Working for Treats

Watch a person training a dog. When the dog does the right thing, the person says "Yes!" or "Good dog!" and gives the animal a treat. Watch a parent and child: when the child does something great, the parent smiles, and his or her body language reflects pleasure and pride. Watch a meditation class. When people report breakthrough experiences, does the teacher smile and show appreciation? When people report problems, does the teacher frown and look concerned? What kind of reports get attention? Are the students working for treats?

Some classes "treat" positive meditation experiences. But any kind of attention can be a "treat": sometimes the sheer drama of a big problem can capture the teacher's attention for long periods. Interestingly, the rest of the class can support this. If the class is discussion-based, as mine are, when a student reports unpleasant or frustrating experiences, other students may start offering sympathy and advice. I have noticed that some people experience this extra attention as a reward; others experience it as a punishment. Either way, the patterns are being activated and running unconsciously. Nobody benefits.

We all want to measure success. It's natural to feel happy when people have breakthrough experiences, and to give extra attention when they are suffering. But it is a mistake to allow these responses to unconsciously influence what gets raised in class. The effect may be to create an increasing sense of fakery, or to cultivate narcissism, or to drive some students completely underground.

You may have noticed some odd behaviour on the part of teachers to avoid this. Many teachers have the same response to everything: they say something like "Yes, yes, very good," or "Keep going," or "Hmmm," or just grunt in a neutral way, no matter what the student reports. But people are very observant, and will pick up the tiniest sign.

The best thing, as always, is to cultivate awareness. If I feel pleasure as a teacher at a breakthrough report, I try to be aware of the pleasure as my own reaction, not as something I need to reflect back to the student. If, as a student, I feel inhibited about raising an issue that I suspect will make me look stupid or a failure to the class, I try to be aware of my insecurity as my own reaction, and raise it anyway. And if, either as a teacher or a student, I feel discomfort at another's suffering, I try to be aware of the discomfort as my own reaction, and refrain from acting on the impulse to "fix" the problem with sympathy or advice.

I Never Metempsychosis I Didn't Like

Human beings in general share the same overarching illusion: that there is this thing called the "self". Imputing permanence to that "self" is an obvious extension of that illusion, in fact it's combining two illusions. The inconvenient fact that people die is explained away by the assumption that their "self" is going to carry forward and assume another form, perhaps another human life. It's easy to interpret Buddhist teachings that way. Heck, the Dalai Lama's on record as being reincarnated 14 times!

But here's the problem: according to Buddhists, there IS no self. So what is being reincarnated?

My answer: I have no idea. I don't believe it, and I don't disbelieve it. I am simply dumbfounded by the whole question.

A lot of people ask me about reincarnation. It can only BE an opinion of course. Proof will come to us all, but too late for us to discuss it. What I know is this: the entity called "Franca" is simply a set of behavioural patterns, memories and fantasies shaped by a whole host of factors, including DNA, childhood, current circumstances, possible previous lives, magical spells cast by evil sorcerers, etc. Sort of like the programs on my computer. But unlike the programs on my computer, I am aware. (Perhaps this is what Descartes was getting at when he said "Cogito, ergo sum," but of course now that we have machines that can think, we have to look deeper.)

This awareness is pretty hard to explain away. It cannot be proved or disproved. But when I look, there is nothing there to prove or disprove anyway. I can't see it, or touch it, I find no direct evidence of it, aside from the fact that... I know. I know, simply, that I am aware.

Like I say: dumbfounded. In that I am not alone. Buddhists as a whole intentionally cultivate a sort of continual state of bamboozlement on this whole issue.

I suspect that "Franca" will end when this body dies. But what is this body? Every cell that was "my body" 10 years ago has been pooped out, breathed out, scraped off, trimmed away, cut out, or shed in some other way. So what's this then? When it turns into a corpse, what can we say that it was?

I also suspect that awareness will continue. How, I don't know: I can hardly imagine it. I suspect this for two reasons. One, I have had several vivid experiences of people within days after they have died... just an intense experience of that individual being present and communicating something quite clear, specific, and understandable. Are these delusions? It's possible. But whatever the explanation, the experiences were real. The second reason I suspect so is because people like the Dalai Lama and many others, some of whom I have met, are not fools or liars. I, however, can be both, and the conventional explanations to which these teachers resort are certainly adapted to the limited understanding of the non-awake. The paradox of wisdom: real truth cannot be expressed in words.

The story: When Buddha awakened, after sitting out for a night under a tree, Mara, the Lord of Illusion, threw some crazy things at him: beautiful women, mighty armies, etc. etc. Buddha just sat there and experienced it all. Finally Mara sat down in front of him and said something like this: "By whose authority do you know these things you claim to know?" Buddha replied with a gesture: he simply stretched his right fingers down and touched the ground.

That is the final answer: one's own experience. The sound of snow crunching under one's boots. The blue of the sky just before sunset. The sensation of breathing in, and breathing out. Perhaps, some day, the moment after dying.

As I said earlier, we will not be able to discuss it.

If a beam falls and nobody notices, does it change anyone's life?

An excerpt from Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon". Sam Spade tells the story of a Mr. Flitcraft, who has a good life, but completely disappears, abandoning his wife and two small children:

"Here's what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up--just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk along side him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his fingers--well, affectionately--when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works.

"Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

"It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had got twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

"He went to Seattle that afternoon ... and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

Most spiritual practice begins with a shock: unmistakable evidence that an "ordinary" life, even a very good one, does not, and will never, satisfy. We all live immersed in differing degrees of denial and frustration, anesthetized (or simply deluded) by our patterns. We drift through our lives, mechanically serving the intricate medley of behaviour patterns that we call "Me".

When the beam falls, there is an instant of awakening. What people do next varies a little, but not much. In the vast majority of cases, they go back to sleep.

I'm grateful to delanceyplace.com for bringing this into my inbox.

8 Tips for Waking Up Over the Holidays

You've developed a nice meditation practice. You sit every day, you face the stresses and strains of daily life with calm and equanimity, and you feel that, finally, you're beginning to get some kind of handle on your patterns.

Then... you go home for Christmas. Or Christmas comes home to you. Either way, now more than ever a budding meditation practice can fall apart. But this is actually the very best time to keep your practice strong.

First, the disruption in your daily schedule will challenge your discipline. If you can keep your practice solid through this, it will be stronger than ever. Second, renewed contact with your family can bring up a lot of old emotional skeletons: what a great opportunity to work with awareness!

Here are 8 tips to help you make the most of it:

On the cushion:

1. Decide the night before when and where you're going to meditate the next day. Then do it. Early in the morning is best, as holiday schedules are unpredictable — best to get to it sooner. Bonus: meditating in the morning will set you up for a more mindful day.

2. Take your meditation cushion with you on overnight visits. For you, it supports your commitment; for others, it's a great conversation piece.

3. During overnight visits, let your hosts/guests know you meditate every day. It will be easier to excuse yourself to do your practice.

4. Adopt a really obvious pose, like sitting on the floor or facing a wall, if you sit in a non-private space while visitors are around. That way, if Uncle Ralph wanders in while you're meditating in the family room at 7am, he'll know not to disturb you.

Off the cushion:

5. Practice deep listening. This is especially beneficial when visiting chatty relatives. Imagine that your whole body becomes an ear, and feel the vibrations of what they are saying moving into and through you. Listen to more than their words: hear their tone, their body language. Most important: include in your attention your own inner responses.

6. When you get irritated, use the opportunity to practice sending and taking. Imagine you can take all the irritation in the world into you in one in-breath, leaving everyone else free of it. Then imagine putting all the nice things you enjoy into one out-breath, and give it all away to others.

7. Take a mindful walk every day. Whether alone or accompanied, open your senses to everything that's there: sights, sounds, smells, sensations. Give your walk your full attention.

8. Imagine every visit will be your last. The only thing we can really count on is impermanence: death can come to anyone at any time. Bearing this in mind can help you focus on what's truly important.

Working with Your Inner (and Outer) Critic

Image: a gargoyle of a nagging wife from a church in Grendon, Northamptonshire.

One of the best ways to avoid experience is to project material out onto others. Let's take being critical as an example. Criticism is often a family disease, passed from generation to generation, which is why it can come up pretty sharply at this time of year.

In my case, I learned to be very sharply critical in a number of ways, including nagging, nasty jokes, "straightening people out", and so on. When I nag my husband or kids, I sometimes have strange moments of clarity wherein I hear my mother's rhythms and tones in my own voice. A sobering experience!

So I look inside, very carefully, when I experience the impulse to criticize. I find that internally I have a critical voice that is talking almost all the time, telling me things I should be doing to improve myself or the world. Under that, discomfort...an anxiety, a sense of things being out of control, of having the responsibility to sharply put things back into "order". Under that, there is anger. Anger that the world is not cooperating with my need for things to be "in order". Under that, there is fear. Fear that if things are not all "in control" I will "lose everything" and "be abandoned". And under all of that, a sense of being vulnerable and alone.

So it is the energy of this fear that cascades upwards through my mind and finds an outlet in criticism. By allowing it to do so, I'm missing the opportunity to simply experience the fear in its true state: simply as energy. I am cultivating the habit of nagging (when has nagging ever helped?). I'm causing suffering for those around me. I am teaching my sons the habit of nagging as well, just as my own mother taught me. But worst of all I'm falling deeper asleep, even as I feel so clear and "right" about my judgments.

When people are critical, they are generally feeling that internal critical voice. This, ironically, makes them hypersensitive to criticism themselves, because anything anybody says that could be seen as criticism is amplified many times by their internal critic, and the only way to silence it is to fight back, defend ourselves and prove them wrong. None of it works. None of it relieves our suffering, it simply distracts us from the pain of feeling what is really there.

When we have a meditation practice, it's typical to start to see all kinds of futile and hypocritical qualities in the behaviour of our friends and family. But observing the foibles of others without recognizing their resonance within ourselves can turn us cruel. So if you experience criticism, or notice the impulse in yourself to criticize, hooray! Here's an opportunity to practice. Try to look at the pain beneath the interaction: their pain, and your own. You don't need to fix it, or transform it, or figure it out, or do anything at all. Just acknowledge that it is there, and observe it. Feel it resonate in mind. Let it come, and then let it go, because it will. Things always come and go, that's their nature.

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen

Getting to the Good Bits

Meditation is a delicate balance. We're in this because we want to end our suffering. That is renunciation, and is actually essential to a good practice. But when we start looking for a specific outcome, like enlightenment, balance, stability, etc., we just get even more confused. As long as "getting to the good bits" is on the agenda, we're in our own way. Because wanting to get to the good bits IS the obstacle.

Remember that nobody, not even the Dalai Lama, not even the Buddha, has ever had any control whatsoever over the outcome of their meditation efforts.

Every time we sit down it is different. But letting go of the illusion of control and just focussing on the work causes a kind of internal release or relaxation. This experience of release is important: you don't only renounce the mental habits that cause suffering, you also renounce misguided efforts to avoid the suffering that has already arrived.

At the beginning of learning how to meditate, one sits on a cushion, adopts the right posture, and waits for the halo to land. Then there's this whole period of confusion and struggle when we realize the halo isn't landing, instead it seems to be raining poop. Eventually, we give up trying to fight the poop and — well, if a halo doesn't exactly land, at least we reach another level. We reach a level where the cushion is a refuge, even when it means feeling our pain instead of avoiding it — where we can see that sitting deepens sanity.

So forget about the good bits. I can't guarantee you they'll happen, and I can't guarantee they'll not happen. It's what IS happening that is important.

Thoughts and Feelings

A lot of people hold the assumption that the objective of meditation practice is to stop having thoughts and feelings. More specifically, that a "good" meditation session is one in which no thoughts or feelings arise. This is a mistake.

What is life? Life is what we experience. What do we experience? Thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Why try to get rid of two thirds of our life? People who have no thoughts are stupid. People who have no feelings are Vulcans.

Emotions and thoughts are not the problem, it is patterns, or rather the unthinking following of patterns, that is the problem. When you learn to experience emotions and thoughts AS emotions and thoughts, rather than getting lost in the illusory world they project -- that is freedom.

At some point the meditator begins to identify that a great deal of suffering seems to come from our thoughts and feelings rather than from an external "reality". This is a start, but we need to look deeper. How does suffering arise? Is it a "thing" that is somehow attached to certain thoughts and feelings? If not, then where does it come from?