The mousetrap

Yesterday we decided to do some cleaning.  We at Wind in Grass have been talking about this for some time, and now we've finally gotten around to it.

We meet every week in a space owned by the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.  The main building, designed by Julia Morgan, has several different rooms which always seem to be in use and which get a corresponding amount of upkeep.

The space we use is a kind of annex to the main building, except that it's actually entirely separate, and you can't get to one from the other.  It also fronts onto a different street, so to get to us from the main building you have to walk around the corner and the down some steps.

That will get you onto Carolina, a street which plunges sharply downwards.  From the top you get a marvelous view of the skyscrapers downtown and the Bay Bridge and the flashing Coca-Cola sign.  To find us you have to break your downward plunge and take a sharp left into a little entranceway.

I love everything about our location, even though the first couple of times I tried to find the group I walked right by it.  During one-days you can take food outside and eat it on the street and look out over the city like you were sitting on the grassy slope of a mountain.  A few times I've gotten a lift downhill on Michael's scooter -  a moment of pure experience if there ever was one.

I also love the space itself.  It is down to earth, unpretentious, simple.  It is basically a large rectangular room with four pillars near the center.   In one corner there is a bathroom and on the far side there is a small antechamber leading to a slightly larger storage area.  We have dokusan in the antechamber.  It's good to practice with humility and simplicity, and easy to do so in a place like this.

On the other hand, those wooden floorboards are pretty rough, and it's not uncommon for people to get splinters in their feet while doing walking meditation.  I like it to think it keeps us awake, but it's probably not the best introduction to kinhin for newcomers.  The place looks generally dilapidated.

So we've finally decided to try to renovate it a little.  Yesterday was the first scheduled day of work practice.  We spent most of it clearing out the storage area.  Apparently nobody had done any kind of sorting of the stuff in there since the 1970s.  The result was a sort of archaeology.

The top layer was our stuff: a few large crates containing stuff for the tea, stuff for the altar, and two big piles of mats and cushions.  The next layer down contained pictures and magazines and children's art projects from the 90s and 80s.  The next two layers, Vietnam War posters and JFK campaign material.

After that things started to get ugly.  At the lowest level the stacks of magazines started to dissolve into amorphous lumps of pulp.  If you tried to pick a pile up half of it would come away in your hands.  By this point you could see the ancient mouse-traps and the scatter of rat-droppings on the floor.

We pulled everything out and placed it into three piles: keep, throw, maybe.  Miscellanea in the throw category included: a set of leather-bound volumes of the complete works of classic authors; a series of large plates for stamping pre-computer spreadsheets into being; milk cartons swilling mysterious liquids.  

The keep pile included an old notebook in which someone had copied hundreds of passages of poetry and philosophy.  I was going to throw it when Marika saved it for our liturgy.  The maybe pile is still there: it is how objects that are too awkward to be carted to the dump have so far avoided destruction.  There are also some pictures nobody wants but were too nicely framed to throw away.

It was all much worse than I had thought.  Every month I've gone into the antechamber to meet with David, who sits right in front of the door to the storage area, blithely unaware of the rat-droppings carpeting the room behind him.

And every week we've sat in the main room practicing mindfulness, completely ignorant of the piles of rotting newsprint festering on the other side of the wall.  There was all this trash right there, just beyond a space we felt so sure of.  The hidden stuff was going to make itself felt at some point, so it's a good thing we dealt with it sooner rather than later.

Rocking the breath

What is the point of this blog?  I don't know - at least, I don't know if it has a single purpose, but I can identify three or four different ones.  And one of these is to provide an independent and when necessary critical viewpoint on some of the many different meditation centers in the San Francisco Bay Area.  So far I've written a lot about Pacific Zen Institute, a little about San Francisco Zen Center, and still less about the Buddhist Community at Stanford.  But I'm slowly but steadily expanding my experience of local groups by checking out new places.  This aspect of the blog is bound to become more prominent since I decided I didn't want to get deeper into PZI.  So here's a brief report on a single day I spent at a prominent local vipassana temple in Marin County.  The report is admittedly a bit late, so we'll have to turn the clock back to last November, when I got an email from someone at BCAS saying that they were organizing a trip to Spirit Rock.

Spirit Rock was founded in the 1970s by Jack Kornfield, a Dartmouth graduate who went to Thailand with the Peace Corps and began studying with the forest-dwelling monk Ajahn Chah.  It works in the vipassana tradition, the way Westerners refer to the style of practice derived from the Theravada or orthodox Buddhism of south-east Asia and Sri Lanka.  It's set among the rolling hills of Marin County, in Woodacre, California.  If you climb the hills right outside of it you can see the San Pablo Bay in the ditance, a flat blue oval ringed by round green hills.  I made the journey up there with four other members of BCAS: our driver, a Zen student; a Chinese girl who'd converted to Buddhism against her atheist parents' wishes; a Religious Studies major keen on Tibet; and an American girl who'd spend a few weeks in a monastery in Thailand a few years previously.  We drove through the large red gates of the bridge and across into the overwhelming lushness and prosperity of Marin.

We'd signed up for a day-long retreat at Spirit Rock on a sliding scale: there were special prices for young people, but being in my late 20s I didn't make the cut, and ended up handing over something close to $100 for the day.  When I got there I was also expected to give a donation, dana, for the teachers.  (Jack Kornfield claimed the basic fee barely covers operating costs, and none of that goes to the teachers; hence the need for donations.)  But what I saw as a pretty steep ticket-price didn't seem to have turned off any punters.  We noticed that as soon as we got there, since the large field that served as a parking-lot was packed with cars.  When we got into the main meditation hall there were probably a five or six hundred people there, mostly on chairs arranged in a semi-circular pattern.  At the front there was some space for a throng of leg-crossing types, and at the back behind the last row of chairs there were people sitting and lying in all sorts of positions on the carpet floor.

The schedule was simple: Kornfield would lead us in a half-hour period of seated meditation, and then experienced practitioners would go outside for walking meditation while first-timers would stay inside for more instruction.  The meditations were pretty standard, although I particularly appreciated the opportunity of practising metta, or loving-kindness meditation, which seems rather under-utilized in Zen circles, at least in California.  Mike Hagerty had taught me the classic approache to metta before, but I'd always found it rubbed me up the wrong way to start a meditation by wishing happiness to myself.  Kornfield told us this kind of resistance was typical in Westerners, so we started off by trying to imagine what our parents felt towards us, and then transferring this love towards ourselves to others.  Kornfield interspersed periods of meditation with some choice passages of other teachers' books, most of them gently humorous. 

When I went out to do walkng meditation I was expecting the ritualized, rhythmic one-foot-after-the-other style that Zen types practice, all in a line of meditators who circle in a given space.  Instead what I saw when I stepped outside was a scatter of individuals, all pacing slowly and solemnly in no particular direction, or in all directions severally.  It looked like they were perfect androids slowly running out of battery power, or like they had all realized they had forgotten their keys inside at exactly the same time, and were racking their brains to remember where they had put them.  I'm not a big fan of walking like there's cement drying in my veins, so I just walked straight up the hill, past a stone Buddha statue festooned with wildflowers, on and up along the path (always good for metaphorical thinking).  When the bell rang I'd be right at the top.  I'd see the robots all suddenly home towards the meditation hall, and I'd race down hill to meet them there.

During walking periods you could also talk to the four or five junior teachers, who set up shop in little cabins outisde the main building.  One youngish guy advertised himself as a skeptic who welcomed skeptical questions, and I wanted to talk to him, but his sign-up sheet filled up too fast, so I went to talk to a teacher whose day-job was as a somatic therapist.  I talked to her a bit about chronic pain, and she was sympathetic, but I was a bit put off by how keen she seemed to get me onboard as a patient, even giving me her business card.  (Mind you, this is America, and people do that all the time, even at social events.)  At the end of the day we all gathered by these huts and walked back to the car.  Lucy, who'd spent time in Thailand, said she appreciated having a Westerner explain the teachings to her.  Everyone else seemed happy enough.  We headed out, part of the calmest tailback you'll ever see.  That was my day at Spirit Rock.  

Brave yellow hay

Old-time (13th century) Zen master Dogen said that studying the way is about studying the self, so here's more about me (not the real me; the pseudonymous one I'm more sure about).  Seeing that he's a fictional character, it's not all that surprising that there's no good picture of Mr. Propter out there on the internet, so I had to make do with one of Aldous Huxley for my blogger's profile instead.  When I introduced Mr. Propter a few weeks ago, the introduction amounted to a summary of some of the central ideas in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (to give the longer title of the US editions of the book).  There Huxley comes across as rather straightforwardly as a proponent of a certain kind of social and political detachment, and more centrally of a particularly uninstitutionalized form of religious experience.  He is, to put it more simply, a mystic, or at least an admirer of mystics.  But if you read some of Huxley's other novels you come away with a quite different impression.

At first sight, Huxley's novelistic career presents a rather unusual development, progressing from the light-hearted yet mordant satires of the 1920s, to the spiritual and psychedelic utopianism of his final novel Island.  The strangeness of writer's artistic trajectory is mirrored by what seems an unusual course through life for Huxley the man.  Scion of a distinguished intellectual family - Matthew Arnold the poet and critic was his grandfather, and Thomas Henry Huxley ('Darwin's pit-bull') his great uncle - Huxley received the conventional education of an English gentleman, attending Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford.  By the end of his life, Huxley had relocated to California and transformed himself into a disciple of the neo-Hindu mystic Prabhavananda and an enthusiastic advocate of New Age causes.  The Doors of Perception, his report on his experiments with mescaline, published in 1954, went on to become one of the literary touchstones of the counter-culture of the 1960s.

Once you scratch the surface, though, and read through a few of Huxley's novels, this bewildering career begins to take the form of an understandable enough progression.  It is true that the early novels are taken up almost entirely with the witty but ultimately meaningless chatter of the English upper-classes, and that the rather perfunctory episodes that punctuate their dialogue are chiefly calculated to expose the hypocrisy and moral emptiness of that particular slice of social life.  In a characteristically inconsequential tale-within-a-tale embedded in Huxley's début, Crome Yellow, published in 1921 and set in an aristocratic country-house, a naive young suitor makes the acquaintance of three ethereally spiritual sisters, who declare their distate for the 'coarse' activity of eating.  Later, he unintentionally comes across them feasting surreptiously in a hidden chamber, their hands clutching chicken-drumsticks to their mouths.

And yet it is possible to discern something else beneath the impeccably witty surface of these early books.  What that something else is precisely is difficult to tell, but it's unmistakably present.  Mr. Gumbril, the hapless anti-hero of Huxley's 1923 follow-up Antic Hay, in a rare break from galivating around fashionable London, reflects that there's 'a quiet...in spite of everythng, at the back of everything.  Lying awake at night, sometimes - not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep - the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece...The quiet grows and grows.  Beautifully and unbearably.  And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps.  Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances...Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can't face the advancing thing.  One daren't.  It's too terrifying, it's too painful to die.  Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone.  Think of the women you'd like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends...'

There are similar moments in Brave New World, Huxley's 1932 vision of a scientific future which has rather surprisingly proven to be by far his most enduring work.  The world of the novel is both utopian and dystopian.  All sources of pain and discomfort have been removed by scientific progress and the systematic application of reason; and if anything does go wrong, citizens can have recourse to soma, a kind of souped-up valium that acts as a panacaea for mental anguish.  But precisely because of this, life has lost all meaning.  A hint of where that meaning might still be looked for comes when Mustapha Mond, the Contoller, decides to suppress a new book because its ideas might lead people to 'lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness'.  And as the Controller concluded, this was quite possibly true, 'but not, in the present circumstance, admissable.' 

Huxley's denigration of chemically assisted happiness in Brave New World sits rather uneasily with his later eager adoption of drugs as shortcuts to spiritual experience.  And for those inspired by Mr. Propter's advocacy of an autonomy grounded in meditative practice, Huxley's later championing of the psychedelic cause can seem something of a disappointment.  As late as 1952, in his non-fiction work The Devils of Loudun, Huxley explained that there were two paths for those seeking to transcend the dissatisfactions of the ordinary self:  downward transcendence, sought for in alcohol, which provided some refuge, but at the cost of the obliteration of all consciousness; and upward transcendence, which offered an escape from the mundane while preserving, and even enhancing, clarity of thought.  Huxley died in 1963, too early to witness the discrediting of psychotorpic drugs as a toll-free highway to higher consciousness.  But the quiet lurking below the chatter of his earlier novels can still remind us to listen out, every once in a while, for footsteps.


 

Sitting

One day a friend of mine asked, 'What do you actually do when you meditate?  Because just thinking about your problems over and over just sounds awful to me'.  I had to agree that that sounded awful.  So it's lucky that that isn't meditation.  Although maybe it can be if you do it with the right attitude.  Because after a while you realize that everything you do, if you just take the trouble to be aware of what it is that you're up to, can be meditation.  It's the flip side of the old koan where the earnest young student asks, 'Master, what is meditation?' and the master says, 'Not meditation'.  Precisely - and not meditation is meditation.

But of course if you'd told me this when I first became interested in meditation it would have seemed like nonsense, and maybe it is.  So let's start how I started, by becoming aware that there are two broad styles of meditation, a style centred on concentration, and a style centered on mindfulness (samadhi and vipassana in Sanskrit respectively, for those who like ancient languages).  I also came across a few other approaches (like metta or loving-kindness meditation) that didn't seem to fit into either category, but I've come to think of most of them as involving some aspects of concentration or mindfulness (since loving-kindness is partly about becoming aware of the other people around you).

In any case, the first form of meditation that most people meet is based on focusing on the breath.  This is the style of meditation I learned about on the internet, and it's typical of many of the concentration approaches to meditation in that it offers you an object of meditation (the breath) and asks you to rest your attention on it.  Another popular technique is to focus on a simple physical object, like a doorknob (favoured by the British teacher Christmas Humphreys), or a ring (something I tried to pin my thoughts to for a while).  The visualization technique I learned from my Thai friend really just replaces the physical object with a mental one like a ball of light.

Mindfulness practices, instead of drawing the mind to a single point, invite you to expand it to embrace everything around you.  You can begin a mindfulness meditation by just becoming aware of the various parts of your body and how they feel, or by simply listening to the sounds around you while trying not to let any particular train of thought carry you away.  When thoughts come, which they will, just notice what they are without criticizing yourself and go back to listening to the noises around you or being aware of whatever sensations there are in your body.  You don't need to grasp at them - they'll come on their own, and all you need to do is pay them the tribute of your attention.

I've practised both these styles of meditation, and I've found that they are different in some ways.  I find mindfulness a more pleasant or rewarding practice when my mind is relatively relaxed and open to the world pouring in.  On the other hand, when I've had a stressful day and my mind is jumping from thought to thought (as one teacher always put it) like a monkey leaping from branch to branch (as it says in the scriptures), I find that concentrating on a visualized object will block out distractions like nothing else, though the exercise itself might feel difficult.  But the more I practice these two different styles the more I'm coming to think that they're doing more or less the same thing.

One way of communicating one of the things they have in common is to say that my friend was right - though meditation is never primarily about your thoughts, in some ways any meditation worth its salt will give you some kind of knowledge of your own thoughts.  In zazen (zen meditation) as I've been taught it the path to being aware of your thoughts is very direct - especially in its most unadorned form, shikantaza, in which you just sit and notice what happens, and whatever does happen in your mind is meditation.  But even the concentration styles have this feature, since though your intention is to focus on the object of meditation, part of the effort of doing that will be to notice where your thoughts have strayed to.

I could put it more strongly: the meditation object in these styles acts as a kind of crowbar with which you can pry your attention from your individual thoughts.  When I first read about meditation on the internet, the monk who wrote the piece I was reading went on at some length about how labelling your thoughts would eventually make you realize that your thoughts and phenomena in the world were two different things.  I didn't understand this at the time, and I took it to be so much metaphyscial claptrap I could leave behind while taking away a useful relaxation technique.  But actually, what the monk was saying is exactly right: really, it's only since I've started to become aware of all the voices in my head that I've realized that I'm going sane.

It's so easy to assume that your friend being an asshole is just a natural feature of the world before you consider that your friend being an asshole might just be a thought rather than something factual.  And your thought may well be right, but it may be useful just to be aware that it could also be wrong.  Mindfulness meditation makes you aware that there's difference between your thoughts and reality by the opposite route: rather than making you aware of your thoughts, it invites you to be awake to what is going on around you, which you then notice is not the same as the thoughts you'd complacently taken for truth.

And after a while you realize that what is going on around you is so much more varied and complicated and spacious and beautiful than what you were thinking that it's not even sad.  And after a little while longer it strikes you that even the anxious thoughts that are distracting you from the moment are part of the moment too, and you recognize that whatever you do, however you may conspire to cock things up, you're part of something very interesting.  And then you can relax, because there's no tecnhique or theory you could possibly need to make anything more perfect than it already is.  What is meditation?  Not meditation.