Eclipse Meditation

There Was a Boy

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

William Wordsworth, 1798

I listened to the poet David Whyte read this Wordsworth piece last night as part of workshop recording I have of his. This was part of my extended meditation in connection with the solstice and lunar eclipse we had overnight. I chanted the precepts, listened to David's talk, and sat in silence until 1am, about half an hour after the eclipse started.

Hearing this poem stood out for me for a few reasons. First, when I was an English major, I really disliked Wordsworth. I always called him "the guy who got his words worth" because his poems always seemed so long-winded. I'm mean, who writes a several hundred page introduction to another poem (which never really got written by the way)?

Anyway, I was sitting on my zafu listening to the poem being read, when I heard these words a second time:

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Suddenly, I saw gassho rise up through me. Not just an image, but the experience of gassho-ing. As if I were "an instrument" for gassho.

After the poem finished, I got up and clicked back to hear it again, and this time there was this:

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents

At the end, I turned off the recording, and sat back down in silence. Those words kept rattling around with me as I sat, until finally I turned to look out the window behind me. The sky was cloudy, but I knew the now partially eclipsed moon was there.

I listened.

Something was rattling outside the window. Falling ice? Squirrels? A person?

It didn't matter what. This was the call and response of life at the moment. Bigger than anything I, or Wordsworth, or anyone could capture, but including us too. Yes, including us too.

Buddhists Love Hope as Much as Anyone Apparently

(*Our Good Buddy Manjushri, and his sword of wisdom that cuts through illusions. Always a good presence to have in discussions about things like hope. May we all awaken our "inner" Manjushri.)


Ahhhhh, hope. It seems like a sacred cow, an untouchable almost. The general view is that people have to have hope, or else they're lost.

Well, you'll have to forgive me, but I've always been one to question whatever is generally accepted as true. Gets me in trouble sometimes. I irritate people sometimes. I'm frequently misunderstood. But that's how it goes.

Yesterday's post, as well as Dean's recent post,have generated some valuable discussion in my opinion. One of the reasons why I have used this blog to question things like hope is that it helps people, including myself, clarify what we actually mean. Instead of just saying "hope is good" or "desire is bad" and then moving on, there's an opportunity to pause and consider what we mean, and how things actually play out in our lives.

Dean's post, and perhaps mine, inspired another blogger, David, to write a counterpost that includes the following:

Hope contributes to a positive outlook on life and if that sounds too “new age” or something that’s too bad. Unless you have some sense of optimism for the future, life can be very bleak. It is through pessimism and negative thinking that we create a lot of our suffering. Hope is a necessary ingredient for a satisfied, peaceful life, and it’s sad to me that there are some Buddhists who want to twist it around into something to avoid.

The Buddha way is the Middle Way. The balance between extremes. There’s no question that too much hope can be harmful. Living for the future excessively is not healthy. But to abandon hope and live only in the present is not the way to go either. Hope reinforces the ego only if you let it. The idea that it represents some form of control that we don’t actually have is wrong. The whole point of Buddhism is to train our minds so that we can control our thoughts, words and deeds and gravitate to wholesome states of mind and not dwell in unwholesome states. We want control and if that is just an illusion then there’s no sense in practicing Buddhism.

There's a lot here I could comment on. One somewhat tangential, but I think related point is that Buddhism is NOT about control. The longer I practice, the less I believe in having control, and that's been quite helpful. I'm less uptight, less angry, less rigid, and more responsive to my life than I was in the past. Acts of controlling destructive thoughts and actions can be skillful means at times, but do not represent the fruition of an awakened life.

I still have to control angry commentaries about certain political issues, for example, but that's because I continue to be working with attachments around those views, as well as insecurities about having political views that are outside the norm.

Back to hope, though. Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, I think that using the word "hope" can be a skillful means. Telling someone "I hope you feel better soon" can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. However, in both cases, we can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but also optimistic about life as a whole.

Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she'd considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn't be too bad (which it wasn't), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen would happen.

Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there's a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don't see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don't get what you hope for?

The Seduction of Hope

Over at the Mindful Moment, Dean has an excellent post about the illusions people have about hope. Whenever concerns about the future come up, I find hope to be like a bottle of quality microbrew after a long day. It's usually something that's nicely packaged, good tasting, and guaranteed to offer some short term relief from the pain. The problem is that hoping takes us away from what's present. And it also diverts us away from the deep source pool from which our future springs forth. To put stock in hope means to privilege an empty story over the wholeness that's inherent in each of us, if we only trusted it more. Dean writes:

In my experience and spiritual practice I've found hope is not a good thing. It's limits ones spiritual development. It isn't good because it in fact is a very subtle form of desire and control that makes us cling to our sense of self and our suffering, prolongs our suffering and keeps us suffering. It is an illusion of a sense of control that we don't actually have. Hope is nothing, it's not even a tangible 'anything', it's just a subtle desire for a future positive event or away from a future negative event.

I'd actually say that it isn't even about positive or negative. Spiteful politicians sometimes spend enormous amounts of energy hoping their political opponents are taken down, or even killed off. Greedy business leaders sometimes invest entire fortunes on schemes built on a hope that doing them will crush the competition. Seriously ill or seriously depressed people sometimes hope to die. Rebellious teenagers sometimes hope to fail exams, and flunk out of school. The common thread, whether the desired outcome is positive or negative in the relative sense, is that desire for control Dean speaks of. Control over what? Change.

I don't know about you, but I have never had any luck control changing. Certainly, I can plant seeds for the direction I'd like to go in, and shift my thoughts and behaviors to increase the possibility of that direction manifesting. And I can regulate my responses to whatever actually does occur. But controlling change itself? I don't think so.

The other thing I actually have come to see about hope is that it puts a lock on the doors of our life. Instead of having everything open and available in any given time, you only have a few doors open. The ones you hope for, and the ones you don't hope for.

That's the place you're operating from. I hope to get a job by the end of the month; I hope I don't go broke. Either one of the two "hopes" happen, or something entirely different occurs. With the former, the pattern of belief in hoping is reinforced. The latter often brings with it a surprise laced with confusion and even bewilderment. I didn't expect to inherit this money. What do I do now? Do I still get a job? Invest it? I don't know. I don't know.

In the end, when you give in to the seduction of hope, again and again, you loose the improvisation skills necessary to fully engage with life as it is.

"Artificial Buddhist Personality"

Over at Open Buddha, Al recounts this useful story:

A friend of mine, named “Robert,” used to own an esoteric bookstore in Seattle. Much of his stock and customers were Buddhists, as opposed to the pagans that I normally ran with. It was one of the places where I began to encounter Buddhist books and ideas though. Robert used to mention that one of the problems with Buddhists, in his experience, was “ABP,” or “Artificial Buddhist Personality.” This is the persona that so many Buddhists seem to assume where they take up the trappings, the mental ones as much as any physical ones like statues or beads, of what they think a Buddhist should be and they wear them like a new skin. They aren’t necessarily compassionate, for example, but they know they should be so they go through the motions. The problem here is, of course, that realization is not a persona. It is not something that we take on or assume as mask or role. It is a waking up from masks and roles. The compassion and other attributes of awakening are the natural result, as expressed in the world, of this awakening.

There is an insidiousness to this "ABP" Al's friend pointed to. It's very easy to get into the habit of acting a certain way you believe is better, and avoid looking at the motivations behind it. I think there is some value in the "faking it until you make it approach," for example, but it's also the case that too much of it leads you away from seeing what's actually arising. You do something kind for another, but you miss the resentment or need to be liked behind the surface. Or you refrain from expressing anger at your co-worker, but you fail to express the need for support or honesty from the same co-worker. There's so much energy put into trying to "do the right thing" that you don't have enough to see what's actually present.

When you think about it, there is a corresponding version of ABP in all religious and spiritual traditions. And this tends to be one of the things secular humanists, atheists, and other folks point to when speaking about how delusional these traditions are. The way I see it, they're totally right that these inflated personas, from which those inhabiting them shame and guilt everyone else around them, are certainly delusional.

Another challenge I have experienced with ABP is that when you put on a "good front," people start to expect that from you all the time. Acting like a saint reinforces the commonplace stereotypes about Buddhists being always kind, peaceful, and loving individuals. Not only is it suffocating for us practitioners to try and uphold such ridiculous standards, but it makes it that much more difficult for others to gain any insight into what Buddhism is all about. Not that some general insight into Buddhism by others is all that important. But it's easier, from my experience, to be yourself when there aren't expectations of some form of perfection inside and all around.

Buddhist Lay Practice in History

The Eighth Century Chinese Chan (Zen) Master Layman Pang understood that Buddhist practice does not have a fixed form to be followed by all. But while he is remembered amongst the famous teachers of the past, in my opinion, it was the synergy of the family as a whole that led to such great understanding.

Here is a snippet of their story:

Originally from Hengyang in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, Pang was a successful merchant with a wife, son, and daughter. The family's wealth allowed them to devote their time to study of the Buddhist sūtras, in which they all became well-versed. Pang's daughter Ling Zhao was particularly adept, and at one point even seems to be have been more advanced and wise than her father, as the following story illustrates:

“ The Layman was sitting in his thatched cottage one day [studying the sūtras]. "Difficult, difficult," he said; "like trying to scatter ten measures of sesame seed all over a tree." "Easy, easy," Mrs. Pang said; "like touching your feet to the ground when you get out of bed." "Neither difficult nor easy," Ling Zhao said; "on the hundred grass tips, the great Masters' meaning."[1] ”

After Pang had retired from his profession, he is said to have begun to worry about the spiritual dangers of his material wealth, and so he placed all of his possessions in a boat which he then sunk in a river.

There are so many learnings to be gleaned from this tiny bit of narrative about them. Notice the way material possessions are dealt with. They clearly benefited from having some wealth, given the freed time for Buddhist study it allowed them. In fact, you can take from this that if what you have materially gives you more time to study and practice, then it's beneficial in your life. Yet, at a certain point, there was also a realization that attachment to possessions is commonplace, and a great hindrance, and thus needs to be abandoned. The dramatic sinking of the family's valuables puts one hell of an exclamation point on that teaching, but I do wonder if it might have been more powerful to hear that the Pangs gave their wealth to another family or individual desiring to have time for study and practice. This is one of the challenges I have always had with the heavy emphasis on poverty and material renunciation in the old stories. That works fine for monastics and wandering individuals, but it's unrealistic for most lay practitioners. With that, I still think theirs is an example for all of us today, who struggle with views about both wealth and poverty.

The second learning from this story is the relational quality of practice. This simple story of a father studying the sutras, and a mother and daughter responding to his comments with their own insights is an important reminder to those of us who have been steeped a bit too much in "just sitting" practice. Chan/Zen is relational. Awakening is relational. Whatever wisdom Layman Pang developed over his lifetime and infused into his poems and sayings came together through studies and practice with his family, interactions with his customers (as a merchant), and practice with other Chan teachers of the day. Even if we each must break through the veil covering the truth on our own, it's our relationships (both with humans and with the entire universe of beings) that provide the ground for awakening.

A third learning, which maybe is less apparent, is that if you look closely enough at the old stories, you'll discover brilliance that hasn't been elevated into the traditional canon. We know very little about Ling Zhao, yet her appearance as a young woman of wisdom is just one of many examples throughout old Buddhist stories. And you can bet that for every Layman Pang and Ling Zhao, there were plenty more who lived unrecorded lives, perhaps completely unrecognized outside of the small community they came from.

It tended to be the monastics who were educated, who wrote down the stories, and who passed along what was considered to be the teachings of the day. So, we're left with a partial record of events, persons, and practices - one that privileged monastics, privileged men, and privileged those who had wealth in their lives at some point.

Even so, this doesn't mean we can't uncover some of the wisdom of great lay practitioners of the past. We can. This little story offers a lot, and it's just one of many. Instead of relying solely on the teachings of modern and current practitioners, I think it's wise to dig into the past - to glean what we can from those who came long before us.

"Free Buddhist Press": A Few Thoughts on Elephant Journal and KPC

Writing about controversial topics is challenging. Doing so in a way that both stands tall in the truth, and also expresses your commitment to Buddhist ethics is even more difficult.

In the wake of the Wikileaks uproar, as well as attempted legal constrictions of free speech coming from places like the U.S. Congress, it's becoming important for bloggers to consider not only what they value, but also how they write about what they value.

There has been some back and forth in recent weeks between Buddhist blogger Bill Schwartz, Elephant Journal, and the Buddhist community Kunzang Palyul Choling (KPC). Essentially, the situation began with a post Mr. Schwartz was writing for Elephant Journal that contained criticisms of KPC, which led KPC to send Elephant Journal a legal letter threatening a lawsuit. All this before the article in question was actually published.

Waylon Lewis, publisher of Elephant Journal, said the following in a recent post:

1. I received a letter from KPC’s board with a legal letter attached. I’ve had a ton of communication with them and it’s all been pleasant and respectful.

2. I’m not sure–I’m no lawyer–but I knew that, not being able to afford a lawyer, that was the end of Bill Schwartz’s fun at the expense of KPC on elephant. I’ve encouraged him to write on other subjects. I can’t risk eight years of work and the potential of elephant to be of benefit if I’m without legal representation or the means to afford it.

3. I’d love for something positive to come out of this–I’ll use your wonderful forum as an opportunity to invite both parties to discuss this with the benefit of all sentient beings in mind. If either will take me up on this offer, I’ll serve as a mediator. They can DM me at twitter.com/elephantjournal or write@elephantjournal.com

First off, I find it quite troubling that a Buddhist community would respond to an unpublished article about them with lawyers. Even if they have been friendly and respectful, there's something really off about bringing out the legal hounds on a small time religious blogger like Mr. Schwartz, and a niche online publication like Elephant, which is doing quality work for sure, but doesn't even have close the stature as, say Tricycle magazine of Shambala Sun.

This morning, however, Mr. Schwartz published a guest post over at Sweep the Dust, Push the Dirt giving his views on the matter.

The post begins with a short narrative about his interest in writing the post, the potential legal action brought on Elephant Journal, and the subsequent blocking of the writing in question. However, then Mr. Schwartz turns on the Buddhist community in general, making statements like the following:

When Travis May published a blog on Buddhadharma about the KPC SLAPP Scandal the editor removed it. Was KPC threatened? No, it wasn’t threatened. Worse, it simply doesn’t care. Why? It doesn’t care because Buddhists don’t care. None of the glossy Buddhist magazines is willing to cover this story. Buddhists don’t believe in a free press.

But surely Buddhist bloggers care? Nope. One Buddhist blogger informed me he wasn’t interested. It would be too much work. It’s much easier to write about wisdom and compassion instead. His audience will just eat that up and ask for more. There is no upside to a Buddhist blogger in harshing the mellow of his audience over something of such little or no interest to Buddhists as a free press seems to be.

The response of individual Buddhists has been even worse—unsolicited dharma advice on Tonglen, sending and receiving. We are to exchange our attachment to our right to free speech for the peace of mind that comes with caring only about ourselves. I kid you not. That’s what Shantideva taught. This is the path of the bodhisattva. The Buddhist response has been that it’s perfectly acceptable what KPC has done.

In my opinion, there are at least a few fundamental errors being made here. Assuming that this issue with Elephant Journal and KPC is widely known amongst Buddhists is completely flawed. Assuming that whatever responses he received represent the views of either "Buddhist bloggers" or Buddhists in general, is also completely flawed. Third, assuming that the "glossy" Buddhist media - i.e. Tricycle, Buddhadharma, Shambala Sun, and perhaps a few other publications - don't care - or that these publications are an accurate representation of the "Buddhist community" (whatever that is) is also a huge stretch at best.

One of the difficulties in writing powerfully and engagingly about controversial issues is that often, our emotional responses take over, and shut out those who could be potential allies. It's critical in any effort to bring about social change, or to safe guard current rights and liberties, to not alienate the very people who you'll need to do the work on the ground.

It's very possible that both Mr. Schwartz and Elephant Journal have been screwed in this situation, and that we Buddhist bloggers and writers might have some serious issues on our hands, but the sweeping generalizations, unsubstantiated accusations, and lone wolf energy of Mr. Schwartz's post make it difficult for those of us who might be sympathetic to respond and perhaps act.

Another problem here is that there are a lack of specifics that would help readers understand what happened, and why this particular blog post was considered threatening by the leaders of a Buddhist community. We don't have the post in question to read, nor much in the way of specifics about the contents of said post.

As someone who readily applies Buddhist ethics to social action when I deem it appropriate, I have a deep interest in seeing such work represent, as best as we can, the values and teachings of our tradition. Part of doing so is being careful about what issues we raise and engage in, and to ask questions, and be rigorous in our reflections about issues that arrive at our doorstep - such as this current situation.

I'd love to hear from others on either this issue, or how you engage social/political issues through a Buddhist lens.

Writing Violence: Thoughts on Authenticity and Spiritual Bypassing

Here in Minnesota, we woke up to over 16 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Most of the city was shut down last night, and people are trying to dig out today. Me? I was out taking pictures, including the one above of my street.

So, I was interested to see what might come of the last post, which isn't my regular writing style. In particular, what I am curious about is the ways that we can write authentically about difficult, disliked patterns and ways of being in the world. Friday's post was about aggressiveness. Competition. Excessive effort. Turning one's spiritual practice into a contest. And also the voices in our heads that can arise from such energies.

Peter left the following comment, which I can imagine was how others felt that read the post:

I enjoy the energy in your post -- but find all that hard-ass, motherfucker language of little interest. too testosterone-laden and agressive for my taste. neither meditation nor blogging (nor living for that matter) is a contest.

i find that there's enough suffering in the world, without creating more under the guise of practice.

First off, those like Peter who are regular readers of this blog know that I'm not given to tossing foul language around carelessly. Most of my writing steers clear of it because it's not necessary for the situation. I actually tend to respond in a similar way to profuse cussing as Peter did to this particular post. Adding cuss words to angry writing tends to bend both the reader and writer towards more anger. And adding cuss words in other kinds of writing often just causes distraction, confusion, and/or aversion in readers.

However, one of the weaknesses, in my opinion, of much spiritual writing out there is a failure to express the fullness of experience, and then use that expression as a way in to understanding the deep truths of this life. What I find is that the bluntness, rawness, even nastiness that sometimes litters our minds and even our actions gets abstracted, shunted, even turned aside out of a belief that presenting such stuff will just cause more suffering. Or is categorically wrong, a no-no for people on a spiritual path.

Let's take a specific example from Friday's post.

Zazen posture seems to be a big deal for a lot of people. Those who can't do the full lotus posture often spend months and even years trying to emulate it, thinking that this it is a requirement for awakening. And when the body inevitably gets sick and/or old, there's a certain amount of grief and suffering that comes up for those who are attached to sitting full lotus, and now can't.

Being in a group, especially during retreats, can ramp up this kind of energy. I've experienced this myself. You've been doing zazen all day, your entire body aches, and yet you look around, and most everyone else is still in full lotus, or half lotus. And what do you do? You stay in lotus, even though you're literally on fire with pain.

What's the mind look like under these conditions. Well, it's probably something like this: Better do full lotus motherfucker - none of that half-assed seiza bench shit.. If you are honest, that's what it looks like. Maybe your mind doesn't have the cuss words, but the aggression that brought you to keep sitting when you really shouldn't includes an aggressive, sometimes really nasty narrative. There's no getting around that.

So, here's the thing. How do we write about such experiences?

How do we convey them authentically, embedded in the teachings we've been given, so that others might gain some insight?

Maybe more importantly though, how do we stay true to where we are at, express fully where we are at, without minimizing or exaggerating?

Because what I see in myself, and also in so many others doing spiritual writing, from the most beginner student to the most seasoned teacher, is a tendency to dance around the heat of that which we collectively have deemed taboo.

Anger. Hard-assed aggression. Violent thoughts. Rage.

These are some of the experiences that we "spiritual types" avoid, minimize, cloak in psychological or other abstract language. And why? We're triggered. We're afraid. We don't know how to handle it. The teachings tell us these things are destructive, cause suffering, and shouldn't be indulged in.

And it's absolutely true that violence, rage, aggression, excessive anger - all of that is destructive, suffering producing, and blinding us from our inherent wisdom.

Yet, I also think it's no coincidence that these very same places tend to be the most common shadows of people who are in religious and spiritual communities, or who have committed themselves to such a path. We have a sense of the destructiveness of those various forms of violence, and yet instead of truly facing it within our selves, we do all sorts of bypassing and then wonder why we can't seem to be open around conflicts that appear in our lives, our communities, even online.

Consider, in contrast, something that is more palatable to work with. Like grief. Or guilt. Or fear.

I have heard some amazingly beautiful, detailed talks linking deeply personal experiences of grief to profoundly universal teachings about grief. No mincing words. No avoidance. Just raw experience, which is then transformed into wisdom, and in doing so, is an expression of compassion for all of us who also are experiencing grief.

The same doesn't seem to be true when it comes to working with violent tendencies. Grief is embraced by spiritual types, whereas rage, for example, is almost universally rejected from the beginning. And that's the problem. It's rejected from the beginning, instead of taken in, fully experienced and documented, until it drops away.

It is any wonder there is so much war and violence in the world.

I'm fiercely interested in how I, and others, might navigate this territory more honestly, more clearly, exposing enough of the rawness to ourselves and others without falling into the swamp of it. What did the mind of the man who was shaking his fist at that bus Friday afternoon look like exactly? Who was that "me" which came and then went, but will come again and again if it goes unexamined?

Because just saying he was angry, he was indulging in anger, he was attached to an outcome, he was this he was that - just saying that doesn't cut it. It cuts what IT was off.

Last night, I was snowed in. I listened to a podcast interview with Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray, during which he describes a practice called "Dark Meditation." Essentially, it's going into complete darkness and staying with whatever comes up. After the interview, I went into my bathroom, covered up all the entry points of light, and sat for an hour in the darkness. Very interesting. You know your body is there, the bathtub is there, the toilet is there - but you can't see any of it. And it doesn't take long before you start feeling disoriented, not in an awful way, but in a "what is this experience" kind of way. The natural curiosity each of us has, but which often is blocked, comes forth rather easily from the darkness.

Where is the natural curiosity towards the violent, rage-driven aspects of our lives? Why is it that instead of curiosity, so often what arises in response to "internal" violence is guilt, shame, and/or fear?

What was so interesting to me about writing that post on Friday was that when I began, it was mostly going to be about calling out the aggression and attacks I saw in The Zennist's and Uku's posts. And yet, as I wrote the post, it became clear to me that doing that wasn't really fair or helpful. In fact, not only that, but it would have been reproducing the very patterns I'm talking about here. Take a look at these guys. Talking shit about their fellow practitioners. Look at how angry their words are. We should be kinder to our fellow practitioners. Blah. Blah. Blah. All of that is true, but it's only part of the story. I'm like them too. You are like them too. The only difference is that I didn't put a post out like that.

So, what's behind the desire to shame them? What is it about angry and/or violent writing, angry and/or violent thinking, that either seductively draws us in or makes us run far, far away? And what can we do about it?

That's what I became interested in while writing that post Friday. And this post is a continuation of that, in it's own meandering way.

p.s. The Blogisattva Awards are out. This blog won the Best Achievement Blogging Opinion Pieces or Political Issues award. Thank you all for the recognition. But mostly, as I said Friday, seeing all those Buddhist blogs located in one place, where anyone can access them and drink in the wisdom, experience, and folly, is really excellent. Bows to us all.