equal
At least in my life, and probably the lives of others, meditation seems to be the Buddhist equivalent to sex. I notice myself talking and thinking about it a lot more than actually doing it.
At least in my life, and probably the lives of others, meditation seems to be the Buddhist equivalent to sex. I notice myself talking and thinking about it a lot more than actually doing it.
Attending a Ngondro lesson the other night I learned about the ten non-virtuous actions known in Buddhism:
Although they look similar, these are a bit different from the Christian/Jew/Muslim Ten Commandments. Sure, you can go to Hell as a result, but that is not guaranteed nor is it the end of the story.
Standing at the back, listening to the Wailin' Jennys, three ordinary looking women with extraordinary voices, I suddenly stopped. Granted I do that all the time – when I meditate, during my walk to work – today when I was biking home and absorbing the weak light emanating from the gray skies. However, just like Jack Kornfield promised, sometimes when we stop bits of wisdom poke through without us even trying. Not always, which is why we need to meditate, bike, and go to concerts – the more opportunity has a chance to knock, the more frequently it will.
During this pause I realized that this is IT. I have been in the “in-between-space” for a year and a half now. Life doesn’t start when I leave the country, it doesn’t wait until I live with my family and definitely not when I meet “Mr. right”. Life is being with right now, whether it is a Mr., a friend, a concert, or a job. This is tough to comprehend as a goal-oriented person in a goal-oriented culture with goal-oriented friends and family.
Life is going to awesome concerts for free because I volunteer, it is getting a bitchin’ personal tour of the Capital and learning a bit more Minnesota History (and politics), a sweet bike ride home on a warm gray day. Life is sharing a movie with two girlfriends and chuckling about naked-cowboys with wicked grins over free margaritas afterwards. It is going to the same job for the 350th time. It is finishing one book and starting another, trying to share the book, an awesome ginger jam, or a personal problem with friends. It is getting over old-loves and wondering about future ones. This is life. It will be the same whether I am in India, England or the Czech Republic.
Life is also feeling three steps behind all the time. As I pointed out earlier, it is Dukkha, the feeling of being out of place, of always missing a note or being slightly out of tune. It is the hopes and dreams that when I leave this planet I will leave the world a better place – perhaps I won’t get as much done as Eleanor Roosevelt did but if I am a happier person in the meantime I will be fine with this. Sigh… even after all the places I have been, all the adventures I have. None is ever more difficult than the present.
Commonly interpreted as "Life is Suffering," it took me awhile to agree with this first noble truth. Although introduced to it at a young age, it was several years before I experienced enough ups and downs to agree that while there is certainly joy, there is also regular sorrow. A lot of time would have been saved, had I read this passage first, instead of being told the abbreviated version:
Dukkha, then, names the pain that to some degree colors all finite existence. The word's constructive implications come to light when we discover that it was used in Pali to refer to wheels whose axles were off center or bones that had slipped from their sockets. (A modern metaphor might be a shopping cart we try to steer from the wrong end.) The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.
It isn't so much that life is suffering, but rather that we suffer because life is off center. Reading onto the next page, the book explains why life goes off center so frequently:
The Buddha taught that what we usually think of as our "self" is actually an ever-changing product of five co-conditioning components (skandhas), namely, body, sensations, perceptions, dispositional tendencies, and consciousness. Because they themselves are instinctively but ignorantly grasping for a center, a "self" that is not there, they themselves are unsatisfying. "The five groups of grasping are themselves dukkha,"says the Buddha.
We feel off kilter because haven't got a real kilter to stand on in the first place. What may be "your center" one moment, may be something completely different the next. However, there is some continuity that leads us to recall who we were and plan who we will be. Scientists have been trying to find the root of the assumed identity:
The medial prefrontal cortex could be continuously stitching together a sense of who we are. Debra A. Gusnard of Washington University and her co-workers have investigated what occurs in the brain when it is at rest - that is, not engaged in any particular task. It turns out that the medial prefrontal cortex becomes more active at rest than during many kinds of thinking.
"Most of the time we daydream - we think about something that happened to us or what we think about other people. All this involves self-reflection,"Heatherton says.
Little Christian kids think they have it bad - worrying about going to hell and all. Ha! Little Buddhist kids worry about the fact that they don't exist.
I sort of kind of went to church today. I mean it wasn't Christian and I wasn't inside but it was Sunday, there was prayer and meditation and lots and lots of people.
Have any of you heard complaints about how there is no "rite of passage" for young folks in the U.S. these days? Sure we graduate from high school and if we are lucky maybe even from college, and there is always our first paycheck, but none of those are a solid, confidence boosters. In many cultures when a person is ready to enter adulthood he or she faces a test that may be more difficult than most of what an adult actually faces, thus after passing, they know themselves better and feel able to deal with what ever lies ahead, with out resorting to drugs or other escape measures.