The Naked Monk

Archive for January, 2010

If I were stranded on a desert island with one book, I’d want it to be Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching. This poetic exploration of not-doing is a sure remedy for the busy mind. Look:

The great scholar hearing the Tao tries to practice it
The middling scholar hearing the Tao sometimes has it, sometimes not
The lesser scholar hearing the Tao has a good laugh
Without that laughter, it wouldn’t be Tao
—trans. Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo  (Hackett 1993); Section 41

I was reminded of this yesterday when my daughter Melanie came home for the weekend with an assignment on it. “But what’s this not-doing?” she asked. “I’ve read the whole book twice and I still don’t understand; at least, not in any way I can explain.”

What a wonderful summary of not-doing! It reminded me once again why I left academic study behind years ago, and am still impatient of scholasticism. Reading through the Tao-te-Ching twice seems to me a torture beyond compare. If you’re looking for lucid explanations, Lao Tzu is as stubbornly silent as a rock. Instead, he delivers paradoxes that don’t just defy logic, they deride it:

Tao called Tao is not Tao
Names can name no lasting name
—ibid. Section 1

Nonsense? Perhaps, but it’s endured for well over two thousand years, while other fine compositions have fallen by the wayside. What’s its secret? The only way to know is to sit with it. You get Lao Tzu not by reading him cover to cover but but by pondering his words a few at a time. That means suspending disbelief and assuming he was on to something. Read one section each morning. Pause after each line. Let it sink in. Take a single stanza or couplet to carry through your day. You might spend a week on one section; or a year. Try it—it’s worth the time and effort.

I’m glad Melanie’s being exposed to this wonderful text, but saddened by how the academic agenda discourages reflective reading. But then, that’s the nature of everything intellectual, and school these days—not to mention the society it serves—is blinded by intellect; insight and intuition have to put on a shirt and tie and sneak in the back door. By contrast, Greece’s Akademia (sanctuary of Athena, goddess of wisdom)—to which today’s institutions are supposedly heir—were more like monasteries or art schools than today’s goal-oriented, job-training universities.

We’re human beings, and we’ll always depend on abstract thought, but too much cleverness is unwise. We need to settle the mind and let it absorb the reality that life is an inconceivable mystery. To survive and prosper requires that we also stop and be still.

Julie Caouette is a social psychologist who’s attending my current mindful reflection workshop, and she’s begun an interesting discussion of meditation as studied in the scientific community. She found 231 published studies since 2008. Before that there are another 3,309! The most recent list, with abstracts, is here, for anyone who’d like to peruse them. She also just pointed me to the study of terror management.

This all has lots to do with the things we discuss in the Quiet Mind, so if you’re scientifically inclined, why not take a look? As the Dalai Lama has said, there are three important points of contact between Buddhism and science; both:
1) depend heavily on empirical method,
2) accept a-priori that the universe operates through cause and effect
3) maintain a deep distrust of absolutes.

Even the darkest doom and the deepest gloom sooner or later evaporate. In my last blog I was hurtling towards oblivion, but today’s a new day filled with bright sunshine. I shovel snow from my driveway and inhale the crisp air. Ah, to be alive!

What happened? Yesterday as I wrapped up a big job, a client presented me with two bottles of lovely wine. Now don’t get me wrong—I enjoy a fine wine, but that’s not the point. It was her simple appreciation. After handing over a hefty cheque—which most people do with demonstrable reluctance—she pulled the bag from behind her back, lit up her eyes and she said, “These are my favourites; I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.”

Being appreciated blows the dark clouds from your mind. We should all experience it—and pass it around. It doesn’t have to be wine. The same feeling comes from simply being heard. What counts is that people see and accept you as a human being. It doesn’t just make life more pleasant, it lightens up the mind, and that’s a gift to us all.

Mindful reflection’s great; and profound, paradoxical, elegant Buddhism is worth a lifetime of study and practice—but none of this replaces human kindness. Without it, as all my teachers endlessly repeated, even years of intense concentration and insight will come to nothing. Now I  see why.

I’ve been working towards my dream for years now. What dream? To teach Quiet Mind Seminars and to write. But haven’t I been doing that? Yes, but unfortunately it doesn’t pay the bills, and I have to keep up my computer and website business. The price of chasing my dream is long hours immersed in this highly focused, mentally taxing work.

My clients call me the computer expert. I find that description a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that I do tricks and escape from traps that drive normal people crazy. They don’t want to lose their minds, so they hire me to lose it for them. You laugh? Hey … a little compassion please.

Several times a week something goes awry; several times a year a whole week goes awry. This is shaping up to be one such week. I’ve been wrestling with printed circuits and hexadecimal code for hour after long hour, falling behind on both my day job and my labors of love. This blog is now two days late; my revamped website is six months overdue. My next book is…okay, now I’m starting to choke up.

In my mindful reflection workshops I talk about how expectations set us up for disappointment. I preach detachment. I encourage my students to let go. I take the moments of silence to sit quietly and practice what I preach. Next morning, though, I’m back bending computers to my will—or having my will bent to theirs. It’s poetic justice, I suppose. A reminder of real life. How easy it is to maintain peace of mind when the circumstances are just right, but how about when they’re not? 

The thing is, to dream a good dream and stay on track. Wish wisely, and never give up.

I dreamed a familiar old dream last night. Returning to school after the holidays I ran into my maths teacher.

“Sorry I’m late for your class, Sister,” I said.

She gazed out of her wimple scornfully and asked, “My class? You think you’re in my class?” She waved me into the classroom where the blackboard announced the division of the class into two groups: whizzes and ignoramuses. On my desk lay last term’s exam paper, a large “28%” circled in red. Sister ushered the whizzes out towards their new classroom as it sank in that I was not among the chosen.

What made this dream especially poignant was that maths was one of the two subjects I actually never failed, despite my generally poor performance (the other was English). Just two and a half years from my sixtieth birthday, I’m still haunted—not just by my old failures but also, infernally, by the compulsion to disallow my successes.

I told Caroline, and she nodded understandingly. Dreams like this seem to hound everyone. “But you don’t feel like a failure now, do you?” she asked rhetorically, and listed my accomplishments in the brightest possible light.

“At this moment,” I said, still weighed down by the dream’s traumatic remnants, “I still do.”

“But you know you’re not,” she said.

“Oh yes, I know that…or rather I decide that. I’m not sure which,” I said. “…. I can rationalize that feeling away. Lord knows, I’ve done it before hundreds of times; but the feeling’s always there—latent.”

“Well,” she replied, “it keeps you humble, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps—in theory,” I said.

This is the third time I’ve used the phrase “In theory.” in this very blog in recent days. In theory, I’m not a hopeless failure, but in my neural pathways, evidently, that conviction remains intact, even though there’s also a whole set of rational counter-proposals.

The art of positive thinking would have us believe that we can focus on just the good stuff, and become our very best. Sounds great—in theory—but I keep falling back on what the Buddha had to say about suffering: that we impose it on ourselves by stubbornly clinging to our cherished sense of self, as if we arise independently of the causes and conditions of our lives, irrespective of our circumstances. It seems to me that positive thinking demands that we deny all that’s unwelcome about who we are. Surely the Buddha’s approach is infinitely more real—a quality that, in the ripeness of middle-age, I value much more than transitory beauty, harmony and security.