I found my cafe the first week I was here. It just happened to be around the corner from the grocery store so I sat down. The waiter was really friendly and corrected my french in the best possible way - laughingly. Now that I'm a regular, I don’t even have to practice the french necessary to order the coffee. I sit down and two minutes later - a cafe creme appears on my table. Yet, I seem to understand and speak more French at this cafe than any other place in the city.
I write a little while and watch the people walk by.
The cafe is across from L’hotel de Sully and bike tours drive by and stop occasionally. The other day the tour guide said something in English to the group while pointing to the building and a man walked by and yelled ‘C’est pas vrai!’ (It’s not true!) and chuckled to himself mischievously.
One guy is my favorite. His job appears to be taking free newspapers and handing them out like they’re Christmas presents. The first time I noticed him he strode out of the cafe and shouted to a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. ‘Salut! Ma petite copine!’ A tiny hand shot out of the stroller and he handed the little girl a paper. She clutched it like a prize on her lap and as she was pushed away, she turned to him and piped out ‘Salut!’
This morning at the cafe, I practiced my French with the waiter. Topics included the holiday (Toussaint), a particularly charming dog at the table next to mine, and our respective moods. The newspaper guy walked into the cafe and was given a rousing standing ovation. I couldn’t hear what they were applauding him for but I agreed. Well done, sir.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Absolutes and the shared reality
I arrived in Paris a few days ago and will be staying for a few months. I've written before about my experiences in France, especially in regard to language and trying to find a balanced way to share a reality.
My experience so far has been different from the one I described in my last post. This is probably partially because I have been jetlagged like crazy. I'm walking around the city and my main reaction is that it is comfortable and accessible and natural. I may get lost and not know the best route to get where I'm going, but that's not a big deal.
I'm also speaking French for the smaller exchanges - buying a coffee, baguette or groceries. In these exchanges, I try to answer questions instead of just caving and saying I don't understand. Like the day I arrived. I had slept 2 hours when I first arrived in Paris, then I woke up with a completely unwanted second wind that was entirely related to daylight and had nothing to do with my mind or body being ready to interact with the world, let alone in a different language.
But I went out anyway. Because the weather was nice and I had missed Paris since my last visit. I stopped in a coffeeshop to get a coffee and asked for an iced cafe latte, adding 'it's possible?' because ice is not common over here. The barista assured me it was possible and then asked if I wanted ______ in my latte. I don't like any extra stuff in my latte so I said no. And he looked at me, very curiously and kindly. Eventually, he appeared to make an executive decision and began making my coffee. It was very good. Only later did it occur to me that he may have been asking me what kind of milk I wanted in my latte.
The difference between this time and the last couple times I've been here, is I feel like I have time to figure things out. Time to learn. Time to figure out how and what I want to say. Time to figure out what is being said around me.
The thing that always caused me stress was when I felt like I was supposed to speak perfectly right away. I was supposed to be able to understand everything that was said to me. And this pressure that I put on myself made it so that I felt I couldn't say anything, couldn't understand anything. If I was dealing with absolutes of language, I was definitely leaning toward the lower end of the scale.
That's the problem with absolutes. If we are thinking in this way, we feel we have to identify with one absolute or another, when our reality is actually somewhere in the middle. When I recognize my capacity in speaking and understanding, I can start from there and work at getting better. If I fall into absolute thinking, I have to ascribe to 'understanding nothing' and I will just rely on what has always worked for me in the past (English) and not try to find a different way to interact.
And beyond the absolute thinking that I need to speak fluent French to be understood, there was the absolute thinking that language was the only way to be connected. I was actually thinking this way despite many experiences where I felt very connected to people who don't speak my language. Connected through feeling, humor or shared experiences.
The other night I was at a small party, the only native english speaker in a room full of French people. I laughed harder than I have in a long time. It is possible that I spoke only five or six french words all night. It is also possible that they were all curse words.
My experience so far has been different from the one I described in my last post. This is probably partially because I have been jetlagged like crazy. I'm walking around the city and my main reaction is that it is comfortable and accessible and natural. I may get lost and not know the best route to get where I'm going, but that's not a big deal.
I'm also speaking French for the smaller exchanges - buying a coffee, baguette or groceries. In these exchanges, I try to answer questions instead of just caving and saying I don't understand. Like the day I arrived. I had slept 2 hours when I first arrived in Paris, then I woke up with a completely unwanted second wind that was entirely related to daylight and had nothing to do with my mind or body being ready to interact with the world, let alone in a different language.
But I went out anyway. Because the weather was nice and I had missed Paris since my last visit. I stopped in a coffeeshop to get a coffee and asked for an iced cafe latte, adding 'it's possible?' because ice is not common over here. The barista assured me it was possible and then asked if I wanted ______ in my latte. I don't like any extra stuff in my latte so I said no. And he looked at me, very curiously and kindly. Eventually, he appeared to make an executive decision and began making my coffee. It was very good. Only later did it occur to me that he may have been asking me what kind of milk I wanted in my latte.
The difference between this time and the last couple times I've been here, is I feel like I have time to figure things out. Time to learn. Time to figure out how and what I want to say. Time to figure out what is being said around me.
The thing that always caused me stress was when I felt like I was supposed to speak perfectly right away. I was supposed to be able to understand everything that was said to me. And this pressure that I put on myself made it so that I felt I couldn't say anything, couldn't understand anything. If I was dealing with absolutes of language, I was definitely leaning toward the lower end of the scale.
That's the problem with absolutes. If we are thinking in this way, we feel we have to identify with one absolute or another, when our reality is actually somewhere in the middle. When I recognize my capacity in speaking and understanding, I can start from there and work at getting better. If I fall into absolute thinking, I have to ascribe to 'understanding nothing' and I will just rely on what has always worked for me in the past (English) and not try to find a different way to interact.
And beyond the absolute thinking that I need to speak fluent French to be understood, there was the absolute thinking that language was the only way to be connected. I was actually thinking this way despite many experiences where I felt very connected to people who don't speak my language. Connected through feeling, humor or shared experiences.
The other night I was at a small party, the only native english speaker in a room full of French people. I laughed harder than I have in a long time. It is possible that I spoke only five or six french words all night. It is also possible that they were all curse words.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Bravery
In 2007, I was traveling in Europe and planned to meet the German Sangha in Hamburg for a week-long teaching by the Dalai Lama. I spent a week at an organic farm in Normandy and then went to Paris for a night before taking the train to Hamburg.
When I arrived in Hamburg I wandered around the city for a few hours before figuring out how to get to the school where the sangha was staying. I had researched the location a little bit before leaving the states and I had a pretty good map of Hamburg so I found it without difficulty. When I got to the school it was empty, everyone was at the public teaching. So I dropped my bags off and wandered around Hamburg some more. When I was walking back to the school, I met the Sangha on the street, walking to the subway to go to a dharma talk at a University. I joined them and talked with some of my American friends, who are monks. On the subway platform, I met my teacher and spoke to him for a little while. He asked where I had come from. This was a reasonable question, considering I am an American and I just kind of appeared on a subway platform in Hamburg. I told him about my travels and how I had gotten to Hamburg. A woman in the sangha that I had met a few times before overheard me and exclaimed "You did all this traveling by yourself!? You are so brave!"
In typical zen master fashion, my teacher smiled silently at me and I laughed. 'No, Anna, that part wasn't brave. This part here, this is me being brave.'
But I understood where she was coming from. To her it was natural to be grounded in a community, to feel comforted, safe and supported by a group. So the idea of traveling alone seemed brave to her. Yet I am the opposite so my independent traveling isn't brave, it's my nature - what comes naturally to me. What is difficult for me is to balance my natural state of autonomy within a group dynamic.
Thinking about this exchange made me look up the definition of bravery, which led to the definition of courage - "the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear"
In the above definition of courage (by way of bravery), I don't know that absence of fear is always accurate. It's natural to be afraid of a situation we see as potentially difficult. Yet when we recognize the value of going through that experience and choose to put ourselves in a potentially uncomfortable situation to experience a perceived benefit, perhaps the fear is overcome.
It strikes me that we don't always know when someone is being brave. Unless we know someone well, we can't know what situations they might interpret as potentially difficult, dangerous or painful. Like Anna, we might see them doing something that we find daring, yet sometimes it's the subtler bravery that isn't apparent. Staying with a large group of people for a week, I not only had to face my habits of autonomy and introversion, I also had to face my perception that I am powerless to navigate the emotional currents in a group dynamic. I often feel overpowered by them and tangled up. To someone like Anna, my discomfort might seem completely ridiculous and so it would never occur to her that bravery might be necessary for me to spend a lot of time with a group of people I care about.
The thing is, when I think about traveling, I don't think of it as being difficult or dangerous. Navigating a foreign city is thrilling to me because there are no emotional stakes, which are the ones I worry about the most. The worst that could happen is I get lost. And I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure that out. When traveling alone there is no need to temper my autonomy, in fact - that autonomy is a strength!
During that week I was able to strike a balance between myself and others. There were times when I felt overwhelmed by the group or overwhelmed by being in a crowd of 20,000 people listening to the Dalai Lama. The trick I found was to be compassionate to my fear yet try not to lose sight of the benefit of facing it. To find a middle ground that was comfortable to me.
Because the teaching was in Tibetan, almost everyone was given a personal radio with different channels for each translated language. When I felt like I needed a little space, I would go out to the area around the stadium and lay on the grass, under a tree, listening to the teaching on the headset. At the lunchbreak, I often joined some of my friends in the sangha for an ice cream cone at a nearby shop. Having recognized my fear and faced it compassionately, I was able to experience the benefit of the group dynamic that I usually perceive as difficult.
And this is the benefit of bravery - to experience something new, something that answers fear with another possible reality.
When I arrived in Hamburg I wandered around the city for a few hours before figuring out how to get to the school where the sangha was staying. I had researched the location a little bit before leaving the states and I had a pretty good map of Hamburg so I found it without difficulty. When I got to the school it was empty, everyone was at the public teaching. So I dropped my bags off and wandered around Hamburg some more. When I was walking back to the school, I met the Sangha on the street, walking to the subway to go to a dharma talk at a University. I joined them and talked with some of my American friends, who are monks. On the subway platform, I met my teacher and spoke to him for a little while. He asked where I had come from. This was a reasonable question, considering I am an American and I just kind of appeared on a subway platform in Hamburg. I told him about my travels and how I had gotten to Hamburg. A woman in the sangha that I had met a few times before overheard me and exclaimed "You did all this traveling by yourself!? You are so brave!"
In typical zen master fashion, my teacher smiled silently at me and I laughed. 'No, Anna, that part wasn't brave. This part here, this is me being brave.'
But I understood where she was coming from. To her it was natural to be grounded in a community, to feel comforted, safe and supported by a group. So the idea of traveling alone seemed brave to her. Yet I am the opposite so my independent traveling isn't brave, it's my nature - what comes naturally to me. What is difficult for me is to balance my natural state of autonomy within a group dynamic.
Thinking about this exchange made me look up the definition of bravery, which led to the definition of courage - "the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear"
In the above definition of courage (by way of bravery), I don't know that absence of fear is always accurate. It's natural to be afraid of a situation we see as potentially difficult. Yet when we recognize the value of going through that experience and choose to put ourselves in a potentially uncomfortable situation to experience a perceived benefit, perhaps the fear is overcome.
It strikes me that we don't always know when someone is being brave. Unless we know someone well, we can't know what situations they might interpret as potentially difficult, dangerous or painful. Like Anna, we might see them doing something that we find daring, yet sometimes it's the subtler bravery that isn't apparent. Staying with a large group of people for a week, I not only had to face my habits of autonomy and introversion, I also had to face my perception that I am powerless to navigate the emotional currents in a group dynamic. I often feel overpowered by them and tangled up. To someone like Anna, my discomfort might seem completely ridiculous and so it would never occur to her that bravery might be necessary for me to spend a lot of time with a group of people I care about.
The thing is, when I think about traveling, I don't think of it as being difficult or dangerous. Navigating a foreign city is thrilling to me because there are no emotional stakes, which are the ones I worry about the most. The worst that could happen is I get lost. And I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure that out. When traveling alone there is no need to temper my autonomy, in fact - that autonomy is a strength!
During that week I was able to strike a balance between myself and others. There were times when I felt overwhelmed by the group or overwhelmed by being in a crowd of 20,000 people listening to the Dalai Lama. The trick I found was to be compassionate to my fear yet try not to lose sight of the benefit of facing it. To find a middle ground that was comfortable to me.
Because the teaching was in Tibetan, almost everyone was given a personal radio with different channels for each translated language. When I felt like I needed a little space, I would go out to the area around the stadium and lay on the grass, under a tree, listening to the teaching on the headset. At the lunchbreak, I often joined some of my friends in the sangha for an ice cream cone at a nearby shop. Having recognized my fear and faced it compassionately, I was able to experience the benefit of the group dynamic that I usually perceive as difficult.
And this is the benefit of bravery - to experience something new, something that answers fear with another possible reality.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Faith
When I was ten or eleven years old, while driving in his car, I had a conversation with my dad that had a big impact on my spiritual curiosity. I had been thinking a lot about death and more importantly, what happens after we die. In Catholic School we had been taught about heaven, hell and purgatory but they seemed so abstract. I asked him what he thought happened after we died. He said something along the lines of 'I don't know. Either there's a heaven and we go there or else there's nothing and that's it - that's the end.' This answer blew my mind. Not because it was something I hadn't already considered, but because he was saying it instead of just handing me the usual Catholic rhetoric that we both had been raised by. This lack of certainty was jarring at first. I said 'But isn't that scary, that we could die and just stop existing?' he said, with typical levity I attribute to his Irish ancestry, 'If we don't exist anymore, we won't be there to be bothered by that.'
(It strikes me as I remember this that some of the best conversations I've had with my dad have occurred while driving somewhere.)
After the initial shock of this statement wore off, I found his answer kind of liberating. Not in the idea that I would have have a reprieve from existential questions when I no longer existed, but that there wasn't one fixed idea I was supposed to comply with. I felt freed to question and consider other possibilities than those offered by the Catholic faith. Which was good, because it had always been my natural tendency. The summer before, I had stayed awake at night, literally giving myself vertigo trying to understand the concept of infinity.
Recently I encountered the work of a poet I was immediately struck with, Arundhati Subramanium. While searching for her books online, I discovered that she had written a book about Buddha. Intrigued, I bought it and enjoyed her approach to the Buddha's life - a mixture of myths and history, her personal experience with Buddhism and an analysis of Buddhist philosophy. Then, I hit a passage that stopped me. She mentioned faith in connection to Buddhism. (I would quote the passage, but I can't seem to find it, even after skimming the book again twice.) My mind balked.
The word faith itself made me uncomfortable. In my mind, it was associated with a kind of lobotomy, a negation of the intellect, a naive submission to some invisible authority. And that wasn't at all how I related to Buddhism. I took a break from the book for a bit. I wanted to swim around in my idea of faith - to feel what my concept of it was before I returned to her point of view.
I had always believed that Buddhism was the spiritual path that worked for me because it didn't demand faith. I've always looked at the spiritual side of my life as being a personal thing, like my favorite color or food preferences. When I meet people who don't consider themselves spiritual, that makes sense to me in the same way it does that I don't like pasta but most people do. We're just different. Different things work for us. I don't have any faith in the color blue. I just like it. It resonates with me so I'm comfortable when I'm wearing it.
I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an athiest. It was a really interesting conversation in that it gave us each the space to explain our point of view, our experiences and preferences without feeling we had to convince the other. He said that to him, we're all like toasters and when we're plugged in, we function. When we're unplugged/die, we don't work anymore. We're just a toaster. Having had this conversation in a different sense at the age of ten/eleven, I found that my own perspective had changed. I said 'I don't think we're the toaster, I think we're the electricity.'
This perspective came in part from the Buddhist philosophy but more directly, from experiences I've had throughout my life, especially receiving and giving energywork like Reiki or IET. Yet I understood that his point was valid as well. That my perspective was valid to me based on my experiences and interpretation of those experiences and he, not sharing those experiences/interpreting the same way, was perfectly reasonable to assume we are toasters.
Obviously, because I teach energywork I believe in its power. And because I participated in a refuge ceremony to become a Buddhist, I believe in that spiritual path. I don't do these things lightly or with an idea that they'll prove themselves later and I'll be rewarded for my faith in them. I do them because they resonate with me and feel valid on a deep level, on a personal level.
Still a bit rattled by the pairing of the words 'faith' and 'buddhism', I did some research.
Faith (saddha/sraddha) is an important Buddha's teaching element in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. The Sanskrit word sraddha is translated as faith; the original word has trust, perseverance, humility and steady effort connotations. In contrast to Western notions of faith, sraddha implies thorough reasoning and accumulated experience.
That last sentence eased my mind. Further:
saddhā , ( Pāli: “faith”: ) Sanskrit Śrāddha, in Buddhism, the initial acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings, prior to the acquisition of right understanding and right thought. Buddhism does not rely on supernatural authority or the word of the Buddha but claims rather that its teachings can all be experientially verified. The act of entering onto the Eightfold Path (the Buddhist system of spiritual progress) involves, however, a provisional acceptance, through faith, of the Buddha and his teachings that is later confirmed by direct experience.
Ok, this I could agree with. My concept of faith was as an ending point, a place where questioning is no longer possible or tolerated. This idea of faith being necessary as a 'provisional acceptance'...sure, I can get behind that.
Returning to 'The Book of Buddha' I found several passages which illustrated this definition.
The Buddha speaks to us because he tells us what we know intuitively to be true. At the same time he does not ask you to drown your rational mind either. There is nothing anti-intellectual about the buddha's stance. (.... )he does not ask for our unswerving obedience or any extravagant act of undying faith. He does not ask for blind faith in scripture, uncritical allegiance to tradition, or self-abnegating devotion to a master. He simply never stretches the limits of our credulity.
...Significantly Buddha does not sideline the role of the intellect or demand blind faith from the seeker. Buddhist thought describes three graded levels of understanding that broadly seem to correspond to the distinction between information, knowledge and wisdom. The first stage is the understanding that is the result of hearing, the second is understanding through cognition and the loftiest stage is wisdom through experience.(...)a complete internalization of the idea, when metaphysics has become part of the marrow, understanding a matter of the gut.
Reading this, I felt an echo of the liberation I felt as a kid in the car with my dad. My truth is that in many ways I am straddling the line between information and knowledge, in a few places I've made forays into wisdom. As much as I might have wanted some definitive answer as a kid, I would have still questioned and felt that curiosity threatened by a pressure to have faith, to believe someone else's definitive answer. I prefer this path - a provisional acceptance from which I attempt my own direct experience.
(It strikes me as I remember this that some of the best conversations I've had with my dad have occurred while driving somewhere.)
After the initial shock of this statement wore off, I found his answer kind of liberating. Not in the idea that I would have have a reprieve from existential questions when I no longer existed, but that there wasn't one fixed idea I was supposed to comply with. I felt freed to question and consider other possibilities than those offered by the Catholic faith. Which was good, because it had always been my natural tendency. The summer before, I had stayed awake at night, literally giving myself vertigo trying to understand the concept of infinity.
Recently I encountered the work of a poet I was immediately struck with, Arundhati Subramanium. While searching for her books online, I discovered that she had written a book about Buddha. Intrigued, I bought it and enjoyed her approach to the Buddha's life - a mixture of myths and history, her personal experience with Buddhism and an analysis of Buddhist philosophy. Then, I hit a passage that stopped me. She mentioned faith in connection to Buddhism. (I would quote the passage, but I can't seem to find it, even after skimming the book again twice.) My mind balked.
The word faith itself made me uncomfortable. In my mind, it was associated with a kind of lobotomy, a negation of the intellect, a naive submission to some invisible authority. And that wasn't at all how I related to Buddhism. I took a break from the book for a bit. I wanted to swim around in my idea of faith - to feel what my concept of it was before I returned to her point of view.
I had always believed that Buddhism was the spiritual path that worked for me because it didn't demand faith. I've always looked at the spiritual side of my life as being a personal thing, like my favorite color or food preferences. When I meet people who don't consider themselves spiritual, that makes sense to me in the same way it does that I don't like pasta but most people do. We're just different. Different things work for us. I don't have any faith in the color blue. I just like it. It resonates with me so I'm comfortable when I'm wearing it.
I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an athiest. It was a really interesting conversation in that it gave us each the space to explain our point of view, our experiences and preferences without feeling we had to convince the other. He said that to him, we're all like toasters and when we're plugged in, we function. When we're unplugged/die, we don't work anymore. We're just a toaster. Having had this conversation in a different sense at the age of ten/eleven, I found that my own perspective had changed. I said 'I don't think we're the toaster, I think we're the electricity.'
This perspective came in part from the Buddhist philosophy but more directly, from experiences I've had throughout my life, especially receiving and giving energywork like Reiki or IET. Yet I understood that his point was valid as well. That my perspective was valid to me based on my experiences and interpretation of those experiences and he, not sharing those experiences/interpreting the same way, was perfectly reasonable to assume we are toasters.
Obviously, because I teach energywork I believe in its power. And because I participated in a refuge ceremony to become a Buddhist, I believe in that spiritual path. I don't do these things lightly or with an idea that they'll prove themselves later and I'll be rewarded for my faith in them. I do them because they resonate with me and feel valid on a deep level, on a personal level.
Still a bit rattled by the pairing of the words 'faith' and 'buddhism', I did some research.
Faith (saddha/sraddha) is an important Buddha's teaching element in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. The Sanskrit word sraddha is translated as faith; the original word has trust, perseverance, humility and steady effort connotations. In contrast to Western notions of faith, sraddha implies thorough reasoning and accumulated experience.
That last sentence eased my mind. Further:
saddhā , ( Pāli: “faith”: ) Sanskrit Śrāddha, in Buddhism, the initial acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings, prior to the acquisition of right understanding and right thought. Buddhism does not rely on supernatural authority or the word of the Buddha but claims rather that its teachings can all be experientially verified. The act of entering onto the Eightfold Path (the Buddhist system of spiritual progress) involves, however, a provisional acceptance, through faith, of the Buddha and his teachings that is later confirmed by direct experience.
Ok, this I could agree with. My concept of faith was as an ending point, a place where questioning is no longer possible or tolerated. This idea of faith being necessary as a 'provisional acceptance'...sure, I can get behind that.
Returning to 'The Book of Buddha' I found several passages which illustrated this definition.
The Buddha speaks to us because he tells us what we know intuitively to be true. At the same time he does not ask you to drown your rational mind either. There is nothing anti-intellectual about the buddha's stance. (.... )he does not ask for our unswerving obedience or any extravagant act of undying faith. He does not ask for blind faith in scripture, uncritical allegiance to tradition, or self-abnegating devotion to a master. He simply never stretches the limits of our credulity.
...Significantly Buddha does not sideline the role of the intellect or demand blind faith from the seeker. Buddhist thought describes three graded levels of understanding that broadly seem to correspond to the distinction between information, knowledge and wisdom. The first stage is the understanding that is the result of hearing, the second is understanding through cognition and the loftiest stage is wisdom through experience.(...)a complete internalization of the idea, when metaphysics has become part of the marrow, understanding a matter of the gut.
Reading this, I felt an echo of the liberation I felt as a kid in the car with my dad. My truth is that in many ways I am straddling the line between information and knowledge, in a few places I've made forays into wisdom. As much as I might have wanted some definitive answer as a kid, I would have still questioned and felt that curiosity threatened by a pressure to have faith, to believe someone else's definitive answer. I prefer this path - a provisional acceptance from which I attempt my own direct experience.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Duality
When I was 18, I got a tattoo on the inside of my ankle. It's a very simple design, two small flowers intertwined. Any tattoo gotten at age 18 might seem childish and regrettable 16 years later. And it's true that the design is definitely less sophisticated than one I might choose now. Yet the meaning of the design still resonates with me and I actually don't regret having gotten it.
Throughout my senior year of high school, I doodled that image on notebooks while I should have been paying attention to teachers. Instead, I was often in my own thoughts. I had been reading a lot of Carl Jung and was fascinated with his ideas about individuation - the anima, animus, the shadow self, these parts of ourselves that we separate and keep divided. This division was familiar to me and the idea of some internal union was fascinating.
Astrologically speaking, I'm prone to duality. Geminis are described as being able to see two sides of one situation, to accept the duality of a situation as a matter of course. They tend to be analytical and enjoy an intellectual understanding of things on a conscious level. This very blog is proof of that in myself.
Further, my moon and ascendant are in Pisces which tends to explore the more emotional, psychological and subconscious elements of existence. Symbology and intuition are the preferred methods of understanding. Perhaps because of this side of me, I was able to be open to energywork and to accept it based on feeling as easily as if it was intellectually proven.
While it's easy for me to acknowledge both of these 'sides' of me, the difficulty is sometimes in figuring out the balance between the two and hopefully, the place where they merge into a whole. Perhaps because I've been interested in this for 16 years, I see it in many things. In spirituality, the balance between the 'self' and the 'universe' - how is it possible to feel part of everything without denying the individual experience?
The closest I've come to an answer has been through artistic expression. In literature, I'm always impressed by books that blend everyday details and interactions with deeper, existential truths. In art, I am struck by artists who express themselves individually and yet the product is something that resonates beyond those individual details and hits a universal experience that others can share.
Despite my analytical nature, it's my habit to prefer the gestalt to the details, the feeling over the 'proof'. Only recently have I begun to recognize that the little, seemingly mundane details are not at odds with the whole. They don't disprove it. They offer a physically manifested expression of it. Without the artists' perspective and individual expression, the universal remains remote. Without the details about a characters physical surroundings and daily interactions, his existential struggles are disembodied, ghostly.
I once wrote a blog post about sentimentality - how I put so much worth in the banana bread I make for my friends, the scarf my mother gave me. I think it's from this place that I do that. There is a desire to have a physical proof of an intangible experience- a blending of the outer and inner world. And yet my mindset has been that they are separate - that there is no merging point. There is banana bread and there is love. So when the banana bread burns or the scarf gets lost, I feel divided, unable to latch on to the world around me.
The trick in all of this seems to be recognizing that the details, the small things...they don't have to be perfect, godlike, some total representation of an entire experience. And they are also not trivial, meaningless and shallow. When I put too much importance in them or too little, I fail to recognize them as a merging point - one out of infinite possible, simple expressions of something larger.
I sometimes forget about this tattoo. Usually until some toddler points it out and asks me if I drew on myself. (next inevitable question, 'if you can draw on yourself, why can't I draw on myself?') I don't think it's a perfect representation of the idea behind it. I don't think it's necessarily beautiful in and of itself. And yet, I've never regretted it. In itself, it's ink on skin. It's also the physical manifestation of a question, an intangible experience I've had for 16 years.
I don't mind it being permanent, because this question, this effort to find a merging point, is indelible in the deepest, invisible parts of me.
Throughout my senior year of high school, I doodled that image on notebooks while I should have been paying attention to teachers. Instead, I was often in my own thoughts. I had been reading a lot of Carl Jung and was fascinated with his ideas about individuation - the anima, animus, the shadow self, these parts of ourselves that we separate and keep divided. This division was familiar to me and the idea of some internal union was fascinating.
Astrologically speaking, I'm prone to duality. Geminis are described as being able to see two sides of one situation, to accept the duality of a situation as a matter of course. They tend to be analytical and enjoy an intellectual understanding of things on a conscious level. This very blog is proof of that in myself.
Further, my moon and ascendant are in Pisces which tends to explore the more emotional, psychological and subconscious elements of existence. Symbology and intuition are the preferred methods of understanding. Perhaps because of this side of me, I was able to be open to energywork and to accept it based on feeling as easily as if it was intellectually proven.
While it's easy for me to acknowledge both of these 'sides' of me, the difficulty is sometimes in figuring out the balance between the two and hopefully, the place where they merge into a whole. Perhaps because I've been interested in this for 16 years, I see it in many things. In spirituality, the balance between the 'self' and the 'universe' - how is it possible to feel part of everything without denying the individual experience?
The closest I've come to an answer has been through artistic expression. In literature, I'm always impressed by books that blend everyday details and interactions with deeper, existential truths. In art, I am struck by artists who express themselves individually and yet the product is something that resonates beyond those individual details and hits a universal experience that others can share.
Despite my analytical nature, it's my habit to prefer the gestalt to the details, the feeling over the 'proof'. Only recently have I begun to recognize that the little, seemingly mundane details are not at odds with the whole. They don't disprove it. They offer a physically manifested expression of it. Without the artists' perspective and individual expression, the universal remains remote. Without the details about a characters physical surroundings and daily interactions, his existential struggles are disembodied, ghostly.
I once wrote a blog post about sentimentality - how I put so much worth in the banana bread I make for my friends, the scarf my mother gave me. I think it's from this place that I do that. There is a desire to have a physical proof of an intangible experience- a blending of the outer and inner world. And yet my mindset has been that they are separate - that there is no merging point. There is banana bread and there is love. So when the banana bread burns or the scarf gets lost, I feel divided, unable to latch on to the world around me.
The trick in all of this seems to be recognizing that the details, the small things...they don't have to be perfect, godlike, some total representation of an entire experience. And they are also not trivial, meaningless and shallow. When I put too much importance in them or too little, I fail to recognize them as a merging point - one out of infinite possible, simple expressions of something larger.
I sometimes forget about this tattoo. Usually until some toddler points it out and asks me if I drew on myself. (next inevitable question, 'if you can draw on yourself, why can't I draw on myself?') I don't think it's a perfect representation of the idea behind it. I don't think it's necessarily beautiful in and of itself. And yet, I've never regretted it. In itself, it's ink on skin. It's also the physical manifestation of a question, an intangible experience I've had for 16 years.
I don't mind it being permanent, because this question, this effort to find a merging point, is indelible in the deepest, invisible parts of me.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Trust
During the refuge ceremony I wrote about in yesterday's post, each person taking refuge was given a name. The first word of the name is considered the overall strength of the sangha's generation. For my generation the word is 'Hue' which means wisdom. The second word is the individual's greatest weakness which, if addressed, could become their greatest strength. Maybe conversely, it could be their greatest strength, which if not harnessed and used properly, could become their greatest weakness. Mine is 'Tin' which means 'trust'. When my teacher gave me this name, he said that I should trust with wisdom but also trust in my wisdom.
Who needs a koan when there's stuff like this to think about?
In the energywork I practice, mistrust is held in the third eye chakra, which governs perception. Often, people who experienced betrayal or trauma hold a lot of mistrust in this chakra and their perception of others and the world is colored by that mistrust. I think the more trusting we were when we were betrayed/traumatized, the more mistrust is created.
And it makes sense.
As a kid I went through traumatic experiences where someone I trusted acted in a way that was completely unexpected and dangerous to me. And especially because they were two totally unrelated experiences, my perception afterwards was that pretty much everyone can become batshit crazy and/or violent with no warning, for no known reason. This mistrust protected me from then on, in a sense. Slightly distant and independent became my standard way of interacting with people. Which sucked, because in general I like people and am curious about them and I like feeling close to them. It just didn't seem safe.
Because this mistrust is in the third eye, there can be a habit of trying to read people, intuit how and when they are going to act in a way that will be threatening. But it clouds the actual perception of people, of situations. We end up seeing what we're afraid of, whether it's there or not, so we have a reason to stay mistrustful and keep our guard up.
In 2005, two years before I was officially given my Dharma name, I went through an extended crash course in trust. I was traveling around Europe for two months, working on organic farms. For some reason, the idea of living with total strangers, 1000s of miles away from my home didn't faze me. I was confident in my ability to remain distant and independent, which in my mind meant safe.
And for the most part, it worked. But then I ended up at a place that had been completely misrepresented with a guy who had completely misrepresented himself. On top of that, he was actively antagonistic and creepy. So I left.
I walked for 6 hours through the French countryside, declining kind offers for rides to the train station. Each person who stopped along the road told me, first in french, then in english, that the train was very far. They were correct. But I was not about to let my guard down. I wasn't about to trust anyone, even for a ride to the train station.
When I eventually arrived at the train station, it was 11pm so there were no trains running. I stayed in a hotel and the next morning I took a train to Paris and from there, a train to Prague - the cheapest place I could think of to stay for two weeks. In Prague I kind of huddled into myself. I wrote, I meditated, I walked around and stared at statues. Met people at hostels, stayed distant yet interested. Then, it was time to go to my next scheduled stay - in Girona Spain. I was supposed to stay at an apartment there with a couple - Xavier and Alicia.
Back in Paris, considering the train to Barcelona, my nerves failed me. I called USairways and asked how much it would cost to change my flight home to earlier, like that day. Then, I decided to go to Spain anyway. Traveling south through France, my nerves got worse and worse and I began to get physically sick. My sinuses were a mess, my head ached. The more I worried, the worse I felt. The train ended in Montpellier, where I was supposed to transfer to another train to Barcelona. But somehow I had missed it and the next one wouldn't leave til morning. I was a full on mess at this point. Sick of carrying my bag with me, I left it on a bench while I went to talk to the ticket lady. The French soldiers who were patrolling the station weren't happy about that and asked me if it was my bag when I returned to it. Normally, I might be a little nervous about being questioned by guys with guns. Not then. All my nerves were shot to hell. I looked at them levelly. 'yep. that's my bag.' I didn't care if someone stole it. Didn't care if the police confiscated it. I was exhausted.
At this point two girls from Belgium came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go dancing with them. True story. I can't imagine what vibe I was giving off that said 'ready to party.' I explained that I was sick and stranded in Montpellier til morning, when I'd be going to Barcelona. I further explained that I was exhausted and sick of doing things like travel planning and therefore, I was just going to sit here, in the train station, until the train to Barcelona arrived.
They began to look at the situation differently. 'You can't do that! It's dangerous! You have to get a hotel room!'. Everything is dangerous, I thought. It's exhausting. I'm just going to sit here, on my bag, in the Montpellier train station.
They picked up my bag and ordered me to follow them out of the train station. I followed them to a street of hotels where they spoke to the desk clerk and arranged a discounted room price, since it was so late and they weren't going to fill their rooms anyway. I watched in wonder.
'Ok - you're set. So, now do you want to go dancing?'
I didn't. But I was extremely grateful and thanked them very much for their help.
And then I passed out.
The next morning, I got a bus to Barcelona. The radio was playing 'Should I stay or should I go' by the Clash. Even in my weariest moments, I am always a fan of an appropriate song for an occasion. The further south the bus went, the closer to some unfamiliar destination, the sicker I got. And then Barcelona. I couldn't find a map to save my life. I couldn't find anyone who spoke English. I was about to pull a Montpellier and sit on my bag until something else happened, when I turned around and realized I was standing in front of the 'English as a second language' school. They were very happy to give me directions in English.
But then, the train from Barcelona to Girona. The further north the train went, the sicker I got. What the hell was I doing? These people could be axe murders.
In the train station in Girona I met Xavier and his friend Nani. I was cautious at first, but they seemed normal. Well no, that's not true. They seemed interesting and comical, but harmless. We drove to Xavier and Alicia's apartment in the middle of Girona. Alicia was sweet and welcoming. The apartment was awesome and ancient. I was still sick and exhausted and nerve-riddled. Alicia insisted I go lay down before dinner. In the loft above the living room, I crashed on a bed and tried to sleep. Instead, I felt my nerves begin to unwind as I listened to Xavier and Alicia talk and make dinner. They were listening to the radio - Neil Young's Harvest Moon. It felt the opposite of dangerous.
When I'm thinking about the koan of my dharma name - this trip offers a lot of insight. My belief as a kid was that I had to make a judgement about people, who was safe and who wasn't. And I failed because I trusted people who were dangerous. So I never wanted to fail again and be put in that situation, I wanted to judge correctly - to recognize danger before it go too close. But that perception kept me in a state of distance and mistrust.
As an adult, I had to compassionately recognize that while there was a reason for this habitual mistrust, it wasn't an accurate perception of the world around me, the people around me. And I had to recognize that my definition of trust was too absolute. I trusted people based on the circumstance, their role in my life, their social position. To trust with wisdom, I had to trust based on experience. But to actually have an experience that was in the present moment, I had to let go of mistrust and see what was actually there. It may be that the experience or the prolonged experience of interacting with someone leads me to distrust them. Or it may be that the experience or prolonged experience of knowing someone leads me to trust them. But I'll never know unless I allow myself that experience. And I have to remember that trust is not faith, it's not blind. It's not all-in or all-out. There are degrees of trust.
Of all the people I met while I was in Europe that year, it's Xavier and Alicia that I am still friends with. I visit them everytime I go to Europe. I'm glad I was able to be open to the experience of getting to know them, despite the near nervous system failure I had on my way there.
Who needs a koan when there's stuff like this to think about?
In the energywork I practice, mistrust is held in the third eye chakra, which governs perception. Often, people who experienced betrayal or trauma hold a lot of mistrust in this chakra and their perception of others and the world is colored by that mistrust. I think the more trusting we were when we were betrayed/traumatized, the more mistrust is created.
And it makes sense.
As a kid I went through traumatic experiences where someone I trusted acted in a way that was completely unexpected and dangerous to me. And especially because they were two totally unrelated experiences, my perception afterwards was that pretty much everyone can become batshit crazy and/or violent with no warning, for no known reason. This mistrust protected me from then on, in a sense. Slightly distant and independent became my standard way of interacting with people. Which sucked, because in general I like people and am curious about them and I like feeling close to them. It just didn't seem safe.
Because this mistrust is in the third eye, there can be a habit of trying to read people, intuit how and when they are going to act in a way that will be threatening. But it clouds the actual perception of people, of situations. We end up seeing what we're afraid of, whether it's there or not, so we have a reason to stay mistrustful and keep our guard up.
In 2005, two years before I was officially given my Dharma name, I went through an extended crash course in trust. I was traveling around Europe for two months, working on organic farms. For some reason, the idea of living with total strangers, 1000s of miles away from my home didn't faze me. I was confident in my ability to remain distant and independent, which in my mind meant safe.
And for the most part, it worked. But then I ended up at a place that had been completely misrepresented with a guy who had completely misrepresented himself. On top of that, he was actively antagonistic and creepy. So I left.
I walked for 6 hours through the French countryside, declining kind offers for rides to the train station. Each person who stopped along the road told me, first in french, then in english, that the train was very far. They were correct. But I was not about to let my guard down. I wasn't about to trust anyone, even for a ride to the train station.
When I eventually arrived at the train station, it was 11pm so there were no trains running. I stayed in a hotel and the next morning I took a train to Paris and from there, a train to Prague - the cheapest place I could think of to stay for two weeks. In Prague I kind of huddled into myself. I wrote, I meditated, I walked around and stared at statues. Met people at hostels, stayed distant yet interested. Then, it was time to go to my next scheduled stay - in Girona Spain. I was supposed to stay at an apartment there with a couple - Xavier and Alicia.
Back in Paris, considering the train to Barcelona, my nerves failed me. I called USairways and asked how much it would cost to change my flight home to earlier, like that day. Then, I decided to go to Spain anyway. Traveling south through France, my nerves got worse and worse and I began to get physically sick. My sinuses were a mess, my head ached. The more I worried, the worse I felt. The train ended in Montpellier, where I was supposed to transfer to another train to Barcelona. But somehow I had missed it and the next one wouldn't leave til morning. I was a full on mess at this point. Sick of carrying my bag with me, I left it on a bench while I went to talk to the ticket lady. The French soldiers who were patrolling the station weren't happy about that and asked me if it was my bag when I returned to it. Normally, I might be a little nervous about being questioned by guys with guns. Not then. All my nerves were shot to hell. I looked at them levelly. 'yep. that's my bag.' I didn't care if someone stole it. Didn't care if the police confiscated it. I was exhausted.
At this point two girls from Belgium came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go dancing with them. True story. I can't imagine what vibe I was giving off that said 'ready to party.' I explained that I was sick and stranded in Montpellier til morning, when I'd be going to Barcelona. I further explained that I was exhausted and sick of doing things like travel planning and therefore, I was just going to sit here, in the train station, until the train to Barcelona arrived.
They began to look at the situation differently. 'You can't do that! It's dangerous! You have to get a hotel room!'. Everything is dangerous, I thought. It's exhausting. I'm just going to sit here, on my bag, in the Montpellier train station.
They picked up my bag and ordered me to follow them out of the train station. I followed them to a street of hotels where they spoke to the desk clerk and arranged a discounted room price, since it was so late and they weren't going to fill their rooms anyway. I watched in wonder.
'Ok - you're set. So, now do you want to go dancing?'
I didn't. But I was extremely grateful and thanked them very much for their help.
And then I passed out.
The next morning, I got a bus to Barcelona. The radio was playing 'Should I stay or should I go' by the Clash. Even in my weariest moments, I am always a fan of an appropriate song for an occasion. The further south the bus went, the closer to some unfamiliar destination, the sicker I got. And then Barcelona. I couldn't find a map to save my life. I couldn't find anyone who spoke English. I was about to pull a Montpellier and sit on my bag until something else happened, when I turned around and realized I was standing in front of the 'English as a second language' school. They were very happy to give me directions in English.
But then, the train from Barcelona to Girona. The further north the train went, the sicker I got. What the hell was I doing? These people could be axe murders.
In the train station in Girona I met Xavier and his friend Nani. I was cautious at first, but they seemed normal. Well no, that's not true. They seemed interesting and comical, but harmless. We drove to Xavier and Alicia's apartment in the middle of Girona. Alicia was sweet and welcoming. The apartment was awesome and ancient. I was still sick and exhausted and nerve-riddled. Alicia insisted I go lay down before dinner. In the loft above the living room, I crashed on a bed and tried to sleep. Instead, I felt my nerves begin to unwind as I listened to Xavier and Alicia talk and make dinner. They were listening to the radio - Neil Young's Harvest Moon. It felt the opposite of dangerous.
When I'm thinking about the koan of my dharma name - this trip offers a lot of insight. My belief as a kid was that I had to make a judgement about people, who was safe and who wasn't. And I failed because I trusted people who were dangerous. So I never wanted to fail again and be put in that situation, I wanted to judge correctly - to recognize danger before it go too close. But that perception kept me in a state of distance and mistrust.
As an adult, I had to compassionately recognize that while there was a reason for this habitual mistrust, it wasn't an accurate perception of the world around me, the people around me. And I had to recognize that my definition of trust was too absolute. I trusted people based on the circumstance, their role in my life, their social position. To trust with wisdom, I had to trust based on experience. But to actually have an experience that was in the present moment, I had to let go of mistrust and see what was actually there. It may be that the experience or the prolonged experience of interacting with someone leads me to distrust them. Or it may be that the experience or prolonged experience of knowing someone leads me to trust them. But I'll never know unless I allow myself that experience. And I have to remember that trust is not faith, it's not blind. It's not all-in or all-out. There are degrees of trust.
Of all the people I met while I was in Europe that year, it's Xavier and Alicia that I am still friends with. I visit them everytime I go to Europe. I'm glad I was able to be open to the experience of getting to know them, despite the near nervous system failure I had on my way there.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sangha
When I was growing up, my older brother and I had to go to mass every Sunday. The rest of our family didn't go - the younger siblings being too small to attend without our parents who didn't want to go to Mass. For some reason, my Dad seemed to think that my brother's and my attendance was crucial to our moral and spiritual development.
This mandated attendance usually involved both of us standing in the very back of the church, as far back as we could get while technically being 'in church'. I would look out over the congregation the way people look at those optical illusion illustrations, where if you soften your gaze enough, some other picture becomes clear. I could do that for 45 minutes. Lost in my thoughts, appreciating the stained glass windows, willfully disregarding all the memorized-into-nonsense prayers.
My brother, being two years older and far more openly rebellious, would stand with arms crossed, sulking or glaring. The very skate punk insignia that covered his mostly black clothing was an all encompassing thumbed nose at all he surveyed.
One Sunday, Father Brennan walked into the back of the church and stopped next to Pat. Conversationally, he said 'They love you in there too, you know.'
Having been raised to be especially respectful to priests and nuns, my brother shrugged and mumbled. Meanwhile, I was drawn out of my reveries by that interaction. I felt embarassment for the priest who spoke so earnestly but had completely misread the situation and mostly - uncontrollable hilarity. I willed myself not to laugh. I refused to look at my brother even after Father Brennan walked away because I knew that when I did, I would lose my shit laughing at him.
We left at the earliest possible time we could while still saying we had been to mass. Outside I immediately started in 'Dude. All this time, you've been hating going to mass. But it's cool now. Problem solved. They love you in there too.'
Being teenagers, we were especially mistrustful of institutions and viewed them and their congregants with a Holden Caulfield-ish hypersensitivity to phoniness and hypocrisy. And to our skeptical eyes, there was a whole lot of phoniness going on there. Not to mention a pretty big disconnect between the idea of the grand scope of Jesus' love and the little insignificant rituals of sitting, standing, kneeling and repeating prayers. From the back of that church, the ritual of mass looked like a collection of small, pixelated images that were obscuring the larger image I wanted to connect to.
More than ten years later, after a few years of working on my individual Buddhist practice, I decided to move to a monastery in Germany for three months to find some kind of structure and support for my practice. The 'official' ceremony for becoming a Buddhist is called 'taking refuge'. The idea is that you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha offers refuge/support in his example of embodying Buddha Nature or the god in all of us. The Dharma offers refuge as a philosophy or lesson. Sangha means 'a community with a common goal, vision or purpose.' And the support it gives is in the day to day efforts to apply Dharma and to recognize our Buddha Nature.
Here again was this idea of a collection of individuals as a support and kind of conduit to spirituality. Yet it was easier for me to feel the validity of that idea within the sanghas in Philadelphia and Germany. Inside these groups, I didn't see them as phony or hypocritical, I saw them as I saw myself - people who aspired to connect with love and spirituality yet who were naturally and humanly flawed and lible to act in ways that weren't quite in keeping with their highest aspirations. Those very flaws, that very humanity was what allowed me to feel connected to them in a way that I didn't feel connected to Buddha or Dharma. There seemed to be a lot of perfection going on there.Whereas our sangha was quite imperfect.
Here again was this idea of a collection of individuals as a support and kind of conduit to spirituality. Yet it was easier for me to feel the validity of that idea within the sanghas in Philadelphia and Germany. Inside these groups, I didn't see them as phony or hypocritical, I saw them as I saw myself - people who aspired to connect with love and spirituality yet who were naturally and humanly flawed and lible to act in ways that weren't quite in keeping with their highest aspirations. Those very flaws, that very humanity was what allowed me to feel connected to them in a way that I didn't feel connected to Buddha or Dharma. There seemed to be a lot of perfection going on there.Whereas our sangha was quite imperfect.
The funny thing about my time in that monastery is that half the time, someone in the sangha was freaking out or acting in a way that was so ego based it seemed the opposite of everything Buddhist. And the structured/organized religion of Buddhism is not completely without monks or nuns who abuse power and act in ways that are hypocritical.
As a 14 year old, standing in the back of the Buddha Hall, I would have disregarded the people as little pixelated images, totally insignificant and unrelated to the concept of Buddhism. I wouldn't have cared if a monk had come up to me and said 'They love you in there too.' Who wants to be loved by hypocritical, crazy people? And what does that have to do with God? I would have softened my gaze, disconnected from the group and tried to see the bigger picture that was separate and better than the group of individuals and their seemingly unrelated actions.
Honestly, sometimes I still do. But then I'm reminded that I am one of those little pixelated images that makes up the bigger picture. And the times that I've felt most connected to the bigger picture, it's because I opened myself up to the humanness of myself and the humanness of others.
From the back of the church, outside looking in, I might see a group of crazy people, or I might see a bigger, seemingly more important image. But inside, among the group, I can feel it. And in the mixture of imperfections and repeated efforts to let go of fear and identify with love and compassion, I can feel the point where the human experience meets the spiritual experience.
And it's in experience that we gain wisdom, which is a deeper knowledge than any we could gain from staying detached and trying to critically and conceptually understand.
And it's in experience that we gain wisdom, which is a deeper knowledge than any we could gain from staying detached and trying to critically and conceptually understand.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Curiosity
So, I've recently become addicted to the show Friday Night Lights. Friends of mine have been recommending this show for ages but not being a huge fan of tv, Texas or high school football, I didn't consider it. When Netflix recommended it to me based on my interest in Mad Men, I was curious enough to watch the first episode. What could those two shows possibly have in common?
Turns out - they do have something in common. Character development.
I'm a big fan of character development. Being more of a reader than a tv viewer, when I think of character development, I think of reading War and Peace and making judgments about the characters only to have those judgments be completely reversed by the end of the book. I loved that because it made the characters seem real. People are more than who we see in the moment. They change and reveal different facets of themselves when they're put in different situations.
Curiosity is a founding principle in Buddhism. The ego judges because it wants to believe it understands a situation and can protect itself. So it creates a judgment that it understands. Something concrete to react to. These judgments are like walls. They make us feel safe and secure, but they obscure the larger picture, they block the path to further exploration. When we allow ourselves to be curious we have the opportunity to learn more. But to learn more we have to let our judgments be loose so they can change and adapt. We have to be willing to go beyond the judgments to see what else is there.
Curiosity is what originally led me to Buddhism. A Zen Master was giving a lecture at Penn Hospital and I was invited to attend. Not looking for a spiritual practice at the time, I went because I was curious. What did a Zen Master look like? What would he talk about? At the lecture I found myself agreeing with much of the Dharma Talk given that night. Where many religions focus on faith, Buddhism focuses on curiosity. Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we tend to suffer in the same ways repeatedly? How exactly does my ego work? What sets it off? How does it react?
These questions allow us to develop our own character. We understand why we react the way we do to certain people, certain situations. Curiosity allows us to let go of the judgments we have about ourselves. The ones that make us feel safe. 'I'm a weak person. That's just how I am.' or 'I'm always the responsible one.' The more tightly we hold onto these judgements we have about ourselves or others, the harder it is to see the other aspects.
By questioning what we 'know' or what we assume, we have the chance to really understand someone deeply. To understand ourselves deeply.
And that's when the story gets interesting.
Turns out - they do have something in common. Character development.
I'm a big fan of character development. Being more of a reader than a tv viewer, when I think of character development, I think of reading War and Peace and making judgments about the characters only to have those judgments be completely reversed by the end of the book. I loved that because it made the characters seem real. People are more than who we see in the moment. They change and reveal different facets of themselves when they're put in different situations.
Curiosity is a founding principle in Buddhism. The ego judges because it wants to believe it understands a situation and can protect itself. So it creates a judgment that it understands. Something concrete to react to. These judgments are like walls. They make us feel safe and secure, but they obscure the larger picture, they block the path to further exploration. When we allow ourselves to be curious we have the opportunity to learn more. But to learn more we have to let our judgments be loose so they can change and adapt. We have to be willing to go beyond the judgments to see what else is there.
Curiosity is what originally led me to Buddhism. A Zen Master was giving a lecture at Penn Hospital and I was invited to attend. Not looking for a spiritual practice at the time, I went because I was curious. What did a Zen Master look like? What would he talk about? At the lecture I found myself agreeing with much of the Dharma Talk given that night. Where many religions focus on faith, Buddhism focuses on curiosity. Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we tend to suffer in the same ways repeatedly? How exactly does my ego work? What sets it off? How does it react?
These questions allow us to develop our own character. We understand why we react the way we do to certain people, certain situations. Curiosity allows us to let go of the judgments we have about ourselves. The ones that make us feel safe. 'I'm a weak person. That's just how I am.' or 'I'm always the responsible one.' The more tightly we hold onto these judgements we have about ourselves or others, the harder it is to see the other aspects.
By questioning what we 'know' or what we assume, we have the chance to really understand someone deeply. To understand ourselves deeply.
And that's when the story gets interesting.
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