My mental circus, inside and out.

wild horses

Under ordinary circumstances, it does seem better to think of skillful and unskillful rather than good and evil.   Along with most beings, Emma has often handled her own mind as well as her relationships with others unskillfully.   However, it is nice to know that she doesn't have to think of herself or others as evil, but just unskillful, bumbling around in existence without much insight.  There's no blame or forgiveness this way, just hope that one can, along with other people, start living more skillfully. One has to set out quite purposefullly to develop skill with the mind.  One can stay mired in unskillful states, even the most unhappy states, because they are old and familiar and even bring moments of transient happiness. 

When Emma's daughter came to her, wondering what she should do about her relationship, Emma could give no advice.  That is because whatever her daughter does, it is not yet informed by wisdom.  Emma hardly thinks of anything anymore as a matter of life or death, though people often think that a decision they face is more extreme than it really is.

Despite these meditations, Emma must go and sing with Maks and the horses.

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 28, 2006 21:21 | link | comments

bodies

Emma comes home with Maud's dinner china and her pearls.  The pearls are a soft, luminiscent golden color.  Emma remembers a picture of Maud, from the 1950s, when she was wearing the pearls.  Maud was a very beautiful young woman, reminscent of Katherine Hepburn, and she kept her beauty well into middle age.  Now Emma has this reminder of Maud's youth, beauty, and elegance.   When Emma's father came to the deathbed, after some years of not seeing Maud, he wept at her damaged head and puffy face.   "I could not recognize her."

Ajahn told the class, "Images of beauty are everywhere and it gets too much emphasis.  It is a bias for only one kind of body.  We contemplate the ugly, because what are bodies but ephemeral?  We would give this exercise to the fashion model: meditate on the ugly, the festering, the putrifying, and the repulsive."

All of these tasks are more difficult than they first appear.  To achieve perfect equanimity. . .  . .Emma has a glimpse from loving Maud. 

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 28, 2006 09:52 | link | comments

Nietzsche

Emma spent some time this weekend reading essays from the Journal of Nietzsche Studies on Nietzsche and Buddhism.   It's the sort of thing that happens.. she's idly putting keywords into databases, and she starts to read whatever comes along, and she was attempting to track down whether the following alleged quote from Albert Einstein, reprinted on hundreds of webpages, was verifiable:

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology.  Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.  Buddhism answers this description.” 

Emma currently believes this quote to be apocryphal, though she's not entirely sure yet.

Nevertheless, it is true that Nietzsche knew something, though not a great deal, about Buddhism, and admired its emphasis on the creative destruction of self.   But Nietzsche saw himself as promoting an "active nihilism" versus the "passive nihilism" of the ascetic who is removed from human community.  Therefore, he thought of Buddhism as weak and the product of an aging, emasculated culture. Nietzsche saw all human behavior as the "will to power," and through destruction of the self, a new "will to power" could emerge.  This is not entirely antithetical to Buddhism, which toys with the idea of power in the Zen koans, where stern teachers and disciplined students are featured.  (See Emma's last post.)  But there is much playful switching, and of course Buddhism emphasizes compassion and "sympathetic joy," while Nietzsche condemned altruism. Compassion in Buddhism, though, has nothing to do with pity which is all about ego, as Emma's teacher stated in the strongest terms.

"Sympathetic joy" is the key.   And why not?  It's more radical than the "will to power," in Emma's view.  

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 27, 2006 21:05 | link | comments

a zen koan

It is an interesting question as to how two non-egos would relate to each other, having overcome egotism, but here is an intriguing story from the Blue Cliff Record, a collection of Zen koans:

Yangshan Huiji asked Sansheng Huiran, "What is your name?"

Sansheng said, "Huiji!"

"Huiji!" replied Yangshan, "that's my name."

"Well then," said Sansheng, "my name is Huiran."

Yangshan roared with laughter.

Reiteration:

I asked Emma, "What is your name?"

Emma replied, "I."

I replied, "But that's my name!"

"Well then," Emma said, "my name is Emma."

I roared with laughter. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 26, 2006 21:47 | link | comments

The forest monastery

Out in a rural corner of Michigan lies the buddhist forest monastery in the Thai tradition.  It' s not really in a forest.  It looks like a farm near a dirt road, except that it has a a decorated  temple with three peaked roofs and a golden buddha inside.  On her quest for enlightenment, Emma ventured out to the buddhist forest monastery to find the sangha, the community of meditators.  Ajahn was the teacher, chubby as the laughing buddha in comfortable handmade purple and orange garments with large,  beautiful buttons.   He taught the class in the basement of the monk's house, and it was so cerebral and demanding a lecture on mind, that Emma is still not entirely sure of what she heard.  Buddhism is a 2,500 year old tradition of phenomenology accompanied by concentrated study of  the ways of the mind, thousands and thousands of Buddhist books have been written on mind, and thus it is hard to imagine absorbing all of the Buddhist teachings on mind and body. No other group of people have spent so much time at this endeavor.  It is a search for truth that makes sense, because it is not in the least metaphysical and lies only within experience, observation,  and verification, which is why Buddhism fits so well with science. 

 Emma asked Ajahn's friend, from his hometown in mid-Michigan, what Ajahn's story was.   He told Emma that Ajahn knew early on how he wanted to live his life, and then discovered Buddhism, which made perfect sense within what he already knew.   Emma had the thought that she had the very same experience.   Only recently had things she knew deeply as a child been suddenly given a kind of authority.  For one thing, Emma always knew of the impermanence of forms.  She remembers attempting to debate this with a biologist at a pizza place in Chicago, and he had looked at her as though she were mad.   But she just had always known this, intuitively, with conviction, for a very long time.  She also knew, from spending countless hours in the forest near her parents' house on the edge of suburbia, that there was an underlying oneness or wholeness to nature.  This preceeded any exposure to romanticism, the American frontier thesis, or any other theories of nature.  It was simply something she knew,  rather like E.O. Wilson's "biophilia,"  and her heart would always expand when she was in the forest, which she also approached like a scientist.  Sometimes, she would lie on the ground feeling her heart beating against the earth and she had a sense of a whole cosmos, but of both difference and sameness.   She must have only been ten or so.  And just as the Buddhists meditate on repulsiveness to achieve balance in their compassion for all things,  Emma had spent hours looking at maggots crawling across a dead dog in the woods, overcoming repulsion to take an objective view of death and decay.  Some of this may have come from Maud, who had a science degree and biology books lying about the house.  But it feels to Emma to have been larger than that. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 26, 2006 11:00 | link | comments