Generosity and Graditude

 

I was all set to post another essay in the series about meditative attainments, but instead, I thought I would post a short note about generosity and graditude. Sort of like those year end "10 biggest stories of 2014" posts you see on various web sites. What got me thinking about this was a discussion I had with my wife on Christmas morning while we were doing a bike ride. There is of course a long Christian religious tradition around Christmas, but I think Christmas has really more behind it than a  sectarian festival. Despite all the commercialism and hype, Christmas is about giving gifts and giving gifts - whether it be a simple card sent to an old friend or a new iPhone for your teenage son - is about generosity. A simple expression of friendship and love, a heart opening exercise if you let it open your heart. Many Christians decry the crass commercialism around Christmas - my Inbox was overflowing last month with special offer emails from Amazon and other e-tailers - and it does get annoying, but I think it helps not to lose sight of what the holiday is really about. Chrismas is a holiday dedicated to generosity.

I don't know if other cultures and religions have a holiday dedicated to generosity. In Buddhism, generosity is the first of the ten paramitas. The paramitas or perfections are the good qualities of mind that a practitioner on the bodhisattva path needs to perfect before they can become a buddha. These are:

1. Generosity
2. Morality
3. Renunciation
4. Insight
5. Energy
6. Patience
7. Truthfulness
8. Determination
9. Loving-kindness
10. Equinimity

Wouldn't it be something if we had a holiday dedicated to each of these? I've often thought about dedicating a year to practicing the paramitas, taking maybe a month for each one and noting carefully when occasions arise to practice and how I handle those occasions. I haven't done it yet, because if I do, I want to do it together with other people so we can discuss our experiences, and right now I'm not practicing with a local sangha.


The other holiday that comes at this time of year is Thanksgiving, and that is a holiday dedicated to gratitude. Gratitude is the other side of generosity, what the receiver expresses upon receiving the gift. A simple "thank you" is often enough, or maybe an email or card, but what really counts is not the physical expression but what you feel. Because there is nothing to sell, well except maybe turkey and stuffing, Thanksgiving hasn't been commercialized as strongly as Christmas, which is one reason its my favorite holiday. Gratitude didn't make it into the list of the paramitas, but you can still do a gratitude practice, and in the past I've done gratitude meditations when I've been feeling the need for some heart-opening. Just bring to mind an incident of generosity, visualize it like you do in loving-kindness practice, and mentally say "thank-you".

This year, we in California are especially grateful for the rain. We had more rain in the last month and a half than we had in the last year and a half. It was not enough to end the drought, but it was a good start.

Hope you all have a healthy, happy, grateful, and generous New Year!

Image courtesy of  markandhelen.org.uk.

Book Review:10% Happier by Dan Harris

When I first heard about this book, I was really prepared to dislike it. Dan Harris (not to be confused with Sam Harris, the atheist and writer of spiritual books) is a news anchor for the ABC News programs Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America, as well as a contributing reporter to other ABC News shows. I never watch television news when I am at home and rarely when I am on the road either. American television news is performance art not reporting. Interviewers fawn all over powerful people and never press them about social justice and other issues important to the poor and powerless for fear of losing their "access", unlike German television reporters who relentlessly go after government officials, CEOs, and union chiefs alike. But by the end of the book, I realized that Harris had written something which everyone could connect with, namely a description of his journey toward a more healthy and sane life through mindfulness meditation.

Harris starts the book with a short description of a panic attack he had while on camera reading the news on Good Morning America in 2004. The attack left him speechless and gasping while the cameras are running. Later on, we find out that this resulted from extensive drug use, basically speed and cocaine, which increased the baseline level of adrenaline in his brain, thereby upping the odds of a panic attack. But the drug use came after a long period in which he sought out and reported from war zones, and came to have a kind of addiction to the excitement and adventure of war. The drugs were an attempt to continue the excitement of war while at home. Along with war came exposure to the horrors of bloated corpses and suicide bombing, and the political infighting at work to get air time. Air time was the only way for an ambitious reporter to advance to the coveted anchor chair.

At one point, Harris realizes that his life is a mess. His apartment is a shambles, he has no personal life, and he ends up getting a mysterious illness that leaves him tired all the time, achy, and not wanting to get out of bed. He goes for tests but the doctors find nothing, so in the absence of any physical cause, depression is suspected. He visits a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist tells him that he has to stop doing drugs, and clean up his life: exercise, get enough sleep, eat healthy food, and don't drink so much alcohol. Harris goes cold turkey on the drugs and then slowly begins to put into practice what the doctor perscribed, continuing his psychotherapy.

About the same time (2004), Peter Jennings, head news anchor at ABC News gives him an assignment to cover the evangelical Christian community for the 2004 election. At first Harris resists, but then he gives in. He gets to know Ted Haggard, a personable evangelical minister, and comes to like him and respect the evangelical community, even as he disagrees with their political and social views. Later on Haggard is exposed as a hypocrite when he is discovered cheating on his wife with a man, and taking cocaine to boot. One of his co-workers recommends a book by Eckhart Tolle, the self-proclaimed enlightened master, which Harris reads multiple times. He eventually arranges an interview with Tolle and is disappointed because Tolle has no advice how Harris can develop the same level of equanimity. He also interviews Deepak Chopra and a few other New Age types, finds them to be mostly self-promoting blowhards.

What Harris is looking for is some way to top the voice in his head, his "inner asshole" (in his words). The voice is constantly taunting him with how he's in danger of failing, like that because he's losing his hair he'll end up losing his job and living in a flophouse somewhere. His wife Bianca gives him a couple books from Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychotherapist, and he arranges a meeting with Epstein. Epstein suggests he try meditation, which he does, and, like most beginners, is astounded to see what his mind is doing. Harris is persistent and he keeps his meditation practice up, even when on the road and even if it's only 5 minutes a day. He eventually does a 10 day vipassana/metta retreat at Spirit Rock where he has a deep opening after a metta session. The opening lasts several days. After the retreat, Harris realizes that he's willing to settle for 10% happier, even though meditation may make him 100%.

Back at work, Harris finds that he's more interested in co-operating with the other young guys who are competing for air time, and more able to help. His boss tells him that he won't ever be a major news anchor so he releases his ambition. But things go too far and he starts losing air time to other reporters, so he has to pull back and start finding a way to balance ambition and equanimity. Epstein provides the answer: nonattachment. By putting maximum effort into something without being attached to the results, you can accept that, ultimately, the results are out of your control.

Harris' book is great for people who think meditation is, in his words, "bullshit" because that's how he felt himself.  In an appendix he goes through a faq of the objections people with this attitude might react on first exposure to mindfulness meditation. Harris stumbled upon meditation and really had no other alternative, since his life was a miserable mess. He wasn't looking for a technique to discover the true nature of reality, or anything like that, just a way to reduce his suffering, even just 10%. He found it, and his story is an eloquent guide for others who may be in the same circumstances.

Meditative Attainments Part II: Altered States

In Part I, I talked about the basics around meditative attainments, that they are meditation experiences which have some kind of lasting, typically positive impact on the practitioner beyond simply the meditation session itself. The classical four paths of Theravadan Buddhism are the prototypical example, though the other traditions with which I am familiar also have examples that are similar though somewhat less well documented, in the sense that they have less detailed maps of what happens. The traditions all attribute meditative attainments to mystical causes. The Theravadan four path experiences are said to consist of two classes of mind moments, one of which, the path or magga in Pali, results from first contact with the Nirvana object,  the second, the fruit or phala, in which the mind is still in contact with the Nirvana object and  practitioner reaps the benefits of the contact, namely that certain defilements are destroyed. Which defilements depend on which path moment the practitioner experienced.

Now, its entirely possible that, seen from the "inside", i.e. subjectively, the experience can feel profound and mystical. Taking the Theravadan first path experience as an example, the experience can feel as if the practitioner's mind is in touch with something ineffable, something which both exists and does not exist as the tradition says of the Nirvana object. I've had such experiences in meditation, though not specifically one of the path/fruit experiences, and I can say that they feel profoundly meaningful and one comes out of them with the feeling that the mind has touched something sacred. But seen from the "outside", i.e. objectively, there must be an explanation of these experiences based on how the brain works, i.e. the mechanism of how these experiences manifest has to be through the body in general and, specifically, the brain.

Psychological research into the psychedelic experience has come up with a way of classifying these kinds of nonordinary experience: altered states of consciousness. Altered states can arise as a result of a number of causes: drugs, fatigue, exercise, religious rituals, etc. An altered state is basically a state of consciousness that is different from the ordinary, everyday consciousness you experience as you're driving your car, shopping for food, taking care of the kids, completing an assignment at work or school, etc. The most familiar altered state is one we encounter every night: dreams. Dreams exhibit the typical characteristics of altered states. The dreamer is experiencing something that is unrelated to the flow of objective reality outside. While the dreamer lies in a darkened room in bed, inside their head, they are experiencing a whole fantasy world. With concentration meditation, these kinds of hallucinatory stories can occur during waking as well (see the Breakdown chapter in the book).

The difference between meditative attainments and dreams or most psychedelic experiences is that afterwards the person achieving a meditative attainment exhibits what psychologists called altered traits, i.e. doesn't just chalk it up to another night or trip, but rather, some deep psychological or existential change occurs. It is the fact of this change that lifts the meditative attainments out of the mundane and places them in the category of the supramundane. Just another dream or seeing some colored lights is mundane even if somewhat bizzare. Having an experience that results in a radical change in a person's behavior towards eliminating suffering is supramundane. The reason is quite simple: changing your behavior in even a very simple way is quite difficult to impossible, as anyone who has lost weight and tried to keep it off can tell you. Changing it in a profound way, a way that results in elimination of suffering for yourself and those around you is nothing short of a miracle. We don't have to attribute any transcendental mechanism to the causes of meditative attainments to acknowledge that they are, indeed, quite extraordinary.

So we can sum up a simple naturalistic mechanism for the meditative attainments:

• Meditation results in a profound altered state of consciousness,
• Altered state of consciousness causes specific rearrangements in the cognitive and/or emotional structure of the mapping between the brain and mind,
• Practitioner experiences radical transformation in cognitive and/or emotional function leading to reduction in suffering.

The actual brain areas that might be affected, how they might be remapped, etc. are the kinds of details that need to be worked out by neuroscientists, but I've got some theories on what might be happening that I may write up in a later blog post if I can find some time to do some background research. For the next blog post, though, I want to discuss the four ways different traditions have described the attainment experience resulting in enlightenment.

Image courtesy of humantwopointzero.wordpress.com.

Dog

Yesterday, I went out for a bike ride like I do most Sundays. As I neared my house on the way home, my route crossed over CA 85, a four lane freeway with sound walls on one side and a steep bank on the other. I happened to glance over the side and noticed a dog walking in the middle of the southbound lane. She was crossing over the southbound lane, heading for the medial separator. She looked like a teenager out for a romp, walking across the highway, looking around, stopping occasionally to avoid a car, but intent on crossing the lane nonetheless. Not aware of the mortal danger she was in. By this time, I had stopped my bike and pulled off onto the sidewalk. I quickly glanced at another guy standing down the bridge from me, riveted to the fence by the drama playing out below us, as I was.

Traffic was light and the cars in the southbound lane managed to slow or stop, letting her pass over to the medial barrier. She jumped the medial barrier and started across the northbound lane, but there she wasn't so careful.  She darted out in front of a blue Prius. The driver braked but didn't manage to stop. The front bumper caught the dog and dragged her along for a couple feet before she was thrown  onto the medial shoulder. I cringed, grabbed my head and shouted "No!" but there was nothing I could do. Traffic was too loud, the dog was too far away, and all I could was turn away or stand there and watch her get hit. I chose to stand and watch.

The dog lay on the medial shoulder, its mouth open. A couple times, its jaw opened and closed. It wasn't bleeding nor were there any gashes or anything, though it did have a couple of abrasions on its side. A woman stopped on the southbound medial shoulder and walked down to the where the dog lay on the other side, a cell phone to her ear. I walked over to the other guy. He was my neighbor, and he, too, had a cell phone to his ear.

"Are you calling the police? " I asked.

"Yes, the dog has a tag, so it must belong to someone," he replied, turning away from the phone briefly to address me.

"I think she's paralyzed," I said, "I noticed she open and close her mouth a couple times but she hasn't moved. I think she might have to be put down."

He dutifully reported this to the police. After talking with the police some more, he turned off his cellphone and put it in his pocket.

"I have to get home, my wife is waiting for me," he said.

"OK," I replied and he ran off.

I watched the woman below talking on the phone, and stared at the dog for a few more minutes before remounting my bike and heading home.

I guess there's a lot more I could say about this on the metaphorical side. How sometimes I've been like that dog, blindly putting myself into circumstances that are dangerous and could lead to serious harm. How everyone does that at times. How, in a sense, the whole of the human species is in that position now with accelerating climate change and environmental destruction. But, in the end, the reality is this: a dog suffered and maybe died yesterday, took dangerous risks for reasons only the dog knew, and I got to witness it. That is one of the things practice is all about, witnessing suffering. Even when you can't do anything to help.