Navigation Charts for the Ocean of Samsara

A lifetime ago, as I was I moving to the great state of Maine, I took a special course in ocean navigation that was called "Boat Handling."  Since I was going to be living by the sea, and a legendary one at that, I figured my survival could depend on knowing how to go with the flow. So I spent a bunch of winter evenings sitting in a high school basement getting from volunteers in the Power Squadron, the educational wing of the Coast Guard, some tips for steering. In all probability, I am still here because those classes taught me to cut across scary swells at a 45º angle, to cut the motor and use the water's oomph when I neared an object, to dock my boat against the tidal flow.

With its moody chops and swells, its tsunamis and reefs, its breakers, and especially its seeming infinity, the ocean has always been the symbol of Samsara. It is, I suppose, the perfect visual for our unending tides of thought, swells of impulse and emotional eddies. Sooner and later, we all lose what we have, don't get what we want, promises aren't kept, hopes are bashed, fears get inflated and some form of aggression erupts to make it all go away. But it doesn't. So the world is said to be an ocean of suffering. 

Also when we inherit a body, we inherit its birthright of old age, sickness and death-- the double whammy of losing what we have by getting what we don't want. Since we can't stop these changes, life is said to be a sea of sorrow.

Its perpetual motion also makes the sea a perfect metaphor for our continual suffering. We go round and round, doing the same things over and over thinking this time they'll come out differently. Our mind goes up and down, churns and calms and changes in an endless flow of reactions. The current of events never stops. We get motion sickness.

Since there are no handrails and nothing to... well, "stand on", our slippery banana peel feeling brings on desperation to stop it. We  want to grab onto something, anything to make it all stand still until we can get a grip. And since, as Karmapa just said, we like to do things the easy way, we think grasping a title, credential, bank account, jewel, property, award, whatever, holding onto something like an icon that wards of evil spirits will disrupt our perpetual and inchoate discomfort. 

What's hugely ironic is that the Buddha diagnosed the cause of our endless suffering to be the unending flow of change, yet since he did that 2600 years ago, what's never changed are the big scary changes he focused on: loss, aging, sickness and death. He thought of these as fate. They were challenges to be accepted and approached, and Dharma offered up a plan. 

In our era of marketing madness, we think of these killer kahunas as disrupters, something corporations can fix with just a product or two.

It was chilling to read about Plan B in a brilliant essay Sunday in the New York Times, "the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death. ...Barriers and constraints —  anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. ...Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity."

  

Evgeny Morozov says Silicon Valley believes algorithms will cure everything that ails us. Apps are being created to make what we don't like to see disappear from view, to make Twitter accounts keep going after death, to crowd source decisions so we can avoid be rejected for our choices. Of course that way we become programmed robots who don't really get to make choices or be responsible for them. Making decisions is the hard work Karmapa says we prefer to avoid. After all, as a Rinpoche once said: "Mistakes are something you don't discover until after you make them."

If algorithms are the new Advil to take away human pain, what we're buying into is Silicon Valley's easy way out: snooze control. Here already a driverless car: coming soon, a mariner-free boat on autopilot cruising the ocean of Samsara. Another labor saving device. No pain, no gain. Learning to appreciate imperfections, Morozov concludes, "at a time when the means to fix them are so numerous and glitzy, is one of the toughest tasks facing us today."

What to do?

Well to give Silicon Valley a run for its considerable money, perhaps it's helpful for those of us out here in mid ocean to remember these imperfections of ours, the thorny sting and itchiness of life, death, sickness and aging its software writers want to abolish, are precisely what provoke some of us to download Dharma and use Buddhism as our primary app. Happily it really is a much much more powerful navigational tool than Next Bus or Google Maps or Waze or anything IT people create. It's like that Power Squadron class I took all those years ago. Awakening internal GPS, it teaches how to steer through the menacing swells, rips and shoals of a specific ocean. It teaches how to approach the flotsam of others and objects. Its goal is smooth sailing to the shore, the harbor of transcendence.


A boat actually is the metaphor for the way to liberation, although it is sometimes called a raft, even liferaft. A boat was the Buddha's way of indicating Dharma is a means of transport, a vehicle. That's the meaning of yana in Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana: something that carries us across the ocean of Samsara to the shore of Nirvana, true blissful enlightenment.

On the ocean in a boat, Dharma protectors becomes the Coast Guard. I scream: "Mayday!"  and they come to my rescue. As I have written in earlier posts Chenrezig responds to my prayers, Medicine Buddha responds, teachers pull up beside my raging fears and tow me to calm. 

Just like when someone actually calls the real Coast Guard for help, I have to be extremely honest about my position. At sea the conjunction of your coordinates is called dead reckoning and it leaves no tolerance for deception. Self-deception undoes it completely. I love the story about the yachtsman floundering in whitecapped distress in the Gulf of Maine calling the Coast Guard on his fancy marine radio and every time another officer asks, "What is your position?" he replies with increasing testiness: "I am a vice-president of the Bank of Boston."

As I remember, the critical lifesaving lesson the Power Squadron teachers repeated was to never embark on an ocean voyage, no matter what length, without sea charts and without giving somebody else the navigation plan, hopefully with updates on whereabouts. In a sense, that is the origin of this blog. Out here on the ocean of Samsara, I'm trying to steer away from trouble and surf swells.  I am trying to cut over big emotional waves at an angle so they don't flip me over, use the force of Dharma to propel me over reefs and shoals, and chart a course. Once I take dead reckoning and know where I am, I send a message.

With these flares I send up, I am also signaling that Dharma is not something for the books back on the shelf, something you read like a novel and then go on to something else. On this ocean of suffering, it's GPS for every minute of every day for everyone. It's a carry-on. Frankly, when I use what it's taught me, I find to my own amazement, I may be all at sea but at least I am aware of that. And this is probably why I am still here.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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