The sticky-wet wrenching end of the world.

The end of the world looks just like any other day. Today is a lovely day. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the clouds are white. And yet, in a way, I'm situated in the midst of an apocalypse of sorts. My life here in London is ending. This world's days are numbered. To be sure the city itself will still go on. Indeed it will hardly notice I've left. But the construction in which I live my daily existence is ever so surely coming apart at the seams. Every day I am confronted by unexpected last times and irrevokable changes.

Still the world looks the same as it ever does. And indeed what else could I expect? As Buddha noticed all those years ago, impermanence is the nature of everything. Still, it's a strange thing that the Mahayana tradition points this out, shows you the way out of that suffering, and then entices you to step back into the fire. Here's the exit door, but gee, isn't that burning room lovely? Boddhisattvas chose to stay because they love the world. That choice causes suffering, but isn't that always the cost of love?

So yes, the world continues to drop away. Our world here in London is closing down, collapsing into smaller and smaller pieces. It's like a tree growing in reverse, reverting back to a seed to await a rebirth in new soil. A month ago, our cats suddenly left us to fly across the ocean and sit out the upheaval from the relative safety of my parents' house. This was the event that seems to have truly shifted our perspective to the move. Before that it was abstract. Now it's here.

Last week I attended my last Thursday night zazen sitting with Manu & Sarita. They are in Vancouver for 2 weeks, so last week was the last session I would attend. Actually I was having a pretty miserable day anyway and I probably wouldn't have gone, but I'd feel bad just leaving without saying a proper farewell. I don't really do goodbyes very well. It's awkward and messy and uncomfortable. Still, I've been trying to be more accepting of the sticky bits of life, and it would be callous and selfish just to disappear.

It's funny, I don't really know them all that well, but they provided me with an important refuge at an important time. Inevitably my path is going to be a lot different that theirs, but I picked up a subtle and important experience there somewhere. Something about being able to drop definitions and expectations and simply enjoy breathing in the presence of others. I don't necessarily know where this path is going, but there is something important there and I'm grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to discover it. Hopefully, this new creature that was born in that world will survive the transition.

That's where the fear comes in. As with any fear of death, the end of this world brings forth the fear for the continuation of the self. The self that lives in this world is facing that death right now. Will the core survive, and if so, what is preserved and what is lost? This is the existential dilemma of the condemned. Indeed, its only the illusion of longevity which allows us to forget this question in our daily lives. Still, what can we do with it when the fear does arrive? I'm sure there are lots of answers. At the moment, I alternate between ignorance and melancholy. Ignorance for pragmatism, and melancholy when there is nothing to be done. Still, it's not a desperate kind of melancholy, more just a rainy afternoon. I've become more accepting of discomfort. One more observation from a new perspective.

This is a bit of a weird perspective I've been trying to adopt here. Trying to be both a scientist and a mystic is not a well-trodden path. At one level I can see a very clear synergy between the practice of science and the practice of zen. However, while the metaphor is apt and powerful, it is also incomplete. These ideas do not sit comfortably together. Like nearly matched overlays they can create a chaos of Moire-pattern turbulence, for these practices bring with them a host of competing and contradictory perspectives, dogmas, and ideals. One side's truth is the other's delusion. It's a tribute to plastic thinking that one can hold these contradictory views, but it always leaves one sitting in doubt. And perhaps that's a good thing. Doubt, after all, is the boogie man that keeps me probing. Not as comfortable as blind faith I suspect though.

Still, I've found that this path leaves me a bit uncomfortable in all camps. Chatting with more mainstream folks in both camps I've found that trying to forge this middle way is not terribly appreciated. Perhaps I'll expand on this topic more later, but I've found that both sides tend to have an overly reductionist view of the other. Both sides are quite attached to the literalist notions of fact, and truth. I've become aware that there is a pretty severe gap between the way science is taught and distributed to the masses and the way it is actually practiced. All of this is bubbling away while the world ends, but I don't think the subject is quite ripe yet. For the moment, suffice it to say that this path I'm on does look like it may be a bit lonely and rocky.

Still, it may be a path where I can do something important. Perhaps this discomfort is not for nothing. I was touched by a comment Manu made last Thursday in the discussion after the sitting. The subject of science had come up, and Manu said that he didn't understand what it was and used to dismiss it. But that through me, he had glimpsed that there is a sense of mystery to it. And perhaps that is the personal legacy I will leave behind here in London: to have given one fellow human being a glimpse that a scientific perspective is not necessarily a soulless one. A small victory I know, but it was well timed and provides some solace here at the end of things. Not meaning so much, for I think I'm tipping quite strongly toward nihilism these days. I'm not big on purpose or meaning, but this human connection does provide a comfort, and that too has value.

On Not Being a Dalek

It is a mistake to think that you can control people. Realize this, and you will have seen the fallacy underlying neo-conservative politics and countless unwise parenting and relationship choices.

It's not just a matter of having insufficient force, though that is the idea that baits the Dalek trap. The problem is that people are chaotic systems. They react non-linearly to stimulus. A small nudge here might produce a gigantic reaction there while a massive clampdown might produce a stubborn lack of any reaction at all. This is easiest to see in children but is true, I think, for all. It's just that as adults we grow used to the patterns of our embedded culture and we stop noticing because we too are reacting in similar strange patterns. Embed yourself in someone else's culture, however, and the chaos will become more obvious.

Still even chaotic systems can contain patterns. The best that we can hope for as parents or lovers or artists or diplomats is to act as a sort of attractor, providing little nudges toward the desired still point and applying tremendous patience. The art of parenting and the art of politics is the art of the soft touch. It is the art of nodding subtly to the door and waiting for the other to take a step in that direction.

It is usually impatience that drives us to control others directly. Efficiency and the dangerous idea that sufficient force (and/or the power of our obviously 'right' view) can eradicate free will leads us to try and cut corners, to enact a hard limit when a soft one would be wiser. The problem with taking the hard line and backing someone into a corner is that they may chose to hurt themselves just to spite you. In toddlers we call this a tantrum. In Iraq we call it an "insurgency". In Israel we call it a suicide bomb. The effect is the same. Give someone no options but to obey you and they may decide just to lash out insensibly instead. When we feel we have no choice, we get desperate, and desperate people are angry and have nothing to lose. Faith in this philosophy leads inevitably to frustration, violence, paranoia, and ultimately, if not checked, to the xenophobic need to exterminate all that is other.

While it may seem wasteful, patience and generosity generally seem to be more efficient in the long-term than direct blunt action, no matter how well intentioned. "Softly, softly" should be out motto. Borrowing from the Hippocratic Oath we should remember to "first do no harm" for that is the danger of rash action. This is the lesson I've been struggling to learn for the last year and I still don't always get it, but at least I can now articulate it.

Life as a Top

There is a zen metaphor that says that the mind is like a spinning top. When it is perfectly vertical there is no movement and all is still, but the slightest tilt and everything begins to wobble and wander. The thing is that the vertical position of a spinning top is an unstable equilibrium. It is only able to hold that position if it's perfectly aligned. Just the slightest misalignment and the whole thing starts to fall apart. If you want to keep that top spinning vertically, you have to continually adjust it and push it back to that still point. Sooner or later you spin out and have to start again.

I think the zen guys knew that.

Now not all tops are made equal. Some have quite a large area near the still point which will hold a nearly stable spin, and some are quite tricky to keep going. Some are more susceptible to passing air currents or ground vibrations.

Sometimes I think I'm a bit of a wobbly top and I just keep spinning out. Not so much in my sitting, but in my life in general distraction has been an issue for quite a while. Really probably most of my life, though it didn't start to really become an issue until I went to college. Before that I could get away with being a bit of a dilettante because school was pretty easy. Now though it can be a bit of a struggle to stay afloat.

Still as in zazen, so in life... I guess I just need to keep making adjustments and patiently set my self upright again. The past is insubstantial. Momentum is just the memory of action. It is action NOW! in the present that is the agent of creation. Drop it all and assume correct form.

...and again.

Eyes Peeled for Weather Balloons

Well, it's official now. I've signed my acceptance letter at FSU and I've resigned my post here at Imperial College. No lightening flashes or goovy 60's music involved, but I did have to walk down a long dark corridor to the HR department. True to form there is a bunch of paperwork to sign. Ahh, you have to just smile at the Brittish infatuation with bureaucracy. Somewhere, I'm sure, my picture will be covered with a bunch of X's and dropped in someone's filing cabinet.

Meanwhile things are certainly 'hotting up' as they say here. Sunshine is making preparations to ship our cats back to Colorado. Sunshine's brothers will be here in a bit under 3 weeks and in a bit less than a month we will probably be leaving this jolly little island nation and returning to the states.

On the home front, it's a bit more like Logopolis than The Prisoner. Entropy is certainly having its way with us and there is a palatable sense of just trying to muddle through the great change which will (hopefully) be "prepared for". Certainly things are resting on critical electronic transmissions to keep our finances from collapsing. Heck, we're even about to acquire 3 new companions, though hopefully they will be a bit more useful than Adric, Tegan and Nyssa.

Speaking of entropy, our iPods have both suffered fatal disk crashes. I suppose a 3 year lifetime isn't unheard of for a laptop-style disk drive, particularly one that gets a fair bit of abuse. Still, always a bummer when a well-used tool dies. RIP Eardrum and Q.... Oh and welcome to Laz's toybox (and his mouth).

In other utterly random news, I managed to sleep through my tube stop for the first time in nearly 3 years today. Sigh, I really should make sleep I higher priority I suppose. I can't blame last night on Laz's schedule though. He went to bed on time, but I got distracted by the internet. Specifically, reading webpages supposedly from 15 years in the future. A so-called 'Alternate Reality Game'... Interesting, if disturbing stuff. Check it out if you're interested. (http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/, http://anotherversionofthetruth.com/ or http://www.ninwiki.com if you want to try and understand what's going on.)

Transcendental Gestalt Switches

Blogging on the met line back from Hampstead again. Tonight's revelation came in the BS session after the sitting. The topic of Big Mind came up and someone mentioned that the voice of "The Way" was a great embodiment of the entire teaching for him. The idea being that the phrase "I am the Way" is none other than full zen embodiment. Which was interesting, because I heard that phrase differently. In the Big Mind DVD Genpo Roshi leads the group through the dualistic Desire, The Seeking Mind, The Mind that Seeks the Way, and The Follower of the Way, and then to The Way. So to me, The Way was my entry to nondual, and the exit was the "Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being." But his point is just as valid, and indeed the phrase "I am the Way" can be heard as "I am nothing but the Way", but it can also be heard as "The Way is just me." It's like one of those Gestalt images where the faces turn into a vase or the other way round.

So then I mentioned that I had a disturbing reaction to The Master, and someone pointed out that it was intended to have the connotation of Zen Master. ie, Obi Wan Kenobi, not the guy with a whip, or the owner of the plantation, or some sort of supreme being, which is how I heard it. (Can we say shadow projection? Very good boys and girls.) Still... It's interesting to me that you can hear these things in different ways and they trigger entirely different experiences. Thus art to me is transcendent, but it could also be heard as the voice of delusion or deception. Hmmm....

Not really sure where this is going...

Do You Realize? by the Flaming Lips sounds very Zen to me tonight.

The Art of Observation

It’s a cool midsummer evening in my back yard in Colorado. I’m 12 years old, staring into the telescope that my parents gave me for my birthday. I’m still scared of the dark and the fear hangs in the background adding a slightly acid tang to the night. The air has made my face and hands cold. I can smell the dew on the grass and the pages of the star atlas in my hands have become soft with the damp.

Through the eyepiece of my telescope I am looking at a faint fuzzy smudge called M13, a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. The books say that this object is a dense nest of tens of thousands of stars, but it is so far away that to me it’s just a faint patch of light. I wait and I stare. I can still hear the night around me and feel the cold and smell the air. I wait, and gradually the pupil in my eye relaxes and opens wide. The faint smudge becomes brighter and then, click! There it is! I can see them! The cloud resolves into thousands of tiny suns sprinkled like the finest salt on a black silk tablecloth. Mesmerized, I continue to stare, and after a while the yard and the cold and the damp are not there, I don’t really notice them any more. The telescope is not there, it’s just an extension of my eye. I am not there. There is just the majesty of ten-thousand suns hanging silently in space.

This is my opening.

I am 20 years old, an undergraduate at Caltech in Pasadena California. I came to school filled with (over)confidence and excitement, but physics has swiftly dealt with that. My ego is crushed by the weight of trying to take in 400 years of astonishing brilliance; the fruit of a great many minds, each of whom have walked this path with much greater clarity than I. I am learning humility and it hurts, but I have stepped onto the path.

It’s not a path that I really understand though. Not at the time. In retrospect, I can look back at this path and understand the where and the why, but at the time, it was lost in the flow. I had long since forgotten my 12-year-old self in the back yard with the Hercules cluster. On the path I was just driven by instinct and momentum. Such is the way I have lived this life and travelled this path.

Further along the path I have met my teacher. It’s a hot summer in New Hampshire and I am now a graduate student at Dartmouth College. I’ve come here to study cosmology. The big ideas and grand mystery of studying the evolution of the universe as a whole appeal to me, but this is not my fate. Instead, I fall into the study of exploding stars. I have come here intending to study the origins and beginnings of all things, and instead I find myself looking at endings. But of course in those endings, spectacular and terrible, are the seeds of new beginnings. Indeed the origin of our own flesh is in the ashes of these dying stars. We are the fruit of impermanence.

My teacher does not, primarily, fill my head with knowledge. Such book-learning is triviality. Instead, he instructs me in the practice of our art. There are the simple practices at first, learning to use our instruments. But there are other teachings too; the subtle skills of effort and patience; the art of coaxing insight from the chaos of noise balanced with the discerning wisdom to recognize delusion.

On a mountain top in Arizona he shows me the quiet art of observing. We live a strange monk-like existence, sleeping in the daylight and coming out at night to watch the sky. In a way we are cut off from the world. At night we listen to the radio broadcasts from the cities down below, but we don’t see or interact with that world. We are on an island between the world of man and the heavens. It is quiet and time is slow.

The universe is an enigma and our telescope the eye which we use to probe it. Our practice is a passive one: we cannot poke the universe with a stick and watch it move. It is out of our reach. Instead, we can only listen and watch. Every moment light from countless grand structures, which has travelled the depths of time and space for untold eons rains down upon our lives unnoticed. The grandeur that is our universe goes largely unmarked. M13 rains its majesty on my life every day, but I haven’t seen it for years. When we open our telescopes we record a tiny piece of that grandeur; a tiny fraction of that beauty is captured. It is transformed, of course. It is no longer the beautiful and weary light that crossed the void. That has been lost forever. But its journey has been noticed and lives frozen like a fly in the amber of our data.

We descend from the mountain to tell the story, but we are not the authors of this story. Our practice is not to tell the tale of our own desire. Rather our practice is to try and sweep all that away and simply to listen carefully. Our art is not the creative spark, but the way to make a space, an opening, where the quiet story of nature can be heard. Our earthly life is too loud and noisy to hear this story. We must leave that behind and travel to a distant mountain, or send our proxies out of the world entirely in order to find a quiet place to listen. And because the stories nature has to tell are alien to our human experience, we must be prepared to leave our expectation behind as well. We must also show patience. Often it is cloudy and we feel we are wasting our time, but we stay for those moments when the clouds break and the way is clear. This is the practice my teacher shows me.

Sometimes at night he tells me stories. Our practice, it seems, has an oral tradition as well. I listen to tales of the old masters, of their mistakes and their insights, of their human failings and their transcending wisdom. He tells me of his own teacher, and I discover that I am a part of a noble lineage. I begin to sense that the practice is alive, passed directly from teacher to student, and that I am becoming a part of that process. I am the latest vessel for the practice, and I’m being trained to be the embodiment of this art. Although I do not realize it at the time, my fate has led me to a good teacher, and he teaches me in that most effective of ways: by being the manifestation of his own teaching.

One day he shows a different kind of wisdom. No longer on our mountain, but back again in the noise of life on the ground he hands me a nugget of truth from outside our practice. Not a truth of the path of listening to the heavens, but a human truth about that path and how it lives in our world.

He tells me that this practice, this art, is rare. It is not practical. We serve no material goal, we further no political agenda, we make no patentable discoveries. We work solely to satisfy the whim of human curiosity. Our art exists only because human beings have a fascination with the universe they live in, but that fascination can only pay so many bills. The cold truth is that most of us who start on this path will leave it at some point, and often not out of a desire to do so, but because of the blunt hammer of pragmatism. To practice this art is a privilege, so we need to be grateful for it while it lasts, and let it go if it should leave us.

This has not been an easy lesson to embody, but it has been one I’ve tried to carry with me, bouncing from place to place as is the custom of young researchers in our practice. Walking this path does require its sacrifices, and not all of those are borne by me. Those costs are hard to count. How do you weigh the burden your path has placed on others? But these costs linger and it is not wise to ignore them. Blown by the winds of whim, luck, and fate it is not hard to see why one steps off of this path.

Now it seems that I may have found root. Soon I will be moving to Florida to join a colleague and build up a new community of practitioners. I have moved along the path and will soon become a teacher. I will have naive and brilliant and eager students and I will have to find the wisdom to show them our way. Hopefully I will have the wisdom to be grateful and enjoy it.

On the verge of this change, I find myself stepping onto another path. My karma has led me to a new practice, one which is at once wholly alien and yet also familiar. On the cusp of becoming a master, I find myself compelled to take up a new art. One that challenges me to drop it all and begin again; to find another way to clear away my expectations and make a space to listen quietly. I have only just set my foot on this path, my eye is just beginning to open. I am in the back yard again. The cold and fear are still present but this returning home has reminded me of the fascination that I forgot somewhere along the way. This new path will be hard, but this time I’m seeing it through two eyes. If all paths are one path then I have been here before and I remember it this time. The sense of return is palpable and the poetry of this moment is hard to ignore. I have some maps. I will find a teacher. I will be unmade and remade again and I will always be returning to that moment in the back yard again. That moment when the cold and the night and my self dropped away leaving just the glittering light of ten-thousand suns.

A Path to a Revelation

More catchup...
Two weeks ago at my Thursday night zazen sitting I was suddenly overcome with a dramatic sense of not knowing why I was there. What was I doing? Why? I've never really shown much interest in this sort of thing. I'm not really facing any deep existential crisis. What the heck is driving me to sitting on a cushion in someone else's living room?

But the interesting thing was that there was a sense of something compelling me to do it. I just didn't know what. I could come up with all sorts of reasons why meditation was a good thing, but they all seemed like justifications for something I already wanted to do, not the compelling reason in itself. And then it occurred to me that I didn't really know why I was compelled to do a lot of what I do. Particularly when it came to my job. What was it about my job that really drives me to drag my family all over the world spending resources I don't really have?

Interesting questions, but no real answers.

Then, last Thursday, the reading at the start of the second sitting started something like "How do you answer people when they ask you why you sit on a cushion?", which certainly got my attention. I don't really remember much about the rest of the reading though because I was distracted by a newly triggered idea. The reading kept touching on the idea of the importance of the 'practice' itself, something which was heavily discussed in the book I had also just finished (On Zen Practice by Taizan Maizumi Roshi).

The reason this set me off is that I had been interviewing students all day long as part of the grading process for lab. And these being typical undergraduates, they had terrible lab books. So I ended up trying to explain to them that what we were really trying to teach them in lab was not physics, but rather the much more subtle art of good experimental practice. I was stressing the art of good lab practice.

During the reading, this idea crashed headlong into the question from the previous week and sparks flew. First, there suddenly seemed like there was a strong similarity between Zen practice and my own scientific practice, and so maybe the mysterious reason behind those two compulsions were one and the same. Second, science is an art, and so is Zen. Third, I suddenly realized that I was strongly attracted to Zen as an art form, both Zen inspired art and just the beauty and simplicity of the practice itself. Zen is art. Science is art. Was that it?

So I tried an experiment. Using the Big Mind technique I've been playing with, I asked to speak to the voice of Art. Low and behold, Art answered, and wouldn't you know it, it answered in a way that is rather similar to Big Heart, or The Way, or Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. Holy crap! Art is, to me at least, a transcendent voice. And one that speaks strongly to me! I sit because it is beautiful to do so.

I talked about this in the 'open sharing' and when the discussion came around again, the guy to my right made the comment that he too felt a kinship between the practice of Zen and his practice as an artist. But the interesting thing was that he felt like in both cases the practice was a method of making an opening and clearing a space for inspiration to happen, but not a method for making the inspiration, which comes forth spontaneously. More sparks went off, because that is a brilliant way of describing the practice of observational astronomy (and at some level, experimental science in general).

All in all, a very interesting session, and at the end, Manu suggested that I should write something about Zen and Astronomy for their Zen magazine Hazy Moon. I thought about this all the way home on the train, and the result bubbled up spontaneously almost whole when I got home. It took a few days for me to get back to it and finish it, but the resulting essay will be my next post.