A moment of silence! Now what
As another year draws to an end, many people are making resolutions for the new year, both for themselves and for the human race. Rather than adding to the weight of unfulfilled resolutions and vows, let me offer a few tips on what to do with silence. (I am assuming all readers of this blog have a refrigerator magnet that says “You have a right to remain silent” and that you exercise that right many times a week. If so, you may find some silences more awkward than others and therefore welcome a tip.)
One of the many kinds of contemplative exercise I have learned through Buddhist practice is one that I have recently read about in connection with Quaker practice. In both of these contemplative traditions there is an exercise that begins by sitting quietly and letting the mind settle as one concentrates on watching the breathing process. Once the mind has settled down from the relatively excited state it maintains during normal waking activity, turn your attention to the some place within the body, such as the region around the heart or in the pit of the stomach; it is best to pick a place in the body where one readily feels physical manifestations of emotional changes. People who are visually oriented may wish to imagine a light shining into that region of the body.
The next step can involved slowly and silently reciting a short list of ethical guidelines. I usually recite in my mind the ten precepts of Buddhism, but one just as easily use the Ten Commandments, or a list of virtues that Stoics recommend cultivating. The object of the exercise is to recite this ethical sayings while keeping attentive to your physical responses to them. If it helps, you can even recite the ethical guideline and then think “Where do I stand in observing this one?” Usually if one recognizes that one's behavior has fallen short of the ideal, there is a physical response that one identifies as a twinge of conscience. Sometimes, if one is paying close attention, one will notice an urge to move on quickly, to run away or to distract oneself. That should be seen as an invitation to stay and hold that feeling in the light, until it is clear where it is coming from. As the feeling is held in the light, it will usually become clear why the feeling of uneasiness has arisen. It will also become clear what one has to do to avoid that uneasiness arising in the future. Et voila! A resolution arises spontaneously.
Because my daily life involves quite a lot of speaking and writing, my practice is to reflect on where I stand with respect to following the guidelines on speech offered by the Buddha.
Before you speak, ask yourself about what you are about to say, Is it true? Is it beneficial to someone? Is there likely to be a receptive audience? If it is not certain that what one feels like saying is true, best not to say it. If it is not going to benefit anyone to hear the words, then why say them? Even if what one has to say is true and beneficial, there may not be anyone around who is likely to receive and welcome what one says. If there is not a receptive audience, then there is not much point is speaking. And even if what feels like saying is true, beneficial and has a receptive audience, this may not be the right time to say this particular thing.
Not infrequently, when I imagine shining a light within my body, I detect some uneasiness arising from a recent failure to heed those guidelines. I recall that I have said something without being fully confident of its accuracy. Often I realize I have recently spoken reactively or in irritation or in hopes of being seen as clever or witty or just to pass time, not to benefit anyone. Sometimes I realize that it should have been obvious that my words would fall on deaf ears. And many times I realize in retrospect that my timing was off. When any of these realizations arise, I hold them in the light. It almost always becomes clear what I should have done in the recent pass, and what I should resolve to do in the future.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 12/30/2007 04:39:00 PM
Back to menu
Mr Socrates, meet Mr Buddha and Mr Fox
Some thirty-odd years ago I was working as a research assistant for a pair of authors who were writing a textbook on world religions. One of the tasks they assigned to me was to read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to see how well his analysis applied to Eastern religions. On a personal level, Weber's book had quite an impact on me in that it made me aware of my own Protestant roots and on how various Protestant doctrines had influenced my heart and mind. I read some of Weber's other materials as well and found myself intrigued by his discussion of prophetic traditions. If memory serves me well, Weber distinguished between prophets who spoke for God (as in the Abrahamic religions) from prophets who spoke for a more impersonal wisdom (as in Buddhism and Confucianism).
As it happened, at the same time I was reading Weber, I was also reading the dialogues of Plato that deal with the trial and death of Socrates. Struck by Socrates's frequent references to his daimon, a kind of inner voice that helped him distinguish right from wrong and was very much at the heart of his notion of the “examined life” that he famously believed was uniquely worth living, I could not help wondering whether he, too, might not be considered a kind of prophet. Most of my friends who were philosophers were not particularly receptive to the idea of Socrates as a wisdom-prophet along the lines of the Buddha or Confucius or Laozi, nor were most of my friends in religious studies. It occurred to me that I was living in an academic culture in which religion is seen as one thing and philosophy is seen as another, that talking of Socrates as a kind of prophet (or the Buddha as a philosopher) was to invite accusations of being terribly confused.
My experience with Quakers also became part of all this thinking about Weber and Socrates. George Fox, who founded the movement of religious seekers who were eventually called Quakers, often spoke of the inward light. Influenced by his reading of the Gospel of John, Fox was convinced that all human beings are capable of being guided directly by the logos—the Word that was with God in the beginning and that was identified with the Christ that existed even before creation. Fox was convinced that there is “that of God” in everyone. Moreover, he was convinced that this bit of God that dwells in all human beings, which he variously called the Inward Light or the Seed, would guide everyone who learned to still the mind, reduce the influence of what we nowadays call the ego, and wait patiently with an open mind and a heart filled with love. Fox's conviction that no one could possibly understand the scriptures without being in touch with the Inward Light that was itself the source of all scriptures, and that one who had access to the Inward Light did not really require the guidance of either scriptures or a professional priesthood or trained theologians, led to numerous confrontations with the religious authorities of his day. He was accused of the blasphemy of thinking that he was Christ, to which he responded that a more accurate statement of his conviction is that everyone is Christ—a response that did not necessarily persuade his accusers that he was innocent of blasphemy.
George Fox said of the Inward Light that it reveals to everyone his or her sinfulness, but that the very Light that shows us our sin is also the Light that shows us the way out of sin. The very awareness that shows us our failures also shows us how to succeed. By following the guidance out of sin or failure, said Fox, anyone can participate in “a certain kind of perfection.” In other words, the Inward Light has the capacity to free all human beings from original sin. Christ can be said to be the savior and redeemer of all human beings in the sense that Christ is but another name for this Inward Light. Salvation through Christ has nothing to do with Jesus dying on the cross as an atonement for the sins of Adam, as is taught in conventional Christianity. Rather, the death on the cross dramatically shows the death of what Paul called the flesh (which corresponds to what we now call the ego) that is necessary if one is to gain access to the heeling Inward Light.
As I reflected on the writings of George Fox, I could not help being struck by how similar all his talk of the Inward Light was to Socrates's talk of his daimon. The inner guide that is within all human beings (and I would want to insist further in all sentient beings) is not exactly the same as conscience, although conscience is part of it, nor is it exactly the same as instinct, although instinct is also part of it. The Inward Light (which is also, I would contend, the daimon) guides us in all things, not just in matters of morality. The better one learns to heed this inward light, the less likely one is to fall into counter-productive and destructive patterns of behavior. The people whom we call sages, saints and prophets are those who are good at heeding their inward light most of the time.
While Fox was inclined to identify his daimon with the Word that was God and Christ, my own conditioning is not as influenced by Christian terminology as was Fox's. I am more habituated to thinking of this Inward Light as what East Asian Buddhists eventually called Buddha-nature (fó xìng). (The naughty punster in me likes to think of fóxìng as Foxing, that is, being like George Fox. But I digress.) The older and more soft-headed I become, the less important difference I can detect between the inner Buddha, the inner Christ, and the daimon. All of them, I think, are different terms for living up to our highest potentials.
It was noted above that what Saint Paul called flesh (sarx) people in our times are more inclined to call something like ego or persona. The claim was also made that our ego or persona—our sense of who we are both as individuals and as social beings—blocks the Inward Light. To the extent that I identify myself as Richard Hayes, American, Quaker, Buddhist, philosophy professor, male and so forth, I put up an obstacle to the best of myself that could provide valuable guidance through life. This is because one's sense of identity is constructed largely of a series of strategies (or what psychologists often call “defense mechanisms”) for dealing with pain and fear. These mechanisms are like walls. Walls keep us safe, and in so doing they block light. These walls also have the effect of making us feel that the very light they are blocking is one of the enemies against which they are offering protection. There is a sense in which that is true, for one of the things the Inward Light does is to challenge the validity of our sense of identity. This is why early Quakers often said that the Light is horrifying before it is healing. This is why many Buddhists acknowledge that it takes a lifetime to learn how to manifest one's Buddha-nature consistently. The walls of the ego seem to have a capacity to repair themselves almost as quickly as they are breached. That is why one must constantly work at breaching them.
There are numerous tools that human beings have developed for
breaching the ego. One that I have come to value is called the
enneagram of personality, a typology of nine basic personality types,
each with two subtypes. There are many books available on the topic;
the one I like best is Don Rios and Russ Hudson's The
Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and
Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types.
This is not the place to go into any of the details of how Riso and Hudson employ the enneagram. To find that, one should go to Riso and Hudson's website. While there are those who are dismissive of the enneagram as a tool, I have found over the years that it is one of many effective tools for becoming aware of the effects of my own persona and finding my way past it from time to time. When those moments of successfully breaching the walls of the ego take place (and before those self-repairing walls are reconstructed), the prophets, the sages and the philosophers of the world make more sense. And so do birds and cockroaches and even ordinary human beings.
There is just one further point to make about Inward Light/Buddha Nature/Inner Christ/daimon and that is without gaining access to it, no kind of critical thinking is possible. Critical thinking is impeded by a the reactionary force of the ego, which hastens to fortify itself against anything that is not already considered part of the self. The ego has no interest whatseover in learning anything. Even when part of one's sense of one's own identity is that one is curious and scholarly, what usually turns out to be the case is that one craves to “learn” in a slightly new form something that one already believes. THis, of course, is not learning at all. The highly trained academic ego operates on the principle that if anything is important, I already know it, and if something comes along that I don't already know, then it is eitehr wrong or trivial. (If you don't believe this, write a PhD someday and defend it in the PhD club. You'll see that most of the questions are designed either to trivialize your work or dismiss it as false. If you don't have time to write a PhD, just join an e-mail discussion group on any topic and venture to say something. Wait a few minutes. You'll be shot down in flames either for saying something stupid or stating the obvious.) In contast to all the reactionary defenses put up by the ego, critical thinking is open and dispassionately awake to whatever is of value and alert to whatever is not. In short, critical thinking is the work of the daimon when it is not being blocked by the strong-armed bodyguards who stand at the door of the ego.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 1/12/2009 02:32:00 PM
Back to menu
Telling stories about telling stories
“No one has ever been angry at another human being—we're only angry at our story of them.”—Byron Katie
There are things that some people do that tend to make me angry. The list is fairly long—embarrassingly long, in fact. Close to the top of the list is having someone—anyone—try to explain why I do the things I do, why I believe the things I believe, or why I have the attitudes I have. So, for example, if someone were to come along and say “The reason you tend to get angry when people explain what you do is because you have unresolved issues with your mother, who had a tendency to try to explain your behavior,” or “It's not at all surprising that you get angry when someone tries to explain your behavior, given that you have carelessly let yourself become a victim of overweaning pride and thus have the arrogant view of yourself that no one but you can possibly understand how your think.” It is not only relatively unflattering stories that annoy me. Nor is it only stories about me that annoy me. I just don't like it much when people make up stories, even pretty good and probably true stories, about other people's deliberate and unwitting behavior.
Stories, it has to be admitted at the outset, make the world go around. (That is a figure of speech, not intended as a scientific explanation of why the earth moves around the sun or spins on its own axis.) Countries go to war because of stories they make up and then believe. The United States invaded Mexico because of a story that President Polk told about the treacherous intentions of the neighbor to the south. More recently, the United States invaded Iraq because of a story that the Bush administration told about the treacherous intentions of Saddam Hussein. I spent the better part of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood hearing stories about what a danger Communism posed to American freedom—American freedom itself being a major plot in yet another story that Americans have loved to tell themselves. Economies fall because of stories that people tell and then believe. Economies also recover because of stories that people tell and then believe. Some people prepare for the end of civilization as we know it because of stories they tell.
On a more individual level, people not only get angry at the stories they tell of other people. People also fall in love with the stories they tell of other people. (Narcissists, of course, fall in love with stories they tell about themselves.) People get married, and then divorced, as a result of stories they tell and then believe about other people in their lives. People are hired and fired because of stories that others tell about them. Children are disinherited because of stories their parents believe about them. People are sent to prison because of stories that judges and juries tell themselves about the accused. People are put to death because of stories that people believe about them.
Whether stories are true makes very little difference. What makes things happen is that stories are believed. Stories come true because people tell them and act as if they are true. Good things happen because of stories people believe, and horrible things happen because of stories people believe. Stories do not care what comes of them; stories only demand to be told.
In Buddhist teaching there is a word for the stories people tell to account for what they are experiencing. Buddhists call these stories prapañca. According to Buddhist psychology almost all of us have an obsessive tendency to want to understand what we are experiencing. Rather than simply noticing, for example, that there is an expectation to find a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, followed by a failure to see a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, one makes up a story to explain the mystery of the missing peanut butter. Someone took some peanut butter and then failed to put the peanut butter container back in the pantry; it was probably left open on the countertop and is now filled with ants. Someone used the last of the peanut butter without making sure to add peanut butter to the shopping list. Someone raided the pantry and stole the peanut butter. A team of very clever cockroaches carried the peanut butter jar outside and ate it, glass and all. An errant black hole came through the house and sucked the peanut butter into it. There never was a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, and my delusional belief that there was could very well be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease.
A key teaching of Buddhism is that a great deal of the pain, frustration, anger, envy, jealousy, anxiety, depression and expectation we human beings experience is a result of prapañca. We tell stories about nearly everything we experience, and about things we do not experience, and then we suffer because of the stories we have told. The obsessive need to come up with a story is a kind of addiction. Or so the Buddhist story goes. As is the case with most stories, it might have been better had that story never been told.
What would it be like to go through a day without telling any stories? What would it be like just to see sights, hear sounds, smell odors, taste tastes and feel corporeal sensations and stop there, without giving any account of them? What would it be like to hear the stories that others tell and simply observe them, without telling stories about why others tell the stories they tell? It might be interesting to experiment with living a day, or even a few hours of a day, in a narrative-free state of simple observance of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and bodily sensations. It might be interesting to cultivate a habit of catching oneself in the act of telling a story and then to refuse to finish telling the story.
Whether it would be interesting to live without telling stories is something one can never know without trying it. Do you feel like trying it? If so, go ahead and do it. I promise not to tell a story explaining why you decided to try it out—or why you decided that trying it out would be a waste of time.
Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 2/03/2009 09:05 PM
Back to menu
