One of the wonderful things about Buddhism is that its teachings can range from the very simplest and most purely experiential to the most intensely scholarly and philosophical--without in either case losing anything of their meaning or value. I've been thinking about this recently with the approaches of four very different teachers sitting on my desk, awaiting my attention. There's a CD filled with short dharma talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, abbot of the Metta Forest Monastery, covering every aspect of the human experience. There's a book by his student (and my friend and fellow sangha member,) Dr. Barbara Wright, describing her application of "metta"--the loving-kindness practice--to interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution. It's based on her board game, Metta. And there's Still the Mind, an audiobook by Bhodipaksa, whose website Wildmind is one of the great online resources for information and guidance about the Buddhist practice.
More of these in the coming days, as time allows. For today, there's Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity by B. Alan Wallace, a pioneering work of careful scholarship that seeks a new basis and rationale for a science of the mind. Exploring, first, the long history of religious meditation practice in both East and West from its ancient origins, Wallace then turns his attention to the attempts of scientists and philosophers, in more recent centuries, to describe the workings of the mind through the lens of a rational, empirical methodology--attempts that have consistently run up against the rocks of the seemingly impenetrable subjective/objective divide.
The main body of his book is devoted to Wallace's own attempt to break through that obstacle, in a series of alternating chapters that "balance" theory and practice in ever-deepening and more carefully refined stages of awareness, awareness of awareness, and observing the awareness of awareness. Following him along with his work is akin to watching the most skilled of surgeons with his scalpel, separating out intricate tissues and pausing to examine each of them under the microscope of consciousness. It's fascinating, intense, and infinitely detailed mind-work.
Be it said, then, that this book requires a lot of patience. "Mind in the Balance" is not one for the slacker. Be it said, too, that I am still in the process of reading it. I cannot claim to have fully plumbed its depths. Because it demands the reader's highly focused concentration and active collaboration, it is not a fast read. Wallace asks a lot of his reader, who must--if he is to read the book as it is intended to be read--learn some pretty skilled meditation practices along the way, and spend more than a minimal amount of time experiencing them before proceeding to the theoretical examination of their implications for Wallace's argument. I'll be the first to admit that I find the practices challenging, to say the least--and I have been at the practice for a number of years.
But if the author asks a lot, he gives a lot in return for the reader's patience and collaboration. This careful, methodical study of workings of the mind is in fact the essence of the Buddha's teachings, as I understand them. Remarkably--but perhaps not surprisingly--it coincides in the most important places with what Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Dr. Wright, and Bhodipaksa have to say. It's simply a different presentation from theirs, a different way--the way of the scholar and the rationalist thinker. At the center of it all is the Buddha and the ineffable depth of his compassion, its radical simplicity and inexhaustible wisdom.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Yet More Stuff: Grey Gardens
Speaking of stuff...
We chose Grey Gardens the other night from our video on demand selection, and were much taken with superb performances by both Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.
Not having seen the original 1975 documentary on which the film was based--the study of two frighteningly eccentric women, the aunt and first cousin (both Edith Bouvier Beales) of Jackie Kennedy Onassis--we were disturbed by the pathetic depths to which these recluses sank. What once had been a lovely home in the Hamptons turned, over the years, into a filthy hovel, overrun by raccoons and semi feral cats. As portrayed in the remake, this mutually destructive mother and daughter pair, once wealthy New York socialites, fancied themselves as misunderstood creative talents who had been denied the opportunities they felt they deserved as younger women and spent a lifetime immersed in pathological self-pity.
I have always found obsession to be at once fascinating and appaling. I have written a good deal about art collectors, over the years, whose obsession is most frequently a positive one. But I sometimes think that there is not that much difference between the multimillionaire who crams whole mansions and warehouses with art and the bag lady who accumulates her scavengings from the street and pushes them around in a shopping cart. The Bouvier women clearly never threw anything away, unless to add to the growing piles of garbage in their house. But I'm not sure that, in their case, it was the hoarder's instinct. I read recently about an Englishman who died amongst the mountains of trash in his own house, because he had closed off the last of his tunnels leading to the door and simply couldn't find the exit.
My sense from "Grey Gardens" is that the Bouvier women did not hold on to stuff for the same reasons--or out of the same madness--but because they couldn't be bothered to clean up or throw it out. Their life was such an illusion of grandeur that they were unable to see the revolting squalor in which they actually lived. Edie the elder clearly believed in herself as the grande dame, above the mundanities of little people, right up until the day she died. Edie the younger escaped from her psychic imprisonment for long enough, it seems, to realize the fantasy projection of herself in a cabaret performance which must have seemed like a mockery to those who saw it.
Let's not be too fast in pitying or mocking these lost souls. They would not be so disturbing if they did not hold the mirror up and offer us a look at our own obsessions and our own self-delusions. To paraphrase that most obsessive of novelists, Gustave Flaubert, "Edie Bouvier, c'est moi."
We chose Grey Gardens the other night from our video on demand selection, and were much taken with superb performances by both Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.
Not having seen the original 1975 documentary on which the film was based--the study of two frighteningly eccentric women, the aunt and first cousin (both Edith Bouvier Beales) of Jackie Kennedy Onassis--we were disturbed by the pathetic depths to which these recluses sank. What once had been a lovely home in the Hamptons turned, over the years, into a filthy hovel, overrun by raccoons and semi feral cats. As portrayed in the remake, this mutually destructive mother and daughter pair, once wealthy New York socialites, fancied themselves as misunderstood creative talents who had been denied the opportunities they felt they deserved as younger women and spent a lifetime immersed in pathological self-pity.
I have always found obsession to be at once fascinating and appaling. I have written a good deal about art collectors, over the years, whose obsession is most frequently a positive one. But I sometimes think that there is not that much difference between the multimillionaire who crams whole mansions and warehouses with art and the bag lady who accumulates her scavengings from the street and pushes them around in a shopping cart. The Bouvier women clearly never threw anything away, unless to add to the growing piles of garbage in their house. But I'm not sure that, in their case, it was the hoarder's instinct. I read recently about an Englishman who died amongst the mountains of trash in his own house, because he had closed off the last of his tunnels leading to the door and simply couldn't find the exit.
My sense from "Grey Gardens" is that the Bouvier women did not hold on to stuff for the same reasons--or out of the same madness--but because they couldn't be bothered to clean up or throw it out. Their life was such an illusion of grandeur that they were unable to see the revolting squalor in which they actually lived. Edie the elder clearly believed in herself as the grande dame, above the mundanities of little people, right up until the day she died. Edie the younger escaped from her psychic imprisonment for long enough, it seems, to realize the fantasy projection of herself in a cabaret performance which must have seemed like a mockery to those who saw it.
Let's not be too fast in pitying or mocking these lost souls. They would not be so disturbing if they did not hold the mirror up and offer us a look at our own obsessions and our own self-delusions. To paraphrase that most obsessive of novelists, Gustave Flaubert, "Edie Bouvier, c'est moi."
Sculpture: A Note
(FOR SOME REASON BEST KNOWN TO BLOGGER, THIS DID NOT GET POSTED SUNDAY, AS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO. WELL, BETTER LATE... HERE GOES)
I love the way the piece interacts with gentle humor with its neoclassical setting, its play with massive weight and soaring weightlessness, its juxtaposition of the human with the natural world (the "littlebird", perched on the oddly slanting doughnut shape on the right side,) and its almost painful elongation of the figure contrasted with the satisfying, slightly comical belly-roundness of the doughnut. Peter's habit of titling his works with elided, non-capitalized words conveys at once a modesty of intention with a sense of the equivalence of all things, human and natural, organic and inorganic, in the great scale of universal one-ness.
As I have noted elsewhere, in writing about Peter's work, his distortion of the human body into absurdly exaggerated forms suggests some of the psychic angst shared by the majority of we mortals about our very fragile bodies and our relationship to the world around us. As one who has struggled with body-consciousness for most of my years on this planet Earth, I have always found the work profoundly moving. It resonates in difficult and often unexplored places in the psyche, and asks me to think further about what it means to be a human being. What more can you ask from a work of art?
Bad Back
I have been given the opportunity, alas, to observe pain in the most personal of ways: I'm suffering it. The lower back spasm that started a couple of days ago has developed into the worst episode of this kind I have experienced in quite a long time.
It is, to say the least, a distraction. I was a first-hand witness to the way in which the mind grabs hold of pain during my meditation this morning. I chose to lie prone, rather than to sit, with the intention of starting out with my usual practice of metta, wishing goodwill to myself, my family, my friends, the world at large... Easier, this morning, said than done. The mind had its wonderful new distraction to keep it busy whilst I tried to quiet it down. In the end, I let it have its way, and allowed it to settle on the area of the pain itself and the way in which it radiated out from its center in my lower back. I found--not for the first time--that becoming the observer of the pain allows me to dissociate from it: I find myself watching it, like a sympathetic third party, rather than suffering from it in the first person, as its victim.
This, it seems to me, is one of the great teachings of Buddhism--and not an easy one to put into practice: "This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." If I'm able to break the attachment to my pain for even a few moments at a time during meditation and experience release, surely the recognition of the efficacy of this strategy will serve as a model, in the regular course of my life, for situations in which I stubbornly prolong pain by clinging to it.
The theory makes it look simple; it's the translation of theory into practice that's hard. I don't know about you, but I too often succumb to those old mental patterns that scream: I hurt. What is it that attaches me to something that I so heartily dislike? It has to be precisely that that need to be "me," to be that person who happens to be suffering, to allow the suffering--however short-lived--to define me for the course of its duration. So I try breathing, watching, dissociating: This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am.
It is, to say the least, a distraction. I was a first-hand witness to the way in which the mind grabs hold of pain during my meditation this morning. I chose to lie prone, rather than to sit, with the intention of starting out with my usual practice of metta, wishing goodwill to myself, my family, my friends, the world at large... Easier, this morning, said than done. The mind had its wonderful new distraction to keep it busy whilst I tried to quiet it down. In the end, I let it have its way, and allowed it to settle on the area of the pain itself and the way in which it radiated out from its center in my lower back. I found--not for the first time--that becoming the observer of the pain allows me to dissociate from it: I find myself watching it, like a sympathetic third party, rather than suffering from it in the first person, as its victim.
This, it seems to me, is one of the great teachings of Buddhism--and not an easy one to put into practice: "This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." If I'm able to break the attachment to my pain for even a few moments at a time during meditation and experience release, surely the recognition of the efficacy of this strategy will serve as a model, in the regular course of my life, for situations in which I stubbornly prolong pain by clinging to it.
The theory makes it look simple; it's the translation of theory into practice that's hard. I don't know about you, but I too often succumb to those old mental patterns that scream: I hurt. What is it that attaches me to something that I so heartily dislike? It has to be precisely that that need to be "me," to be that person who happens to be suffering, to allow the suffering--however short-lived--to define me for the course of its duration. So I try breathing, watching, dissociating: This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am.
Monday, May 4, 2009
More Stuff..
We did the swap meet. Up at four forty-five AM. Out at five fifteen. Arrive at swap meet to find assigned lot and set up... Got some pictures with my trusty I-Phone...
Here's someone who bought a bunch of Blue Willow from my mother's dining room in Wales--then brought the biggest piece back to ask for a refund. She'd discovered a tiny imperfection that we'd never noticed ourselves.
Our lane... Ellie to the right of center...
Ellie front and center, with very small pink parasol.
It was cool and overcast for the better part of the day, but there were moments, later in the morning, of bright sunshine, tempered by a pleasant cool breeze. Here's some of our stuff, including copies of art catalogues for which I wrote the text. Not big sellers, even with the extraordinary offer of an author signature!
More stuff. Including some of my mother's Blue Willow...
It's sad, honestly, knowing their previous life, to see these things laid out for sale, for cheap, on a table at a swap meet in the Southern California sun... We sold, too, a game of "Animal Bingo" which we had played as children in the nursery, back in the 1930s. Some nice person found it charming enough to want to take home with her. Her mother was one of the few to buy a catalogue--the one, two pictures above, with Don Bachardy's portrait of Christopher Isherwood on the cover. She bought it as a gift for her teacher, who keeps telling her to "put more red" in her faces.
My chair, temporarily abandoned in the midst of the turmoil. And...
... my chair, occupied. The dealers were around already at six o'clock, scouting. The event opened to the public at seven. At about two o'clock in the afternoon, we started to pack up.
Not to make a bid for sympathy, but all this with a bad back. It has been grumbling for a few days now, but yesterday put the finishing touches on the problem. Toting heavy boxes filled with books is no way to treat an ailing back, and since returning home I have been suffering the pay-back for the punishment I handed out. I have found that the best way to deal with the situation when my back "goes out" is to keep exercising it gently. Walking is usually the best cure. We drove downtown later in the afternoon to reward ourselves for our efforts with a gelato, and spent a while walking on the boardwalk.
A lovely end-of-the-afternoon, with crowds of visitors on the boardwalk. George was widely admired, and we ran into a couple of others of his breed--always an occasion for a pause and a chat. When we had our first King Charles--twenty years ago now--they were a rare sighting and attracted oohs and aahs whenever we went out. When he's not simply irritated by it, George tends to remain regally indifferent to all the attention. The truth it, his little brain is focused on the more plebian hope that, just possibly, someone might have a tennis ball hidden away in a bag or pocket for him to chase.
Here's someone who bought a bunch of Blue Willow from my mother's dining room in Wales--then brought the biggest piece back to ask for a refund. She'd discovered a tiny imperfection that we'd never noticed ourselves.
Our lane... Ellie to the right of center...
Ellie front and center, with very small pink parasol.
It was cool and overcast for the better part of the day, but there were moments, later in the morning, of bright sunshine, tempered by a pleasant cool breeze. Here's some of our stuff, including copies of art catalogues for which I wrote the text. Not big sellers, even with the extraordinary offer of an author signature!
More stuff. Including some of my mother's Blue Willow...
It's sad, honestly, knowing their previous life, to see these things laid out for sale, for cheap, on a table at a swap meet in the Southern California sun... We sold, too, a game of "Animal Bingo" which we had played as children in the nursery, back in the 1930s. Some nice person found it charming enough to want to take home with her. Her mother was one of the few to buy a catalogue--the one, two pictures above, with Don Bachardy's portrait of Christopher Isherwood on the cover. She bought it as a gift for her teacher, who keeps telling her to "put more red" in her faces.
My chair, temporarily abandoned in the midst of the turmoil. And...
... my chair, occupied. The dealers were around already at six o'clock, scouting. The event opened to the public at seven. At about two o'clock in the afternoon, we started to pack up.
Not to make a bid for sympathy, but all this with a bad back. It has been grumbling for a few days now, but yesterday put the finishing touches on the problem. Toting heavy boxes filled with books is no way to treat an ailing back, and since returning home I have been suffering the pay-back for the punishment I handed out. I have found that the best way to deal with the situation when my back "goes out" is to keep exercising it gently. Walking is usually the best cure. We drove downtown later in the afternoon to reward ourselves for our efforts with a gelato, and spent a while walking on the boardwalk.
A lovely end-of-the-afternoon, with crowds of visitors on the boardwalk. George was widely admired, and we ran into a couple of others of his breed--always an occasion for a pause and a chat. When we had our first King Charles--twenty years ago now--they were a rare sighting and attracted oohs and aahs whenever we went out. When he's not simply irritated by it, George tends to remain regally indifferent to all the attention. The truth it, his little brain is focused on the more plebian hope that, just possibly, someone might have a tennis ball hidden away in a bag or pocket for him to chase.
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