Micro and Macro Happiness

The disciplines I've been checking out, Buddhism and yoga, focus a lot on inner happiness, and disciplining oneself to regulate the fluctuations of the mind so that we aren't all slaves to our fidgeting brains and insecurities and egos. This stuff is pretty great, and I really like it, but let's think about external reality for a minute.

I once chided my friend for moving across the country to make a change in her life, telling her, essentially, wherever you go, there you are. In general, I believe this - why run when the sickness is inside you? When she moved, my friend identified for me many many tangible external realities that affected her inner world, demonstrating that her location did have meaningful impact on her "self." And I also believe this is true. For example, I know that access to nature noticeably improves my sense of well-being. I feel great that I have a nutty, loving spouse. I absolutely must have A Room of My Own in order to sustain my happiness. Stressful and sedentary work makes me suicidal - I don't care how hard I work at my mental equanimity and inner peace, I can't have an office job.

But isn't the purpose of disciplining our minds to protect our happiness from the endless unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances of life? I might not be able to live somewhere with easy, daily access to nature. My spouse could decide to leave at any second. I might need to take an office job to survive. I might not be able to afford a room of my own or it might have to be sacrificed to other life exigencies. Shouldn't I be able to maintain a happy state of mind no matter what? Isn't that the point of what I'm working on?

I don't think so. Feminist reading has been pretty provocative for me these days. I'm pretty sympathetic to counter-cultural approaches to existence - in a full-blooded American way, too - the Declaration of Independence after all is premised on the idea that when a way of life no longer works for people, their natural human right is to change it from the top down and just start over. But there are so many forces that we are mired in that we may not realize are congesting our human potential for happiness and self-realization. I wrote recently (a few post ago) about feeling oppressed by the feeling of being the "dinner-maker" in my feminine, nuclear familial role, and how I do it to myself, and how ingrained the dinner-maker role and identity are within me, and yet how limiting and stressful it is, too.

Changing these ingrained parts of myself is a multi-step process. Here are some ideas I have about identifying and changing basic things about life, off the top of my head:

1) realize that something about it is making me unhappy. This is easier said than done. I don't think we're very in tune with what is actually affecting our moods and health. There are a lot of veils in the way that don't point us to things that are right in front of us. Hey-o, yoga and meditation are great for tuning in on these issues and sensitizing yourself to the impact of your daily reality on your Self.

2) figure out what is making me unhappy about it. What is it? The amount of time? The expectation? Lack of reciprocation? The lighting, the smell? What is making me unhappy about a particular activity? Do not underestimate the power of just stopping the activity. Don't automatically blame yourself or your "attitude" for your discontent, a la, "I just have to adjust my expectations/approach/outlook."

3) imagine a version of the activity that brings more happiness. What has changed? Is it in my head, the atmosphere, or outside of myself?

4) imagine not doing this activity anymore. How does it affect life FOR ME, not for anyone else (ie, disappointing or angering someone is NOT a good reason to keep doing something that is not contributing to your well-being)? This helps me figure out if I am doing something out of obligation, or role-assumption, or a sense of being beholden to some situation or person. (Germaine Greer observes that all too frequently, "Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice." Ladies, keep an eye on your own martyrdom as a way of substituting identity and meaningful work - I definitely do this.)

5) be completely okay with a version of life that unfolds without trying to keep the old activity as part of it.

Okay so that's just thinking about it right now, any additional ideas about perspective and analysis are extra-welcome.

At the moment I am most troubled by the prospect of a future life built around the structure of the nuclear family. It sucks. It is isolated and inefficient: no one should be alone with the same five people most of the time, all up in their business, and there is no reason each tiny family bungalow needs its own lawn mower and washing machine - nuclear isolation is good for corporations, by the way, but that's another rant for later (yes, Greer is all about this, too). And the limited universe of the nuclear family doesn't help social progress, either, but that's good for the moneyed classes, too. Greer says it thusly: "[T]he function of the patriarchal family unit in capitalist society" is that it "immobilizes the worker, keeps him vulnerable, so that he can be tantalized with the vision of security. It gives him a controllable pattern of consumption to which he is thoroughly committed. His commitment is to his small family and his employer not to his community."

My role as a woman in the nuclear scenario is not okay with me. I don't want to be a dinner-maker, not just on principle, but because the reality of it is soul-sucking. So this is one of those assumed role things that I'm trying to picture for myself - I want inner happiness no matter what, yes, but creating my own mental reality is just the micro version of manifesting a truly sincere, macro, outer reality of happiness.

I have to be careful about this stuff, though - can't just run around rejecting responsibilities out of liberated self-realization.

Bein' a Lady, Buddha's Aaight Reprieve, More Preposterous Life Fantasies

I just heard Hilary Clinton’s Women’s Rights are Human Rights speech from September 4, 1995 at the 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session in Beijing, China. Something is going on with me and the woman stuff – I am pretty interested in it lately. I finished The Feminine Mystique, of course, and currently on the docket is The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer; I also just wrapped up Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness by Ariel Gore. It feels a little bit cosmic to have heard Clinton’s speech replayed on the radio today, and about a month ago I also heard a show about Eleanor Roosevelt and her life – which, to be brief, was basically kick-ass. I feel like a little spark of time/place is settling over me, a neat dimension to my identity that isn’t just who, but when, I am (yay corniness!).

So let’s consider the Bluebird book for a minute – this book definitely is in favor of an Action Girl approach to female happiness. (Action Girl is also, by the way, an excellent comic book that all should enjoy.) She is in favor of confronting what it is you truly want to do, and trying to do it, even when it isn’t what you are “supposed” to be doing. This kind of tough-self-love appears frequently to revolve around relationship-ending narratives, a la “screw this house-dog-car-job scene, I’m going to chart the seasonal fecal change of snowbirds” or whatever. I get this – I think a lot of people spend their youths trying to feel safe and secure by finding love and purpose to attach to, and then once they are fully adult and feel actually safe and secure, they realize they are being held back by the love and purpose that they were once so desperate to tether themselves to for fear of floating away. It seems like a natural life progression, actually – like a second childhood cycle. As babies and kids we need need need direction and instruction and safety, and then as teenagers we resist and rebel and deny all direction and instruction so we can become a different, independent self. Then we do it all again, probably dozens of times in our adult life: attach, rebel; attach, rebel.

Anyway Gore is in favor of bold and radical happiness action, and I think that is great, and I completely agree – it has that seed of Friedan’s call to arms to resist “adjusting” to your expected role that I really love. She also examines the problem of fearfulness – the opposite of happiness is anxiety, she says, and one of the cures for anxiety? – why, meditation, of course. I was thinking that while I don’t feel like I’m a Buddhist exactly, and that I think it’s a bad idea to try to find yourself by finding something religious to hold on to, I have to give a little bit of credit to the path of self-via-spirituality – I do think that investigating my spiritual side a little did give me access to ways of viewing my life that have functioned as little launch pads for further self-discovery . . . like balancing (or reconciling) the feelings that, one the one hand, I am exactly where I need to be at any given moment on any given day, and on the other hand, I should strive for change and growth and the feeling of using and expanding my capacities. Every reasonable point of view is a paradox, isn’t it? Including that one! Ha ha, both reasonable and paradoxical, nice.

But anyway willingness to take radical action and intellectualized balanced approaches notwithstanding, this still leaves most of us with the question of What Am I Supposed to be Doing? The feeling of infinite choice and the problem of choosing one thing to the exclusion of several others – as well as the influence of circumstance, inclination, funding, time, and everything else over what even feels possible or practical among the infinite - it can all be so very paralyzing. I am still distilling myself – I keep having fantasies lately of going to South America again, only this time, going for longer and taking a language class and having the “experience” I had always wanted – I mean, it’s been so wonderful to take care of this one buried longing – yoga certification – that I think I’d really feel relieved in a check-list sort of way if I did that. But it would really interrupt everything else that is unfolding right now – my guitar lessons start this week, and yoga is going really well, and my reading is really engaging, and my husband and I are thinking it’s time to buckle down and buy a piece of real estate to set up all our wacky projects in. Well, anyway, you can see how going to South America for six months would postpone all these things that are in progress - and even though I appreciate Gore's happiness prescription, making oneself happy isn't permission to follow whim or totally cave into one's panic about life and aging, to me. So could I do it in a few years? What if there’re babies in my life? Then what? It makes me a little sad to think about shelving the South America dream, but really, one thing at a time.

I'm Not a Buddhist

I really like meditation. I really, really like it. I don't do it every day lately, but it's pretty great when I do it. I think I like it because it's kind of trippy and it's like being on completely optional drugs that stop working when you want them to. And I like all the little Buddha-man tricks of perspective that help me feel more relaxed about the irritations of life. These are all pretty handy. But it's just not enough to be a primary source of pursuit and study for me.

I was wondering a while ago whether spirituality is a substitute for personality traits and I am feeling these days like the answer is yes. Having a big hole in your chest, I think, is much more likely to mean that you are not using your human capacities in a way that makes you feel fully connected to society. Joining a church can certainly provide that in the sense that there are books to study and people to discuss things with and weekly obligations to attend and volunteer opportunities - all these things can create a sense of purpose and accountability, but it's not really about finding a spiritual center. It's about using your regular, secular, reality-based abilities in a useful way.

In general, I think it's a mistake to go looking for god if you're looking for yourself. I mean, did I mention that the guy who leads the Buddha discussions in the deli is a master carpenter, accomplished musician, as well as a husband and father? And he isn't just a practicing Buddhist, he's a group-discussion leader, highly social community member, and is sometimes employed by the temple to build specialized pieces of woodwork. It makes sense to me that he would be a happy guy with probably minimal identity problems; he's using his capacities pretty fully to contribute to a social direction.

When I wonder about a cure for emptiness, I connect most with Betty Friedan's research on identity and happiness:

"The identity crisis . . . seems to occur for lack of, and be cured by finding, the work, or cause, or purpose that evokes his own creativity." And Friedan cites the failure to find this work/cause/purpose, this emptiness, the "problem that has no name," (or The Feminine Mystique) as a problem of, well - laziness and confusion. This rings the most true to me. This is what I accuse myself of in my own search for myself, so I'm predisposed to agree with it, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Friedan continues:

"[E]ven if a woman does not have to work to eat, she can find identity only in work that is of real value to society . . . . [But f]or fear of commitment, hundreds of able, educated suburban housewives today fool themselves about the writer or actress they might have been, or dabble at art or music in the dilettante's limbo of 'self-enrichment,' or apply for jobs as receptionists or saleswomen, jobs well below their actual abilities. These are also ways of evading growth."

Sounds familiar. I remember when I started this blog I wrote out some criteria for happiness, and "meaningful work" was number three. And as an afterthought, I added spirituality. I think this is still the true order of things. Meaningful work is spirituality. Why is it so hard to find one's meaningful work? I think I may be getting a little bit closer to it. I think in the next ten years I'll have figured out one or two things, or be a little farther along on my feeling of long-term commitment to something. I love body stuff. I really look forward to practicing my yoga teaching on my friends on Sundays, so I think I'm on to something here, at least. And I'm glad for the insights that looking into Buddha stuff has given me, and the things it has made me think about, but it still strikes me as utterly secondary to the true questions of work and self and purpose and place in community. For me, investigating spirituality is an excellent vehicle for connecting with other people who want to talk about finding life purpose - its function is community, and opportunity for connection to community, more than anything. But sense of self is more centered in commitment to exploring your own abilities in a long-term, non-dilettante way.

Excuse me Professor Buddha, can we go over again why living in the moment is so great?

Regarding the past, I can definitely get down with letting go of being hounded by regrets and anger and stuff like that. Regarding the future, I can understand completely how fruitless it is to think any version of “I’ll be happy when . . . .” I can roll with happiness-as-gratitude-and-a-sense-of-ongoing-marvel and that feeling thankful for all that I have is very important. Etc. Also that thing that nun said about how it doesn’t really help peace on Earth to scream at other people to change their ways really made a lot of sense to me. AND on top of this I really get a lot out of sitting quietly and focusing on my breathing and hoping for peace on Earth, it’s pretty awesome. But really, why am I supposed to live in the moment again? What moment? This one? Hum of the fridge, sound of a dried leaf scratching a window, fall of shadows from the retractable overhead light. Yeah yeah, I am certainly capable of contemplative appreciation for the simple things etc. And I know I could die any second now for any one of a zillion random reasons, but if life is going to make any sense, I need my personal concept of a future to exist. In order to shower, to better myself, care about others in a real-life, secular humanist empathetic way, I need to keep tomorrow, and next week, and ten years from now in mind. Am I just taking this moment-living thing too literally? It's just that I hear this idea batted around an awful lot and if I’m supposed to define it for myself or something, well then, living in the moment includes a touch of future, because it has to in order to have any meaning. Betty Friedan wrote that “It is precisely this unique human capacity to transcend the present, to live one’s life by purposes stretching into the future---to live not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world---that is the distinction between animal and human behavior, or between the human being and the machine.” I see her point.

Where is the human progress in contentment and happiness? Friedan’s book (The Feminine Mystique, of course) is about how at a certain point in our culture, women were epidemically suppressing their potential and sense of self in order to “adjust” to society. This is why housewives ran screaming down the street in the middle of the night. Not because housewifing is dumb in and of itself, but because culturally we’re outgrowing the apron role as our only possibility – to have only one true option is a limitation and can’t be forced back in to those old clothes. Friedan wrote about this fifty years ago, and I feel like this is what I see not just in me but in everyone, all the time now – misery and confusion from trying to adjust to cultural circumstances that do not have the same shape as the true self: offices, huge grocery stores, cars, air conditioning, offices, offices, offices. Thoreau in “Economy” (in Walden) says that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and that “resignation is desperation confirmed.” He said this in reference to the relentless slaving and over-hoarding of his working contemporaries. Friedan then says 100 years later, about the oppression of women, “The adjusted, or cured ones who live without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.” I do truly dig what you're saying about living in the moment, Buddha man, but can personal evolution really be a by-product of contentment? Should I not want personal evolution?

Okay here’s the other thing that is bothering me about Buddha stuff. I already am kind of bummed about the priestly hierarchy stuff – my friend said he abstains from a lot of this stuff since he really doesn’t want “bigger parents.” I agree. Also, why should a be-robed “master” seem to be important to me? He and/or his lifestyle certainly don’t represent the goal of practicing dharma to me (sort of in that way that a psychiatrist somehow represents the successful end of psychotherapy, at least from the point of view of the patient – but you’d never want to model your life after a shrink, they ALWAYS have the most f***ed up kids, have you noticed?). What the be-robed Buddha man represents to me is retreat from life into total abstraction and a career choice that just won't work for me. I know they mop floors and eat cookies or whatever and are supposed to be grounded, but they sure as hell aren’t trying to live among society in a way that I can understand – and isn’t this what they’re supposed to be helping? Regular folk? I really love that Iyengar rejected monk-hood, explicitly with the idea that yoga and enlightenment are paths meant to be compatible with checking the mail and walking the dog and going to work and paying the mechanic . . . oh that reminds me, one of the monks had a dog. I’m exaggerating the priestly thing a bit, probably.

But upon whom, please, should I be modeling my concept of myself?

Hmm. Well, this is the very guidance that all paths lack, isn’t it? I mean we already all know that we cannot take our identities from the generation before us – would anyone like to be his or her parents? I didn’t think so. For a long period of life the whole point of parents is to have someone’s image to reject in order to form your own identity. But where is the example being set that I want to follow? I don’t think it exists, and that’s what’s so unnerving. There is no shape in the world exactly my size that I can fit myself into; we have all outgrown everything that can be known because it is already over; there is only the unknown – the future. Who and how we are is constantly evolving because we cannot be content to repeat what we have outgrown – I mean, maybe there is no “now.” We need the future and discontent to have identities, and identity is what gives us our future and sense of discontent – and I know ego and identity are all supposed to be bullsh*t and the very cause of my suffering but I’m not convinced.

Feeling Conflicted (as usual) About Revelatory Insights

It seems like I am always hearing about people's next, next, and then next best and profound realization about life. I get tired of this. There is always a book I have never heard of, a swami I've never heard of, a retreat to the mountains I've never heard of, or some obscure little extra credit corner of spiritual and revelatory life that is providing someone with the new perspective they are finally ready to hear (tee-pees! Amazonian Shamanism! Kundalini energy!). Bleh. Even just the saying "when the student is ready the teacher appears" is kind of snobbish - "well look at me, I'm ready!" It could just as easily say "when the human is desperate, the free market will fill the hole for anywhere from 20 to 3,000 dollars." I mean, I'm pretty skeptical that new-insight people are enjoying entry into new aspects of self-inquiry as a result of their mastery of previously studied disciplines. And it's tough to take seriously the "next thing" seekers when everything else in their lives seems to have been taken so lightly that it can be abandoned for something "better." I mean I'm not trying to hate on personal evolution - our progress should be continual/cumulative in life and I certainly don't think we should ever consider ourselves to be "done" becoming who we are, but there's a line, no?

On the other hand: I like this stuff a little bit. I like to read books about things that are supposed to be useful to my perspective on myself and the world and everything like that. I even like to tell my friends about handy little ways of looking at the world that have been useful for me, and I'm sure I have been at least a touch sanctimonious about it a few times (I am thinking of one blog post in particular that I re-read and then cringed at myself about; there is no prize to readers who know which one I mean). And I love love love to hear what other people are thinking about with stuff like this. Also I am sensing a shift in myself away from the sect of Buddhism I have been looking into and more toward the India-centric yoga-related schools of meditation and stuff - at least in my inquiry stage (man I'm feeling jaded about Buddha - dharma is cool, but karma can suck it, and so can the priestly hierarchy and the glamorous temple and the unending, supplicating prayers). So am I a dabbling dilettante? A potential guru-hopping "new truth finder?" Probably. What to do about this?

Well, sticking with something is maybe a good start. I mean, sometimes I don't want to read anymore books about this stuff. I have enough books as it is, and I haven't exactly integrated them fully into my life in terms of insight and application. In a case of actual irony, I am thinking about this partly thanks to the insightful books I just read that my friend lent me. But really, to just keep reading on and on and on is the same thing as Sharpening Pencils. It's hard enough to hold on to new insights as they are arising. It's another thing to apply them to life and let them affect you enough to mean anything. In Buddha class this comes up sometimes - intellectual insights are nothing without putting it into practice, and the metaphor is that it's like having the prescription for the right medicine, and believing that since it is on your bathroom sink you're cured. You have to actually take the medicine. Knowing something is useless without acting upon it. In some way, being in a constant stake of seeking is yet another way to postpone meaningful life progress.

So anyway I feel like I have to boil down my plan for my relationship to yoga a little bit so that I don't end up in the ever-seeking stage dilettantish amateurism they way I have for everything in my whole life so far. For now, I have in front of me: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which is the main yoga source text; my own physical and mental yoga practice; and muscular anatomy to learn. That's plenty. Can't go picking up book after workshop for the rest of time. Sigh, well, I have one new book right now on women and yoga which I'm going to read but I feel okay about that one because I feel like I can file it under anatomy. But seriously let's keep things manageable, here.

Some New Buddha Books

So I have been reading a few new Buddha books that my friend lent to me. One of them combines yoga and Buddhism into an approach the author has given his own sort of proprietary title, which I will omit here because I'm not crazy about his whole thing. The book is useful in a historical/comparative way. Someone was going to systematize and label this yoga/Buddha synthesis eventually, so anyway that's out there. I am a little resistant to fully embracing this book's message because I took a class once with this author several years ago and I didn't like it/the author. Oopsies I'm letting cult of personality influence my receptivity to information! Oh well.

The second book I'm really pumped about - Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor. I've read a bit of it so far and it's offering a nice contextual/historical perspective on the religion-ification of Buddha's teachings. This book is right on time for me as I am feeling a little bummed out by the shiny glamor and obvious expense of the temple I went to, as well as the priestliness of the whole thing.

One thing is sort of bothering me so far, though - in "Beliefs," the author says that "The Buddha did not reveal an esoteric set of facts about reality, which we can choose to believe in or not. He challenged people to understand the nature of anguish, let go of its origins, realize its cessation, and bring into being a way of life." Well, there are at least two facts in operation here - the presumption of existing anguish, and the desire or expectation that this anguish should, for whatever reason, cease. In the law we might call these the ipse dixit(s) - the things asserted but never proven. Usually an ipse dixit is the cause of many many specious arguments. Maybe here is where I am a little stuck lately; it's pretty hard to deny that there is massive suffering in the world and in our minds. That this anguish exists is not really disputed, and we all feel it plenty so we don't really question it - and as a further precondition of awakening, we need to see and feel the anguish to realize its cessation. But isn't there another way of looking at it? I know Buddhists get a bad rap for dwelling on suffering so much, and I definitely feel that. It's a problem.

Maybe I think that another way to see the eventual end of suffering is to see that there is no suffering, really. I'm not sure where this is headed, I have to think it through a little bit.

Compassion and Abstraction

That is to say, compassion is an abstraction. In Buddhism the practitioner is asked to focus intently on the object of his/her meditation, and eventually to hold the feeling of compassion for all living beings in the mind in order to generate the spontaneous wish to relieve their suffering and to achieve enlightenment in order to do so. I find it hard to hold this idea in my head. I find it hard to fully comprehend a broad compassion. I find it hard to concentrate on one tiny instance of compassionate feeling, even, because it is extremely upsetting to focus on others’ suffering. It is much nicer instead to think of anything else.

I am still thinking about how I don’t like to watch upsetting movies. The two hour roller coaster is so fatiguing, and I feel so manipulated by it, and so spent. I am supposed to be trying to maintain equanimity in my life and in my mind, and going to the movies is the opposite of equanimity. It is purposefully discombobulating, the intentional upsetting of one’s balance for entertainment. I keep wondering whether this can ever be productive, ever.

And I do get upset – I was really upset by the movie I just saw with my friend in which the main character recounts some pretty upsetting things about his childhood, and I was watching my physical reaction to the scene. My stomach felt that anxiety feeling, I was angry and sad for his bad experience, I felt protective of the character as an adult even though the bad time was all over and there was nothing more to do about it, and I felt that feeling of wanting to hold someone and make all their pain go away. And I know this is what the Buddha teacher is talking about. That we have all had this experience of wishing we could take on the suffering of someone we love for them so they wouldn’t have to feel it. Whether it’s a little kid who had a terrible time during recess that day, or a friend going through a break up, or someone was rude to your mom in a coffee shop or someone is sick and dying – whatever it is, there have been moments in our lives in which we have wished for the power to make it all feel better or disappear or never have happened at all. And as far as I understand it, that unbearable feeling of seeing people we love upset or in pain is what we use to fuel our determination to reach enlightenment. I resent being upset by my own compassionate impulses when I go to the movies, and it makes me never want to go to the movies, at least not for emotionally trying films. Crappy romances, sure thing, no problem. Emotionally substantive? No thanks. No wonder it’s so hard for me to keep compassion in my mind for the benefit of world peace if I can’t bear it at the movies. Of course I don’t want to imagine suffering on purpose and focus on it really really hard. Every day I’d have to make myself cry as motivation for working toward enlightenment. I don’t really want to do that right now. I guess I’ll bring it up at the next Buddha club meeting and see what the guy says.

Hi, Sweetie, How Was Buddha Sleepover Camp? Fine. Make Any Friends? I Guess.

So I went to a big Buddhist temple in Western New York for a night. I went to three meditation teaching things, had some monk/nun-made vegetarian food, and slept in the women's dorm with some other Buddha learner chicks. It was very nice and the people were very nice and the grounds were very nice with some very nice walking trails and it was all extremely nice. So here's the other stuff:

First things first: this was a big step up from talking about meditating in a guy's deli in New Paltz on Wednesday nights. Community class is casual and practical and not intimidating at all. At the temple it's a little different, or at least it's too much for me - we're talking serious varsity Buddhism here, as far as I can tell. The people in the robes, the beads (whatever those are for), the bowing on the ground, the glamorous and cavernous temple with shiny Buddhas everywhere, the singing prayers in the meditation sessions (and I'm not crazy about the tune they set the prayers to, by the way). I feel like I muddied the waters a little bit, or least was sort of in danger of muddying the waters. The delight of Buddhism for me right now is its manageability, its portability. Here is the stuff that I can handle right now: just focus on your breathing, concentrate on that one thing to the exclusion of all else as best you can (while remaining relaxed), and try to direct your effort to something good like world peace and not something mean or negative. This is a habit I can take home and work on. The teachings on the retreat are significantly more complicated for me, even though they boil down to the same thing eventually, I think. It just seemed like there's about a zillion Buddhas to thank for their teachings, and each of them has different useful symbolism to them, and there are symbolic gestures in the prayers like making prayer shapes with your hands and then moving it to four different points on your body at certain moments in the prayers, and three bows on the floor that everyone makes before the meditation teaching begins. I don't know, feels complicated. I got some useful imagery out of it I think, but I have to just focus on the most simple part of it before I go learning a million new things that are supposed to help me. Plus one meeting a week has been enough to keep me thinking for a while - at the temple I went to three sessions in 24 hours. I just couldn't process it all in any meaningful way. I was fatigued.

Second: I did get something nice out this (besides my comfort with my own beginner level), and that's that I don't care about the hyper-reasoning or rationales that have been distracting me with Buddhism, such as whether it is impossible to make decisions without relying on a good/bad paradigm of life, whether training your mind to be selective in its thoughts isn't just a way to say Repress Your Dark Side To Be Happy - I think being so overwhelmed with the Super Buddha information made me feel a little less critical of it, paradoxically. I think I am starting to believe that I can't change emotional and spiritual problems intellectually, and a few different sources have told me the same thing in the last few weeks so the point has been taking root in my mind - Iyengar in Light on Life says that you must address your emotional health emotionally; and also in psychotherapy there is apparently such a thing as "intellectual resistance" to progress - we want to talk ourselves out of or into certain ways of feeling, and it's not really that productive (I read this in Friedan's The Feminine Mystique this week, what a rad book that is!). This is still pretty abstract for me but I'm liking where it's going.

Third: another nice thing I got out of this - I feel a little better about hiding from the world these days. I feel occasional waves of guilt about not using my law powers for good because it's too stressful for me. There was this one nun at the temple who heard me talking to someone about whether meditating and yoga are actually "doing" anything "good" for the world, and she laughed a bit, and chimed in. She said she wasn't laughing at me of course, but that her path to Buddhism really started when she found herself at a peace rally in a state of terrible rage. She said she felt that she was not really contributing to peace in the sense that she, too, was ready to kill and shout and destroy in order to get other people to change their behavior. That she was yelling and fighting to get someone else to work on world on peace, and it wasn't really going anywhere. She parroted what other people had said to her about meditation, along the lines of "if you want to help the world why don't you protest, picket, write letters, etc," but that she decided that she could really only work on herself. Someone also said that Buddhism is pretty much in favor of whatever you want to do as long as you're not hurting yourself (or others ostensibly), and stress is, well, extremely harmful for me and my health. But I'm still struggling with this whole problem, in the sense that spirituality seems like escapism to me sometimes, and that enduring the aggressiveness of social advocacy is really important, and that I should contribute somehow. I'm really glad that I can vote, and the only reason I can vote is because some insistent lady folks went to jail and took a few punches for me (yes this is more from The Feminine Mystique). What if they had all just meditated for change? I don't know. But I do feel like I have a positive framework for at least justifying/rationalizing my hermit-like behavior a little bit.

Fourth: made a friend! I had a really nice chit chat with someone from Canada who was really into Buddhism, and I got a really useful mini-lecture on Buddhist history and some nice feedback on searching for a path and what that means and that it's okay to shop around for a spiritual path, and all that stuff. We won't keep in touch or anything but it was a nice little two-hour friendship that made me feel pretty good about my personal struggle and that it's okay not to really know what's going on for now. I don't really know what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence, and that's what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence. It's sort of nice.

Went to Buddha Class, Can’t Wait to Make New Friends!

Two nights ago was Buddha class in a deli in New Paltz. It was really nice. A bunch of people came, like about ten or so, and the guy was really nice and gave a good talk about meditation and how it is really useful. Speaking of which, I am probably going to Buddha sleepover camp a few hours away from here next week for two nights, or one night and two days. I’m a little nervous about it, in sort of silly ways like will there be tea? How much bathroom privacy will I get? These things impact my desire to leave the house quite a bit.

I hung around a little to talk to the Buddha guy about Buddha stuff, and it was nice to get some stuff off my chest – what’s the difference between suppressing thoughts and “choosing” whether to think about them? What about the buying groceries thing, isn’t that impossible if you don’t see anything as good or bad anymore? I don’t get the whole “emptiness” thing yet, what’s the deal? Anyway he was really friendly and said he’s looking forward to talking about Buddha stuff more in the coming weeks, and boy oh boy will I be there in the front row with my hand raised. He did call me “cerebral” which I took in a flattering way, which is vanity, and totally not okay with Buddha, but oh well. One thing at a time.

And I’m working on my class write-up for the class I need to teach for my certification, and it’s pretty engaging, but also sort of difficult. I think I’m making the class too hard, putting too much stuff in it. I’ll try it out a few different ways and see how it goes.

Happy New Year, Homeslices

I'm having fun with my new standing date to practice my yoga-talking on my friends on Sunday mornings. We've done two so far. It's pretty great, since it's at a friend's mom's house, and the mom is way into having people over and made us buttery pastries one week and popovers with jam the next week. So we have a little yoga session in an empty room with a little faux gas fireplace thingy, and I burn a little sage and turn the heat up, and we get cozy and yoga and then have coffee and treats. Could anything make me feel more lucky to exist in this time and place? Not much. A free pony? Meh.

The teaching practice is very informative. My current two lab mice are pretty athletic and coordinated and flexible and incredibly game for anything, so in that sense I have it easy with them. Also I think maybe it's tough to speak up and tell me it's not going great, but I think I'm getting other indicators about what is and isn't working outside of needing them to tell me explicitly. E.g., if I say something and it doesn't produce in them the movement I am trying to evoke, well, that's bad. And the first week I came up short on time, and the second week I did way too much stuff and they were really beat and went over a little. And I was pretty sore, too, so I think we overdid it.

The temptation to say EVERYthing I have EVER thought of EVER is tough to resist. It's incredible to have a rapt audience in this way. The ego temptation is pretty severe. I want to blow hearts and break minds with the bestest things I've ever thought of. Ah but this isn't the point, I know, I know. So trying to provide guidance for people to have their own experience, not MY experience, is pretty hard. Also I really want to talk about all this stuff with someone, so having people who are interested in it to listen to it is exciting.

Buddha class is this Wednesday and I have a coupon for a bring-a-friend-for-free, and I'm thinking about who might want to go with me. Man oh man do I want someone to talk about everything with sometimes. I just need to find someone who is willing to read all the same books at the same time and also be into yoga and also want to talk to me. But this is harder than I think it should be. I have a few ideas of people to make into my friends who are into stuff. It's going to take some courting, though. I'm not such a good courter - I come off a little over eager. Gotta play it cool. There's other stuff I can do, though. Buddha class has talking in it, and a yoga place nearby has a Bhagavad Gita discussion thing, but it costs money. We'll see.

More on the lower back problem: it started hurting again, so I got a massage from my friend (barter, yay!), and today I went to a massage-chiropractor person, and maybe next week I'm going to go to an acupuncturist too. Machine-gun approach, baby. Gonna fix this thing. Then I'll be broke but whatever.

Snow Storm Mania: More on Good and Bad

Holy moly the snow in the Northeast is crazy!! It's so snow stormy that it's not even fun to romp around in. You could only walk away from the wind and then never get home anyway because it's impossible to see. Pretty awesome.

So I'm all cozy, house-sitting some cats and enjoying decadent thermostat settings of anywhere from 62 to 68. Treats for me. Too bad the sit-ees didn't leave a huge cache of marvelous treats in the fridge for the snow storm (although they did leave about a hundred batteries in case I wanted to play Wii . . . which I don't). I don't tend to check the weather, my stock reason being that it's pretty much the only thing I can ever be sure of actually happening, right now, in this moment, ever. Plus my friend rightly calls weather news "The Worry Channel" and I'm all set with that generally speaking. But knowing a storm is coming is handy. Oh, one of my only jokes also: do Xtian radio stations provide weather reports, or is that blasphemy?

So back to the good/bad issue I've been thinking about. Here is the problem: learning that anything is good means creating a seed of judgment in yourself that the opposite behavior is bad, and this is why we're all doomed to live in eternal strife/conflict. Take something like punctuality or sharing. We learn that it's polite to be on time and to share our toys. Well then, now we have some basis for thinking that anyone who is late or doesn't share toys is impolite - and we feel we have a basis for thinking of someone (or at least their behavior) as "bad." Then we get to feel offended or angry, because we know that being on time and sharing are "good," and being late and not sharing are "bad" (the issue of why we feel personal offense needs more examination I think, but another time). I mean, beyond good/bad, there are lots of substantive reasons for being on time - it's respectful of other people's time and expectations etc. And sharing is important because it fosters good will and what goes around comes around etc. But these more (barely) substantive explanations are still mired in good and bad and being judgmental. The ideal would be that I become someone who shares, but doesn't get mad or filled with hate at anyone who fails to share in the way I would. And that I am on time as much as possible, but I don't label as rude or disrespectful (aka "bad") someone who is perpetually late. Wouldn't this be nice? If we all had high standards for ourselves and infinite patience and forgiveness for others? Wouldn't the world be awesome? Wait a minute - let's change "patience and forgiveness" to something closer to total good natured indifference, and not even reach the mental state where we have to use our patience and forgiveness muscles, because this usually means something like "you're bad but I am overlooking it out of ego-driven magnanimity." I don't even want to get to that point. I just want to not even notice or be bothered if things are delayed or someone doesn't share.

How can someone be taught to behave very well without teaching them to judge the opposite behavior as being bad? It seems too abstract. When someone is late, so many things inform our anger: we're going to miss part of the show, or maybe not get tickets, or I'm hungry and we are holding dinner for the late person, or I settled into a state of mind in which I am Ready To Go and I had to put down my special projects in order to be on time and now because of this lateness I am sitting here in my nice clothes when I could have spent another half an hour in the garden and finished up the whatever I was doing. Okay so if all these things are attached to someone's timeliness, what is the state of mind that would permit someone to just not be bothered? You have to let go of EVERYTHING. It's fine if we miss the beginning of the show! It's fine if we can't get tickets, we'll do something else! It's fine if the gardening isn't done! It's even fine for me to sit here in my nice clothes with nothing to do but try not to get dirty! Yes I'm hungry and maybe there is emotions connected with the feeling of being hungry (crankiness!) but that's fine too! I don't even internalize a feeling of personal offense if the late person is so oblivious or self-absorbed to others' time that this inconvenience doesn't register for them! Phew. I mean, that is a LOT of stuff to be okay with. I think someone would have to be pretty evolved to abandon all those negative feelings in order to truly not care if someone else is late. This isn't easy. Imagine a kid believing that it doesn't matter if Susie is hogging the green crayon even though the kid really needs it for the shrubbery (and Susie totally knows this), or that it's fine if you miss the beginning of the movie. Seems unlikely.

What to do? I can't think of anything right now except to aspire to be cool with everything a la Buddha says so.

Heaven/Life Conundrum

I had dinner with some friends last night and one friend got to talking about "trans-humanism," which, I'll tell you upfront, I am not currently interested in wiki-ing up for my own edification at this moment. The way my friend explained the short version was that it's a way of viewing the future that is concerned with/interested in the implications of the manipulation of the genetic map of human beings and our relationship with machines and how to make peace happen in the future with all of our knowledge about how to monkey with ourselves, and imagines a "post-human" sort of state of society. Neat-o. At one point he said that we are basically the last generation of "regular humans," and it just sounded so freaking true when he said it that I was alarmed. I think we might be. I am in favor of being a regular human as much as possible.

Anyway, as Friend #1 explained, one of the happy potential implications of post-human or trans-humanist society is a state of being or consciousness that is only peaceful and transcends conflict and angst etc. Friend #2 at dinner said this sounded horrible, and that passion and struggle and pain and love and elation are the human experience and he wouldn't want a perfectly happy experience, bleh, no way. And then the question was this: so what do you imagine heaven to be like, Friend #2? Answer? Well, it's basically a peaceful state of consciousness transcending conflict and angst etc. So why wouldn't he want to experience in his earthly body the feeling of his imagined heaven? Why? Because we are so attached to our identities in this turmoil? Wrongly attached? I think Buddha would say so. Buddha says, as I understand it, that we have access to heaven right now and we choose suffering out of ignorance, confusing our delusions and distractions with our "self" - but do we prefer our ignorance (out of ignorance?)? Is the habit of longing for things and clinging to our pain so ingrained that we don't think we even want happiness? Do we think we have to experience earthly turmoil in order to enjoy heaven in a relative way? What is happening here? I'm not sure. It's pretty interesting.

Ego's Incessant Corruption

In my Buddha book and at Buddha class there is a meditation approach to cultivating love for the whole world and developing a real bodhicitta (wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings), wherein you think to yourself how much you want to remove the full range of suffering of everyone you love, and then eventually extend this wish to the whole world. Once this is sincere and you really get it then you are starting to get somewhere.

This is a helpful way of viewing the world for me sometimes. Like if there's a pushy person at the bank or something who might make me roll my eyes and think what a jerk they are - instead, I can think to myself that I wish for their suffering to end, for their feeling of impatience, their feeling that they have to be aggressive on their own behalf, for any feeling making their trip to the bank so negative to go away so they could be happier. I think it's a fair assumption that a host of unpleasant mental functions are contributing to people's behavior, since this is my personal experience too. I can cultivate a little compassion for people by referencing my own craziness, like when I want the line to move faster and someone decides to write a check, I might feel impatience swell up in me (not that much though because I am an exact-change-counter-outer in lines which takes a bit long sometimes so I am happy to hang for check-writers). For some people that impatience just rolls right out of their mouths or makes them push and shove or whatever. I can genuinely wish for their suffering to end the same way I wish all my trips into the world could be free from suffering.

Okay so there's the good side of this way of thinking. But there's a dark side. I am really challenged by my feelings of dislike for someone that I have to maintain a pleasant relationship with, and calling upon my "may your suffering end" technique has taken a dark turn. It feels like pity in my mind. I'd like my thought to be something like "I see a grain of my own suffering in your experience, and through us the suffering of the world, and I wish for your and the world's suffering to end, forever, amen." What it comes out as is more like "I wish for your suffering to end, because you are so freakin' insufferable and so unlikable that I feel bad for you, and I also feel kind of bad for me that I have to be around you, and if your suffering ends then maybe it would be less painful for me to be around you, amen." So that's the bad side of this way of thinking.

I'm just noticing how my own ego can corrupt a gesture of love and compassion into a way to feel superior to people - especially people I don't like, because believing they are lesser than I am by pitying them makes their unlikeability more palatable, and less threatening, or whatever. It's pretty impressive actually, the ego's cleverness. I don't even know if I'm using "ego" in the correct "Ego" way but I think that's what I'm driving at, etc. Anyway I'll have to spend a little mental energy on purifying this technique again for myself and not conflating it with pity and dislike and superiority.

What Happened Yesterday, Continued: What are you Talking About?

I was planning on going to a Buddha class last night in New Paltz until the phone-upgrade incident (post below) side-tracked me for an hour making me miss the class – but anyway I picked up my one Buddha book again yesterday and the day before, and thinking about going to class had me reminiscing a bit about the Buddha place in Brooklyn.

Once, the teacher asked us to identify some great source of distraction for us that keeps our minds frantic. One woman said “food.” And the teacher thought she meant the “I want treats” version of food, and we talked about that stuff, about craving and searching for something that we hope will make us happy, and how treats provide a goal to work toward that makes us feel happy. I assumed, however, that what the woman meant was the struggle to get and pay for food as part of the overall problem of survival, that the fear of dying cold, broke, starving, alone, and in pain was the main source of distraction for her mind. I think that’s what she meant. That’s what I wanted the teacher to talk about.

Another time the teacher asked what kind of fears we have. I wanted to say “dying cold, broke, starving, alone, and in pain,” but someone else beat me with a different question. This student said “not fulfilling my potential.” And the teacher picked this up and went with it, and it was pretty interesting and everything, but I also wanted to ask this student what she meant – what is “potential” and how would we “fulfill” it? Does she mean creating a great work? Fame, success, adulation, the execution of some nagging vision? I’m assuming the teacher probably talked about fulfilling our potential for compassion, love, and happiness, but I kind of think this lady was talking about being super rad in some vaguely powerful, socially recognizable, basically magazine-cover kind of way, and she was afraid she’d die without feeling like she really got it done in a way that satisfied her sense of self or ego or whatever. I assumed this because she was super tall, super pretty, definitely over 35, and not famous.

Isn’t it silly that I thought people were saying something different from what the teacher interpreted two different times? And silly that I imparted to the first lady my own ideas/fears, and imparted to the the second lady a pretty shallow personality (which maybe also was probably most likely um basically related to my own fears and insecurities and sometimes desire for recognition that I wanted the teacher to address)? Anyway everything really is only our heads. We hear what we want. I think the teacher was doing this too with the first lady, since he sometimes references treats as a weakness, and talks about getting older and chubbier and how it strikes at his vanity, and also has jars of jam and little chocolates on his shrine. We all have our own things.

Hounded

I went to Chile by myself for about 4 weeks in February of 2005. I have always had a vague sort of Latin-America-is-neat type of thing, and my college Spanish was pretty okay, and I had some money saved up and I wasn't getting any older etc etc.

I came home about a week early. I was supposed to stay a full month but I didn't make it. I was starting to feel insane and lonely and trapped in my head. In some way this was what I wanted - I wanted to be alone and feel like I knew myself and affirm some kind of self-sufficiency or independence of mind. But what I found, confronted with myself, by myself save for the hotel owners and waitresses, was not familiarity or a return to being, liberated from obligation, uninterrupted by context, but instead, a daily, lonely terror of boredom and self-loathing. Somewhere inside, I thought, I could reconnect to some nascent version of my identity that gazes contentedly out windows, feels no more severely than curious and happy wandering through new scenery, and has no worry about the future and no regret about the past. But being alone with my thoughts was too hard. Every single petty horror of my life up to that point chased me all day long, replaying over and over, sometimes with new clever ways I should have behaved thrown in for a bit of memory theater. My mind was swimming and churning so much that after a while, I couldn't even make sense of what I wanted to do with my day besides find breakfast and go to sleep. Did I feel like walking? Did I want to go to the museum in this town? Did I want to read a book, and could I find one in English ('cause screw practicing my Spanish, btw)? How about a movie? Which place for dinner? How do I even "know" how I "feel" or what I "want" to do? What is my compass? Who am I besides every stupid and horrible thing I've ever done? Every single inclination I might have had just felt so stupid, just some attempt to sustain the desperate, infinite distraction from myself. I couldn't wait to get back to my life and all the convenient distractions of it; the kitchen and cooking, my friends, some job to take up the hours of the day, anything but the endless walking in loops in my toxic brain.

So this is habit of mind for which I seek relief. This is what I want yoga or Buddhism to cure me of. And I believe that I can escape the prison of memory, and I can re-train myself to ruminate positive things, and learn to contribute only positive, helpful things to me and my loved ones and the world, AND ALL THAT STUFF. And while I am further along in my sense of confidence and worth and stuff than I was in 2005, what still troubles me most is the sustained effort of training my mind. It's so difficult. There is this pacing that I do that doesn't help me, and I know that working on my concentration, which would eventually result in meditation, is so clearly right in my reach, and I just have to sit down and dedicate a little sincere time and effort to it, and I will build up new habits of mind that will free me from myself, but it's hard. I get fatigued by trying to live purposefully, and sometimes all it feels like is the "righteous" version of traveling in Chile - instead of figuring out whether I want to go to the museum, I'm choosing books to read or yoga classes to attend, like the low-fat edition of everything else I've ever done. When does the distraction end and existence begin? When I've absorbed enough tools of positive action to put them to work? When I am more disciplined? When? How? I hope I am getting closer.

One Freakin' Thing at a Time

I was discussing yesterday with Friend the issue of submitting to an entire religion or philosophy whole heartedly, believing (and presumably also adhering to) every aspect of it, as opposed to taking what you want and not worrying too much about the rest. Friend suggested that maybe this was a Western thing, this feeling that participating in something that you only kind of mostly believe is insincere, or deceptive, or at least an incomplete experience. A spiritual path would be diluted if it were only guidelines, left to each semi-adherent to adjust it as s/he sees fit, no? What are you looking for if you want to keep your own ideas whole and just sort of be affected or moved by something - you're certainly not looking for change or for god, right?

Well, I don't know. I love that I can enjoy Buddhism without having to worry too much about samsara and karma. I love this so much that - bear with me here - I got myself all excited about going to divinity school. Really. I mean hell, why not? I'd love to study the Bible for reals, and if I can enjoy it for what it offers and shed the rest, well, that would be great! Actual Xtians already do this - it's not like all those Xtians wear strictly single-fiber clothes as the Bible commands, etc etc all that other crap that nobody pays attention to. As the secular world so frequently likes to point out to crazy bigoted fundamentalists, there's an awful lot of cherry picking of the Bible that goes on. And sometimes it's evil and used to justify meanness, but sometimes it's great - HERE is an awesome radio story about an evangelical preacher who decides that there is no hell. And his revelation is really persuasive and moving and makes me like Jesus so much more, and makes the crucifixion make so much sense that it goes beyond sensible and back to magical. But anyway thinking about the take-it-or-leave-it part of religion and philosophy made me excited about being able to actually enjoy Xtianity stuff (because whoa nelly believe you me normally I wouldn't really want to be associated with all the stuff that goes on under that umbrella), especially if I can just make it my own.

So yeah back to this - right now in my fantasy life if I could go to divinity school and become a pastor-type thing that would be awesome. Which at last brings me to my actual point: one freakin' thing at a time, pal. This is a kind of curse of the contemporary purposeless human (which is me, so maybe it's just me), this feeling that there is something really huge and complete that you can/should be working toward, and that whatever you're doing at the moment isn't really what you should be working on unless it's part of this bigger thing, and you should maybe hurry up and figure out what your bigger thing is so you can feel peacefully ready to die someday, and death, by the way, will happen before you know it. School is so handy for that feeling. You get to have the manageable task thing from semester to semester, and it's all part of Your Important Degree, and everyone agrees in our cultural that Education is Really Important, and it's just a highly credible long-term thing to be doing.

But right so with this potential new permissive kind of belief I started letting all these things about myself take form in a litte spirituality orb, adding pieces of my philosophical self (law degree! totally read part of a book by Aristotle that one time! I have completely heard of Plato and the Situationists!); my spiritual self (read most of a book by a real live Buddhist! totally learning about yoga! meditate sort of!); my other hobbies (playing music! and I took some Latin in college, those are totally religious things!); and my personality (kind of a talkative know-it-all, enjoy writing a blog, so perfect for a preacher-type!), and made a little fantasy about becoming a woman of the cloth and quoting Joseph Campbell and just digging life and having something really big to be working on, and feeling finally like all the freakin' hats I've tried on in the last 32 years will actually make one cohesive outfit. Of hats. Whatever.

Okay, slow down. Not even one third of the way through my yoga training. That half of that Aristotle book was kind of boring. Still have to finish the Buddha book anyway. Need to get a job. I sometimes can get myself worked up about a big purpose to the point that I can't even actually take the steps required to finish one tiny component part of the fantasy. It's like this: "I can't read this book on yoga, I'm too busy becoming a yogi." Anyone picking up what I'm putting down, here? So my mission for the foreseeable future is to do one thing at a time and actually enjoy it and not worry that too much time is passing without me making important strides toward my Real Big Purpose in life, and that I'm not losing time or progress or anything if I don't start on a Bible-reading regimen or start a philosophy book club or brush up on my Latin all by next month. Chillax. One freakin' thing at a time. My actual life in this actual moment is really nice and has the benefit of leading me toward something big, yoga teaching! That's big enough. Hell being happy is big enough. That's what I'm going to work on.

What is a Personality Trait?

So of course I like the promises of Buddhism and Yoga that happiness comes to the diligent practitioner. But the way this happiness is explained is sometimes confusing to me - it sounds like everything that I think of as making me who I am would disappear if I were to achieve this happiness, and that makes me nervous. I think the point is supposed to be that actually my inner essence would be illuminated as I distill and focus my mind, shedding delusions and revealing my Self to me and connecting to the universe etc., but it sound kind of scary. For example, here's something written by Sri Swami Satchidananda from the preface to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali:

"[Yoga's] goal is nothing less that the total transformation of a seemingly limited physical, mental and emotional person into a fully illumined, thoroughly harmonized and perfected being . . . "

okay sounds rad so far, but then this is the rest of the sentence:

" . . . from an individual with likes and dislikes, pains and pleasures, successes and failures, to a sage of permanent peace, joy, and selfless dedication to the entire creation."

So who would I be if I came to have no likes/dislikes, no pain/pleasure, and no success/failure? These are among the things that I identify as constituting who I "am" - sort of in the way that people might describe me to someone I know: "she likes music and cooking, quit her job and moved out of NYC this year, blah blah blah." Even if you take this kind of description one layer deeper, it still relates to likes/dislikes - "she respects discipline, and thinks that finding things funny makes everything better." Or something like that. That's actually kind of hard - to describe what I think might be me accurately. Probably because it's all delusion and my true self is hidden to me under layers of distraction, and when I do find my true self, there will be no words for it.

But I mean I'm pretty well mired down in the idea that I "am" what I "do" or "think" or "feel." (I know, I know, "You are not the body, you are not the mind" - but I don't totally feel it at this point since I'm a beginner) How would I make decisions if I had no likes or dislikes? What would my compass be? We guide ourselves through inclinations, which are informed by past feelings of pain/pleasure and success/failure - so how would I guide myself if my inclinations were neutralized by my own boundless joy? For sure, I want to be supremely happy, but I don't want to be a blank vessel of joy. Seriously, how boring. What do enlightened people talk about besides being enlightened? Would we have music, and art, and fiction? Well, yes, since monasteries are full of that stuff. How about roads? Well sure, necessity would still be addressed by communities of enlightened beings if they needed a good road to get to the water supply or whatever.

I did ask the Buddha man about this once a while ago, asking if Buddhism has room for me to want to learn Portuguese, to bake bread, or whatever, and he said sure, go for it - and that the real fantasy at the core of learning Portuguese and how to bake bread isn't those things themselves, but of inner peace. Like I don't picture myself baking bread all pissed off, I picture my happiness. It's attached to the bread making in my head, but it's still really about inner peace. Uh, writing that out makes me realize that I don't really understand what he meant.

And Iyengar also brings this up in Light on Life - he mentions that he had at least one opportunity to withdraw into monastic-type of life, but he declined. He opted for the life of a "householder" and all the attendant anxieties of survival and family, saying that it was just more suited for him, and practicing Yoga and finding happiness in the realm of a person with regular problems is actually kind of more satisfying and a greater accomplishment than being a dedicated monk-type. So maybe I can merge with the Universal Consciousness and still prefer almond croissants to chocolate ones, and want to buy new clothes, and think some bands are dumb and some aren't.

Anyway, I don't know, in some ways the promise of happiness sounds like whitewashing my whole brain. Maybe that's true, and maybe that's the whole point, but I'm a little scared of the idea of giving over to that completely. But then there's the "householder" thing that makes it seem like that's not necessary. Well if I did achieve some kind of enlightened state, I'm pretty sure I would be even more "who I am" but I guess I'm in the material world enough not to really know what that means.

Buddha Man Layin' Down Some Sick Wisdom

I went to the Buddha place in Prospect Heights that I like (it's the only one I've ever been to) last night and man oh man is that guy smooth. He has really learned to articulate the human experience in a way that shoots right into my guts. I wish I could just repeat the whole class right now, but re-stating his special understanding is pretty tough. Straight up wisdom, yo.

Last night was a lot about bodhichitta, the spontaneous wish to realize enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I don't think I have this wish sincerely inside me yet, or know if it will appear, but I don't think it matters. Bohichitta seems like a technical term, but the talk was about how we have a grain of Buddha inside of us already. We want to help others, like the people we love, remove their suffering - so we can build on that part of our nature to have love and compassion for all people. And how everyone we see is just like us, trying to be happy, but we all have delusions getting in the way of our happiness. And all the crazy things we do and fantasize about to try to find some peace for ourselves and how fruitless it always is, every time, but we keep doing them. Clicking on stuff on line, buying better furniture, constantly experiencing our dissatisfaction in life as a temporary state, after which some thing or purchase or new job or boyfriend will make us finally happy. And it just never happens. We never arrive into our happiness. We get glimpses of it, but it's not sustained. This and all the rest all makes such total sense to me that for the most part I believe Buddha knows exactly the prescription for my ills and I'm ready to follow orders.

With a small exception! So I read most of a book by the founder of this particular branch of Buddhism and wasn't really feelin' it regarding: karma, six levels of reincarnation, and this horrible description of being the womb that really disappointed me. So I asked the guy after class about all this - basically saying that my skeptical impulses with some of the more specific beliefs was distracting me, that I really dig the meditation and love and bliss stuff, but what can I do if I can't get into this other specific stuff? Buddha man of course said the perfect thing. Basically he said don't worry about it. Take what you want and let the rest sit on the back burner. Keep your doubt, it's fine. Treat karma metaphorically if you want. Six levels of suffering in samsara? You don't have to sign on to that - besides, there might be 30, it's just a framework. You don't have to believe everything, Buddha doesn't care.

Man was I relieved to hear this! I was more relieved than I even realized I wanted to be - I can still enjoy Buddhism without treating any particular thing as gospel. My friend asked me afterwards why I needed to hear that my doubt was okay from the Buddha guy, and it's a good question. I am always free to take what I like and leave the rest, in every aspect of life, so why the need to consult? I think it's because I like Buddhism, and knowing I'm welcome in it even if I am not ready to believe some stuff makes me like it more. Knowing that the teacher there himself sympathizes with my hesitancy and doesn't see it as a bar to my enjoying and benefiting from Buddhism is really reaffirming. It's so sensible, that finding happiness and extending love to others is the priority, and that if I'm on board for that aspect of it, then that's great. I love that.

Forgetfulness and Anxiety

A lot of the busy-ness of my mind has to do with fear of forgetting something. I use "fear" here pretty broadly, since I don't wish to forget to get milk on the way home, for example. I'm not really "scared" of forgetting the milk, since this is a pretty low-consequence obligation, at most resulting in a little disappointment or chagrin when I make coffee or tea in the morning and it won't be just exactly how I like it - but I still find the worry over whether I will remember to get the milk to be a "fearful" sensation.

But other obligations are of course more consequential. Fulfilling these obligations can implicate the security of one's livelihood, or mean disappointing one's friends, or really hold up the progress of something you have committed to and create more work for other people. The economic, reputational, and practical consequences of forgetfulness can be pretty inconvenient or unpleasant.

For me the anxiety I experience in anticipation of these potential consequences means I try hard not to forget what it is I have obliged myself to do - and this means I have a running checklist in my mind that is compulsively being checked off throughout the day. A little paranoid secretary in my head says "don't forget to get milk" over and over until I get the milk. But sometimes I forget to get the milk anyway, and then all day I've crowded my head with repetitive worry for nothing. Oh chagrin - worse chagrin than the consequence of forgetting the milk, actually.

This worry habit of mine really gets in the way of meditation. I fear forgetting. One goal of meditation is supposed to be gaining a sense of existence separate from "I" - and separate from all the things we attach to that "I" including, I assume, its obligations. Along with all the other near-impossibilities of meditation, I find it really hard to submit to the experience without "don't forget the milk" or "remember to call Susie" popping into my head over and over. I'm afraid successful meditation will make me so happy I don't remember to do anything, or who I am, or that I am supposed to call someone later. That's unlikely to happen, and I've never heard of that being one of the "dangers" of meditation, but it makes it impossible for me to live in the moment.

So how can I remember what I'm supposed to do and still give myself over to experiences of concentration that push out the weight and repetition of all my obligations? Write it down? No, then I just think "did I remember to write milk down?" Some kind of email prompting system? Again this kind of reminder is only as good as the data one inputs, which means there is still the worry of whether I've put in the right data. I want to be confident in giving myself permission to forget that I want to get milk, knowing that I will remember to get it once I have "returned" from a forgetting episode like yoga or meditation. It would be nice to just take care of things the second they arise in my head, but that would a weird, inefficient, and equally distracting way to live. Imagine getting up from a movie theater to go pick up milk. It doesn't make sense.

What to do? I don't know.

Too Vain for Meditation Books

Holy moley so I've started to read a Buddhist meditation book since, you know, knowing something about what you interested in is usually a good idea. I have minor beef with the title, though, which is "Transform Your Life." Too corny! Too self-help! I want a book titled "Serious Ideas for Truly Credible Thinkers." That's something I could take on the subway, or run into an old friend while carrying. (Even though, yes, I am reading it to help myself. Still, come on.)

But on to the real fun. In keeping with the Buddhism = life sucks model, the first hundred pages of this book are a non-stop description of the sadness in the world. The most upsetting so far is the discussion of old people and their physical deterioration and mental isolation, dying alone and wishing for company that never comes. Yeesh.

But the best so far is the story of human biological creation and how much we suffer just being conceived and carried around! Enjoy:

"Our home for nine months is this small, tightly compressed space full of unclean substances. It is like being squashed inside a small water tank full of filthy liquid with the lid tightly shut so that no air or light can come through. [para] While we are in our mother's womb . . . [w]e are extremely sensitive to everything our mother does. When she walks quickly, it feels as if we are falling from a high mountain and we are terrified. If she has sexual intercourse, it feels as if we are being crushed and suffocated between two huge weights and we panic. . . . [para] When we are emerging from our mother's womb, it feels as if we are being forced through a narrow crevice between two hard rocks, and when we are newly born our body is so delicate that any kind of contact is painful."

Okay, so there are a few things about this that bother me. I mean, babies definitely have anguish and stuff, no doubt - but I am convinced, first of all, that the womb is probably great. I think it must be a warm, suspended, peaceful, magical place that we are all really sad to have left. Everyone curls up fetal sometimes because it's the most comforting thing to do with ourselves, and that's what we like. Second, I am not sure anyone, even a Buddhist master, can remember this experience, and I would like to decline the invitation to put such a horrible spin on something I have no memory of. Wow, that's going to be one of my new General Policies. Note to self: no making up upsetting memories.

I get that the whole set up here in this book, that life is miserable, is meant to emphasize that meditation/nirvana is the only way to eliminate our suffering, but this seems a little much. We'll see what happens in the rest of the book.