Bibliophilia, or, a teenager meets Buddha. Part 1.

One should easily glean even from the few posts that I have up here thus far that I am a bit of a bibliophile. It's true. I love books. Always have. I can remember going with my parents on Sunday evenings to the bookstore as a child. I was always told to get whatever I want (this policy had its limits of course), that money was not an issue. My mother would take my sister and me to the library during the day while my father was at work, and we would spend hours wandering up and down the aisles past shelf after shelf of books. We would often leave with dozen of books in our arms, and always with smiles on our faces. I was reared in a household in which books were almost sacred in their importance. Every room had books: the living room, where the coffee table was stacked with "coffee table books" and magazines; each bedroom, with its airport paperbacks and biographies, short story collections and encyclopedias; my father's study, where old chemistry textbooks mingled with books on hiking, home brewing, horse racing, and Kurt Vonnegut novels; and finally (and perhaps most importantly), the shelf by my mother's bed, which was filled to bursting with books on religion and spirituality.

I always bristled at my mother's insistence that I look into these books she had. Her favorite spiritual writer is Sylvia Browne, the putative psychic and author of dozens and dozens of books on her career as a psychic medium, life on "the other side," and also on Gnosticism and mystical spirituality. I'm not sure whether my mother knows this or not, but these books did have an impact on me. I can remember one in particular by Sylvia entitled, simply, meditations. I remember regularly swiping this book from my mother's bookshelf and sitting on the floor of my bedroom for hours at a time trying out the various mediations in that little book. They were visualizations mostly, but they did give me an early instruction in following the breath and calming the mind.

Coinciding as this exploration into meditation did with my newfound interest in the Beats, I discovered a book somewhat more off the beaten path than On the Road and Howl; I discovered The Dharma Bums. Dharma Bums is the story of Ray Smith (Kerouac) and his friend Japhy Ryder (the poet Gary Snyder) as they flirt with and practice Buddhism in California. I read it voraciously, carrying it with me from class to class at school, sneaking snippets of reading time during class, precariously propping the book against my backpack to shield it from the view of my teachers. It was a marvelous find not only for the young bibliophile in me, but for the yearning spirit in me. I fell into a cliche of which I was not aware at the time and began to idolize Jack Kerouac. His journey (spiritual and literal) enticed me. I wanted to go on a journey myself. Eventually, I discovered that Kerouac, in his days of studying Buddhism, read from and intensely studied A Buddhist Bible, a collection of sacred Buddhist texts edited by Dwight Goddard. So, on one of our weekly Sunday trips to the bookstore, I picked up this Buddhist Bible with money earned at my part-time job. And there it sat on my bookshelf for years.

I couldn't get into it in the way that I had gotten into Kerouac's own writing on Buddhism. Where were the fast cars and the hashish and the bop jazz and the women? I didn't get it. How could a book recommended by one of my favorite writers be so, so....boring?

Nevertheless, I pressed on. One day, after getting home from school, I found the phone book sitting open on the island in the kitchen. There, circled in black ink, was The Indianapolis Zen Center. As always, my mother had taken an interest in my interest and had done a little homework for me. It wasn't long before we journeyed from our little suburb of Fishers, Indiana into the big city to see first-hand what Buddhist meditation had to offer to a teenager and his forty-something mother.

So it was that one cold weeknight my mother and I drove to Indianapolis for the weekly Open Zazen session at the Indianapolis Zen Center. I don’t recall now what exactly I expected, but I imagine my head was filled with some pretty egregious stereotypes—a bunch of diminutive Asians sitting around in robes, the smell of sandalwood incense drifting through the air, the lingering reverberations of a gong filling my ears as I sat in a large open room in perfect, unadulterated bliss. In fact, the Indianapolis Zen Center was a wholly unremarkable building in a not-so-good part of town with potholes in the parking lot and very little identifying signage. Inside, rather than a gaggle of serious-looking Japanese, I saw a few middle-aged white people who looked to have just left their local Sierra Club meeting. The inside was drafty, but looked well-apportioned. Everyone was remarkably calm and friendly, welcoming me and my mother into their little Buddha club for the evening.

After a few awkward moments (over tea, no less) in which my mother and I had to somehow justify our presence to people who had clearly been practicing for some time, we all entered the sitting room for meditation. We received a few remarks on how to sit properly for those of us who were new (read: me and my mother), and then we took the first step on the path to enlightenment. Unfortunately, no one told me that first step involved pins and needles in my leg and a pain in my spine unlike any i'd felt before. My mother and I left that night wholly uncomfortable and not exactly jazzed about returning. For weeks, months, and years afterwards, newsletters from the Zen Center arrived in the mail and usually went unopened. Somehow, I think both my mother and I didn't even want to open them; whether it was from shame, disappointment, or lack of interest, I don't know.

All I know is that that after that night at the Indianapolis Zen Center, it would be years before I ever turned my eye toward Buddhism or meditation again.* But when I finally did, it was not Zen or Kerouac I turned to, but rather, a little book by an over-the-hill American nun.

*Let it be said in hindsight that these misgivings and irritations had nothing whatsoever to do with the community or leadership at the Indianapolis Zen Center. The people we met there were nothing but hospitable, helpful, and happy to see us join them. It just wasn't, shall we say, our cup of tea. At the time.

Awakening the Heart

Noah Levine, the notorious "Dharma punk" examines loving-kindness meditation in an article on Huffington Post:

In reaction to the pain in my life I began to close my heart and to harden myself against all forms of love. So it was with great hesitance that I experimented with Buddhist practices of kindness and compassion. In the beginning I don't think forgiveness was even in my vocabulary. The only reason I opened my self to these meditation practices, often called heart practices, at all was because I had tremendous faith in the practices of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment), the Buddha and my teachers, who assured me that it was safe to love again.

The fact that Levine comes from a hardcore punk background lends a certain credence to his writing that is missing from some of the more fluffy, lovey-dovey writers one commonly encounters when poking around in bookstores and blogs for quality writing on Buddhism and meditation. His is an experiential Buddhism, and the fact that he has so fully embraced Buddhist teaching given his background makes his writing all the more powerful.

I look forward to checking out some of his books as soon as the funds and the space in my to-read list allows.

Meditation and Aging

From the Guardian newspaper comes this article on the effects of a meditation practice on aging.

Money quote:

After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing.

Thomas Merton and Interdependence

I have lately begun perusing Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain once again. I've been interested in him for some time, at least since I first moved to Kentucky five years ago and saw his name on a list of famous people who had lived here. I purchased his famous autobiography over a year ago, but it has unfortunately just joined the seemingly bottomless stack of unread books on my floor and shelves. Earlier this evening I had just read a passage in H.H. The Dalai Lama's book The Power of Compassion on the topic of interdependence. Funnily enough, shortly after I picked up SSM and flipped it to a random page. This is what I read:

“You cannot live for your own pleasure and your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feelings and interests of practically everybody you meet. But, as a matter of fact, in the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another’s aims and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.”

I seem to encounter coincidences like these almost every day. Perhaps it has something to do with reading the same types of writers all of the time, but nevertheless, this intrigued me. I am no longer near my books, so I cannot track down the specific passage from the Dalai Lama that I read earlier, but he apparently echoes Merton's sentiments regularly:

A young child's affection does not come through faith; it is naturally very strong. I think the mistake we make is that when we're grown up, we start to think we're independent. We think that in order to be successful we don't need others—except maybe to exploit them! This is the source of all sorts of problems, scandals, and corruption. But if we had more respect for other people's lives—a greater sense of concern and awareness—it would be a very different world. We have to introduce the reality of interdependence. Then people would discover that, according to that reality, affection and compassion are essential if anything is ever going to change.

It is no secret that America, perhaps more than any other nation on earth, falls victim to the myth of independence to which both Merton and the Dalai Lama reference. Whether we are discussing financial productivity and success, or, on the other hand, the search for spiritual fulfillment like that which Merton documents from his own life in SSM, we find that society's subtle emphasis is on independence and narcissism. We see this in politics, where wealthy business owners extoll the virtues of the free market and limited government without taking into consideration that the government--which is to say the society as a whole--is in large part responsible for establishing the rules of the road that make it possible to be a successful businessman to begin with! We are reared in this country, by and large, to believe in the virtues of fierce independence.

And yet--as we see, it is only through recognition of our precious interdependence that we will find happiness and compassion.

Shambhala Training Level 1: Discovering Basic Goodness

Recently I attended a teaching of the first level of the Shambhala Training at the Lexington Shambhala Center. It was an illuminating experience. Our teacher was Dr. Lance Brunner, a music history professor at the University of Kentucky and apparently a world-renowned Shambhala instructor. He told us that he had just returned from San Diego, where he led a retreat, and said that he would be visiting New Zealand and Australia this summer to teach as well. I don’t know why he chose to tell us all of this, but it affected me positively: I knew then that we were in for a treat.

He discussed the paradox of starting down the Shambhala path, which is that, while on the one hand we are to enter our training without any great expectations for spiritual enlightenment or deep fulfillment, we are, too, drawn to Shambhala for a reason deep within us, something that we yearn for, whether it be peace, discovering and strengthening our inherent muscles of compassion, or simply learning a way to relax. We continually returned to this interesting paradox throughout the weekend.

The first evening of the training, we partnered up with another member of the class to learn two things about them:

1. What brought them to this place
2. One person to whom they are grateful

Perhaps unfortunately, everyone instantly teamed up with the person sitting nearest them, which paired me with my girlfriend Grace. Now, this was not ideal, but it did allow Grace and I to ease into the weekend with someone familiar. After learning about our partner, we then had to share their story with the class. As soon as he said this, my pulse began to race, my palms got sweaty, and my breathing rate shot through the roof. I was paralyzed with nervousness at the notion of having to speak to a room of perfect strangers. When my time came I was brief and to the point and immediately passed the baton to Grace.

Then the voices started. Wow, you really sounded nervous, Richard. Do you think they could hear it in your voice? That sure is a good way to make a first impression. Can’t you do anything without getting nervous? So it went.

Pervasive anxiety is an affliction with which I have been dealing for some time and to be honest, it is something I have long hoped a steady meditation practice would help me to cope with. So in spite of the admonitions to the contrary, I held this aspiration in my heart as we began the weekend. The incident Friday night further solidified in my mind the need to work on this aspect of my person as I delved into meditation that weekend. I resolved to do as the teachings dictate and return to the breath—in and out, in and out—as a means of regaining my sense of place and alleviating irrational thoughts and fears. This determination helped get me through some of the most rigorous moments of the weekend.

We learned quite a lot about each other in those brief introductions. One thread that seemed to tie everyone together was that everyone there seemed in some way damaged. I do not mean to be melodramatic—it’s just that you would not pay a huge wad of money to come to a weekend meditation course with a bunch of strangers if you didn’t have a damn good reason to be there.

The Shambhala Training is a five-part series based on the book Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder and spiritual leader of Shambhala International. Thus the training, like Trungpa Rinpoche’s book, begins with a teaching on the concept of Basic Goodness. Basic Goodness, as explained by Dr. Brunner and by Trungpa Rinpoche himself, is our inherent capacity for goodness; it is a type of goodness that has always existed. Indeed, it existed before dualistic labels turned our understanding of goodness into a good/bad dichotomy. This is, therefore, not relative goodness, but simply pure, unadulterated, Basic Goodness. And how do we tap into this Basic Goodness? Through the practice of meditation, of course.

Trungpa describes the practice thus:

By meditation here we mean something very basic and simple that is not tied to any one culture. We are talking about a very basic act: sitting on the ground, assuming a good posture, and developing a sense of our spot, our place on this earth. This is the means of discovering ourselves and our basic goodness, the means to tune ourselves in to genuine reality, without any expectations or preconceptions.

So that’s what we did. Sit. And boy, did we sit. We sat longer than I have ever sat before in meditation. It appeared to be twenty minute segments of sitting cut up by twenty minute segments of walking meditation (a practice with which I was heretofore unfamiliar), though I cannot be sure of the specific times as I made sure to not have a watch or cell phone on me during the training.

We sat together, walked together, ate together, talked with one another, and discussed the concepts of the training together in group discussion sessions. By the end of the weekend, even the people to whom I had felt the least connection somehow seemed to be friends. It’s inexplicable, really, because I didn’t get particularly conversatioinal or friendly with anyone else in the class, at least not in a conventional sense. But there is something powerful about sitting together and walking together and engaging in even brief moments of quiet contemplation and meditation that brings together people in a way that goes beyond mere words.

After the final session ended Sunday afternoon, I left convinced that I would return for Level 2 of the training, and that is still my intention. Grace and I put on our coats, bid our goodbyes and went back out into the world. The first thing we did when we sat in the car was to light up a cigarette. Even a full weekend of Shambhala training couldn’t magically break that habit.

Pema Chödrön - Why I Became a Buddhist