Yours in the Dharma

Shift Control, Option Command,

2012-02-04T17:26:00.000-08:00

"In your mind's browser, clear your cache...delete your history...navigate to a blank web page..." That's the cartoon version of how computer geeks learn to meditate. It flashed on my screen this week, courtesy of an amused lama, and I couldn't resist forwarding it to a Dharma brother who runs a meditation class sanctioned as time-out stress reduction for high-powered co-workers at Adobe. I also couldn't resist taking this take as a must-do download, a new up-to-the-nanosecond Dharma app. Buddhism: a software program to run your mind. A whole new operating system!

We've progressed from the Dalai Lama telling a hotdog vendor: "Make me one with everything", to: How does the Dalai Lama send email? With no attachment. The late Trungpa Rinpoche riveted Westerners in the '70s by delivering Dharma in familiar psychological jargon, coining phrases like "spiritual materialism", "ego clinging" and "guru neurosis." In the 80s slick, four-color photogenic magazines purveyed it as fashionably active ecology. In the '90s, a hip Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche made a film instead of a thangkha; Dzigar Kongtrul taught wearing Armani suits. Now comes the cyber version for the whole under-40 generation devoid of any other frame of reference. Buddha: Like him on Facebook!

Frankly, I would've forgotten that carton and not be writing this if it hadn't hit my screen days after a Tibetan lama asked me why other lamas and gurus have wider, more enthusiastic (read that: book buying) audiences than our precious Rinpoche, who happens to be the greatest Tibetan Buddhist scholar alive. A trick question or perhaps just a tricky one to answer because the lama got edgy when I tried to explain those already in the know--the older crowd long ago won over to the bright side--knew Rinpoche was the most precious teacher alive and hung on his words. Yes. But those words, traditional monastic, high falutin' and based on ancient Tibetan cultural metaphors, had no resonance for the young in a world of instant messaging. They needed metaphors more magnetic than how a cow pees slowly or a butter lamp lights the dark. The younger Rinpoches and lamas are popular because they describe meditation as charging your cell phone battery so you pick up signals. Ponlop Rinpoche calls the Buddha a beatnik, hippie rebel, an Occupy forefather. Mingyur Rinpoche has even gone on You Tube with a short very direct and funny video of how to meditate while multitasking in a busy world. (Hint: When you awake, say Om Mani Padme Hung (May all beings be free of suffering), which will set your mind in a particular frame.) "We need to modernize the message," I said.

So here we go...testing...testing...The computer screen on which you are reading this is cyber space. It perfectly reflects what Buddhists call the ultimate truth, the Dharmakaya--kaya being the Sanskrit word for a universe or realm or the space in which something happens. Your mind is the Dharmakaya: like a mirror, like a computer screen, it reflects everything it contacts. Just like your computer screen, anything can appear on/in it, spontaneously appear fully formed and disappear just as spontaneously when you focus on something else, open another window. The way computers work is how Buddhists describe the mind.

Ask yourself: where did what appears on the screen actually come from? Locate it precisely, can you? Okay, where did it go when you scrolled down or moved on? Can you say with certainty where it resides when not on your screen/in your mind? Is what flashes on your screen and what flashes in your mind substantial, solid, real? Or is it just the play of light? Meditate on that.

Your computer browser is a perfect example of openness, ready with space for anything to arise. And so is the Dharmakaya, your mind. That's emptiness: unobstructed spaciousness allowing for the appearance of anything. That's non-solidity, impermanence, that continuous flow of appearances across the screen. Are they really there, alive, those appearances? How did they get there? Can you engage with them? Do they engage with you? Do you cling to certain images, invest them with power they do not intrinsically contain? Or do you watch detached without judgment, hope or fear, as they flow by? Why do you act out, taking the images that flow through your mind as present and very real?

Can you see what's on your screen? Do you always know when something is there, no matter what that something is? That's what Buddhists call luminosity. That's the sublime power of the mind: it always knows, always illuminates what's being reflected on it, so we know. We may not know right from wrong but we do know what we know.

Do you update early and often? Do you empty the trash or keep it on the computer, even though you can't see it? Put that in psychological terms and you've got Dharma.

Does your mind get stuck on something? Does something drag you away from the present moment back to where you've already been to make it seem present? That's cookies! Just like on your computer marking sites you visit, crowding your cache, these lingering traces of past activity stain your mind like markers. Like cookies, they are attachments. Meditation is having TACO reveal how many cookies are hidden behind the computer screen, how many past thoughts are stuck, caught on something in the flow of the mind. It's about erasing all that past crap. No tracks, no trace, just freedom, ultimate freedom.

My mind is My Space, and the Dharmakaya is definitely linked in. The original world wide web is Indra's net in which every node of webbing is a jewel reflecting every other node, so that none can be distinguished as apart. Everything old is new again. Control...delete...escape...

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Radio Rinpoche

2012-01-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

Early in December word leaked from Hong Kong that on the eve of his 78th birthday, our precious guru, the great scholar (the literal translation for that, Khenchen, is his Tibetan title) Thrangu Rinpoche suffered what may have been a mild stroke. Nobody would give an accurate diagnosis but emails claimed Rinpoche seemed to be recovering-- although there was still residual damage to his eyesight and vocal chords.

Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche is a Dharma vessel, a way of saying he is a lighthouse of rock solid sanity in the swelling sea of Samsaric madness we all flounder in. Now with the risk of that vessel being permanently cracked or broken, everyone was urged to arouse aspirations and pray for both his full recovery and extended life. Specific prayers like those to the Medicine Buddha or Amitabha, deity of immortality, or White Tara, the compassionate Mother goddess of well-being (long life, strong health and wisdom), were recommended.

Like other students of Thrangu Rinpoche's, I hopped right to chanting Medicine Buddha and White Tara mantras, lighting candles, clasping my hands in front of my heart and praying to the deity of accomplishment and the deity who removes obstacles for his long life. Mine was just a small voice but it was flowing into a massive polyglot outpouring of love streaming toward Hong Kong like one of those giant arrows on the Weather Channel. I felt tremendous satisfaction knowing that even despite a lack of medical training or proximity to the patient, I was doing something to help someone who has been an extraordinary helpmate to me.

By the new year, news from Hong Kong was getting ever more positive about the possibility of Rinpoche's chances for full recovery. Still, since you can't be too sure, we were asked to keep praying. So I am, with great fervor--and not with blind faith. Friends ask why.

For one thing, Rinpoche has always urged his students to pour positive energy into this negative world, particularly in troubled times. He always says there can never be enough or too much to go around. Besides, even if you don't believe the world is just a kaleioscoping energy field, how or who can your aspiration to stop suffering actually hurt? Where is the downside to prayer?

The other thing is that I have personally experienced prayers making a big difference. I saw their uncanny power to affect outcomes. About two years ago in this blog, I reported on being magically rescued from the abyss of a nasty death in the family by Chenrezig, the great god of compassion for the suffering, to whom I had so desperately prayed for help in a moment of painful confusion. This past year, on the advice of one of Rinpoche's higher lamas, I have been praying every morning to the deity who removes obstacles and lately also reciting a special prayer to all the protectors and deities of the world to put everything in good working order for me. Actually "auspicious" is the word used: "May all be auspicious...all harm removed and obstacles pacified." And whaddya know. Since the solstice I feel like a dark, heavy weight was lifted off by an invisible crane and I'm giddily free in the clear sunshine of auspicious possibilities.

Another reason I feel this way right now may be, or so a friend says, because there was an astrological shift newly favorable to us beleaguered Capricorns. This, of course, strengthens my belief that there really are all sorts of forces chauffeuring us through life, that we are not as much in control of our destiny as, say, the energies of the Zodiac, all that Mercury retrograde and Saturn in your fifth house stuff. Frankly, I now believe so much in cosmic cues--although not $10 fortune-tellers, that I spent some of New Year's Eve trying to win at solitaire, thinking this would be an omen that 2012 would be a winning year. Unfortunately, I went to bed struggling to decide if losing all five games meant all my losses for the year had just been played out so I was now good to go, or I had just been warned about another hopeless year.

I worried about this because I have come to accept the fact that that behind the scrim of our man-made culture lies a real world we can't manhandle. As science says, it's all energy, continual morphing waves of energy. Spiritual pursuits like mine are an attempt to acknowledge that since I am not in charge, the best I can do is tap or tune into, and harmonize, with them. Thus my companion the Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes), and my checking in with the Greek Zodiac that charts annual energy flows. Last May my Tibetan goddaughter wouldn't let me hang prayer flags until she checked which day was the most auspicious and which day would prefigure disaster, something I'd never considered before. But I will consider it every year now because those were the only prayer flags that never seemed diminished or dulled due to time and weather. They were magically flying as whole and bright five months after we put them up as the morning we put them up, chanting prayers.

I think of the primeval Buddhist deities to whom I pray as ancient versions of modern radio stations: invisible energy waves in the invisible ocean of air. Each has its own spectrum, often visualized broadcasting as one of the colors of the rainbow, which is merely light waves of energy. (Medicine Buddha is lapis blue, Amitabha is blood red, Chenrezig is stainless white.) By praying, I tune in to surf the most propitious waves. If I connect, as the Irish say, I go forward with the wind at my back, the sun on my face. Or in other easy rider words, I don't go against the grain and all is auspicious. That's peak experience.

Admittedly, I can't hear the deities the way I can hear All Things Considered, but that does not dent my faith. Rinpoche always insists the deities hear me. And since I started praying, I have to say he's right. They have been dialing down my life into less and less of an obstacle course, something more and more auspicious and joyful. That's why I stay tuned. And why I, along with so many others, continue to send out energy waves of prayer to lengthen the life of the man who gave me this extraordinary gift.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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New Year Resolution

2012-01-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

Finally, at the very end of 2011, a multi-starred restaurant chef stated the sadly obvious: "... if you are at a good restaurant, you can assume that the ingredients will be good and that they'll be cooking seasonally. That simplicity, it's a beautiful way of eating and cooking. But as a chef, it's not the most gratifying. At some point you have to ask yourself if we are talking about food as nourishment or food that is emotional and impactful."

At some other point, I guess, you have to ask yourself why food as nourishment isn't emotional and impactful--and gratifying? What is food anyway?

Actually, we all need to ask ourselves because the Gilded Age gotta-have rage, and concurrent consumer culture bubble, is food. Notice in the chef's quote how "simplicity, it's a beautiful way of eating and cooking" is so cavalierly dismissed? That's why at a moment when a quarter of the country is starving, one tenth of one percent is ostentatiously stuffing itself with $500 a person dinners. People with too much money and time are so bored now by everything else, they're playing with food.

Lack of respect for food as simple nourishment has brought us all the manically unstoppable bacteriological, biological and inhumane horrors in our food chain. The day that quote about simplicity not being enough appeared in print, another headline shouted: Planting the Beach! It heralded the sad story of how Baja, California is being systematically stripped of its soil and water simply to meet our unrelenting demand to eat distinctly seasonal ingredients, particularly tomatoes, any time of the year we damn well want to. How's wanting to have it all all the time no matter what for emotional? And impactful too.

Other headlines are screaming that emotional and impactful food for the people rolling in excess dough these days, that infamous 1%, isn't just blow torch mini-bites but humungous tray-sized slabs of meat, if not the entire animal itself on a spit. Restaurants that imitate Roman banquet orgies are a Wall Street rage, echoing in the mad profusion of steakhouses and hamburger joints spreading across urban areas. Apparently, the more animals murdered, the merrier. It's Mad's "What me worry?" all over again, because thanks to other headlines, we are well aware of the destructive impact of polluting factory farms, and exactly how animal manufacture increases the menace of climate change.

Since long before the birth of the Buddha, greedy appetites were a major cause of suffering, Shakyamuni could accurately diagnose our human problem: craving. Enough is never enough. We always want more of something out there to fill up what we can't find inside. The Buddha connected the Brahmin caste's ravenous consumption of beef with a wide-spread famine in India because all the cows that pulled the plows and gave the milk that made the ghee, yogurt and cheese, had been confiscated for their beefsteak. He never stopped teaching that because our need to eat inevitably impacts everything and everyone around us, simple eating, consumption without harm, is beneficial for everyone and everything. The generosity of not making a mess is extremely gratifying because it makes others grateful.

In my book, Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, I tried to convey this ancient message that what and how we eat matters every which way. I wanted to prick the current food bubble with food framed in its historic perspective as nourishment, as life and therefore something very sacred to be respected. The ingredient degradation and agricultural destruction so frenetically in process (not progress) can't be stopped until we stop seeing food as blood sport (all those killer TV competitions), high style pornography (all those carefully doctored high gloss photos and lascivious descriptions), rocket science (all that chemical engineering with high tech blow torches), entertainment (highly stylized food that, for instance, takes you on a walk through oak leaves so you can remember your childhood), or what marketers today call "aspirational" to put a spin on social climbing ostentation.

In a brief email correspondence I had, the famed and former Zen Buddhist chef Deborah Madison wistfully noted how unusual it was these days to have a food book published without magnetizing glossy photographs. "I thought it was our obligation as Buddhists," I wrote back, "to not feed the frenzy of attachment and lust, to inflate the bubble any further." She did not reply.

If you are at all aware and awake to this frenetic fuss over food as consumer gilt, going to the supermarket, or better yet the farmers' market, becomes authentic Dharma practice. Standing there selecting food to digest makes you aware of your choices and decisions, your motivations and intentions, your being connected to a greater whole. That tie-in to the greater whole is the literal meaning of the Latin religio, the English religion. I wrote about the power of sesame seeds and the historic meaning of rice to show how people have struggled for millenniums to figure food as fuel for their body so it runs. Humans have thought about food as long as there have been humans because without food there can't be humans. That's really all you need to know: food is what every single being has in common. It is what truly unites us and ties us back to the Earth, re-ligio, religion. It is sustenance, and what sustains us needs to be sustained. A shared survival resource is not a play toy.

I started my life as what was derogatorily called a stomach Jew, somebody who pulled the rank of religion only to get good corned beef sandwiches and pickles. And I can still pull rank to tell a cream cheese schmearing Tibetan they don't know from bagels. But I've spent many of my adult years proud to be a gastronomic Buddhist. I cook and write about food to nourish minds that feed bodies that support the mind. I think I may be the only one or nearly so with this compulsive focus, but I don't think I'm crazy. Two thirds of the Buddha's rules for monastic behavior are about food. "Many of the 250 monastic rules given by the Buddha,” the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche told his Western students when he started teaching, “are connected with how to eat properly. When you eat properly, then you can walk properly, think properly and relate with other human beings properly. A lot of things are based on the idea of eating food properly, which is how to behave as a basically decent person.”

This is why I've been dismayed that the earliest and most widely disseminated review of my Veggiyana book, despite its positive encouragement to buy the book, complained under the heading "What is Dharma?" that I stopped short of actually delivering much Buddhist philosophy. Here are the exact words: "I assumed a book with "Dharma" in the title would include lots of guidance (that I need!) on pursuing enlightenment or at least serenity. Something along the lines of 'present moment, wonderful moment'. I was hoping for tips on how to keep my mind in the present while chopping vegetables...My dear friend...an ordained Zen priest...defines Dharma as...'teachings of awakening'. I don't see much about awakening..."

Talk about no awakening! The reviewer called me a Zen Buddhist when most of the text starting with the dedication made clear my Buddhism is Tibetan. She called pomegranates and daikon hard to find, exotic ingredients that belied my promise of universality. And despite my revelations on how profoundly Buddhism has influenced how and what we eat, even my stating right in the introduction that I hoped to raise awareness of our relationship with food, she said I offered no guidance on pursuing enlightenment.

If Dharma, as she says, is nothing more than step by step instructions on how to stay serene while stirring soup, that woman, PhD in science, is clueless about awakening. That's sad, especially if others also think Dharma is just about minding the moment you cook or clean. One of the great Tibetan Rinpoches, watching Zen students obsess over kitchen chores, pointed out how exaggerated mindfulness becomes a distraction, in fact a roadblock on the path to discovering the enlightenment in your own mind. I wrote almost two years ago about sadly watching Theravada mindfulness students obsessively focus on their footsteps--now my knee is bent, now my leg is stretched, now my foot touches the ground-- as they walked outside on a gloriously green spring day. They were so absorbed by their body movement, they were pathetically oblivious to the glory of mixing their minds with the clear blue sky and the liberating joy--the peak experience-- of Dharma.

Resolution, the word most associated with New Year, actually has meanings beyond the one traditionally trotted out on January 1: aspiration to begin something new, do something differently in the time ahead. One of those meanings is to bring something to an end. A resolution can be an outcome. For this New Year 2012, the resolution I am praying for is the bursting of the food bubble, and re-awakening to awareness that food is Dharma practice. Because Dharma practitioners have to eat, we could wake up to the food supply alarm. Awakening this year can mean the simplicity of eating seasonal, sustainable food that is nourishing and beautifully cooked, as well as the gratification of not being emotional or "impactful" in any way. Wouldn't that usher in a nutritious and delicious new year for everyone.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Emaho ho ho

2011-12-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

Here we are at the magical solstice moment when light comes back on.

And we get to see convergences. What joy to the world that the main Christian theme of Noel, "all is calm, all is bright", is the entire theme of our precious Buddhist practice. When the calm of shamata and clarity of vipassyana come together, the wisdom of enlightenment is born. Salvation...redemption...hallelujah!

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Dog Rights Man

2011-12-10T17:13:00.001-08:00

Earlier, I wrote about the problems a friend's mentally unstable daughter had brought to the family, about how not jumping to bail her out of her trouble--and jail-- had been the way to get her out of jail and into rehab. It turns out the story has an even happier ending. Prepare yourself, though, because on the surface it's very sad.

For the past five or six years that my friend's daughter was moving around the low end, drug dealing part of an urban area, her constant companion was a blue-eyed Husky dog rescued from the pound. No matter how low she got, how homeless or foodless or drug addled, she very faithfully took care of that dog, refusing to be parted from it, even when she was homeless.

The insistent love she lavished on this most astonishingly mild mannered animal, even in the darkest moments of her descent from decency, seemed to me a sonar beacon. I suggested to my friend that bond was transmitting from the depths a clear, hopeful message. Her daughter's greatest suffering was not the ravages of street drugs. silicone implants, bulimia or pimp violence. It was that she knew all along she wasn't right, that she had a dangerous mental imbalance. She could see it taking over but she couldn't stop it. Her attempt at hanging on to a "normal" live was keeping that dog, a non-judgmental companion who wouldn't leave her no matter how awful things got. He was there to share her secret truth, and be a reminder of her innocent childhood with the family pet.

That husky was a patient, generous canine who never demanded anything. He was thin but he looked fed and alert. He never jumped on people, howled or got in the way. He was just there, hovering, year after year hovering as my friend's daughter went from horrible circumstances to worse and then even more worse, around and around in a vicious cycle of depravity.

When the police took her to jail, the one call my friend's daughter was allowed to make went to her mother: "Please take my dog," she pleaded. "Take care of my dog." This was not the first time my friend had been asked to do this and not the first time that she took the Husky in, even though her aged cat was not amused. He was an old dog now, but no trouble really, mostly staying in the barn on a mound of blankets.

A month went by. The first thing my friend's daughter wanted when she got out of jail was the dog. She took him to the room she got while trying to be admitted to a year-long rehab program. She brushed him, she fed and walked him. She even thanked her parents for their help with him--a first. My friend told me her daughter upon questioning, confessed she had always clearly known that she was not right and not doing the right thing. "I knew when I was 13," the daughter told her Mom, "that there was this bad me taking over the good me."

Three weeks ago, the state found a place for my friend's daughter in their rehab program. It is also a safe place for someone turned states' evidence in a drug dealer case. When she moved in to the dormitory, my friend got the dog again. After the week of orientation and evaluation, my friend went to the campus. What she found there was re-assuring, so re-assuring it started to loosen the 30-year load on her mind. She was impressed with the care and the concept but mostly she couldn't get over how determined her child had get back to a normal, decent life, and to make up for her lapses with her brother's girls. But she wasn't getting her hopes too high.

In the middle of that night, the dog had seizures: horrible, painful, scary seizures. The next day, my friend raced him up to see her daughter, so her daughter could see something was happening to the dog. Then she brought him back to her house, into the house, and that night surrounded by my friend, her husband and her daughter's son, he died.

"I know what you're going to say," she said the next morning on the phone. "I've learned how you Buddhists think and this time I know what you're going to say and you're going to be right. Huskies are sled dogs; they pull people through. This dog knew my daughter had reached safety, so his job was done. He was 12 years old. That's much longer than the average Husky lives. He must've hung on to go that whole far distance with my child. And I think he left us to say: she's going to be all right now. You won't need me."

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Thanks giving for the 99%

2011-11-25T11:57:00.000-08:00

Here is my Thanksgiving food for thought about those turkeys, the one percent. It's a quote from the venerable Kyabgon Traleg Rinpoche.

"You must realize that if your whole purpose in life is to pursue wealth, to protect friends and relatives, and to destroy enemies, you will not be spending your time well and are actually causing a lot of harm. When death arrives nothing will be of any use except the spiritual insights you developed while alive."

HSandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Occupy Self

2011-11-23T19:49:00.000-08:00

I spent Thanksgiving weekend practicing teachings recently offered to me on my human body, specifically how to use its tangible physicality to locate and work with my insubstantial, intangible mind. Four days of Occupy Self.

The first step was, in a manner of speaking, to claim squatter's rights by directing total attention to those parts of my body that were touching the ground--or a cushion or a chair that was itself touching the ground. The practice was to notice how without judgment or demand, the ground, aka the Earth, so willingly supports me. With a little help from gravity, it does all the heavy lifting. There's absolutely nothing to do but relax, just relax the entire body into its embrace, sending all tension and stress down into the Earth. It's there for me, for all of us, a cushy support 24/7.

Realizing there's no need to fight to hold the body up is a tremendous relief, an eraser that clears the mind. Feeling grounded, or anchored if you prefer, makes it possible to direct total attention to breathing, to the air that comes in and then goes out of the body. In and out, in and out... to just be keenly aware of this continual interchange between the body and outer space. That too is friendly and supportive, and becoming a bit more palpable.

Every in-breath is a fresh lease on life, a new start. Every out-breath is a death, a release. Inner space fills and merges with outer space; the body exhales and separates itself. The body itself begins to feel like space, an open window with air blowing through it. Not so heavy, not so settled, not so inflexible as it seems.

The practice is to breathe deeper into the body. Deep down to hit the spot four fingers below the navel, deep inside the core. Tibetans call this sweet spot "the origin of all dharmas", which means all phenomenon. They mean it is every person's epicenter. I don't know how they figured this out without MRI machinery, but this is actually the embryonic spot we all stem from, the very source of our life. "It is the place where the egg becomes a ball of cells that form space for the spinal cord to sprout," a medical doctor just explained to me. "That's like a template/architectural blueprint from which the pattern of the body gets formed. It's the first movement of creation and sets the tone for the entire process, which of course, is ongoing until death terminates it."

So the practice is to hit the spot with full attention and try to hold it there. Magically, effortlessly, all perceptions shift as the mind expands. It's possible to simultaneously feel grounded in the Earth yet free and wide as outer space. It's easy to see I am not so limited as I thought. There is more...much much more...vastly more. Possibility is infinite if I don't choke it off again.

Sense impressions become astoundingly clear--unfiltered high definition. And just as magically the crucial distinction between what is real--what is actually perceived by the senses-- and what is imagined as we experience that--our wishful or ignorant spin-- becomes more self evident. This is "waking up." Or in non-Buddhist words, a bailout. This now subprime collection of hair, skin and guts obsessively covered with fashionable clothes, this old bag of liver spots and bad knees who has become so frighteningly forgetful she went the wrong way up a one-way street she knows very well, this is not me. I am not stuck with or in older age. I am beyond that.

I could occupy myself with this realization forever.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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A Worth to the Wise

2011-11-10T22:38:00.000-08:00

Last night, the exercise in my Dharma class was to breath/feel deep down into the body and say aloud: "I am worthy...I am worthy." Three weeks ago it had been: "I am grounded in the Earth...I am grounded in the Earth" and two weeks ago: "I am alive!"

Being worthy turned out to be much harder than being alive, at least for the small, dark haired woman facing me as a pair-off partner. At first she couldn't get the words to pass through her thin lips and when they finally did escape, water flooded her eyes. She wiggled, struggling to tamp down her despair so she would not cry. Instead of the words: "I am worthy," she uttered a trembling sigh, and her shoulders sank under its painful weight.

"Do you not know about Buddha nature?" I felt compelled to whisper. She shook her head, "no."

She was an excruciating reminder that way too many of us don't know how Buddhism is fundamentally different from other religions readily available to us. Unlike Catholics being damned for original sin, Protestants with lists of must not dos, obsessive Jewish guilt and consumerism with its come-ons that if you just buy this now you will live happily ever after, Buddhists believe we are all pure and perfect just as we are, 24/7. This is not a stretch of the imagination. The Buddha was just a human being, one who used his personal struggles to get enlightened and thus transcend the limiting depredations of his human body. By logical analogy, all human beings also have what it takes: that same "Buddha nature." Right now, and always, we have within us that same ability to use our own experience to cultivate enlightening wisdom. We just have to want to stop shopping and texting and try.

"Sentient beings possess the essence of Buddhahood," Je Gampopa says in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. "The actual way in which they possess it can be exemplified by the way silver is present in silver ore, the way sesame oil is present in sesame seeds or the way butter is present in milk. It is possible to obtain the silver that is in the ore. It is possible to obtain the oil that is in the sesame seeds. It is possible to obtain the butter that is in the milk and likewise it is possible to obtain the Buddhahood that is in sentient beings."

The late Trungpa Rinpoche liked to say our failings and foibles, what we and he called "our shit", was the ideal fertilizer, the perfect manure for wisdom to grow in. Our ability to sense that the problems we have and create for ourselves are what make us ill at ease, this painful sensation of dissatisfaction is actually the bright sign that wisdom is already seeded in us. At the most basic level, Mingyur Rinpoche once pointed out, when our leg gets cramped or throbbing, we instinctively move it into a different position that will make it feel better, so we do know how to fix ourselves.

In the homeopathic sense, our "shit" is the poison that becomes the medicine that can cure us. The more of it we have, the more it churns, the more likely, and faster, we are to see how useful it is, because it takes a suffocating sense of suffering to impel us to seek relief, if not through drugs perhaps by tiptoeing or diving headlong into something else mind altering like Dharma. "They haven't suffered enough," is what my teacher told one of his longest students when she asked him why her adult children weren't as interested in Buddhism as she was.

The churning of crap into the gleam of Buddhahood is the supreme way Dharma proves you are worthy, because if you don't have any suffering, any bad stuff to wrestle with like Jacob and the angel, you're not likely to discover your own potential and net worth. The lotus is the symbol of Dharma precisely because this magnificent, eye-catching flower grows out of unseen mud and comes into view unsullied.

At lower and simpler levels, Dharma is chockablock with re-assurances, starting with the unimpeachable fact of your human life. Given how many lower life forms are out there in the universe--gazillions of bacteria, insects and protozoa--you obviously did something right to have had the good karma to get born in a human body and not as a beetle, or a burro or a goldfish. The proof that you are super worthy is that you were born not only in a human body, but to boot in a safe place with clean food, water and easy shelter, with nobody firing bombs or natural devastation like earthquakes blowing you to smithereens. You are not a slave in chains or other physical bondage. Then too, you must have been top of the good karma crop to be born with your brain chemistry balanced and your sense faculties in working order so that you can see, hear, taste, feel and as they say in law, know the difference between right and wrong. Not everybody is that lucky. You evidently earned this.

All these riches bestowed upon you are the magic wand that can crack open the treasury of Dharma, and grant access to an infinite wealth of wisdom. The wealth starts with the re-assurance that you are good to go as is, pure and perfect as you'll ever get, and paves a path to the profound understanding of this great inheritance, your inherent Buddha nature, s surf board that will carry you up and over all the waves of suffering.

Meanwhile all Dharma cohorts and the Asians in traditional Buddhist countries who politely bow to you are a rewarding reminder that you are a potential Buddha, even if you, like that woman I was paired off with, think you're going to be the turkey at Thanksgiving. After I whispered all this to her, she managed to smile. And when the class was over, she got up and hugged me.

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

2011-10-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

I treated myself yesterday to the live HD feed of the Metropolitan Opera's Don Giovanni at my local movie theater. Although I sat four hours in a stale dark space on one of the most glorious HD blue sky days San Francisco has ever offered --with my iPhone turned off and my water in my lap because the woman to my right colonized the drink holder, I left giddily sunny from sheer joy. Driving home, I got even more ecstatic when it occurred to me that something created before electricity and jet propulsion --written during the gunfire of the Americans Revolution, something that old was very much alive and well in our high tech time of nanosecond obsolescence. Even more amazing: something more than 220 years old could astonish and enthrall me more than my sparkly new iPad.

The transporting joy of this period piece with breeches and capes, exquisite chamber music vocals and harpsichord embellishments, was a Dharma teaching. For one thing, two far apart and disparate eras had lovingly held hands, and their union-- the high tech, high definition transmission of the devilish antics of an 18th Century Don Juan--gave birth to that sublime happiness called joie de vivre. How lucky I was to live now when I didn't have to be an aristocrat in Vienna, or fly to Manhattan and spend $150 to participate in vocal and visual splendor. How dependent I was on the generosity of others who willingly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to make my experience possible. How special to witness the union of the electrified and the electrifying. How magical that my mother who has been dead over 40 years could suddenly be so alive because it was she who bequeathed me love for music, beauty that widens my world by lifting me into heavenly possibility. A gigantic web of interdependence was supporting me.

The glory of Mozart's music was also a reminder that the arts exist as training for our senses, a way to help our consciousnesses make sense. Music shows us how to hear, painting how to see, cooking how to taste.... . Of course to make art, great art, or to appreciate it, requires absolute focus, absolute stability, absolute ruthlessness in avoid the extraneous, absolutely being right here right now in touch with life's essence. This is what the Buddha taught as the pathway to enlightenment.

These revelations were comforting enough, but the most comforting teaching was about the harsh consumer seduction by corporate come-ons as unrepentantly self-serving as Don Juan. It was a teaching for all the wannabes and aspirational buyers of our time who think that buying an expensive penthouse or Porsche or Prada handbag is going to catapult them to some stratosphere of power where they will be immune to the daily depredations of ordinary life. Mozart, the man who created a sublime, eternal work of art like Don Giovanni, Mozart who had written dozens of equally breathtaking and beloved compositions before he passed away at 35, died uncelebrated, and was buried anonymously in a pauper's grave. Ditto Herman Melville, who on this side of the Atlantic a century later, created the most profound portrait of America ever envisioned, the novel Moby Dick, and died in humiliating obscurity.

They didn't matter then. They were not the "indispensable people", as Charles deGaulle once snapped, cemeteries are full of. And yet these lonely, unheralded, dispensable beings were not forgotten once they were laid to rest because they have never been laid to rest. They are still very much alive, nourishing us.

In this time of obsessive getaway travel and private jetting, it's useful to remember that Picasso, who saw everything he needed to change the way we see, never left the ground. Neither did the Buddha. Or Galileo. The Serbian-American engineer Nicola Tesla so lionized by computer geeks today was not recognized during his own lifetime as the genius we understand him to be. The Moroccan cooking maven Paula Wolfert said at a book talk I sped to yesterday after Don Giovanni, "In Morocco for centuries cooking was cared for by women, anonymous 'housewives' and mothers who preserved the techniques and recipes that today fame the kitchens of celebrity male chefs."

So, we all need to examine what's really important. In all probability, the people, places and philosophies that will actually change our lives by changing our minds are not the "indispensable" celebrities now boomeranging around so profitably and cavalierly in the spin of our cyberkaya and its overwhelming media echo chamber. Anonymity, indispensability, and nonrecognition are, like everything else, temporary phenomenon in an ever changing universe. Mozart in HD can certainly teach us that.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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More Adjustment for Inflation

2011-10-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

While my friend's grandson was suffering from the delusion that he could save his mother from herself, my Tibetan goddaughter fell into a terrible and very uncharacteristic funk. All the good girl effort she had put into working overtime and volunteering new programs and income means for a museum did not get her the full-time job she thought all that deserved.

Every time she would call to tell me the founder of the museum stopped to say: "I'd really hate to lose you," or somebody on her guided tour said she was the best guide ever or how she had done so much to improve the place out of her great love for it, I would quietly cringe. I was standing back far enough to see how the girlfriend convinced herself that being responsive, competent, and consistently available, not to say carefully manicured and dressed, would have to win a guy, because it would force him in turn to be that into her. I kept trying to warn her that a museum is just another bottom line business. Unless its financial handlers could see monetary profit in finding her a special job outside the extant hierarchy, which was to say get more money back than they would pay her, they had no motivation to hire her no matter how much of her heart she'd given to the place. Heart was not a PhD or MBA.

But for six months she insisted on not looking elsewhere for work, believing the museum really didn't want to lose her. She imagined the guy at the top who admired her contributions to his namesake institution would come through and rescue her, especially now that he knew how badly she needed a full time job. All she wanted was $40,000 and health insurance. But it was never offered. And when he subsequently donated another $25 million to the place with not even a penny of it earmarked for her, she exploded from the pain. "He lied to me," she said, "when he said he would hate to lose me. It's him who didn't come through."

How could I tell her it was she who lied to herself with expectations when at the moment I wasn't doing that much better at managing my own?

When my book Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, was published in September by Wisdom Publications, I expected my life to light up like a switchboard. I expected ka--shing! I had downloaded 50 years of powerful information that would help two generations of people clueless in a kitchen, so I expected invitations to talk or cook or be interviewed for magazines. I expected agents to line up asking me what else I had to write--because this in fact happened to me decades ago after one op-ed piece in the New York Times. But all I got was silence. A vacuum. An echo chamber of disappointments. As Buddhists like to say: nothing happened.

I needed a new job as badly as my goddaughter, and had been counting on this book to be a life changing launch. The oblivion that punctured those high hopes became unbearable. I badmouthed the publisher and distributor for not doing their job and took to promotion with a demonic vengeance. But I kept hitting walls. When I couldn't even convince my local bookstore to care enough to buy more than one token copy to stuff on its shelf, I bought two books from Amazon to dent their independence.

Eventually I got over it. Being that angry was ruining even sunny days. It was a bummer being grouchy 24/7? I didn't like myself so much that I finally stepped back and looked in the mirror. What I saw there was a sick joke. I had been flogging myself with the nasty whip of my expectations--very personal expectations that nobody else in the universe knew about. Great expectations for the same sort of happily ever after my goddaughter and my friend's grandson wanted. My own idea of happily, of course. Not that anybody would know that.

In that mirror was a pathetic Dharma student, still crazy after all these years because she sometimes thinks she gets no satisfaction. Here was someone who somehow threw her Buddhist practice aside and thus forgot to remember its most important mind training sound bite: Give up all hope of fruition.

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

2011-10-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks have been stuffed nonstop with suffering. So many loved ones around me were hurting so badly, I felt like full time 911. And now that I have wiggled out from a pile of pathos and put my Buddhist glasses on, I can see that despite the unique details of each situation, all the pain actually came from the same damned thing: great expectations.

Probably the clearest case of how high hopes can lay you low was my dear friend's 22-year-old grandson tying himself in paralyzing knots of worry about his mother, making himself literally so sick, he was unable to eat or get out of bed. This was understandable since blood is thicker than brains when it comes to the mother-child bond. Even though this mother long ago abandoned this child, now that she was back begging for help, he was wrestling like Jacob with the angel. What was the "right" thing to do?

As it happens, his mother has a chemical imbalance that makes her what we call "mentally ill." Whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic is unclear because, for two decades years, she's medicated herself with street drugs, especially crack cocaine. That's what led her away from her 4-year-old son into a degrading odyssey through a wretched netherworld more squalid and sordid than anything Dickens or Hieronymus Bosch ever depicted, a propulsion into a hell realm where she even stole money right out his pocket while hugging him. Now she'd come to a full stop: jail, for drug dealing, and she was beseeching him by phone and letter to bail her out, to get her out of there. She was pulling his heartstrings, promising the moon.

Nothing had changed for 18 horrific years, yet my friend's grandson thought if just this one more time, he gave her the money and bailed her out, he could save her and all would be well. That's what he wanted: all well happily ever after. All the devils and demons forever gone away in the light of this new day. What he said was: "I have to try this one time, just to prove to myself that I did everything I could. And maybe she really will come clean."

My friend asked me to help, so I fed her grandson dinner garnished with a little Buddhist advice. Whenever students ask my teacher what to do when confronted by street beggars, I explained, he always tells them they have to be clear about the situation so they don't make matters worse. Causing harm is bad for your karma. "Compassion doesn't mean giving money to everybody who asks. If somebody is begging for money to go buy more drinks or drugs, you shouldn't give it to them," he says. "Give them an orange if you have one or give them nothing. It's okay. Maybe this way you are actually helping them to get help to stop their suffering." Since figuratively bailing his mother out of difficulties for years hadn't changed anything, perhaps, I hinted, this time letting her stew in her own juice would be more beneficial. Maybe it would finally force her to confront her circumstances and want to change. Sometimes not doing anything is the best way to help somebody get their own act together.

Compassion also means taking care of all sentient beings, ALL without exception. That means you too, I said. I told him he had as much an obligation to free himself from suffering as he did to free his mother. In fact, he had a bigger one because other people like his grandparents and his employer were depending on him. Failure to deal with his own suffering would dramatically increase theirs--and his. He had to make himself strong for others and that in the end would make him strong enough to do the "right" thing for his mother.

As he went out the door, I hollered one more bit of advice: "There is no 'right' thing. And there is no 'wrong' thing. That's just your imagination playing trick or treat with you. It's your intention that really counts. Take care of yourself. That's always the right thing when others need you. "

The next morning my friend called to say her grandson was a changed person, much relieved and more relaxed, even smiling again. Yes. The Buddha had given him permission to let go--of what he had no control over, his mother.

And as it turned out, he didn't bail her out. She was eventually freed, having turned states' witness. She is now waiting at a motel for the attorney general to get her into a state-run rehab program, something she wants very much. Last week she went to her parents house where her son also lives. She walked through it without stealing and sat down quietly to enjoy a family dinner. "I"m worth more than I thought," she said out of the blue. "I deserve better than I've given myself. You make me see that."

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Sudoku, or pseudo cue

2011-09-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

To my own amazement, I have become something of a sudoku freak. I now almost religiously end my day by eagerly tackling a puzzle or two, and find myself constantly scouting for another book so I don't run out.

What makes this amazing, at least to me, is that as a wordwright in love with language, I've always been a crossword kid. Not much is as delightful as a cup of coffee with a chance to scramble from five across to sixty down. I loved it when a friend told me the reigning puzzlesmith, Will Shortz, gave a speech in her town saying the beauty of crossword puzzles is the depth of knowledge they require you to plumb: you have to have learned a lot--art, history, science--to fill in eight down and thirty across. You have to know stuff. But, intelligence and memory aren't necessary for sudoku, he said. Anybody with a pencil can do it because it requires no foreplay of knowledge. It's just plain single digit number manipulation.

Actually for me that was the point. Since I suffer from numeric dyslexia and can't push numbers around without reversing or inadvertently repeating them, I thought maybe some easy sudoku could help me sharpen my focus, my familiarity with numbers, and make me less dysfunctional with basic checkbook math and telephone contacts. And, yes, I succumbed to all that hype about how playing with these puzzles could sharpen an aging brain.

I bought a small book of easy puzzles and had at it, one a day or many on a plane. Sadly, my numeric dyslexia echoed back at me continually, with errors like three 3s in the same line. Boy, am I handicapped, I told myself and tried to persevere with this necessary remedy. I loved the bingo! high of getting a whole puzzle right, even if it was just for babies.

Maybe it was curiosity or maybe that devil in me. Before long I started flipping through my book, and peeking at the "hard" or "expert" puzzles further back. I even took a stab or two at them but these were seriously frustrating. And really, life is frustrating and humiliating enough that I didn't need to volunteer for more in bed with a puzzle book. My trigger finger stayed on the answer page, ready to pull it into view. But every once in a blue moon, I actually solved a hard puzzle without it. My exuberance hit the page as a huge star with an exclamation mark scrawled across the squares. Naturally, I wanted more...now that I knew I could do it.

That's how I become obsessed with solving the "challenging" or "expert" or "hard" sudoku puzzles --one a night before I go to bed. I told myself I was really sharpening my aging brain and curing my dyslexia--my very own self help improvement program. But last week I finally realized I am addicted to these number puzzles as outrageous d.i.y. Dharma practice. They teach me how to tackle and defuse frustration. Because I am determined to succeed and scrawl my star!, I've developed astonishing patience for solving the problem set out by the rules. I take my methodical time. I strategize all sorts of skillful means for lining everything up harmoniously in its proper place and thrill when something turns out to solve the sudoku. It's so gratifying to scrawl that star! as a reward for my own laborious effort.

In other words, I am religiously spending lots of time safely developing problem solving skills and the patience to deploy them. I find myself now entering emotionally unsafe human and work situations as though all those involved are sudoku numbers that have to be fit into their proper cube by my skillful strategy. And every night I tackle another sudoku puzzle to remember how to do it this new way: calmly, generously, open mindedly--the way the Buddha would want. Who knew sudoku had this in it?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Impermanence in the land of steak and potatoes

2011-09-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, was released last week with a flourish of signing/speaking events. The enthusiasm for this little book has been startling, all the more so because it spans generations: from college students to the patrician grandmother of a college student. "My granddaughter spent two weeks with us and the whole time she cooked us vegetarian meals that were surprisingly delicious. When she left, she told us we should eat more this way and I just know your book is going to help me," she said.

Being a Dharma book, Veggiyana is garnished only with vegetarian recipes, 108 of them gathered from around the planet. So it seems to bring up the question of meat eating. Surprisingly, many people are struggling with this, trying to make their way through a briar thicket of habit, morals and need. They want to know if they should go "cold turkey" or if it's wrong to eat meat once in a while or eat fish or what. Factory farms, faulty regulation, the diabetes epidemic and the new loud drumbeat of publicity about them seem to have put the ethical issue on speed dial. What wonderful impermanence.

There is of course no one or right answer. Even the Buddha knew that and his equivocation was maddening. So all I say is, there is right effort, right intention. Upon inadvertently witnessing a chicken being slaughtered for his first meal in India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama instantly went full tilt vegetarian and ended up in a hospital. So I have to say it's probably best to hasten slowly, surely, keeping your awareness well honed. I've found the more I myself can stay aware of animals as fellow beings suffering in this life too, the less I want to eat them, and the less I do. But as one woman confessed to me last night: "I was a vegetarian for 38 years and now every so often I just want to eat a cheeseburger, so I do."

Our bodies evolved eating animal protein so we still have that need. One way to fulfill it,probably the oldest trick in the book, is to simply stop eating slabs of roast beef and quarters of chicken and whole lobsters and just use tiny bits to flavor the rest of your food. Last week for example, I discovered that three thin slices of pepperoni diced into fine bits could delightfully flavor corn chowder for three. The whole point is that every time you reduce your demand one way or another, you reduce the slaughter you want to prevent and move closer toward your personal goal.

One or two people proudly told me they were vegetarian but they do eat fish. Yikes. When I asked them where was the difference between not eating one creature but eating another, they were stunned. And then downright disheartened when I said that many Buddhists, particularly Tibetans, will categorically not eat fish because fish are silent and cannot scream to reveal their pain when we kill them. This strikes them as extreme cruelty as does, say, eating 12 clams for one meal. So there are no easy outs or answers.

One young woman asked me what I thought about veganism. I thought this was a loaded question. I stalled by telling her the Buddha wasn't vegan and that I'd once read a book by an Oxford don about veganism used as extreme religious and political heresy. And then it hit me, a connection I'd missed. It's been the non-vegans who actually saved the cow from extinction by recognizing its uniquely precious ability to turn solar and plant energy into valuable protein, giving us a necessary nutrient so we don't have to kill for it. In other words, realizing that milk, butter, cheese and yogurt are life giving to us, gave life to the cow. Wouldn't have happened in a vegan world.

But it turned out, I didn't have to go that far. Having been diagnosed as malnourished, this woman gave it up for plain old vegetarianism-- the usual denouement, I hear. Veganism is not nutritionally sustainable without a lot of supplemental tricks and equipment like iron pots and tea kettles. A little butter on your bread is not going to bring the world to an end. It certainly beats caviar or salmon paté. We have to try to look at our choices that way.

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

2011-09-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

A year ago I wrote about my friend who had adopted three Sudanese siblings so that after the horrors they'd witnessed and survived, they could stay together as a family. Last week I got to spend time with my friend and her youngest "child", Adut, who is 15 and already 5'9" tall. I want to share the beautiful news.

As I said earlier, my friend is raising Adut pretty much from scratch. As one of the "lost children of Sudan", she got out with only her budding life, no skills whatever at all. She was illiterate and couldn't count or cook. My friend likes to say all the limelight was put on the 200 or so lost boys, thanks to Dave Eggers' bestselling book, but there were also 89 girls and nobody noticed them because females don't much count for anything in much of Sudanese, read that Islamic, society. Adut and her siblings came from the south, where people were massacred merely because they were, like her family, Christian. As a Chinese woman once said to me: "I can't understand how people can kill each other over an idea when there are so many ideas in the world."

Thanks to the extraordinary compassion--and finances--of my friend today Adut is a seemingly normal teenager. She has braces, she is reading the Twilight series and is mesmerized by the movie versions, she's playing sports at school and she just loves ice cream. She also loves her faithful but frisky black lab, now one-year-old, whom she named "Addie."

Me being me the food finder, I asked Adut if she ate Ful, the stewed fava bean dish beloved by Egyptians, Libyans, Ethiopians and Somali. Once we cleared up what I meant, she brightened noticeably. "Yes, sometimes we did," she said. I asked her to tell me about other Sudanese dishes. She told me her sister made really good injeera, the spongy flat bread I discovered not that long ago as the basis of an Ethiopian meal. The Sudanese like the Ethiopians use this not only as a plate and sauce absorber, but the way to get food into their mouth. They break off pieces and mop. I noticed however that Adut didn't have any trouble using the knife and fork for my dinner offerings. She had lovely table manners.

Adut was so delighted that I knew something about her world, she invited me to go to her sister's house in Boston to have some Sudanese food. And when I produced a can of Congo peas, aka pigeon peas, from my pantry and asked if she knew these, an enormous smile lit up her pitch black face and she hugged me. That's what I love about food: it's so primal, common and joyous. We all share it; eating, we are all one.

I'm headed to Boston next week for book signing events and Adut was really happy to know I'm going to be staying at "her" house, even though she'll probably be really busy with homework and stuff. My friend makes sure she has full time access to a therapist, tutors and via her own smartphone, her sister and brother. So there it is: wisdom, compassion and skillful means. One of those lost children of Sudan has been found and liberated from suffering.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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The Truth of NOT Suffering

2011-08-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

I have been writing for the past few months about the way deity practice fills my world with friendly company so I never feel alone. The hard won Dharma revelation that the universe does care has become the utmost comfort in an increasingly bleak and chilling world. Of course that's why millenniums ahead of me humans invented God and then inflated Mary. It's why Topper had a friendly ghost and Walter Mitty his daydreams. Most of us feel orphaned, even abandoned, in a seemingly unfair universe that doesn't frankly give a damn.

The Dharma is one way to understand that the universe actually does give a toot. The positive giving energy I put out has been coming back to be as blessings: no hurricane damage, no obstacles in my work, good health. It is constantly reminding me I am part of something larger, much larger, than myself--that I am connected to a vast whole, a player in a cosmic game. That's religio for you, the tying or linking back of my thread into the whole cloth.

But the more common classic response of our society, adapted with a vengeance by settlers of its new world, has been to not give a damn back at a universe we don't think cares a hoot, and in a huge fit of sour grapes smash it all to smithereens. Disregarding the real, the natural, world, often attacking it as the enemy to conquer it and bend it to our will, not letting sleeping dogs lie is the story of our culture, at least all the tampering and manipulation that passes for it. You know the motto: "Living well is the best revenge."

Taking over the whole creation and putting yourself in charge is even better. Here's the ultimate vindication of sour grapes. Thus the rush to clone life, air condition space, fly to the moon to put footprints on it. Now these same "scientific" people who believe only in their own power of engineering feel so in control of the world, they easily shed a childish belief in something or body watching over like a nanny, umpire or guard dog. there is nothing bigger or more important--no other player-- but them.

Jonathan Franzen recently wrote with astonishing eloquence about the whole 20-40 generation addicted to computers, smart phones and IPads for the powerful feeling they give of being totally in charge. You can order up anything you want, when you want, how you want. You can be out there pulling strings and rank while you hide behind the screen like Oz. There's no risk, no chance you have to accommodate anybody else. It's just your ego blazing and reinforcing its armor. Computers are a control freak's wet dream. The whole world is Burger King, dished up their way. Even if it is virtual and not exactly real, which begs the new question of what is real?

What and where is the real world?

I belong to the first generation that technological gimmickry like airplanes and television pushed across a dividing line from the past, leaving a gap in view of a real world between me and my elders. Since the 60s, kings of commerce have made hay exploiting all the newer batches of young people who come into being with newer assumptions and expectations of reality, forged by newer and newer gadgets and conveniences. Originally "The Gap" meant not your parents' clothes. Then we moved on to "Not your father's Oldsmobile!" "Not your mother's jeans!" And now that I from the 60s am in my 60s, I find myself flung to the dark side not of a gap, but an abyss, looking back at a not brave new world. The solar system has been replaced by solipsism.

Every day I find myself facing human beings infantile enough to actually believe with every ounce of their well fortified ego that the world is supposed infallibly to meet all their expectations and needs. What they are entitled as a birthright is not to be inconvenienced, apologetic, helpless, at risk or wrong for even a nanosecond. In their not brave new world, there is no fret, only Frette. These beings don't have to suffer for a second, least of all us fools who still think we must accommodate ourselves to circumstances, and develop patience, flexibility, grace under pressure. Their fitness training is just for abs and quads, never mind or spirit. That's why one woman in a condominium building I manage spent the entire ten minutes the power was off and the fobs weren't opening the building door screaming at me on the phone while running to a locksmith to get a real key. By the time she got back everything was working fine. But she didn't feel it incumbent on her to just wait a minute.

Along with the idea that we have to adapt ourselves to reality and not adapt reality to our selves, they've thrown out history, literature and all artistic pursuits of ideals and ideas. It's so much easier to start with your own clean slate than have to fit into a going concern. Not all that long ago hot news was that clergymen were being coolly booted from their pulpits for giving sermons admonishing uncharitable, and immoral greedy behavior instead of praising the wealth driven lives of their listeners. These kings of the universe whose community gating is a firewall want to hear only what they want to hear . Their entitlement to have the world go only their way or no way, to get what they want, is the cancer what's corroded our politics and society.

Having thrown out the past and everybody else who may be present, they can't learn from anything so here we go again.... So many educated pundits and policymakers seem to have botoxed brains that prevent them from thinking on their feet, for being responsible for the consequences of what they say and do. They're rather like all the speed boaters who fly by my dock blithely ignoring the NO WAKE sign and the repercussions of the roiling they create as they go smoothly along.

A year ago I was disturbed to learn that my friend's daughter's newborn son had been a total designer baby, conceived and delivered to meet her personal desires: a light haired boy made in a petrie dish and born by appointment. Last week I read in the New York Times about people of this same generation deciding to abort one twin so they didn't have to deal with two children at once. I suppose they got the idea from all the genetic mutilation going on to make fish and poultry the way we want to see it on our dinner plate: fat breasted turkeys that can't stand up, salmon with foreign features, cows that produce more milk than anybody needs.

The buzz word of the last years has been "risk management." Everybody seems to be into hedging for that. There are even internet sites for handpicking your college roommate instead of having to live with the luck of the draw. Every consumer product including medicine--which has become a corporate consumer profit center for things like smoother skin, shinier teeth, less fat deposits, everything HD television perfect-- is geared to putting the whole world under your thumb, conveniently. Like. No spontaneity, no randomness. Like. No frets, no bad bets. Like. No wrinkles, no aging, no girl baby if you want a boy. Like. No surprises, no risks, no detours or wrong turns. Like. Like. Like. Next up is no death.

This a no growth world in which all the don't likes and others disappear. Or maybe are just computered, not papered any more, over. We say in the Dharma hope is about getting what you want and fear is for getting what you don't want. So this new breed of beings live in a virtual paradise without the risk of fear and not much need any more for hope. But as the Buddha warned us, even his princely palace of earthly delights wasn't fool proof. Suffering will inevitably intrude: sickness, old age, death or change. Spontaneity strikes. An earthquake, a tsunami, a bloody riot, a nasty terrorist bomb, a steak with salmonella.

Those of us who acknowledge being part of a larger whole set a place for the stranger at our Seder table, leave cookies out for Santa when he comes down the chimney, drive in the right lane when we're not passing and put bird food out in winter. We hold the door for the person behind us too instead of letting it slam in their face.

Shantideva says the only joy in the world comes from helping others, which is to say, recognizing more needs than your own. I say, after six and a half decades trying to get it right, there is much to be praised for facing fear and surmounting it, more survival skill to be gained from learning to accommodate others and the wider world itself. That's why these myopically manipulative subhumans keep bringing back to my mind what my grandmother used to holler at me across our generation gap: Educated you are but smart you're not.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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A year of magical linking

2011-08-07T14:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Nancy's five-year-old granddaughter came to a picnic party last weekend in a pink ballerina dress with wings. With long blond hair and extreme height for her age, she looked like a cross between a cotton candy butterfly and a tooth fairy. "It's so wonderful," my friend whispered to me, "she still believes in fairies and magic. She's so happy." Indeed she was, running back and forth between our picnic table and the shoreline to feed the screeching, clamoring gulls--as though this was something amazingly precious and special.

Actually, I thought it was. One of the most precious gifts the Dharma has given me is a radical change in perception. Sometime back I seem to have had some sort of sight surgery that implanted a wide-angle lens in rose colored glasses. Everything these days feels enchanted, not the usual normal ho hum. Dharma teachers call seeing through the ordinary with the third eye "pure perception." Having it means seeing everything as pure and perfect, everything as a manifestation of powerful, positive deities come to coach you. Pure perception is being that five-year-old in the pink fairy dress with wings and believing there's magic all around you.

And so for me those squawking, grubbing gulls were a bevy of protecting goddesses come to surround that lanky child. Birds are supposed to be dakini energy. The 16th Karmapa, Rigpa Dorje, collected birds and built an extensive aviary at his monastery in exile, to keep close at hand in that foreign land the protection and affection of the wisdom deities. (BTW: Wisdom is feminine in every culture and grammar group.)

Having heard this about a year ago, and having it confirmed to me privately by my own teacher, I began to view the single seagull who constantly uses the top of my dock portal as a sentry post and the adjacent ledge as its personal picnic table, (its totally covered now in broken clam and mussel shells) as a goddess assigned to watch over me. Not only has this made the permanent presence of that noisy, dirty bird less annoying, but the gull has come to seem majestic. Spotting the special creature on its lookout day after day makes me keenly aware that this bird only caws its loud, cacophonous message when I am somewhere in range. What do you make of that?

If you find my vision/version ridiculous, what can you say about this? Last week, I did some physical therapy for my knee in the water off my dock. At that moment most of the world was mired up to its eyeballs in man-made misery, I was feeling so happy, so utterly blessed to be swimming in the salt sea under a sunny sky that I started chanting a mantra supposed to symbolize dakinis swooping and fluttering joyfully around as they pour down blessings. The third time I repeated it, treading water with a noodle, out of nowhere a flock of wild turkeys suddenly came right over my head going from one side of the channel to the other. I had never seen them here. Where did they come from all of a sudden? I had never seen turkeys flying in formation over the water. What made them do it at that late afternoon moment when nothing threatened them? I never had any birds come flying that close to me. I could almost touch them.

Three days ago, I took a little walk to the end of the dirt road that goes past my house and on my way back, a large black lab came bounding out of nowhere, heading toward me. I couldn't tell if it was friendly, fearful or figuring to attack. I stopped short and sucked my breath. And then it came to me that here at the appointed mid afternoon hour, 4 PM to be precise, when monasteries make offerings to their protectors, a huge black being had manifested out of nowhere. "Om Mahakala," I said, and continued with the mini mantra: "Mahakala yaksha betali hung tza..." The lab stopped dead in its tracks. Its ears perked up. It stared benignly at me, dropped its tail and stood listening--as if it knew exactly what I was singing. It cocked its head. "Om Mahakala..." the big black protector. The dog turned and galloped away.

The late Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, laughing at his students: "The universe is raining blessings all over you and you have your umbrella up!" Pure perception is taking it down-- and throwing open the shudders. (sic)

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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Over Easy

2011-07-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

I had small surgery last week and that's actually a big thing to say because I subscribe to that old saw that minor surgery is what's performed on everybody else, major surgery is what happens to you. Because I'm something of a medical virgin whose only encounters with the hospital system were long ago brutal battles over inhuman machinery and procedures being used on dying friends and relatives, I was apprehensive to say the least. But now that it's safely past me, there's no way I can claim it was a big deal.

Partly, I'm sure this is because it happened in a small town hospital where everybody is kind and humane and seemingly happy to help. Twenty minutes after I came to, a gentleman volunteer was asking me what I wanted in my coffee and if I wanted a blueberry or cranberry homemade muffin. Twenty minutes before I went under, a male nurse sauntered by and told me he'd had his knee repaired twice. It was a piece of cake, I shouldn't worry.

Actually, I was working very hard on not worrying when I walked into that hospital at 6 AM. I was working hard to be very cheerful, maintaining my best "going to a party" attitude. I was doing that by imagining that I was walking in escorted by caring parents: my guru Thrangu Rinpoche and my protector White Tara. I was muttering mantras. Everything felt very bright and joyful.

The young nurse was cheerful herself at that hour in the morning as I surrendered my clothes and my body. I don't know how we got there within three minutes of personal conversation about her kids and my house but I told her I was doing prayers to the Medicine Buddha and she told me she needed to know more about that because her husband was always telling her she was some kind of self-propelled, self-controlled being who didn't need any outside help, like from God or something. She wanted to know if that made her Buddhist.

I described for her the Medicine Buddha who I was then trying to imagine sitting on my knee pouring his blue light into it. I didn't tell her I was also trying to imagine thousands of mini Medicine Buddhas dancing all around him up and down my right leg. But I was. The glaring white lights of that pre-op room were like disco globes and those little Buddhas were joyously bouncing all over my knee and leg in big swells of blue. I did not feel in any way alone.

Then came that IV drip and I switched to Vajrasattva, drip by drip his white ambrosia purifying my body with each of the syllables in his 100 syllable mantra. Pure and perfect as it is, my body. "The gang's all here," I thought as I was wheeled away into brighter light. "Nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing happens ...nothing happens...nothing happens...."

I woke up as easily and even more fresh than from a sleep or nap. I had no pain, no feeling abnormal in any way. It took a moment to remember because everything had happened so fast. I was out before I knew it and up before I knew it. I was under the surgical knife at 7:30 and drinking coffee with a blueberry muffin at 9:15. I walked to the toilet without help. Everyone had been so kind and smiley. The experience was a joy.

Two weeks before, when I asked him what to do under anesthesia, Rinpoche told me to watch my mind. I really had wanted to do that in the most Mahamudra way, but I went under so fast I don't think I had the chance. Or maybe I was doing it all along?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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A Site for Sore Eyes

2011-07-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

A line in the prayer I am supposed to chant at the outset of meditation practice says: Let me realize that samsara and nirvana are inseparable, and I got to realize that last week. I mean the whole week, because I spent it at my teacher's monastery, living in the company of monks and laypeople devoted to them and the Dharma they represent.

It was a terrible week of nightmare news, samsara on steroids. Syrians being shot dead by their own soldiers just for walking in the streets, Libyans tearing themselves apart, Africans starving or being scorched to death by tyrants, Russian children drowning in a decrepit boat, and of course more of all the evil that men do in Washington DC., this time hurling the nation through the debt ceiling to doom because they can't stand the idea of sharing.

And yet I watched people share the love and give peace a chance. The monastery monks were essentially Tibetan and the laypeople fussing all over them in perpetual motion with food and tea were, for the most part, Chinese. So I had to keep in mind their very palpable pride of purpose vividly contrasted with the bloodlust of Beijing for the total eradication of Tibet. I had to keep in mind that Mao's cultural revolution and the mass gold rush of the last decade were built over the Middle Kingdom's buried history as a Buddhist nation. Such a faithful nation, I was told that newly affluent Mainland Chinese are now making a pilgrimage to this Tibetan monastery to pay homage because there aren't that many being built fast enough over there for them. They want to be part of something beyond collecting money. How's that for the double samsara/nirvana standard.

It was the week of Canada Day and July 4th, both celebrations of New World nationhood. But that isn't much to celebrate anymore because nations are communities, a sharing of place and time and wealth, and childish, noisy bullies in our place and time don't want to share anything, thank you. Mine, mine, mine. All private, no public. And here you have it: America has no money for schools, firemen, national parks or seniors without a golden parachute but in a matter of moments $86 million manifested for one team in the color war we call Presidential Elections.

My iPhone was the bearer of despair but my eyes were the bringer of joy as everyday about 100 of us of all colors and cultures sat together to pray that everyone soon finds themselves in Dewachen, the vast paradise of no pain. People helped each other find seats, get prayer books, get a ride to a cup of coffee. They shared computers. Someone organized a discussion group to help the bewildered. Twenty Canadians showed up one morning with croissants, omelets and real coffee. Several people made themselves readily available to help the 94-year-old get around; I saw two people give up their chair to someone whose disability seemed greater. One woman, with a pronounced French accent, worked indefatigably, despite her 62 years, from 8 am to 10pm mopping floors, watering trees, tilling soil for vegetables, serving lunch and brewing tea. And like the equally challenged monks, never lost her bright smile or sense of humor.

One night after evening practice, a well dressed young woman tapped my shoulder and asked if I came to this place often. I don't know why she selected me, I truly don't, to tell her about the Buddha represented by the sky-high brass statue that is the glittering focal point of the place. She wanted to know about meditation and how it came to me. By the time I finished my story, the room had emptied out except for the energetic Chinese shutting down the webcam and audio systems, watering the flowers and packing up the prayer books. She beckoned a man with a small child.

"We are desperate," she explained, "because our daughter suffered very serious burns to her arm and she cannot recover. She is always in pain and her body is shutting down. I know the woman who comes here every night to cook dinner for the monks and she suggested I bring my daughter to see if somebody here could help. We just met the most beautiful man who gave her a blessing (that was Rinpoche, who also gave her--I could see--an amulet) and since she saw him, she's stopped crying. Maybe my friend is right: this is a place for healing."

I sat with this woman and her daughter for a few minutes more, encouraging her to return and also to stay in touch with me. She gave me her card: she has an MBA and is an entrepreneur. The next morning amid all the nightmarish news on my internet app, I saw an email from her. "After returning home from the temple, my daughter slept very well (she hasn't slept through the night in months!) and she was extremely happy today. This turnaround has really prompted me to want to find out more."

I went downstairs and found that volunteer breakfast of croissants and coffee. Life can't get much better than this, I told myself, even if it's confined to a monastery. But that of course is the point of the monastery, the challenge if you will. To carry the beauty of meditation into the mess of post-meditation and transform it from samsara into nirvana.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Coming Apart at the Seems

2011-06-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

My Rinpoche is now in the West and the monastery in Woodstock, New York was trying to share his weekend teachings via webcam. Unfortunately the feed wasn't steady, at least on my Mac, so I was subject to endless opportunities to experience emptiness that was not the Buddhist kind. I got so frustrated with the blackouts after while that each time Rinpoche vanished into the cyberkaya, I began to rapid fire click and desperately punch the keyboard to make him re-appear. Somehow at some point, I ended up with his video feed streaming behind a series of pointless cartoonish ads for sophomoric shows and absurd beverages, and then it streamed atop a banner that flashed every 50 seconds offering Ads by Google.

So there was Rinpoche intoning on the critical teaching to not be attached to honor or wealth or anything in Samsara because attachment is simply a distraction, a detour from the truth. And there I was, smashing the delete button every 50 seconds to get rid of all those flashing Ads by Google banners trying to seduce and attach me. And in that disconnect between Rinpoche and Ads by Google was the clear realization that the Dharma and our consumer culture share a crucial common bond: they are both relentlessly focused on appearances, obsessed with how everything looks and how you should look at it all. Eyeballs, as they say in the ad trade.

The difference of course is that for Buddhists appearances are nothing. They don't matter because they are not real, have no meaning, don't count for anything. They are distractions of the imagination like a mirage or chimera. We practice meditation to get past them, to deconstruct them down to nothing. We struggle to understand people see what they want to see, not what is actually there. It's all empty space. But to the consumer culture appearances are everything. They are the only things, all that counts and matters and reveals all the meaning you are supposed need to fill the space of your thoughts. Pretty images and peppy talk ("I made a fortune and so can you!") are all about seducing you into somebody else's control so you give them all you've got, and you know how seduction ends: you get screwed.

America is so mired in make-believe that it's actually been fun to watch a culture smitten by the picture perfect face, designer suit and Harvard resume coming apart faster and faster at all its seems. People are very painfully finding out those they trusted are just not into them anymore, that high achiever athletes their kids worshiped like gods are just druggies who couldn't do squat on their own. Executives hire stylists to make them look like power and then the powerful bare themselves in all their pitiful bestiality (Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, John Edwards and name your overpaid athlete), venal duplicity (name your politician beside I-Rod who just got shunted to Illinois jail, lobbyist, Federal Reserve banker or TV talking head), and profound incompetence (name your economist, nuclear regulator or President of the United States who although incursions in Libya look a lot like war says it's categorically not). It's fun to watch instant celebrities of no substance blow themselves up with some substance abuse or other and watch Jon Stewart trap Chris Wallace at Fox News into finally admitting that network is not what it wants to appear to be: fair and balanced. Pretentious is the same as pretend. Lying is now the truth of life. Almost every day Nobel economist Paul Krugman calls out "very serious people", heat seeking missiles aimed at every camera angle, who pronounce like popes although they actually have nothing coherent or cogent to say about what's really happening. They are stuck on disconnected ideological platitudes, a box into which reality doesn't fit.

The Buddha would agree with Jon Stewart, Paul Krugman and all the other public voices shouting: you can call it what you want; you can call a Marine a pizza, (You can call Scalia a justice although he's beyond blind) but everything will still be what it is. And that's mere flashing appearance of light, ephemera of no import. Let go of them and you get a life, with no Ads by Google.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Here's Looking at Who?, Kid

2011-06-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

A while back, when I was too fraught to blog, an email from an unknown popped up late at night. I am really quick to smack the delete or junk button at what smells of spam, so I had my hand poised when I saw the subject line: A Buddhist question. That stopped me cold. And this was the message:

"I saw your website in my search to understand the Buddhist concept of emptiness. I am a college student taking a course on Mahayana Buddhism and I am working on a paper right now. Although I thought I understood the material, it turns out that I am completely confused. If you can help me that would be great, but if not I understand."

The material, it turns out, was "emptiness." Whatever did that mean, in Mahayana terms? She'd been reading some college professor's textbook full of didactic descriptions of Buddhism and came away thoroughly baffled. She wondered if the statement: "all dharmas are emptiness" meant the Buddhist teachings were empty. And what did that mean? Maybe it was just a Mahayana thing?

Well...it meant she had a seriously high falutin' teacher parroting a lot of pedantry. And it meant she was getting Dharma from someone with absolutely no experience of it, which is precisely what the Buddha and all the teachers ever since insistently warn us against. And it meant somebody was actually reading my blog. And that amazingly good news meant I had to honor my vows to never let Dharma be perverted and respond to her call for help. So I tried to be a 911 emergency Buddhist responder.

And this is what I improvised: a beginner's guide to emptiness, me being the beginner.

"You have asked a huge and complex question that I hope I can answer in a simple and unconfusing way. Buddha’s teachings have come to us in a two-step sequence. They start with what’s called Hinayana or small path, sometimes called Theravada or in America Insight Meditation. These teachings are “small” because they relate only to the individual and are called insight because they are about discovering that there really is no ongoing coherent, solid person inside your body. Your body has changed a lot since you were two years old and will not be the same in another two years. What you know and how you see things keeps changing too, doesn’t it? It keeps changing all the time.

So in the Hinayana, you work with understanding that because everything in your body is in flux and can’t be frozen, there is no real solid ego or self in your body. You do meditation exercises asking yourself: am I my knee? Am I in my heart or my brain? If I lose a finger, do I lose myself? This is to help you understand you are just imagining that you are really there all the time as the one same unchanging hardcore thing. When you think that, you work very hard to protect that one same unchanging hardcore thing, which is what causes you suffering, mainly because it’s changing all the time: you win some, you lose some, you move on. Nothing stays the same. Think of it as a kaleidoscope: can you pinpoint anything solid there in it? When you look for something, you can’t find anything, just movement. The container is empty. In essence, hinayana is about discovering the “emptiness” of your ever shifting body as a container. This liberates you from worrying about a lot of things.

Mahayana means “great vehicle” because its focus is no longer just yourself but all others. And this is where emptiness can take on complex meanings. When it says “all dharmas are emptiness,” it means something like this: dharmas are simply all the phenomenon of the world—all the happenings that happen, that show up, that go on—everything outside yourself. Mahayana teaches you how to relate to all that through this idea of emptiness. And it is basically the same idea you discover in the Hinayana: nothing that happens and nobody else is solid and unchanging and invincible any more than you are. Everything is one big flux, one big kaleidoscopic gyre. Nothing is what it appears to be. Your imagination is just working overtime, making you shadow box with your own projections.

Here are some simple examples, really simple, of how emptiness works. Put four rubber wheels on a steel chassis with four doors and what do you have? An engineer sees the strength of good quality rubber and the benefits of Indian steel and the perfect calibration of horsepower. A salesman sees $3000 commission on that baby. Maybe you see a way to get to school. Somebody else sees a status symbol that makes them look good. So what is the real sum of those parts, the real essence, the one solid thing you can absolutely count on to never deceive you? Nothing! Those parts are in themselves devoid of all ascribed meaning. They are “empty” and it is that very emptiness, that clean slate, that lets you project your particular meaning onto them.

Here’s another example: your mom sees you and sees “my daughter.” your sister or brother sees you coming and sees “my sister.” Your teacher sees you in class as “my student” who is there from 11 to noon. But your best friend sees you as someone to text and go to the movies with on Friday night. So which one are you really? Everyone who sees you assigns to you a different meaning. And you yourself are one minute a daughter, one minute a lover, one minute a student. So who are you really? You are a container that traps a lot of passing ideas but is actually empty of any solid, sure, ongoing meaning.

So the whole world is only what we make up about it every passing moment, and everybody has their own ever changing way of seeing it. Some people see Barack Obama as the devil, some as a Muslim terrorist and some as their savior. Malia just sees him as her father. What actually is he? Just a screen for all those projections. Thus all dharmas are emptiness. It is the great gift of the Mahayana to help us to realize this, for once you begin to do that and relax your grip so that you don’t cling to your own mistaken impressions and suffer as things change or elude your grasp, you begin to notice how others around you make themselves suffer so terribly by not seeing how there is really nothing there that they think is there. This is how compassion spontaneously arises. That is the very heart of Mahayana teachings: compassion for the suffering of others and a will to stop it.

In a recent blog post I talked about selling old clothes and how shocked I was when I took a sweater I had been hoarding for years as so fabulous it would make me appear special to two different consignment shops and had it rejected as “old and baggy and not at all stylish.” So you see how we vest something with our own ideas about it when in truth it is just a bunch of atoms bonding for a moment. That’s emptiness.

P.s.Here is another quick example you can use in your paper. Take the word “flower.” I’m sure you know what that is and you are sure you do. But look closely at that word: does it mean a rose? An orange blossom? A daisy? More to the point, what is the flower? It is petals and a leaves and stem and probably a pod head with seeds. Which part is the real flower? If you take off the leaves or pull off one daisy petal, do you still have a flower? The same flower you had before in your mind? If all the petals fall to the ground, is it still a flower? Is the bud the flower? Is the first shoot the flower? Or perhaps is flower a word we make up to cover this ever changing evolution of energy from a seed to a shoot to a sprout to a bud, to a bloom, to falling petals and rotting smell. What actual meaning does “flower” have? It’s pretty empty, isn’t it?"

The only reason I am telling you all this is because I got a return email. It said: "Thanks so much, you are seriously the nicest person in the world! This information is so helpful, I can't thank you enough."

So perhaps this will be useful to others who wish they could call Buddha 911.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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No kidding karma

2011-06-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

My Tibetan goddaughter Tashi is a perpetually practicing Buddhist who seems just as devoted to the practice of revising my habitual world view. If I report with complaint that somebody stole the plant off my entry ledge, she will tell me that's good news because it means an obstacle has been removed on my path to success. I should be grateful for the theft. When I tell her Rinpoche says he's proud of me, she insists I forget I heard that and stop being attached to praise or bad things will come from my pride. So last week I figured I'd throw at her a karma puzzle I couldn't solve.

Two summers ago, a lifelong Maine lobsterman who I'll call Joe promised to produce four fresh lobsters for my teacher, Thrangu Rinpoche, to release back into the sea in a specially arranged Life Release ceremony. Rinpoche and his entourage were down at the water's edge ready to go when Joe putt putted up in his boat and handed the wiggling crustaceans over. I tried to put money in his hand but he pushed it away. "Keep it," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "I need the...what do you Buddhists call it...good karma."

So, I asked Tashi, how do you explain good karma when two months later lightening struck his house and blew out everything electrical? How can you possibly consider it good karma when six weeks after that, because of lightening damaged wiring, his house burned to the ground and he lost everything?

She shot me her reproachful "duh!" look. "Come on," she said. "You should have figured it out. You told me the lightening struck at night when he and his wife were home, right? And it didn't harm them, only the electricity, right? And then you told me that when the house actually did burn down from the lightening damage, they were both away at work, so nobody got hurt. Well that was the merit he earned, the good karma. The fire didn't happen when he was in the house. Because of that delay, he wasn't hurt or killed. He came out fine."

As it happened, the next day we saw Joe's adult son and I couldn't help but tell him what Tashi had told me about his father's good luck. "Do you think so?" I asked.

"Oh yeah," he said, nodding vigorously. "Definitely. It was awful for my parents losing everything they had, but the truth is that old house was crumbling and dark and my mother absolutely hated it. She was always praying something would happen to get her a new house. And then it did. She is so happy now in that new place."

Tashi shot me her best "I told you so" look. Amen.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Majestic Resonance Imaging

2011-05-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

I’d like to say the devil made me do it but I honestly think it was the Buddha. When the friendly older woman working as the MRI technician asked me if I was going to feel claustrophobic in a small space or scared by the machine’s “knocking” noise, I looked over from my prone position on the gurney and assured her I’d be just fine. “I’m going to meditate.” Why not? Here at last was free time.

“Oh no. You can’t,” she said worriedly. “Not here, dear. This is not a place of peace and quiet. The machine is very noisy. It makes a loud knocking sound. Here. Wear these headphones and I will play music to distract you. What kind do you like?”

I was thinking to answer: "Mantra," to help me meditate… to prove I could here and now in this scary colorless, people-less sci-fi setting. The Lojong teaching says: practice while distracted, and was this not an amazing opportunity for exactly that? Meditation was actually going to be my distraction-- from fear. That spotless, soulless sanitized room was unfamiliar and horridly forbidding, but the deities were recognizable old friends I called from time to time to keep me company. I could be quite comfortable imaging them around me.

So she wouldn’t worry, I told that sweet soul in the technician's turquoise two-piece to play me some jazz. She served up Diana Krall purring like Peggy Lee, with a warning: “Okay now, the first one will be three minutes. Don’t move.”

Jack hammering...the machine’s purr was constant low-grade jack hammering. Diana Krall was seductively singing: "Peel me a grape. Bring me some wine..." And I was totally alone in a large white room of bright light and alien machinery. It was surreal. I closed my eyes and summoned Tara, the great goddess who protects from fear, sickness and stupidity. One click of the mind and the icon blew up as touched and vivid as one on an iPad or iPhone. She was as white as everything in that room and that tunnel where I was stalled. The purr of the machine was her energy, protecting me, as I said her mantra over and over like the sound of a motor running. I tried to keep her steady in my mind’s eye, and felt my body melt into her warmth. I was so relaxed I was barely breathing. No danger I would move. Only my breath and lips were working, talking to Tara. How many recitations of the mantra could I add to my collection in three minutes?

“Are you doing okay?” the technician suddenly said into the headphones. “Music okay?” “Fine, fine,” I replied. “No problems.” “Okay, this next one is 3½ minutes. Ready?”

Who to call? What to do? Yes, of course: Vajrasattva as white as that room and the inside of the tube I was in. Vajrasattva who purifies. His drip of white was the steady sound of the machine. My rhythm for his 100-syllable mantra was Diane Krall’s. I was moving on wings of white light through time and space… . ”Okay, for that one. You all right?”

There were two more sessions. And that jack hammering tried to get on my nerves by getting louder and more insistent. I tried harder to pay it no attention, to distract myself. I summoned Guru Rinpoche, the archtype of accomplishment, beseeching him to bless me that I could sail through this whole torn knee episode without a glitch or a panic. I mumbled his mantra as though my life depended on it because...well, you just never know.

I gave the last one to Chenrezig, the lord who sees all suffering and sends white light in all directions to purify it, the way my time in that MRI was purified into Dewachen, the pure land of no suffering. My wanting all suffering to be as pacified as mine put extra resonance in his famous six syllable mantra: Om mani padme hum. “Okay dear, you’re all done. That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“No, no, not at all,” I said, giving her back the huge headphones. “It was actually fun. And I got a lot accomplished.” Short sessions, which is exactly what Dharma teachers prescribe.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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All That's Cracked Up to Be

2011-05-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Spring has sprung. Crazy color has burst all over. Explosive hot pink rhododendron, waving yellow iris, ice blue Johnny jump-ups that seem to shout "surprise!" Plants are rioting in the staidest city neighborhoods, their festive red, white and purple hues springing like geysers behind tended fences or meticulous stone walls. They're crazily painting the town. Party time. We're here!

What a joyful fling is their spring! What a bright show of manicured wealth and health in the tended part of town, where every flower is carefully controlled like the manufactured poise of debutantes. It's so rich. But yellow flowers are popping through the cracks at makeshift parking lots, around the edges of abandoned factories. And that affluent white alyssium under all those landscaped hedges somehow escaped to burst like fireworks from a seedy curb.

And I am thinking: look at that. What flaring flair! They're blooming their fool heads off-- as though this rundown corner were a palace. No difference do they see. Nor do they know they look here like weeds, untended and unloved. They're just being fully alive while they can be. Vive la difference to me. These vivacious flowers know I need their cheer right here and now at this red light. Thank you.

And I am thinking: look at that. Transcendence. They're glad to be here too, and not just in the richer part of town. They're as bright and melodic as the ones ten blocks back in those expensively elegant gardens. No petal of difference in their performing art. How bravely they shove upward to bloom through these forgotten concrete cracks. What joy to not care a whit where they are or who should pass by or cast an eye or render an opinion. Look at that. They are just there abloom with utter happiness, whatever, so what and all that jazz. Just the way the Buddha says the sun shines on everyone everywhere without conditions. And we should ourselves be wherever we are with whoever may be there as readily cheerful and magnificently unselfconscious as all that.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Bin there, dun that

2011-05-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

In the raucous din of the glowing and crowing about the thrilling John Wayne commandos killing Osama Bin Laden, I keep hearing my teacher softly speaking the Buddha's advice: killing a body solves nothing if you haven't killed the hatred and aggression in your own mind. In fact it only makes matters worse. Rinpoche likes to point out if you have an enemy and you harm or destroy that enemy, you automatically multiply enemies: that enemy's friends and family, people who also think they're right. So you still live with the cold fear of vengeance and retaliation. Nothing changes. It's like punching down Bozo the clown: Bozo springs back up again. It's just another episode in a shaggy dog story going on and on. And thus it was, true to his teachings, that news of the assassination was instantly followed by alerts to be extra careful this week on trains and airplanes and in US compounds around the world. For sure somebody will be out to get us.

The sad truth is we've already been had. Bin Laden was a heat seeking missile who achieved his devastating goal to destroy America. We are no longer the shining cohesive country we were before he blew up our buildings, Navy ships and moral high ground. We let him do that to us as his enablers. Our childish, panicky reaction to him was to drop everything we stand for and go native, to give ourselves up and shamelessly adopt his paranoid mindset. It's not just that assassination--which we resorted to-- is an Arabic word, meaning an Arabic concept. We blew ourselves away by truncating our democratic freedoms, subjecting each other to criminal like pat downs, destroying our economy with war profiteering, wrecking the lives of half our citizens while pouring billions of their tax dollars into the pockets of Pakistanis and Afghanis insidiously joyful at the prospect of turning our funding against us for their gain, degrading our standing in the world, creating more enemies and enmity, attracting more aggressive attacks and sacrificing our moral worth.

Having no firewall against his hatred, we absorbed it as our own. Instead of looking at what caused him to be our enemy-- what aroused all that violence and vindictiveness-- and dealing forthrightly with it, we merely decided to erase him, as though hating somebody back that much could stop the terror straphanging in our psyche and let us live happily ever after. By screaming our hatred is bigger than yours, we could move on without bothering to change our lives or behavior, without caring that not changing anything would inevitably cause more of the same problems that produced Bin Laden and thus merely create more like him. Our stuck mind, our warped perspective, our refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of our own actions made us our own worse enemy. Compared to the profound destruction we heaped on ourselves, Bin Laden taking down two towers was a piker.

My teacher has on several occasions told us his story of fleeing the horrors of the mad Chinese communist legions wiping out Tibet in 1959. He, his family and devoted monks were fleeing for their lives on foot and on horseback as the Chinese fired from behind. Rinpoche says at some point a Chinese soldier got out in front, near to him, and Rinpoche had a perfect moment to shoot him out of the way. But the teachings rose in his mind: to kill was to create a mountain of bad karma that would devour any merit gained for lifetimes. And it would achieve absolutely nothing in the end. There would only be more people to kill, more aggression, more hatred, more bang bang you're dead. So Rinpoche goaded his horse and flew as fast as he could. A bullet came at him, right at him and should have smashed through his head or chest. But before his eyes, he saw it deflected into the ground behind the horse, and a shimmering chimera like image of his protector deity in front of him.

"I didn't kill anyone," he says. "I didn't create any bad karma or more hate. I rode on to safety. I had absolutely nothing but it all worked out rather well." Yes indeed. By virtue of his virtue, he has magnetized thousands of devoted followers in Chinese lands and ours. He oversees six enormous monasteries filled with monks and nuns, and a boarding school for about 400 penniless children. In person he has spread the Buddha's teachings beyond Asia to four other continents and published more than a dozen books. Six charities are in his name.

So now Bin Laden is dead at the bottom of the sea. Did this ancient equation of an eye for 3,000 eyes really change anything? Did abandoning the high ground make us high and mighty? Are we safer now? Freer? More united? As we ponder the terrifying duplicity of the Pakistani government and the horrifying depravity of the one in Afghanistan-- whom we have enabled with our treasury, is today the start of happily ever after that turns out well for us? Or did, as Buddhists like to say, nothing really happen?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Good Saturday

2011-04-23T23:12:00.000-07:00

I showed up this morning at 11 for what the invitation called “tea and meditation” and found seven other women had reacted the same way. I arrived first and stood wondering as one by one, the women came in alone, some from considerable distance, sat down with a cup of tea and shyly tried to blend into a friendly group.

I didn’t know anyone but everyone seemed to be in her 30s, and not at all aware I was old enough to be their mother. (No complaints from me about that awareness failure.) Their array of fresh, unpainted faces and hoop earrings hinted that none worked at banking, lawyering or any predatory profession, and it did turn out—at least in part—that these were earnest young women dedicated to helping others. In the end, they exchanged cards and brochures for bodywork and nutrition counseling.

Gathering for 90 minutes in the middle of a Saturday in the middle of a major mainstream holiday weekend to meditate and mull it over seemed to be a way each had decided to help herself. There was mention of gratitude for the invitation being to women only. This let them feel more relaxed and open. This being a Saturday and a weekend the city feels hauntingly emptied by families rushing off to Disneyworld or Sierra skiing or Baha sunbathing, and unnaturally quiet while its considerable Latino population prepares for Catholic fetes and Easter feasts, and this being a spring so many millions of stifled and stunted individuals have exploded with demands for freedom in the Maghreb and the Middle East, the freedom we had to gather at someone’s house to practice the teachings of the Buddha seemed particularly poignant and precious.

All the more so when these young women asked pained questions about how to make meditation help them in their busy lives. Their concern was how to be right now, how to react when they realize they’re speeding unheeding through life, how to stay in and not stray from the moment at hand. Of course that’s the big Buddhist trick and the trickiest part of the trick, as was discussed, is not to turn away from what’s happening right now because it seems boring or hurts or frightens us or disappoints expectation.

It is in fact in just these distinctly edgy, unglamorous moments—standing alone in a Starbucks line, scrubbing pots, confronting physical pain—that our life is airing in high definition. If we attentively watch that show, we get all the insight we need to confront suffering, impermanence and the restlessness of existence. Fearlessness, not turning or running away, is the trick of the trick. And our culture definitely discourages that. It tries extra hard with all its networking, neon, entertainments, opiates, luxe, lucre and celebrity come-on to brush over, cover up or debunk reality. People who believe in a permanent high get laid very low very fast. They get foolish or violent. Perhaps that's why taking time for tea and meditation on a holiday weekend, seeking stability and satisfaction by going against the current, sitting still, being alone or lonely, breathing in and out, in and out, trying to see joy in flossing, can be a resurrection.

To have time to understand heart ache is a blessing.

When several women wanted to know how to sustain a meaningful practice, which is really the question of how to stay motivated, our hostess, Rose, quite forthrightly and matter-of-factly in her Cornwall accent, said: “Well, you know, we all have this beautiful Buddha enlightened mind in us and we can either turn on the TV and spend 15 minutes watching the antics of some fictional family or friends, some stupid gossip or food fight, or we can spent 10 minutes tuning into ourselves and our own perfection.” Yes, you can watch your own home box office for free 24/7.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Once upon a time

2011-04-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was a volunteer judge for a voluntary junior high school program called World Affairs Challenge. Until a week ago, I knew nothing of the small nonprofit, World Savvy, that created and runs it, but for the past few months, it's evidently been the center of attention of some 150 middle schoolers in the San Francisco Bay area. They had been tackling its 2011 topic: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, and this was the big day of prizes for presentations. A dozen groups of 8 -10 each got to display a table top shout-out solution for whatever problem they had chosen to examine: climate change changing farming, saving our seas, corn, gmo's, the meaning of organic, factory farming, fair trade food, bees. I loved the ingenuity of the high school group (I wasn't involved with the 160 high schoolers also assembled for presentations and prizes) making its case in the argument over corn fed or grass fed beef: under posters explaining what happens in the gut of a cow fed corn and a cow grazing grass, they put out a huge pile of forks, saying: "You vote every time you choose what you eat, so vote now by putting a fork either in the corn-fed bowl or the grass-fed bowl." B the time I got there, the grass-fed bowl was overflowing.

At 11- 14, the middle school children I was assigned to were the obvious target of the Justin Bieber/Hannah Montana puberty panderers, yet before the day began, they'd taken a 50-question world affairs quiz and answered such questions as: In July 2010 which county experienced flooding so devastating that it will likely set their development back almost 50 years? And: 2011 has seen a dramatic increase in food prices around the world. The last time prices were this high was in 1) 1987, b) 1995, c) 2001 or 4) 2008? Frankly, I who am up to the elbows in food and food facts had no idea.

Most importantly perhaps, the tweens got to act out a 10 minute skit to illustrate their problem solving skills, and were obliged to produce its bibliography to show they'd done research to define the problem and used facts to solve it. As the afternoon raced on, it was obvious they all knew something had gone very very wrong with the lifeline between the earth and the kitchen. They stood up in front of friends, family and strangers like me judging them to show problems of malnutrition and maladies stemming from malfeasance and misplaced priorities, then tell how to right this dangerous tilt in the food supply and save the food chain from breaking. Their common scenario was either a TV news show or a courtroom drama, and the unanimously common conclusion was that everybody should live happily ever after. The 4 ft high girl with big glasses and a big smile of metal covered teeth sticking out of her head-to-toe tuna fish costume, the 12-year-old twirling around as a honey bee, and the 4 ft tall boy who popped up as a gmo and started squirting "pesticides" on the taller boys standing there as cornstalks made me want to eat that delicious thought right up. I wanted to support in their idealism because that's where we really need sustainability. What else should you want when a young woman with teeth still in braces, dressed in a white lab coat as a doctor in Africa, says matter-of-factly on The Black and White Report: "Everybody knows climate change has made disastrous changes to the Earth and to farming."

Having done their homework, these kids had absolutely no doubt that Monsanto, corn-based fuel, factory farms, and high fructose corn syrup were weapons of mass destruction. They seemed to have unearthed a vital but ignored truth: when it comes to food, we are all totally dependent on the kindness of strangers-- and kindness, at least the last time I or they checked, is not in any corporate mission statement.

Maybe that's why they really took my heart in the special section called Collaborative Question, a problem solving exercise that put together 10 kids pulled from their own groups and mixed up in ad hoc ones. Each of these temporary groups had 30 minutes to decide which of four real food-based nonprofits deserved a hypothetical contribution of $10,000. I was to judge how well the members of one collaborated with each other and with reason to reach a conclusion. It only took my group ten minutes to bypass the Food Alliance which supports Fair Trade and The Hunger Project which serves 11 countries and choose a miniature group that gives gardens and nutrition training to HIV patients in Rwanda. They have in fact only pilot projects to build up immune systems and supply food that help as medication. "We chose this one because it will save people from dying of AIDS," they explained. "The others do good things but people can survive. We can help people not die."

That little tuna with bright braces didn't want her tuna parents in the sea to die. She didn't want the whales to die. The bumble bee didn't want to die. Nobody wanted people to die because their corn crop was taken away for car fuel or cattle feed. Nobody wanted chickens or cows or pigs to be mistreated before they died. Every kid in every group I judged displayed the natural compassion the Buddha and the Dalai Lama insist is inherent in all human beings. I was so exhilarated by the constant arising of that innate wish that everybody and everything live happily ever, I voted for it by giving all those kids high marks.

Then I came home, sadly haunted by that other insistent Buddhist teaching: impermanence, and down my high spirit came. Yesterday was only once upon a time. And it's gone already. How long til money talks loud enough that these kids no longer hear their heart? Is their hope for happily ever after as sustainable as they want our food supply to be? When will they stop feeling world savvy and start taking all their food for thought with a supersized grain of salt? That seems to be the world challenge we need to judge.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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The Hope of Audacity

2011-04-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

As the horrors of unchecked financial hi-jinx and hi-jacking continue to rise above the high tide mark, I want to share the tidbits of sunshine and joy that also washed in this week. It's a comfort, I think, to know shoots of compassion can sprout in a sea of selfish greed. So here you go:

An Irish woman, retired from nursing and a master organic gardener, wrote that she is getting a visa to go at her own expense to Kathmandu, Nepal to work at a nunnery teaching vegetable gardening skills, nutrition and emergency medical response. A young American man trained as a pastry chef is going at his own expense to work in the kitchen and vegetable gardens at Namo Buddha monastery in Nepal where there is currently a serious shortage of water and not always ample supply of food.

A bamboo flutist in Philadelphia did two extra-curricular concerts and sent all the proceeds to feed children in Nepal.

A mother of two in Switzerland wrote that somehow between family and friends, she would find some money to help a literally penniless young woman from the high Himalayas who is finishing scholarship-funded high school studies in Europe. A mother of three in Halifax then wrote that she would take the young woman in and immediately got her accepted at a university there with a minimum wage job that should pay for her books. "All you have to do," she wrote, "is find about $6,000 for the non scholarship funded tuition--and airfare to Halifax."

I immediately emailed Vancouver and Portland, Maine and got responses back almost as fast. People would do what they could. Maybe they'd organize a fund-raising dinner or sell something precious. None of these people even know Karma Dolma who comes from a mud hut in Manang where almost everyone is illiterate. She now speaks five languages: Nepali, English, Tibetan, Manangi, Hindi--and a bit of Swiss German because she's been living in Zurich for two years, on the kindness of strangers. Here's what she wrote to say she was trying to go to a university:

I made a website to fund raise for myself: www.journeyofkarma.weebly.com

Here's an excerpt: I had to graze the cattle, collect the firewood and help my parents with the farming. I used to collect firewood with my friends and sometimes with the neighbors. To collect firewood, we had to walk for two hours on narrow and steep paths in the mountain forest. Life in the village was very hard. We had to walk to the forest in the morning around 8am and go back home wit our firewood during lunch time, around 2pm but sometimes due to strong wind blowing, we reached home very late, covered with dust. Seeing the hardship of the village life, my uncle (disciple of our founder, Rinpoche) brought me and my sister to Shree Mangal Dvip school (SMD). Thanks to his help and Rinpoche's kindness, today I am able to share my life experience with everyone very proudly though I am from a poor family.

It's already awesome that she's graduating from high school in Switzerland, so add her hope to go to a university so she can go back to Manang to help her people. And think how little it would take to help her do so much.

Out of the blue three weeks ago, I got an email from an unknown person in Croatia, and I immediately set out to spam slap it as a new take on the old Nigerian scam. But somehow I noticed that the writer was a Buddhist looking for the lyric to the haunting Calling the Lama from Afar prayer. Finding this on my teacher's website, I sent the link with all good wishes. This person immediately sent back not only gracious thanks but a copy of another Buddhist prayer I might find meaningful. And now, it seems, I am linked to Croatia because once a week news of a website that could be of interest pops up in my email.

Right here at home in San Francisco, last week, members of my Mahamudra dharma group that meets once a month spontaneously volunteered to offer me money to help pay for the visit of a lama I personally funded. One individual, who didn't even get personal time to talk to the lama, flipped four $20 from his wallet and wouldn't take rejection for any of them. "It isn't right you bear the whole burden and we got to enjoy him too," he said.

And finally, last week, a notary public upon hearing the charitable reason I was asking for the seal of approval, refused to take the required fee for service. "My contribution," she said, with a gesture of pshaw.

It's enough to keep your spirit above water.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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To a T

2011-04-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

Warning: Here comes the nuclear blow up of a mind hit this week by a tsunami of inane human news.

It's become impossible to see any difference these days between the Taliban and the Tea Party, so the wonder is why we're so expensively trying to eradicate one while so extensively placating the other. Both are radical terrorist groups so terrified that time goes by, they advocate an extremist turn back the clock hold on tight conservatism. Both are so hysterical about losing their seeming individual specialness in the trend toward interracial, interactive interconnectedness, they are desperate to have the world their way or go away. They are control freaks so frightened by freedoms, they're hellbent on establishing a Medieval theocracy, a dictatorship where everything is permanently cut and dried. Mike Huckabee, a former preacher and current politician--same thing these days--was arguing forcefully this week with Jon Stewart that he has no problem relying on a discredited ideologue historian because we have to do everything we can to prove America was meant to be a Christian nation. Read his lips: I'm the one with the truth and you're out.

The Tea Party and Taliban are so scared of losing control--read that: self control, they won't take No for an answer: no more fouling the climate, no more infallible Shariah laws, no more coal or oil. And no other people allowed to exist in the universe, just them. The rest of us are flies on their food for thought who must be shooed away before we poison it. That makes them chillingly cavalier about killing, and knee jerk ready for violence. That gives them a sense of macho in charge here, of cleaning up and ordering the universe to fit their view of it. Ah, the world served to me just as I ordered it! And they want to push women back into the darkness of silent servitude, because sexuality--something more likely to control you than you it-- seems to scare this hell out of them. After all it involves others and otherness devils these people. Those this uncomfortable in their own skin keep itching for a fight, their way to vanquish otherness.

You also have to wonder why all the anguished talk about schoolyard bullies and the epidemic of social networking bullies, but none about those holding up the cue cards for these kids. Not one word about the Tea Party bullying here, the Taliban there, the corporate CEO's and Rovian Republican leaders in Washington, the military in Tahir Square and all the Arab strongmen trying to stop sandstorms in their desert. So many people now so profoundly believe in that old football philosophy "winning isn't the only thing, it's everything," that bullying has become the 21st Century's M O. The fear of being wrong, second guessed or second best is now so intense, being indisputably right has become the obsession of the Right. What's Left is whatever.

Bang bang, you're dead and now I don't have to deal with you is the way fundamentalists historically react to doubt, a natural corollary of otherness: if them, what about me? Fundamentalists are certainty zealots deathly allergic to doubt the way some are to peanuts. We don't need radical Islam to show us the horror of this hysteria. We've been there, done that before with Nazism and fascism and the Catholic totalitarianism of the Inquisition, the French reign of terror. Burn books, burn people: the poet Heine pointed out they are the same thing. It's so much easier to blame the other guy for your distress, to change the furnishings instead of yourself.

A Buddhist realizes thoughts flow through our mind like huge schools of fish out in the sea and we tend to hook onto one as though it's really there and matters terribly. Most of us eventually let it flow on and catch a new idea but not the Taliban or Tea Party. The Taliban and the Tea Party have hooked on to one stale thought and are holding for dear life as though that's all there ever should be. They are not just attached to an idea, you might say, an idea that is actually something ephemeral and insubstantial and always floating away. They are cemented into it like it's a coffin. They're so embedded they can't get out. I was listening to a Tea Party spokeswoman interviewed on CNN and no matter what was asked, she shouted the same memorized answer. And she sneered viciously at both host Anderson Cooper and the Democratic spokesmen for not "getting it" when they continued to probe. Over and over with increasing shrillness, she parroted the same lines. I thought her mind had been botoxed. She seemed as brainwashed as crazed cult members in Guyana or Waco. It is so sad. So many minds so dark and airless. So much suffering to the rest of us caused by so much suffering they don't want to see.

Impermanence is the nature of all existence, the Buddha said. No wonder the movement most opposed to the Tea Party is called Move On.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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What Time Is It?

2011-03-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

When the lights flickered this afternoon in Nordstrom’s, the Persian woman waiting on me told me how the lights had gone off last week during her dinner party. “It was our New Year,” she said, “so I had quite a job to make a celebration with no electricity.”

This reminded me Persians celebrate Nowruz, which means “new light”, on the vernal equinox. For them the rebirth of spring is the start of the year. They seem to be at the end of a long parade of New Years that seems to start with the Hebrews who were once their neighbors. Jews use the new moon of autumn harvest time for their Rosh Hashonah, which means head or start of the year. Because it's lunar, the date fluctuates from early September to October. Maal Hijra, as Islam's New Year is sometimes called, migrates on our calendar because the Muslim lunar year is 11 days shorter than our Christian solar one. Right now it's working its way backwards through November.

The Chinese have an altogether different lunar imagining, and call their New Year “spring festival” for it marks the end of winter in our February much like Lenten Carnival. The Indians have no agreed turn of the year but instead celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights in the fading days of autumn, and Holi, a literally colorful and chaotic rite of spring that usually takes place in March.

So, the truth is that nobody really knows when a year begins. Or how many months it has. Whether it starts when the harvest is in and life is secured as Hebrew rabbis thought or when the harvest is put in and the seed begins to sprout as the Chinese think. Whether it should be determined by rotations around the sun or proximity to the moon or some combination of both. Or why with us it’s January 1 and not on the December solstice like Christmas is supposed to be, marking the return of light.

All these conflicting ideas of how to calculate the passing days just goes to show that time is no sure thing. It's really whatever we imagine it to be and nothing fixed or guaranteed or substantial. My tomorrow is today in Japan, my summer is fall in Buenas Aires. My New Year’s moment in San Francisco is three hours after the ball falls in Times Square, New York. So when and where is it, the new year?

Mine may not be yours but it is not more right or wrong. We all have our own way of seeing things. That's exactly what the Buddha said: each of us lives in a world of our own making. And what we make of New Year celebrations is a shining example of emptiness, the timeless Buddhist teaching. All our hoopla and ado about somebody else's nothing is a great way to understand what that really means.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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How to Help This Catastrophic World

2011-03-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Last week, my teacher the very venerable Khenchen (great scholar) Thrangu Rinpoche posted this “Call to Prayer”, and I want to share it as a clear example of how a Buddhist meditator ought to think.

In this world there are natural disasters that take the lives of many humans and other sentient beings, or that injure them and cause financial and other difficulties. In recent weeks, there has been an earthquake in New Zealand, which killed several hundred people, and the great earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which took the lives of over ten thousand people and destroyed the homes, possessions, and livelihoods of millions of others. Additionally, problems at a nuclear power plant have caused the release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Due to these circumstances, many humans and other living beings have been injured or fallen ill. Their minds are filled with suffering and fear. They are experiencing great difficulties living their lives. In such a time as this, I myself am making as strong aspirations and prayers as I can that such sufferings quickly be pacified, and I encourage my faithful students to also make similar prayers and aspirations.

Maybe we can’t fix the radiation leaks or help comb through the rubble for survivors, maybe we don’t have enough funds to make a difference with food and shelter but as Rinpoche reminds us, many peoples’ minds are now full of suffering and fear, and we do have practices and prayers to help with that. We can do tonglen (sending positive thoughts on the out breath to take away negative ones as we breathe in) or Medicine Buddha (setting the stage for healing) or Chenrezig (praying to vanquish suffering in any form). We can beseech Mahakala to remove obstacles to Japan's renewal. We can sing with gusto the prayer for everyone to find themselves in the joyful paradise of Dewachen where there is no sickness, death or suffering. We have the power to do something.

This call to arms--welcoming arms-- is such good news in such bad times. The world is such a moral mess of spilled egos, it’s hard to know where to focus first. On Japan or Libya or Bahrain or now Burma/Myanmar or Darfur or the pointless suffering caused by Wisconsin and Washington DC? A tsunami of self-absorption and hatred has flooded the planet and threatens to destroy us. Since it is composed entirely of negative man-made energy, and energy keeps morphing without decrease, who's to say the procession of "natural disasters", all the major storms and earthquakes of the past year, isn't simply "the gods angry with us", a way of saying Mother Nature is erupting in gastric distress as she struggles to absorb all our bile?

Rinpoche seems to be saying what he was saying the day after 9/11: what we can really do if we want to do something about these current catastrophes is to pour as much positive energy into the world as we possibly can. We can soothe the situation with mission creep. We can generate a flood of bright light that rolls up against and pushes back this overwhelming flow of black thoughts and negative activity. We can create a high tide of helpfulness against disasters both natural and man made. All that negative energy—that arrogance, aggression and lust for power-- has caused the very sort of suffering our minds have the power to counteract. We can, as Rinpoche says, realize how many minds are filled by fear and try to work with that. Mind-o a mind-o.

The beauty of this is of course that there’s just no way the pure intention to alleviate suffering by praying for others can hurt you. It may even help you vanquish your own.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Knee Jerk Reaction

2011-03-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

A month ago, the basic teachings on impermanence and the suffering of change hit me in high definition. I woke up with startling pain in my right knee. Just like that, I couldn’t walk.

The offhand diagnosis—being hands off and over the phone three days after my call for help—was arthritis caused by the degeneration of age. My cartilage had become brittle enough to tear; fluid was rushing into its cracks, swelling up. Cartilage does not heal itself like muscle, bone or blood. It's inert. Cartilage is the canary in the coal mine, the siren that screams: Alert! Here comes time, the tsunami that follows the earthquake of birth. Apparently that's why the doctor said since there was no cure, she would not sign me up for an X-ray.

I thought about friends and family members who’d had trouble with their knees, and sometimes needed to have them replaced. This really depressed me because their stories of cause and effect made my sudden failing seem unfair and pointless. I’d never had the elating moments they enjoyed, the high-energy joys they took in trade for destroying their knees. I wasn’t a daredevil skier or marathon biker or tennis competitor. Nobody has ever accused me of exercise. Why me?

My sudden limp, my having to manage stairs by putting both feet on each step like a child, my need to cling to banisters for dear life made my spirit throb as painfully as my knee. There are certain milestones in life devastating to pass because you wish you could somehow get around them. My first came during my 30^th year at a rock concert in a college gym, when moments before the warm-up act, two teen-aged girls approached the row of folding chairs where I sat on the aisle, stopped, turned in and said with much politeness: “Excuse us, ma’am.” It took a decade to get over being old enough to be called “ma’am.” Who knows how long will it now take me to recover from the young man who, when I limped out of Office Depot last week burdened by a ream of paper and a shrink wrapped folding chair, chivalrously rushed over and said: “Let me help you get to your car with that.”

“Why thank you very much,” I said, much surprised and a little flattered. “Oh no need to thank me,” he replied in all sincerity as he took the chair from me. “I like to help old people.”

The Western medical doctor very obviously didn’t want anything to do with me since arthritis isn’t ta-da! curable, and I not so obviously didn’t want anything to do with her offhand offer of physical therapy because, ta da!, it offered not one helpful moment in my three year fight against chronic pain from my neck. PT’s mechanized, militaristic attack on my body turned out to be as brutally and expensively useless as the effort in Iraq or Vietnam, especially after simple and cheap hands-on alternative therapies like posture correction, massage and sacral-cranial touch worked perfectly. So I’ve gone back to acupuncture and taken up indoor swimming (free thanks to Medicare) and smeared on lots of trusty Traumeel cream and do flex stretches here at the computer. I am up and while not exactly running, I can walk without limping all the way.

As life would have it, direct perception is the focus of my weekly Dharma class and last week, the concept of pain came up. I say “concept” because I was immediately reminded of the 9^th Karmapa’s very clear teaching in Ocean of Certainty about how to bring pain onto the path to liberation. He starts by asking if you take a knife and stick it into a wooden table, obviously displacing molecules, does the table feel pain? How is this different from sticking a knife into your skin to cut yourself? You feel “pain.” Well, what exactly is that pain? What precisely caused it? Where is it coming from and going to? Can you precisely pinpoint it? What exactly does it feel like? Is every beat as strong as the last or is there variety? People who do this questioning do report that it lessens the intensity of suffering. Evidently, we fixate on the initial shock and replay it over and over as though that’s what’s continuing to happen, when in fact the instant replay of our imagination is preventing the latest real time news from getting through. Pain is often created more by mind than neuro-transmitters.

Anyway, one of the class members brought up the fact that he had a permanent cramping in his foot. At first he was obsessively focused on it, as it was so painful and debilitating it overwhelmed everything in his life. But gradually he remembered the teachings and began the examination of where exactly the pain was emanating from, how often, etc. “And amazingly enough,” he said, “the pain got very manageable. I started to notice that it was itself energy, an energy calling for attention. So I started trying to channel it in a positive way and now even though my foot is still cramping, I don’t notice pain much and just go about my normal life.”

I thought about that the next day when I decided to walk to the bank. The route was flat—recommended —but long: 1½ miles each way. After three blocks I started to feel searing pain in my entire leg, a massive protest against this forward movement. I stopped at the next corner, turned around and told myself I should go back: this was a message that I was making matters worse. I was brought up to be very fearful so I wanted to go back to bed. But another voice kicked in from somewhere and told me to go on ahead, to stop being a wimp and start to fight through the pain. I heard that guy in the Dharma class say his pain was only the stirring of energy. The pain was just energy.

I don’t know how, but I found the courage to walk on. For the next two blocks I did the Tara mantra to work with my not inconsiderable fear. Two more blocks for the Mahakala mantra to remove obstacles (i.e. crippling arthritis)--a little touch of hope, and three or four blocks for Chenrezig, my standby for help with suffering. I made it to the bank and by the time I got back home, I had no pain. I felt like the old... whoops, make that original, me. Later, the Chinese acupuncturist said my pain came from fluid damming the flow of energy around my knee and the forceful circulation from all that walking had broken through its blockage. I had triumphed.

That was quick. The pain is back. So much for impermanence. I so badly want to bargain—I’ll do this if that pain goes away-- that last night I sunk to wondering whether I had been crippled because in moving to a smaller apartment I had to remove the Medicine Buddha thangkha that hung for 10 years over my bed. It’s now in a closet. Was Medicine Buddha mad at me and striking back? I worried. I took the thangkha out of the closet, then told myself: “this is stupid” and put it back. But just in case he did want appeasement--you can never be too careful, I said his mantra three times with my hands clasped in prayer.

This morning I focused on the Tibetan idea that physical ailments are simply manifestations of mind’s dis-ease. This meshes with the concept of pain as blocked energy and with my experience of ailments. My father, who never heard a word I said in any conversation, became hard of hearing before old age. One of my goddaughters was so stressed by her roles as survivor of a best friend, abandoned daughter, and parenting partner of a man who refuses to earn income she developed breast cancer and had to have her femaleness removed. Just as a woman I know who hates heterosexual men “solved that” by developing breast cancer and had hers amputated, making her at least in her mind no longer femininely attractive to them. I who used to stick my neck out way to far to help way too many people ended up with two herniated, useless disks that now prevent me from doing that.

So I have started to rethink this suddenly crippled knee. Something brittle tore, forcing fluid to flow through the cracks, building into a dam that is blocking the energy that would let me propel myself forward as freely and unselfconsciously as I’m used to. Oddly, this actually happened at a particularly painful moment of my life when for the first time, changed financial circumstances made me less flexible, constraining me from traveling abroad and spending my local way around town as freely as I have been used to. Since at my age there's little hope for fixing such brittle circumstances, I have been actively struggling to get the pain of reduced circumstances out of my mind. And in the midst of that suffering, I awoke with such startling physical pain in my knee, my body itself was reduced in scope. It could no longer go forward at will. Was that coincidence or what?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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The Fog of More

2011-03-06T22:22:00.000-08:00

Clarity, as anybody trying to practice Dharma knows, is mighty hard to come by. But I somehow had a small Eureka! moment last week, a putting of two and two together that added up to something I’d like to share.

An endless and endlessly crude political race to the bottom, through the bottom line, continues to dominate the news even though it flies in the face and splats on the facts and frustrations of the country. And while people are literally screaming in pain for the social justice of economic and educational opportunity, along with a little rule of law in financial matters like mortgages and credit cards, nothing about this vicious spin of Samsara has been more puzzling than the ambivalent, uncompassionate silence of Barack Obama. Why is there no "their" there?

Well, although nobody else seems to have noticed, a few weeks ago he actually did clear the air about why he doesn't care and there is no they're there. With his wife Michelle Marie Antoinette off skiing in Colorado while ordinary working people protested for their pay, he bid public farewell to his friend and press secretary, Robert Gibbs, a man who laundered and spun rinse cycles as he protested professionally for the pay of $192,000 a year. Since that would pay three firemen to really put out fires or four teachers to set children straight—and they have to fight for the pittance now, we need to note that in his friendly send-off for Gibbs, Obama flipped us all the bird with this bit of flippancy: “Now he can go make some real money.”

Does that clear up the fog of this President’s view for you?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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