Useful Obscurity and Celebrity Opposition

The title of this post is a play on Ivan Illich's "The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies," which I read once long ago, but haven't been able to re-locate.  Illich is one of those people that would make my list of authors who've influenced me, and while much of what he says is flat out wrong, naive, and unworkable, it's useful to read him as a thought exercise.

In the title I've referenced, Illich makes a plea for the idea that too much of what is done in society is relegated to "professions," which he views as blocking people from entering endeavors they otherwise would have little problem entering (if people were "usefully unemployed"); in effect, professions are an otherworldly clerical class as seen by Illich (oddly, given his theological background, or more properly precisely because of his theological background). 

As a professional, as one who has seen the rank stupidity that goes with people acting as though education and credentials don't matter, I can't abide by Illich's position categorically, though for sure many professionals have huge blind spots and canyons of ignorance abiding in their minds, and no doubt that goes for yours truly.  But Illich's point does have some utility...when it comes to "celebrity."

It's an interesting coincidence in the Buddhist blogosphere when in the short space of time the Joshu Sasaki thing is going on while it's announced that Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges will kind of sort of do a road show together.  Celebrities.

Why are there celebrities? The short answer is because there are those that make others to be that.  Maybe they are attractive or like Stephen Hawking, ostentatiously crippled.  Maybe they are brilliant, like Hawking, or maybe they're NFL linebackers.  In some cases, they are human bubbles (well, we're all human bubbles) - really popular human bubbles, such as Bruce Lee, who was incredibly talented, and not simply physically and whose celebrity became a kind of bubble which if traded on some kind of market exchanges, would have reached stratospheric heights.

But almost all of us are not celebrities.   Many of us are fans who live in a kind of symbiotic albeit likely dysfunctional relationship with celebrities.  I think the whole fan - celebrity thing is indeed dysfunctional.  I think it's more than OK to consider that John Lennon or Lady Gaga are talented folks, but the idea that these people are different - they are the celebrities who make the fans who the fans are - that idea is strange and unhealthy.

As I get older, I am trying to develop and keep learning new things, and not simply technical things in my chosen field.  I am doing this not only because I don't want to watch TV all day when I'm retired (if I ever actually retire), but also because I find it inherently interesting.  I am not a professional musician nor artist, but I would like to find my own voice and view in these things; my own idiom; I can say after all these years I kind of do have my own idiom in my style of technical development/design approaches.  And I am fortunate enough to be doing some parenting/mentoring/leading...hopefully passing on what little I have learned with a minimum of damage to the next generation.

I have been fortunate that in more than one of these endeavors I've met people with remarkable, tremendous skill and in some cases trained with them.  You've never heard of them unless you're a kind of specialist, but it doesn't really matter; they never needed popularity or fame to do what they did, but they did need the 10,0000 hours of practice and effort.   That 10,000 hours tends to be 10,000 hours not doing PR; it is indeed useful obscurity.

Now I have no problem per se with a Jeff Bridges/Bernie Glassman road show; I liked The Big Lebowski as much as the next guy (probably more - I maintain the film can't be fully appreciated without a deep knowledge of The Big Sleep,  because that's where the humor's really deeply embedded).   I just can't imagine what claims they could make on my attention beyond those things that already have huge claims on my attention.   I mean ...seriously...why should I see them? Does it have to do with clown noses?  An understanding of Zen?  The basic goodness of a fictional naive stoner who is really an anti-Philip Marlowe? (A more interesting area of exploration: Jeff Lebowski contra Philip Marlowe; but you can explore that yourself, can't you?)  Well, whatever...

Good luck to Danny Fisher and Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman - though I hope somebody gets to ask the latter about Genpo Merzel, if only out of a sense of mischievousness.  But even if I lived in the LA area, I'd have other plans that night. 

I see more of Brad Warner's view momentarily...

This thing from Sweeping Zen regarding some yearly message from "Soto-shu" sounds really corporate.

I mean really corporate.

Oh, that's not Adam Tebbe's fault either, in fact, kudos to him for bringing that up.

無 does not mean "nothing." But it doesn't mean something either.

I'm reading something by Koryu Osaka on the 公安　無.  And he wrote what's in the title of this post more or less, or at least that's attributed to him somewhere in that text.  No matter.

I'm reading stuff on Buddhism in the blogspace, stuff that seems re-hashed, and to some degree recycled.  I've rarely, if ever, recycled anything, myself; I can't fault those who do, but I wouldn't recycle anything on this blog until I re-edit a bunch of old posts and publish them together.  At least that's my plan.

But the stuff I read on Buddhism in the blogspace...it tends towards being quite ...um...not what I'd intended to be blogging about in the Buddhist blogspace (please don't get me started on celebrity meatspace-op blog posts either, but chacun a son goûts.)  And there's still that feeling I've had of late...everything is exactly the way it should be.  Flaws and ignorance and hatred and all.   My own hatred and anger and stupidity and basest rage and all that comes with that and all that is misplaced, disowned, lost, and forgotten or repressed. That too is exactly as it should be - it is as though it is neither overdetermined or underdetermined; it's n  equations in n unknowns, so to speak.

It's all  無.     Those Buddhist blog posts, this Buddhist blog post, it's all 無.  Ditto for self/no-self,  poisons, celebrities, misplaced interpretations of sutras, vestigial rantings about George W. Bush, etc. etc.

It's exactly the way it should be; it's all the product of aggregates that have come together, dependent on previous conditions, states, actions, etc, to be exactly the way it is now.

Is this making any sense at all?  Hope so.  And the nature of the "self" is just like this.

The stupid...sometimes it's hard to take...

It may be down the memory hole pay wall by now, but the New Yorker had an article up last week about college kids taking speed...only they weren't calling it speed, and they were couching it an updated version of the language that was use in the 60s to describe physician prescribed pep pills. 

Not long ago, I met with Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in his office, which is tucked inside the labyrinthine Penn hospital complex. Chatterjee’s main research interests are in subjects like the neurological basis of spatial understanding, but in the past few years, as he has heard more about students taking cognitive enhancers, he has begun writing about the ethical implications of such behavior. In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition. Chatterjee worries about cosmetic neurology, but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery has; in fact, with neuroenhancement it’s harder to argue that it’s frivolous. As he notes in a 2007 paper, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter,” needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all “abundantly clear.” In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

Chatterjee told me that many people who come to his clinic are cognitively preoccupied versions of what doctors call the “worried well.” The day I visited his office, he had just seen a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names. “Here’s an example of someone who by most measures is doing perfectly fine,” Chatterjee said. “She’s not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems, and it’s very hard to know how much of that is just getting older.” Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation, both of which have been shown to help maintain cognitive function. But maybe they’re already doing so and want a bigger mental rev-up, or maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill.

Recently, I spoke on the phone with Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge University, and the co-author of a December, 2007, article in Nature, “Professor’s Little Helper.” Sahakian, who also consults for several pharmaceutical companies, and her co-author, Sharon Morein-Zamir, reported that a number of their colleagues were using prescription drugs like Adderall and Provigil. Because the drugs are easy to buy online, they wrote, it would be difficult to stop their spread: “The drive for self-enhancement of cognition is likely to be as strong if not stronger than in the realms of ‘enhancement’ of beauty and sexual function.” (In places like Cambridge, at least.)

See what I mean? Take a pill to make yourself "more."  Now I happen to be in the camp that would say it is possible to use technology to alter our behavior - this is in some ways self-evident: a pair of running shoes makes it easier to run.  A Wing Chun dummy enables one to practice Wing Chun without a partner.   A swimming pool helps one practice swimming. 

There are limits to this though.  Technology will extract a kind of "karmic debt" with everything else - it then becomes a question of one's willingness to use the technology at the price of the karmic debt.  I'm having a cup of coffee. If I want coffee in the future I'll have to make more soon - and the whole host of behaviors of having coffee come with the coffee.  If I have it late at night I can't sleep.   A technology that makes us feel happy all the time robs us of honing the skill of using depression, sadness and grief to benefit all.  The same goes for other kinds of technologies besides the chemical. 

You get the point. Speed kills now just as it did then.  Taking that crap won't make us all John McAfee, but we might be something repugnant anyway.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

Yesterday I had a colonoscopy for the first time in my life.   Probably most people who read this blog who aren't over 40 or so have little idea of what that actually entails.   To put it bluntly, you eat a very low fiber diet for a couple of days and then the day before you have the colonoscopy you're supposed to have a liquid diet until...it's time to take the "super laxative" they  prescribe for you.  And then there's predictable results.

You take that super laxative again (in the regimen I was prescribed) a few hours before you're supposed to show up at the hospital for the actual procedure.  After the second ingestion of the super laxative, along with a liter of water, you're not supposed to eat or drink anything until the procedure.  Suffice it to say, when you're at the hospital, you really aren't in any shape to do much of anything.  You're dehydrated, your electrolyte balance has gone blooey,  and your mind can't really focus on anything. 

Being at the hospital in this shape, when for all intents and purposes you're otherwise healthy is strange, to say the least.  I was in the "short stay" area of the hospital, but it still was a hospital, I was in a hospital bed wearing a hospital gown, etc. etc. etc.  The TV had some kind of "hospital advice" channel for new mothers.  Someone had left a "Weekly Standard" as reading.   I tried reading some blather about the "Tea Party," and didn't get far.  Then I went through 2 episodes of "Law and Order" on the TV (even now I haven't a clue what the story line was).  They wheeled me into the place where the colonoscopy was to occur,  gave me some kind of Valium derivative mixed with fentanyl  - and I was out.

Anyway, I had the predictable meal afterwards, slept, ate again, etc. etc. slept,  and then I woke up this morning.

And I sat.

And everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be.   

It probably is related to the microflora ecosystem in my gut and its relative changes after the procedure, as well as a whole host of other aggregates and things, but ...anybody else ever feed profoundly good after something like this?

Everything Under Attack

Pop neuroscience is under attack, so says the NY Times.

Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.
A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.
As a journalist and cultural critic, I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.
Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.
A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Well. There is a more than a bit of silliness in much of the pop-whatever these days: "Wisdom of the crowds" (Walmart Black Friday stampedes anyone?) and "Blink" come immediately to mind.   As well as anything David Brooks has ever written, if that qualifies.

Still...Brain's neuronal connections being plastic and all that...it seems intuitively obvious that some people with rigid thinking - yeah, some extreme right wingers - well, their brains do seem to work differently.

And as regular readers to this site know, the author is no fan of "spiritual" "mind" "technology."  Gladwell was right about a few things, most interestingly the need to practice a lot. So yeah, be skeptical a bit. 

But then again everything is "under attack."  Dosho Port seems to be going in the direction of saying Zen is "under attack" because, hey, it seems Sasaki Roshi couldn't keep his hands to himself, and... he's still going strong at 105.

Sooner or later everything ought to be questioned,  especially Zen.   There's a crack in everything, Leonard Cohen said - it's how the light gets in.  

But keep going. 

And a brief word to Adam Tebbe...

...based on what I read here.   Ultimately, any "teacher" whose misbehaved in the course of his teaching will have to deal with the fallout of that, as will the objects of that "teacher's" misbehavior.

But there's no point in trotting near paranoia and conspiracy theories.

But...let me just say this:

The  rumored or reputed misbehavior of "teachers'" is not the Way,   but so it is also for scandal blogging for the sake of scandal blogging.

Point is this: Even Genpo and Eido Shimano and  George W. Bush are worthy of compassion.

Difficult, ain't it? Genpo may be a phony (Brad Warner's very legit beef with him), but that guy too is worthy of compassion.

Ain't gonna be happy all the time, and most certainly shouldn't

That's what came to me as I read this.   Stress has a purpose, just as relaxation and being care-free does.   No doubt you can have apps that improve your life, and more will come, apps that observe you.  But happiness won't come without unhappiness.

Thanksgiving Zen Scandals

Oddly enough it seems when holiday season comes around, it's time for another scandal at a Zen center somewhere or other.  

I am beginning to have  mixed feelings about all these "Zen Center Scandals."  Yeah, don't sexually harass folks, Zen teachers.  No sh!t, Sherlock, at this point, right?  But some of this stuff, especially the Mt. Baldy stuff, does not start to make sense to me at all.  I was going to write a lot more about this, but I would just like to take one example for now, that featured prominently Sweeping Zen.

Myoan Grace Shireson, you almost write were groped on the grounds of a Zen temple. I believe you. But when you say "Not only was there a culture barrier, but we had been instructed to be friendly to lay people..."  Culture barrier? Culture barrier?  Are you kidding me???? I have no idea how old you are, but I guarantee you  that when you were in Japan there was a name for such people: 痴漢, ちかん　which translates as "pervert."  Yes, they have issues like this on trains in Japan (and a reverse problem where many men are afraid to sit near a woman on a train for fear of  being falsely accused).   But in no way is this an accepted part of the culture.   There are different sexual morés in Japan, to be sure and yes, they have had more than their share of issues with gender equality to put it mildly.   But in Japan, the guy who groped you was a 痴漢,   such people are not tolerated and haven't been for years, and what you experienced wasn't a culture barrier but instead an ignorance of their culture.

I also don't know how long you've been in Japan or how many times you've visited there, but if you've been there frequently, and if you have a reasonable knowledge of the language and culture today, there simply is no reason for you to have phrased your experience there this way - you'd have known what the culture is in this regard; all you have to do is know people and ride a train in a major city, for example.

I might add the rest of your post there is similarly culturally uninformed and hardly inclusive in language, presupposing that the only form of harassment that can take place is a male in a position of power abusing a female with less power.  Police and authority figures in government are indifferent to everyone; I'm sure it's worse with women, but c'mon, been through airport security lately?

The best way for Zen centers, frankly, to deal with this problem might not be to register as religious institutions, but as corporations subject to corporate law on harassment, etc.   The law is an imperfect tool, but it does at least provide redress and remedy when harm is done.

One other point I want to make about this, as a guy who's been studying Zen for a number of years. It's why I'm increasingly ambivalent about this whole Zen scandals everywhere thing.  When you've studied with a teacher for a number of years, they don't really seem as gods, but they seem every atom a human being.  I don't care what the teacher is teaching, but every good teacher, if you are with them long enough, you will see they're slobs just like you, though with more knowledge and skill.

I'm reading about the Mt. Baldy scandal, and I just can't square "sexual scandal" with "the teacher is a slob just like you."  That is to say, - and I direct this to commenters who are citing POWER POWER POWER as a reason for "why" these scandals happen - when you've trained for a period of years, it is simply inconceivable if you're training with any halfway competent teacher that you will see any kind of "power" differential at all, because why the teacher may be older, more knowledgeable and more skilled, after a certain point it gets to the point where it becomes kind of obvious that you're capable of getting there without that particular teacher, because whatever's getting you there isn't him, isn't really you, but it's in the nature of - or lack thereof - in the 5 aggregates so to speak. It just is.  And so your teacher isn't a god, but a guy helping you along, even if you're never actually given adulation and praise for a snappy koan answer.  You've come to expect that bell to ring telling you sorry bud, sanzen's over for today, better luck next time, and it's not so important that you have to invest ego, time, worry, self-image, etc. etc. over it.  It's important, but not important to use a logic by which Leonard Cohen described Joshu Sasaki roshi.

That's what I find hard to square with this sexual harassment.  Plus the guy's over 100 years old.  But mostly the former. Sasaki roshi was evidently, at least echoing what was an effective teaching at least for some people.  And maybe he was a 痴漢.   Maybe he's been both of them.    But it reeks of Orientalism to say that such things as gropings are tolerated in Japan, and yeah,  what Stuart Lachs has said elsewhere.   These people aren't gods and aren't viewed as such in their own societies.  They may be rare in this country or the world, but isn't everyone?

A couple of brief thoughts about the importance of the Great Matter in "Western" Buddhism

Does anyone really care about the hippies anymore?   Does it really matter one whit if the importance of the Great Matter is emphasized or not in "Western" Centers?


皆様は、死刑がある。

Everyone has been given the death penalty. It's a consequence of being born.  The resolution of the  Great Matter is our resolution of the cold, hard fact that this is the case for those between birth and death.

And any substitution of the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑 with "pragmatic psychology which is meant to address universal human ethical concerns"  really pretty much is bullshit.  Human ethical concerns are only realized with the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑.

Who the hell writes this stuff?

In reading what might be an otherwise unremarkable NY Times book review on a biography on Brigham Young, I came upon this passage:

The perennial question in Mormon history is: Whose side are you on? For over a century, the church cleaved to “faith-­promoting” histories about heroic Joseph and Brigham, and the evil Gentiles who persecuted them. As recently as 19 years ago, Salt Lake’s guardians of the Saintly flame excommunicated several prominent writers and historians for what the old-line Soviets would have called “deviationist” points of view. (Some of them have since rejoined the church.)

Turner is on the side of good history, and he generally negotiates the many tripwires in the Saints’ story — the “hall of mirrors,” as he calls it — with aplomb. For example, he unflinchingly recounts the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and their Paiute Indian allies killed a group of emigrants from Arkansas. While he writes that Young encouraged the Indians to attack the wagon trains, Turner allows that no document directly links him to the horrific murders of 120 men, women and children. Turner does note that Young cynically billed the federal government for $3,527 worth of gifts supposedly distributed to “sundry bands of Indians near Mountain Meadow.” The gifts — steers, clothing and butcher knives — had in fact been plundered from the slaughtered settlers. What Turner calls “the dark stain the Mountain Meadows Massacre” left on Young’s reputation remains to this day.

That this guy, Brigham Young, is celebrated by any segment in our society is pathological, and probably  more pathological than if any segment of our society celebrated Sonny Barger - the latter I would claim and those like him are more honest in their endeavors.  You know what the Hell's Angels are.   They don't claim to be the one true religion yada yada yada.

Of course, that a nominee for President of the United States can't bring himself to address issues such as this - that is to say, how does he square his Mormon-ness with the questionable history of this church - and that nobody wants to go there is even more pathological.

"And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking?"

So says the NY Times Beliefs editor.

I suspect the editor may be right, but not in the way that he thinks...

The case in point involved some kind of social science researcher who is some kind of right-wing Christian who managed to get a study published that claimed that households run by teh gay have more problems than otherwise, and the resulting brouhaha.

One can easily imagine why there might be reasons where this is true, but irrelevant (e.g., gays have more problems because heterosexuality as defined with a male patriarchy is privileged in this society, for starters).

But I digress a bit...

The worldview we should aspire to is no worldview.  The writer seems to make it as though worldviews were like clothing or hair styles, and most right wing Christians make this sort of appeal.    But it's immature in the extreme -it is like saying, do we want to play spies or cowboys and Indians or Muslim and Christian?

We shouldn't seek to adopt a set of beliefs - although much brouhaha has also been made of the Buddhism without Beliefs of Stephen Bachelor,  the point remains that Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things is going to be Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things no matter what we necessarily want to make believe is true about them.

So, in a sense, any worldview is already a mistake.

Changing the world...

I have recently been involved in trying to do something new in my work life.  This new thing is kind of evolving with a bunch of people.

There's obstacles.  The obstacles are being maneuvered in a 功夫 kind of way - "being like water."  Obstacles are a form of dukkha.  There's one particular obstacle that has been bothering me...but I think I figured a way around that obstacle - and it requires a profundity in what we are doing.

I think I may be on to something - the degree to which one can transcend the obstacles in life is the degree to which, in being like water, we make a profound radical change (not necessarily an arduous one.)

Thanks everyone for your continued support on this blog!

This is obviously, totally not the right way to go

If you give kids pills because their environment's bad, you are fostering the notion that you should not change what you should change, and you are fostering the notion that it takes something external to one to change what is inside of one. And it teaches them that there is separation, and that society's sicknesses must be accommodated  for rather than treated.

"I feel like it's getting out God's word to those who need it."

The NY Times reports on that curious sacrament of Texas, played with religiosity.'

School district officials ordered the cheerleaders to stop putting Bible verses on the banners, because they believed doing so violated the law on religious expression at public school events. In response, a group of 15 cheerleaders and their parents sued the Kountze Independent School District and its superintendent, Kevin Weldon, claiming that prohibiting the students from writing Christian banner messages violated their religious liberties and free-speech rights.

On Thursday afternoon, the two sides met in a courtroom on the second floor of the Hardin County Courthouse. It had all the trappings of a high-profile courtroom drama: Lawyers from both sides haggled over the Texas Constitution and the cheerleaders’ own constitution, a police officer with an assault rifle and binoculars was stationed on the roof, reporters filled the jury box, and one witness — Kieara Moffett, an 11th grade cheerleader — teared up on the stand during cross-examination.

The superintendent’s decision has outraged many students and their parents, and has brought national attention upon a small town about two hours outside Houston. The cheerleaders’ supporters have put up lawn signs and started a Facebook page called Support Kountze Kids Faith that, with nearly 50,000 members, far exceeds the town’s population of 2,100...

Each side’s lawyers cast their clients as courageous: The teenage cheerleaders, for standing up to the school district to protect their religious views, and Mr. Weldon, himself a Christian and a former football coach, for taking an unpopular position in a largely conservative Christian town in order to, as he sees it, uphold the law.

After a daylong hearing that included the testimony of two cheerleaders, District Judge Steven Thomas of Hardin County decided to extend for an additional 14 days more a temporary restraining order that he had put in place two weeks ago. The move prevents district officials from enforcing the ban on religious signs for 14 days and allows the cheerleaders to continue to create and display the banners at the home game on Friday night as well as other coming games. It seemed likely that the judge would hold another hearing in two weeks.

“I feel like it’s getting God’s word out to those that need it,” Kieara, 16, said of the banners.

Yeah, people need to see bible verses and they need to do so at the football games to which they go.

And yeah, Kieara, you surely feel that way,  I submit.

I don't know how far it goes back, but the arrogance of this stuff is breathtaking.  Regardless of what eventually happens in this case (which depends, naturally on case law being followed, which in this benighted time and that benighted place might be different than what one might expect), regardless of what happens, it certainly doesn't reflect well on the bible sputtering cheer-leaders, their parents, or their religion.

It all leads to death...and when you die, they die. The gut bacteria, that is.

My wife was reminding me last night about one acquaintance with a brain tumor who now can't recognize others and another who is in the last stages of liver cancer.

There's a heck of a lot of dreck that comes about in the course of living one's life.

And it all leads to death.

The trick is doing it gracefully, beautifully, and compassionately, and yes, with skill.

At the same time I still know the 67 year old guy who can do 詠春券 to the point where he can outdo others.

So, yeah, it depends on skill.

And when you die, they die.

Who?

The bacteria flora in your gut, inter alia.

The bacteria flora in your gut are responsible for amazing things. According to a recent RadioLab Show (entitled, helpfully enough, "Guts;" you can Google it, I'm working through a bad cold this week), the ecosystem of bacteria flora in your gut are more than possibly strong contributors to one's mood.

This brings the whole issue of 5 aggregates and all that into an entirely different realm, I think.

How to handle a pathological liar...or, advice to Barack Obama

I watched the debates last night, or I should say parts of them. Yeah, yeah Romney lied through his teeth and Barry pulled his punches.

I mean, if I were there, and Willard was spewing the lies that he told, I would have put it to him thusly:

"Mitt, we know what you've said in the past; it's recorded multiple times all over the place.  Either you've changed your positions - again - which brings up fundamental questions about trusting you - or - you're not being honest here tonight, which also brings up fundamental questions about trusting you.  Is there anything you'd like to walk back considering the video record that's out there?"

Simple enough.  Maybe the Obama folks know this and are going to blitz the airwaves with these ads which would be so easy to make.  But as for me, I simply would have said the above.  It's true, it's accurate, it's somewhat delicate.  And it pins Romney.  And it's what people would have wanted to see. 

Either that or the whole thing's been scripted from the get-go.  I can't discount that.

We're all downtrodden...even if we believe we're not...

An interesting point is made in the NY Times recurring talking head series "Room for Debate" by one Hastings Wyman, in this case, on why the South is more right-wing than the rest of the USA.  Well, actually he could have made it slightly better, so I'll make the slightly better version:

There were two ethnic groups alone in the South, and pretty much nobody else, unlike pretty much the rest of the country.  The native Americans were largely exterminated or ethnically cleansed.

So there weren't really Irish to realize that in their being picked on by the WASPs,  they were in solidarity with Germans,  Jews,  Poles, Italians, and,  yes, African Americans and Latinos.

I think it's one of the cases where if we can see our common state of dukkha, we're a bit better off; a smidgen of suffering is transcended right there.

A few things Stephen Chow on YouTube for your perusal

Because you can't get much Stephen Chow in the US of A...and I have nothing particularly edifying to say at the moment...







"The God of Cookery"









"Hail the Judge"







"From Beijing with Love"

I'm even younger than that now...

I am now listening to "My Back Pages," one of the great songs about maturity by Bob Dylan.

And I realize...

It's possible that it's possible to go beyond "My Back Pages."


There was a time when it all made sense to not take a hard position...but...

Sometimes you must sadly, regretfully, and with a sense of loss tearing you to the heart...to...

take a position that is black and white.

Sometimes,  despite the utter folly of humanity's existence, despite the complete insanity that defines everything from the murders carried about under Sargon to Pol Pot to George W. Bush that...

One must take a firm position: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

And sometimes, place where "Here I stand!" is, is a knife's edge.

Game theory, you know.

The moment someone says "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" ...well...that creates problems...for which one can only respond in certain ways...

More to come...time to deal with home stuff again...duties...see above.

I should have known it would be something like this...

So as it happens, there's a whole bunch of rare earth deposits, gems, and evidently valuable stuff that's being discovered as Greenland's ice sheet melts.

Now I get it.

Same principle as Tibet.


A person with a vested interest in exploiting a country chock full of untapped resources might make all kinds of justifications for doing anything or nothing as long as they can get their hand near the cookie jar.

Can't escape suffering. Nope.

It is not for nothing that we say we don't annihilate suffering but rather that we transcend it.

We cannot escape pain in life; it is what gives life its poignancy.

Can't escape death either.

It's good to be prepared.

Not a lot of separation. And yet separate, when it comes to genetics

A bit in the Sunday times on fatherhood and epigenetics:

Before I began reading up on fathers and their influence on future generations, I had a high-school-biology-level understanding of how a man passes his traits on to his child. His sperm and the mother’s egg smash into each other, his sperm tosses in one set of chromosomes, the egg tosses in another, and a child’s genetic future is set for life. Physical features: check. Character: check. Cognitive style: check. But the pathways of inheritance, I’ve learned, are subtler and more varied than that. Genes matter, and culture matters, and how fathers behave matters, too.  

Lately scientists have become obsessed with a means of inheritance that isn’t genetic but isn’t nongenetic either. It’s epigenetic. “Epi,” in Greek, means “above” or “beyond.” Think of epigenetics as the way our bodies modify their genetic makeup. Epigenetics describes how genes are turned on or off, in part through compounds that hitch on top of DNA — or else jump off it — determining whether it makes the proteins that tell our bodies what to do.  

In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad. Psychologists and sociologists particularly like it because gene expression or suppression is to some degree dictated by the environment and plays at least as large a role as genes do in the development of a person’s temperament, body shape and predisposition to disease. I’ve become obsessed with epigenetics because it strikes me as both game-changing and terrifying. Our genes can be switched on or off by three environmental factors, among other things: what we ingest (food, drink, air, toxins); what we experience (stress, trauma); and how long we live.  

Epigenetics means that our physical and mental tendencies were not set in stone during the Pleistocene age, as evolutionary psychology sometimes seems to claim. Rather, they’re shaped by the life we lead and the world we live in right now. Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that history could reach them. (One person who did imagine it is the French 18th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that acquired traits could be inherited. Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback.)

There are certain problems with the above text though in general I agree with its sentiment. First the problems: No, Lamarckism is not staging a comeback - Larmarckism held that in general acquired traits are inherited.

The degree to which we can make choices is also shaped by prior inputs and states,  and we don't know to what extent what was shaped by what because it's all interconnected.

But yeah, stop messing with the future in a bad way.

I've been REALLY busy lately, but...

I couldn't pass up this bit of what I can only see as strange news.

GAPYEONG, South Korea — North Korea has decided not to send a delegation to South Korea to attend the funeral of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, a senior church official said Thursday. "When I was in the North, I was told by the officials there that there would be no funeral delegation to visit the South," said Park Sang-Kwon, president of an automaking joint venture the church established in North Korea in 1999. Speaking to reporters at the church's headquarters at Gapyeong, east of Seoul, Park said officials in Pyongyang had cited lingering anger over a recent US-South Korea military exercise. "They said the North still had hard feelings... and it may be inappropriate for them to send the delegation after criticising the South so much in recent weeks," he said.

So let me get this straight:  A right-wing exploitative cult leader dies, and the cult-like leftwing dictatorship to the North had actually considered sending someone to this guy's funeral.

Weird.

Kitsch and Buddhist Imagery and What It All Might Mean

It's been a few weeks since I've had a blog post.  This has been for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the strange internet conditions in the People's Republic of China, the fact that I was doing something creative at work, and that creative thing was sorely needed.

In my travels to NY this year my siblings and I were involved in settling my mother's estate.   Evidently my mother was a rather avid collector of something called "Precious Moments."

She was, I think, under the impression that these things would increase in value, kind of like the way some people would have bought Thomas Kinkade "paintings" for the same reason.   Like Thomas Kinkade, these things ooze what is commonly called "kitsch."  The Wikipedia article on kitsch describes Milan Kundera's view on the subject:

The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as "the absolute denial of shit". He wrote that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions".

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptableconsensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch."

For Kundera, "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

And this led me to the question: is Buddhist imagery kitsch? I think some imagery can be considered this way,  but not all of it can, just as some Christian imagery is definitely not kitsch, but some is.  

It is kind of interesting to me though that some aspects of Buddhist inspired arts, notably those Zen-derived, strive to incorporate some aspects of "real life," or emptiness, or wabisabi (侘寂).   

Coincidentally, there's been some discussion in the Buddhist blogosphere of something called "near enemies." 

I'll go out on a limb here and say I'm not sure there are such things as "near enemies."  There are, of course ways of being that are not conducive to the transcendence of suffering, to be sure.  And those ways of being are ways of being that just won't go - you cannot expect to be entirely rid of attachments, envy,  hatred, greed, etc. 

That's not the point, of course, the point is to transcend them.

But there is also talk of pity, indifference,  and something that is substituted for true feelings (which makes them, what, false feelings?).

I'm not sure there are such things...take pity for example.  Pity might not be the best of all possible worlds - that is pity as kindly sorrow for another, which, I'd submit recognizes a difference between the pitier and the pitied.  And it is a motivator of charity in which there is still a gaining idea (the problem with much of so-called "Christian charity.")

But I think it may be more of a continuum than a set of discrete and separate states. Pity might lead to compassion, if the pitier realizes his separateness from the pitied. 

I agree with Barbara, that it's good to have a relationship with a teacher to help. 

But one still shoulders the responsibility here. 

I may have more to say on this later. 

Acting according to someone else's "revelation" is violent and blasphemous

I am a Buddhist because, among other things, appeals to supernatural have never seemed particularly effective to me, nor have I seen any convincing evidence that it was effective for anyone else.   I don't claim to be a metaphysical naturalist (too idealistic in my view, especially with regard to the limitations of language, thought and perception).   However, I'm sure I seem damned close to one if the person doing the seeming is a monotheistic "believer" of some sort.  I put quote marks around "believer" because I think there is a whole entire question of whether or not a anyone can "believe" anything in the sense of what a writer in the bible said; that is faith is the "evidence of things not seen."  Is this "belief" delusion by another name?

It is a question I will not get to here, because for now I have a larger question in mind.  Some  people I know are perfectly content to attempt to convert others to Christianity, and otherwise talk as though it is natural and appropriate to presume the existence of Christian belief in polite conversation.  People with whom I am a little less familiar think there's no problem at all in attempting to convert others to Christianity, particularly children and adolescents.

I say this is a kind of violence, in the sense of an unjust or unwarranted exercise of force or power.  This view, I'll admit, owes a bit to R. D. Laing's brilliant case for how much of what we call "love" in Western "civilization" is really a form of violence as found in The Politics of Experience.

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.  

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day. Orwell's time is already with us. The colonists not only mystify the natives, in the wasy that Fanon so clearly shows, they have to mystify themselves. We in Europe and North America are the colonists, and in order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God's gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process. 

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s, if possible. 

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age. 

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny. 

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. 

It is an obscenity and blasphemous to say that one person has been deigned lucky enough or good enough or sacred enough or holy enough to have had the Great Holy Truth Revealed to Him and Those Who Say the Same Things He Does And No One Else Does.

It's not "love" or "compassion" talking when one wants to "share the good news," but rather it is pride and narcissism. 

And it should be pointed out to be such.  Look, if you want to talk about such things, and "believe" such things, fine, good for you.  But do not be so rude and arrogant as to assume that people who don't "believe" such things should be "brought around to your way of thinking."  You are just as existentially unlucky as anyone else.  You cannot escape.  You can only try to help others without the religiosity, and if you have another way and it's not empirically demonstrable, don't waste anyone's time most of all your own.

I was recently on a flight to Washington D.C., and I was sitting next a wonderful woman who worked for World Vision, a Christian charity. We discussed quite a few things related to charity (such as why the heck a lawyer was needed for that charity and why they needed government grants - I never actually got an answer to those questions).   But the issue of charity came up.  She said people helped others in World Vision "because they wanted to recognize that God loved them." (Actually I think at first she said, "Because we want to show God's love in the world" - that really is the kind of  issue I'm talking about.)

This struck me as odd, and out of reasons of sparing the woman's feelings, I did not  tell the woman that if you're not helping people because people are hurting or will hurt, and for those reasons alone - that is, to alleviate suffering now and in the future - then you're not helping them as effectively as you could. 

It is a kind of narcissistic blasphemy to think you're "showing God's love in the world" by thinking you're "doing unto others as you would have others do unto you."  You may be helping fellow human beings.   But if somebody's dying of cancer maybe the last thing they need is someone to preach to them with an affect of religiosity and instead they need someone to care for them without a first or second or third or n-th thought as to the "goodness" of this in the eyes of any real or imagined deities.   Maybe if they're religious,  and dying of cancer they may want some religious comfort.  Good for them, and for you if you both want to pray together.


In some cases, even a dying person can be attempting to manipulate others in religion talk, even to the point of attempting to get people to say things they don't believe in just to make the dying person "feel better."  Again, nobody's "revelation," even a dying person's, is of any greater value than anyone else's and regardless of who does it, it is violence to act otherwise, and should be stated as such.  And I don't really think many dying people are actually any more comforted (and perhaps less - there's that whole damnation thing)  by appeal to a monotheist deity than anyone else.  In the cases where I've seen this type of manipulation of the family by the dying, it certainly wasn't the case.

So hopefully that sets a few things straight here.

One more thing: you're still responsible.  You can't blame "faith" for hate and narcissistic arrogance disguised as care and love.  This is partly my Buddhist/existentialist answer to the question of where morality comes from. But it is, here, ultimately my entire point: we're responsible. I'm responsible for what I do, and for what I do in response to whatever behavior I encounter.  If you're going to act "in God's name" to me, you better damn well do it as though God doesn't exist  (in which case why are you saying you're doing it in God's name?)  You better damn well do it as though God doesn't exist, because whether or not a monotheistic deity exists, you're still responsible.

OK, that's it for today.

What's in your mind?

In doing my day-to-day practice, I've been noticing that indeed my mind doesn't do anything I know about except for the "5 Aggregates."

This is fascinating to me.  But even  more so, it is the fact that my mind does this and "mediates things" in such a way that a heck of a lot of wants tend to come up. It seems that so much  of my day-to-day awareness is driven by the "Oh, no I'm going to die under a bridge" kind of feeling arising from me not liking that I may not "get" what "I" want.

But it's all empty, void of substance anyway.  Everything "I" want is impermanent, imagined, a thought construct.

Isn't that strange? And yet, I'd bed most people are exactly the same way much of the time.

Is there any wonder then that this wanting, wanting, wanting, leads to suffering, suffering, suffering, and why one might want to transcend it?

A couple of responses to Buddhist blog posts of late...

• Regarding Jordan's post on morals and Zen,  I must remonstrate slightly, though I share his overall sentiment.  Jordan writes:

Zen, an abbreviated term for Zazen: Sitting upright with legs crossed. Zen is the practice of all the Buddha ancestors. You might even say zen is a yoga posture. You might call it Cha'an, or Sitting Dhyāna. Everything else is not zen. 

Zen is not an agenda.
Zen is not a doctrine
Zen is not some idea of the true way.
Zen is not a religion despite dictionary entries and many views to the contrary.
Zen is not writing a long intellectual blog post.

I remonstrate slightly because "everything else" can be Zen.  The mindset/orientation/disposition of koan practice or shikantaza can be brought into everyday activity.  But yeah, morals have no Zen in what he's saying.

• Regarding Danny Fisher's interview Heshima Kenya’s Alisa Roadcup, I'm very sure she's dong great things for people who really need it, and encourage support for Heshima Kenya.  Still, I could not help to have done other than to have been reminded of the Blue Cliff Record, Case 1.  And one need not necessarily go far to do good for all beings.

I don't work in Silicon Valley, but if I did...

I'd find the idea of hard-partying 20-30 something year olds indeed a ridiculous stereotype.  I'd find it a ridiculous stereotype anyway a) because there's lots of people my age over there... that is they're "grownups," and b) every engineer in the course of their work knows or should try to know how they're going to change the world...unless you're an engineer in the defense industry (where it's kinda sorta obvious how you're going to change the world).

"Zen" "has" no morals?

Via NellaLou, and Wonderwheel,  I am informed of yet another critique of Zen Buddhism based on the behavior of Eido Shimano and one Klaus Zernickow.  My first reaction though was basically a consideration of what it might possibly mean that "Zen" "has" no morals: does the universe have morals?  Does a dog have Buddha-nature?

Missing from the discussion overall, I feel (though NellaLou and Wonderwheel go in the direction) is that the sangha has a responsibility to act to see that no one is harmed (and in fact, much, much more than that - to see that the suffering of all beings is transcended).  That's your "morality" of "Zen" right there.

Wonderwheel writes of the critique, by one Christopher Hammacher:

In Section 4, Hammacher suggests six potential causes leading to the phenomenon of otherwise intelligent or reasonable Zen students accepting such flagrant misconduct: a) Lack of morality; b) Japanese authoritarianism; c) Impossible ideals; d) The Absolute vs. the Relative; e) The institution of dharma transmission; f) Emphasis on enlightenment; and g) Cultic tendencies.  Hammacher discussion of these six points is conclusory and based on superficial presumptions and analysis.  

Wonderwheel does a good job of discussing these items, though when it comes to "Japanese authoritarianism," well, I haven't read Hammacher's paper, but I'd suspect that he hasn't actually been that exposed to Japanese culture as some of us - and I frankly don't have time to delve into a detailed rebuttal other than to say anyone that doesn't get the concept of wa (和) was it relates to Japanese organizational dynamics won't be a big hit in the Japanese business world, let alone a Japanese-descended sangha. Finally, yes, I suppose "Zen" does lack a "morality," in the sense of a lack of monotheistic notions of "sin."  But that's a feature, not a bug: its purpose is to avoid moral failures by attachment to one's falling short of ideal behavior.


I repeat: I did not read the article in question.  Enough at this point is being said and done re: Eido Shimano, at the very least, not to mention Genpo Merzel et al.  But to take these institutional failures and then claim "Zen" has a "lack of morality" is based on an ignorance of what Zen Buddhist practice actually is.

I've been very lucky, perhaps, to have had guides who were upstanding in their treatment of me, and because of that, it's easy to see what they did right when others did not do right.  It could, of course, also be related to the fact that I've advocated a "kick the tires" approach to selecting and interacting with a potential "teacher."

What do you value? What do you keep? What do you get rid of? How?

As I stated below, I recently returned from NY;  I was with most of my large family going over details of the "personalty" from my mother's estate.

My parents were hoarders.

They had a lot of stuff,  much of it with very little value at all, although some of it had great value.  Don't ask though about the really valuable stuff - diamond rings and such.  That's the subject for another koan. 

There are some items that appear to be made of jade.  The price of jade has gone up in value astronomically, as China's fortunes have gone on the upturn in recent decades.

There's also silver coin, and maybe-not-silver-but-definitely-stuff not made anymore. Like the above coin that (forgive the poor photography) in real life sports 2 swastikas.

There's other things, too, some of which might have gone up in value a great deal, some of which was wisely sought after by my parents, and some of which even now seems hideous to me. 

My parents were the sort of people who had certain ideas about "fashion" and "style."  That is, they wore whatever they wanted to however they wanted to (or was available? on sale?) and they simply did not care how it looked.  Oftentimes it seemed the idea was calculated to shock, if you can imagine how extremely conservative 2nd generation East European late middle age/elderly folks might shock one.

My wife tells me some of this stuff has gone up in value - there is apparently a strong market in China for bolos, inter alia. 

All of this brings up a few interesting koans, i.e., the title of this post.  Does one keep a Nazi era coin? Does one sell it? Throw it out? What about my father's idiosyncratic clothing/accessory tastes? 

One item was a no-brainer: My parents had saved - like many Americans do - about $45.00 in pennies in jars.  They went right to Coinstar. The silver was heavy enough, thank you.

But back to the koan. We "inherit" a lot of things from a lot of people.  Some things we can profitably give away to other people. Some things we can use to our benefit and enjoyment and the benefit and enjoyment of others. Some things we can sell, because the economic value of the thing sold is worth more than keeping the thing.

Among the items I received was a 硯 (suzuri, or yàn) that was apparently purchased in China back in the 80s.  It is very close in size to the kind that I had seen a Japanese master use, though this one has a minor flaw.  I am told it may be valuable to sell, but if I used it it would have less value.  But I do wish to continue a practice of 書道.   But I also am quite an amateur.  It's not quite but sort of in the same direction as if you were to give an 11 year old kid a vintage Gibson guitar...of course you don't give an 11 year old kid a vintage Gibson.  Or if you do you make sure he damn well knows how to use it.  Then again my kid has a rather pricey violin.

I'm keeping the 硯, of course, and know enough about 書道 to be able to understand how to take care of it. 

Much of the problems we have both with ourselves and with our families/communities can be attributed, I'd suspect, to a lack of understanding of what should be valued, what should be kept, what should be disposed of, and how things should be disposed. 

A couple or three of Buddhist temples in NY

Near the house I've inherited part of,  there are deer, vultures, turkeys, wildcats, wolves, and a couple of  Buddhist temples within an hour's drive or so.  First, there is the Mahayana Temple (大乗寺) temple, one of the oldest Buddhist temples located in a rural area in the Northeast. (It's one of those things you may or may not have read in "American" Buddhist media. I don't know. ) They will be shortly observing their 50th anniversary; if you are in the area, stop by.  They are by no means well known, but should be more well known.  Here are some photos of the temple, as it's expanding in preparation for its 50th:

And also within 1 hour's drive is Zen Mountain Monastery:

Finally, every lay person's home should be a temple in the sense that everything done in there should be done with great care and attention and, of course, all the other human aspects. Home is an important place.   I am very lucky; here is the view from my NY home: