Category: attention

Even though not everything I’ve said about the Tibetan tradition is unalloyed praise, I’ve been invited to speak at Tibet House in New York City next week. I’m always reassured by Buddhists who do what the Buddha did (keep open minds) rather than try to maintain an ideology at all costs. So, we’re heading out there next week, and also to the Won Institute in Philadelphia, to give a talk and promote The Novice. For more information, follow these links:

Won Institute: Friday morning, April 09, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm: Journey of a Buddhist Skeptic
Is the primary responsibility of a Buddhist to defend the historical teachings or to question them? Stephen Schettini recounts his harrowing quest for spiritual purpose as a struggle between conformity and integrity.

Tibet House:  Friday evening, April 09, 7:00 pm: Buddhism & What the Buddha Taught — Is There a Difference?
Stephen Schettini took his Buddhism so seriously that after eight years as a monk, he quit his robes, his teachers, his fellow monks and his hard-earned fluency in Tibetan, slamming the door on privileged monastic life. Now, thirty years later and teaching mindful reflection to secular, stressed-out consumers, he makes a careful distinction between Buddha and Buddhism. He’ll talk about the difficulties of balancing faith with open enquiry, and the challenge of transplanting the Buddha’s message in the West.

Stephen Schettini was a Buddhist monk for eight years. He studied in the Tibetan tradition and in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and early eighties and was trained to be a teacher of Buddhism to Westerners. He is director of Quiet Mind Seminars in Montreal and author of The Novice, How I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit and What I Learned, and of It Begins with Silence: The Art of Mindful Reflection.

It’s been in the air for a while now; for years, in fact, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it — until last week. I’d been scouring the past for landmarks, to the McCarthy era and a Europe divided. The prime emotion for so long was fear. Today I realized, it’s hatred.

I’m not talking of the simple, visceral, easily-targeted hatred of Hitler and the Nazis; that didn’t even provoke hatred in the allies so much as a cheerful determination to not stoop to their level. What’s happening today is more subtle, not ‘out there’ any more but an insidious division in our midst.

President Obama is not, as presidents once were, simply a political adversary to the republicans; to many of them he’s a liar, a communist and bent on the destruction of America as they know (or imagine) it.

Obscene comments have flooded lawmakers’ offices since the health care reform bill passed. Callers have made death threats against lawmakers and their children. Windows were shattered at four Democratic offices in New York, Arizona and Kansas. In Virginia, someone cut a propane line at a house believed to be owned by Rep. Tom Perriello. Sarah Palin’s Twitter page encouraged supporters: “Don’t retreat, instead – reload!” The former vice presidential candidate’s Facebook page also featured a map of the U.S. with circles and crosshairs over twenty districts.

Here in Canada, the rebuffal of Ann Coulter by students of Ottawa University turned quickly into a dialogue of hate about hate. This ‘republican firebrand,’ as the media loves to call her, saw her rejection as an opportunity, and played it to her advantage. “They hate me,” she said ingeniously; even critics fell into line.

Yesterday in Michigan, eight men and a woman were arrested for planning to kill a police officer and then ambush their colleagues at his funeral. They called them members of a Christian militia. Jeez—the things that go on in Christ’s name!

Osama bin Ladin must be delighted with the way things are going in North America.

My concern is to resist the tit-for-tat reactivity that turns disagreement into disgust into fear into my own hatred. Just because I practice mindful reflection doesn’t make me immune. As a tool it can help me resist the worst part of being human and to nurture the best, but only if I have the presence of mind to put it into practice.

Yesterday I spoke to a surprisingly shy lot of McGill students and afterwards had lunch with some of them and their Professor, Lara Braitstein. The class was on Tantric Buddhism, and they’d all been instructed to read my memoir (see right), which was on their reading list alongside bios of Marpa and Milarepa — two highly eccentric Tibetan mahasiddhas. There was a time when being elevated to the Buddhist big-leagues like that might have tempted my poor ego, but yesterday it just provoked a hearty laugh.

My, how things have changed! Dissent, doubt, questioning and criticism of teachers came so easily to them all that I had to remark on it at lunch afterwards: “You know, all this talk would have been seditious back in my day.” I recalled how nervous I’d been as a waning monk to speak my mind and transgress the unwritten rule that all things Tibetan were sacrosanct.

Tibetans are more accessible today; more of them speak English and more is known of their quirks. Also, far more is known of the grisly annals of Tibetan history, which have been excavated like never before in search of a rational explanation for the Dorje Shugden debacle. Nothing’s quite as healthy as the clear light of day. Still, I can’t help thinking that the colorful complexities of Tibetan Buddhism, quite apart from its potential for good and, dare I say it—evil, obscure the profound simplicity of what the Buddha taught. Whether you study the Mahayana (advanced) and Tantrayana (esoteric) teachings that have sprung up in the wake of the historical Buddha, there’s no substitute for, and no excuse for not, getting to the root of what he was all about.

Even studying the Pali Canon, championed by the Southern (Early) Schools of Buddhism, demands a critical eye, for it’s not always clear what the Buddha said and what others said for him (presumably but not necessarily in good faith). Just as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles must now suffer the forensic scrutiny of linguists and historians, Buddhist texts and dogmas too are coming under the spotlight. For those who feel threatened by all this, remember that the Buddha wasn’t teaching a belief system so much as a means of enquiry, and even though he used philosophy he wasn’t providing answers. His contribution to civilization was to pull the rug from under our feet and encourage us to let go, for nothing’s been more painful, destructive and futile for the human race than hanging on to our illusions of certainty, truth and righteousness.

Hello? Is anybody out there?

I was sure my blog post Spiritual Life would bring in a flood of comments; so was Caroline. True, it wasn’t that profound, but we thought it was at least provocative; while it did express some of my thoughts I was more interested in yours, dear reader. I guess mine just weren’t radical enough.

Or, could it be that I make so much sense that you all just agree with me? God, you’re not just being polite, are you? In either case, I feel that I’m preaching to the converted, and that’s too close to religious conformity for my liking.

In that post, I used a word that I usually avoid religiously: spirituality. Let’s face it, it’s a highly unspecific blanket term used more by those who want to believe what they want than by those genuinely investigating their own minds. I suspect that most of the latter, like me, don’t actually consider themselves religious at all. The best word I know to describe the decision to slow down, get to the root of consciousness and uproot stress, is practical.

This is what the Buddha was all about. He rejected the establishment of his day — the Vedic teaching that ritual, not self-development, was the way to salvation — and sat under a tree to see what he could figure out for himself. After he died, of course, Buddhist orthodoxy began to paint him as perfect. Most establishment Buddhists today are horrified by the suggestion that we might ourselves reach the same level of accomplishment as the Buddha himself — but clearly, they’ve got issues. If we’re to believe anything about the man Siddhartha Gotama, it’s that he taught so that others could find the same peace of mind as he. That was really, really nice of him; it’s just plain rude to suggest that we can’t do what he did.

Anyway, all this provocation is probably falling on deaf ears. None of you are hard-core Buddhists or you wouldn’t be reading The Naked Monk — unless my old teachers have set spies upon me — so you won’t take umbrage at my little sacrileges.

Hmm … how can I stir things up?

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I take my exercise at a local gym. Shouldn’t I—a former Buddhist monk and teacher of mindful reflection—be a dedicated yoga practitioner? Actually, I did practice yoga for many years, and also tai-chi, which I particularly loved. These days, however, I frequent the noisy, unassuming, weight room of the Hudson Racquet Club.

There seems to be a general consensus that yoga is spiritually superior, but I’m not of that mind; I hate the very notion of spiritual superiority. More to the point, neither yoga nor Buddhism are innately spiritual; nor are churches, mosques and temples for that matter; not even the most magnificent Himalayan sunset. If the word ‘spiritual’ means anything at all, it’s a state of mind. A calm, loving state of mind—right? Well … I’m not so sure of even that.

To me, spiritual is the opposite of material, and materialism is faith in the happiness-producing effect of stuff, which means anything that seems graspable. To be spiritual is to withdraw your hopes from those things, turn your attention to the grasping mind itself, and train it not to go where it doesn’t belong. That may eventually produce calm, loving states of mind, but in the meantime, there’s work to do.

I began weight-training for two reasons. One was a response to the horror of osteoporosis, which seriously deprecated my mother’s last decades and which I swore to fight—lifting weights grows both muscles and the bones they’re attached to. The other was to cope with the anger over my separation and divorce. The strenuous routine absorbed the physical symptoms, leaving my mind the space it needed to process the change in my self and my life. It was profoundly steadying.

Still, there are things I dislike about the gym; for a start, it’s almost impossible to work out in silence. Once again, if I want to concentrate and internalize the experience, you’d think a yoga studio would be more suitable, no? Well … no. In those havens of dim lights and soothing music I find myself drifting away in a semblance of meditation that’s really more like tuning out than in. Years of meditative retreats left me with a deep and, I must confess, inflexible attachment to peace and quiet; I become irritable when I can’t have it, even anti-social. How spiritual is that?

So, I try to forgive those people who chatter away instead of working out, and deconstruct my annoyance with loudspeakers that pump out loud, offensively predictable pop music. Now I’m in a quandary, because I’m convinced that mind-numbing, thump-thump music deepens automaticity, accellerates entropy and discourages mental growth. As the years go by, I don’t want my mind to grow rigid any more than I want my bones to go brittle.

So, should I give into my attachment to the quiet of yoga, zone out and let my brain deteriorate—or should I expose myself to the sound pollution that goes in the name of ‘pump-up’ music and let my brain deteriorate? Is the spiritual life really supposed to be this complicated?

From Inquiring Mind Volume 26 Number 1 / Fall 2009