Synaptic juice

The San Francisco Bay Area is its own little world.  I don't mean that in the sense people sometimes mean it: the most reflexively left-leaning corner of America, one of the most pot-friendly, a haven and promised land for gays with the dubious luck to be have been born and raised in the Bible Belt.  All those things are true, of course, and are worth enjoying, and maybe even being proud of: I have to say that I savoured the rare juxtaposition of a rock musical powered by drag queens on a recent Friday night with a meditation and service with black-robbed monks in the Zen Center the following Saturday morning.  But what I appreciate most isn't the area's well-defined and well-known profile, but its less celebrated diversity: not the fact of weirdness but its multifacetedness, and even its coexistence with the humdrum.  Alongside the gays of the Catro and the Mission's hipsters, there are also the yuppies in the Marina or the retirees of Marin.  And maybe no region attracts as much interest from outside the area, and as much ambivalence from inside it, as the South Bay, not so recently rebranded as Silicon Valley.

The Bay Area's an interesting place to practise meditation for a range of reasons.  There's a certain liberal tolerance of what others get up to, an open-mindedness about spiritual practices inherited from the hippy movement, and longstanding connections with Asia, as close to SF as to any American city.  But one reason it's an interesting place to become acquainted with an ancient tradition is its hyperbolic modernity, its position at the cutting edge of scientific research and technological innovation.  The cultures of Eastern mysticism and high-tech entrepreneurship come into contact more than you think, and have settled into a comfortable enough relationship: I only recently met a young man at SFZN who leads mediation sessions at Google, a company that regularly hosts talks by such mindfulness luninaries as Jon Kabat-Zinn.  I have my doubts about the spiritual-technological complex, partly because the union of an ascetic tradition enjoining detachment and a computer industry focused on making a profit looks to me like an awkward hook-up.  Still, like many an awkward hook-up, it's hard to deny after the fact that the experience has been interesting. 

In the Bay Area, the junction of science and spirituality is something you can decide not to pursue, but which will probably thrust itself into your attention every few months regardless, so I thought I'd give you an update on a couple of recent experiences (that is, experiments) that I've had.  The first was a result of an email that was sent around to the Buddhist Community at Stanford mailing list.  Now, I've seen negative reactions to people using that list to send round requests to support the monks' protests in Burma, on the grounds that the issue was a political and not a spiritual one.  But, this being Stanford, we quite regularly get emails from researchers - research, you see, is never political, especially when it might lead to the development of an iPhone app.  And on this occasion the researcher involved offered us a coupon for Jamba Juice, and fruit smoothies can be counted on to constitute just too much temptation for any California Buddhist to resist.  I signed up immediately, and booked a slot at Stanford's Calming Technology Lab.  I never knew it existed, but as I can now assure you, it does.

I was met at the lab by a friendly young doctoral researcher called Neema Moraveji.  He fixed me up with an apparatus designed to track my breathing, which consisted of a band that I put around my torso and some wires  He then asked me to sit at a desk and perform some simple tasks on the computer: one of them was to count down from a given number in sevens.  After a certain point I was told to watch a video informing me that your brain performs better when you're calm, and that calm states correlated with states of deep, slow breathing.  After that, I was told to try to deepen and slow my breathing, something I found surprisingly easy - maybe it's all the meditation, although none of the styles I practice encourage you actively to control your breath, just to notice it.  Finally, I was asked to return to the exercises on the computer, and repeated them for a second time.  The aim, as I understood it, was to develop technology that would encourage office-workers to slow their breathing, thus increasing both industrial productivity and inner contentment.  Win-win.

The second recent experience of this type started after a pretty dry dharma-talk at SFZC.  A young woman stood up after the Ino had finished his announcements and introduced herself as Kim Fisher, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.  She needed meditators to volunteer for an experiment she was conducting as part of her dissertation.  CIIS is an institution that was founded in the early 70s by SF types connected with the human potential movement and interested in bringing together East and West, spirituality and science.  They offer Master's courses in subjects like 'East-West Psychology' and 'Dance Therapy', as well as doctoral programs in Psychology and related disciplines.  It's a small school with not a lot of money, so they were not able to offer me a boosted smoothie in return for breathing deeply.  But I went along anyway to one of their buildings in the Upper Market area of town, just before the street turns really nasty.

When I went in Kim immediately asked me to meditate for half an hour in whatever style I chose.  I knew that she was interested in testing intellectual performance, so I went for my concentration practice, after describing it to her.  She had cushions and mats set out just like in the Zen Center and sat next to me when I sat.  (Considering that she was doing that all day, her experiment must be affording her a pretty good chance to get some sitting in, dissertation research meeting Buddhist retreat.)  After we'd finished I was called over to a desk, told a short story, and asked to repeat it word for word.  Then I was shown a complex geometric object and asked to reproduce it on a piece of paper using only a pencil and memory.  It looked like a 7-year-old boy's design for a space-ship.  At a certain point the fire-alarm went off, which she said would probably force her to throw away some of my results.  A week later I was called back in and I did similar tests but this time without meditating first.

I asked both of these researchers more about their projects, but it's understandable that they were cagey about the details, seeing that the studies were ongoing.  On the other hand, it's not hard to guess that the basic methodology involved in both is to compare performance on mental tasks before and after meditative practices of various sorts (in the first experiment, it was the physiological correlates of relaxation that were tracked, whereas in the second meditation was left to each individual's own definition).  Both studies were extremely interesting to take part in, and it's hard to be against learning more about meditation in this way (though I've had a go in previous posts on this blog).  It will be key for both scientists, I would suppose, to restrict their conclusions to claims about the effects of meditation on subtracting by seven and redrawing space-ships, and not on global intelligence (whatever that is).  And though (to be fair) neither researcher is explicitly excluding the spiritual aspect of meditation, it's hard not to feel that, in giving people an app that reminds them to take deep breaths rather than integrating them into a challenging ancient practice, they're missing out on something.  What that something is can't be quantified; but so much the worse for quantification.

Killing (in the name of)

 
'I vow not to kill' is the first of the ten precepts, and it looks like an easy one to fulfil.  I haven't killed anyone, at least not knowingly or deliberately, at this point in my young life, and I can't imagine doing so in the future, although times change.  Since I moved to California I've gradually become a vegetarian: first I stopped cooking meat at home, then I stopped buying it when I was out, and finally I began to tell people I was a vegetarian and to refuse meat when it was offered to me.  Admittedly, I did it only partly for ethical reasons, and partly because doing without meat is cheaper and healthier.  And admittedly, the ethical reasons which did figure in my decision - the grotesqueness of factory farming, the unnecessary suffering caused to intelligent beings like pigs - didn't center on an aversion to killing animals for food.  Still, it's reassuring to realize that I don't regularly incentivize the unnecessary slaughter of animals.

Although I still eat fish, mainly because they're good for you and a fine source of protein, but also because I like to think that I agree with Kurt Cobain: it's okay to eat fish, because they don't have any feelings.  And I eat plants, but they're not sentient, so they don't count, right?  I'm on shakier ground when it comes to pacificism, that other great Californian fad that you might think is part and parcel of the Buddhist way.  The problem is, I still remember reading as a teenager George Orwell's denunciation of the pacificism of the intellectuals of his time, and even though I'm Mr. Propter and Aldous Huxley was among the most prominent of the 1930s peaceniks, it always struck me that Orwell had the better of that particular argument.  In particular, it seemed that the pacifists had a hard time saying what action they would take against fascist aggression, or how inaction would be in any way acceptable in the face of the Axis powers.

Part of this is bred in the bone.  I was born into an army family and raised mostly on army camps across Canada and Europe.  My father spent most of his career training and developing tanks, making sure that they could drive over knife-edges of sand and ultimately that they would be good at killing lots of people quickly.  My brother has spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and though the ostensible end in view was bringing democracy and stability to troubled lands the means employed doubtless sometimes involved killing people.  If there are always going to be Nazis and Taliban in the world, someone will have to stand up to them; and if they refuse to back down, standing up to them may ultimately mean killing them.  My teacher David Weinstein told me his first Tibetan teacher admitted that if there was a terrorist threatening to hijack an airplane he was on, he would consider compassionately hitting him on the head with a hammer.

David came to our Wind in Grass sangha the other night and announced he would give a talk.  He told us about a lady who had mice in her house.  She wanted to kill them but she was a Buddhist so decided not to.  Instead she caught them, except she eventually became convinced there was really only one mouse, a fact she confirmed by painting one of his nails crimson and letting him go - sure enough, the next mouse she caught had had the same manicure.  This was like the old story of the student who saw a spider drop down in front of his face every time he meditated.  He brought a knife to his meditation and the spider only got bigger; eventually his teacher told him to bring a brush instead, and to paint an X on the spider's belly as soon as he saw it.  He did that and the spider went away.  That evening, much relieved, he took his clothes off to have a bath and found a big X painted on his own tummy.

The talk went down well.  The three or four newcomers who had turned up that night were taking the first sips of their tea as he started by declaring that he'd been thinking a lot recently about killing.  Ashley came in just as he'd finished telling us about the mice and the spiders and explaining that we had mice and spiders in our brains.  I asked David whether you could build channels and obstacles for the mice, jumps and wheels they could run in.  Michael said it felt like the mice came from outside of the house and David told him to paint them and look at his belly.  David told us there were no cats and that, as a Zen teacher, he was of course the mental equivalent of a cat.  When Ashley drove me home that night, she expressed some confusion about the discusssion period, the cats and mice and spiders and Michael's belly.  I told her the stories and that cleared things up, or not.

Not killing in the Pacific Zen school seems to mean primarily not killing your thoughts, your temptations, your spontaneity.  The obvious objection to that recommendation is that sometimes we have to kill our spontaneity in order to stay alive or to avoid doing somethig awful.  The rejoinder is that we don't actually have to kill the evil mind-mice or slice up the spiders of temptation with smuggled knives; actually, trying to kill the beasties only makes them stronger.  Instead it's better to mark them with a brush and some ink or nail-polish.  And that helps you see that there's only one mouse that might as well become your pet, and that there's actually no spider at all, there's only your hairy belly that you can live with, since after all you've lived with it all your life.  You see the anger and the lust come and go, and imagining you can kill either doesn't help you become kind or strong.

Hence the story about the master and the official out walking when a rabbit saw them and ran away.  The official asked the Zen master, 'Why would a rabbit run away from you?'  The master replied, 'Because he knows I like to kill'.  Humans eat rabbits and rabbits eat lettuce and bears eat humans though lettuce doesn't: there's no way out of the chain of suffering and enjoying and maybe it's better not to pretend that there is.  You're certainly not going to impress the official if you pretend you're never hungry and end up chasing after the rabbit.  I like to hate and desire and be self-regarding and self-loathing, but it's only when I try to eradicate and annihilate and deracinate those mice, throwing nails at them and bowling balls and napalm, that they grow fangs and shells and develop cloaking devices.  But it's hard to stop doing it - you see, I like to kill.  And I'm sure I'll keep doing it.  I vow not to kill. 

Democrats or donkeys?

My teacher David did a talk near the end of my second retreat with PZI that centered on Jerry Brown, the past and present governor of the state of California.  It turns out that Jerry Brown has a longstanding interest in Zen, and shortly after losing the race to become the Democratic candidate for President, he boarded a plane for Kamakura in Japan to experience a few months in a traditional monastery.  It just so happened that David was studying there in the same period, and the two Americans ended up sharing a flat.  (I'd overheard David talking about the Governor before; one night at WiG he mentioned, in an unpretentious way, that Jerry had called him to ask about state funding for addiction-recovery programs; David advised him not to cut it.)

David told us how there was a tradition in the temple in Kamakrua to celebrate any spiritual breakthroughs made by individual students.  And amazingly enough, Jerry Brown experienced a breakthrough of just this sort during his relatively brief stay at the monastery.  It's my understanding that the teacher recognizes and confirms progress of this sudden kind; but when the Japanese Master announced to the other monks that Jerry had experienced a breakthrough, the celebrations were somewhat muted.  A number of the Japanese students got together and drafted a letter to the Master beginning with the phrase, 'A number of us believe...' and expressing their suspicion that Jerry Brown's breakthrough had less to do with essential understanding than with his status as a politician.

It was clear enough - though I don't think he said so explicitly - that for David, the monks' reaction was motivated mainly by envy.  In any case, the main point of his talk was that we shouldn't consider anything as outside of our practice, including our thoughts and feelings about the progress of other students or about decisions made by a teacher.  As usual, David seemed to have the best intentions, and if we assume that Jerry's breakthrough was genuine (or that the Master took it to be genuine), it's not hard to perceive an embarassing lack of dignity in the actions taken by the other monks.  But what is the Master was really corrupt, and just certified a breakthrough to increase, say, the fame of his temple in America?  When I asked David this on the night, he said he'd talk about the corrupt master when he came across one.  (It doesn't strike me, from my superficial researches, that they're that rare.)

I can remember a talk I heard at school that was given by a visiting expert on Asian politics.  When someone asked him why India was virtually the only stable democracy in Southern Asia, he replied that it was because India was one of the only countries in the region where Buddhism was not a major force, and that Buddhism taught people to be content with whatever government they had, and not to engage in violent revolts.  I'm not overly fond of religious explanations of political structures, and in any case Japan and South Korea are counter-examples to the posited correlation between Buddhism and political repression (and Thailand and Sri Lanka may be turning into further exceptions).  But the claim has always stayed with me, partly because it runs counter to the link that many intellectuals (such as Aldous Huxley) want to forge between meditation and personal freedom and autonomy.

For me, there's nothing more heart-breaking (and no stronger admonition for converts) that the sight of earnest and loving students of the dharma being abused by con-men like Dennis Merzel, and taking it lying down.  On the other hand, it's hardly surprising, since meekness and acceptance is partly what they've been taught to cultivate under all circumstances.  The problem with David's advice to treat your suspicions about a teacher as part of your practice - hosting them with a patient mind the way you would with pain, say, or a distracting noise - is that it assumes that the suspicions are unfounded.  It's just like when overeducated wranglers accuse opponents of employing 'rhetorical devices' instead of arguments: the phrase itself implies that the arguments have no substance, but allows its users to avoid saying why.

These people would be better off simply showing how the argument they're attacking doesn't stand up to scrutiny; and Zen teachers who accuse critical students of base motives would be better off simply demonstrating that the students' criticisms have no basis in reality.  The fact that they often don't choose this route, tending instead to treat complaints as distractions or pathologies, points a finger at a very real problem with authority in spiritual communities: there is always a danger that the very content of the practice becomes part of the structures of authority that were meant to be incidental to it.  Scott Edelstein advises that we give teachers authority only in their specific field of competence, just as we listen to a doctor's recommendations about our physical health, but not about what car to buy.  But this may underestimate and impoverish the scope we desire for our spiritual practices.

The problem, in plainer language, in that we want our spirituality to seep into every aspect of our lives; a path that worked well for money problems but couldn't help you with grief or bitterness would not really be a spiritual path at all.  Because of this, it's hard to tell people to listen to their teacher's expositions of koans while turning a deaf ear to their comments about marriage (even if the two things could be clearly separated in the first place).  It's been my experience with PZI that students (myself included) want to discuss their personal problems with a teacher; that's one of the reasons they turn to the practice.  An attempt to restrict the authority of teachers by restricting the applicability of the dharma is bound to fail, since the whole point of the dharma is that it's universally applicable.

If trying to compartmentalize spirituality and politics as two separate spheres does damage to spirituality, though, we should remember that it does damage to politics, too.  There is no space in any aspect of human interaction in which politics is not operative, and we only hurt ourselves and others by pretending otherwise.  In other words, the standards of logical argumentation and evidence-backed claims that we employ in our professional lives should not be abandoned simply because we're in a group whose raison d'etre is spiritual.  If teachers or students try to wiggle out of this, we should judge them for it, though of course we should also try to judge in a non-judgmental way.  If Jerry Brown deserves to be treated on campaign with as much compassion as the next Zen student and human being, he also deserves to be dealt with in the monastery with as much scrutiny as any other politician.

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.