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if ihad an ipad – the subtle surrender of relationship

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I posted this comment on Ox Herding yesterday:

I don’t want happiness.
I want an IPad.
Very simple, really.

If Ihad an Ipad,
I would be able to acquire all the things I want to acquire
and then
I would have power, fame, and fortune.

If Ihad an Ipad.

What would you sacrifice to have that bright, shiny new toy?  The question is not a couched accusation.  I ask because I found myself caught in a moment’s dilemma a few weeks ago.  An email arrived from a group list of mindfulness practitioners that offered a free iPad (yes, in the poem above I’ve inverted the caps in the letters for good reason). All I had to do was go to the Apple site, click on the links and I would get an iPad to beta test some apps.  OK, any opportunity to be pimped out to a technology giant, I’m first in line!  It’s an adorable failing of mine and my family has attempted a few interventions to no success – unless you count that sucking sound of Frank and The Kid falling into the black hole of Kindles, cell phones, notebooks, and nanopods.

Following the instructions carefully, I entered all the relevant information on the website as it dangled luscious pictures over and over again of all the things I could do with my new iPad (which I get to keep after the beta-testing).  My addiction tends to put me in a jhana level I call Fire, Ready, Aim.  Click, yes please include me.  Click, here’s my vital statistics.  Click, yes you can harass my husband about my worst habits.  Click, you can  have my first-born (and no exchange or replacement allowed).  Click, here’s access to my contacts…

It is in moments like this that I am deeply grateful for my years of practice in paranoia.  Contact list?  I don’t think so.  Sacrifice my spouse and first-born, no problem.  Share my Contact List, well… let’s talk about that, shall we?

But there’s no talking to be had with software designed to get more from you than it’s designed to give.  You’ll be proud of me: I let go of my desperate need for an iPad to preserve the sanctity of your email box.

Starting with yesterday’s post and into this week, I’ll be circling the drain of mindless consumption.  My friends in the US are celebrating Turkey Day and Black Friday (is that a celebration?) this week.  And the world is zooming in on that Season-Who-Should-Be-Renamed. ‘Tis the season for a peek at the subtle ways we are lead astray.  One of the chapters in Stephanie Kaza’s terrific book, Hooked: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume is by Diana Winston titled You are what you download.  Using the 12 links of “dependent (or not) origination,” Winston explores how her addiction was triggered by the Internet:

On the day I realized that I could have anything I wanted over the Internet, I bought ten new books, a subscription to a simple-living magazine, and a pair of black leather boots, and sent myself daily quotes of the Buddha.  The Buddha sent me an email about the law of karma.  He said actions have results.  If I plant a plum pit, I will get a plum tree.  If I practice greed, I will be more greedy.  If I practice generosity, I will be more generous.  Buddhism 101.

It’s easy to get sucked in.  It’s easy in that vortex to have the light that glows from what we value diminish and flicker.  It’s easy to believe then that what we want is so much more valuable than what we have – or are about to give away.  However, that moment in the iPad seduction was more insidious than my usual unrestrained forays into Internet shopping.  For whatever the reason, that split second of realization that I would have to surrender all the names in my address book broke the trance.  I was being asked to offer up relationships of trust for a piece of technology.  Lovely technology, mind you.  Sexy, smooth, vibrant, del.icio.us technology.  And that seductive software made the fatal error of asking me to betray a trust.  Fulfilling Internet-fueled cravings was no longer an individual matter.

Winston goes on to point out that it helps to have more space between the first arising of craving and the grasping (or aversion) that follows.  Although she is quite correct in exploring this aspect of Internet-fueled greed as an individual risk, I realized it is very much a relational risk too.  From the chain emails to i-viral infections, we are asked to expose our connections to others either deliberately or inadvertently.  And, I haven’t even got into the whole exposure process of social networks which are a variant on the body count issue of yesterday’s post.

Winston offers many possible antidotes to being in the thrall of the Internet.  Limiting the time spent, having a one-to-two ratio of time spent on the Internet with time spent with friends and so on.  I like the metaphor that arrived in my mail – the real, drop it off in your box at the end of the laneway mail.

Our electricity company now charges based on the time of day I use my appliances.  High to low peak hours remind me to use the green-zone times to do the wash, run the dishwasher so that I consume less and minimize the impact on my environment.  The potential duplicity of corporations aside, this is a neat sticker to place on my desk, reminding me that there are times when my actions will have a greater relational cost and to use those times wisely.  Looks like Internet offers of satisfying lack go in that red zone.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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musical chairs & the subtle nourishment of lack

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Yesterday marked a turning point in my practice.  As most of you know, Frank and I facilitate/manage/runaround a sangha.  Most of the time, it’s a lot of fun.  We have an opportunity to sit, walk, drink tea, and laugh with like-minded folks who share a curiosity about life.  Sometimes, it’s a pain where the zafu meets the body part.  Events are rarely attended and often we’ve been left holding the financial bag for community gatherings.  (Probably the worst was a fund-raising dinner for a local charity to which we had “bought” a table for 10 and no one showed.)  We tend to roll with these things though Frank and I have markedly different approaches to the ups and downs of interest and attendance.

My view is quorum-based.  There’s no point going ahead without the right size of body count.  His view is to go ahead with practice and eventually the bodies count.

I finally acknowledge that Frank is right.

There.  It’s in writing and published across the multi-verse.  And yesterday was that kind of turning point in my practice, a realization finally that practice must be independent of all outward markers of success.  It was our Day of Mindfulness (zazenkai, for those of us who need exotica in our language).  The number of emails expressing regrets suggested there would not be anyone attending but we went ahead anyway.  One person did come – in fact he came twice: the day before, thinking it was Sunday, and again on Sunday.  Now that is dedication! K. walked in and said, “Oh, is no one coming today?”  And for the first time, I truly felt the paradox in our thinking.   I replied,  “There will be three of us today.”

I have wondered where this need for a body count comes from, especially in the sanghas I’ve attended.  One dharma teacher would send out anxious and angry emails railing at the community for not showing up.  Another would become furious when other communities formed because it threatened to take people away from his group.  A third, greatly beloved by all and sundry, took strips off Frank and me because we had only brought 11 people to his retreat (final body count 35) and refused to give talks at our budding sangha until we had over 30 people attending regularly for at least two years.

Looking back, I can see this as a subtle training in sensitivity to lack, to not having enough, to the Other as a threat to acquiring more.  Sadly, it reduces the spiritual path to just another form of desperate consumerism.  Interestingly, the talk I chose for our DoM yesterday was given by Sensei Beate Stolte at Upaya ZC: Exploring the Self.  In it, Sensei Beate goes on a bit of a tangent but an important one.  She describes the subtle ways in which we foster our fear of not getting what we deserve, not having enough.

She used the example of a child’s game, musical chairs. You know the game.  It starts out with much laughter and fun as the music plays, children run around the chairs, and squeal as they try to find a chair when the music stops.  Quickly though, the implications of the music starting and stopping sink in.  Now it’s become a full contact sport.  Has it ever become again just a game for us since those days of birthday parties and summer picnics?  Was this part of the early seeding of our competitive, driven nature? Do we still walk into a room, a situation and scan it for the potential of “one-less-chair-than-bodies?”

I had hoped it would not be that way in communities given to mindful consumption or dedicated to the uprooting of greed.  Apparently it is not and this is distressingly so.  The marker of a community dedicated to practice cannot be the number of bodies sitting in rows.  Admittedly, if we’ve got to support temples and structures which necessitate an accounting at the end of the day, bodies count.  And perhaps, that’s a morality tale in itself about tails wagging dogs.  At the same time, I won’t say I’m not concerned by the low body count in sangha-building but it’s more a concern about people not taking advantage of the dharmic riches available.

But yesterday, it was different for me.  Whatever it was, however many we were, it was enough.  In my striving to be homeless, free of attachments, I noticed that three of us shared a wonderful morning of meditation, followed by a lunch of roasted squash soup, fresh-baked bread, spinach salad, tea, a walk in the woods, and then a gentle sharing about our practice.  There were two chairs and a zafu leftover and no one had to fight for their seat in the circle.

Thank you for practising,

Genju