fortune Martha’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving, so there’s only two of them this year. So. I am halfway through the holiday rapids. Shoot Christmas successfully, my lord, and we arrive in the calm water of January.

Tried a timer of 8 minutes for my short meditation. Not obviously right, not obviously wrong. It’s not clear to me that it’s doing less than the 25 minute sit – so far that kind of time (15 to 30 minutes) seems to me maybe a bad compromise. The bell is coming too soon to really step into another place. If I’m just saying my prayers and checking in then maybe even shorter than 8 minutes might work. Let’s just experiment. In any case it’s not a stationary target :-)

I am also wondering whether an even longer sit, but with a short interval of walking meditation in the middle, might serve. Around forty minutes the physical discomfort becomes insistent, and since I don’t intend to ignore physical discomfort entirely – imprudent at my age, certainly, and maybe imprudent at any age – 60 minutes with 5 minutes of walking in the middle might be more beneficial. Some of the benefit of course comes precisely from coping with discomfort, but some also comes from that wonderful sense of having crossed over into a radically different kind of time and space. There’s a limit to how valuable impassivity in the face of discomfort is, but I don’t think there’s a limit to the joy of crossing over.

Whose Side?

Probably the greatest aid is to chant “Whose fucking side are you on?” and to consult my own journal. Maybe I should add that chant to my morning and evening prayers:

Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?

I mean, really, that’s the meat of it. They’re trying to reduce me to wretchedness and slavery. Am I going to collaborate?

---

Real time note: I wrote this thoroughly tongue in cheek, but I found myself chanting it on my daily walks, and it has entered my standard repertory of aspiration prayers. It is the prayer against gluttony, and the gist of it is: am I to be on my own side or not? Am I going to support myself or let myself down? The swearing is not just for novelty or piquancy, but to remind myself of the intensity of frustration that originally motivated the prayer. (Apologies to anyone of my father's generation who might be actually offended by the language: as far as I know that cultural moment has departed. My father is 96 and I don't think he's reading blogs these days.)

The Most Helpful Practice Text

So it turns out, shockingly enough – try to contain your astonishment – the the mere presence of “do one new thing” on my list has the power to frighten me into a decline. That is to say, the eating of large quantities of muffin and ice cream. No problem, really, you silly old man. If the hurdle’s too high, lower it a bit and start again. You don’t have to DO a new thing today. You just have to PLAN doing a new thing. If you’re going to go look at materials in a hardware store or a hobby shop, find out which one you’re going to. What its hours are. When you’re going, tomorrow. Then tomorrow you can actually do the thing. What you don’t do, lad, is grit your teeth and say “I WILL run at that hurdle! I WILL!” You’ve got all the time in the world, and none at all, and none of it matters in the slightest. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. Not really. Relax.

The very most helpful practice text for me is my own goddamn blog. I have been thinking the same goddamn thoughts for twenty years. Probably forty, but the blog doesn’t go back that far.

One New Thing

 Oh, dear, I am grieving: I am too old for this, and this is exactly where I have placed myself. Courage, little man. There are yet tendrils, or at least a recrudescence of fruiting bodies. You are not dead yet. And the movement may – probaby will – prove salutary, one way or another. You’ve lain dreaming in the cold sand long enough. So I am going to require of you that you do one new thing today, go one place you have not gone before. Because not filling in your little check boxes is a problem, but it’s not the problem. Right? You know this. The problem is that you’re a timid child hovering at the edge of the playground. And you’ve got to stop letting everyone else draw the lines around your life. For one thing, nobody really cares. For another, insofar as they do, modeling liberation is really more important than administering opiates. And Mr Death is not as far away as you think he is. Yes, the time is out of joint. So what? It has been for hundreds of years, and it’s not going to be put right in the year of our Lord 2025. Get real.

Sacred Time

So making and observing a sacred calendar is – yet another piece of, say, re-enchanting the world. Although the point of sacred time basically is that it’s NOT under one’s control and it is NOT dictated by secular concerns, so – as with so much of this re-enchantment project – it’s sort of self-defeating. Though I may be able to build something around solstice and equinox, as the Wiccans do.

Still, if I’m rolling my own, the benefits won’t even really start to accrue until the second or third round. Hmm. I still haver about whether I shouldn’t just go to a church and let somebody else run all this stuff. Even if I invent something useful for myself, it will just be because I’m so extraordinarily fortunate in actually having time to think and read and plan and do.

But – yeah, higher time. I do have strong associations with the Halloween season – which is considerably after the equinox, actually – being the time when the barrier between worlds thins and becomes less opaque. I don’t know how much of that is the dislocation of the time change. Hmm. I just dunno.

Anyway, I’m going to track for a few days and see if I can actually practice anywhere near solar noon. An obstacle there is that when I get close to that time I (rightly) think that getting my lunch before it gets too late is a higher priority. Eating early is indeed something that I need to do. I’m going to try doing it before practice – see if that works

[ written in early November, obviously ]

Doing Something Different

Here’s a question, then. I do “pray” for help against gluttony on my morning and evening walks, but I don’t really feel I’m engaging in it in any serious way. Does that mean it’s idle? Or that it needs souping up somehow? I mean, I am keeping to regimen, barring a few cough drops here and there, and it’s working, so do I even need to?

Well, yes, I actually do, because I’m not really addressing the disconnective part of it well, and if I don’t do that, then – as I know well from experience – the pressure will slowly build until I bust loose. That’s how it’s always happened, and that’s why, despite all my successes, I find myself, six or seven years down the road, twenty-some pounds overweight and still engaged in this weary internecine war. What I want is not to weigh 167.3 pounds: what I want is peace. 

So in that regard – no, I really am not doing very well. Given the stresses of the lead-up to Martha’s second knee surgery, I can maybe count just keeping in regimen as a win: but it’s important not to slip into a purely materialist mindset and mistake the finger for the moon. What I really want is peace, fullness, connection. And that means Doing Something Different.

Realize that this is intimately related to these boxes on our daily checklists that we can never check off. The endless, tedious search for titillation is also what occupies so much time that theres “no time” to do the liturgy work or the 2 pp of Trafalgar. There’s lots of time. I am never ever going to “have more time” than I have now. 

I think perhaps what I need is not more resolve – and anyway, where does one purchase more resolve? At WinCo? – but more brainstorming, and possibly more help from actual other living beings. Rather than praying distantly to a probably nonexistent God, come up with alternate activities. The music is one. Reading a Big Book is two. I’ve actually made good use of both of these. Another one might be watching some netflix series with Martha. Yet another making something with my hands. I mean, I might just go to hobby shops, hardware stores, TAP plastics, and see what synapses fire.

The Lord's Prayer

I say the Lord’s Prayer over breakfast, as discreetly as I can, so that I will not be one of those who pray standing in the synagogue, or on the street corner (or on the War Department YouTube channel) in order to be seen of men. The wording I use is as in the King James' Matthew, though I say “trespasses” rather than “debts,” as the Catholics do. The power and glory bit at the end, which seems to be a late addition to the scripture, I leave to Hegseth and his ilk: they have their reward.

I always remember Lama Michael’s response to someone asking about celebrating Christian holidays when one is not a Christian: after one of his characteristic, unsettling pauses, he said carefully, “it’s not obvious to me that I am not a Christian.”

In fact, in this twilight of my life, as I give rein to my intuitional mind to play with prayer as it sees fit, it is obvious to me that I am a Christian, in several important senses. There has never been a teaching I responded to more immediately and viscerally than the Sermon on the Mount.

The Dalai Lama once said that you should practice in the religious tradition you grew up in, if you can, which is good sense: it will be adapted to your sensibilities and your culture in ways that no alien tradition will be able to match. I used to mull that over, and conclude that I was someone who grew up in a Christian culture who could not practice in it, because of its insistence on endorsing propositions about God that seem to me to be inescapably self-contradictory, and clearly wrong. But of course I didn’t grow up Christian, or only Christian. I grew up atheist and aggressively, reductively materialist, as well. (My mother was some sort of faint Christian who didn’t choose to challenge my father’s atheism: I often wonder now what her interior religious life was like. I will never know.) My father’s morality is entirely Christian, though, like many atheists, he fondly believes that he thought it all up rationally.

And then Buddhism has been an equally deep influence: if it came later, it was also the context of almost all my structured spiritual practice, and my most influential teachers. I have fallen gradually back into praying, before meditation, with the full Buddhist prayers, together with their references to enlightenment and reincarnation: using my own tailored versions felt increasingly artificial and stupid – like correcting someone’s grammar when they’re making a passionate declaration of love. There are times when being correct is not being right.

So I have either become one of those woolly-headed vague spiritual types that I used to to view with such contempt: or else I’ve simply realized that I come from a thoroughly decayed and fragmented background, that I’m the pup of an old bitch gone in the teeth, and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending I’m anything else. I’m not going to obtain authenticity by picking some old tradition and pretending I don’t know anything about any other. There is no way to back up, and anyway I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go on.

Putting Off Taking a Shower

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

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

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

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

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

Novels You Ought to Read

A friend was asking what Dickens novels he should read, the other day. I had to think a bit. I listed, I think, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations as the novels "I would not want to die without having read." He seemed a little surprised by that way of putting it.

I happily read any Dickens novel, but that's quite different from my sense of their importance. I don't feel that people who aspire to a literary education should read The Old Curiosity Shop or A Tale of Two Cities. But they really should read Great Expectations.

I realize this is a very old-fashioned point of view, and one that is shared by some extremely unpleasant people in the current ideological moment. To be clear -- or maybe to be obscure -- I do not hold the value of these novels to be absolute, which I would consider philosophical nonsense. They are not (importantly) things, they are invitations to spiritual dances, and their value depends on where the dancers start from, what they need, and what steps they already know. It will change. Grow up and get over it. That doesn't mean that all novels are of equal value, or that assessing their value is inappropriate. It just means that you are assessing the readers as well as the writers, to the best of your ability. Which is a piece of staggering effrontery, of course, but it's also what every human being owes to their fellow human beings. We're in this together, kids.

I have devoted much of the last ten years to reading Spanish fiction, and while I've read many rewarding novels I've encountered only two novelists I would not want to die without having read: Gabriel García Márquez and Ana María Matute. You should read Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca; you should read Primera Memoria and Olvidado rey Gudu. Three of these exist in excellent English translations: I'm fervently hoping that Laura Lonsdale will come through with an English Gudu sometime, but she's a busy woman and it's a large project.

Opening and Sealing Prayers

So, starting with the practice, rather than with the theory: rather than deciding what the prayers that open and close my daily meditation should be, I’ve just been trying out prayers, seeing what works and what doesn’t. (“Works,” is vague, I know, but in practice it seems pretty precise: some things I have tried quite obviously did not work.) The current version of the opening prayer is this:

Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath
I give drink that beauty may come to the thirsty
I give food that beauty may come to the hungry
I give thought that beauty may come to the heedless
I give peace that beauty may come to the troubled.
Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath

I suppose that one could substitute other “objects of meditation” for the breath. I tend to use either the breath or the ambient sound (in practice mostly the hum of my tinnitus!) as my object of attention: I’m sort of halfway to meditation without an object, or maybe I’m just sloppy. But “breath” is “spirit” and stands for attention of any sort, anyway. What the hell.

Then comes the bodhicitta prayer, which I discussed before, and then I sit for some predetermined amount of time (anywhere from five to thirty minutes, these days; not long. My knees and hips are still getting used to sitting at all, again.)

At the end come the sealing prayers, which obstinately retain their reference to Mahamudra (“the great seal,” which in this context traditionally means I think complete enlightenment: but I make a possibly louche semantic sideslip so that it means “that thing we’re talking about: that aspiration to be more in harmony with myself, more attuned to the world, and more benevolent to others.”)

By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra
And establish all beings without exception in this state

… this with palms together (anjali mudra), touching forehead, lips, and chest (i.e. body, speech, and mind.) Then lastly hands laid palm up on my knees as I say the Navajo hozho prayer:

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind my I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again

I have no business meddling with Navajo stuff, which is its own intricate tradition with its own demands, of which I know very little: but the first time I read those words they landed with me, in a way no other prayer has. That. So I use it for a sealing prayer. "Dedicating the merit," as they say, in the Tibetan tradition, anyway. Wrapping it up and declaring what all this is in aid of.

Strange Rites

In Strange Rites Tara Burton sets out to tell “the story of the religious sensibility of a whole generation. It’s the story not just of the religious “Nones,” but of an even broader category: those who aren’t rejecting religion, but rather remixing it. It’s the story of how more and more Americans – and particularly how more and more millennials – envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions.” 

Burton does a fabulous job, but I’m irritated at once by this way of putting it. We’re not remixers because we want to be. At least I’m not. We’re remixers because we have to be, because we’ve been made painfully aware that we’re already remixing, “negotiating” with our traditions, and we’re aware (unless we’re real dullards) of dozens of vibrant competing traditions: and we can’t legitimately disavow responsibility for our religious selections. We’ve been backed into remixing. We have no choice.

I am by temperament loyalist and traditionalist. I want to sink into a tradition, and be trained and corrected by it. It’s just not a course that’s available to me. We’re in an age like the age of St Augustine, a maelstrom of competing faiths, and an upwelling of heresies. Whether we like it or not, we're pitched into creating the patristics of the future. What can we do but lean into it?