Flawed Bodhisattva Blues

Life happens. Does seem to be a life happens sort of day today. So yes, life happens, even when I’m not looking for it and maybe not even ready for it. Life still happens and so it goes. A circumstance arose and somewhere I found a transcendent me to respond with kindness and make a leap of faith.

Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.

Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.

So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.

When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).

Ice-cube tray people

Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.

How come everybody wanna keep it like the kaiser?

Here’s an unusual perspective you don’t hear much about. It is possible to love someone you’ve never met, never even spoken a word to. It’s possible to love them completely and totally unreservedly, with no strings and no expectations. In fact, i daresay its quite common. I’ve loved my son since well before I met him. He never had to earn such affection. It was given freely and without hesitation without merit. With no guarantee for my own return I tied my heart to his and have never counted the (not inconsiderable) cost of doing so.

And yet it seems as a people we don’t apply such notions beyond the parent/child relationship. For love between peers we look for some sort of quid pro quo. There are probably many reasons for this and some of them may even be valid and true. To be sure you need to be secure in your own situation first. You must have faith your own needs will be met to be open. Indeed, the drunken idiocy of fresh romantic love might even be a biological adaptation which catalyzes pair-bonding. In our stupid twitterpated state we never ask the tough questions of quid pro quo which we worry so much about the rest of our lives. Buzzed and horny we just take a leap of faith and hope it all works out. Then, when the buzz wears off, we start keeping score again and start getting divorced.

But ponder for a moment how much it diminishes us. This planet is full of so many lonely Eleanor Rigby’s, so many broken hearted souls freezing in the cold indifference of the world. Fear and loneliness make us so terribly small. But imagine the bliss of opening our hearts to others without need of return. Imagine the limitless, meritless love of new-minted parenthood writ large on the canvas of life. Imagine being not small, but limitless and inexhaustible. Imagine being big heart. Or better yet, don’t imagine, manifest. You are big heart. We all are. We just tend to forget.

I did. I’d even found it again for a while, and amazingly forgot it anew. And then, out of nowhere, amid a most disorienting and chaotic emotional tempest, a crisis which threatened to plunge me deep into dark places forgotten for 20 years, it was there. Open. Like someone switched a light on in me. Big heart incarnate, flooding the world with life. Still blissing on it as I write. I’ve missed this.

Welcome home.
Namaste

The furniture in the child-mind's playroom

In 1975, Carole King wrote songs for an animated musical movie with children’s writer Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, etc..). The album from Really Rosie is actually one of Carole Kings stronger releases and is one of those things thats literally been in my life longer than I can remember. I’d have been
2 or 3 when this music appeared in my house, earlier than my earliest long-term memories and so I literally cannot recall my initial reaction to it. It just one of those things that’s always been there.

Now I can remember listening to the album (rather a lot) as a child, and so it is strongly embedded in my permanent memory. Perhaps in a similar vein, I can’t really remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I’m so familiar with it that I can actually listen to the John Williams score and quote about 80% of the dialog in perfect timing. Useless and geeky, I know, but this is what’s embedded in the foundations of my brain.

Anyway, back to Really Rosie. It’s only really recently however that I’ve actually stopped to take notice of the contents. We bought a bunch of Scholastic DVDs for Laz, and one of these includes excerpts from Really Rosie. Now I grew up with the album, which came with a booklet of pictures, but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen the movie. (Of if I have, it’s lost in the mists of my pre-memory). Seeing this as an adult, I’m struck by the oddness of the content. There’s a song about a boy who gets eaten by a lion and then befriends him (in that order). There’s a song about a boy obsessed with Chicken Soup, (and dies eating it according to one of the songs on the album). There’s a counting song about a boy who want’s to be left alone and threatens to eat all his unwanted guests. There’s a lot about eating. Weird.

Anyway the thing that struck me this morning is not that it never occurred to me that these things were weird, but that I’d never even noticed them before. They were just there as part of the landscape of my existence from my haziest early memories. Just an example of a large class of things that I “knew” long before I’d “understood”. When and where did I learn the concept of mortality? Or the idea of “God”?

The latter is a particularly interesting question since my family was never particularly religious. They weren’t militant atheists raging against religion. Rather it was just largely absent. So in what context did I discover that people believed in a God or Gods or the like? I have no memory of learning this rather astonishing piece of information. To this day I have a significant discomfort engaging with deeply religious people. It’s not that I’m afraid they are going to despise me or attack me or whatever. Its a much more fundamental hind-brian feeling. It’s xenophobia pure and simple. It’s a version of the same chill up the spine you get when confronted with a snake or an insect or a spider. The recognition of being in the presence of the alien. Somehow the landscape of my child-mind included both the knowledge of religious belief and the understanding that it was not I, well before I was ever able to consciously discern and evaluate these things. I can only assume that the reverse must be true of many of those brought up in strong religious traditions.

Watching the interaction of this phobia with my burgeoning interest in zen has been interesting to say the least. It’s probably no accident that the kind of spirituality that speaks most directly to me is the kind that is least personified. Spirit in 3rd person is easy to accept: God is everything. Great. I can even just about get with Spirit in 1st person: God is me. But the concept of Spirit in 2nd person: a conscious personal God which is external and other stings like a 9-volt battery on the tongue. Creeps me out like a Ridley Scott movie, and yet that very surrender seems to provide great comfort to others.

All of which seems miles away from where this started.
Hmm...
End of line

Astronomy: not American enough for John McCain?

So apparently John McCain doesn’t see my profession as a worthwhile occupation for good wholesome Americans. In one of his rabid rants about spending he views as wasteful came the following tweet:

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web

Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.

The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).

In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.

Heliotrope on the Beach (with Einstein)

It is nice to feel the sun in February. It is good to feel the warmth and see the colors. I naturally want to turn and face it. To embrace the moment and be and celebrate the sensory now between the ticks of the clock. To stop and smell the roses and be, in that pause, the all that is both rose and nose, sensor and scent. To be the face on both sides of the Daddy-Laz nose-to-nose-to-nose-to-nose game.

This is perhaps one aspect of the meditative experience. Certainly it is suggested by phrases such as “being in the moment” which often get batted around in new-agey circles. But I think perhaps that this is also a bit of a trap, or at least it’s a pleasant truth might hide another one. A false minimum which is not a destination but only a philosophical rest stop and scenic vista. Snap a picture, breathe the air, stretch your legs, grab a snack and move on again.

The thing about being in the moment is that it puts a lot of emphasis on “the moment”. That delta-function pixel point, the little frame marker that ticks across the bottom of the You-Tube window. And the thing about moments is they are always fleeting. To be in the moment is to be alive, but always dying. The moment passes, the clouds roll in and you step on a small green wooden triangle left upright on the living-room floor. Ouch.

In my more lucid moments I can just about wrap my head around relativity and see time as space, force and movement as geometry. As Ford Prefect told Arthur Dent, “Time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so.” We experience time as a sequence of moments, irrevocably dripping from the past to the future but physics, (at least some physics) seems to suggest that this is at least partially a matter of perspective. The moment is the interaction of the stimulus and the sensor, but even that is not quite true. Like a general behind the lines my news is always late. I am never in the moment but always behind it, and the information is never pure. I experience not the warmth of the sun (or the son) but only the electrochemistry of the wetware connecting sensors to sentience. And who or what, pray tell, is the I-I that is receiving these messages transmitted through meat and cabling and imagining a world full of sunshine?

In my really lucid moments I can hold these ideas and get a sense of the path as a whole. Of life not as a series of discrete nows but as a 4D holism. A shape without hard edges, but which, while seeming coherent in the middle, is interwoven with the rest of creation like roots in soil. If I concentrate, method actor me can experience June sun in February and February sun in June. If I pay attention, I am not a creature falling through moments, but a me made of moments. The timeless thus of all the nows. This at least is a sort of description of the incomplete glimmer I get of Big Mind like a tesseract shadow projected down to flatland and uploaded to memeland and propagating now inside your own self dear reader.

Nice day for it.

Metaphysical Flywheel (A Clockwork Marmalade?)

Inevitably, I find that my metaphorical imagery is full of physics. It is only natural, I suppose, given the amount of time that I inhabit that noospace. I suppose it might seem kinda nerdy, or perhaps even sterile depending on the context. Regardless, it is what comes naturally to me, and so there it is.

I suspect it’s not even that uncommon a phenomenon. I dimly recall discussing the dynamics (thermodynamics?) of the “dating” environment with Tara freshman year using a chemistry metaphor. (As I recall, increased environmental pressure and “the ratio” tended to lead to distorted equilibria. And there was something about electronegativity, though the specifics escape me now.) In any case, the point remains: we use the metaphorical structures that come readily to mind, and inevitably those structures are well populated by the language and ideas of our everyday experience.

Thus I tend to use physics metaphors to describe lots of things. Apologies.

Now, as a massive particle I have become keenly aware of inertia of late. Indeed, I seem to battle it on a daily basis. My own mostly. I’ve found it takes a lot of effort to get things rolling, particularly in my head. My headspace has been rather swampy lately: difficult to traverse, far too full of undergrowth and liable to be full of unpleasant smells, quicksand, or alligators. (Not all of my metaphors are physics, apparently.)

Getting things moving in this quagmire has been a difficult task of late, though once I build up some steam, then I can get some things accomplished. On the other hand, I usually get distracted and derailed pretty quickly. Indeed, my life is pretty much divided up into lots of little chunks most of the time. (Thank you academia). So this is perhaps something of a problem. What I need here is a sort of flywheel of the mind. A way to store momentum when I get distracted so that I can get a bit of a rolling start.

Unfortunately, this is where the momentum metaphor seems to break down. The cool flow of samadhi, the laser focus of being “in the zone,” it’s not really about movement. At least not in the Newtonian sense. It’s a gestalt. It’s an eigenstate, or perhaps even an ensemble. A clockwork jammed can sometimes be relieved by a short, sharp shock. But a frazzled self may need more than a boot to the head.

I am out of balance.

The feeling is all too familiar. The fear lurks below the surface of consciousness, a leviathan below mist covered waters. I react too much. I respond too little. I pinball from to to fro without a plan or a clue, and the razor cut of sorrow and regret comes all too easily.

I need centering.

I’ve been here before. There are methods, paths, a way perhaps. But I worry about the cost and second guess the diagnosis. Is this just a selfish desire? A homesick yearning to return to a soothing distraction? Is it selfish to take the time to find an anchor when the storm is raging in all directions and there is water on the deck and in the hold? Is this a luxury I can afford?

Entirely too much Synchronicity II. Time to change the tune I think.