Category: attention

As someone who was raised as a Catholic — and as a former celibate, albeit Buddhist — I can’t help but follow the scandal that’s finally breaking over the Catholic Church. Long, long overdue, it’s the stuff of nightmares — the worldwide sexual abuse of children for decades, probably centuries, and the instinct of most church officials to deny its sins and leave victims to rot in their own misery. It goes against just about everything the Church is supposed to stand for, and has horrified Catholics and non-Catholics alike. After decades of successfully dodging widespread publicity, the Vatican now faces a broad-based, tangible protest — actually, blood-lust is more like it. No surprise there. Will the church survive? Will it learn? I’d bet on the first, not the second. I said as much on Huffington Post, and drew the ire of Catholic bashers, as if I were a sympathizer!

All in all, I was fortunate. Although I was terrorized by my Catholic teachers as a boy, the abuse foisted on me was only physical and emotional, not sexual. Years of therapy and mindful reflection have taught me to disbelieve the disparaging inner voice of my teachers, and to wrestle it aside whenever it shows its ugly face, but it still shows up. I’ve worked hard and can win the battles, but the war goes on.

Now, do the math: if thousands of children were sexually abused, then how many were simply abused like me? I’d guess millions, most still carrying their demons around and passing down the same old ‘discipline’ on their children. It becomes instinctive.

Mine is just one story, not unusual. Children are society’s most natural scapegoats — weak, defenceless, silent, and respected by only a minority of parents. Most of us are in need of psychotherapy just as much as of dentistry and daily hygiene, but people still look at those in therapy and wonder, ‘What’s wrong with them?’

Nothing’s wrong — at least, no more than usual. It’s just life in an imperfect world.

Many blame the sins of the pedophile priests on a mix of homosexuality and celibacy, but to equate pedophilia with homosexuality is reactionary, and mistaken. The celibacy connection is another thing altogether. Forcing celibacy on those with healthy hormones — and telling them that they’re becoming ‘pure’ because of it — is a recipe for deceit, perversity and disaster. On the other hand, there are those who handle it well, even thrive off it — it seems to be a matter of personal temperament. I was avowedly celibate for eight years with great enthusiasm, hoping it would wean me off urges that had only brought me pain and heartache. That didn’t work, and I returned to a normal lifestyle, to face the music and eventually discover unexpected joy. Other people, like Wilfred Thesiger the great English explorer and writer, professed to simply prefer that way of life. There was no social pressure on him to be a confirmed bachelor; he simply was one.

Likewise, many priests are successfully celibate. Still, those who are not are apparently not a tiny minority, as the church insists. The history of the Catholic Church is one of breathtaking hypocrisy, featuring among other things dozens of pope’s mistresses, even wives. Wisely, the Eastern Orthodox Church offers priesthood with or without celibacy.

Why is the Catholic Church stuck on it? Because it’s considered holy.

I found the same attitude in Tibetan monasticism, where celibacy is the norm and homosexuality, of course, exists too. I never heard of any cases of pedophilia, but that’s presumably because the Tibetan establishment bears the same unwritten code of silence as the Catholics, and is not exposed to the same sort of scrutiny. Bad things that happen in monasteries are hushed up for two stubborn reasons: so as to not a) besmirch the monks, and b) weaken the faith of the laity. Within the confines of the ‘holy’ life, such logic is the automatic reaction. Also, in the ritualistic world of Tibetan Tantrism, ‘preserving one’s seed’ is considered a meditative accomplishment, a source of vigour and prerequisite for serious practice.

I never experienced, understood or believed that, and have never been sympathetic to it. I went to church every Sunday as a child, and heard the weekly announcement of ‘couple counseling’ provided by the parish priest — a man with supposedly no experience of sex, personal intimacy or parenting. I thought that preposterous; to their credit, many of my parents’ Catholic friends were of the same opinion, though they kept it discretely to themselves.

As I studied the life and times of the Buddha, it seems to me that he demanded celibacy from his monks for entirely practical reasons — firstly, he built communities that were dependant on local lay people for food and shelter, and needed his monks to not look as if they were having a fun and pleasant life on the backs of their benefactors. Secondly, a life of withdrawal was the antithesis to the ‘householder’ life, i.e. one with family responsibilities. In the days when sexual intercourse led almost inevitably to pregnancy, dependants and the need for a livelihood, you could either withdraw into meditative retreat or accept the everyday responsibilities of a parent, spouse and provider — the two were mutually exclusive. Makes sense to me, but what does it have to do with ‘purity?’

I’ve come to think of purity as an affectation, a notion I associate mostly with religious and racial bigots, a pretense and an untruth especially when it comes to sex. It’s true that sexuality can be a source of dissipation and confusion, but it’s also the source of the greatest intimacy most people experience. In good hands, it’s a foundation of mature, fruitful relationships — far more compatible with the reflective lifestyle than is the pointless attempt to deny one’s natural urges. It’s simply enriching — though not necessarily so. That takes a suitable match, real honesty and hard work.

There’s nothing revolutionary in this. Many religious traditions, like the Orthodox Christians, embrace sexuality. Some, like Judaism, largely reject celibacy. Now that makes sense. Except for a small few, celibacy is unnatural. Even when it is suitable for a particular individual, I can’t for the life of me see how it suggests any sort of saintliness or spiritual advantage; it’s just a preference. Even the Catholic Church calls marriage a sacrament, though most clergy obviously consider it a lesser one than priestly ordination. Perhaps in the fallout of this scandal the Vatican powers will at last reconsider their old prejudices. As rigid and intolerant as the Catholic Church has been over the ages, when it really has to adapt, it does. It’s a survivor.

Ajmal Kasab was sentenced to death on May 6th for his part in the November 2008 terror attack on the Chhatrapati Shivaji (formerly Victoria) Terminus railway station in Mumbai. Terror’s the right word: he cold-bloodedly shot, maimed and killed people even as they lay around him screaming; survivors are emotionally scarred for life. Some people don’t like the sentence; they wish it were harsher.

What he did was heartless, and yet upon hearing his fate, probably to be delayed by years or decades, he appeared to sob uncontrollably. “He should have thought of that,” said one commentator.

Why not be heartless? Kasab was.

I understand this response even as I’m repulsed by it. My first thought for Kasab was, “What did he expect?” Presumably, to die dramatically during the attack and be instantly transported to paradise. He may be a dangerous, premeditated mass murderer, but he’s also a fool. My second thought was wondering whether, had I been raised in the same circumstances, I too might have fallen for the same sort of twisted pseudo-religion. Do I have monster potential? I sorely remember how naive and gullible I was at the age of twenty-two.

Those who are haunted by the question of capital punishment wonder, if we’re heartless to the heartless, what that makes us. Those who favor the death penalty see compassion as a weakness — as did Kasab. Selecting those who deserve it assumes moral superiority and the right to judge persons, not just what they do. I have a problem with that. It’s condescending to those who are deemed worthy of compassion and, worse, it undermines the whole point of compassion — a word that means ‘suffering together.’ Kasab was presumably motivated by a twisted wish to do the right thing. The uncomfortable truth is that good and evil are both products of the human heart, found nowhere else but in the human heart.

To feel compassion for Kasab is not to condone his actions. Nor does it suggest he should go free. That would be insane. Part of me wants to treat him with unmitigated contempt — to think of him as inhuman. That way, I don’t have to wonder whether I too — unlike him a real human — have monster potential. Another part of me recognizes that who I am is contingent — that I’m lucky to have been well nurtured.

We all trip up; when we do, nothing helps us back to our feet like real compassion. It makes us all better people. It makes society a better place. Who knows? It might even lead Kasab to regret his actions, not just because he got caught but because he realizes just how lost he was. Is there something wrong with that?

I’m just back from a symposium on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Diversity in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Alone among psychologists, analysts, social workers and academics, I nevertheless found myself quite at home. Almost all were meditators, some with decades of practice under their belts. There’s a natural affinity between Buddhism and psychology; both are concerned with the human mind’s tendency to avoid the real world by creating its own reality, and to get to the root of angst.

In spite of reminders that mindfulness is rooted in many traditions, Buddhism kept popping up as a principal source; politically incorrect perhaps, but hard to avoid. The Buddha’s teachings explore, explain and map introspective practices with a breadth, depth and precision that’s the envy of other traditions, as well as a growing body of scientists.

Discussion centred upon mindfulness in therapy, but there was also the issue of proving it in clinical settings. The problem is measurability — coming up with the facts and figures needed to loosen purse strings in hospitals and other public institutions. Since 1995 Jon Kabat-Zinn has created credibility among researchers, academics and clinicians for his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, but that’s only one method; full acceptance has a long way to go.

Riffle through the scientific literature and you’d think the clinical study of mindfulness is proceeding at full steam. One of my students recently found 3,540 ‘meditation’ studies on PsychInfo, a database of psychology research. Some findings trickle down into mainstream publications like Time, where you might have seen pictures of fMRI scanners wired to the heads of Tibetan monks, measuring brain activity and spitting out hard evidence. Measurable evidence like this is easier to find in long-time than short-term meditators; so far it’s come down to asking, ‘So how’s it going?’

Even the question, ‘How much do you meditate’ is impossibly murky. Is quietly sitting still necessarily being mindful? In an hour, how much time is mindful, how much distracted? How about that hour-long conversation with your spouse when you were unusually open and soul-searching — does that count as mindfulness practice?

It’s not just that the questions are so subjective, they’re also tough to answer. In my last meditation session, for example, was I focussed more than ten percent of the time? More than forty? I’ll answer, but not with great certainty. Lots goes on in my head, even when I am focussed. How about the big picture? I think I’m happier and more stable than I was as a young man but, as keynote speaker Dr. Tony Toneatto pointed out, that could just be the process of maturity. He’s got a point, though maturity certainly isn’t guaranteed. It’s my observation (purely subjective) that people who take no time in life to work on themselves tend towards a cranky old age. There’s nothing inevitable about learning from our mistakes; facing or turning away from them is a conscious choice we make every day. I count my practice successful if I face more than I avoid, and particularly if that ratio increases year by year — no scratch that: decade by decade. We fall back too, sometimes for longer than we like to admit. And how about that horrible meditation session when you saw just how much your thought processes are guided by narcissism and self-righteousness? But wait a minute, isn’t that insight, with all the subliminal power to shift attitudes?

In the world of scientific measurement, subjective data is unreliable, to say the least — and yet the Buddha developed mindfulness as an empirical practice. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that Buddhist practice and science share three qualities: a commitment to the empirical method, belief in universal cause and effect and a distrust of absolutes. Both favour outcomes that can be duplicated — scientific research by replicating results in different laboratories and Buddhism by guiding people to the same state of awakening. However, although you and I can chat fruitfully about our meditational experiences, there’s no way to compare them brick for brick.

Without hard evidence, a forward-thinking activist working in a hospital, say, is hard-pressed to sell his or her vision to budget administrators. She’s asking them to commit scarce resources to an untested — indeed, so far untestable — new approach to stress.

But of course it’s not new at all. It’s been around for twenty-six hundred years, morphing in that time from the teachings of an itinerant iconoclast (Siddhattha the Buddha) to the monolithic traditions of austere Theravadins, anti-rational Zenners and magic-wielding Tibetans. Keynote speaker Ana Bodnar raised the question of why interest in mindfulness has grown so explosively in recent years. I see two reasons: these practices come into the hands of secular Westerners just as we’re being drowned in the attention-fracturing synthesis of fast-changing technology and knee-jerk consumerism. We’re also dealing with the indigestible materialism that’s left over from the rejection of our parents’ religion and the growing realisation that the baby’s gone with the bathwater.

How are we now to take such ancient practices? Many people, as I once did, embrace one or another of these foreign cultural forms, and adapt. Others, like those who come to my Quiet Mind Seminars, have no interest in delving into that cultural baggage and just want the goods — to understand their own minds and to be more awake. In short, we all see the practices as a form of therapy — which brings us back to the symposium.

Anyone who’s practiced meditation knows at first-hand the benefits of sitting quietly and letting the mind find its own balance. Delve deeper with an experienced teacher and you begin to uncover some of the illusions that underlie daily stress. Long-term meditators are motivated by their own experience and don’t need facts and figures. Then there are the committed practitioners, driven by the Buddha’s extraordinary promise of a permanent end to stress — hard to believe, but equally hard to refute, especially once you see stress as a subjective response, and not ‘out there.’

Who knows how plastic the mind can be?

Those who’ve benefited from mindfulness generally wish the same benefits on others, especially when they’re part of a religious tradition that urges kindness and compassion. Psychologists are healers, and want the best for their clients. How difficult and/or practical is the use of mindfulness across the board? Time will tell. Hopefully, they will tell.

There’s no such thing as a religion that can’t be abused:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100504/buddhist-extremists-drive-christians-from-village-in-bangladesh/

I mentioned in my last entry Glenn Wallis, scholar, translator, teacher, author. He set up our Philadelphia trip last week, as a result of which I was able for the first time to sit down with him face-to-face. While there’s always a difference between friends and acquaintances; with Glenn, it was as if we’d been friends for years.

I first met him by email after reading his book, Basic Teachings of the Buddha — the work of an eminently independent mind. In his introduction (which I wish all Buddhists would read, even if they disagree) he describes young Siddhattha — the Buddha — as a “bombastic braggadocio” who claims shortly after his historic awakening to “have no equal” (Ariyapariyesana Sutta). This isn’t to say that he’s down on the Buddha — quite the contrary; it’s just that he’s boldly staking out his personal opinion that the man was, well, just a man who took a while to refine his message. In so doing, Wallis reminds us that all those who claim to be the Buddha’s rightful heirs, as well, are just expressing their own personal opinion, ancient traditions notwithstanding.

The various Buddhist faithfuls, each seemingly innoculated by the weight of its own ancient roots (Theravadin, Tibetan, Japanese, etc.) presume themselves to be pristine — a claim I really can’t imagine the Buddha supporting. As is becoming increasingly apparent in these secular days, monolithic institutions encourage believers to believe what they believe because their elders want them to and most of the people they know go along with the charade. This is a human weakness unworthy of anyone claiming to follow the Buddha. Siddhattha Gotama tirelessly championed the precarious art of thinking and discovering for oneself.

Out of the thousands of Buddhist sutras, Wallis has strategically chosen sixteen, and translated them. These are the core of the book, but not the whole. The introduction is lengthy, innovative  and informative, and his explanatory Guide to Reading the Texts is challenging and thoughtful. In a field where the preeminent approach is conservative guardianship, his creativity is a breath of fresh air and a reminder that the Buddha taught for the sake of living human beings, not to create an indestructable institution. The whole is a slim but intense resource for anyone who’s ever sat back and imagined what it must have been like to walk with the man from Sakya twenty-six hundred years ago.

*       *       *

Until I met him last week, I presumed Glenn to be a product of the religous studies department of Harvard University, where he obtained his PhD. I learned instead that he considers himself primarily a philologist — someone who studies texts, not beliefs. (Before that, incidentally, he was a high-school dropout and touring punk rocker.) While religious Buddhists study the very same texts, it’s exceedingly rare to see them leave their devotional agenda behind. The hands-off attitude of textual analysis leaves more room for discovery, innovation — and inconvenient interpretations — not to mention glimpses of the Buddha’s humanity. For example, the words of the Ariyapariyesana Sutta have been around for millennia, but who in that time has ever made the apparently self-evident observation that the young founder of Buddhism sounded like a “bombastic braggadocio?” To the religious ear, it just won’t do; to the disinterested reader, however, it’s sort of obvious. Wallis goes to some lengths to describe the relationship of the text to the reader and of course, encourages a disinterested reading in the strongest possible way.

Which is where I stand up and applaud. I’m eternally grateful to my old Tibetan teachers, and wouldn’t dream of discouraging young men and women from entering monastic life if they’re so inclined.  I trust the Buddha’s teachings to lead those with little dust in their eyes to a place of dispassionate honesty about what they’re learning and how they’re learning it.  However, the dangers of institutional ‘truths’ are legion; they must be constantly challenged by knowledgeable dissenters and not just by opinionated outsiders.

Don’t just read Basic Teachings of the Buddha; study it. You might hate the translations of what you thought were familiar terms. Fine — disagree strenuously if it’s in your bones, but articulate your disagreement. On the Amazon listing for this book, a reviewer wrote that he preferred another translation. If you can’t read the original Pali or Sanskrit, it’s a mistake to ‘prefer’ one translation over another; serious readers will study several. All those who can, should contribute to any debate that prevents old institutions and automated beliefs from slipping into the numbing slumbers of the sacrosanct.

Diligence is the path to the deathless.
Negligence is the path of death.
The diligent do not die.
Those who are negligent are as the dead.
—The Buddha, Dhammapada 21 [trans. Glenn Wallis]

We just had five great days in Philadelphia and New York, promoting The Novice. Up here in Canada, we tend to be critical of the good old U.S.A. — which is to say U.S. politics — while actually feeling pretty good about the people. Some of them still seem to think we all live in igloos. That’s okay guys; we make fun of you too. Really though, we are cousins  — two countries born from the loins of the same strangely repressed-adventurous Anglo-Saxon stock, then strengthened with language, culture, cuisine, religion skin-color and attitudes from a worldwide gene pool.

Glenn Wallis and the Won Institute of Graduate Studies gave us a warm welcome and a full house for my talk on Friday morning. Glenn was generous in his praise, which is to say that he and I see eye-to-eye on most things Buddhist. Like me, he has little time for supernatural nonsense about the Buddha and the Buddhist saints, and can only imagine the man Siddhattha as just that — a man, and hard-core empiricist to boot. To think othewise is to put his accomplishment beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, which is about as disrespectful of the Buddha’s life as you can get. Glenn and his wife Friederike fed us a wonderful dinner at their home while we tried to figure out why so many ’Buddhists’ end up as uncritical believers in search of spiritual security, far from the groundless, iconoclastic role model of the Buddha himself.

New York was strangely peaceful. It took us a while to figure out just how: as usual, the traffic was crazy, the sidewalks crowded with weaving, slouching, cell-phoning, jay-walking, happy, sad, crazy, tall, short, slim — unexpectedly not so wide — people of every color, size and shape; the sky hummed with airplanes, helicopters and radio waves. Then we realized what had changed — no honking. The formerly endless barking of cars, trucks and mostly taxis had finally been silenced by a new by-law equipped with a $350 fine. What a difference! The noisiest place of all turned out to be our hotel room in the Millennium Hilton — I mention it so you know to avoid it at all costs — which faced right into ground zero and it’s relentless 24/7 construction schedule. Still, as sleepless as our nights were, it was impossible to ignore the momentous significance of this mass murder site. I gazed again and again into the haunted, empty space.

The most unusual part of our trip was my talk at Tibet House — rather than a full house, it was intimate and select. One by one, the visitors filed in and introduced themselves as I put out chairs — a fine-artist, a copy writer, a young man in search of himself, a lady curious about Buddhist debate and — just as I was beginning, a straggler. An older man walked in carrying a seventies-era briefcase wound with duct-tape and a bulging plastic bag; he looked as self-possessed as he did out of place. He unfolded a chair right between Caroline and me, blocking our view of each other. Making himself comfortable, he folded his hands and stared at me.

“Good evening,” I ventured. He stared at me with expressionless intensity.

“You’ve come to hear about The Novice, then?” That’s about as good as I get at small talk.

“Is that your book,” he asked abruptly, pointing.

I held it up. “The Novice? Yes.”

He reached for it. I handed it over. He examined it minutely.

I wondered if he wasn’t all there and said, “I’m going to talk about it. You’ll be able to buy it if you want.”

He didn’t look up.

“I’ll begin now, then, I said more loudly.”

He continued to ignore me, opening the first page.

By now, everyone was staring at him from all sides. He was oblivious, seemingly unperturbed. Suddenly, he raised his head, gave the faintest of smiles and blurted out, “I’m deaf. I can’t hear.”

“You’re deaf?” I asked. “Completely?”

But he’d already turned back to the book.

“You can’t hear anything?” I said, this time very loudly. He didn’t look up.

He read for about twenty minutes while I spoke, then closed the the book and placed it face down on the floor. Concerned for its resale value, I reached towards it.

“I’m going to buy it,” he assured me. “I’m going to buy it.” He opened his briefcase, which was neatly packed to the brim, pulled out a check book and filled out a stub, then a check. He handed it over.

I opened the book and wrote in it, ‘To Richard O’Neill’ — the name on the check — ‘who came to hear me speak.’ I signed it.

He accepted the book without a smile, without a word of thanks and yet in some way I can’t explain, graciously. I thought his eye twinkled, but can’t swear to it. He leaned back and watched me for the remaining hour and forty minutes with rapt attention. At first I mouthed my words precisely, but had no sense that he was lip reading, or had any idea what I was saying. When at the end he got up to leave, he came to me and asked, “Where can I write to you?”

I pointed to my web site address on the dust cover.

He nodded, satisfied, and then announced. “I’m writing a book.”

“A memoir? I asked. Disappointingly, he didn’t even respond to that; he just turned on his heel and made a bee line for the door.

We were all wide-eyed as he left without a backward glance. Nobody was untouched by this man. Even by New York standards, he was unique. He made our evening unforgettable.