This came in via Tricycle Magazine’s “Daily Dharma” today:

Several years ago, a sociologist studied students in a neurosurgery program to see what qualities separated those who succeeded from those who failed. He found ultimately that two questions in his interviews pointed to the crucial difference. He would ask the students, “Do you ever make mistakes? If so, what is the worst mistake you’ve ever made?” Those who failed the program would inevitably answer that they rarely made mistakes or else would blame their mistakes on factors beyond their control. Those who succeeded in the program not only admitted to many mistakes but also volunteered information on what they would do not to repeat those mistakes in the future.

- Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Pushing the Limits”

Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi has a relevant comment in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

When we reflect on what are doing in our everyday life, we are always ashamed of ourselves. One of my students wrote to me saying, “You sent me a calendar, and I am trying to follow the good mottoes which appear on each
page. But the year has hardly begun, and already I have failed!” Dogen-zenji said,’ ‘Shoshaku jushaku.” Shaku generally means “mistake” or “wrong.” Shoshaku jushaku means “to succeed wrong with wrong,” or one continuous mistake. According to Dogen, one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master’s life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded effort.

Admitting your mistakes is being real. Only by living with and learning from your mistakes can you advance your thinking. How can this play out in daily life? I’ve found that meetings I’m in are more productive if I’m willing to contribute thoughts that might be wrong. By offering unfiltered ideas that might be “mistakes,” I have often advanced the discussion toward productive decisions and solutions.

A mistake can be seen, then, as productive exploration.

satori

What we think of as reality is just shadows of shadows, internal reconstructions of sense data fed imperfectly into electrochemical processors within the brain and imperfectly rendered – “imperfectly” depending on your sense of perfection, of course. The point is more that it’s a rendering, and the rendering is no the thing rendered. And all the renderings and things rendered are impermanent – as the Buddhists say, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Emptiness is another word for impermanent, and unreal in the vernacular sense of reality. I was thinking about this earlier today, and thinking how computer networks are more of the same – imperfect data imperfectly rendered, but feeling substantial and real despite its (their?) illusory nature. I can’t help you see any of this if you don’t already see it, but it’s rather exploded in my own thinking.

The sort of things you just have to write down somewhere, like on your blog…

Got these via K. Marcus Hartsfield on Facebook…

“Directly it is said that not a single thing exists, and yet we see in the entire universe nothing has ever been hidden.” (Dharma Hall Discourse #53 from the Eihei Koroku (Dogen’s Extensive Record)   

He reports finding this one written on a bathroom wall at The Omega Institute in upstate New York:

“Satori. Don’t think it will be glorious; that momentary burst of radiance illumining all. Nonsense. It is more like losing your mother in a large department store. Forever.”

I presented this at “Life, Extraordinary: An Evening of Autobiographical Monologues,” which was produced as part of a powerful writing and creativity class taught by my friend and fellow traveler, Maggie Duval. This is dedicated to the memory of the late, great George Hasty.

My friend George, an old Buddha, died recently. The cancer that was in remission for so long revived, occupied cells throughout his body, brought the living George system to an eventual halt. He was around 70 and had been meditating for many years. He and I had shared stories about our Buddhist practice and had gone together to sit at the Shambhala Center in the nineties.

I didn’t keep the practice discipline, not right then, but George did keep sitting at Shambhala, dug deeper and deeper into Chogyam Trungpa’s Vajradhatu and its somewhat westernized Tibetan Buddhist teachings. He became an influential meditation instructor within that context. He committed much of his life to the Buddhadharma.

After George died, we joined the Shambhala sangha to support his transition to the bardo, from this life to the next “whatever-it-is,” through a Vajradhatu funeral ceremony including Tonglen, where you visualize taking on the suffering of others, and giving your own happiness and success to others. It was a powerful ceremony.
Before the ceremony, George’s wife Louise told me that his last words were “It’s too late…” She wasn’t sure what he meant.

I have learned to breathe and connect to an energy that is within me and within all the myriad things that are part of ONE everything.

I have learned that form and energy are manifestations of one thing. I have learned that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

I have learned that emptiness means impermanent, changing, never fixed in any way.

I have learned that suffering is a consequence of misunderstanding the nature of all things, their inherent emptiness.

And then there’s death.

I was fifteen years old when I realized that the death of this body and this identity is imminent and inescapable, ultimately real, totally unavoidable no matter what I do with my life. I was intelligent and well-read for a fifteen year old, my head was full of facts, concepts, and perspectives from many sources, from classics, to Classics Illustrated, to pop cultural science fictional writings and artifacts. My intellect was maturing much faster than my emotions, and at the point where I got clear about death and suffering, I wasn’t emotionally solid and together. I became obsessed with death and filled with dread.

Okay, dread is just a word, it doesn’t capture that emotion – it knocked the wind out of me. I was whole-body fibrillating with profound anxiety which I could not dispel. Everything, even the lightest bit of fluff on television or in films, reminded me of death.

Was I the only person ever to feel this profound suffering?

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was sheltered from suffering in his youth and similarly shocked and disturbed when he first encountered old age and death. I wasn’t sheltered in quite the same way he had been, though I lived in a fantasy self-constructed from comic books, television, science fiction novels, films of every genre, etc. On the other hand, I could see the reality of old age and death around me as I was growing up, it wasn’t completely hidden. But that reality had just been another data feed, and I took it no more seriously than “Father Knows Best,” “Lost in Space,” or “Forbidden Planet.” Given my pervasive media habit, I had evolved a rich internal fantasy life – so this anxiety, really claustrophobic panic, about death was an early opening to phenomenological reality, and an understanding that aspects of my life and existence were totally beyond my control.

Like Gautama, I tried to find answers. I turned to books rather than contemplation, because in my world, books were supposed to have answers to all the problems and riddles and mysteries you could ever encounter.

I happened to have a book called My Answer by Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. It was a book meant to address various questions he’d heard, and of course, one question he’d heard a lot was about life after death. His answer: in heaven, we spend eternity singing hymns with angels – or, if we’re evil, or if we’re democrats, we’ll spend eternity burning in hellfire and brimstone, a vision of hell I knew at that point mostly through Jimmy Hatlo’s Inferno cartoons.

Either way, the conclusion was horrible. Yes, I would live forever, but I would live forever either tortured by fire or tortured by boredom.

The Buddha said that our life is prone to dukkha, which is often translated as “suffering,” but is probably closer to “unsatisfactoriness.” It’s like a potter’s wheel that doesn’t turn smoothly, and screeches with friction.

We have this sense that life is unsatisfactory because we cling to states and objects as though they were fixed, yet they keep changing. It’s like chasing the rainbow. If your lifeis tied to a belief that you will reach the rainbow and that the rainbow will be a fixed object, you’ll always feel that life is unsatisfactory, because you misunderstand the reality of the rainbow, which is that it is an impermanent reflection of light in a particular context, always changing, never persistent, never fixed. When you have the right understanding of the rainbow, you can appreciate it when you see it, but you won’t chase it or cling to it.

Everything in our life is like that – all impermanent, changing with time and context. I can see this so much more clearly, as I get older, as I see everything around me changing. I saw both my parents move through various stages of life, grow older, ,eventually die. Not long before she died, my mother said to me, matter-of-factly, “I’m ready.” I brushed that off, but within a month she was dead. I couldn’t imagine being “ready” at that point in my life, but I’ve come to understand this impermanence.

And who dies? There is no permanent, fixed self. Rather, there is coherence of many systems that comprise a particular organism. It’s a complex system of processes orchestrated from a seemingly single perspective, the thing we perceive as “self,” as “me.”

This conductor of the orchestra, the sense of self, is just a perpective, a point of integration. It only seems to persist from second to second, but that’s an illusion. In fact, “seconds-in-time” are just contructs relative to context, there is no real second or minute or hour that you can capture in any sense as a real thing. “Real” and “thing” are relative concepts. The idea that you are a separate living thing is an illusion, so your death is also an illusion. There is no birth, no life, and no death, even though we experience all of these things. There is no experience.

I can’t take comfort in this because there is no I to take comfort and no comfort to take, but all of these things seem to exist in a particular context and perspective and flow.

“When a man rightly sees,
he sees no death, no sickness or distress.
When a man rightly sees,
he sees all, he wins all, completely.”
~ Chandogya Upanisad

It’s too late. It’s never too late.

Notes I made a couple of weeks ago while listening to Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain:, talking about samadhi (concentration). This advice resonates well with my own practice, wanted to make note of it here for reference (mine and yours).

• Set an intention – which sets the mind to a particular direction.
• Relax, settle down.
• Help yourself feel safer.
• Activate positive emotion. Think about things that gladden the heart (activating dopamine and norepinephrine).
• Keep the critters out. The voices in your head aren’t necessarily friendly or helpful.
• Build a wholesome neural structure.
• Intend and sense/evaluate benefits – “How’s that going for you?”

In a conversation with a longtime friend, I just sent an email message that was fairly clear on some points I’ve been thinking about, so I’m reposting part of it here, ending with an unusual reference.

I’m currently into Buddhist practice and a related qigongish practice, and while many people who aren’t into those things mistakenly believe they’re “religious” or “spiritual,” they’re really just practices about understanding mind and self. In Buddhism we talk about emptiness, the realization that there’s no permanent real self. I heard a Buddhist say the other day something about not believing your thoughts. I think that’s really key to getting straight. We identify with thoughts in our heads as though they were real objects with weight and permanence, and it just ain’t so. The voices in your head aren’t necessarily your friends, and often it’s better to ignore them. I thought about all this when I read your paragraph above about identity and opportunity. I think it’s important to get behind your identity and realize there’s nobody behind the curtain. It’s a hard realization and it takes work. It leads to a real opening, potentially, though.

Truth, power, justice, framing, global warming etc. are just concepts and aren’t real things, and it can be helpful on some level to realize this. You do have to come back to a level where they’re treated as real – but there’s creativity in understanding that they’re not real things that are beyond your reach, but concepts that you’re co-creating with everyone else – that can be asserted, diverted, hacked, etc. They’re only real in a kind of mental consensus that we have about them.

***
Our politicians are more focused on politics and power – concepts, not realities – and they’re not so much into focusing on what’s real. What are the markets of the future and what skills do we require to be competitive and have viable economies? My business partner and I have been saying that we’re moving away from economies where you make money by extracting resources, applying labor to produce products, and tossing whatever’s not used as waste – to economies where knowledge substitutes for labor and heavy equipment, and where we engineer to extract as much as possible from any resource. Knowledge and social capital become as valuable as, or more valuable than, finance capital. We’ve wanted to study this more and write about it more, but we’re working on our social media consulting business, where we have deep knowledge and understanding. However we see that social media is relevant to sustainability economy, so we’re moving in the right direction no matter what.

Around 1966 or 67, Bert Rafelson and Jack Nicholson made a film called “Head” starring the Monkees (Nicholson was the screenwriter). There’s a scene in that film, where the Monkees stumble into a steambath where a Maharishi-like yogi is sitting, and he says this:

We were speaking of belief; beliefs and conditioning. All belief possibly could be said to be the result of some conditioning. Thus, the study of history is simply the study of one belief system deposing another, and so on and so on and so on… A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience. If there is a difference, and most of us believe there is -am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To experience the now, without preconception or beliefs, to allow the unknown to occur and to occur, requires clarity. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. And why should anyone listen to me? Why should I speak, since I know nothing?

Around 1969 I sent a short poem and a letter to Allen Ginsberg but saw my letter as neurotic “peter pan yak,” as he called it, or adolescent rambling.  At the bottom of the card he sent me, he suggested that I should take up dyhana meditation, which I did, and for the last 40 years I’ve been a hot and cold running Buddhist.

Tricycle has published in interview with Ginsberg, who calls himself a “flaky Buddhist.” Read the whole interview, and don’t miss the closing quote:

Everybody’s got a life to lead and they’ve got a bodhisattva tendency, everybody wants to do good…. On a larger scale, there doesn’t seem to be any hope unless compassion becomes a more widespread important teaching on how to live. Compassion to self and others

Stanford has released results of a study suggesting that “the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could.” This isn’t news to me… I’ve been conducting my own self-study and repair for many months now.

For years, as I evolved as a supposed multitasker extraordinaire, facilitated by Internet technology, I was persistently balancing a large number of projects on my little nose. However I had a growing sense that things weren’t working as they should, even though I seemed to get a lot of things done.  I felt fragmented, and I was losing bits and pieces of conversations and occasionally missing appointments or failing followups. I was pretty clear that my mental faculties weren’t diminishing, rather, the demands on them were growing.

The solution (which I’m still successfully processing) came a couple of ways. For one thing, after 40 years as an armchair Buddhist, I got serious about the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. In Buddhist practice you step back and become aware of the workings of your mind, which in my case was pretty chaotic with all the facts and events and processes I was tracking. I could see clearly how my cognition was fragmented. It was like a cup filled to overflowing. I had “multitasked” beyond my ability to track and organize.

The other thing was seeing the problem reflected by my business partner, David Armistead, who has met with me almost every day for the last two years as we’ve worked to evolve our business. Our work has been demanding – we’re not just building a business, we’re also thinking through philosophical and practical impacts associated with the growing use of social media and the growing demand for sustainability – big subjects that require as much focus as we can muster, given their breadth. David could see in our various meetings that I was losing focus at points – actually shifting focus to other things that were urgent, if not critical. He’s given me persistent helpful feedback as I’ve pared down the number of projects I’m tracking and get laser-focused on our the work we’re doing.

If you need to “defragment,” you don’t necessarily have to adopt a Buddhist practice, but mindfulness exercises are helpful.  Feedback from someone close by is very helpful.  But the main thing is to stop thinking you can “multitask,” because you’re only ever focusing on one thing at a time, and what you call multitasking is exploding your focus into fragments.

Psychologist Paul Ekman believes that Charles Darwin may have been inspired by Tibetan Buddhism. Says Ekman,

The Buddhist view, like Darwin, said that the seed of compassion is in mothering, global compassion: focus on others as mother. When I see you suffer it makes me suffer, and that motivates me to reduce your suffering so I can reduce my suffering. The Dalai Lama says compassionate acts help me more than the person I help. That’s identical in Buddhism and in Darwin’s explicit writings

Darwin knew something of Tibetan Buddhism, but there’s no established link between his views and Buddhist thinking. However “his view on the nature of commpassion is identical in almost the exact words to the view of Tibetan Buddhism.”