What, Me Worry?

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

-- Lewis Carroll

I took my last prednisone today, hopefully for at least a while. That stuff makes you jumpy. It upsets your sleep patterns, it's no help at all in meditation, and I've been taking the stuff in big doses the last two months. It's been some benefit, not as much as I'd hoped, but I'll take what I can get, especially while I muddle through a transition in doctors, since the pulmonologist I'd been seeing has decided to leave his private practice. Meantime, my prescription for Advair (yay, another steroid!) unexpectedly expired, and I felt briefly as if I had myself fallen through the cracks of our dysfunctional medical system. By chance, I had visited a colleague of my new doctor some time back, which is more than I can say for my new doctor, who won't see me until next month. Only that visit to his colleague prompted his office to send a renewal of that prescription. Without it, and with my old doctor off to who knows where, I would have been in a world of hurt. Welcome to the Great Society!

Be that as it may... at least I'm getting a little more comfortable in my meditation again, with far fewer drugs in my system. Since I'm not so jumpy, I'm feeling less bored with sitting still, and I'm able to be consistently more quiet overall, and it feels good. I might even try to talk a bit about Zen this time. Let's just throw caution to the wind, what do you say!

If you're interested in Zen, but don't know much about it, I would certainly suggest you visit a Zen Center near you, and to buy or borrow some good books on the topic. I would hate to think you learned all you know from me. But I'll be happy to describe a little of what I do. You can compare it to what the experts say. I'm just a semi-retired actor/programmer. I know nothing.

I have the requisite Zen cushions, called a zafu and a zabuton, wherein the small round pillow (the zafu) is placed on the mat (the zabuton), so that one can sit on the small zafu cross-legged, with good support, and meditate in relative comfort for extended sessions. Of course, I don't always use the pillows. Sometimes, I defer to age, or perhaps laziness, and simply sit cross-legged in my large recliner chair. I personally think some formalities are overrated, but then, I told you I'm not the expert. For me, the important thing is to sit with good balanced posture and a straight, upright back. I really can't do the lotus; my legs are fairly muscular and thick, and they weren't close to being flexible enough even when I was meditating in my twenties. The lotus is better if you can do it, but mostly my legs are just crossed. I appreciate that form is very important in Zen, but I try to honor that mostly with my straight back and my cupped hands forming my mudra.

The mudra is very important. I relax my arms, but keep them slightly away from my sides, and lay the fingers of my left hand over those of my right, in front of me. My thumbs touch each other gently to form the "cosmic" oval close to my navel. My mudra has become pretty solid, my hands relaxed, and from there I just breathe, and focus on following my breathing.

I suppose the most difficult thing for anyone to deal with in zazen, other than some discomfort maintaining the zazen posture, is what to think. I have read and listened to many Zen masters on that topic for many years, and while they've all mostly said the same things, I have managed to remain confused for most of those years. Now, I'm much more ready to take what they said at the face value, and literally just think about each breath going in and out. I've dealt with the frustration of that seeming complete waste of time, and I've let my mind wander in fantasies more often than I'd care to admit. After a while, though, it starts to sink in, and I just pay attention.

I know the most completely wasted times I've spent in meditation were the times I felt like I was "making progress" toward being a "better me." Master Shunryu Suzuki would tell me that no time is really wasted, but it seems like nothing disrupts meditation faster than trying to see how well it's working. If you've read Buddhist literature of any kind, you know that the desire for personal gain is our fatal attachment, the root cause of all our pain and suffering. But that seems a very conceptual thing, and it's hard to imagine not being attached to this world and our ability to make ourselves useful to it in some way. Fortunately, Zen doesn't put much stock in concepts.

Now when I meditate, I feel the difference between the calm moment by moment experience of sitting and breathing slowly, and the tense diffusion of thoughts as I focus on goals and achievements while each of those moments drift slowly away. I am learning to appreciate those homely little moments on my zafu or chair, even if they're not very special. It's a little easier to see now that those moments will never come again, and if I don't enjoy them just a little bit now, the chance is lost forever. I know that when I stopped trying so hard to be a Zen master in my meditation, I started to feel just a little bit of what they must have felt. I know, too, that you may read this paragraph over and over again, but you'll only understand that when you are ready.

When I've written about Zen, I've tried to make it seem so prosaic one might wonder why bother to do it at all. I've described it as little more than calisthenics, and I'm not backing down on that score. Zen is terribly misunderstood here in the West. I think we're so anxious to imbue something like Zen with such extraordinary qualities that we completely cover it with our own opinions until it can't even be found. Folks, it really is just what it looks like. It's nothing fancy. You're more likely to improve yourself reading Chomsky, or watching Hardball, for goodness' sake. You're sitting cross-legged like a lump. It is what it is.

I've done a lot of calisthenics over the years. Until my condition began to really slow me down nearly two years ago, I was doing 300 toe-touches, 200 push-ups, and 150 sit-ups every day like clockwork, and I enjoyed being fit and energetic from that discipline. Even there, I knew the best push-ups were those when I really concentrated and paid attention. Even there, it took a focused mind to get results. That's all to say that there is something else about Zen that's a little like attitude. Perhaps a better way to put it is it's about heart. Beyond that, I would be hard pressed to give a description. If you try zazen, I think you'll understand.

I've often referred to my spiritual hero Shunryu Suzuki, and this is a good place to plug the late master's most famous books: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and Not Always So. Master Suzuki writes far better than I can about the delicate topic of the mental approach to zazen. For the most part, I would say don't worry about it. Don't be upset when your focus is poor, or your mind wanders. A standard approach that I still use myself on many occasions is to count your breaths from one to ten, and then start over. It helps to keep the mind focused on the breathing, and gives the mind less chance to get lost in its random thoughts. But that's bound to happen over and over again for quite a while. When it does, don't beat yourself up. It's part of the process. Just go back and start counting your breaths all over again.

If you start thinking about something, it's ok to go with that, and think that thought all the way through to its end. A good rule of thumb, though, is, as Master Suzuki would say, "there are no second thoughts in Zen." Don't look to follow up on that random thought once it's completed. Just go back to counting, or just following, the breaths. If and when another "compelling" thought wants attention, deal with it, don't just try and push it away. Soon enough, the more distracting thoughts are fewer, and your mind becomes calm and quiet as your breathing deepens. For me, this feels like coming back to point zero.

I'm not going to try and make you believe I know all about point zero. I've never actually made it that far, as near as I can tell. It's not that out of reach to get fairly close, though, and I think this may be one of the best ways to see the advantages of Zen. To use a truly disturbing analogy, the old (but still sometimes useful) practice of electroshock therapy has been used to disrupt the destructive patterns of mental patients. I think that approaching point zero in meditation might be a preferable approach to getting out of those mental ruts, if I'm allowed to choose. Once I go back to thinking again, my thought patterns may not have improved, but I've gotten them off to a little bit of a fresher start. I think it helps me to be more flexible and resilient.

It's good to take a little time out here and run my mouth about Zen a bit. I don't want to get too carried away with it. I definitely think it's useful not to make too much of Zen, and it's really counter-productive to get all excited about it. I like haikus as much as the next guy, but it's nice to just keep things in perspective. A fresh and flexible mind has a lot of potential, perhaps even the mind rattling around in my much-battered skull, but it certainly won't change things as much as you might hope. It's just a mind that's a little more ready for the task at hand.

Is there a way to prepare the mind for the things we're having to wrap our heads around now in this troubled world? Can we look at Musharraf in Pakistan without at least half a dozen really cataclysmic thoughts clamoring for dominance? Who's guarding the nukes? Is Musharraf giving George any ideas? Where's Osama? Then there's the redoubtable Michael Mukasey and his champions in the Senate. I know I'll always think of him as Mr. Waterboard. But hey, America was always over-rated anyway, right? I'm sure gonna miss it, though. We're just another country that tortures now. America is what you read about in history books.

I recommend a lot of meditation in the coming weeks. I think it will be important to stay as fresh as possible. There aren't many out there who act like they're paying much attention to that Big Mind that may be the better part of us all, but I'll do what I can to be quiet for Big Mind if it so much as whispers. I think right now we're going to need all the help we can get.

Machinations

I'm not a smart man... but I know what love is.
-- Forrest Gump

I am somewhat squeamish, but I steeled myself to keep from averting my eyes during the final scenes of Ken Burns' The War on PBS last Tuesday evening. I saw piles upon piles of corpses "stacked like cords of wood", as more than one witness had described. There's nothing quite like a 50-inch plasma display to maximize the impact of a video moment. All over the world, only a few short years ago, life had become a commodity of minimal value. As I switched off the TV and turned my attention to our modern world, I felt how deeply vulnerable we may be to the chance of its happening again.

The issue is ... whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism, with the bewildered herd marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives and admiring with awe the leader who saved them from destruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they're supposed to repeat and the society deteriorates at home. We end up serving as a mercenary enforcer state, hoping that others are going to pay us to smash up the world. Those are the choices That's the choice that you have to face. The answer to those questions is very much in the hands of people like you and me.

-- Noam Chomsky, Media Control

Noam Chomsky was described in the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive." In September of 2006, Hugo Chavez displayed Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival to world leaders at the United Nations, describing it as "an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century." Of course, Chavez also expressed regret at not being able to meet with Chomsky before his death (Chomsky is very much alive), so one must reserve a degree of skepticism for Mr. Chavez' acumen. Osama bin Laden, in his video earlier this year, referred to Chomsky as "among the most capable of those from your side who speak to you on this topic." (Hey, with endorsements like that, who needs the Times Book Review?) Pat Tillman's mother, and Chomsky, have confirmed that a meeting had been arranged between Tillman and Chomsky on his return from Afghanistan. I suspect all, or at least the vast majority, regret that meeting did not take place.

I mention these references to highlight the really stunning impact this individual is having on the world. I have purchased three of his books -- Failed States, Hegemony or Survival, and The Chomsky Reader. I'm reading Failed States now, so I'm working backwards, I guess, but there's also so much material on the internet that it's somewhat slow progress. (Of course, there were the Ohio State and Cleveland Browns football games as well.) Chomsky is a complex man with complex thoughts, so I don't want to try and summarize him too quickly. But to underestimate his importance is to ignore the world.

What is the message that resonates so strongly with those who stand against U.S. foreign policies? If such a man as Osama bin Laden praises him, why should we even care? The ancient Greek philosopher Antisthines said "There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper, and a friend who loves you dearly." Osama bin Laden has unquestionably lost his temper, but I suspect Noam Chomsky loves us dearly. To this point, he appears to be telling us the truth, no matter how painful. We need to care, and I'm saying that Chomsky is only trying to warn us before it's too late.

If you've passed safely through the gauntlet of disinformation to appreciate that global warming is a fact, you also need to know that scientists are seeing that the process is occurring much faster than estimates had indicated. This crisis alone is more than sufficient to make us stop and take notice, but Chomsky elevates our awareness of the patterns of our overall behavior, and a much broader view of its causes and effects. The most critical problem of all is that we're heading in the wrong direction, and we're not slowing down, we're speeding up.

One of the "strongest" objections to Chomsky -- though not particularly strong, in my opinion -- is that the policies of the United States are infinitely preferable to the alternative, and ultimately result in humanitarian benefits over time. I would respond that the policies of the United States are infinitely less preferable than a revitalized policy founded principally on fundamental human rights. It represents a great lack of faith, to my mind, that we despair of making serious attempts to reform the destructive elements of the machineries of progress we've unleashed upon the world. I want to believe that we have far too much potential simply to ride on the runaway train and shout ahead with warnings.

It's not necessary to read Chomsky to get the feeling that the window of time for making adjustments may be closing, but it helps. The array of information he provides is available as a matter of public record, and the scrupulous methodology that has made him the most important linguistic scholar of our time is applied with vigor to these topics as well. It's not a matter of refuting his information, because he's simply repeating what is well known. The difference is his genius, and of course the enormous applied effort that is the real secret of genius, that allows him to broaden our view of events to include a much larger range of causes and effects, and perceive the underlying patterns. It's hard to imagine a more fitting toolset for understanding our world than a mastery of the basic elements of communication.

The problems of our world, when viewed in the historical and political contexts provided by such scholars as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, can be overwhelming. Many of us have a growing fear that it may already be too late, so why even bother? I can't even comprehend that point of view, so I'll allow that to pass without further comment. I do believe that there's an excellent chance things are going to get much worse. I could have made that into a more comforting phrase such as "things are going to get much worse before they get better," but the truth is, by the very nature of our crises, it's more prudent to have placed the period to the sentence right where I put it. When concern about these issues is sufficient to have reached critical mass, there will be a response, of course, but it's increasingly likely our response will indeed have been too late.

So what should we do? I'm trying to do my part, in my small way. I really believe the most important thing is for us to simply recognize the problems. Many of us are not being very honest with ourselves, and you know who you are. Most of us are just trying to avoid being talked to like I'm doing now, and I probably can't blame you for that, there's a lot I'd rather be doing, as well. I think we should try to see "things as it is", as Shunryu Suzuki used to say. We should practice zazen and become less rigid, less dogmatic in our interactions, and waste far less time regretting the truth than in staying open to truth in every moment.

I really am very, very hopeful. With reservations.

Beginner's Mind

In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Suzuki Roshi's words are more relevant now than ever. In a time when legendary economists innocently reveal the most damning truth of the Bush Administration so far, yet fail to envision a world where such obscenities might have been avoided, we see the limitations of the box we've been so reluctant to "think outside of", as they say. The extension of such thinking has led the Senate to make a virtual declaration of war against yet another nation being drawn into the morass that is Iraq.

I just made a post on the MSNBC site on the message board discussing the Democratic debate. I was really disheartened, and more than usual, by the ignorance and tightly closed minds of too many posters. I tried to add a little historical context to the topic:

The United States of America was created, and defined in its historic Constitution, to be a nation governed by the people themselves. Out of the long human history of rule by kings whose powers were decreed by God, America flowered as a testament that we are all children of God, and no less capable of governing than kings.

More than two centuries later, there is still insufficient appreciation for the revolutionary nature of this country. For many, the temptation to imbue special qualities to the wielders of power is still too great. In America, at least for the moment, each one of us is powerful in ways the Medieval spirit could scarcely have imagined, but we've been painfully slow to assume the accompanying responsibilities.

We have all been declared as noble by the law of our land, yet too often we still cling to our savage nature. We are each of us tasked to meet the hopes and expectations of Washington and Jefferson in our daily lives, to live the dream of America and protect its birthright of liberty. As citizens of this extraordinary republic, we all have much to learn, and obviously much studying yet to do. Each of us must ask the hard questions once only the province of kings, and assume our portion of the nation's burden. That's a serious commitment, and we must not abdicate, because this world does have evil in it, and we should strive to be alert to threats from every
direction.

Far from a gloomy responsibility, the task assigned to each American is a joyous one, with a vision of freedom not defined by docile ignorance, but of empowerment, opportunity, maturity and understanding. It is the spark of the Divine in every living being, unfettered by tyranny and oppression. It is not just George Bush's responsibility, or Hillary Clinton's.

It's yours.

OK, that's a little heavy for the MSNBC message board. But I almost know how Jesus felt when he cried "Oh, Jerusalem!" Do you know what I mean? I see such potential, such unrealized potential.

It's hard for me to realize my own potential, needless to say. I didn't really need more physical difficulties, but I'm on extra meds again, and I'm not happy about it. I'm still having more troubles than I'm supposed to be having, so more 'roids, and a different antibiotic this time, called Ceftin, or something. I don't know much about it yet, but so far, none of the bad reactions I had to the sulfa-based SMZ/TMP, to which I'm obviously allergic. So, I'm not feeling that great, but I have so many thoughts I'd like to write down over the next few days. We'll see what happens.

There is so much going on in the world, and so much I'd like to see headed for the right path while I'm still around to enjoy it, but I always find strength in the words of men like Shunryu Suzuki. There are two primary books associated with the teachings of this Zen master who came to California and established the first Soto Zen monastery in the West before he died in 1971. I have been reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind periodically for more than thirty years, and more recently, a compilation called Not Always So. It's been fascinating to chart my progress in understanding the simple words of Suzuki. Great books such as these are not necessarily the literary achievements of Shakespeare and Goethe, but share their ability to measure our growth in understanding as we pass through life. Just as a passage of Shakespeare reveals new layers of meaning as I grow older, so I seem to fall slowly through my own layers of misunderstanding each time I read Suzuki, and sense just a little more of the kernel of meaning he tried to convey. Without question, that task will be incomplete when my time is up.

I still can feel intensely bored by meditation, but I am confident in my will to persevere. If something about that practice has undergone any subtle changes, I am only reminded what a beginner I truly am. I know that the deeper I reach within myself, the closer I feel to all of you, my living teachers. I am touched by the deep inability of words to express that sort of paradox, yet I know it's in the riddles that we find a touchstone of our journey to understanding, and that they resonate with the jangled tune of our crisis-ridden planet as it speeds through vast, vast emptiness.

Bill Clinton has made some remarks of great importance. If you haven't heard them, please play this short video.

I might update a given blog to correct a spelling error or add a tag, but I don't like adding content after the fact. I'm making a late addition here, but I'll try not to make this a habit.

Toward the end of the MSNBC debate, Tim Russert asked one of those hypothetical questions. The scenario here, if I recall, was a prisoner formerly 3rd in command of a terrorist group with information about a pending terrorist attack. The question posed to the candidates was whether an interrogator of this prisoner might be pardoned for using torture to thwart the attack.

The Democratic candidates all condemned the use of torture under any circumstances, and of course, that's the answer we must give in response to such questions, if we are to make any claim to legitimacy as a leader in the free world. But I want to look a bit deeper into the implications of this stance, and imagine myself, not as the President, but as the interrogator in the critical moment of decision. If I were this person, I think I should feel the full weight of all crimes against humanity that hung in the balance, through terrorism and torture alike. At such a moment, it should be clear to me that, should I choose my own criminal path, there will be no pardon, no subsequent redemption no matter the outcome. Let this be the sobering context of this drama.

As a trained, experienced interrogator, of course, I would know how to apply far more effective techniques than torture, and be much more prepared to respond to the crisis than any of the stars of 24. This was another fake question, based on one of the many steps backwards in understanding we've taken this century. Until they burn the books, we can recover forgotten knowledge, and move forward.