Illusion: the din. Reality: the song.

Outside my private chamber,
just below the din of my thoughts,
songbirds are softly singing.

Reflecting on the recent robbery of our home

In that my spiritual sensibility has for a long time resembled Buddhism more than anything else, I must say that the recent robbery of our home confronted me with the relationship of suffering to personal attachment in unexpected ways. (For those who don’t know: Siddhartha Gautama, the man whom followers refer to as the Buddha, cited personal attachment as the root cause of all human suffering.)

I wasn’t “myself” for a while after the robbery. My emotions swung between murderous anger, deep sadness and grief, each bound in a cold, wet, constricting blanket of helplessness. My response was been symptomatic of depression. I couldn’t get enough sleep, no matter how much I got. I tended to withdraw into myself, even when I was with my family. Nothing was funny. When others were enjoying a conversation or a laugh together, I couldn’t relate. Something in me seemed broken, and I didn’t know what it was. Sometimes I felt like I was at that stage of freezing to death where one is unaware of pain—just weary, tired of everything and wanting to go to sleep forever.

It wasn’t about losing “stuff”. We got it all back. And even before we got it all back it wasn’t about losing stuff.

To me it was about seeing our back door kicked in. It was about Anne’s and Asher’s bags being cavalierly opened, the contents thoughtlessly, inconsiderately strewn all over the floor of the living room. It was about the intruders rifling through boxes of family pictures where there were no valuables to be found. It was about unconcerned, underdeveloped hominids invading our sanctuary, creating a big mess for us to clean up after. It was about the sense of violation. It was about the cavalier disrespect of our peace and privacy.

This really, really, really pissed me off. I am really, really, really attached to my idea of acceptable behavior regarding respect for peace and privacy.

Many species of the animal world — perhaps even some among our own species — may not, in fact, have the mental/psychological/spiritual capacity to respect and share my ideals. I understand that it’s futile to try to get them to cooperate. I’m happy to let them do their thing in their own realm, but when they seek entrance to mine, my rules apply.

I will defend my realm of peace and sanctuary. To intruders I will communicate in terms — verbal and/or physical — that their behavior indicates they understand. I will calibrate my response to the level of threat they seem to pose.

Peace is for the subscribers to the notion of peace; mercy is for those who clearly respond to the offering of mercy. If the behavior of an intruder indicates need for me to make a snap judgment opting for violence in my response, I accept that my judgment is fallible—I might respond more violently than every I would under circumstances that allowed time for more dispassionate analysis. But if I’m going to make a mistake, in a snap-judgment circumstance, it will not be the mistake of underestimating the potential threat.

I would prefer that violence was never appropriate in the conducting of human affairs. I grieve the fact that my personal preferences hold no sway over The Way Things Are. All is right with the world. Everything that is, is as it should be—all things considered, at any given point in time.

Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure: had the twerps who robbed us gotten to my studio and taken guitars, etc., THEN it would be about the “stuff.”

;-)

Wind Through the Pines

The voice of wind through the pines is wise: listen closely.

—from the Book of Chazz

The Six Most Helpful Insights I've Ever Received from Others—So Far

Back in the mid-nineties I decided I would like to leave a list of lessons and insights that might help my kids avoid making the same mistakes I have made in life — mistakes that have cost me time, money, contentment and peace of mind.

I began writing down insights that, to my mind at any given time, passed for wisdom. The first thing I noticed was how much the things I wrote down were driven by strong emotions. I was primarily recording judgments on things about life that did or did not suit my preferences.

Finally, I realized that's not how wisdom works. Wisdom does not care about my preferences. Wisdom does not seek to make me feel better. Wisdom is about calling a spade a spade; seeing things, situations and people as they are — it's about recognizing the truth about...whatever...and simply accepting it.

Wisdom is an individual matter. And it's purely and simply about making one's individual peace with What Is.

Originally I thought my list of insights would be long — long enough to fill one of those bound books you can buy that has blank pages to write on. But no. I expect the list of insights I ultimately come up with might do well to fill a page. Anything more would probably amount to needless repetition or self-indulgence.

Also: Originally I thought the insights might be products of my own grand invention. Not so. All of the wisdom I most value at this point has been received wisdom — realizations that other people have pointed out to me, and that I finally understood when and how they put it to me the way they did.

What follows is my list of Most Helpful Insights so far. Some are direct quotes, others are paraphrased:

1. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest to fool."
2. The secret to contentment is to maintain an Attitude of Gratitude.
3. "Charles, you give people WAY too much credit."
4. There is not just one "world". Each of us has a world of our own making that exists only inside our own head.
5. No one else upsets us; we each upset ourselves.
6. When it comes to making a living, we're all pretty much working retail: we have a set of "customers" and those customers must be pleased.

If one is going to offer a list, marketing typically indicates that one should offer the top three or five, or seven or ten. Those are the numbers that sell. So, OK. I'll offer a seventh insight. This one was not received from anyone. It comes from my own observation:

   7. Many, if not most of us have never really met ourselves.

See? Number seven is kind of a repeat of number one, but using different words. Oh well. I think that one bears repeating.

Traditions: like the children's game of "telephone"?

When I think about it, traditions seem very much like the children's game of "telephone." There was an original message that the originators thought worthy of passing down the line. But as it was passed along, human foibles corrupt the message and eventually make it laughable.

I say this not to cast aspersions on originators or original events — these may well be worth commemorating. But the process of tradition-making is by nature a process of corruption. And the most adamant "defenders" of tradition are most likely the most corrupt of tradition-makers.

Interesting parallel between Jesus and the Buddha #4

Those who want to save their life shall lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake shall find it.
— Jesus, Mark 8.35

With relinquishing all thought and egotism, the enlightened one is liberated through not clinging.
— Siddhartha Gautama, Majjhima Nikaya 72.15

Traditional Christians would not consider these sayings parallel because to them, Jesus' importance lies not so much in the wisdom he taught as in their notion that Jesus is their "redeemer" — i.e., that they are mysteriously absolved of personal responsibility for their own unwise, erroneous thoughts and behavior by Jesus' dying to absolve them from their sins.

In the quote of Jesus above, what did he mean by "my sake"? The underlying, implicit question that determines one's interpretation is this: How did Jesus see himself — as an essentially ego-defined entity, or as an ego-less exemplar of a way of being? Traditional Christians believe the former, I the latter.

The ramifications of this matter of interpretation are hugely consequential. The road to hell in human experience has, over the centuries, been paved with the notion that God has (or is) an ego. Is this not the fuel behind every act of cruelty or violence perpetrated "for the sake of" religion?

It seems to me that Jesus' thought of himself not in terms of an ego-bound "I" but as the embodiment of a way of being. If anything, he seems to have come to liberate those of his own Jewish faith from the notion of a dictatorial, egocentric god.

Perhaps the verse that traditional Christians point to most in order to "prove" that Jesus thought of himself in egoistic terms is John 14.6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me."

I understand. The claim does sound pretty egotistical — unless the key to interpretation is to understand that Jesus was not referring to himself in the typical way (as an ego entity) but as the embodiment (the manifestation) of a more godly way of being.

Madness or Innocence?

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit, where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or another, as madmen or innocents, we are already there.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

—Thomas Merton