Finally some rain. It has, as local readers know, been unusually hot and dry. Oddly, the streams aren't all that low, perhaps a consequence of last year being so wet. The cornfields behind my neighborhood were flowing with two feet of water at one point. Walking through thigh deep running water amidst seven foot cornstalks was a little eerie. Felt a bit like 'Nam. Except for the corn being much taller than rice and no one hiding out trying to kill me and my home being 1500 yards away.

  Over the weekend I spent a bit more time reading news and trolling the internet than I often do. There can be so much to take in... at first it is enjoyable, then revs up into info-greed, and soon the swirl of emotions (provoked by politics, advertising, and general weirdness) mutates into compulsion. For me, it is a tense and de-centered feeling, which once I become aware of it, becomes a physical restlessness. It become more difficult for me to concentrate as a result.

   So I pull back. Of course, at this moment I am blogging, but it is number 7 on the list of things to get down this morning bracketed by photographing parts of the garden and a trip to the post office and guitar store (my favorite makers and repairers: those two angels at The Guitar Parlor). My internet misadventures did turn up a few items I would like to share: the truly awesome, but non-consequential fact that space indeed has a smell, and a sharp little taste of a new edition of William James' work on religious experience (e.g. James "constantly worried that we’re being encouraged by a certain type of scientific analysis to put our faith in abstracted explanations, often at the expense of our own experiences — the only things that we can truly know anyway. In the Varieties James is examining the emotional fundamentals not only of religious belief, but of all belief.")

   Per James, it isn't just scientific analysis that leads us to "put faith in abstracted explanations". This has always been a problem within religious practice. It is so easy, for people of particular temperaments, to simply enjoy and take comfort in the formal practices, the robes, the incense, the schedule, the liturgies, and so on. It is equally easy to completely reject these as superficial and distracting. And it is not a matter of simply splitting the difference. It is the essential task of living my own life and responding to what is around me genuinely and with deep engagement. Ritual and the rejection of ritual can be equally abstracted from direct experience.

   For some, ritual can be a dynamic mix of challenge (hearing what you don't want to hear, sitting zazen for an hour, etc) and comfort (co-religionists, inspiring words, sights, and sounds, escape from daily pressures). Taken together, it can be pretty strong stuff. If we pick and choose, however, we run the risk of merely creating a rather monochromatic expression of ourselves to gaze at, rather than the direct experience of the inner and outer life.

  Picking and choosing is what we do naturally, isn't it? For the most part we move away from discomfort and toward pleasure or relief. And as we deepen our sense of self, we radically broaden what we experience as pleasure, folding into this many experiences that our younger selves might have really run away from. In Zen practice, sitting might be one of these. Or training martial arts. But for some of us, being radically open and connected to others is the great challenge, the one most riven with doubt.

   The primary delusion is that we are fundamentally separate from others. I would like to discuss this further a little later...

  As a Buddhist practitioner and a therapist (for lack of a better term), the word "attachment" is packed with irony. Attachment, in the Buddhist sense, is clinging to thoughts, feelings, people, objects, anything that for the moment we invest with a sense of permanence. Suffering arises because nothing is permanent, so we experience loss when we come to depend on something always being a certain way. Non-attachment frees us from how we want the world to be, and allows us to be in the world that actually is.
  In psychology, or at least how I approach it, 'attachment' is the basis for emotional and relational health. The safety and reliability of our earliest caregivers become the foundation for later development. Our inner world of expectations and trust shape subsequent relations with the self, others, and the world.
   One could state that non-attachment in the Buddhist sense is not possible without attachment being achieved in the psychological sense. We need a profound and preverbal confidence in ourselves and the world (and our teacher, I might add) to make that vast leap of letting go.
    The really painful and disorienting miles on the spiritual path can also be seen as a letting go of the failed relationships that betrayed us, and turning our focus to whole of reality, including our experience, and allowing that to be the basis of our (psychological) attachment. From that newfound confidence, we can let go, knowing that letting go is not an abandonment but an acceptance. As Dogen put it, "to carry yourself forward and illuminate the myriad things... is delusion...that the myriad things come forth and illuminate themselves is awakening..." (see this for a helpful discussion of this aspect of Dogen's thought).
  
   The unexpected is the great teacher. When we seek to tighten control over much of our lives, the effort casts a shadow. That shadow is our inability to accept, or even see (!), what we don't expect. The pile of un-lived, unacknowledged life piles up in our darkness, and one day, topples over us.
   In this respect, we deny certain parts of reality because we can't deal with it, because we haven't the confidence (based on prior experience) that we can accept it without being overwhelmed. So it piles up and up, until it can't be denied any longer. But that can go on a long time.
 
 

Blue Mountain Zendo

    Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting the Blue Mountain Zendo. It is a tiny place, tucked in a quirky little village on the edge of Allentown, PA, astride the 6oo acre Lehigh University forest preserve. Instead of going through west part of town to get there I drove the two or three miles on the edge of the preserve along the Lehigh River and the freight rail. The big river appeared in flashes through the dense trees, and after a while, the asphalt gives way to gravel and the road drops down to the railroad bed. Then the road rises again for awhile, all wooded, until I popped out into an uphill, winding street dense with older, narrow houses. The zendo is the best kept house on the block.
    Joriki Dat Baker greeted me, and we sat down for tea. One of his most senior students joined us, and we shared our stories: mine of the school and my practice, his of the zendo and his practice. Joriki is a perceptive, inviting man, easy to laugh and wears his deep study lightly. None of that "stink of Zen" here.
   They used to be in Bethlehem; I had gone to a few meditation sessions there. But this modest little place had the feel of community rooted in Zen practice... it felt right.

   Over the next few weeks I hope we can a establish a bond between TAS and Blue Mountain. They offer sesshin, weekly services, a small residential training, and face to face teaching. Any of you, dear readers, who wish to know more can contact me or drop in at their website.

Mind Training

  We train our mind constantly. Actually, we train our brain, in that the brain continually adapts to the environment it seeks to influence. This loop is permanent; there is no getting out of it. Good friends, good nutrition, awareness of our own intent, speaking kindly, all these can be represented as some point on the great circuit that loops out of our deepest being, through our world, and back again. To varying degrees any point on this loop can be altered, affecting the whole system over time.
   Generally speaking, when we decide to "consciously" change something, this is a function of the pre-frontal cortex, that tip of the iceberg that seems (to the self) to be whole of one's being. This is an illusion. For instance, we generally aren't all that aware of our body language, but body language effects how others experience us and react to us, phenomena which loops back into our inner world, creating a vibrant mix of conflict and harmony.
    Often our body language expresses our mixed feelings and outright conflict: imagine being polite to someone who has hurt you deeply. You are in conflict. They may or may not be aware of even hurting you, but may be reacting- even unawares- to the signals you broadcast via body language. These splits, so often within both parties in a conflict, have huge consequences.
     It is not unusual for there to be no clue to the existence of the conflict within ourselves. We must learn to look outward, to external indicators: how those we trust react, how those we don't trust react, and so on.
     There are other ways as well. For instance, in Shim Gum Do, the martial art I study, there are hundreds of forms. Each form is a beautifully composed sequence of sword techniques involving all parts of the body, that extend or work variations on previous techniques and anticipate later ones. It requires a lot of concentration to execute them competently. Eventually, as the cognitive and physical demands increase, the art requires long daily practice, as well as meditation and other modes of study to support it. But if I notice the quality of my experience while training- my focus, intensity, energy, pre-occupations, pain- this can point to something like a core experience that I can continually cultivate.
   I was in class with my teacher in Boston last week. It was the third evening in a row of hard training, and I spent the broiling hot day working in the gardens around the temple. The class was all fellow black belts, and requires endurance and total focus. "Peter! Mind train when you do it!", he shouts in his heavy Korean accent.
  What he meant was completely clear to me, but something else presented itself as well: if I am not totally focused, then I am practicing "not being totally focused". If while leaping through a form,  I am considering how vulnerable the injured tendon in my ankle will be upon landing, I have a split consciousness.
   At that moment, I am reinforcing the pattern of a split consciousness and will thereby maintain it under certain conditions. When those conditions arise, my consciousness will split.
   When I sit meditation, I generally begin by imagining and sensing myself executing the sword forms. What my teacher was insisting on- in response to my not being totally focused- was that I keep the meditation of the form I was practicing just a touch ahead of its physical execution.
    When carrying groceries, meditate on the act of carrying the grocery bags. When pumping gas, meditate on the act of pumping gas. So many of us can create that sort of non-split awareness only in times of high intensity, and often with a loss of other types of awareness along the way.
   Every moment is the practice of wholeness or fragmentation. Choose.