field flowers

by louise gluck

what are you saying?  that you want
eternal life?  are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that?  certainly
you don't look at us, don't listen to us,
on your skin
stain of sun, dust
of yellow buttercups: i'm talking
to you, you staring through
bars of high grass shaking
your little rattle - o
the soul!  the soul!  is it enough
only to look inward?  contempt
for humanity is one thing, but why
disdain the expansive
field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups into what?  your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change.  better than earth?  how
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?

umwelt

from the open: man and animal by giorgio agamben (translated by kevin attell)

"if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man - and of "humanism" - that must be posed in a new way.  in our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.  we must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.  what is man, if he is always the place - and, at the same time, the result - of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?"

"too often, [jakob von uexkull] affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world.  this illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated.  uexxkull shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist.  the fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us - or with each other - the same time and the same space."

"there does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which little red riding hood loses her way."

"every environment is a closed unity in itself, which results from the selective sampling of a series of elements or 'marks' in the umgebung, which, in turn, is nothing other than man's environment.  these are not, however, objectively and factically isolated, but rather constitute a close functional - or, as uexkull prefers to say, musical - unit with the animal's receptive organs that are assigned to perceive the mark (merkorgan) and to react to it (wirkorgan).  everything happens as if the external carrier of significance and its receiver in the animal's body constituted two elements in a single musical score, almost like two notes of the 'keyboard on which nature performs the supratemporal and extraspatial symphony of signification,' though it is impossible to say how two such heterogenous elements could ever have been so intimately connected."

"the two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as 'fly-like'.  though the spider can in no way see the umwelt of the fly (uexkull affirms - and thus formulates a principle that would have some success - that 'no animal can enter into relation with an object as such,' but only with its own carriers of significance), the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness."

"uexkull informs us that in the laboratory in rostock, a tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is, in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment.  he gives no explanation of this peculiar fact, and limits himself to supposing that in that 'period of waiting' the tick lies in 'a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience every night.'  he then draws the sole conclusion that 'without a living subject, time cannot exist.'  but what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years?  how is is possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment?  and what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?"

trillium

by louise gluck

when i woke up i was in a forest.  the dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.

i knew nothing; i could do nothing but see.
and as i watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.

are there souls that need
death's presence, as i require protection?
i think if i speak long enough
i will answer that question, i will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives-

think what i understand already.
i woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, i didn't know my voice
if one were given me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
i didn't even know i felt grief
until that word came, until i felt
rain streaming from me.

not knowing is most intimate

The Great Mirror

By The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

Our so-called life, from the Buddhist point of view, is simply experience, and experience is relationship. Put simply, we don’t have independent existence. We cannot exist without depending on others. When I go to the grocery store and buy an apple, I might feel very independent. I walk in, grab an apple, pay with my own money, and go home and eat by myself. But in fact I can only enjoy this apple because it is connected to so many people and conditions: the store owner, the shelf stockers, the truckers, the farmers, all the way back to the seed and the Earth. There's so much connection, all the time.

Of all of the relationships we have in this interdependent experience of ours, the most direct, most emotional, and most apt to bring great joy and suffering is a close, intimate relationship with another human being. We give it great, special prominence in our mind, but it helps to remember that it is the same as the apple. It’s about interconnection, interdependence.

From a Buddhist point of view, relationship is a great mirror. It is the mirror in which we see ourselves, in which we discover ourselves. That mirror can be distorted. I remember the first time I saw myself in a funhouse mirror: “Oh, what happened to me? I’m all stretched out.” [laughter] The mirror can also be very clear. We can see ourselves and what we are up to so directly. That makes relationship a beautiful experience.

When we sit by ourselves, it’s easy to enjoy our mental games, fantasies, ego trips, and so forth. We can go on and on and on without any problem. But try that with your partner! Then here comes the mirror. The mirror will reflect and show you your ugly ego trips. A mirror is very neutral—it just reflects. It doesn't take any sides. It is just a mirror for both of us.

In this mirror, we discover ourselves—our tendencies, our weaknesses, and our strengths. We discover our good qualities as well as our negative qualities. So this mirror becomes a very precious teacher for us, a very precious path. The mirror of relationship becomes a very precious teaching for us to discover who we really are and where we are on the path and in the world altogether.

This is a lot to take in, so our tendency is to see what we want to see in this relationship mirror. The problem with this approach in a close relationship is that two people are seeing two different things. If I want to see something and she wants to see something else, we're both seeing two different things. As a result, we're being thrown off from the balance, the benefit, the preciousness of the relationship, the mirror. We would rather idealize our relationship; we would rather escape. We would rather live in the future than in this very immediate present moment. But if we can practice being in this present moment, relationship can become a path and the mirror can be a great teacher.

In our relationship with another, we often misunderstand how we are connected. We may think we are two made into one, or we may think we are completely independent. My father taught me that a marriage or partnership, an intimate relationship with another human being, is like two rings coming together. You can illustrate it with your fingers. Make a ring with each hand, then join the rings together. There's a common space in the center. There is mutual responsibility, joy, and sharing, yet at the same time, we must understand there are also the two sides. There is not only the middle; individual space is also necessary.

If we try to overlap these two rings totally, we lose balance. There is a common bond, but there are also two individual mind streams. We must respect that and allow the other independence. The common space respects the individual space. We cannot overpower the other or make them just like us. The other not only has needs but also individual, habitual karmic habits that you cannot change. They need to initiate change themselves; you cannot forcibly change them. Buddhism teaches us that you cannot change someone's karma; not even Buddha can do that. He said, “I can only show you the path; to do it is totally up to you.”

That's the basic principle in a relationship—we share. We share our wisdom, our knowledge, we allow ourselves to be a mirror, but it’s up to the individual to make the choice. We must respect that. We must know that the other acts out of habit pattern, just as we do. Just as we cannot be forcibly changed from the outside, so too with them.

Problems begin when we lose the balance that comes from understanding the interplay of connection and separateness. We lose the sense of mindfulness when we lose the basic balance of the selfless, egoless teaching, and become selfish, ego-centered, or even ego-maniacal.

That's where dukkha (suffering) begins and joy ends, where the joy of relationship ends and the dukkha of relationship begins. When a relationship is troubling, that will stimulate our path. We can’t expect it to always be perfect. In the mirror of relationship, we discover all these things. We discover the real nature of relationship and we discover how we go off balance, how we lose the egoless, selfless view, how we lose the sense of love and caring.

Practicing mindfulness and awareness can help us see in the mirror more clearly. Mindfulness can tame the mental wildness that causes us to go so off balance. Mindfulness puts that wild mind in a corral. Once the wild horse of our mind is a little settled, we can train it by tying it to the post of awareness. Then we can train the horse to do all sorts of things, including to exert itself on the path of relationship and take joy and delight in loving.


from We Are All Wayfarers

By Sylvia Boorstein

... The ninth branch of the eightfold path is relationship, and its path is metta, loving-kindness practice. Loving-kindness is really mindfulness, telling the truth about what’s really going on. One way we can practice it is to say on the in-breath, “May I meet this moment fully,” and on the out-breath, “May I meet it as a friend.” Try that, and see how it feels. When we meet the moment fully, in relationship, as a friend, we combine mindfulness and loving-kindness. We stop plotting our fable, our story about who did what to whom.

Buddhism is very optimistic about the human capacity for love, about the potential of what we can do with love. We can develop a love that is steadfast and universal. We develop it not because we force ourselves to love so fully. Rather, we discover that loving unconditionally is the greatest source of joy, and that we are the loser for any hesitation or interruption in that love, such as “I would really love you if you would just do your share of the cooking, if you would just do this, if you would just do that.” Whenever we hesitate like that, we lose.

Buddhism tells us that in spite of all the circumstances we face, we could have a steadfast love for all beings. For most people who come to study dharma, this kind of love begins to feel right to them. It seems right to them when they realize that this world only becomes problematic when we hesitate to love.

There’s a phrase that I’m very fond of that comes from the late Nyanaponika Thera, a wonderful German-born mindfulness teacher who went to Sri Lanka and was ordained as a monk. Thera spoke of a “love that embraces all human beings, knowing well that we are all wayfarers through this round of existence and that we all experience the same laws of suffering.”

This is such a moving phrase, because if I can see that the person who has irritated me has, like me, very simple wants, then I can embrace the moment fully and as a friend. This person irritating me really just wants to get through this life without too much suffering. This person, like all people, suffers in the same ways I do: Things don't happen the way they want. Things that are dear to them don't last. Things keep changing. They are “wayfarers through this round of existence,” and they suffer just like I do.

There's a line from the Buddha that may seem discouraging of relationships. The Buddha says that everything that is dear to us causes pain. I didn't like that when I first read it at the beginning of my practice, but after a while I realized that it’s simply an expression of the truth. It doesn't mean we shouldn’t have relationships. It doesn't mean not to have things dear to you. It just means that in this life of change, we will lose everything that's dear to us, unless that which is dear loses us first. Everything will change. It won't be what it was, or it will no longer be what we wanted, or we’ll stop loving it and then we'll feel bad about it, or we'll love it so very much and something will happen to it, and then it won't be available to us, and on and on and on. This life is full of getting used to losses. The only adequate response is to love fully and realize we have a precious short life.

The teaching that everything dear to us causes pain has helped me to be more clear that I'm eager to use relationship as a practice. It helps me remember not to mortgage away any of my days by having a grudge or a grievance or making myself distant. That would simply cause a rupture in that steadfast, universal love that is so joyful.



Not Knowing Is the Most Intimate

By John Tarrant

Having a meditation practice is a way of fully entering your life, without reservation. When you meditate, when you sit and notice without assessing how you’re doing, you just show up for your life. In the moment of meditation, nothing is required of you. It’s enough to be here on the planet, to experience a moment of presence, to fully honor the gift of being alive. And it is a gift, one that just comes to you. You don’t have to ask.

If we don't show up for our own life, we tend to ask other people to fill in the bits we won't show up for. That makes it hard on them. So love begins with really showing up. And practice helps. It’s a way of not dodging the difficult, painful bits. It’s also not dodging the beauty and the marvel of life, the wonder and our capacity to connect to others. Love starts there.

But we often make a few really basic errors. We sometimes have the idea that a relationship is like a machine, one we can fix if we put the right oil on it or replace a few sprockets. We also can think that a relationship is a matter of calculating the sums of good and bad, what we’re getting and not getting.

If we start looking at other people as a gift, it helps us out of these traps. I have a teenage daughter and I'm close to her. You notice with a child that you show up without wanting a lot in return. It’s not an exchange: give this, get that. It could be like that in all our relationships, with lovers, teachers, friends, what have you. It’s not a trade. The word bodhichitta conveys wanting to open our own hearts and minds because it’s good for the world, not just for us (but it is good for us, too). Bodhichitta is not esoteric; it’s a fundamental human experience. It’s part of the nature of mind.

Relationship is not an event isolated from our spiritual practice. We're involved in a relationship because we're on our path. We have a practice and somehow our relationship has become part of our practice. It’s not something different from our practice. It’s not this thing over there that makes me happy so I can have a practice over here. It’s not the other thing that pays the rent or gets me laid. It’s part of practice.

There's a long arc to love, just the way there's a long arc to having a spiritual practice. When you’re on that long arc, you don't say, “I tried meditation once, and I didn’t get what I wanted, so it’s not right for me.” If you have a spiritual practice in your life, you're actually showing up for your life. If your mind is restless and uneasy, you're showing up for your mind being restless and uneasy.  If you stop fighting it, stop thinking it should be different, if you allow a little bit of an opening—even just having compassion for your inability to have compassion—the donkey will start to turn toward home.

You don't have to be good at this stuff. You just have to have a little bit of turning toward it and it will start teaching you and giving you gifts. It’s much better to do a spiritual practice really badly than not to do it. In fact, it’s much better to do a spiritual practice really badly than to do it well, because if you're doing it badly you'll probably learn something, so long as you keep doing it.

A while ago my mother was dying. I traveled home, went to the hospital, held her hand, and sat with her. The next morning she was still alive, so I did the same thing. Meanwhile, my sisters were negotiating with the nurses about oxygen levels, my father was trying to encourage mom to stay in this world, to eat for him (“May I tempt you with just a spoonful of this custard, Allison?”), and my mom was holding off my dad with garlic and crosses. But I didn't have anything to do, no special role, and I began to think that was probably good. I noticed that when I wanted anybody in that room to be different, it became rather painful. “Dad, ease up. I mean, she's dying. She doesn't want to eat.” Or, “Mom, he just loves you and he's trying to be helpful and it probably would help if you ate.” Or, “Girls, you could relax; the oxygen is not going to help her now.” I had all those let's-improve-the-world thoughts, but I noticed that when I didn't go with those, everything was completely at peace. People were doing what they were doing because they needed to. Who am I to know what they should be doing? It was beautiful appreciating how much they cared about each other.

The koan for that situation is, “Not knowing is most intimate.” What if someone shouldn’t be improved? Maybe if they gave up smoking, they’d turn out to be a serial killer. How about not wanting to change others? How about not wanting to change yourself?

We spend a lot of time whipping the donkey. If we stopped doing that, we might find we change in unexpected ways, and others do as well. Most projects to change other people or ourselves are really projects about interior decoration for the prison. A spiritual practice is really about jail breaking. When you show up for your life, what kind of ride do you want to take? Do you want to spend your time telling other people they should be different?

Love means bearing people's differences without trying to change them—not just bearing, but valuing and appreciating and loving people's uniqueness. That’s a path all by itself. What if the fact that you're different from me is a gateway rather than an obstacle?

lamium

by louise gluck

this is how you live when you have a cold heart.
as i do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

the sun hardly touches me.
sometimes i see it in early spring, rising very far away.
then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it.  i feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

living things don't all require
light in the same degree.  some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

but you know this already.
you and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

the wild iris

by louise gluck

at the end of my suffering
there was a door.

hear me out: that which you call death
i remember.

overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
then nothing.  the weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

it is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little.  and what i took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

you who do not remember
passage from the other world
i tell you i could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

kora in hell:

by william carlos williams 

IMPROVISATIONS XVIII. 

1

How deftly we keep love from each other. It is no trick at 
all: the movement of a cat that leaps a low barrier. You have 
if the truth be known loved only one man and that was before 
my time. Past him you have never thought nor desired to think. 
In his perfections you are perfect. You are likewise perfect in 
other things. You present to me the surface of a marble. And 
I, we will say, loved also before your time. Put it quite 
obscenely. And I have my perfections. So here we present 
ourselves to each other naked. What have we effected ? Say 
we have aged a little together and you have borne children. We 
have in short thriven as the world goes. We have proved fertile. 
The children are apparently healthy. One of them is even 
whimsical and one has an unusual memory and a keen eye. 
But It is not that we have not felt a certain rumbling, a certain 
stirring of the earth but what has it amounted to? Your first 
love and mine were of different species. There is only one way 
out. It is for me to take up my basket of words and for you to 
sit at your piano, each his own way, until I have, if it so be that 
good fortune smile my way, made a shrewd bargain at some fair 
and so by dint of heavy straining supplanted in your memory the 
brilliance of the old armhold. Which is impossible. Ergo: I 
am a blackguard. 

The act is disclosed by the imagination of it. But of first 
importance is to realize that the imagination leads and the deed 
comes behind. First Don Quixote then Sancho Panza. So that 
the act, to win its praise, will win it in diverse fashions according 
to the way the imagination has taken. Thus a harsh deed will 
sometimes win its praise through laughter and sometimes through 
savage mockery, and a deed of simple kindness will come to its 
reward through sarcastic comment. Each thing is secure in its 
own perfections. 

2 

After thirty years staring at one true phrase he discovered 
that its opposite was true also. For weeks he laughed in the grip 
of a fierce self derision. Having lost the falsehood to which he d 
fixed his hawser he rolled drunkenly about the field of his 
environment before the new direction began to dawn upon his 
cracked mind. What a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness. 
Soft hearted, hard hearted. Thick crystals began to shoot 
through the liquid of his spirit. Black, they were: branches that 
have lain in a fog which now a wind is blowing away. Things 
move. Fatigued as you are watch how the mirror sieves out the 
extraneous : in sleep as in waking. Summoned to his door by a 
tinkling bell he looked into a white face, the face of a man 
convulsed with dread, saw the laughter back of its drawn alert 
ness. Out in the air: the sidesplitting burlesque of a sparkling 
midnight stooping over a little house on a sandbank. The city at 
the horizon blowing a lurid red against the flat cloud. The moon 
masquerading for a tower clock over the factory, its hands in a 
gesture that, were time real, would have settled all. But the 
delusion convulses the leafless trees with the deepest appreciation 
of the mummery : insolent poking of a face upon the half-lit win 
dow from which the screams burst. So the man alighted in the 
great silence, with a myopic star blinking to clear its eye over his 
hat top. He comes to do good. Fatigue tickles his calves and 
the lower part of his back with solicitous fingers, strokes his feet 
and his knees with appreciative charity. He plunges up the dark 
steps on his grotesque deed of mercy. In his warped brain an 
owl of irony fixes on the immediate object of his care as if it 
were the thing to be destroyed, guffaws at the impossibility of 
putting any kind of value on the object inside or of even reversing 
or making less by any other means than induced sleep which is 
no solution the methodical gripe of the sufferer. Stupidity 
couched in a dingy room beside the kitchen. One room stove- 
hot, the next the dead cold of a butcher s ice box. The man 
leaned and cut the baby from its stem. Slop in disinfectant, roar 
with derision at the insipid blood stench: hallucination comes to 
the rescue on the brink of seriousness: the gas-stove flame is 
starblue, violets back of L Orloge at Lancy. The smile of a 
spring morning trickles into the back of his head and blinds the 
eyes to the irritation of the poppy red flux. A cracked window 
blind lets in Venus. Stars. The hand-lamp is too feeble to have 
its own way. The vanity of their neck stretching, trying to be 
large as a street-lamp sets him roaring to himself anew. And 
rubber gloves, the color of moist dates, the identical glisten and 
texture : means a ballon trip to Fez. So one is a ridiculous savior 
of the poor, with fatigue always at his elbow with a new jest, 
the newest smutty story, the prettiest defiance of insipid pretences 
that cannot again assert divine right nonsensical gods that are 
fit to lick shoes clean : and the great round face of Sister Palagia 
straining to keep composure against the jaws of a body louse. 
In at the back door. We have been a benefactor. The cross 
laughter has been denied us but one cannot have more than the 
appetite sanctions. 

3 

Awake early to the white blare of a sun flooding in sidewise. 
Strip and bathe in it. Ha, but an ache tearing at your throat and 
a vague cinema lifting its black moon blot all out. There s no 
walking barefoot in the crisp leaves nowadays. There s no 
dancing save in the head s dark. Go draped in soot; call on 
modern medicine to help you: the coal man s blowing his thin 
dust up through the house ! Why then, a new step lady ! I ll 
meet you you know where o the dark side! Let the wheel 
click.  

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which 
coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the 
screen at the movies. Somewhere there appears to be a mal 
adjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of 
unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual 
things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow 
dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not 
always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can. 

if you love the terrible

getting acquainted

from awareness itself: the teachings of ajaan fuang jotiko

"other people can teach you only the outer skin, but as for what lies deeper inside, only you can lay down the law for yourself.  you have to draw the line, being mindful, keeping track of what you do at all times.  it's like having a teacher following you around, in public and in private, keeping watch over you, telling you what to do and what not to do, making sure that you stay in line.  if you don't have this sort of teacher inside you, the mind is bound to stray off the path and get into mischief, shoplifting all over town."

"a student came to complain to ajaan fuang that she had been meditating for years, and still hadn't gotten anything out of it.  his immediate response: 'you don't meditate to 'get' anything.  you meditate to let go.'"

"how do you use your powers of observation to get acquainted with the breath?  ask yourself: do you know the breath?  is the breath there?  if you can't see whether the breath is for real, look further in until it's clearly there.  the important thing is whether or not you're for real.  if you are, then simply keep at it.  that's all there is to it.  simply keep being real, being true in what you do, and your mediation will make progress.  it'll gradually grow stronger, and the mind will grow calm.  just be clear about what you're doing.  don't have any doubts.  if you can doubt even your own breath, then there are no two ways about it: you'll doubt everything.  no matter what happens, you'll be uncertain about it.  so be straightforward and true in whatever you do, for everything comes down to whether or not you're true."

"the breath can be a resting place for the mind, or it can be what the mind actively contemplates.  when the mind isn't willing to settle down and be still, it's a sign that it wants exercise.  so we give it work to do.  we make it scan the body and contemplate the breath sensations in the different parts to see how they're related to the in-and-out breath, to see where the energy flows smoothly and where it's blocked.  but make sure that your mind doesn't wander outside of the body.  keep it circling around inside and don't let it stop until it gets tired.  once it's tired you can find a place for it to rest, and it'll stay there without your having to force it."

"people of discernment can take anything at all and put it to good use."

"there are two kinds of people: those who like to think and those who don't.  when people who don't like to think start meditating, you have to force them to contemplate things.  if you don't force them, they'll simply get stuck like a stump in concentration, and won't get anywhere at all.  as for those who like to think, they really have to use force to get their minds to settle down.  but once they've mastered concentration, you don't have to force them to contemplate.  whatever strikes the mind, they're sure to contemplate it right away."

afterkill

i went for the throat
my throat
said too much
coughed up blood
two fingers to the windpipe

i went for the head
against the wall or floor
my head
smashing?  i can't remember
something rattled, came loose

i went for the fluids
drained every organ, orifice
my openings
scratched the definition of skin
which is the real
which has its limits

was there a gun or a knife or
a car or ice was there a fall
on rocks or fumes or pills was it
spring or evening what
was swallowed where
did it lead

i went for the walk
in good company,
my desire.
a train approached, a whistle.

i let go of my hand

3.22.13

aphrodisia

quotes from the use of pleasure: the history of sexuality by michel foucault

"the aphrodisia are the acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure."

"when aristotle in his nicomachean ethics wants to determine exactly which people deserve to be called 'self-indulgent,' his definition is cautiously restrictive: self-indulgence - akolasia - relates only to the pleasures of the body, and among these, the pleasures of sight, hearing, and smell must be excluded.  it is not self-indulgent to 'delight in' colors, shapes, or paintings, nor in theater or music; one can, without self-indulgence, delight in the scent of fruit, roses, or incense; and. . . anyone who would become so intensely absorbed in looking at a statue or in listening to a song as to lose his appetite or taste for lovemaking could not be reproached for self-indulgence"

"for there is pleasure that is liable to akolasia only where there is touch and contact: contact with the mouth, the tongue, and the throat (for the pleasures of food and drink), or contact with other parts of the body (for the pleasures of sex)."

"one should, however, note the importance attributed by many greek texts to the gaze and to the eyes in the genesis of desire or love, but it is not that the pleasure of the gaze is self-indulgent; rather, it is thought to make an opening through which the soul is reached. . . as for the kiss, it was very highly valued as a physical pleasure and a communication of souls despite the danger it carried.  as a matter of fact, an entire historical study could be undertaken on the 'pleasure body' and its transformations."

"in the teaching and the exercise of moderation, it is recommended to be wary of sounds, images, and scents; but this is not because attachment to them would be only the masked form of a desire whose essence is sexual: it is because there are musical forms capable of weakening the soul with their rhythms, and because there are sights capable of affecting the soul like a venom, and because a particular scent, a particular image, is apt to call up the 'memory of the thing desired.'"

"in the experience of the aphrodisia. . . act, desire, and pleasure formed an ensemble whose elements were distinguishable certainly, but closely bound to one another."

"nature intended. . . that the performance of the act be associated with a pleasure, and it was this pleasure that gave rise to epithumia, to desire, in a movement that was naturally directed toward what 'gives pleasure', according to a principle that aristotle cites: desire is always 'desire for the agreeable thing'. . .for the greeks there could not be desire without privation, without the want of the thing desired and without a certain amount of suffering mixed in; but the appetite, plato explains in the philebus, can be aroused only by the representation, the image or the memory of the thing that gives pleasure."  


"what seems in fact to have formed the object of moral reflection for the greeks in matters of sexual conduct was not exactly the act itself (considered in its different modalities), or desire (viewed from the standpoint of its origin or its aim), or even pleasure (evaluated according to the different objects or practices that can cause it); it was more the dynamics that joined all three in a circular fashion (the desire that leads to the act, the act that is linked to pleasure, and the pleasure that occasions desire).  the ethical question that was raised was not: which desires?  which acts?  which pleasures?  but rather with what force is one transported 'by the pleasures and desires'?  . . .it was an ontology of a force that linked together acts, pleasures, and desires.  it was this dynamic relationship that constituted what might be called the texture of the ethical experience of the aphrodisia." 

"the second major variable that engaged moral valuation, in addition to the 'quantity of activity' criterion, was the question of remaining in one's role or abandoning it, being the subject of the activity or its object, joining those who underwent it - even if one was a man - or remaining with those who actively performed it.  for a man, excess and passivity were the two main forms of immorality in the practice of the aphrodisia."

"while it was all right to 'use' pleasures, one had to be careful not to be carried away by them - the reason was not that sexual activity was a vice, nor that it might deviate from a canonical model; it was because sexual activity was associated with a force, an energeia, that was itself liable to be excessive."

"when he speaks in the symposium, the doctor eryximachus claims for his art the prerogrative of advising on the  manner in which one must make use of the pleasures of the bed and the table; according to him, it is doctors who ought to say how to enjoy rich food without making oneself sick; it also rests with them to prescribe, to those who practice physical love - eros pandemos - how to have an orgasm without any resulting ill effects.  it would be interesting, surely, to trace the long history of the connections between alimentary ethics and sexual ethics, as manifested in doctrines, but also in religious rituals and dietary rules; one would need to discover how, over a long period of time, the play of alimentary prescriptions became uncoupled from that of sexual morals, by following the evolution of their respective importance (with the rather belated moment, no doubt, when the problem of sexual conduct became more worrisome that that of alimentary behaviors) and the gradual differentiation of their specific structure (the moment when sexual desire began to be questioned in terms other than alimentary appetite)."

"they all raised the same question: how could one, how must one 'make use' of this dynamics of pleasures, desires, and acts?  a question of right use."

the answer to anger & aggression is patience

By Pema Chödrön


The Buddhist teachings tell us that patience is the antidote to anger and aggression. When we feel aggression in all its many forms—resentment, bitterness, being very critical, complaining and so forth—we can apply the different practices we’ve been given and all the good advice we’ve heard and given to other people. But those often don’t seem to help us. That’s why this teaching about patience caught my interest a few years ago, because it’s so hard to know what to do when one feels anger and aggression.

I thought, if patience is the antidote to aggression, maybe I’ll just try that. In the process I learned a lot about what patience is and about what it isn’t. I would like to share with you what I’ve learned, to encourage you to find out for yourself how patience works with aggression.

To begin with, I learned about patience and the cessation of suffering. It’s said that patience is a way to de-escalate aggression. I’m thinking here of aggression as synonymous with pain. When we’re feeling aggressive—and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling—there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved.

So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. Something hurts our feelings, and initially there is some softness there—if you’re fast, you can catch it—but usually you don’t even realize there is any softness. You find yourself in the middle of a hot, noisy, pulsating, wanting-to-just-get-even-with-someone state of mind: it has a very hard quality to it. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the pain of aggression, you create more aggression and pain.

At that point, patience means getting smart: you stop and wait. You also have to shut up, because if you say anything it’s going to come out aggressive, even if you say, “I love you.”

Once, when I was very angry at a colleague of mine, I called him on the telephone. I can’t even remember now what I was angry about, but at the time I couldn’t sleep because I was so furious. I tried meditating with my anger and working with it and doing practices with it, but nothing helped, so I just got up in the middle of the night and called him. When he answered the phone, all I said was, “Hi, Yeshe.” But he immediately asked, “Did I do something wrong?” I thought I would very sweetly cover over what I was really feeling and say something pleasant about all the bad things he had done, whatever they were. But just by the tone of my greeting to him, he knew. That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s vibrating.

Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.

Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.

This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.

Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. It’s like sitting on a wild horse, or on a wild tiger that could eat you up. There’s a limerick to that effect: “There was a young lady of Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They came back from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger.” Sitting with your discomfort feels like riding on that tiger, because it’s so frightening.

When we examine this process we learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We think we can resolve everything! When we human beings feel powerful energy, we tend to be extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved in some kind of secure and comforting way, either on the side of yes or the side of no. Or the side of right or the side of wrong. Or the side of anything at all that we can hold on to.

But the practice we’re doing gives us nothing to hold on to. Actually, the teachings themselves give us nothing to hold on to. In working with patience and fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we’re human beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time until the end of time is naturally going to want some kind of resolution to this edgy, moody energy. And there isn’t any. The only resolution is temporary and just causes more suffering. We discover that as a matter of fact joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of the energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid.

So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy. We don’t have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even for a moment, because we’re just completely typical human beings; the only thing that’s unique about us is that we’re brave enough to go into these things more deeply and explore beneath our surface reaction of trying to get solid ground under our feet.

Patience is an enormously wonderful and supportive and even magical practice. It’s a way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by going either to the right or the left, calling things right or calling things wrong. It’s the way to develop courage, the way to find out what life is really about.

Patience is also not ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You wonder, Who am I? Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns? Who am I at the level beyond birth and death? If you wish to look into the nature of your own being, you need to be inquisitive. The path is a journey of investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what’s going on. The teachings give us a lot of suggestions about what we can look for, and the practices give us a lot of suggestions on how to look. Patience is one extremely helpful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand, prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity. Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation into a hard, solid, fixed pattern in which somebody wins and somebody loses.

When you begin to investigate, you notice, for one thing, that whenever there is pain of any kind—the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain—if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we’re holding on to.

I say that with such confidence, but you have to find out for yourself whether this is really true. You can read about it: the first thing the Buddha ever taught was the truth that suffering comes from attachment. That’s in the books. But when you discover it yourself, it goes a little deeper right away.

As soon as you discover that behind your pain is something you’re holding on to, you are at a place that you will frequently experience on the spiritual path. After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you’re there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften.

That choice is presented to you again and again and again. For instance, you’re feeling pain, you look deeply into it, and you notice that there’s something very hard you’re holding on to. And then you have a choice: you can let go of it, which basically means you connect with the softness behind all that hardness. Perhaps each one of us has made the discovery that behind all the hardness of resistance, stress, aggression and jealousy, there is enormous softness that we’re trying to cover over. Aggression usually begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft, but before we even notice what we’re doing, we harden. So we can either let go and connect with that softness or we can continue to hold on, which means that the suffering will continue.

It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You’re going to say to yourself, “I don’t want to see this.” You’ll be afraid, because even if you’re starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you’re going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it’s something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking to see if there’s something you’re holding on to, often it’s going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, “It’s too big; you can’t let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go.”

That was extremely good advice. You don’t have to do the big one, because usually you can’t. It’s too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

You can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to let go, because there’s a lot at stake. What’s at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity. You’re beginning to move into the territory of egolessness, the insubstantial nature of oneself—and of everything, for that matter. Theoretical, philosophical, distant-sounding teachings can get pretty real when you’re beginning to have an inkling of what they’re actually talking about.

It takes a lot of patience not to beat up on yourself for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to the fact that you can’t let go, somehow that helps you to do it. Patience with the fact that you can’t let go helps you to get to the point of letting go gradually—at a very sane and loving speed, at the speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It’s a big moment even to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is what you need at that point to just wait and soften, to sit with the restlessness and edginess and discomfort of the energy.

I’ve come to find that patience has a lot of humor and playfulness in it. It’s a misunderstanding to think of it as endurance, as in, “Just grin and bear it.” Endurance involves some kind of repression or trying to live up to somebody else’s standards of perfection. Instead, you find you have to be pretty patient with what you see as your own imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness, because the speed of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You are developing patience and loving-kindness for your own imperfections, for your own limitations, for not living up to your own high ideals. There’s a slogan someone once came up with that I like: “Lower your standards and relax as it is.” That’s patience.

One of the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha’s slogans says, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” It means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and fearlessness, and patience and curiosity. We are actually jumping all the time: whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re really happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, in terms of not just filling up the space, going a million miles an hour—impulse buying, impulse speaking, impulse acting.

I’d like to stress that one of the things you most have to be patient with is, “Oops, I did it again!” There’s a slogan that says, “One at the beginning and one at the end.” That means that when you wake up in the morning you make your resolve, and at the end of the day you review, with a caring and gentle attitude, how you have done. Our normal resolve is to say something like, “I am going to be patient today,” or some other such set-up (as someone put it, we plan our next failure). Instead of setting yourself up, you can say, “Today, I’m going to try to the best of my ability to be patient.” And then in the evening you can look back over the whole day with loving-kindness and not beat yourself up. You’re patient with the fact that when you review your day, or even the last forty minutes, you discover, “I’ve talked and filled up all the space, just like I’ve done all my life, as long as I can remember. I was aggressive with the same style of aggression that I’ve used as long as I can remember. I got carried away with irritation exactly the same way that I have for the last...” If you’re twenty years old, it’s been twenty years that you’ve been doing it that way; if you’re seventy-five years old, it’s seventy-five years that you’ve been doing it that way. You see this and you say, “Give me a break!”

The path of developing loving-kindness and compassion is to be patient with the fact that you’re human and that you make these mistakes. That’s more important than getting it right. It seems to work only if you’re aspiring to give yourself a break, to lighten up, as you practice developing patience and other qualities such as generosity, discipline and insight. As with the rest of the teachings, you can’t win and you can’t lose. You don’t get to just say, “Well, since I am never able to do it, I’m not going to try.” You are never able to do it and still you try. And, interestingly enough, that adds up to something; it adds up to loving-kindness for yourself and for others. You look out your eyes and you see yourself wherever you go. You see all these people who are losing it, just like you do. Then, you see all these people who catch themselves and give you the gift of fearlessness. You say, “Oh wow, what a brave one—he or she caught themselves.” You begin to appreciate even the slightest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know it’s not easy, and that inspires you tremendously. That’s how we can really help each other.

nostalgia

questions?

tonight

watch out for the sun

i'll take an x on my finger

quotes from the essay "gay marriage and queer love" by ryan conrad (from the book queering anarchism: addressing and undressing power and desire)


"marriage has never been centrally organized around love, but the buying and selling of womyn as property through a patriarchal dowry system that evolved into the soft coercion of domestic indentured servitude."

"now, in the aftermath of the nauseatingly class-elitist failed campaign, gay and lesbian organizations, and the professional activists that prop them up, remain resiliently resistant to critically questioning what we, as queer and trans subjects, are seeking to be equal to in the first place.  do we really want full inclusion in the institution of marriage, a social contract that explicitly limits the ways in which we organize our emotional and erotic lives?"

"these state benefits and privileges, as outlined in the defense of marriage act, are overwhelmingly about the transfer of money and property (including children, as the only way marriage allows us to think about them is like property).  the almost exclusive emphasis on property rights highlights that marriage has little to do with love, but with benefits and privileges as doled out by the state to those who adhere to a specific set of moral values determined by the church."

"what if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage's forbidden fruits (i.e., healthcare, freedom of movement across nation-state borders, etc.) for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?"

"neoliberalism, which i broadly define here as the concentrated privatization of every facet of our daily lives, depends upon this affective discourse, which asserts that the immediate family constitutes an unproblematized site of safety and security while the rest of the world is rendered a dangerous outside."

"furthermore, equality rhetoric has created a vacuum of gay pragmatism in which our queer political imagination has withered away."

"equality rhetoric. . . positions our most fantastic queer futures as not only unattainable but also unreasonable.  it demands that we put our time and energy into the desperate fight to be equal participants in oppressive and archaic institutions instead of attempting to actualize our dreams of queer utopia. . . i invoke utopia here not as a naively conceived physical time or space, but rather as a mode of critical inquiry, an understanding that we should always be attempting to realize our most fantastic and equitable queer futures in the here and now.  why aim for anything less than the horizon of becoming?"

and some words from emma goldman (1917)

easier

faith in awakening

by thanissaro bhikkhu

The Buddha never placed unconditional demands on anyone's faith. And for anyone from a culture where the dominant religions do place such demands on one's faith, this is one of Buddhism's most attractive features. We read his famous instructions to the Kalamas, in which he advises testing things for oneself, and we see it as an invitation to believe, or not, whatever we like. Some people go so far as to say that faith has no place in the Buddhist tradition, that the proper Buddhist attitude is one of skepticism.
But even though the Buddha recommends tolerance and a healthy skepticism toward matters of faith, he also makes a conditional request about faith: If you sincerely want to put an end to suffering — that's the condition — you should take certain things on faith, as working hypotheses, and then test them through following his path of practice.
There's a hint of this need for faith even in the discourse to the Kalamas:

"Don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These mental qualities are skillful; these mental qualities are blameless; these mental qualities are praised by the wise; these mental qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them."
AN 3.65

The first few phrases in this passage, refuting the authority of scripture and tradition, are so strikingly empirical that it's easy to miss the phrase buried further on, asserting that you have to take into account what's praised by the wise. That phrase is important, for it helps to make sense of the Buddha's teachings as a whole. If he had simply wanted you to trust your own unaided sense of right and wrong, why would he have left so many other teachings?
So the Buddha's advice to the Kalamas is balanced: Just as you shouldn't give unreserved trust to outside authority, you can't give unreserved trust to your own logic and feelings if they go against the genuine wisdom of others. As other early discourses make clear, wise people can be recognized by their words and behavior, but the standards for wisdom are clearly measured against the Buddha and his noble disciples, people who've already touched awakening. And the proper attitude toward those who meet these standards is faith.

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this: 'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I'... For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this: 'Gladly would I let the flesh & blood in my body dry up, leaving just the skin, tendons, & bones, but if I have not attained what can be reached through human firmness, human persistence, human striving, there will be no relaxing my persistence.'"

— MN 70

Repeatedly the Buddha stated that faith in a teacher is what leads you to learn from that teacher. Faith in the Buddha's own Awakening is a requisite strength for anyone else who wants to attain Awakening. As it fosters persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, this faith can take you all the way to the deathless.
So there's a tension in the Buddha's recommendations about faith and empiricism. I've discussed this point with many Asian Buddhists, and few of them find the tension uncomfortable. But Western Buddhists, raised in a culture where religion and faith have long been at war with science and empiricism, find the tension very disconcerting. In discussing the issue with them over the past several years, I've noticed that they often try to resolve it in the same ways that, historically, the tension between Christian faith and scientific empiricism has been resolved in our own culture. Three general positions stand out, not only because they are the most common but also because they are so clearly Western. Consciously or not, they attempt to understand the Buddha's position on faith and empiricism in a way that can be easily mapped onto the modern Western battle lines between religion and science.
The first interpretation has its roots in the side of Western culture that totally rejects the legitimacy of faith. In this view, the Buddha was an embodiment of the Victorian ideal of the heroic agnostic, one who eschewed the childish consolations of faith and instead advocated a purely scientific method for training and strengthening one's own mind. Because his method focused entirely on the present moment, questions of past and future were totally irrelevant to his message. Thus any references to faith in such issues as past karma, future rebirth, or an unconditioned happiness separate from the immediate input of the senses are later interpolations in the texts, which Buddhist agnostics, following the Buddha's example, should do their best to reject.
The second interpretation has roots in the side of Western culture that has rejected either the specifics of Christian faith or the authority of any organized religion, but has appreciated the emotion of faith as an essential requirement for mental health. This view presents the Buddha as a Romantic hero who appreciated the subjective value of faith in establishing a sense of wholeness within and interconnectedness without. Tolerant and opposed to dogmatism, he saw the psychological fact of a living faith as more important than its object. In other words, it doesn't matter where faith is directed, as long as it's deeply felt and personally nourishing. Faith in the Buddha's Awakening means simply believing that he found what worked for himself. This carries no implications for what will work for you. If you find the teaching on karma and rebirth comforting, fine: Believe it. If not, don't. If you want to include an all-powerful God or a Goddess in your worldview, the Buddha wouldn't object. What's important is that you relate to your faith in a way that's emotionally healing, nourishing, and empowering.
Because this second interpretation tends to be all-embracing, it sometimes leads to a third one that encompasses the first two. This interpretation presents the Buddha as trapped in his historical situation. Much like us, he was faced with the issue of finding a meaningful life in light of the worldview of his day. His views on karma and rebirth were simply assumptions picked up from the crude science of ancient India, while his path of practice was an attempt to negotiate a satisfying life within those assumptions. If he were alive today, he would try to reconcile his values with the discoveries of modern science, in the same way that some Westerners have done with their faith in monotheism.
The underlying assumption of this position is that science is concerned with facts, religion with values. Science provides the hard data to which religion should provide meaning. Thus each Buddhist would be performing the work of a Buddha by accepting the hard facts that have been scientifically proven for our generation and then searching the Buddhist tradition — as well as other traditions, where appropriate — for myths and values to give meaning to those facts, and in the process forging a new Buddhism for our times.
Each of these three interpretations may make eminent sense from a Western point of view, but none of them do justice to what we know of the Buddha or of his teaching on the role of faith and empiricism on the path. All three are correct in emphasizing the Buddha's unwillingness to force his teachings on other people, but — by forcing our own assumptions onto his teachings and actions — they misread what that unwillingness means. He wasn't an agnostic; he had strong reasons for declaring some ideas as worthy of faith and others as not; and his teachings on karma, rebirth, and nirvana broke radically with the dominant worldview of his time. He was neither a Victorian nor a Romantic hero, nor was he a victim of his times. He was a hero who, among other things, mastered the issue of faith and empiricism in his own way. But to appreciate that way, we first have to step back from the Western cultural battlefield and look at faith and empiricism in a more basic context, simply as processes within the individual mind.
There, they play their major roles in the psychology of how we decide to act. Although we like to think that we base our decisions on hard facts, we actually use both faith and empiricism in every decision we make. Even in our most empirically based decisions, our vision is hampered by our position in time. As Kierkegaard noted, we live forwards but understand backwards. Any hard-headed business entrepreneur will tell you that the future has to be taken on faith, no matter how much we know of the past. What's more, we're often forced into decisions where there's no time or opportunity to gather enough past facts for an informed choice. At other times we have too many facts — as when a doctor is faced with many conflicting tests on a patient's condition — and we have to go on faith in deciding which facts to focus on and which ones to ignore.
However, faith also plays a deeper role in many of our decisions. As William James once observed, there are two kinds of truths in life: those whose validity has nothing to do with our actions, and those whose reality depends on what we do. Truths of the first sort — truths of the observer — include facts about the behavior of the physical world: how atoms form molecules, how stars explode. Truths of the second sort — truths of the will — include skills, relationships, business ventures, anything that requires your effort to make it real. With truths of the observer, it's best to stay skeptical until reasonable evidence is in. With truths of the will, though, the truth won't happen without your faith in it, often in the face of unpromising odds. If you don't believe that democracy will work in your nation, it won't. If you don't believe that becoming a pianist is worthwhile, or that you have the makings of a good pianist, it won't happen. Truths of the will are the ones most relevant to our pursuit of true happiness. Many of the most inspiring stories in life are of people who create truths of this sort when a mountain of empirical evidence is against them. In cases like this, the truth requires that faith actively discount the immediate facts.
If we dig even deeper into the psychology of decision-making, we run into an area for which no scientific evidence can offer any proof: Do we actually act, or are actions an illusion? Are our acts already predetermined by physical laws or an external intelligence, or do we have free will? Are the results of our acts illusory? Are causal relationships real, or only a fiction? Even the most carefully planned scientific experiment could never settle any of these issues, and yet once we become aware of them we have to take a stand on them if we want to continue putting any energy into our thoughts, words, and deeds.
These were the areas where the Buddha focused his teachings on empiricism and faith. Although his first noble truth requires that we observe suffering until we comprehend it, we have to take on faith his assertion that the facts we observe about suffering are the most important guide for making decisions, moment by moment, throughout life. Because his third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, is a truth of the will, we have to take it on faith that it's a possible goal, a worthwhile goal, and that we're capable of attaining it. And because the fourth noble truth — the path to the cessation of suffering — is a path of action and skill, we have to take it on faith that our actions are real, that we have free will, and yet that there's a causal pattern to the workings of the mind from which we can learn in mastering that skill. As the Buddha said, the path will lead to a direct experience of these truths, but only if you bring faith to the practice will you know this for yourself. In other words, "faith" in the Buddhist context means faith in the ability of your actions to lead to a direct experience of the end of suffering.
The Buddha offered these teachings to people seeking advice on how to find true happiness. That's why he was able to avoid any coercion of others: His teachings assumed that his listeners were already involved in a search. When we understand his views on what it means to search — why people search, and what they're searching for — we can understand his advice on how to use faith and empiricism in a successful search. The best way to do this is to examine five of his similes illustrating how a search should be conducted.
The first simile illustrates search in its most raw and unfocused form:

Two strong men have grabbed another man by the arms and are dragging him to a pit of burning embers. The Buddha notes, "Wouldn't the man twist his body this way and that?"

The twisting of his body stands for the way we react to suffering. We don't bother to ask if our suffering is predetermined or our actions have any hope of success. We simply put up a struggle and do what we can to escape. It's our natural reaction.
The Buddha taught that this reaction is twofold: We're bewildered — "Why is this happening to me?" — and we search for a way to put an end to the suffering. When he stated that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering, he was responding to these two reactions, providing an explanation of suffering and its end so as to do away with our bewilderment, at the same time showing the way to the end of suffering as a way of satisfying our search. He had no use for the idea — often advanced by later writers in the Buddhist tradition — that our suffering comes from our struggle to resist suffering; that the search for an end to suffering is precisely what keeps us from seeing the peace already there. In the light of the above simile, simply relaxing into a total acceptance of the moment means relaxing into the prospect of being burned alive. The present keeps morphing into the future, and you can't turn a blind eye to where it's taking you.
This simile also explains why the idea of a Buddhism without faith holds little appeal for people suffering from serious illness, oppression, poverty, or racism: Their experience has shown that the only way to overcome these obstacles is to pursue truths of the will, which require faith as their rock-solid foundation.
The second simile:

A man searching for fruit climbs a tree to eat his fill and to stuff his garments with fruit to take home. While he is there, another man searching for fruit comes along. The second man can't climb the tree but he has an axe, so he chops the tree down. If the first man doesn't quickly get out of the tree, he may break an arm or a leg, or even die.

This simile shows the perils of looking for true happiness in the wrong place: in sensual pleasures. If your happiness depends on anything other people can take away from you, you're putting yourself in danger. As the Buddha notes, we hope for happiness in sensual pleasures not because they've ever really satisfied us but because we can't imagine any other escape from pain and suffering. If we allowed ourselves to believe that there is another alternative, we'd be more willing to question our strong faith in our cravings and attachments, more willing to look for that alternative and give it a try. And, as the third simile argues, if we look in the right way, we'll find it.

A person searching for milk tries to get milk out of a cow by twisting its horn. Another person searching for milk tries to get milk out of the cow by pulling at its udder.

The Buddha taught this simile in response to an assertion that there is nothing a human being can do to attain release from suffering. We can attain it, he said, as long as we follow the right method, like the person pulling at the udder of the cow.
The right method starts with right understanding, and this is where faith in the Buddha's Awakening comes in. As the Buddha once stated, he didn't tell us everything he awakened to. What he told was like a handful of leaves; what he learned was like the leaves in the forest. Still, the leaves in the handful contained all the lessons that would help others to awaken; right understanding begins with learning what those specific lessons are.
The most important lesson, and the most important item of faith, is simply the fact of the Awakening itself. The Buddha achieved it through his own efforts, and he did so, not because he was more than human, but because he developed mental qualities that we each have the potential to develop. To have faith in his Awakening thus means having faith in your own potential for Awakening.
However, the specifics of what he learned in his Awakening are important as well. It's not simply the case that he found what worked for him, while what works for you may be something else entirely. No matter how much you twist a cow's horn, it'll never produce milk. The Buddha's insights penetrated into how things work, what it means for them to work. These insights apply to everyone throughout time.
When summarizing his Awakening in the most condensed form, the Buddha focused on a principle of causality that explains how we live in a world where patterns of causality fashion events, and yet those events are not totally predetermined by the past.
The principle is actually a dual one, for there are two kinds of causality interweaving in our lives. The first is that of a cause giving results in the immediate present: When this is, that is; when this isn't, that isn't. When you turn on a stereo, for example, the noise comes out; when you turn it off, the noise stops. The second type of causality is that of a cause giving results over time: From the arising of this comes the arising of that; from the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. If you study now, you'll have knowledge long into the future. If you damage your brain, the negative effects will be long-term as well.
Applied to karma, or intention, the dual principle means this: Any moment of experience consists of three things: (1) pleasures and pains resulting from past intentions, (2) present intentions, and (3) pleasures and pains resulting from present intentions. Thus the present is not totally shaped by the past. In fact, the most important element shaping your present experience of pleasure or pain is how you fashion, with your present intentions, the raw material provided by past intentions. And your present intentions can be totally free.
This is how there's free will in the midst of causality. At the same time, the pattern in the way intentions lead to results allows us to learn from past mistakes. This freedom within a pattern opens the way to a path of mental training that can lead to the end of suffering. We practice generosity, virtue, and meditation to learn the power of our intentions and in particular to see what happens as our intentions grow more skillful, so skillful that present intentions actually stop. Only when they stop can you prove for yourself how powerful they've been. And the spot where they stop is where the unconditioned — the end of suffering — is found. From there you can return to intentions, but you're no longer their captive or slave.
In presenting his teachings on karma and suffering to his listeners, the Buddha would offer empirical evidence to corroborate them — noting, for instance, how your reaction to another person's misery depends on how attached you are to that person — but he never attempted to back these teachings with full-scale empirical proof. In fact, he heaped ridicule on his contemporaries, the Jains, who attempted to prove their more deterministic teaching on karma by claiming that all those who kill, steal, lie, or engage in illicit sex will suffer from their actions here and now. "Haven't you seen the case," the Buddha asked, "where a man is rewarded by a king for killing the king's enemy, for stealing from the king's enemy, for amusing the king with a clever lie, for seducing the king's enemy's wife?" Even though the basic principle of karma is simple enough — skillful intentions lead to pleasure, unskillful intentions to pain — the dual principle of causality through which karma operates is so complex, like a Mandelbrot set, that you would go crazy trying to nail the whole thing down empirically.
So instead of an empirical proof for his teaching on karma, the Buddha offered a pragmatic proof: If you believe in his teachings on causality, karma, rebirth, and the four noble truths, how will you act? What kind of life will you lead? Won't you tend to be more responsible and compassionate? If, on the other hand, you were to believe in any of the alternatives — such as a doctrine of an impersonal fate or a deity who determined the course of your pleasure and pain, or a doctrine that all things were coincidental and without cause — what would those beliefs lead you to do? Would they allow you to put an end to suffering through your own efforts? Would they allow any purpose for knowledge at all? If, on the other hand, you refused to commit to a coherent idea of what human action can do, would you be likely to see a demanding path of practice all the way through to the end?
This was the kind of reasoning that the Buddha used to inspire faith in his Awakening and in its relevance to our own search for true happiness.
The fourth simile stresses the importance of not settling for anything less than the genuine thing:

A man searching for heartwood goes into a forest and comes to a tree containing heartwood, but instead of taking the heartwood, he takes home some sapwood, branches, or bark.

Faith in the possibility of nirvana — the heartwood of the path — is what keeps you from getting waylaid by the pleasures of the sapwood and bark: the gratification that comes from being generous and virtuous, the sense of peace, interconnectedness, and oneness that comes with strong concentration. Yet, surprisingly, modern discussions of the role of faith in the Buddha's teachings rarely mention this point, and focus on faith in karma and rebirth instead. This is surprising because nirvana is much less related to our everyday experience than either karma or rebirth. We see the fruits of our actions all around us; we see people being born with distinct personalities and differing strengths, and it's only a short leap to the idea that there's some connection between these things. Nirvana, however, isn't connected to anything we've experienced at all. It's already there, but hidden by all our desires for physical and mental activity. To touch it, we have to abandon our habitual attachment to activity. To believe that such a thing is possible, and that it's the ultimate happiness, is to take a major leap.
Many in the Buddha's time were willing to take the leap, while many others were not, preferring to content themselves with the branches and sapwood, wanting simply to learn how to live happily with their families in this life and go to heaven in the next. Nirvana, they said, could wait. Faced with this honest and gentle resistance to his teaching on nirvana, the Buddha was happy to comply.
But he was less tolerant of the stronger resistance he received from brahmas, heavenly deities who complacently felt that their experience of limitless oneness and compassion in the midst of samsara — their sapwood — was superior to the heartwood of nirvana. In cases like this he used all the psychic and intellectual powers at his disposal to humble their pride, because he realized that their views totally closed the door to Awakening. If you think that your sapwood is actually heartwood, you won't look for anything better. When your sapwood breaks, you'll decide that heartwood is a lie. But if you realize that you're using bark and sapwood, you leave open the possibility that someday you'll go back and give the heartwood a try.
Of course, it's even better if you can take the Buddha's teachings on nirvana as a direct challenge in this lifetime — as if he were saying, "Here's your chance. Can you prove me wrong?"
The fifth simile:

An experienced elephant hunter, searching for a big bull elephant, comes across a large elephant footprint in the forest. However, he doesn't jump to the conclusion that it's the footprint of a big bull elephant. Why? Because there are dwarf female elephants with big feet. It might be one of theirs. He follows along and sees some scratch marks and tusk marks high up on the trees, but still doesn't jump to the conclusion that he's on the trail of a big bull elephant. Why? Because there are tall female elephants with tusks. The marks might be theirs. He follows along and finally sees a big bull elephant under a tree or in a clearing. That's when he concludes that he's found his bull elephant.

In explaining this simile, the Buddha said that all the preliminary steps of the practice — going into the wilderness as a monastic; adhering to the precepts; developing restraint, contentment, and strong concentration; seeing past lives and gaining vision of the beings of the cosmos dying and being reborn in line with their karma — are simply footprints and scratch marks of the Buddha's Awakening. Only when you have your own first taste of Awakening, having followed his path, do you really know that your faith in his Awakening was well placed. Touching the dimension where suffering ends, you realize that the Buddha's teachings about it were not only true but also useful: He knew what he was talking about and was able to point you there as well.
What's interesting about this simile is the way it combines healthy faith with honest skepticism. To act on this faith is to test it, the way you'd test a working hypothesis. You need faith to keep following the footprints, but you also need the honesty to recognize where faith ends and knowledge begins. This is why, in the Buddhist context, faith and empiricism are inseparable. Unlike a monotheistic religion — where faith centers on the power of another — faith in the Buddha's Awakening keeps pointing back to the power of your own actions: Do you have enough power over your intentions to make them harmless? Do harmless intentions then give you the freedom to drop intention entirely? The only way you can answer these questions is by being scrupulously honest about your intentions, to detect even the slightest traces of harm, even the slightest movement of intention itself. Only then will you know the deathless, totally unconditioned by intention, for sure. But if you claim to know things that you don't, how can you trust yourself to detect any of these things? You need to make your honesty worthy of your faith, testing its assumptions until you find true knowledge in the test.
This is why science will never be able to pass valid judgment on the truths of Awakening, for the path deals in matters that outside experimenters can't reach. Although others may sympathize with your suffering, the suffering itself is an experience you can share with no one else. The honesty and skillfulness of your intentions is an affair of your internal dialogue, something that is also purely your own. Scientists can measure the neurological data indicating pain or intentional activity, but there's no external measurement for how the pain feels, or how honest your intentional dialogue may be. And as for the deathless, it has no physical correlates at all. The closest that outside empirical measurement can get is to pictures of the footprints on the ground and the marks in the trees.
To get to the bull elephant, you have to do what the Buddha's disciple Sariputta did. He kept following the path, without jumping to dishonest conclusions, until he saw the elephant within. Then, when the Buddha asked him, "Do you take it on faith that these five strengths — faith, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment — lead to the deathless," Sariputta could answer honestly, "No, I don't take it on faith. I know."
As Sariputta stated in another discourse, his proof was experiential but so inward that it touched a dimension where not only the external senses but even the sense of the functioning of the mind can't reach. If you want to confirm his knowledge you have to touch that dimension in the only place you can access it, inside yourself. This is one of two ways in which the Buddha's method differs from that of modern empiricism.
The other has to do with the integrity of the person attempting the proof.
As in science, faith in the Buddha's Awakening acts like a working hypothesis, but the test of that hypothesis requires an honesty deeper and more radical than anything science requires. You have to commit yourself — every variation on who you feel you are — totally to the test. Only when you take apart all clinging to your inner and outer senses can you prove whether the activity of clinging is what hides the deathless. The Buddha never forced anyone to commit to this test, both because you can't coerce people to be honest with themselves, and because he saw that the pit of burning embers was coercion enough.

RIP chinua achebe

butterfly
by chinua achebe

Speed is violence
Power is violence
Weight is violence

The butterfly seeks safety in lightness
In weightless, undulating flight

But at a crossroads where mottled light
From trees falls on a brash new highway
Our convergent territories meet

I come power-packed enough for two
And the gentle butterfly offers
Itself in bright yellow sacrifice
Upon my hard silicon shield.

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"when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.”

“there is no story that is not true.”

“privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.” 

"the world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”

"charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.”