...to yesterday's entry. Sincere thanks to Cardozo, Carly, and Eli for thoughtful reminders, hints and suggestions. I have read them carefully and taken them to heart, and I do value the goodness of heart from which they came. My intention is to be patient, and to pursue this weighty problem with all the mindfulness I can muster. Funny, isn't it, how our unacknowledged addictions can blindside us? This seems to be the one that I'm given to address at this point in my life. As in so many other aspects of my life, I need above all to learn--and to practice--patience.
It's a lovely weekend here in Laguna Beach. It seems that I have drop-ins from various parts of the country and the world these days, so good wishes to all for a wonderful weekend in no matter where you may be.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/31/2007
"If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband."
~J. Krishnamurti
~J. Krishnamurti
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Friday, March 30, 2007
Dismay
Those who have been kind enough to follow these entries for the past few weeks will know of my decision, a couple of weeks ago, to take a vacation from my habitual evening glass of wine. I did so, in part, to see what morning clarity of thought and increased mindfulness might follow; but also, in part, thinking to work a little on that spreading waistline and the sense of bloat that seemed to accompany the consumption of alcohol. I confidently expected to lose a few pounds.
Well... you can hardly imagine my dismay, stepping on the scales nearly two full weeks later, to discover that I have actually PUT ON weight! And not just a little: I'm SIX POUNDS heavier than I was two weeks ago. Dismay is too kind a word to describe my reaction. I was appalled, staggered, distressed... SIX POUNDS? After all that dedication, all those envious sidelong glances at my neighbor's glasses at the restaurant, all those noble moments of resistance at the refrigerator door (I bought an excellent bottle of Sancerre before making my decision. There it sits, cooling nicely.)
I sat glumly over one half of a "healthy muffin" at breakfast, brooding at this injustice. The temptation now, of course, is to go out and get pleasantly soused as a gesture of indignation. Maybe that would take some of this extra weight off. Is it possible that wine has been protecting me from obesity all these years? Perhaps I was entirely mistaken in believing that it contributed significantly to the flab? Any dieticians or nutritionists out there who can help me with this? I need to get to the bottom of it.
Before this travesty occured, I had been planning to write today about the "Chocolate Jesus", a six-foot sculpture of a naked Jesus on the cross by the artist Cosimo Cavallarro, which was to be shown starting Monday evening at the Lab Gallery inside Manhattan’s Roger Smith Hotel.
Said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group, “This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever. It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.” Aside from the bad taste, I'm not sure that it's any worse than the chocolate Easter eggs which represent, I was told as a child, the stone that was found rolled away from Christ's tomb on Easter morning. Or what about all those bunnies? What to they have to do with anything? I always understood that rabbits were the champs in the field of sexual reproduction...
Anyway, listen, it's always fun to tease the Christians. I applaud Cavallaro for his subversive action, and wonder who gets to break off the first piece and eat it. And what that piece might be. It would take some balls to go for the penis, no? (The picture I found is strategically cropped to avoid any possible embarrassment to sensitive viewers, but I would have to assume that it's circumcised.) But anyway, I'm off my chocolate now, given the first part of this entry. And what's next? A chocolate Buddha? God forbid. Well, no God. So, heavens forbid. No heavens either, actually. No matter. In the meantime, of course, cheers, skool, prosit, salute, salud, sante...Cheers...
Oh, by the way, I've discovered that you can indeed view the whole, and wholly naked chocolate Jesus. Try the link. And be sure to "launch!"
Well... you can hardly imagine my dismay, stepping on the scales nearly two full weeks later, to discover that I have actually PUT ON weight! And not just a little: I'm SIX POUNDS heavier than I was two weeks ago. Dismay is too kind a word to describe my reaction. I was appalled, staggered, distressed... SIX POUNDS? After all that dedication, all those envious sidelong glances at my neighbor's glasses at the restaurant, all those noble moments of resistance at the refrigerator door (I bought an excellent bottle of Sancerre before making my decision. There it sits, cooling nicely.)
I sat glumly over one half of a "healthy muffin" at breakfast, brooding at this injustice. The temptation now, of course, is to go out and get pleasantly soused as a gesture of indignation. Maybe that would take some of this extra weight off. Is it possible that wine has been protecting me from obesity all these years? Perhaps I was entirely mistaken in believing that it contributed significantly to the flab? Any dieticians or nutritionists out there who can help me with this? I need to get to the bottom of it.
Before this travesty occured, I had been planning to write today about the "Chocolate Jesus", a six-foot sculpture of a naked Jesus on the cross by the artist Cosimo Cavallarro, which was to be shown starting Monday evening at the Lab Gallery inside Manhattan’s Roger Smith Hotel.
Said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group, “This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever. It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.” Aside from the bad taste, I'm not sure that it's any worse than the chocolate Easter eggs which represent, I was told as a child, the stone that was found rolled away from Christ's tomb on Easter morning. Or what about all those bunnies? What to they have to do with anything? I always understood that rabbits were the champs in the field of sexual reproduction...Anyway, listen, it's always fun to tease the Christians. I applaud Cavallaro for his subversive action, and wonder who gets to break off the first piece and eat it. And what that piece might be. It would take some balls to go for the penis, no? (The picture I found is strategically cropped to avoid any possible embarrassment to sensitive viewers, but I would have to assume that it's circumcised.) But anyway, I'm off my chocolate now, given the first part of this entry. And what's next? A chocolate Buddha? God forbid. Well, no God. So, heavens forbid. No heavens either, actually. No matter. In the meantime, of course, cheers, skool, prosit, salute, salud, sante...Cheers...
Oh, by the way, I've discovered that you can indeed view the whole, and wholly naked chocolate Jesus. Try the link. And be sure to "launch!"
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/30/2007
"The mind has to be empty to see clearly."
~J. Krishnamurti
~J. Krishnamurti
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Thursday, March 29, 2007
Yoga in Lebanon
What a delight to see, amidst the welter of dreadful and not-quite-so-dreadful events reported on the BBC World News last night, the image of young Lebanese children practicing yoga under the tutelage of Indian United Nations peacekeepers in that unhappy country. The children were filmed in a restful pose, humming away contentedly, while their teacher explained, in an interview, how much they have benefited from the practice. It has gone a long way, she told us, toward healing the emotional wounds of last summer's war, and the children enjoy it enormously.
Aside from the sheer pleasure of seeing these children so engaged in the practice, I found it wonderfully satisfying to see how cultural borders can be crossed and cultural heritages merged when people of goodwill come together. Here was a class of Muslim children in a deeply disturbed country in the Middle East who were able to immerse themselves in the spiritual practice of a wholly different culture, and to benefit immensely from the experience. It says something to me about the shared understanding of what it means to be living in this human body, and about the value of paying attention to it in the particularly mindful way that yoga demands of us. It also says something about the capacity that we all have, even children, to find an inner peace amidst the turmoil the surrounds us.
A very lovely vision, and a tiny seed of hope for the future of humankind.
Aside from the sheer pleasure of seeing these children so engaged in the practice, I found it wonderfully satisfying to see how cultural borders can be crossed and cultural heritages merged when people of goodwill come together. Here was a class of Muslim children in a deeply disturbed country in the Middle East who were able to immerse themselves in the spiritual practice of a wholly different culture, and to benefit immensely from the experience. It says something to me about the shared understanding of what it means to be living in this human body, and about the value of paying attention to it in the particularly mindful way that yoga demands of us. It also says something about the capacity that we all have, even children, to find an inner peace amidst the turmoil the surrounds us.
A very lovely vision, and a tiny seed of hope for the future of humankind.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/29/2007
"Do not think about yourself, but be aware of the thought, emotion, or action that makes you think of yourself."
~J. Krishnamurti
~J. Krishnamurti
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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Genocide
Thanks to Christi for her addition to my list of scandals, yesterday. And how could I have forgotten Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extreme rendition and those secret CIA prisons, and the "Justice" department's rationalizations to authorize torture? Not to mention the virtual neglect of yet another round of genocide in Darfur...
I was talking yesterday to my friend, the painter Mark Strickland, about his newest mural-sized painting "Indomitable Spirit". It's about the Holocaust. Arising in part out of his experience in sensitivity training with a group of actors in Rome, and in part out of a subsequent visit to the site of the Dachau concentration camp, it's a massive work which incorporates passages from Elie Wiesel's "Night" along with images of both agony and redemption. Our conversation turned my mind, of course, to the empty promises to "Never forget" and to the repeated acts of genocide in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and today in Darfur--acts which the world stood by and watched with apparent impotence and possible indifference.
All of which inspired a particularly uncomfortable meditation this morning, since I wanted to focus my mind on the reality of genocide, and on the stain it leaves on the consciousness of the human race. The effort led me on a three-step journey, unplanned in advance, but nonetheless powerful for that. The first step was the one I usually take, into as clear as possible a mindfulness of my own presence in the world--a body scan accompanying the observation of the breath, beginning with individual areas of the body and leading, finally, to a full body awareness, a heightened sense of my physical being in the context of everything around me until the boundaries start to evanesce and everything becomes a single, breathing universe.
Then, staying with the body, I found myself moving spontaneously into the second stage of the meditation, imagining myself the target of genocidal assailants: how it would be to have to watch the women and girls in my family raped and mutilated, our children pierced by bayonets or thrown into the flames of burning villages, my own body hacked apart by grinning sadists with machetes and left to rot in the blazing sun...
And then, moving even deeper into the darkness of the human heart and soul, I found it necessary to imagine myself the perpetrator, the one with the rifle or the machete in his hand, the one inflicting horrors on his fellow human beings, the one so dehumanized and so empty of consciousness and conscience that he is able to commit atrocities with a cold heart, contemptuous of the humanity of others. I tried insofar as possible to actually go through the motions, to feel these terrible actions in my body.
This last was the hardest part, and I'm sure there are those who will be puzzled, offended even, by the necessity I felt in going there. But I feel strongly that we will never begin to address the dreadful propensities of our species until we understand and acknowledge our part in them. It's all very well to point the finger at those "Nazis" or "the Janjaweed" and blame them for the atrocities--but in doing so, we conveniently dissociate ourselves from their actions without recognizing our part in having allowed them to happen. I think, too, that this is the only way I will ever be able to follow the Buddha's injunction to feel compassion for all living beings--including even those we loathe; because, to feel compassion, I have to find some place of empathy, no matter how vestigal, in my own experience.
The compassion that the Buddha teaches, I believe, is not a matter of tolerance or of forgiveness. Such acts would be unforgivable, even if we had the power to forgive them. It's not a suspension of judgment, either. Who can fail to judge behavior of this kind as heinous, heartless, reprehensible? All words seem feeble in the context of this kind of horror. No, but it's possible, I believe, to hold the perpetrators accountable for their deeds, and to be compassionate without absolving them of responsibility. And the first step toward such compassion would be the acknowledgment of shared humanity, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.
I was talking yesterday to my friend, the painter Mark Strickland, about his newest mural-sized painting "Indomitable Spirit". It's about the Holocaust. Arising in part out of his experience in sensitivity training with a group of actors in Rome, and in part out of a subsequent visit to the site of the Dachau concentration camp, it's a massive work which incorporates passages from Elie Wiesel's "Night" along with images of both agony and redemption. Our conversation turned my mind, of course, to the empty promises to "Never forget" and to the repeated acts of genocide in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and today in Darfur--acts which the world stood by and watched with apparent impotence and possible indifference.
All of which inspired a particularly uncomfortable meditation this morning, since I wanted to focus my mind on the reality of genocide, and on the stain it leaves on the consciousness of the human race. The effort led me on a three-step journey, unplanned in advance, but nonetheless powerful for that. The first step was the one I usually take, into as clear as possible a mindfulness of my own presence in the world--a body scan accompanying the observation of the breath, beginning with individual areas of the body and leading, finally, to a full body awareness, a heightened sense of my physical being in the context of everything around me until the boundaries start to evanesce and everything becomes a single, breathing universe.
Then, staying with the body, I found myself moving spontaneously into the second stage of the meditation, imagining myself the target of genocidal assailants: how it would be to have to watch the women and girls in my family raped and mutilated, our children pierced by bayonets or thrown into the flames of burning villages, my own body hacked apart by grinning sadists with machetes and left to rot in the blazing sun...
And then, moving even deeper into the darkness of the human heart and soul, I found it necessary to imagine myself the perpetrator, the one with the rifle or the machete in his hand, the one inflicting horrors on his fellow human beings, the one so dehumanized and so empty of consciousness and conscience that he is able to commit atrocities with a cold heart, contemptuous of the humanity of others. I tried insofar as possible to actually go through the motions, to feel these terrible actions in my body.
This last was the hardest part, and I'm sure there are those who will be puzzled, offended even, by the necessity I felt in going there. But I feel strongly that we will never begin to address the dreadful propensities of our species until we understand and acknowledge our part in them. It's all very well to point the finger at those "Nazis" or "the Janjaweed" and blame them for the atrocities--but in doing so, we conveniently dissociate ourselves from their actions without recognizing our part in having allowed them to happen. I think, too, that this is the only way I will ever be able to follow the Buddha's injunction to feel compassion for all living beings--including even those we loathe; because, to feel compassion, I have to find some place of empathy, no matter how vestigal, in my own experience.
The compassion that the Buddha teaches, I believe, is not a matter of tolerance or of forgiveness. Such acts would be unforgivable, even if we had the power to forgive them. It's not a suspension of judgment, either. Who can fail to judge behavior of this kind as heinous, heartless, reprehensible? All words seem feeble in the context of this kind of horror. No, but it's possible, I believe, to hold the perpetrators accountable for their deeds, and to be compassionate without absolving them of responsibility. And the first step toward such compassion would be the acknowledgment of shared humanity, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/28/2007
"If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation."
~J. Krishnamurti
~J. Krishnamurti
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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Thoughts on Enlightenment During Meditation
During my meditation session yesterday I had an interesting thought enter my mind:"Enlightenment is a practice not a prize."
~Peace to all beings~
PHOTO CREDIT: Standing Buddha statue from the 2nd or 3rd century in a museum (not sure which one). However, Tom Armstrong sent the picture to me. Thanks Tom!!
It's amazing how well intact is appears to be considering it's age.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/27/2007
Insight is not an act of remembrance, the continuation of memory. Insight is like a flash of light. You see with absolute clarity, all the complications, the consequences, the intricacies. Then this very insight is action, complete. In that there are no regrets, no looking back, no sense of being weighed down, no discrimination. This is pure, clear insight - perception without any shadow of doubt. Most of us begin with certainty and as we grow older the certainty changes to uncertainty and we die with uncertainty. But if one begins with uncertainty, doubting, questioning, asking demanding, with real doubt about man's behaviour, about all the religious rituals and their images and their symbols, then out of that doubt comes the clarity of certainty.
~J. Krishnamurti
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~J. Krishnamurti
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
Not Descanso Gardens...
.... maybe, but OUR garden.
A bit smaller in scale, of course. Including the fish! But not too shabby, all the same... And then there are these...
... BOYS DOING MEN'S WORK
Seriously... I have been counting scandals. I think they result for the most part from people, from the president on down, being unqualified for their jobs. They're boys doing men's work. They should not be holding the high offices they hold. They lack the maturity of perspective, let alone compassion. I look at Bush, I look at Cheney, I look at Gonzales... I see grown-up little boys. They think politics is a win-lose game. They think government is evil. How did we end up like this?
My own partial list of scandals would include:
the Iraq war scandal
the returning veterans scandal
the Walter Reed scandal
the failed intelligence scandal
the misused intelligence scandal
the scandal of endless untruths
the Valerie Plame scandal
the Pat Tillman scandal
the health care scandal
the Enron scandal
the Tom Delay scandal
the attendant lobbying and corruption scandals
the firing of federal prosecutors scandal
the lying Attorney General scandal
the mismanagement of the Justice Department scandal
the mismanagement of the Defense Department scandal
the cronyism scandal
the Hurricane Katrina scandal
the new David Stockman scandal
the 2000 election scandal
the 2004 election scandal
the voter exclusion scandal
the War on Drugs scandal
the prison overpopulation scandal
the scandalous neglect of education
the scandalous neglect of health care
the scandalous neglect of the environment
the scandalous neglect of science
Please, add your own scandals... Feel free. I'm headed back to the garden.
A bit smaller in scale, of course. Including the fish! But not too shabby, all the same... And then there are these...
... BOYS DOING MEN'S WORK
Seriously... I have been counting scandals. I think they result for the most part from people, from the president on down, being unqualified for their jobs. They're boys doing men's work. They should not be holding the high offices they hold. They lack the maturity of perspective, let alone compassion. I look at Bush, I look at Cheney, I look at Gonzales... I see grown-up little boys. They think politics is a win-lose game. They think government is evil. How did we end up like this?
My own partial list of scandals would include:
the Iraq war scandal
the returning veterans scandal
the Walter Reed scandal
the failed intelligence scandal
the misused intelligence scandal
the scandal of endless untruths
the Valerie Plame scandal
the Pat Tillman scandal
the health care scandal
the Enron scandal
the Tom Delay scandal
the attendant lobbying and corruption scandals
the firing of federal prosecutors scandal
the lying Attorney General scandal
the mismanagement of the Justice Department scandal
the mismanagement of the Defense Department scandal
the cronyism scandal
the Hurricane Katrina scandal
the new David Stockman scandal
the 2000 election scandal
the 2004 election scandal
the voter exclusion scandal
the War on Drugs scandal
the prison overpopulation scandal
the scandalous neglect of education
the scandalous neglect of health care
the scandalous neglect of the environment
the scandalous neglect of science
Please, add your own scandals... Feel free. I'm headed back to the garden.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Descanso Gardens
Ellie and I took a walk at Descanso Gardens on Sunday afternoon.
Enough said.
Oh, and... speaking of nature, what a fantastic series starting on Discovery Channel's Planet Earth! I find the hyperbole of the narration a bit irritating, but the images are superb.
Enough said.
Oh, and... speaking of nature, what a fantastic series starting on Discovery Channel's Planet Earth! I find the hyperbole of the narration a bit irritating, but the images are superb.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/26/2007
The tao is both singular and universal. It is open to all with the resolve and inclination to walk it. Those who do, however, take a variety of disciplines in approaching it, for the tao extrapolates from the specific to the general.
~Dave Lowry
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~Dave Lowry
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Sunday, March 25, 2007
Guilt, Shame and Buddhist Practice
Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.~Buddha
James: This reminds me of something that my mom told me in regards to guilt. Carrying guilt around in our minds is like hiking up a mountain and picking up every rock we stub our toe upon and throwing it in our backpack. That is unskillful. It is unnecessary suffering and it stems from a belief in a separate self. That somehow we are so important that we should suffer more than anyone else. It is also the belief that we are so powerful that we can actually revisit these past unskillful actions and somehow in reliving them change the result.
I personally have greatly suffered from the vicious cycle of guilt and shame and understand this process very well. I have worked hard on being in the moment and am now slowly learning how to let go of guilt through meditation and concentrating upon mindfulness.
Through meditation we can practice letting go of the burdens within our mind via deep breathing. Further, meditation is like a reset button that we can push to return us to the sharp wisdom of the present moment. Bringing us back to our natural state of peace, relaxation and freedom from the specter of invented ghosts which the ego-self creates for it's need of chaos and drama to feed "itself" and survive.
Mindfulness brings us back to the present moment as well. It keeps our attention upon what is going on in our present reality. Keeping us focused and aware. This keeps us from falling one step behind ourselves which leads us to trip over obstacles along our path because we are so focused on reliving the past that we do not see them coming. Obstacles which throw us off of the trail of balanced Reality of the present moment and into the waiting arms of the ego-self. Staying mindful of the present moment allows us to be aware of obstacles rising up and have the mental clarity to move safely around them.
May we all be more aware of the present moment and not pick up rocks. And if we do, may we only hold them for only a moment and throw them innocently back down onto the path and not into our backpacks to carry around like a martyr.
~Peace to all beings~
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/25/2007
Without the tao, Kindness and compassion are replaced by law and justice; Faith and trust are supplanted by ritual and ceremony.
~Lao Tzu
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~Lao Tzu
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Saturday, March 24, 2007
Critical Space
It seems to have been a big art week. More today: we're off to the Getty later this morning. But first, yesterday. We saw "Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980-2006" at the Municipal Gallery, then went on to "Wack!" at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art--a major revisiting of the feminist art movement that began a half decade ago. More of these at a later date: I plan to address them in my next entry on Artscene Visual Radio in "The Art of Outrage." For now, I have more to say about another exhibit at the Geffen, "Andrea Zittel: Critical Space."
It's a show that should appeal to the Buddhist sensibility, because it's all about mindful living and modesty of means. Amongst the favorite maxims she lists on one prominent section of the gallery wall, try this: "Sometimes if you can't change a situation, you just have to change the way you think about a situation." Than Geoff would not disagree. Or this: "What you own, owns you." Zittel's work hovers comfortably between art and design. It deals, as the title suggests, with space, and the way in which we occupy space in a world where its use is increasingly "critical," with dwindling resources and an exponentially expanding population. (Visit Zittel's A-Z website for a more complete picture of what she is about. You'll be amazed--and perhaps a little humbled.)
With a Quaker craftsman's eye for simplicity and exquisite detail, Zittel creates miniature--but practical--living spaces where every legitimate need is planned and nothing is in excess. One notable piece included in the current show is an entire dwelling that appears to fold up into a single large crate, ready for instant transportation.
A combination of advanced, hi-tech design sense and bare-bones modesty, these living and work spaces have the privacy of a monk's cell and the convenience of contemporary utilitarianism. She sees constraint--whether spatial, financial, or practical--as a challenge to the imagination, a form of liberation rather than a constriction. "What makes us feel liberated," she writes--another of those maxims--"is not total freedom but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves."
Zittel is clearly fascinated with the contingencies of daily living. Nothing is unworthy of her meticulous attention, from cutlery to dish design, from place settings to furniture, from bed and floor coverings to clothes, which she calls "uniforms."
These were initially conceived, as the brochure accompanying the exhibit tells us, "as a solution to maximize Zittel's extremely limited resources. In the uniforms one can see both an expression of personal fantasy--unusual combinations of color and material--and a clear evolution of material choices." The dresses, as I understand it, were constructed by the artist out of handy raw materials and were designed as multi-purpose wearables. The term "uniform" seems accurate: their designer elegance covers for the simple, practical necessity of having something distinctive and yet inexpensive to wear in any circumstance--whether hiking in the desert (Zittel's home base is in Joshua Tree) or attending a social function in the New York art world.
I admire the quiet integrity of this artist, and the breadth and consistency of her vision. I admire the fact the she uses her creative faculties to address the realities of the world we live in, and proposes practical solutions to some of our most pressing problems. I admire her ability to combine a highly sophisticated familiarity with design and technology with a pleasing simplicity and a frank utilitarianism. I admire the humor and the appreciation for the small things that make life immediate and pleasurable.
Avoiding, for the most part, the glitz of the contemporary art world despite the attention that is now gives her, she seems more than anything to enjoy doing her work. That, at least, is the impression I get from this engaging exhibition. Pay attention to the small things, she seems to say: the big ones will take care of themselves. Very Buddhist...
It's a show that should appeal to the Buddhist sensibility, because it's all about mindful living and modesty of means. Amongst the favorite maxims she lists on one prominent section of the gallery wall, try this: "Sometimes if you can't change a situation, you just have to change the way you think about a situation." Than Geoff would not disagree. Or this: "What you own, owns you." Zittel's work hovers comfortably between art and design. It deals, as the title suggests, with space, and the way in which we occupy space in a world where its use is increasingly "critical," with dwindling resources and an exponentially expanding population. (Visit Zittel's A-Z website for a more complete picture of what she is about. You'll be amazed--and perhaps a little humbled.)
With a Quaker craftsman's eye for simplicity and exquisite detail, Zittel creates miniature--but practical--living spaces where every legitimate need is planned and nothing is in excess. One notable piece included in the current show is an entire dwelling that appears to fold up into a single large crate, ready for instant transportation.
A combination of advanced, hi-tech design sense and bare-bones modesty, these living and work spaces have the privacy of a monk's cell and the convenience of contemporary utilitarianism. She sees constraint--whether spatial, financial, or practical--as a challenge to the imagination, a form of liberation rather than a constriction. "What makes us feel liberated," she writes--another of those maxims--"is not total freedom but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves."Zittel is clearly fascinated with the contingencies of daily living. Nothing is unworthy of her meticulous attention, from cutlery to dish design, from place settings to furniture, from bed and floor coverings to clothes, which she calls "uniforms."
These were initially conceived, as the brochure accompanying the exhibit tells us, "as a solution to maximize Zittel's extremely limited resources. In the uniforms one can see both an expression of personal fantasy--unusual combinations of color and material--and a clear evolution of material choices." The dresses, as I understand it, were constructed by the artist out of handy raw materials and were designed as multi-purpose wearables. The term "uniform" seems accurate: their designer elegance covers for the simple, practical necessity of having something distinctive and yet inexpensive to wear in any circumstance--whether hiking in the desert (Zittel's home base is in Joshua Tree) or attending a social function in the New York art world.I admire the quiet integrity of this artist, and the breadth and consistency of her vision. I admire the fact the she uses her creative faculties to address the realities of the world we live in, and proposes practical solutions to some of our most pressing problems. I admire her ability to combine a highly sophisticated familiarity with design and technology with a pleasing simplicity and a frank utilitarianism. I admire the humor and the appreciation for the small things that make life immediate and pleasurable.
Avoiding, for the most part, the glitz of the contemporary art world despite the attention that is now gives her, she seems more than anything to enjoy doing her work. That, at least, is the impression I get from this engaging exhibition. Pay attention to the small things, she seems to say: the big ones will take care of themselves. Very Buddhist...
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/24/2007
In the history of Chinese civilization, no significant scientific advances came as a result of Confucian studies. They were scholastics, and a scholastic in those times was one who went by the book, who believed what the ancient text or the ancient scriptures said, and who studied them and became proficient in them like a rabbi or a Christian theologian.
But mystics have never been very interested in theology. Mystics are interested in direct experience, and therefore - although you may laugh at them and say they are not scientific - they are empirical in their approach. And the taoists, being mystics, were the only great group of ancient Chinese people who seriously studied nature. They were interested in its principles from the beginning, and their books are full of analogies between the taoist way of life and the behaviour of natural forces seen in water, wind, or plants and rocks.
~Alan Watts
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But mystics have never been very interested in theology. Mystics are interested in direct experience, and therefore - although you may laugh at them and say they are not scientific - they are empirical in their approach. And the taoists, being mystics, were the only great group of ancient Chinese people who seriously studied nature. They were interested in its principles from the beginning, and their books are full of analogies between the taoist way of life and the behaviour of natural forces seen in water, wind, or plants and rocks.
~Alan Watts
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Friday, March 23, 2007
A Funeral... and More Art
This morning we leave after breakfast for the funeral of the daughter of a man we have known for many years as a friend of the family. She was forty-nine years old, and had battled for five years with lung cancer. She had never smoked. There's an irony. My father smoked cigarettes for his entire life and died in his mid-eighties without ever having been afflicted with that terrible disease. I myself had never met this still-young woman, but knew of her as a notably successful writer--at the opposite end of the political spectrum from my own. We can hardly imagine the pain of a father being called upon to watch his daughter suffer for so long, and then to lose her in this way, and it is with that especially in mind that we plan to attend her funeral. (I think, too, in this context, of John and Elizabeth Edwards, and her continuing, very public battle with the disease. I wish them well...)
MORE ABOUT ART
I enjoyed reading Carly's spoof of "installation art" in yesterday's comments--provoked, presumably, at least in part, by my enthusiasm for Lita Albuquerque's "Stellar Axis." I don't think, though, that artists need confine themselves these days to the traditional media of painting and sculpture--though I love both these approaches to making art. It seems to me that works like Robert Smithson's famous "Spiral Jetty" and James Turrell's Roden Crater Project have a significant place in the canon of contemporary art. Why not use light as a medium? Why not use "landscape" as medium in a more literal way than in paint on canvas? If it offers me a different and challenging new way to see the world, or the opportunity to see myself in the context of the world, I say--to paraphrase a once hubristic president--Bring it on!
Case in point, the exhibition Ellie and I saw at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on our gallery tour yesterday. Joel Tauber's "Sick-Amour" is an interior installation documenting an outdoor intervention--the artist's attempt to rescue and restore to health a sycamore in the parking lot at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Tauber takes his tree-hugging seriously: he falls in love with his tree, and the exhibit is part love story. His installation creates a kind of electronic tree at the center of the gallery, from whose "branches" hang multiple video monitors with visual narratives and sound tracks (available through dangling earphone sets), along with "jewelry" designed for the cosmetic decoration of the object of his love.
This whimsical play has its serious side, of course, because the theme of the work concerns the protection of nature from the ravages of the human species and its demands. The videos describe the natural patterns of the tree's growth, and the way in which the parking lot surrounding the tree deprives its root system of needed water: the artist is seen subversively jack-hammering at the tarmac and fending off the suspicious inquiries of city authorities. I wish him luck.
The tree--I trust he'll forgive my appropriation of his copyrighted image in this small-circulation context!--looks at once beautiful and sad to me. Its lonely presence in the parking lot has a certain poignancy that is curiously, almost anthropomorphically appealing.
Is it art? Of course it is. Tauber could, certainly, have chosen to make a painting of the tree--and a painting could have made some of the same associations. But there's a great deal of the narrative here that would have been impossible to convey in a two-dimensional, static medium. By combining a complex of media, including sound and video, photography, performance, installation, and documentary information he allows himself a far broader "canvas" than would otherwise be available. If anyone wants to call it something other than art, they're welcome to do so, so far as I'm concerned. For me, it's a "Gesamtkunstwerk" appropriate to the media available to creative minds today.
I might get an argument from Carly on this. I'd welcome that--as well as thoughts from others on the limitations of art. If you believe it has them.
MORE ABOUT ART
I enjoyed reading Carly's spoof of "installation art" in yesterday's comments--provoked, presumably, at least in part, by my enthusiasm for Lita Albuquerque's "Stellar Axis." I don't think, though, that artists need confine themselves these days to the traditional media of painting and sculpture--though I love both these approaches to making art. It seems to me that works like Robert Smithson's famous "Spiral Jetty" and James Turrell's Roden Crater Project have a significant place in the canon of contemporary art. Why not use light as a medium? Why not use "landscape" as medium in a more literal way than in paint on canvas? If it offers me a different and challenging new way to see the world, or the opportunity to see myself in the context of the world, I say--to paraphrase a once hubristic president--Bring it on!
Case in point, the exhibition Ellie and I saw at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on our gallery tour yesterday. Joel Tauber's "Sick-Amour" is an interior installation documenting an outdoor intervention--the artist's attempt to rescue and restore to health a sycamore in the parking lot at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Tauber takes his tree-hugging seriously: he falls in love with his tree, and the exhibit is part love story. His installation creates a kind of electronic tree at the center of the gallery, from whose "branches" hang multiple video monitors with visual narratives and sound tracks (available through dangling earphone sets), along with "jewelry" designed for the cosmetic decoration of the object of his love.
This whimsical play has its serious side, of course, because the theme of the work concerns the protection of nature from the ravages of the human species and its demands. The videos describe the natural patterns of the tree's growth, and the way in which the parking lot surrounding the tree deprives its root system of needed water: the artist is seen subversively jack-hammering at the tarmac and fending off the suspicious inquiries of city authorities. I wish him luck.
The tree--I trust he'll forgive my appropriation of his copyrighted image in this small-circulation context!--looks at once beautiful and sad to me. Its lonely presence in the parking lot has a certain poignancy that is curiously, almost anthropomorphically appealing.Is it art? Of course it is. Tauber could, certainly, have chosen to make a painting of the tree--and a painting could have made some of the same associations. But there's a great deal of the narrative here that would have been impossible to convey in a two-dimensional, static medium. By combining a complex of media, including sound and video, photography, performance, installation, and documentary information he allows himself a far broader "canvas" than would otherwise be available. If anyone wants to call it something other than art, they're welcome to do so, so far as I'm concerned. For me, it's a "Gesamtkunstwerk" appropriate to the media available to creative minds today.
I might get an argument from Carly on this. I'd welcome that--as well as thoughts from others on the limitations of art. If you believe it has them.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/23/2007
Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.
~Edward De Bono
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
~Edward De Bono
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Grasping Fire
The Buddha's teaching is all about understanding suffering--its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. When we contemplate suffering, we find we are contemplating desire, because suffering and desire are the same thing. Desire can be compared to fire. If we grasp fire, what happens? Does it lead to happiness? If we say: "Oh, look at that beautiful fire! Look at the beautiful colors! I love red and orange; theyre my favorite colors," and then grasp it, we would find a certain amount of suffering entering the body. And then if we were to contemplate the cause of that suffering we would discover it was the result of having grasped that fire. On that information, we would hopefully then let the fire go. Once we let fire go then we know that it is not something to be attached to. This does not mean we have to hate it, or put it out. We can enjoy fire, can't we? It is nice having a fire, it keeps the room warm, but we do not have to burn ourselves in it.--Ajahn Sumedho, Teachings of a Buddhist Monk
James: It seems that a lot of us "Buddhists" forget the Buddha's teaching on the middle-way even though we know it on an intellectual level. What I mean is that we like to become martyrs and punish ourselves because we have passions and enjoyments. We do not have to be robots and statues to enjoy the fruits of the Buddha's teachings. The key, as Ajahn speaks of is to not attach to them one way or the other.
~Peace to all beings~
Tattoos... and Soldiers & Refugees
Please tell me what you think about tattoos... The subject came up at group last night, after one of our artists brought in two paintings of young women with tattoos--one an IV drug addict, the other a hooker. His theory--I trust I represent him accurately--is that tattoos, along with body piercings and other such practices, suggests a return to tribalism among young people in the context of a society whose systems they reject. One reader of these pages, I know, has been conducting his own informal poll about shaved heads. Are they related to the tattoo phenomenon, I wonder? I have a few ideas myself, but I'd be really interested to hear what you-all think...
***
Speaking of tattoos, there was a piece on CNN this morning about their growing appeal in Iraq, where they were previously forbidden. Some take it as new expression of freedom. Others, distressingly, believe that tattoos will help their relatives identify them in the event of their death and dismemberment in one of those all-too-frequent deadly bomb attacks. Faithful Islamists decry them as a desecration of the body given us by God. Meantime, according to the CNN report, the tattoo artists are doing good business.
I also watched the first half of Richard Engel's "War Zone Diary" after group last night--I admit I was too tired to watch the whole two hours, and I had forgotten to record it. But I found it to be a very moving account, precisely because it was so personal. Interspersed with mini-interviews with himself recorded on a personal hand-held camera, the piece took an up-close look at people in dire, life-threatening situations and listened without slant or judgment to their stories.
It was a harrowing experience, just to watch this footage. Aside from the gore, the burned bodies, the severed body parts--and there was no shortage of these--the reality of war was brought home in the "band of brothers" intimacy and courage of American soldiers separated from their loved ones, as well as in the pain and grief of Iraqi war victims. There were those who had lost or were forced to abandon their homes, the dispossessed and the refugees. There were those who were trapped by their circumstances in the middle of the battle. There were those who were maimed in body or in mind. There were those who had chosen to take up their own weapons to join in the fight. All people. All living in close, first-hand proximity with suffering and death, and seen through the lens of a camera that seemed to want to get beyond the news and beyond the emnities, to the very human heart of the matter.
Kudos to Richard Engel for this "diary." Like this diary of mine, in its more fortunate, sheltered way, "War Zone Diary" tries to look out on the world with an honest gaze, and to take things--in a good way--personally.
LES'S GREENS: a dream
Ellie and I are visiting my good friend Les. He shows us the greens he has been cultivating in the basement of his home with great love and care, and of which he is genuinely proud. Arugula? Perhaps. They are exotic, highly prized greens, a rarity and a special culinary treat. Les has been planting them in stages: some are young and tender, some advanced in growth. As he tells us about them with great, affectionate pride, I casually reach out and pull one of the taller ones from the ground, with the suggestion that we share it three ways between us. Les is devastated. He can't believe I would be so thoughtless and insensitive. He can't see how our friendship can ever be renewed. Ellie, too, is appalled. I realize now what a dreadful thing I did, and feel mortified by my action. Les has taken refuge under one of the shelves in this greenhouse he has created, and is too distressed to speak. I try to apologize. I beg him to accept a make-up, some act of service that will restore the good faith between us. I am still unable to reach him as the dream comes to an end.
***
Speaking of tattoos, there was a piece on CNN this morning about their growing appeal in Iraq, where they were previously forbidden. Some take it as new expression of freedom. Others, distressingly, believe that tattoos will help their relatives identify them in the event of their death and dismemberment in one of those all-too-frequent deadly bomb attacks. Faithful Islamists decry them as a desecration of the body given us by God. Meantime, according to the CNN report, the tattoo artists are doing good business.
I also watched the first half of Richard Engel's "War Zone Diary" after group last night--I admit I was too tired to watch the whole two hours, and I had forgotten to record it. But I found it to be a very moving account, precisely because it was so personal. Interspersed with mini-interviews with himself recorded on a personal hand-held camera, the piece took an up-close look at people in dire, life-threatening situations and listened without slant or judgment to their stories.
It was a harrowing experience, just to watch this footage. Aside from the gore, the burned bodies, the severed body parts--and there was no shortage of these--the reality of war was brought home in the "band of brothers" intimacy and courage of American soldiers separated from their loved ones, as well as in the pain and grief of Iraqi war victims. There were those who had lost or were forced to abandon their homes, the dispossessed and the refugees. There were those who were trapped by their circumstances in the middle of the battle. There were those who were maimed in body or in mind. There were those who had chosen to take up their own weapons to join in the fight. All people. All living in close, first-hand proximity with suffering and death, and seen through the lens of a camera that seemed to want to get beyond the news and beyond the emnities, to the very human heart of the matter.
Kudos to Richard Engel for this "diary." Like this diary of mine, in its more fortunate, sheltered way, "War Zone Diary" tries to look out on the world with an honest gaze, and to take things--in a good way--personally.
LES'S GREENS: a dream
Ellie and I are visiting my good friend Les. He shows us the greens he has been cultivating in the basement of his home with great love and care, and of which he is genuinely proud. Arugula? Perhaps. They are exotic, highly prized greens, a rarity and a special culinary treat. Les has been planting them in stages: some are young and tender, some advanced in growth. As he tells us about them with great, affectionate pride, I casually reach out and pull one of the taller ones from the ground, with the suggestion that we share it three ways between us. Les is devastated. He can't believe I would be so thoughtless and insensitive. He can't see how our friendship can ever be renewed. Ellie, too, is appalled. I realize now what a dreadful thing I did, and feel mortified by my action. Les has taken refuge under one of the shelves in this greenhouse he has created, and is too distressed to speak. I try to apologize. I beg him to accept a make-up, some act of service that will restore the good faith between us. I am still unable to reach him as the dream comes to an end.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/22/2007
Kindness should become the natural way of life, not the exception.
~Buddha
~Buddha
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Wine... and a Stunning Art Work!
One of the convenient little stories I have always told myself, as I neatly avoided any real thought about the matter, is that a glass or two of wine--or sometimes three, or four...--is a necessary accompaniment to every social event, whether eating out at a friend's house or at a restaurant, or having guests at home. I have also long suspected that my spreading girth and the concomitant feeling of physical bloat result in part from the consumption of alcohol, so I decided this week to question that unmindful assumption, and to put it to the test.
So... Having taken an easy weekend off from this peculiarly seductive palliative, I decided on Monday that my first real test would be that evening. We had been invited by friends to meet their visitors from New York over dinner in their home. Instead of the usual glass of wine before dinner, I requested water. In all honesty, I did find myself eyeing the vodka in my neighbor's glass with a certain envy, and even watched Ellie enjoy a glass of wine with a wishful thought to share in her enjoyment. I had, however, made my decision and I abided by it. I noticed that the world had not come to an end by the time we headed homeward, nor had the sky fallen. I had not been socially incapacitated for want of a glass of wine, and I think that my friends had not found me in ill-humor. In a word, I had survived.
Last night, dinner at home with friends. I served wine... and water for myself. Again, I survived the evening with no ill effects and with no noticeable loss of pleasant social interaction. Nobody even noticed, and I was even rather pleased with myself for having made the stretch. It does not escape my attention, this morning, that I am reluctant to say that I'm feeling better for the omission. I guess that's a part of the story: I hate to have to acknowledge the simple truth that some things are good for me, and some things not. And to admit it to myself makes it all somehow binding--because who in their right senses wants to continue doing things that are demonstrably bad. Well, to use the less judgmental Buddhist term, unskillful. And some major part of me does not want to surrender the pleasure of a good glass of wine.
And yet... here's another piece learned from the day-long retreat last Saturday--a piece that struck me when Than Geoff uttered the words and has stuck with me since then. It makes good sense, he said, "to sacrifice a smaller for a greater pleasure." This is the principle that led to my final victory over nicotine. After years of unsuccessfully trying No, no, no, shouldn't, mustn't, and so on, I finally gave myself permission to smoke; but with the understanding that my ability to climb a set of stairs, for example, without huffing and puffing, or to lay my head down on the pillow at night without a pounding heart were more rewarding pleasures than that next, foul-tasting, foul-smelling cigarette. I managed to choose the greater benefit. That was about twenty years ago.
My intention as of this moment is to continue to observe the physical effects and the inner thoughts and feelings for a while. And to keep noticing my reluctance to commit! I will report further as this experiment progresses.
Our guests for the evening, by the way, were the artist Lita Albuquerque and her husband. After dinner, she showed us some spectacular pictures of her recent Stellar Axis installation in Antarctica, which entailed the replication of star alignments at both North and South poles with the use of ninety-nine cobalt blue spheres of widely differing sizes. The visual effect was stunning, as you'll see if you check out the Stellar Axis site and click on the link to her related blog. I'm fascinated by the photographs and the story of the installation process, but am most knocked out by those pictures (including the aerial shots) that document the spheres they were meant to be seen, in isolation against the whiteness and the distant mountains of one of the purest remaining places on the face of the planet Earth.
So... Having taken an easy weekend off from this peculiarly seductive palliative, I decided on Monday that my first real test would be that evening. We had been invited by friends to meet their visitors from New York over dinner in their home. Instead of the usual glass of wine before dinner, I requested water. In all honesty, I did find myself eyeing the vodka in my neighbor's glass with a certain envy, and even watched Ellie enjoy a glass of wine with a wishful thought to share in her enjoyment. I had, however, made my decision and I abided by it. I noticed that the world had not come to an end by the time we headed homeward, nor had the sky fallen. I had not been socially incapacitated for want of a glass of wine, and I think that my friends had not found me in ill-humor. In a word, I had survived.
Last night, dinner at home with friends. I served wine... and water for myself. Again, I survived the evening with no ill effects and with no noticeable loss of pleasant social interaction. Nobody even noticed, and I was even rather pleased with myself for having made the stretch. It does not escape my attention, this morning, that I am reluctant to say that I'm feeling better for the omission. I guess that's a part of the story: I hate to have to acknowledge the simple truth that some things are good for me, and some things not. And to admit it to myself makes it all somehow binding--because who in their right senses wants to continue doing things that are demonstrably bad. Well, to use the less judgmental Buddhist term, unskillful. And some major part of me does not want to surrender the pleasure of a good glass of wine.
And yet... here's another piece learned from the day-long retreat last Saturday--a piece that struck me when Than Geoff uttered the words and has stuck with me since then. It makes good sense, he said, "to sacrifice a smaller for a greater pleasure." This is the principle that led to my final victory over nicotine. After years of unsuccessfully trying No, no, no, shouldn't, mustn't, and so on, I finally gave myself permission to smoke; but with the understanding that my ability to climb a set of stairs, for example, without huffing and puffing, or to lay my head down on the pillow at night without a pounding heart were more rewarding pleasures than that next, foul-tasting, foul-smelling cigarette. I managed to choose the greater benefit. That was about twenty years ago.
My intention as of this moment is to continue to observe the physical effects and the inner thoughts and feelings for a while. And to keep noticing my reluctance to commit! I will report further as this experiment progresses.
Our guests for the evening, by the way, were the artist Lita Albuquerque and her husband. After dinner, she showed us some spectacular pictures of her recent Stellar Axis installation in Antarctica, which entailed the replication of star alignments at both North and South poles with the use of ninety-nine cobalt blue spheres of widely differing sizes. The visual effect was stunning, as you'll see if you check out the Stellar Axis site and click on the link to her related blog. I'm fascinated by the photographs and the story of the installation process, but am most knocked out by those pictures (including the aerial shots) that document the spheres they were meant to be seen, in isolation against the whiteness and the distant mountains of one of the purest remaining places on the face of the planet Earth.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/21/2007
Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.
~Buddha
~Buddha
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
No God
So. No God. And yet a yearning, for me, to somehow "make sense of it all"--for a bigger context in which to place this tiny manifestation of life which I'm given to live out. It pleases me to think that there is more than just this being born, growing old, and dying, and having no greater significance in the process than any other fragment of organic matter. I know that others find this form of consolation in their God and, some, in their conviction that a good life, free from pain and suffering, awaits them when they leave this world. Usually, for believers, this is "heaven." The other place is reserved for... well, others.
My own parents shared this belief--not perhaps so much in eternal damnation, but certainly in a return to their God's loving arms. Their ashes now lie side by side in the graveyard of a tiny church overlooking the sea in a small village in Wales. It would be nice to think of the two of them wandering, ageless and at peace, hand in hand through the fields of paradise in their Christian heaven. But I think that's fantasy. Is it any more or less reasonable to believe in their return to another cycle of life on this earth, in some other form? My mother, particularly, was very fond of birds. (Birds. Hmmm... some Freudian reverberations here? I wonder...)
I think it's the suffering that all of us experience in this life that drives our need to imagine a "better place" to go to when we're finally released from it. Enter the Buddha, who learned through hard experience and shared with us his wisdom about suffering. His four noble truths teach us that suffering is unavoidable, since we are all subject to aging, sickness and death; that the origin of suffering lies in our attachment--whether to the desire for those things that please us or the avoidance of those that don't; that there is an achievable end to suffering; and that there is a path we can follow to achieve that end. Unfortunately, it does involve some work, some sacrifice, and an awful lot of honest self examination.
It was certainly a period of acute suffering in my life that led me in this direction. Since early manhood, I had drifted through life with relative impunity: youth tends to get you out of a good number of scrapes, and allows you to bounce back up with relative ease when you've been knocked down. I managed to breeze through it all quite nicely--as some of us are privileged to do--without God, or thoughts of God, or serious consideration of my own mortality, and without more than the average share of suffering: a broken heart now and then, the occasional worry about jobs or money... Until life slapped me with a challenge I couldn't easily brush off, or sidestep, or ignore. The story is no longer important here, though I have written about it in unsparing detail elsewhere. What matters is that I needed the kind of help for which some people turn to God. I found Buddhism.
At least, it was the form of Buddhism that was close at hand--the form practiced by a friend who offered it to me in a spirit of generous desire to help. I had known in a general way about meditation in the past--especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a surge of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies--but had never seriously entertained the idea of trying it myself. While I admired those who had the patience for it, I simply assumed that my head was too busy to tolerate a prolonged period of silence. What my friend offered was something I saw as a possibility to keep me busy while I meditated--and that something was a repeated chant: nam myo ho renge kyo. Not only could I chant, I could chant for something--the end to my suffering, for example--and would be rewarded with results.
Many will recognize this as soka gakkai Buddhism. I chanted for a year and a half. It was my introduction to practice. And it did bring results. It took me a year and a half, though, to fully realize my discomfort with this kind of goal-oriented practice, and to realize that I did not, in fact, need the chant as what I eventually came to see as a diversion for my mind. I discovered that I could sit in silence. Fifteen minutes, at first, seemed like a very long time, but those early fifteen minute sits opened up the door for a practice that has proved an invaluable guide to life's vicissitudes for, now, more than ten years. And to a growing familiarity with the teachings that support it.
No God, then. No belief. Not even a willing suspension of disbelief. No Oz. No curtain. Just an increasing understanding of the value of mind-fulness at each and every moment along the way, and of how the mind creates its own suffering by attachment to its causes. The notion that I determine my own karma through my actions and their consequences is more reasonable to me, and somehow more comforting, than the belief in stories that have no discernable basis in the only reality I know through my lived experience.
My own parents shared this belief--not perhaps so much in eternal damnation, but certainly in a return to their God's loving arms. Their ashes now lie side by side in the graveyard of a tiny church overlooking the sea in a small village in Wales. It would be nice to think of the two of them wandering, ageless and at peace, hand in hand through the fields of paradise in their Christian heaven. But I think that's fantasy. Is it any more or less reasonable to believe in their return to another cycle of life on this earth, in some other form? My mother, particularly, was very fond of birds. (Birds. Hmmm... some Freudian reverberations here? I wonder...)
I think it's the suffering that all of us experience in this life that drives our need to imagine a "better place" to go to when we're finally released from it. Enter the Buddha, who learned through hard experience and shared with us his wisdom about suffering. His four noble truths teach us that suffering is unavoidable, since we are all subject to aging, sickness and death; that the origin of suffering lies in our attachment--whether to the desire for those things that please us or the avoidance of those that don't; that there is an achievable end to suffering; and that there is a path we can follow to achieve that end. Unfortunately, it does involve some work, some sacrifice, and an awful lot of honest self examination.
It was certainly a period of acute suffering in my life that led me in this direction. Since early manhood, I had drifted through life with relative impunity: youth tends to get you out of a good number of scrapes, and allows you to bounce back up with relative ease when you've been knocked down. I managed to breeze through it all quite nicely--as some of us are privileged to do--without God, or thoughts of God, or serious consideration of my own mortality, and without more than the average share of suffering: a broken heart now and then, the occasional worry about jobs or money... Until life slapped me with a challenge I couldn't easily brush off, or sidestep, or ignore. The story is no longer important here, though I have written about it in unsparing detail elsewhere. What matters is that I needed the kind of help for which some people turn to God. I found Buddhism.
At least, it was the form of Buddhism that was close at hand--the form practiced by a friend who offered it to me in a spirit of generous desire to help. I had known in a general way about meditation in the past--especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a surge of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies--but had never seriously entertained the idea of trying it myself. While I admired those who had the patience for it, I simply assumed that my head was too busy to tolerate a prolonged period of silence. What my friend offered was something I saw as a possibility to keep me busy while I meditated--and that something was a repeated chant: nam myo ho renge kyo. Not only could I chant, I could chant for something--the end to my suffering, for example--and would be rewarded with results.
Many will recognize this as soka gakkai Buddhism. I chanted for a year and a half. It was my introduction to practice. And it did bring results. It took me a year and a half, though, to fully realize my discomfort with this kind of goal-oriented practice, and to realize that I did not, in fact, need the chant as what I eventually came to see as a diversion for my mind. I discovered that I could sit in silence. Fifteen minutes, at first, seemed like a very long time, but those early fifteen minute sits opened up the door for a practice that has proved an invaluable guide to life's vicissitudes for, now, more than ten years. And to a growing familiarity with the teachings that support it.
No God, then. No belief. Not even a willing suspension of disbelief. No Oz. No curtain. Just an increasing understanding of the value of mind-fulness at each and every moment along the way, and of how the mind creates its own suffering by attachment to its causes. The notion that I determine my own karma through my actions and their consequences is more reasonable to me, and somehow more comforting, than the belief in stories that have no discernable basis in the only reality I know through my lived experience.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/20/2007
When something has happened, Do not talk about it. it is hard to collect spilled water.
~Proverb
~Proverb
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Monday, March 19, 2007
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/19/2007
However young, The seeker who sets out upon the way Shines bright over the world.
~Buddha
~Buddha
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
God
Okay. God. As I mentioned yesterday, God has been on my mind, and I've been meaning to write about him/her/it for a few days now. What set me off, perhaps, was this Op-Ed piece by Sam Harris in an issue of the Los Angeles Times last week about what he sees to be the gullibility of a vast majority of Americans in religious matters, and their frequently literal belief in stories so absurd--the Creation, let's say, for one glaring example--as to defy our faculty of reason. He wrote the piece, in part, in praise of Pete Stark, the California congressman who appears to be the only one who has the guts to avow his disbelief in God in public.
Imagine how successful a candidate for President might be if he or she took a similar public stand. Given the overwhelming majority of Americans who claim belief in God and who are willing to judge character based on similar belief, they wouldn't stand a chance. It seems that every candidate must make this public avowal of piety as a prerequisite for running for office, and seek the favors of the Almighty with as much fervor as he (let's call him he, if only for convenience) is thanked by triumphant sports heroes or Grammy winners--or by those fortunate enough to have survived car wrecks or natural disasters.
I think that I have never "believed" in God. Even as a child, brought up in the home of a minister of the Church of England and taken to church every Sunday, I don't think I actually "believed" in that bearded old guy up in the sky somewhere who dispensed favors in response to the prayers I was taught to say, kneeling by my bed each night, and was reputed to reward good and punish bad behavior. Santa Claus was more real to me than God--and I was more ready to suspend my disbelief in this particular old man with a beard. His favors were more... well, tangible. At least by the time I reached puberty, with reason budding in the brain along with the hormones in an even more interesting organ, the God I was required to "worship" as a part of my school's curriculum mattered less to me than the cigarettes I used to sneak behind the hedges on the Sussex Downs.
Which accounts in part for my growing appreciation for Buddhist thought and practice. It's a religion that first addresses the practical realities of life. No sin, no guilt. Just an honest appraisal of what's going to work and what's going to cause harm. "Past mistakes," says Than Geoff, "do not mean that you have to suffer." Just be aware of the negative outcome of your action, and work to do better next time. No God. No need for one. At the day-long retreat that Ellie and I attended last Saturday, Than Geoff told the story of how he was accosted, in his monk's robes, at a local bookstore, by a man who wanted to talk to him about "religion." Than Geoff agreed to spare a few minutes, and the man's first question was the demand to know if he believed in God. Than Geoff's simple "No" put an end to the conversation, but the man continued to stalk him through the bookstore in evident anger, until our monk felt nearly threatened enough to summon the manager of the store.
Interesting, then, and not a little dismaying, to realize that the existence of God is a matter of such fearful importance to people who might otherwise appear relatively sane. And sad, too, because, as Sam Harris noted in his Op-Ed piece, "Every one of the world's 'great' religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos." How strange that any reasonable person, looking at the marvelously intricate workings of every aspect of physical reality, from the leaf of a humble plant to the miracle of the human body, to the solar system and the vastness of the universe, would want to understand it all in the simplistic light of a creation myth. I love the quotation from Carl Sagan that I have used before, in another context, and it seems to me that it's worth repeating here.
God must be even greater than we dreamed! A fine idea. My disbelief, perhaps, is directed at those "little gods" with whom believers seek to intimidate us or limit our potential.
On a related topic, I happened to watch a history program on public television last night--the story of the months between D-Day and VE-Day told with original color footage from the period and with the texts of letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home. Included, of course, was the liberation of two of the concentration camps--Buchenwald and Dachau--and the all-too familiar images of the innumerable dead and the relative handful of piteous survivors. The piece I had never seen before was the service for the dead at Buchenwald, conducted in Hebrew by a US army rabbi. The faces of the survivors as they listened to that ancient liturgy were one of the most moving scenes of the holocaust that I can remember--a mixture of disbelief, of indelible grief and pain, and of such tentative and mistrustful joy...
It's a well-worn speculation, of course, to wonder how any all-powerful God could allow his Chosen People to be treated in this way--and indeed how any God could stand by and watch his creations slaughter each other with such glorious abandon as they did in World War II, when sixty million people lost their lives in excruciating circumstances. It's man and his sinfulness, believers like to say, not God in his goodness that permits such things. Maybe so. Meantime, however, our various gods pursue their good work in this world, apparently inspiring humans to the most godless acts. The current occupant of the most powerful office in this country--I have difficulty bringing myself to refer to him as a "president"--apparently believes that his own infallible God is guiding his actions in the world, and look what they have brought about: the death of countless thousands of innocent souls and a chaotic situation that only promises more violence and death.
Let people believe whatever they want, I say. If they choose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that the Great Poobah rules the planet Mars, more power to them. But please let's be agnostic, at the very least, when we make public policy and put the lives of men and women at risk. Let's be more like the courageous Pete Stark and build our public policy on reason, not by surrendering to fantasies of some supreme being who avenges himself mercilessly on those who have the gall not to believe in him.
Far from God creating us in his image, it seems to me that we have created our various gods in ours. And it's none too flattering a self-portrait.
Imagine how successful a candidate for President might be if he or she took a similar public stand. Given the overwhelming majority of Americans who claim belief in God and who are willing to judge character based on similar belief, they wouldn't stand a chance. It seems that every candidate must make this public avowal of piety as a prerequisite for running for office, and seek the favors of the Almighty with as much fervor as he (let's call him he, if only for convenience) is thanked by triumphant sports heroes or Grammy winners--or by those fortunate enough to have survived car wrecks or natural disasters.
I think that I have never "believed" in God. Even as a child, brought up in the home of a minister of the Church of England and taken to church every Sunday, I don't think I actually "believed" in that bearded old guy up in the sky somewhere who dispensed favors in response to the prayers I was taught to say, kneeling by my bed each night, and was reputed to reward good and punish bad behavior. Santa Claus was more real to me than God--and I was more ready to suspend my disbelief in this particular old man with a beard. His favors were more... well, tangible. At least by the time I reached puberty, with reason budding in the brain along with the hormones in an even more interesting organ, the God I was required to "worship" as a part of my school's curriculum mattered less to me than the cigarettes I used to sneak behind the hedges on the Sussex Downs.
Which accounts in part for my growing appreciation for Buddhist thought and practice. It's a religion that first addresses the practical realities of life. No sin, no guilt. Just an honest appraisal of what's going to work and what's going to cause harm. "Past mistakes," says Than Geoff, "do not mean that you have to suffer." Just be aware of the negative outcome of your action, and work to do better next time. No God. No need for one. At the day-long retreat that Ellie and I attended last Saturday, Than Geoff told the story of how he was accosted, in his monk's robes, at a local bookstore, by a man who wanted to talk to him about "religion." Than Geoff agreed to spare a few minutes, and the man's first question was the demand to know if he believed in God. Than Geoff's simple "No" put an end to the conversation, but the man continued to stalk him through the bookstore in evident anger, until our monk felt nearly threatened enough to summon the manager of the store.
Interesting, then, and not a little dismaying, to realize that the existence of God is a matter of such fearful importance to people who might otherwise appear relatively sane. And sad, too, because, as Sam Harris noted in his Op-Ed piece, "Every one of the world's 'great' religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos." How strange that any reasonable person, looking at the marvelously intricate workings of every aspect of physical reality, from the leaf of a humble plant to the miracle of the human body, to the solar system and the vastness of the universe, would want to understand it all in the simplistic light of a creation myth. I love the quotation from Carl Sagan that I have used before, in another context, and it seems to me that it's worth repeating here.
"In some respects," Sagan wrote, "science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better that we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more sublte, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."
God must be even greater than we dreamed! A fine idea. My disbelief, perhaps, is directed at those "little gods" with whom believers seek to intimidate us or limit our potential.
On a related topic, I happened to watch a history program on public television last night--the story of the months between D-Day and VE-Day told with original color footage from the period and with the texts of letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home. Included, of course, was the liberation of two of the concentration camps--Buchenwald and Dachau--and the all-too familiar images of the innumerable dead and the relative handful of piteous survivors. The piece I had never seen before was the service for the dead at Buchenwald, conducted in Hebrew by a US army rabbi. The faces of the survivors as they listened to that ancient liturgy were one of the most moving scenes of the holocaust that I can remember--a mixture of disbelief, of indelible grief and pain, and of such tentative and mistrustful joy...
It's a well-worn speculation, of course, to wonder how any all-powerful God could allow his Chosen People to be treated in this way--and indeed how any God could stand by and watch his creations slaughter each other with such glorious abandon as they did in World War II, when sixty million people lost their lives in excruciating circumstances. It's man and his sinfulness, believers like to say, not God in his goodness that permits such things. Maybe so. Meantime, however, our various gods pursue their good work in this world, apparently inspiring humans to the most godless acts. The current occupant of the most powerful office in this country--I have difficulty bringing myself to refer to him as a "president"--apparently believes that his own infallible God is guiding his actions in the world, and look what they have brought about: the death of countless thousands of innocent souls and a chaotic situation that only promises more violence and death.
Let people believe whatever they want, I say. If they choose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that the Great Poobah rules the planet Mars, more power to them. But please let's be agnostic, at the very least, when we make public policy and put the lives of men and women at risk. Let's be more like the courageous Pete Stark and build our public policy on reason, not by surrendering to fantasies of some supreme being who avenges himself mercilessly on those who have the gall not to believe in him.
Far from God creating us in his image, it seems to me that we have created our various gods in ours. And it's none too flattering a self-portrait.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Good News
Well, it's official. L got a new job!!!! We are so excited and I am unbelievably proud of her and her dedication. I am humbly grateful. The pay is about the same but the insurance is awfully expensive. She's covered 100% but to cover me we'd have to pay a $400 a month premium so we're taking the medicare route for me to cover all the drugs I have to take.L told me that now that she has a new job that she's going to buy me a pair of non-leather, cruelty-free, sweatshop free shoes!!! I'm so excited!!! And they look pretty cool. I'm buying them through my new favorite store, mooshoes.
Here is a picture:
The Buddha picture is of the world’s biggest outdoor Buddha at the top of a mountain on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. I wish I took this picture but I found it on Google images.~Peace to all beings~
Birds
What is it about me and birds? Was I a bird in some previous incarnation? Am I being prepared to be one in a future life? You're not going to believe this, but I swear it's true. Ellie and I decided that we would do our Sunday meditation in our back patio this morning. We spent yesterday at a day-long retreat with Than Geoff, so we figured, well, we'd just stay quietly at home today, and the back patio is a wonderful place to sit.
So there we were. Sitting silent, peaceful, with eyes closed, breathing in the cool morning air. There was the sound of water from our Buddha fountain, the breeze in the eucalyptus leaves, the songs of birds. Now and then, there was the whirr of a hummingbird flitting around, gathering nectar from the springtime blossoms... Then all of a sudden, with a zipping sound that could have lasted no more than a pair of seconds, this one hummingbird made a beeline for my head. I heard it pass directly over me and as it passed I felt something soft and moist drop in my hair. Then it was gone.
I had been targeted. What are the chances of a hummingbird happening past and shitting on your head? The experience was as distracting from my meditation as had been the car keys--remember them, from last Sunday? See my entry, "Clinging"--the week before. While the impulse to confirm the evidence of my senses was powerful, I resisted the temptation to reach up and check my hair for bird poop, and struggled instead through the rest of my sit with excitement at having been thus selected for a blessing from above and with doubt as to whether this miracle had actually happened, or whether it was rather the result of an overactive imagination. I sat, then, breathing, eyes closed, for the rest of the sit, and worked to discipline the mind. ( I was also impatient to tell Ellie of this strange event, and my brain kept wanting to get the words together for this entry in The Buddha Diaries. "Not now" was Than Geoff's suggestion...)
Ellie was in charge of the timing and the bell, and when she rang it I asked her to check my hair for the forensic evidence. There was none. Whatever had fallen on my head--and I'm quite sure that something fell--had vaporized by the end of the meditation. Perhaps, I speculated, the bird had been bathing in the Buddha fountain, as they sometimes do, and had shed a drop of water as he flew away... Could it have been the tip of a wing, in flight? I actually have no idea. But I did hear, very clearly, the whirr of his passage close above my head. And I did feel something fall, or touch me...
Well, I'll take it as a Sunday blessing, and be grateful. Perhaps it's no more than another lesson on the ease with which my mind becomes distracted from the task that I assign it. I was going to write about God today... He'll have to wait until tomorrow now.
So there we were. Sitting silent, peaceful, with eyes closed, breathing in the cool morning air. There was the sound of water from our Buddha fountain, the breeze in the eucalyptus leaves, the songs of birds. Now and then, there was the whirr of a hummingbird flitting around, gathering nectar from the springtime blossoms... Then all of a sudden, with a zipping sound that could have lasted no more than a pair of seconds, this one hummingbird made a beeline for my head. I heard it pass directly over me and as it passed I felt something soft and moist drop in my hair. Then it was gone.
I had been targeted. What are the chances of a hummingbird happening past and shitting on your head? The experience was as distracting from my meditation as had been the car keys--remember them, from last Sunday? See my entry, "Clinging"--the week before. While the impulse to confirm the evidence of my senses was powerful, I resisted the temptation to reach up and check my hair for bird poop, and struggled instead through the rest of my sit with excitement at having been thus selected for a blessing from above and with doubt as to whether this miracle had actually happened, or whether it was rather the result of an overactive imagination. I sat, then, breathing, eyes closed, for the rest of the sit, and worked to discipline the mind. ( I was also impatient to tell Ellie of this strange event, and my brain kept wanting to get the words together for this entry in The Buddha Diaries. "Not now" was Than Geoff's suggestion...)
Ellie was in charge of the timing and the bell, and when she rang it I asked her to check my hair for the forensic evidence. There was none. Whatever had fallen on my head--and I'm quite sure that something fell--had vaporized by the end of the meditation. Perhaps, I speculated, the bird had been bathing in the Buddha fountain, as they sometimes do, and had shed a drop of water as he flew away... Could it have been the tip of a wing, in flight? I actually have no idea. But I did hear, very clearly, the whirr of his passage close above my head. And I did feel something fall, or touch me...
Well, I'll take it as a Sunday blessing, and be grateful. Perhaps it's no more than another lesson on the ease with which my mind becomes distracted from the task that I assign it. I was going to write about God today... He'll have to wait until tomorrow now.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/18/2007
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
~Martin Luther King
~Martin Luther King
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/17/2007
Great knowledge is broad, small knowledge is petty. Great talk is powerful, small talk is loquacious.
~Chuang Tzu
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
~Chuang Tzu
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
Friday, March 16, 2007
Water on Mars
Did you hear they'd discovered huge amounts of water on Mars? Buried in all the news of yesterday was that tiny item, that the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter had found a stash of ice at one of the poles about 11 kilometers deep--a resource that would cover the entire planet, if unfrozen, with thirty-six feet of water! I predict that over the course of the centuries to come--assuming that there are some for us Earthlings--this discovery will prove more important to the history of humankind that all of the disasters cooked up by our current president.
We know the story of how life as we know it crawled out of the water--at least those of us who don't believe that God created the world and all its creatures in a single week six thousand years ago. We also know that all life forms (is that true--all?) depend on water. But I'm thinking more about the future, when our species might well need that water for its own extraterrestrial survival. When we bolt the hole we have polluted beyond habitability, will we be seeking other places to despoil? Knowing us, I think we might. And all that Martian water could certainly come in handy.
That's all for today. Back to the taxes. Have a good weekend, all!
We know the story of how life as we know it crawled out of the water--at least those of us who don't believe that God created the world and all its creatures in a single week six thousand years ago. We also know that all life forms (is that true--all?) depend on water. But I'm thinking more about the future, when our species might well need that water for its own extraterrestrial survival. When we bolt the hole we have polluted beyond habitability, will we be seeking other places to despoil? Knowing us, I think we might. And all that Martian water could certainly come in handy.
That's all for today. Back to the taxes. Have a good weekend, all!
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 3/16/2007
People will not compete with you if you don't make much of your own cleverness...
~Cleary
~Cleary
Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma Compassion
Thursday, March 15, 2007
"The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins
I saw this book in the bookstore months ago and knew that I would be reading it sooner of later but that I was backed up on my reading. Well, yesterday I picked it up and began reading and let me tell you that so far it doesn't disappoint. I've read up to page 23 but already the author, (Richard Dawkins) has made some intriguing points. This will be the first of many posts on the book.First of all I want to share a great quote from Carl Sagan on the matter of a supernatural "God:"
Carl Sagan put it well: '...if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying...it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.'
This quote pretty much sums up my attitude about and toward a "God." However, I would add the following: My personal view of a "God" is most closely to that of a pantheist (if I have to delve into definitions). I try not to put limits upon such a force. Even though I do not believe in a supernatural "God" I do believe in an Unfathomable "God-force."
I think that such a force is so Enlightened that it is not limited to a permanent body (as my friend David alludes to in my cross-post at my Buddhist blog). That all sentient beings and non-sentient things have a piece of this "God-force" within "their" very DNA and molecular structure. I call myself a "Buddhist" to make it easier for people that think in structured, dualistic 'religious' terms. However, as a "Buddhist" I see that there really is no such thing as a "Buddhist" or "Buddhism" as both are always changing--as are all things according to the Buddha. Being a student of "Buddhism" I promptly looked up "Buddhism" in the index of the book and found this lonely reference.
And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.
I do not believe in a "God" that can be conceivable to the average theist either and I would submit that Dawkins believes the same. That his belief in science is a 'religion' but as the below quote explains, he purposely does not call himself 'religious' because that word is loaded with centuries of preconceived ideas.
He seems to be a pantheist:
Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs it's workings. ...Pantheism is sexed up Atheism. He then goes on to quote Einstein's religious beliefs and agrees with them: 'To sense behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.' In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever graspable.' But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural.'
James: After reading this quote I sank my teeth into the first, real meaty issue of the book. That being the idea that anything religious deserves an abnormal amount of respect and even a state of untouchability. He gives a couple of great examples regarding this issue:
I have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in public discussions of ethics in the media and in government. Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio and television. I'm not suggesting that we should go out of our way to censor the views of these people. But why does our society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, family lawyer or a doctor?
James: This is an excellent point. Abortion for example is a medical issue and not a religious issue. Sure religions have a right to be against abortion but why should a religious belief influence our laws that are supposed to be independent from any religion? Especially if we believe in a separation between church and state? Religions have a right to be free from governmental imposition of beliefs but the government has a right to make decisions based on science, reason and sociological data rather then on faith, based on what an arguable, mythical, "man in the sky" tells us to belief or do. History has tried many, many times to run government by religion and it has made a serious mess of things. That was one of the major reasons that the American revolution took off and was so successful. If religious groups are going to be invited to discuss and decide major government and political issues then they should lose their tax exempt status.
Here's another weird example of privileging of religion. On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine. Note that is sufficient to believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotheraphy. Yet the Supreme Court ruled in 2005, that all patients who use cannabis for medical purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims such an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.
James: This is going to be a great book.
~Peace to all beings~
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