Category Archives: Buddhism

Kalachakra For World Peace: In Washington, DC and in Sacramento

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Did you know that the Dalai Lama is currently engaged in an 11 day ceremony in Washington DC, called  “The Kalachakra for World Peace?” Did you know that a Sacramento organization, the Lion’s Roar Dharma Center is giving a parallel ceremony from July 23, to July 30?  Please read on for the details.

Kalachakra Sand Mandala

Kalachakra, meaning Wheel of Time, is philosophy and set of practices that “revolve around the concept of cycles and time from the cycles of the planets, to the cycles of human breathing.  It teaches the practice of working with the most subtle energies within one’s body on the path to enlightenment.”  Kalachakra also refers to a Tibetan Yidam or meditational deity, who represents a Buddha.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra

Yidam practice is complex and widely misunderstood, but here is a quick analogy: a kid who pretends to be Luke or Leah or Yoda is doing something similar – invoking a figure who represents and inspires bravery and wisdom.  Perhaps the child experiences an inflow of those qualities – except it is not really an inflow because it is already there, in seed form, inside all of us.  Imagination can awaken these latent potentials in a child and in a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism.

I used to pretend to be Davy Crockett for the same reason.  There was never any real confusion, although my mother looked at me strangely the day I asked her to pick up some bear meat the next time she went shopping – but I digress.

Kalachakra is one of the most advanced Tibetan practices, but because of his perception of the urgent need for non-violence in the world, the Dalai Lama opened this series of teachings to anyone who was interested.  A Tibetan Sangha in Sacramento, the Lion’s Roar Dharma Center, is offering a similar series of classes, beginning with an introductory lecture, July 23, from 7:00-9:00pm, followed by classes and empowerments from July 24-July 30. http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=rnxs8gcab&oeidk=a07e3puot1u6e5e5f26

Finally, here is a description of the ceremony by , a Tibetan nun who has been working in Washington since May, 2010 to prepare for the Dalai Lama’s performance of this ritual, which is now in progress.

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137848121/in-washington-a-ritual-for-world-peace?ft=1&f=1003

The Freedom Index

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Actually, there is no Freedom Index, except in my possibly fevered imagination.  The idea came from reading the WordPress Daily Post, “What Does Freedom Mean?”  That’s a good question to think about.  It is very hard to answer, which makes it interesting.

All of the obvious answers lead you in circles.  Millions of people in these troubled times long for the freedom that work brings, but that reminds me of all the five dollar bills I tossed into lottery pools at work.  I’m guessing that nearly all working stiffs sometimes dream of winning the lottery and achieving that sort of freedom – even though lots of studies show that a year later, most winners are no higher on the Happiness Index (which really exists).

News reports are always full of threats to our freedom, often couched in words of blame for someone else.  Still, on a hypothetical Public Freedom Index, things could be a lot worse.    We can watch fireworks if we choose – or not, since we don’t have mandated public celebrations.  The explosions tonight will be for fun; we live free of the threat of real bombs.  We can can blog and tweet to our heart’s content, and Google on a staggering array of topics.

Personal Freedom is always a little more dicey.  We are still guaranteed “the pursuit of happiness,” but you have to wonder how most people would answer the Dr. Phil question:  “How’s that working for you?”

The Dalai Lama says all of us desire happiness and an end to suffering, but we really don’t know how to go about it.  Many of our choices lead to the opposite result.  Perhaps the freedom to ask – really ask – where our real happiness lies, is one of the greatest freedoms of all.  That and Freedom of Information which allows us to follow the trail where ever it leads.

Here is Buddhist blessing/prayer, known as The Four Immeasurables:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the supreme happiness that is beyond suffering.
May all beings rest in equanimity, free from attachment and free from aversion.

Happy Fourth of July!

A Year of Blogging

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Snoopy writing

During high school and college, I tried to keep journals, because that’s what writers are supposed to do, but I never got too much traction writing only for myself.

Far more important were the letters I wrote to several close friends during that time.  You could say I learned to write because of them, for they really encouraged me, and an appreciative audience was all it took to turn on an incredible flow of words.  I wrote page after page, jotting down ideas as I tried them on for size, and things that just came to me in mid-sentence.  What kept me going was the thrill of knowing someone wanted to read what I had to say.

I think you can see where I am going with this…

Fast forward a few decades and in June, 2010, I signed up for a day long blogging workshop because these days, “building a platform,” is what writers are supposed to do.  I had and have some fairly cynical thoughts on that proposition (for writers of fiction that is), but that is beside the point.  I simply would not have kept at it if blogging was nothing more than a means to an end.

Almost immediately, this endeavor took on a life of its own.  It continues to surprise me.  If I had to sum up what blogging means to me, I would say, “discovery.”  Not only because of all the things I get to research and learn about, but because I continuously surprise myself by finding things in the psyche I don’t know are there until I see them on the screen.

So I want to sincerely thank everyone who stops here and reads a post, and maybe even takes a moment to leave a comment.  You keep me going and I appreciate you very much

I’ve learned many things this year, chief among them, the seemingly inexhaustible way the mind generates ideas.  I don’t know how many times I’ve posted something and gotten up thinking, “Well, that’s it.  It was a nice run while it lasted, but I’m finally out of things to say.”  The experience is so common, that I get to see, at least once or twice a week, that if I just go do something else, the next idea will appear in it’s own time.

Ideas are common – they come and go, but once in a while one sinks deep, resonates, and even changes some aspect of your life.  Something stated very simply this spring by Edward Espe Brown, who I posted about at the time, had that effect.  It crystalizing themes that had been on the back burner for a very long time:

Are you going to be a rule follower or are you just going to be you? – Edward Espe Brown

Brown made the comment in the context of spiritual practice, but it has a much wider scope.  It certainly does in the field of writing.  Here’s a confession:  some two years ago, a critique group buddy said, “I’ve heard that editors don’t like colons.”  I am ashamed to admit that I went home and rewrote several sentences.  Blogging has sharpened my perception of the absurdity of pronouncements like that, and something else that Brown said cuts at the very motive for heeding “advice” of that sort:

What is precious in us doesn’t come, doesn’t go, and it does not depend on performance.

Edward Espe Brown

I am very fortunate indeed to have a forum like this where I get to pass along things of value like that when I come upon them.  And as for what’s coming up in the next year – I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I do.  Meanwhile, I very much hope you will stay tuned.

A Retreat with Anam Thubten Rinpoche

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I recently heard the results of a poll that I found surprising: 50% of Americans report having had a “spiritual experience,” but of that group, 80% say they never want to have another. That was exactly the opposite of the 70 or 80 people who gathered on Saturday for a daylong retreat with Anam Thubten Rinpoche, sponsored by the Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group.

Anam Thubten Rinpoche

Rinpoche is a Tibetan word meaning, “precious one,” and is usually only applied to those recognized as reincarnations of spiritual leaders or teachers of the past, most famously, the current 14th Dalai Lama.

I first attended a retreat with Anam Thubten in December, 2005 and have been fortunate enough to get to a half-dozen more since then, for his home and teaching center, the  Dharmata Foundation in Point Richmond, CA, is not far away.  In the years since I first heard him, the clarity, resonance, and joy contained in his teachings have brought him greater renown:  his book, No Self, No Problem, originally published by the Dharmata Foundation, has been picked up by Snow Lion Press (a self-publishing success story!), and he was chosen to kick off the ongoing series of online retreats at Tricycle.com

In my own efforts to write of the concept of no-self last December, I quoted Anam Thubten for his simple, experiential way of presenting the concept:  “this ‘I’ is a fictitious entity that is always ready to whither away the moment we stop sustaining it.  We don’t have to go to a holy place to experience this.  All we have to do is simply sit and pay attention to our breath, allowing ourselves to let go of all our fantasies and mental images”

It should be clear that any culture like Tibet, that believes in Rinpoches, is not using the concept of “no-self” to tell us we don’t exist or that life does not continue after death.  In Anam Thubten’s vision, “no-self” means an end to the painful illusion of seperation, an end to isolation, an end to living in a friend-or-foe, fight-or-flight world.

Yet although he mentioned this concept, which first drew me to his teachings, on Saturday he had a different focus, “Primordial Mind,” the unconditioned and indefinable base of what we are, prior to concepts, prior to ego, prior to all delusions.  The experience of this spacious mind is surprisingly near if we are willing to let go of fixed concepts, and practice a simple meditation technique, and if we are motivated by devotion, by longing for union with the absolute the way a thirsty man longs for water.

Anam Thubten’s book elaborates the concepts we need to let go  of as well as his favorite meditation practice – the simple but difficult art of learning to relax and let go of effort, even the effort to meditate “well.”  This longing – for God or the guru or Buddha; for oneness, or emptiness or, selflessness, or enlightenment – however we conceive of the ultimate good, is finally a longing for love, he said, and this is what remains when our fixed ideas break down.  In Anam Thubten’s teaching, God is love, or Buddha Nature is love, as it is in the words of many other spiritual masters.

My description is close to being new-agey, which is why Anam Thubten is the teacher and I am not.  He didn’t gloss over the difficulty and struggles involved in a serious spiritual search, and in his quiet and understated way he noted that if one is not receptive, “this talk will be very strange.”

In the end, it is the person of the teacher himself that does the convincing.  Is this person really what he seems – genuinely centered, full of peace and compassion?  I believe Anam Thubten really is a man of peace and joy and I trust his message that what he has found is accessible to anyone willing to look and make the effort.   More information and his teaching schedule can be found at the Dharmata Foundation website,  http://www.dharmatafoundation.com/

Dharmata is a word that means, “the way things truly are.”

A Walk in the Park and Minor White

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The other day, I fired up Google to look at opinions on the appropriate age for protagonists of young adult vs. middle grade fantasy. The reason, as I have said here recently, is that I am reviewing all my ideas and assumptions about the story I’m working on. Everything is on the table.  I was thinking of the greater freedom middle grade fantasy allows; as one blogger put it, “in middle grade, tall ships and laptops can exist in the same universe.”

Opinions on the age divide between the two genres varied, and in particular, no one seemed to know where to put a 14 year old lead character – what I am currently leaning toward for my heroine.  She started out 14, became 16 for a while, and is probably going to get younger again.

At the end of this search I was not only frustrated with the lack of clear answers, but also slightly disgusted with myself.  I have written about not being bound by rules, and these are the most inane sort of rules.  I remembered my very first post on this blog, when I quoted from Neil Gaiman’s editorial notes for the collection of stories called, Stories (William Morrow, 2010).  Gaiman says:  “I realized that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre:  the idea that categories which existed only to guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kinds of stories that were being written.”

The next day, Mary and I were walking in the local park and I was relating the results of my search and grousing a bit.  I said, “It would be nice to forget the whole business of getting published.”  She shrugged and said, “Why don’t you?”

Why don’t I indeed?  And we’re not talking here of the old cliche, “I just write for myself,” which implies indifference to quality or being read.  We’re talking of what T.S. Eliot meant when he said, “Take no thought for the harvest but only for the proper sowing.”

Why don’t I?  The reason is simple.  I’m still learning my craft as a writer, still a little hungry for external validation, but I have travelled this arc from apprentice to journeyman before.  I thought of the words and photographs of Minor White who influenced me more than anyone else when, after two years of college, I changed majors and schools to study art and photography.  Minor White’s dedication to photography as a spiritual practice was one of the reasons I went.

White, (1908-1976), began taking photographs in 1938 after spending five years writing poetry.  In 1946, Ansel Adams invited him to join the faculty of the first American fine arts photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  White’s work always had an inward focus; he evolved the concept of “equivalents,” a word first coined by the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who served as a mentor for White’s and Adams’s entire generation.

Equivalents are photographs, often of mundane subjects, that are seen with an almost visionary regard for form and light.  At their best, “equivalents” evoke powerful and even semi-mystical responses in the viewer, unrelated to the literal meaning of the image.  Later in his working and teaching career, White wrote extensively of Zen and camera work.

Snow Door by Minor White

Zen has always been associated with certain arts, traditionally, painting, poetry, archery, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) wrote a manual for cooks.  My friend, Rosi Hollinbeck, has written about the inspiration she gets from Natalie Goldberg who writes about writing from the perspective of a long time Zen practitioner:  http://rosihollinbeckthewritestuff.blogspot.com/2011/03/book-for-writers-and-lovers.html.

For me, it was Minor White who opened a doorway into the practice of art as a spiritual discipline.  At the core of any such discipline are moments of selflessness, where the subject-object split disappears, and mindfulness replaces concern for the “product.”

I hadn’t thought of Minor White in some time, but the memory brought a great sense of relief, because I remembered that once before I had learned a craft well enough that it sometimes became transparent, became a doorway to “the still point in the turning world.”  Sometimes I didn’t realize when it was happening; sometimes I did, as with this image of a crumbling barn in western New York.

"Near Oswego, NY," 1973, by Morgan Mussell

Seen from this perspective, the answer to Mary’s question, “Is it possible to forget about results in writing,” becomes, “It is necessary!”

I was fortunate enough to meet some of the great photographers of White’s generation – Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham.  I never met Minor White himself.  It’s probably just as well.  He was a heros then, and some heroes can loom so large it is hard to let them go when the time comes.

Minor White, 1973. Photo by Robert Haiko

I don’t really have heroes now; heroes are for young men.  What I have is tremendous gratitude and respect for those who, like Minor White, served as mentors and guides.  These are people who found a way to walk their own individual paths, and in doing so, showed us that it remains possible.

The Inklings and Stuff

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The Inklings was the name of an informal literary group at Oxford that met for nearly two decades, between the early 1930’s and 1949.  Fans of fantasy literature know that regular members included authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Neville Coghill, a Chaucer specialist, and Hugo Dyson who had been a member of the club that spawned the Inklings, “The Coalbiters,” a group founded by Tolkien to discuss Icelandic myth.

The Inklings discussed, among other things, myth, religion, and what we now call fantasy “world-building.”  Tolkien read chapters of Lord of the Rings and Lewis read his Narnia books.  They met on Thursday evenings in Lewis’s college rooms, and often shared lunch on Tuesdays at the Eagle and Child pub, commonly called, “The Bird and the Baby.”

The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford

Nowadays we call such literary clubs, critique groups.  You often hear fans of fantasy literature say, “Oh, to have been a member of that group!”

Lately I’ve been thinking of the downside of such associations.  If you were C.S. Lewis, what would you have done when Tolkien told you not to publish Narnia?  “You will embarrass yourself,” he said.

I also think about the first Harry Potter book, which would never have been blessed by any critique group.  J.K. Rowling broke too many rules.  For starters, she mixed elements of middle-grade fantasy with young-adult fantasy, and by all conventional rules, that is a no-no.  The problem is, conventional rules lead to conventional books.  Check out some book-jacket blurbs at the local Barnes & Noble to see for yourself if that’s true.

I can clearly remember when it wasn’t like this.  In the eighties I used to hang out at a quirky fantasy bookstore.  I could go in with a theme in mind like, “spirit guides in contemporary urban fantasy,” and walk away with a couple of titles the owner pointed out to me.  Try that at the Barnes & Noble!

Learning and practicing conventional wisdom is a part of mastering any craft.  I went through it in art school.  It was necessary, but eventually became like wearing mental blinders that prevented me from appreciating or producing work that ventured beyond certain boundaries.  The problem was, I could not see past the filters even when I started wanting to, because I had spent so much effort learning the rules.  Only with the passage of time – a lot of time – did my rigid ideas relax and dissolve.

Is there any way to speed up the process now?  Because now I know what is really at stake:  it’s about recapturing a spirit of freshness and play as a reader and a writer.

***

This morning I found myself rereading notes I had taken in March when I attended a retreat with Edward Espe Brown, an event I posted about at the time.  No wonder!  Brown is one of the least doctrinaire people I have ever met.  Here is the story that really stuck with me:  Brown was leading a meditation session, and as leader, his role was rather formal.  One day he sat down and reviewed his inventory of meditation techniques – which was extensive – to choose one to practice that day.  A sudden inspiration arose in his mind – Why don’t you just touch what is inside with warmth and kindness?

That is a very revealing exercise.  One of the first things that comes up for me you could call the “inner achiever.”  I bet most of us learned early in life to be virtuous and hard working.  Play only after you get your work done, and so on.

It’s easier to see the dynamic in meditation where nothing else is going on.  I tend to procrastinate more in attempting such a strange (warmth and kindness?) exercise in writing.  Yet a timed period of freewriting in the morning, before the daylight mind is fully awake, can lead to a startling result – it can open a doorway into play and an unexpected abundance of ideas.

I do this freehand in spiral notebooks and tell the inner achiever these are “warm up exercises.”  And after repeating this for a few days, I’ve witnessed ideas pouring onto the page, in such a profusion that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.  Try it and see.  For me it was something of a revelation.  I’ve done free writing before without experiencing this, but I suspect I was secretly harboring agendas along the lines of self-improvement or self-discovery or something like that.

Where are all these ideas going?  I really don’t know, and I am determined not to ask.  It’s too adult a question – “Are you engaged in an educational form of play?  Is this leading toward a measurable goal?  I have no idea.  I don’t even know if these ideas are “mine” or if “me” and “mine” have any meaning while this is going on.

Here are some other notes I jotted down when Edward Brown was here:

  • What is precious in us doesn’t come and doesn’t go.  It is not dependent on performance.
  • You can’t figure it out.
  • Focus on what is beyond thinking – and that means what is in the heart.

Finally, he posed a stunningly simple question:  Are you going to be a rule follower or are you going to be you?

You can’t just make a simple decision on that one and then do some warm up exercises.  What was it that C.S. Lewis knew about himself and his work that kept him going when Tolkien told him Narnia wasn’t fit to publish?

That is a very important question for any writer who wants to listen to others without losing his or her own inner center of gravity.

A Day With Edward Espe Brown: Zen, Cooking (and Writing Too)

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When Edward Espe Brown was head cook and baker at the Tassajara Zen Center in the mountains above Big Sur, he had a serious problem with biscuits.  As described in the recently updated, Complete Tassajara Cookbook, no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get them “right” – right to himself that is.  Other people raved about the biscuits.

Then one day he realized he was comparing them to the Pillsbury biscuits that he had enjoyed as a kid. He actually tasted his own biscuits and was amazed at how delicious they were. Brown writes:

Those moments – when you realize your life as it is is just fine, thank you – can be so stunning and liberating. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product makes it seem insufficient. The effort to produce a life with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger is bound to fail – and be endlessly frustrating.

The Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group, http://www.sbmg.org/,  hosted Brown for a one day retreat last Saturday.  First you need to know that Brown is an ordained Zen priest and Dharma heir of the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the teacher who, more than any other, first put Zen on the American cultural map.

Then you need to understand that Edward Brown is one of the funniest men I’ve ever met.  A lot of Zen teachers and students come off as stern and unsmiling, but Brown reminds me of Steve Martin and the late Leslie Nielsen, in his ability to crack up a room of 50 people with the lift of an eyebrow or the subtlest “Who, me?” expression.  As in his cooking, so in his teaching, Brown has gone his own way.  Learning to trust your own heart and find your own way was the core of the message he gave on Saturday.

Brown relates that one time he was the meditation leader during a three month retreat with 20 students at Tassajara.  One day, as he debated which technique to practice, an unexpected thought bubbled to the surface:  “Why don’t you just touch what’s inside with warmth and kindness?”  He spent the rest of the session in tears and left the organization not long after.

No cookie-cutter biscuits, no cookie-cutter Zen, no cookie-cutter life.  “Are you going to be a rule follower or are you just going to be you?” he asked on Saturday.  That particular quote is highlighted in my notebook for its importance to anyone trying to write.

“Are you going to be a rule follower or are you just going to be you?”

***

Edward Brown leads The Peaceful Sea Sangha.  The website has a calendar of his activities, a recent article about his cooking, and a large number of Dharma talks available for free download.  http://www.peacefulseasangha.com/default.html

Says Who?

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This post is about judging ourselves negatively based on unexamined or under-examined beliefs.  What got me thinking in this direction was the recent exploration I did on ebook publishing.  I’m guessing that most unpublished writers long for the validation that acceptance for traditional publication confers:  “Now I am somebody!”  In fact, those ebook authors who have launched their careers by non-traditonal means have also done an end-run around our customary who’s-who assumptions.  New game, new rules.

I want to consider some of the ideas we use to bludgeon ourselves.  I’m not talking about (relatively) small issues:  I wish I had a nicer lawn. Nor am I considering such serious and potentially clinical issues as a pervasive, non-specific, feeling that I am just no good: I am not up to taking on original sin, in any of its many variations.

I’m talking about the dozens of ideas we or our friends have used to put ourselves down.  Reasons I am a loser:

  • Because I didn’t make the little league team.
  • Because I am dumb in math
  • Because girls think guys in the math club are nerds.
  • Because I’m not as pretty as my sister.
  • Because I didn’t get into my first choice college.
  • Because I don’t like my job.
  • Because I am not married.
  • Because my marriage is on the skids.
  • Because I don’t have any children.
  • Because the kids are out of control, which means I’m a terrible parent.
  • Because I got skipped over for a promotion.
  • Because I can’t handle my new job.
  • Because I got laid off.
  • Because I hate this town and want to live in (fill in the blank).
  • Because I can’t get get my book published
  • Because I want to be somebody.

Something in that list may bring to mind some past or present hot button issues.  Ideas like this can be incredibly painful, but interestingly, the moment our minds change, the issues and pain disappear.  We can see this by considering past ideas, the ones we no longer believe.  One day in grade school, I had a revelation:  I don’t really care about little league – I was just trying out because everyone else was. Instantly, all the inferiority vanished.  I was no longer a loser just because I wasn’t good at baseball.  Soon enough, however, new limiting ideas filled the void and I was a loser again.

That dynamic should make us very suspicious!

It made Cheri Huber suspicious.  Huber, a Zen teacher who is also versed in modern psychology, has made it one of her special missions to take on the voices of self-hate she finds so rampant in our culture.  Huber travels and teaches internationally, is a prolific author, has a regular radio talk show, and hosts workshops both online and at “The Zen Monastery Peace Center,” in Murphys, CA.  http://www.cherihuber.com/index.html

Huber is the author of twenty books, most of them published by “Keep It Simple,” an independent press she and her sangha founded back in the ’80’s.  Perhaps her most pervasive theme is contained in title of one of her most popular books:  There Is Nothing Wrong With You:  Going Beyond Self-Hate.  In the introduction, she writes:

Every spiritual path tells us that what we are seeking is inside us.  Society, the world, others, conditioning, teaches us as children to stop looking to ourselves in order to know what is so for us, and to begin to look to others in order to know what is right.  We first learn to look to parents, then teachers, then friends, lovers, husband or wife, children, Jesus or the Buddha or God – all “out there.”  The love, the acceptance, the approval is out there (emphasis added).

Huber sometimes uses the model of “sub-personalities,” to illustrate the origin of the self-hating voices.  Simplistically, sub-personalities are a series of “mini-me’s” living inside my psyche, with the power to take possession of my awareness from time to time.  Some of them hate me.  Some of them do nothing but whisper poisonous thoughts, and of these, Huber says:

You can listen to the voices that say there is something wrong with you.  It’s actually very helpful to be aware of them.  Just don’t believe them.  Most of what we have been taught to believe we had to be taught to believe because it isn’t true.  This is why children have to be conditioned so heavily!  We would never have reached these conclusions on our own!

I sat in a one day retreat with Cheri Huber in the summer of 2005, and got a sense of her deep commitment to this particular work.  It was clear from her comments that she had come from a starting place of crippling inferiority and lack of self worth.  She now seems like a joyous person, and one who believes her process is open to everyone, and judging by the numbers of people who threw themselves into the work that day, quite a few others have found it true for them.

As you learn to sit down, sit still and pay attention, you begin to glimpse that which sees through the illusion, beyond the voices of society’s conditioning, back to the original being.  And slowly that perceiving becomes more real than all you’ve been taught to believe…you begin to see with a much broader view…you begin to be the love, acceptance, and compassion you have always sought – Cheri Huber.