Category Archives: 108 thoughts

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sweet nothings

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The deadline for our Learning Reflection Papers has crept up on me.  Has it already been one month since the Core Chaplaincy Training retreat?  On Sunday, I pounded out the LRP on the segment delivered by Dr. Merle Lefkoff on Complexity, Spirituality and Compassion.  The Science of Surprise and black swans appearing when you least expect.  The Theory of the Black Swan (authored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) is of an unpredicted and undirected event which is then rationalized by hindsight.  It reminds me of one of the most powerful books written in Psychology by Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails.  Following one of those planetary catastrophes predicted by messages from aliens, Festinger and his research pals noticed that the failure of the event lead to some interesting backwards engineering – or forwards propping.  In this specific case, the group who had predicted the end of the world gathered to wait for salvation.  When the predicted end didn’t happen, they announced that it was because they had gathered, full of faith in the aliens’ intention to destroy Earth, that the aliens had changed their plans.  Thus was born the concept of cognitive dissonance – how we change past thought history to cope with things not going the way we expected.

I used to sneer at this kind of cognitive reverse engineering.  As I did at sweet whispered nothings which had the effect of derailing a hot date in my youth.  These days I’m finding it harder and harder to see the line between things I don’t expect and things I didn’t predict.  Ultimately, they both have to do with a form of blindness.  I don’t expect things because I’m blind to the causes and consequences of my actions.  I can’t predict things because I haven’t yet allowed the data into my consciousness.  Either way, the blindness has its own consequences.

What does this have to do with practice?  May be nothing.  I might be procrastinating on writing the next LRP on the shadow side of the paramitas.  Or, maybe I’m starting to consider the metaphoric Black Swan Event when I come up against moments that turn out to be acts of generosity, virtue, patience, love, stability and wisdom.  I understand that Taleb meant events of global and cultural consequence however missing such unpredicted and undirected moments in our practice lives can also have wide-reaching impact.  And, I fear that when the realization hits of the true nature of the act I received, my backwards rationalization may not do service to myself or the other.

Would mindfulness be enough to notice the growth of a Black Swan?  Taleb, in his 2010 revision, added a section on how to avoid Black Swan Events (getting fired may be a Black Swan Event for the employee but guaranteed it wasn’t for the corporation).  So perhaps, the sweet nothings I disregard or the assumptions I make about intentions and a common humanity could stand a bit of scrutiny.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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sweet dharma

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The pink arrow is pointing at our daughter, the intrepid adventurer, on her way to Cameroon with International Children’s Awareness Canada. I got home long enough last week to throw my still-damp toothbrush into my purse and take off with Frank and the Kid for the airport in Toronto.  Thankfully, Frank’s broken ankle was assessed as healed and he got to drive.  Had I known that would designate me as the the parent-in-charge-of-keeping-the-child-quiet, I likely would have broken it for him again and driven the entire way.  Not really.  There’s something sweet about being in a closed metal box hurtling down a highway at high speed, in the company of a young woman who is finally finding her true self and doing so while on her way to an adventure.

This isn’t the first time for Alex.  A few months after the 2004 tsunami in India, she left for the outskirts of Chennai where she worked in an orphanage for 10 weeks.  Then came a year-long trek through New Zealand and a realization that conquering all the mountain peaks in the world doesn’t change the nature of suffering although it can bring one close to the nature of deep personal dukkha.  When she got back from India, she was powerfully moved by the ways in which we can corrupt generosity and compassion.  When she got back from New Zealand, she was equally moved by the reality that progress doesn’t bring with it generosity and compassion.

These adventures result in long evenings with Frank, deep in discussions about the sociological-political-complexity-laden-entropic windings of the world.  Having no brain for such things, I tend to retreat into Facebook or my tumblr treating them as distractor video games so I don’t have to face my massive ignorance of how the world really works.  To give her credit, Alex does try to educate me but I have such a resistance to seeing the world writ large.  When she returned from New Zealand, she brought me Emma Larkin’s book, Everything is Broken: a tale of catastrophe in Burma.  It changed her life, she said, wanting me so much to be excited by it.

And I was.  Excited, that is, by the fact it had changed her life, giving her passion and direction to fit the steamroller attitude that often hides a deep compassion for others.  The book was bland in comparison;  it left me frustrated by circumambulating writing and a refusal to dig deep into the psychological-emotional power of the events of Cyclone Nargis.  Alex was unimpressed by my critique of Larkin.

I try.  Really.  But we speak vastly different languages and I try to explain that listening to her debate with her father is like listening to a symphony.  A delight to attend but hardly something I want to or am able to perform in.  She points out that she got her abilities from somewhere and, given her father’s haplessness, I have to bear the burden of that legacy.

Brat.

So now it’s onto Cameroon and the possibility that it will give her more training in the upaya/skill-in-means of Bodhisattvas.  Charles Prebish in Destroying Mara Forever: Buddhist Ethics Essays in honor of Damien Keown notes that Keown called Mahayana’s emphasis on the bodhisattva ideal as a paradigm shift away from the ethical approach of the earlier Buddhists.  There’s more to this but what is important for me to hang on the wall until the Kid returns is what Keown calls normative ethics or upaya1, one of two aspects of skill-in-means:

Upaya1 does not enjoin laxity in moral practice but rather the greater recognition of the needs and interests of others.  One’s moral practice is now for the benefit of oneself and others by means of example.  Through its emphasis on karuna the Mahayana gave full recognition to the value of ethical perfection, making it explicit that ethics and insight were of equal importance for a bodhisattva.

If the righteous indignation of events in India and New Zealand have given rise to a determination to find a way to benefit others and if that benefits the Kid, I will call that sweet dharma, indeed.

Thank you for practising,

Genju