Category: attention

“We’re all in the same boat. Born as we are in this human body, we can’t escape the blessings and tortures of the human brain. From our first breath, we yearn for love and understanding in the most complicated ways imaginable. We find it most satisfyingly as we learn to give it. The ability to do this comes from acceptance of our frailties. By understanding the conditions of our own lives, we accept the conditions of others. Compassion is not condescension, but a leveling of the playing field, a recognition of yourself in others and an acceptance that their stress is your stress, that their happiness is your own. The gulf between us all is imaginary, born of insecurity and fear.”

—It Begins with Silence (Chapter 9)

It was warm today—a full, balmy six degrees Celsius—and the squirrels were out in the melting snow as I drove up Côte-Saint-Charles. In fact, one of them almost dashed under the wheels of my car—after which I was much more attentive. I like squirrels. More to the point, I hate running them over; but there’s no way around it—when it comes to crossing the road, they don’t come any dumber.

As my driving became more attentive, I got to thinking. Attention is the key to mindfulness; and ‘mindfulness,’ like ‘meditation,’ is becoming ridiculously misunderstood. As I watched out for squirrels I realized that it came at a cost—my attention to other things on the road, like fallen branches, pedestrians and other vehicles. I couldn’t be equally attentive to everything. The more I tried to look, the more I realized just how much I had to choose. This applies not just on Côte-Saint-Charles on a balmy winter’s day, but in all situations. I recalled the Buddha’s instruction on mindfulness—it’s very specific.

The popular take on mindfulness has become, “being in the moment,” which sounds really cool but doesn’t by itself mean a damn thing. The point is that ‘attentiveness’ is transitive—you’re attentive (or not) of something. The sort of practice that leads to awakening doesn’t just let go of annoying thoughts and groove on sensory perception, but actually attends to the three marks of existence: inconstancy, stress and emptiness. This is a lot more substantial, and a lot less airy-fairy. It’s not what people want to hear—which is perhaps why it disables wishful thinking so effectively.

For meditators who seek value for their investment of time and effort, mindfulness brings a) insight into the nature of existence, and b) a letting go of the illusions that keep us committed to cyclic existence. By seeing every breath, every thought, feeling and sense perception as inconstant, stressful and empty, we develop an intuitive sense of urgency, and are shifted from the theoretical realm of good ideas to the immanent one of good sense, here and now. It’s how we become happy.

If you read my last blog then you’ll know I believe in art. The one unbroken thread in my life has been the search for freedom, and for me there is no more creative pursuit. Whether I prefer this or that form is secondary; the process itself leads to freedom.

In the blog, I described the notion art is successful only if it sells as “not merely a mistaken belief that one can throw off with a shrug, but a relentless current of the society in which we live and against which we must persistently strive.” With sublime poetic justice I was viscerally reminded of this truth within hours of posting my clever words. Shortly after two in the morning, my eyes sprang open and I faced the dismal reality of my life gone awfully wrong. Like insomniac sheep, the endless string of failures, bad decisions and missed opportunities passed before my eyes; unable to avert the parade, I took the poison to heart. It was a negativity of extraordinary intimacy.

Meanwhile, my rational mind cogitated busily with counter-proposals. With fifty-seven odd years of hard-won wisdom and firm intentions under its belt, you’d think it could wipe away my baseless imaginings with a flick of the wrist—right? Wrong! The demon of self doubt wormed its way into my unresisting soul. It’s not that I didn’t try. I pulled fletch after fletch of crystal logic from my quiver and aimed it unerringly at the target. But the emotions were formless spectres; every projectile passed through harmlessly.

Sound familiar? Since, dear reader, you’re a fellow homo sapiens, then I’ll bet it does. This is the stuff of human spirit, the flip side to all hope and positivity, a reminder that life is not ours to manipulate but a bag of mixed and unruly blessings. In the unexamined life, stress and anxiety runs amok —but wait, am I not a teacher of self-examination, an exemplar  of how to not be victimized by one’s own subconscious? Well—am I not a fraud?

To fall for that, as I very nearly did, is to invest in the phantasms of the wakeful night; I refuse them even as they torture me. I choose freedom especially when I’m most obviously imprisoned; who doesn’t? There’s more to freedom than knowing better, and free will is an unpredictable gift, a volatile moment of opportunity that spins into existence and out again in the wink of an eye. To grasp it, you must be on guard. For so many since the times of Democritus, Parminides, Sextus Imperius, Gotama and Nagarjuna, free will lurks in the moment between stimulus and response. Stick your foot in that door and you can preempt karmic momentum—even stop manufacturing it, so they claim. Clearly, it’s not easy; equally clearly, only a fool wouldn’t try.

When I was young and searching for a teacher, I dreamed of someone with all the answers; I now know that’s not the point, but I acknowledge that hope—perhaps in my students—and ask, would you be taught by someone who lives without stress and anxiety, or by one who struggles with it daily, who reaches stubbornly for integrity each time his bearings are scattered, who turns what was once defeat into a mere miss, and draws from it a lesson? I’m not as perfect as I once thought I’d be by this time, but I examine my responses with more verve than ever, and have learned a few small tricks. I hope to inspire—if necessary, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up again. After the gifts of my teachers, and from a lifetime of inseparable hope and disappointment, I’d be a fool not to.

Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce (Parami Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-097797741-3) by Peter Clothier
[Purchase here.]

At face value, Peter Clothier’s Persist is a rallying call to starving artists everywhere to never, ever, give up. Under the surface however, it’s considerably more—a manifesto for art at a time when the art marketplace is buttoning up and people are confused about what art is and what it’s for.

According to Clothier, some of that confusion has come from the art literati, in seeking to establish standards and to explain what people should and shouldn’t be looking for in various works. In one chapter he describes how, at a gathering of the art establishment, he inadvertently let loose the word ‘beauty,’ and promptly found himself sticking out of the crowd like a very sore thumb. This is just one of several personal disclosures he makes, AA style, in this series of essays. He describes himself as a ‘recovering academic.’ I relate to this self-description in a far more than abstract way, for my writing/teaching too is the product of a scholastic background from which I’m in constant flight.

Clothier is on a mission to reinforce the artistic spirit in the face of relentless commercialism from which no one is immune. Yes, the starving artist is a heroic image, and the many millions of us who create art daily, while supporting themselves with a mundane ‘day job,’ draw comfort from this image. But he goes further and describes a yet deeper layer of the artistic spirit—the act of resisting the notion that our works are successful only if they sell. This is not merely a mistaken belief that one can throw off with a shrug, but a relentless current of the society in which we live and against which we must persistently strive; not just an act of will but a meditative endeavour in which we look past what’s presented as self-evident in search of a deeper truth.

Here is the underlying theme of Persist: the notion that art is an introspective and subjective path to integrity. As I was reminded just last week by one of my own readers: to be authentic, the act of creation must stand on its own two feet. That said, once it’s finished it has to be promoted, for all art says something, and therefore demands an audience. It’s at this stage of the process, which involves a qualitatively different kind of creativity and far more brutal sort of persistence, that artists risk losing themselves.

I don’t know the art world with any familiarity, but I do know the vicissitudes of selling a piece of writing, and especially of marketing a book in this age where there are more titles released each week than ever before, while publishers take on fewer and fewer per year. On the one hand, there are more small presses and self-publishing opportunities; on the other, the cost of promoting a book so that it stands out of the crowd has risen exponentially. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. What used to be the creative side of publishing—risk-taking—is a dying art as publishers seek out sure bets. I can only presume the same is true of the art world.

Clothier is author of The Buddha Diaries, a long-standing blog that you may have stumbled into as you google Buddhist issues. He’s a passionate advocate of mindfulness and describes in this book both the practice of sitting and the doing of art as an exploration of self. He’s emphatic about meditation being a non-transcendental affair, and gets what many would-be Buddhists don’t—that mindfulness is about dealing with what’s right in front of you. That often means pain and insecurity, uncertainty and confusion. He’s concerned not with bliss but with wounds, and in quoting Rumi and Leonard Cohen (“it’s where the light gets in”) he also reveals his poetic roots. This is the opposite of what most people want from meditation—tranquillity and escape—but it’s unambiguously what the Buddha was addressing.

If you write, play, paint, sculpt or just daydream in any way that needs to be expressed, you’ll find Persist a friend to sooth your frayed nerves, comfort your lonely soul and energize your resolve. Art is ultimately a process in which you create yourself, and in doing so hopefully recognize that self as contingent and ultimately indefinable—something infinitely greater than one solitary creative soul. Clothier’s warm and engagingly authentic book is a breath of fresh air that will help you remember that.

Stephen Schettini is director of Quiet Mind Seminars and author of The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit and What I Learned (Greenleaf Book Group Press, Sept 2009).

Not long ago the Olympic games were a unique emblem of nobility and wholesome ethics. Professional athletes—i.e., those paid to undistractedly practice and participate—were banned. Anyone with gumption had a chance at gold—or so it seemed. In the popular imagination, it was all about the sheer love of sport.

How that’s all changed is too obvious to rant about. Like other sports, the Olympics are now dominated by corporate money; to get their attention, serious participants abandon lifestyle balance from a tender age. The wholesome has become disturbing.

One thing’s the same as ever, though: athletes compete. They want to be the best, and they want it known. As someone who’s particularly uncompetitive, I sort of get that, but am awed by the lengths they go to, as amazed as everyone else by the technological edge that’s become part and parcel of the winning formula. Countries with more sophisticated material science today provide their athletes with superior equipment and a better chance at gold. It’s a long way from naked young Greeks proving their mettle on the slopes of mount Olympus. We shrug. That’s the way it is nowadays.

The way it is, is about winning. True, it always was; but it was also about character and dignity, nobility and poise: words that raise an easy giggle—they’re so old-fashioned; does that mean out of date? While I’m sure those qualities exists in the heart of most olympians, corporate sponsorship and the single-minded demands of winning clearly have no interest in promoting such honest simplicity.

We live in times of material plenty and spiritual paucity. We’re reviled for it by many, attacked by zealots in the name of God. Quite apart from being under fire from people who are even more out of touch with themselves than most capitalists, we’re in danger of losing touch with the qualities that brought our success—those old fashioned values that seem so irrelevant to those who would guide us into today’s culture of entitlement. It saddens me to think that they value those fine athleletes more for the science of winning than the art of competing, and the intuition and heart that go with it.

Tashi Delek—it’s Tibetan New Year! Today, everyone would normally put on brand new clothes, replace last year’s sun-bleached prayer flags with freshly printed ones, and eat and drink to their heart’s content for at least three days, though the festival usually lasts fifteen.

Alas, this year the Dalai Lama’s asked Tibetans worldwide not to celebrate, as a mark of solidarity with the Tibetans who still actually live in Tibet or, as the Chinese call it, China. They are now a racial minority in what had been their own country since the seventh-century reign of King Songtsän Gampo. The Red Army invaded (they say liberated) Tibet in 1950/51 and since then has ruthlessly suppressed Tibetan culture and religion in the name of ‘progress’—a term which the rest of the world is now beginning to view with mixed feelings. True, traditional Tibetan life was rife with superstition, poor hygiene and a questionable judicial/penal system; it was also managed by a theocratic superclass based not on merit but on monastic hierarchy, medieval intrigue and subterfuge. However, the prevalent belief system was Mahayana Buddhism, which values compassion above all, so it was far from completely dysfunctional; still, neither was it what we expect from a modern state. Even the Dalai Lama admitted that the Chinese did him a favour in ejecting him from the gilded cage of the Potala.

Does anyone really believe the Chinese government is modernizing Tibet from the goodness of its neighbourly heart? After all, it started back in those mad early days of the Cultural Revolution. Tibet is China’s lebensraum—growing space for an overflowing population. It’s also a strategic eagle’s nest and home to the largest lithium deposits in the world.

Although the Dalai Lama—to the dismay of many young Tibetans-in-exile—long ago abandoned any hope of Tibet independence and has announced that he’d settle for mere ’cultural autonomy,’ China still paints him as an unrepentant ‘splittist.’ Chinese official Zhang Qingli last year called him, “a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast.”

A what? The rest of the world is puzzled over this depiction, to say the least. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a familiar, warm-hearted personality on the world stage, usually seen preaching universal kindness and peace. Now he’s preparing to meet the US president in Washington DC, and the Chinese have threatened a diplomatic storm—perhaps more. Why? What’s their problem? As their star rises you’d think their insecurities would take a back seat and they’d be trumpeting a strong, self-assured image. Why does this self-effacing man and his tiny diaspora raise such fury in this giant powerhouse of a nation? They’ve got their Tibetan real-estate; the Dalai Lama knows that’ll never change; even if every Tibetan on the planet took to the streets of Lhasa, they’d be crushed in mere days.

Barack Obama isn’t going to back down, and the Chinese will vilify the USA in their own press in order to keep their own people on board—but are they? This isn’t good for business. Isn’t that sufficient motivation? Perhaps the Chinese are threatened by the enormously disproportionate influence of the Tibetans as Buddhism grows in the West, not simply as a religion than but especially as a system of practices and perspectives that might restore balance to a world in danger of industrial destruction.

What do you think?