The temple bell stops.
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Basho

Step Four: Take Action.  The final step in The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton is to use the clarity developed through the practices of stilling and connecting with our emotions.  As we see that our reality is constructed, we detach from its power to define us, to set our identity in stone.  The remainder of Cayton’s book covers a lot of ground, beginning with the way we create (and re-create) our reality and diving into the need for ethics and self-compassion.  By his definition, the litmus test of ethics – or rather the way one knows if an action is ethical – is if it leads to creating health and well being.  

I’m chewing on this.  Harkening back to the first post of this series about past actions that ripen into present karmic consequences, I have to wonder about Cayton’s definition.  I wish things were so clear-cut when choosing actions that avoid harm and foster good.  One thing I’ve learned about making decisions to divert harm: someone is always invested in the trajectory of the present moment and you’re bound to piss them off when you mess with their equation.  And the reason is simple: in your mind, their actions may bear harmful fruit; in their mind, your actions may bear harmful fruit.  I’ve often found it useful to sit with some people and, as a starting point, agree that we are likely both delusional in our perceptions.  We strike up a partnership to pool our investments and determine the best course possible.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.

There’s no “most times” because inevitably someone decides that their delusion is more important to defend than adapt.

In matters of determining ethical actions, I keep returning to René Girard’s monkeys and the banana (see Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).  Initially, the conflict is about eating the banana.  Inevitably however, it becomes about who owns the banana.  Getting caught in right and wrong is also like that.  Initially, it’s about the right thing to do.  Eventually, it’s about who is seen as doing the right thing.  This is where the self-awareness and clarity of mind is crucial.  Once I can see that I’ve become invested in being the one who is doing the right thing, I’ve lost the ground I stand on.

Nevertheless, I’m pleased that Cayton raises the issue of ethics as an important aspect of practice.  There can never be enough said, written, or taught about it.

A little lesson from Zen Master Sprout to go along with The Misleading Mind and Karuna Cayton’s Third Step: What’s going on?  Over the few months, Volvo (on the left) has been suffering the boisterous bouncing of Sprout.  He takes great delight in pouncing her off the rocking chair, sofa, zafus at every opportunity, taking advantage that she is clawless and he is fully loaded.  For a while, we worked hard at intervening, insofar as one can intervene with a lightning fast kitten who has perfected the surgical strike.  Even when we caught him and applied an appropriate reprimand, there was neither remorse nor reflection, making rehabilitation unlikely.  Shame and blame were not effective on the monster and we decided that Volvo (who was at least losing her pudginess from the running around) was going to have to handle it on her own.

The middle sections of Cayton’s book deals with the destructive emotions – he also calls them “disturbing emotions.”  Attachment, aversion, and ignorance are covered rather well.  I particularly like his work up of “ignorance” which causes all kinds of… well… confusion when we try to understand it.  Confusion, doubt, fogginess, uncertainty, illogical thinking, blind faith, forgetfulness, and absence of introspection are some of the ways we manifest ignorance.  In fact, this little list helped me track my reactions to the caterwauling when Volvo and Sprout were duking it out over something or the other.  I had no idea if leaving this up to animal nature was the right thing to do.  I think at some level my contemplation and intention in letting them sort it out was based on the eternal koan: does a cat had Buddha nature?  I was hoping they did because animal nature was not proving tolerable.

In the section on blame versus accountability, Cayton makes some clear points about the difference between the two concepts and the litmus test of that difference.  Blame leads to unskillful action; accountability leads to skillful ones.  In my rather simple terms, blame says “everything conspired so I couldn’t do better.”  Accountability says, “I can do better.  Period.”

I watched the two cats leap to the windowsill together and held my breath.  They sat there for a long time enjoying the breeze and the swooping starlings.  Sprout turned to Volvo and she made it clear that whatever he was telegraphing was not on.  No howls, snarls, or shrieks.  Just a clawless paw suspended in the space between them.

“You can do better.  Period.”

We’re continuing with The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton.  I’m trying to find the connection between Step Two: Set up your laboratory and a rationale for the practice as he’s teaching it.  I know you know.  You know I know.  I know that you know I know and vice versa.  But in a book that sets out to deal with the Trickster Mind, I really want Cayton to assume I don’t know!  But I’m going to trust his process and practice anyway hoping it leads to that pot of gold.

Reading the instructions for setting up the laboratory, I have a strong sense of Cayton’s corporate coaching persona coming through.  The language is very “go-get-’em” and the “ABC” breathing practice floats out there without much of an intention to anchor it.  I can infer the intention because I know from other experience that the practice holds promise; but it takes me away from my intention to hold a Beginner’s Mind.

The issue of “what is mind?” seems to be what he gets to in the third chapter.  How do I clarify my experience so that I can understand reality is what I create?  So, in the ABC, A is for anatomy; bring awareness to the areas of tension in the body.  B is for breathing; anchor yourself in the breath.  C is for counting (really); count the in- and out-breaths.  I can’t resist so let me infer that the sequence is to calm and steady internal turmoil.  In psychological circles, it’s a variant of progressive muscle relaxation blended with breathing to calm symptoms of anxiety.  Not a bad thing but a link to how this prepares “the laboratory” (presumably of body-mind) would have been helpful.

Enough about the book.  More about me practicing with the book.  Cayton explains that “disturbing emotions” have the power to “hypnotize us…so they become ‘reality’.”  This nugget is worth getting to and a powerhouse of energy is conferred when I work with it.  It also reminds me of Tara Brach’s use of the term “trance” in describing our habitual energies and auto-pilot.  I call it getting on trains that take us away from our experience in the moment; we believe escaping on the train as the reality because we think it’s safer or that we’re actually acting on the distress.

Later in the chapter, Cayton points out that our mind is very much like a video camera and TV screen running simultaneously.  Our sense organs (I’m interpolating) record the impingement of sensations which leaves a mental imprint.  And, at the same time, we’re layering our interpretation of the experience on that imprint.  Instantly, the process of logging the experience becomes laden with our bias, our preferences.  We create the world as we are.

And it ain’t so.  We can absolutely count on that.

It’s easy to make more of something than it is.  It’s easy to put a negative face on a person or situation to justify our anger, frustration, helplessness, and ultimately, our reactive actions.  

A couple of weeks ago, I made a phone call to an agency that, over the last 15 years, has referred people for psychological treatment.  I needed some paperwork sent for a particular client so they could take part in one of our programs.  The colleague I spoke with was embarrassed; she hedged around her answer and then blurted out, “You’re no longer on our provider list.”  She was upset about it, working on re-instating our clinic, but until then her hands were tied.  As the story wound out, it seems someone from my ignoble past has slid into my professional life with an agenda.  From what we could tell, this has been cooking for about four years and has ripened into action.

I spent a few days embellishing various fantasy scenarios of retaliation.  To give myself credit only one or two involved violation of the precepts.  Mostly, hunger strikes on the steps of the agency, opening a free clinic, and holding protest marches tended to be the flavour of my hit-backs.  Now before you go all Awwwww on me, let me point out that the ego is still quite rampant in the latter scenes despite the great Gandhi-like camouflage.  And then there were days of practicing one of the Shadow Fourth Noble Truths: Noble Outrage; I envisioned miles of needy patients snaking down hallways, winding out into the parking lots, and drifting in wounded aimlessness down the street.  I rarely worry about the closure of DVD rental places; there are ample life has uploaded into my mind. 

And then, in sangha, a friend asked what we were going to do to protect ourselves.  I responded, “Nothing yet.  It’s only been four years.”  True, there is potential in this situation for injustice, inconvenience, and the up-ending of projects waiting to be activated.  All of which to say, there is great potential for high drama and the tilting at windmills.  Yet once I strip away all the drama, faux-calls-to-social-engagement, and I call into play that powerful practice of patience, I’m left with a very different set of choices.

Reading The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton, it was good to see I’m not too far off base.  In the book, Cayton describes four steps to vanquishing the delusional mind.  Step One: You have a Choice!  I do absolutely have a choice.  There is a choice in viewing something as just what it is.  No more, no less.  As I sat with the not-doing, this was an additional realization: to narrow* our focus on the individual or the situation as it is now is the delusional process.  And no choice of skillful actions can arise out of that perspective.

Cayton sets up a four-step process of training the mind.  I don’t quite follow the set up of the book to see how the four steps match up with the chapters.  But maybe that is just my hobgoblin mind wanting a clear map.

Regardless, it doesn’t take away from the practice he describes and which I’ll explore this week.

* Edited 2012 May 21 @ 0941

No mud

No lotus

I’ve been immersed in books lately.  More so than usual.  Unfortunately these are not books I’m reading but books that are arriving, arriving at the door.  Books to be reviewed, books to be read, books to be studied.  Chaplaincy books, poetry books, psychology books, Buddhist books – all clamouring for attention.  And dare I mention the pixelated books in my e-readers that are sending me subliminal messages via 3G?  I can skate by with some of these by scanning the text and getting a feel for the author’s message.  Others are denser woods to navigate through and I risk not seeing the forest through the trees.

In some genres more than others, seeing the trees without losing sight of the forest is important.  The specifics of the book are critical to understanding the teachings they impart.  They must be practiced to be embodied and only then does a reflection on them have legs.  In particular, every book about Buddhism is a book with which one practices.  I’ve yet to find a book of this genre that didn’t demand this singular, whole-hearted commitment from the reader.  So, I quiver in fear at the number of Buddhist-y books stacking up on my shelf – I cleared out a single shelf solely populated by Buddhism-books-to-be-reviewed – because there are not enough life-times to practice what is contained between the covers of these volumes.

Somewhat disheartened, I stumbled around the megalithic bookstore in town wishing every sheet of paper bound between glossy laminates would leap up and flap their way up through the vents in the ceiling.  I stared at volumes of books by the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh – two of the most prolific authors.  I rolled glassy-eyeballs over titles that proclaimed liberation and peace were possible.  And I bought one of them.

I can justify this!  Really.  It comes to me unburdened by any publishing company’s publicity agent.  In fact, Parallax Press is rather firm in ignoring my offers to review Thich Nhat Hanh’s books despite the sycophantic waving of my brown Order of Interbeing jacket.  So, blessed by such ignominy, I feel free to recommend this book, unhampered by any need to please anyone.

Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist sutras and commentaries initially looks like a compilation of Thấy’s various sutra commentary books.  It’s not.  It is 608 pages of revised translations and new commentaries on key sutras.  The Anapanasati, Satipatthana, Knowing a better way to live alone (my favourite and a life-changer), Better way to catch a snake, On the Middle Way, On Happiness, Eight Realizations of the Great Beings represent the Pali Canon.

The Heart and Diamond sutras bridge us into the Mahayana teachings.  Each sutra is given a clearer translation and deeper treatment in commentary than the previous single volumes.  This is followed with a series of sections focused solely on practice.  New and detailed exercises for the Awareness of Breathing and the Four Establishments of Mindfulness sutras are available in this voluminous text along with histories of and other texts related to the sutras.  The commentaries of the Diamond and Heart sutras are vastly expanded and directly connected to everyday life.

There’s a contemplative feel to the writing (though I admit often having trouble getting into Thấy’s style) and it promises to challenge anyone attempting a sutra study.  If ever there was a book that qualified being called a Buddhist Bible, this might be it.  I’m looking forward to practicing with it over my lifetime.

For some reason, the theme of dancing has been popping up in my writings.  Recently, I reviewed Mindfulness: an 8-week plan to find peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Dan Penman.  It’s a lovely book and as with any manual that guides us through our suffering, I approach it with a seriously critical stance.  Mark’s book makes it easier because of the chocolate meditation in the first chapter.  But letting that go, letting it dissolve, I am also aware that in my own struggles through anxiety and depression, I’ve never done well with the authoritarian, directive approach to healing.  I’m very much of the “let’s eat the pudding to see if it proves to be worthwhile.”  Yes, dear reader, the correct aphorism is that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”  In other words, like Zen, the words are devoid of teachings; the experience is the practice.

So with this book, I started with Chapter 1 and practiced each day to truly experience the cultivation of a different stance to my life as it is.  Here.  Now.  And yes, the chocolate helped.  But what helped more than anything is the connection with a lovely idea that our practice is one of learning to dance with life again.  I feel like I’m surfacing out of a heavy fog or maybe making land from a storm.  Whatever the metaphor of coming into ground from chaos, it feels like it is time to dance into my life.

Whole-heartedly.

At the end of a retreat conducted in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, retreatants are invited to take the Five Mindfulness Trainings.  These are the lay precepts cast in terms of positive engagement by Thich Nhat Hanh.  At one level that is so; at another, they continue to contain elements of the “do not” found in all calls for ethical behaviours.  While the terminology is not as directive, the commitment to not kill, not steal, not engage in sexual misconduct, not speak in anger or untruthfully, and not to use intoxicants is very much evident.  It’s unavoidable really.  The first step of any practice whose intention is well being begins with restraint.

This aspect of ethics is a touchy one for many of us.  We don’t like being told what to do; even more, we dislike being told what not to do.  And yet, in the liminal space between moving forward and holding back, there may be something valuable that can emerge.

So today, I’m watching the many ways in which I can act with restraint, hold back, pause.  Not as a process of denying myself or others but rather as a practice of awareness, of not obstructing the possibility of something different arising.

So it was with this past weekend.  Frank and I attended a retreat organized by the local sangha which practices in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition.  It was being held in a center that is the home of the Grey Nuns (now the Grey Sisters).  The building is a residence for the Grey Sisters, a retreat center, a community resource for counselling and activities, and a museum of the history of the Grey Nuns.  And what started out as a practice of being in the present became a journey into my past.

You can read about the founder of the Grey Nuns, Marguerite D’Youville, here; a fascinating story of one woman’s life in the New France of the 1700′s, surviving adversity, and transforming her suffering into a path of service.  Her work with the poor was so reviled by the culture of the mid-1700′s that she and her supporters were mocked with the name “Les Grises” – the “grey women” or the “drunken women.”  Yet, despite the enormous opposition, they grew as a community and persevered to found and fund numerous hospitals, shelters, and schools globally.

Where does my past fit in this?  Walking down the hall of history at the retreat center and reading of the various schools the Grey Nuns founded, I realized I had been taught by them and two in particular might well have watered the seeds of practice for me.  As a child in elementary school, I only knew them as The Nuns and Sr. Leger in particular as the woman who saw through my defensive posturing and deep into my potential.  I lost touch with them only to reconnect with them in the Grey Nuns retirement residence in Montreal about 10 years ago when I was there for another retreat (in TNH’s tradition again).  There are few specific memories however what I remember of our relationship is set deep in my bones.  I know this because when went to meet Sr. Leger, I stood up taller and shook the cobwebs out of my brain.  She was never one to be tolerant of my tendency to sloppiness – whether it was in body or mind.  And through her persistence, I realize now that she transmitted to me an unrelenting devotion to the spirit of practice.

The pictures in the hallways were interesting relics.  What penetrated me was the interconnections and the surfacing of the past in a new perspective and with new understanding.