The Requirement of the Moment"

A few people found some of my recent comments about human reason and Buddhist practice questionable. I can understand this. Yet, the more I reflect on it, the more valuable it seems to me to keep questioning "calls for reason."

Here's a small segment of a post by Ajahn Sumedho on the blog Buddhism Now:

If we are intellectual, we are always up in the head, thinking about everything. Emotionally we might not be developed at all-throw temper tantrums, scream and yell when we do not get our own way. We can talk about Sophocles and Aristotle, have magnificent discussions about the great German philosophers and about Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and Buddha, and then somebody does not give us what we want and we throw a tantrum! It is all up in the head; there is no emotional stability.

I'd like to offer the following statement for consideration. Many of us well educated in the academic sense types are attached to reason. In fact, even though Buddhist teachings point us beyond our own thoughts and understandings, we're so comfortable in the realm of reason that we think it is the answer to all of our "problems." That if we just think things out better, analyze things a little more rationally, we'll break through the confusion and emotionalism, and figure it all out.

Barry over at Ox Herding took up fear this morning in a way that I think could add to what I'm considering here.

Recently my teacher said:

Fear is the absence of presence.

I don't often experience the quivering of full-on fear, but I'm well acquainted with its young sibling, anxiety.

And when I look into the familiar, queasy feeling that comes with anxiety, I sometimes can see the refusal embedded within the feeling.

It's my refusal to show up to the requirement of the moment.

It's this last sentence that I keep going back to. When I made the statement that I didn't think reasoned out arguments about immigration would be of much service in the current political climate, it wasn't because I have, or want, to give up on it all. No, it's about stopping and wondering what the "requirement of the moment" truly is. Is it more data and analysis? Is it deep listening? Is it marching in the streets? I'm not sure.

However, what is clear to me is how many of us "educated" types can come up with a myriad of ways to emphasize reason, and discount and/or diminish everything else. Oh, all that talk about emotions is fluffy, new age shit! Oh, why can't just be more reasonable! What good will all this focus on intangible things do (insert all things emotional and spiritual here) when the world is falling apart?

All of this just points to imbalance in my view. We need not toss out the wonderful skills of human reason to appreciate the wisdom that comes from other sources, including emotions we'd just assume be rid of. Yet, so often, we do, hanging hard on reason until it breaks, and then getting wildly emotional because we don't know how else to respond.

It's pretty screwy if you ask me. Why not strive for some balance, and having a tool box with many types of tools in it, because certainly the requirement of the moment keeps on changing, doesn't it?

Trying to "Handle" One Another

A sangha friend just made the following comment on a recent post I made on Life as a Human:

The phrase, "Some people don’t really know how to handle The Birdman", caught my attention. By your artful telling, the Birdman cant' be handled at all. Perhaps suffering stems from trying to 'handle' one another?

It's funny. I was feeling like I wanted to write something today, but really couldn't come up with anything. And then this comment came. It feels right on.

What's interesting is that when I think of this "handling" that we all seem to do sometimes, there are a few components to it.

First, there is the obvious desire for control. You want someone or a group of someones to act a certain way because it will make your life easier, make you feel more comfortable, etc.

Second, there is the anxiety of being out of control.

And finally, though, is something kind of surprising because it flips over the view that this behavior is all about trouble. Behind wanting to "handle" someone is a desire to know them, to know what they are going to do, what they think, how they feel, to know how they tick. When you start to examine your misguided behavior, I do think there is an element of wanting to see and experience how we are interconnected behind it, even when we are terribly out of whack.

But when we seek to "know" someone, we're trying to fix a certain image of them, just as we go about our day trying to fix certain images of situations we experience.

Part of the reason I felt compelled to write about The Birdman is that his uniqueness easily stands out, and one of the teachings he gives just by being himself is that we can't pin each other down, can't really ever completely get "a handle" on who each other is.

An old girlfriend of mine used to say "I know you, I know you," but she really didn't, nor could I know her like that. Both of us believed those lines too much, and it probably was a main reason why the relationship didn't last.

Life is full of opportunities to drop this desire to know, and thus be comfortably "in the know." Maybe this quality is what Dogen was pointing to when he said "he dropped off body and mind."

Arizon Immigration Law and Buddhism - II

Was out hiking at a local state park yesterday, and enjoyed a computer free day. No e-mail. No blog. Nothing It was excellent!

Came back to find a comment challenging my post on the Arizona immigration law. I was surprised that there weren't more, but anyway, I'd like to address this comment.

You know it is easy to say that the new Arizona law is racist. Harder, I think, to back that up. What is racist about it? You are aware, of course, that the majority of the police officers responsible for enforcing this law and most of the Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police in Arizona are Hispanic, are you not?

Unfortunately, this is a issue that involves race. You can’t get around it. The problem is not that we have large groups of white Europeans flooding across our borders illegally. How else can you address this situation from a law enforcement standpoint without looking at a person’s race?

I am both a liberal and a Buddhist, and I have mixed feelings about this law. The feeling that seems to override all others is the sense that people are reacting to this emotionally and not rationally. How does this law go against Buddhist teaching? Tell me how.

Nagarjuna, in the Ratnavali, says: “Having examined and identified particularly hateful murderers, you should send them into exile without killing or harming them.”
What he is saying is that those who break the law should be dealt with, sans vengeance, and that compassion is not about turning one’s head and allowing people to break the law. What is compassionate about allowing people to engage in illegal activity? That is just as harmful.

Everyone is agreed that illegal immigration is a problem. Those who don’t like this law should come up with a better solution, instead of making things worse with emotional protests. I, for one, have always valued the right to protest. In this case, I just feel its distorting the issue.

First off, I have to say I find that too many "Westerners" reduce Buddhist practice to reason and rationality. I just don't buy that view. Human reason is a powerful thing, but it fails us more often than not. Anyone who has has studied koans would be able to attest to this, but I think there's enough mystery in daily life for all of us to see this, if we only bothered to pay attention.

You'll have to forgive me if this particular issue - immigration policy and how native born people treat immigrants - gets to me. It does. I'm not completely objective, but who the hell is? Objectivity is just another story in my opinion, something people like to think they possess, but which they don't. This doesn't mean that everything is relative, and that every viewpoint is equally valid. It's more about how flimsy our ability to grasp the vastness of life is, and how the narratives we have about it are always partial, pointing to the moons kind of narratives.

So, back to David's comments.

"Nagarjuna, in the Ratnavali, says: “Having examined and identified particularly hateful murderers, you should send them into exile without killing or harming them.”
What he is saying is that those who break the law should be dealt with, sans vengeance, and that compassion is not about turning one’s head and allowing people to break the law. What is compassionate about allowing people to engage in illegal activity? That is just as harmful."

Let's look at the definition of "illegal activity." If you're speaking about entering a nation without documents, it's true, undocumented people are breaking the law. However, you never hear anyone screaming about undocumented Canadians in the U.S., or undocumented Irish, just to give two examples of predominately white groups of undocumented people. When you add up the numbers of undocumented people from Canada, Europe, and Australia, all places white predominantly white populations, they probably represent between 20-30% of the total undocumented persons. So, the outrage we see against Latino/Latinas is skewed in my opinion.

If your looking at serious crime being committed by undocumented people in the U.S., you know, like the drug running, rape and murder variety that scares the shit out of people, the whole "illegal activity" argument falls apart. The view that undocumented people commit more violent crime than native born people is a myth.

But in all the furor, there is this hitch: The perception of high crime rates by illegal immigrants is pure myth. And it is misdirecting public policy about what we really should do to stop illegal immigration. A century of studies has consistently shown that recent immigrants are in fact less likely to commit a crime or be in jail than native Americans.

The last comprehensive national report, by Ruben G. Rumbaut, Walter A. Ewing and the American Immigration Law Foundation, found two years ago that while the number of unauthorized Latino immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime during the same period dropped nearly 35 percent.

White Americans seem all too willing to ignore the past. My own Irish ancestors probably experienced the same kinds of stereotyping and discrimination during the 19th century, as did my Polish ancestors. U.S. immigration laws (or civil service practices, which often overrode the law) were stacked against Italians and Eastern Europeans for decades, and for many of these people, the only significant benefit they had in the U.S. was being white in a nation run by white people.

When it comes to people of color, regardless of country of origin, the U.S. immigration laws were always stacked against them historically, and currently are only friendly to chosen groups of refugees from nations we have either negatively impacted through war (Somalia, Ethiopia, Laos, and Vietnam come to mind), or which are considered nations providing well educated people who can more readily fit into our high tech, post industrial nation (India and China immediately come to mind). Of course, most of us rarely consider the brain drain effect when it comes to this kind of immigration, which is often fueled by U.S. corporate recruitment.

When it comes to Latin Americans, many of whom have experienced devastated economic and social conditions in their home nation, in part due to U.S. sponsored warfare and/or influx of U.S. multinational corporations, the immigration laws are basically a closed door in the face. Periodically, there is a short window open, such as when natural disasters occur, but usually this is a temporary opportunity with no guarantee of a path towards citizenship.

So, these are the kinds of reasoned out arguments I have made for years. And I think when people actually examine both our history, and what's happening now, they stand up for the most part.

But you know what, when it comes to this issue, most people just say I'm a fucking "bleeding heart" and call it a day. David wants people like me to be reasonable, and he is also acting reasonable in his comments, but what good does it do when emotional reactions rule the day?

Having worked in immigrant communities for over a decade now, I've heard enough stories about peoples' lives to know that it's all terribly complex, and black and white laws can never address the myriad of issues involved.

David asks me to be compassionate and stop people from breaking the law. Well, what about people making laws that are discriminatory in the first place? Shall I give them a pass. And what is true compassion in this situation?

I find that those who support these kinds of laws or who get uppity about "national borders" and "those black and brown" people "breaking the law" tend to have little or no experience with said people. They not only know little about the struggles, challenges - eh, absolute misery - involved in completely being uprooted from your homeland and moving to a foreign country where you have no idea who will offer a tiny bit of support and who is going to spit on you, shoot at you, and run you out of town.

And the same people aren't willing to admit that our country often has some responsibility for the destabilization of these peoples' lives, and that if we want to have move people from Latin America staying in their home nations, we have to be willing to change our business practices in their nations, and also change our love of military interventions (both overt and covert) in their nations as well.

Most people would rather stay home, not leave their families behind to go trekking through a deadly desert just for the opportunity to cross into the U.S. The dreams these people have of America are often dreams of desperation, fueled by basic human hope and dire poverty.

As to David's question of how this law goes against Buddhist teachings, I'm not sure if this is even the right question. We could go back and forth getting with witty citations of Buddha, Nagarjuna, and any number of others, but does any of that truly lead us to being more present to the people who are, right now, regardless of how they got here, our neighbors?

I could easily go on and on with various comments on teachings, stories of people I have met, statistics, and whatnot - spend hours trying to construct the perfectly balanced post that includes the rational, emotional, and spiritual elements of this issue, but in the end, I have to agree with you that the emotional is so ramped up that it drowns out everything else.

So, maybe instead of just saying "be more rational," which I think is more about being a certain well-loved Star Trek character than being human, maybe we should all slow down, reflect, and meditate on the roots of the emotionality on all sides of this issue.

The main reason I stand against laws like the one in Arizona is that they are reactive in nature, done out a desire to please and appeal to the reactions of others. If Buddha taught us anything it was to consider carefully both the situation at hand and the potential consequences of any actions being done to try and remedy that situation.

The Illusion of Borders: Immigration Laws and Interconnectedness

Ah, immigration - sometimes I think it's the visual representation of nearly every major issue people face on this planet. I've tried to stay away from addressing the new law in Arizona that has lit up the United States over the past week. Why? I didn't want to go on and on about how miserable it is, how racist it is, how classist it is, etc. I can do so, but at this point, I don't know what such a display would do.

Maia over at Jizo Chronicles, has a good post about some of the ways in which this law goes against Buddhist teachings, and also a photo protest action being conducted by people on Facebook. I kind of like the photo protest idea, but wonder if it's worth targeting the Governor of Arizona. The issues are so much bigger than a single state, and I don't know if this particular governor is going to be persuaded by anything other than a firm shaking of the economy and by business leaders expressing their frustration. That's the sad state of things - human suffering will often only be addressed if it's tied to profits.

I did something this morning that I really dislike others doing to me - I interrupted a conversation two people were having at the coffee shop I am in. They were sitting right next to me, talking about the man's interest in moving to Arizona, when he broke out in a diatribe about how all the talk of racism in immigration policy is just a smokescreen for failing to address the "real" issue: corporate greed. That's a false dichotomy in my book. These two things are completely intertwined, and as the guy went on about how the level of immigration is unsustainable and whatnot, I found myself growing tense.

After twelve years working in immigrant communities here in the Twin Cities, I've heard it all when it comes to the politics and perceptions of immigrants and immigration. There is tons of ignorance, even amongst people who are sympathetic to newcomers. It's really difficult to remain patient in the middle of all the bullshit being spewed out there.

Anyway, I found myself saying to this guy "Will you ever, ever be asked for your papers in Arizona?" You can guess he was, like myself, a white male. He looked at me, rather pissed off, and said "I'm not getting into this with you!" And I shot right back "You're the one that brought up this hot button issue in a public place!" To which he replied, "I didn't ask you anything. I'm having a conversation with my friend!" A few more rounds were exchanged, but mostly, after he reminded me of my crossing over the line (it's always about crossing the line somehow, isn't it?), I backed off.

The kicker of it all is that a less than a minute after I disengaged he said to his friend "I know racism is part of this." And then a few minutes later, he spoke of his plan to attend the dharma talk at my zen center this Sunday (Reb Anderson Roshi is in town.) It seemed to point to just interconnected we all are, and how foolish it is to be erecting barriers, internally or externally, in an attempt to keep others out. I'm still not sure what a skillful response is to the Arizona law, or to the myriad of injustices in immigration policies all over the globe - (anyone following the British elections will know that immigration policy is a big issue, and the British Nationalist Party, while having virtually no chance of getting elected, has had little trouble getting it's racist, anti-immigrant agenda into the media.). However, I do know that all this fighting over land, borders, and "rightful" ownership speaks painfully to how little we are able to trust other, and how easy it is to hate those who are different from you.

Power Abuse in Spiritual Communities

If you flip over any half dozen rocks out there in the spiritual world, you'll find a scandal. Yes, the Catholic Church has been the major player in recent years, but no one seems immune, and clearly the plethora of problems shows just how challenging it is for humans to handle power in a healthy way.

Over at Integral Options Cafe this morning was a reprinted article that is in process for an upcoming issue of Tikkun magazine. (Tikkun is an excellent mag by the way for those interested in reading articles spanning across religious traditions.) The post this morning had to do with the on-going, unresolved abuse allegations which center around Andrew Cohen and the Integral/Evolutionary Enlightenment crowd. Among those linked with this group are well known teachers Genpo Roshi and Ken Wilber, which is why there seems to be a fair amount of attention (in the blogosphere anyway) being paid to this scandal.

What's so interesting in my view is how the same kinds of issues keep getting played out in such diverse spiritual communities. Money, sex, and power abuses almost always seem to be linked in some form or another - it's almost as if these three are the holy trinity of a spiritual community gone bad. We've seen it in the Catholic Church, in evangelical mega churches, in New Age groups, and even in Buddhist communities.

My own sangha got a taste of all this several years ago, and it's still, in some ways, recovering. Just as you can see with the scandals in these other communities, our sangha split into factions. There were ardent supporters of the former teacher who left the community to join him. There were those who were stunned by the whole thing and dropped out of Zen all together. Others strongly condemned the teacher's actions, but wanted reconciliation. And still others condemned the teacher completely, and wanted nothing to do with him again.

Much of it was left unresolved. There were efforts on both ends towards some kind of reconciliation, but ultimately the sangha moved on, and the former teacher moved on. It was kind of like the way a cracked romantic relationship ends: neither side has owned completely their part in the destruction yet, but both realize it's time to stop adding to the misery. Often, this comes after false departures and returns, or demands of departure from one party that are agreed to by the other party.

One of the challenges I have seen, not only in my own sanghas' case, but also in reading accounts of what has happened in other places, is knowing what actually has happened. Emotions get so riled up, and stories spill from the actual truth to a felt truth which has some validity, but makes sorting out what happened really challenging. This sadly makes it that much harder to pin down abusers because they can easily speak to the over-inflated parts of people's stories, and minimize and deny the rest.

Furthermore, many of us, whether in the middle of such situations, or outside of them, fail to see how the distorted social environment itself plays into both the actual abuse, as well as our perceptions of abuse. You know something isn't right, and because of that awareness your radar is heightened to the point where most everything feels like a mechanism of abuse. To this day, I honestly don't know for sure how much of what I heard in my community was a true account of events, and how much was colored by the pressure of the environment we had been practicing in together. Whatever happened though, what is clear to me is that the social environment of our sangha had spun off center, making healthy spiritual practice impossible.

I'm really trying to refrain from simply pointing the finger at our former teacher and calling him out as a bad guy. Why? Because that's what we humans always do. We point at those with the most power, say they're "evil" or "responsible," and then dig in our heels. And either these people go on abusing their power, like former U.S. President Bush and his buddies did, or we get rid of them, and another comes along at some point to replace them.

I firmly believe that those in power positions have a heightened sense of responsibility in situations. When things go wrong, and they have been at the center of those things, it's theirs to own, no matter what others involved contributed.

At the same time, if we simply stop at holding the leaders accountable, we never get at the roots of power abuse in the first place. And if the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo taught us anything, the social environment in any given situation has as much, and probably more, power than any individual within that situation.

In Zimbardo's famous experiment, which was originally designed to be a simulated prison situation, the following occurred:

The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition.

Before we go on, I highly recommend Scott Edelstein's Sex and the Spiritual Teacher. It's a great primer on understanding these issues, and how to take steps to prevent them.



What happened in the prison experiment sounds a bit like what Andrew Cohen and others are being accused of. However, both cases are more extreme than the average. I'm convinced much less actual abuse can occur in a given situation, and still can lead to lots of distorted behavior and emotional states coming from those involved. Once the line between healthy use of power and unhealthy use of power is crossed enough times, the perceived possibility of more abuse often is the most powerful element.

If we are really serious about diminishing the amount of abuse in spiritual communities, and actually developing and/or maintaining healthy power structures and dynamics, then we must move beyond blaming leaders and seeing their removal and/or downfall as the end of the problem. Even if we could hold every last abusive leader, spiritual, political, financial, etc. responsible for their actions, we wouldn't be rid of the roots that will bring the next power scandal. I'm all for holding people accountable, but until we come to grips with the power of social environments, and group dynamics, there will continue to be plenty more miserable abuse stories in the future.

The Dharma of Conserving Your Life

This is a post for all of us 21st century digital boys and girls! Katie, over at her blog Kloncke, has a knack for raising up life issues, and then pointing out things the regular commentaries miss. So refreshing!

Today, she takes up a new book by Soren Gordhamer entitled "Wisdom 2.0." Although skeptical of it's self-help feel, Katie digs in anyway and finds actual wisdom within. In addition, she's not afraid to challenge the book, such as here:

The snappy magazine tone isn’t my favorite — partly because it tends to veer into upper-class magazine generalizations, where the only external causes for stress are cranky co-workers and long lines at Starbucks, rather than, you know, institutional racism.

What's funny is that I felt something akin to this last weekend, during a talk and question/answer period at my zen center. The talk was on, among other things, the difference between waiting and patience, which Katie speaks about in her post as well. I enjoyed the talk, but found myself at a loss when the same tired examples came up about impatience while driving, or waiting for the computer to download something or whatever. It says a lot about how tied to these technologies many of our lives have become. And it also speaks to the failure of the "everyday dharma" approach to speak about the ways the teachings can be applied to the deep-seated injustices that some of us experience everyday, due to race, class, disability, sexual orientation or other cultural marker.

All of this plays out everyday in the world, both in the flesh, and online. We need not leave anything out, be it social injustice, traffic jams, or even the following:

That’s another thing: this book is reminding me that waiting can be pleasurable! Waiting for photos to upload, waiting for a page to refresh, waiting for a wireless connection to come through…simply by reworking my own mind, I experience them as moments of rest and alert relaxation, not impatience and weird greedy hypnosis.

How often does something terribly mundane, like slow wireless, cause a tornado to appear within you?

Seems silly to waste so much energy on something barely tangible, and yet we do. And that makes dealing with the more challenging things in life, like the death of a parent, being turned down for a loan because your credit "isn't good enough" (i.e. the bank doesn't lend to people of color), or loosing your lifelong career that much more difficult. Part of what Katie, and Mr. Gordhamer are pointing to is energy conservation. The conversation of your life.

I've heard teachers speak and write about many of us being leaky vessels. We go about our life wasting the precious energy we have been given on the wrong things, or on the right things in the wrong way. And then, when the challenging stuff appears, we wonder why we can't handle it, and are tossed away into rage and blame and sadness and all sorts of sloppy behaviors.

So, I think all the "green" metaphors floating around out there that have to do with a healthy planet, are also available to us for application on ourselves. Certainly it makes sense to conserve one's energy. It also can make sense to recycle old skills, thought patterns, and ways of being into something slightly or vastly different, but made of the same "stuff." We'd also do well to reuse that which we thought was only applicable to a certain job, relationship, or situation.

I have long been of the opinion that you can discover wisdom anywhere, even in junky self help book filled with cliches and soft platitudes. Now, maybe it's better not to wade through hundreds of these books, or go out clubbing every night seeking the wisdom of the barroom or dance floor, but simply being open to such possibilities means that if one of these lands in your lap, you'll be ready. This, too, is how you conserve your life - every lessening of resistance to what's happening now is a way of not leaking away the life you have.

What's Feeds Your Spirit?

Our old friend Marcus, who used to have his own blog, is now part of a cool, new group blog, Wake Up and Laugh!. This morning's post, by Chong Go Sumin, is worth quoting in whole:

The great Korean Buddhist teacher Hanam Sunim (1876-1951) once said that the things we do in our lives either brighten our minds, or darken them. (He said that there’s really no neutral ground, just effects that are too subtle for us to notice.)

I thought of this the other day, when I came across this great line :

Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. (Bangkok Tattoo, 179)

So here’s an open question for everyone: What feeds your spirit?

I suppose some out there might squabble with the word "spirit" - ok, check. Now, move on and reflect on the question.

Here's a short list for myself.

1. Gardening, even the "tedious" parts like weeding.

2. Researching and learning new things.

3. Breathing fresh air.

4. Conversation and time with loved ones.

5. Writing and art.

6. Hiking.

7. Bodies of water.

8. Watching squirrels, cats, and other "wild" animals.

9. Outdoor meditation

How about you?