Those Kooky Sri Lankan Monastics . . .

Arrogant:  Having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities.

Antagonistic:  A person who is actively hostile or opposes something; an adversary.

"Faith and morality is knowing that something is true because you have seen it work, because you have observed that very thing within yourself.  In the same way, morality is not a ritualistic obedience to some exterior, imposed code of behavior.  It is rather a healthy habit pattern which you have consciously and voluntarily chosen to impress upon yourself because you recognize its superiority to your present behavior. 

The purpose of meditation is personal transformation.  It changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts, words, and deeds.  Your arrogance evaporates and your antagonism dries up.  Your mind becomes still and calm.  And your  life smoothes out.  Thus meditation properly performed prepares you to meet the ups and downs of existence.  It reduces your tension, your fear, and your worry.  Restlessness recedes, and passion moderates.  Things begin to fall into place and your life becomes a glide instead of a struggle.  All of this happens through understanding.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power.  Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you.  Your intuition sharpens.  The precision of your thought increases and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

These are just promises on paper.  Learn to do it right, and do it.  See for yourself."

Venerable Henepola Gunaratana - Sri Lankan Monastic  

Normally when I find something as profound as this I copy it word for word and then pretend like it's mine, but this is so obviously above my pay grade and intellectual capabilities that I can't be bothered to make the effort this morning.  Eh, who am I kidding?  Everyone knows most of what I post are lies and fabrications so why would some harmless plagiarism be a big deal?  This is good stuff, though, good stuff to answer the question: "Why should I meditate?" or "Why should I keep meditating when I continue to suck at it?"

Work?!

 I steadfastly maintain that the emphasis on self-examination is one of the most important lessons I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous.  It's always about me and it's never about you and it makes no difference if you've actually behaved badly or not.  My job is to look inside and heal myself, to generate massive loads of compassion for others while minimizing my own good qualities, as elusive and miniscule as they are.  Meditation is a great enabler for me in this pursuit of compassion.  It makes me more ready to forgive and forget.  I feel love toward others because I understand them.  And I understand them because I have begun to understand myself.  I have tried to look deeply inside and see self-illusion and my own human  failings.  I have seen my own humanity and learned to forgive and to love.  Without some compassion for myself I don't have much compassion for others.

One of my go-to bits of wisdom for new people is to inquire how much time they're willing to put into their recovery.  I would walk over hot coals to get at some alcohol while balking at going out to a meeting if it's sprinkling or below freezing.  While this number is hard to quantify the point is that the time I've spent on my recovery is a drop in the bucket compared to the time I spent drinking, preparing to drink, recovering from drinking, along with all the time spent cleaning up messes with cops, courts, doctors, employers, etc.  It's nothing.  I tell people this because it's one of the things I need to hear myself.  If someone balks at the work they may not be ready to get sober because - let's face it - there's work involved.

Perspective

Perspective:  A way of regarding situations, facts, etc., and judging their relative importance; the ability to think about situations and problems in a reasonable way without making them seem worse or more important than they really are.

For me, perfect happiness would mean getting everything I wanted, being in control of everything, playing Caesar, making the whole world dance a jig according to my every whim.  Then I look at people in history who have actually held this type of power.  These were not happy people.  Most assuredly they were not people at peace with themselves.  Why?  Because they were driven to control the world totally and absolutely and they could not.

They could not.

I meditate because I want to be able to control my own mind - at least to some little degree - and not the other way around.  My mind has been in control.  It likes being in control.  It likes calling the shots.  That's the function of the mind: to think and run the show.  That's normal and natural and may work for people who don't have a mind that runs amuck, that makes poor decisions, over and over and over again.  I want to recognize my desires but not be controlled by them.  It's okay to want something but the goal is not to be compelled to chase the desire.  It's okay to turn away from painful things but the goal is not to stand frozen in fear, quaking in my boots, unable or unwilling to take good, healthy action.  I believe that I can live a normal life but with a totally different viewpoint.  

Hold up a pencil, close your right eye, and line the pencil up with a tree in the background.  Then close that eye and open your left - suddenly the pencil leaps to the left of the tree, far out of alignment.  Same pencil, same tree, different perspective.  This is what I want: to own a pencil and to have eyesight in both eyes.  That's it!  Fuck the tree!  Who cares about the tree?  You can have the tree.  You can cut the fucking tree down for all I care as long as I can see and have a few pencils.

The Brown Polo and the Blue Hoodie

"But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave.  We found that it is fatal.  For when we harbor such feelings we cut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit.  We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of which we have not even dreamed."  Big Book of A.A.

Our leader this morning asked us to share on our interpretation of the phrase "the sunlight of the Spirit."  First of all, I believe that whenever a word is capitalized in our original literature it's a stand-in for God so in this case that the Spirit is beaming out some sunlight.  Which is pretty cool.  Theoretical physicists speculate that the fourth dimension is the mathematical extension of the concept of three dimensional space; either that or the fourth dimension is time.  Which is an arbitrary concept in and of itself.  In math, time can be defined as an ongoing and continuous sequence of events that occur in succession, from past through the present, and to the future.  Time is used to quantify, measure, and or compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and even, sequence of events.

Okay, I'm a little off the recovery path here.  My share this morning probably sucked.  People probably didn't want to hear me drone on about my conception of theoretical physics.

This is how arbitrary time is: it has not been that long that time has been standardized in American life.  Each town and municipality used to have their own time.  If you said it was noon, it was noon.  It didn't have to agree with the next town over.  You could leave your house at seven, walk for three hours, and end up someplace an hour before you left.  Pretty cool.

A woman came back to the meeting after drinking again.  She had a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve and then "a couple" of mimosas the next morning.  I felt a general sense of dubiousness when she said "a" glass of champagne and "a couple" of mimosas.  Math and honesty aren't the hallmarks of a typical relapsing alcoholic.  She then said this: "I asked my sponsor if I had to change my sobriety date."  We are nothing if not astonishing.  I was left wondering what she thought she had to do to relapse.  Whew.

But then there's this: I walked on the cold beach this morning with a long sleeved polo shirt under a thick hoodie.  Halfway through the walk I got hot so I removed the hoodie, took off the polo, and then put the hoodie back on.  Perfect.  I stopped for coffee - I was out of the sun - so I put the polo and the hoodie back on for maximum warmth.  I read the paper.  I got up, collected my things, went back into the restaurant to donate the paper, went to an off-site bathroom, then walked back to my car before realizing that I had left the brown polo somewhere.  I retraced my steps and was amused/astounded/flummoxed that some asshole had picked up my polo and taken off with it.  I paused for a moment to lift up the hoodie, revealing the polo underneath . . . still on my body.  So I'm not going to spend much time criticizing some lying relapser.  I'm glad I got home in one piece and fully alive.

The Good, The Bad, and The Boring

One of the main reasons I'm attracted to the Buddhist way of thinking and acting is that it seems so attainable to the common man.  And there's no God, per se, no one telling you what to do and what not to do and if you don't do it or you do it, depending on the rule for that particular behavior, you're going to get a lot of really good stuff or look out for the Lake of Fire and this is an everlasting Lake of Fire - I don't think anyone would be excited about a brief dip in the Lake of Fire let alone burning there forever and ever and ever.  And I'm not sure that there are very many experts in Buddhism.  There isn't this pastoral class that has to learn everything found in the texts of dubious provenance and then tell you when you're following the rules or you aren't following the rules.  I mean .  .  . c'mon . . . does anyone really believe that books that are two or three thousand years old, that have been passed along orally or transcribed by the few people who could read and write and undoubtedly had agendas of their own from time to time and even if they didn't it seems plausible they'd make a mistake from time to time and who would know because no one else could read or write that these books are word for word from the books that were found in burning bushes or given to pilgrims living on locusts in the desert?

Here's this:  "No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail.  No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you.  And in between those times, life is so boring you could scream.  We have built walls all around ourselves and are trapped in the prison of our own likes and dislikes.  We suffer.  Suffering is a big word in Buddhist thought.  'The essence of life is suffering,' said the Buddha.  Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely.  Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no matter how great this moment is, it is going to end.  No matter how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days  guarding what you have got and scheming how to get more."

People have a tendency to divide their experiences into three categories: Good, Bad, and Boring.  We chase the Good, we run from the Bad, and we tolerate - barely - the Boring.  There's not much there that sounds good to me.  Bleak is the word that comes to mind.

But wait . . . "There's a completely different way to look at the universe.  It is a level of functioning where the mind does not try to freeze time, where we do not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, where we do not try to block things out and ignore them.  It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain.  It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and it is a learnable skill.  It is not easy, but it can be learned."

Just a Little More

Some ramblings from a book on Mindfulness by Venerable Henepola Gunaratana and the great thing about a name like that is that I don't care if I misspell it because . . . c'mon . . . who's gonna know? 

"Because of the simple fact that you are human, you  find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away.  You have a vague awareness that something is wrong.  But there is really a whole realm of depth and sensitivity in life, somehow, you are just not seeing it.  You wind up feeling cut off.  The world looks like the usual foul place, which is boring at best.  This impulse at discontent is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms: chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness.  It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice that keeps saying, 'Not good enough yet.  Got to have more.  Got to make it better.  Got to be better.'  Watch the news.  Listen to the lyrics in popular songs.  You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations.  Jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress.  We are stuck in the 'if only' syndrome."

I do need these reminders that what I got is enough and by "enough" I mean a shit-ton more than I deserve or need or that most other people have.  I'm drowning in stuff and friends and family and blessings and experiences and yet I think: "More, please."

I return over and over to the possibly apocryphal quote attributed to J.P. Morgan at a time when he was the wealthiest man in the world.  He was asked how much was enough.  "A little bit more," he was reputed to have said.  When we moved from OH to CA we had to downsize.  We got rid of a lot of shit and I mean a lot of shit and we still moved way too much stuff, most of it then ejected in our new home.  It was exhausting dealing with all of that stuff.  Much of it I didn't want and nobody else I knew wanted it and we couldn't convince any strangers to give us even a few dollars for it and the fucking thrift stores probably threw away everything we gave them but it was still hard to loosen our grip on it.  Today it's still gone and I don't miss it.  I can honestly say that I can barely remember any times where I consciously missed a piece of stuff that I used to have.

Selfishness - Self-Centeredness!

 "Sponsorship is an important aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous - a reflection of the way A.A. was founded; with one alcoholic helping another.  In A.A. sponsor and sponsored meet as equals, just as our co-founders, Bill W. and Dr. Bob did."    A.A. pamphlet on sponsorship.

"Sometimes great distances exist between the high points of our lives.  Time moves swiftly and we tend to let it slip away without making it count while we wait on another high experience.  We discount it as nothing unless we have reached some spectacular height and have passed ten other people on the way.  The Indian does not consider himself idle when he stands still watching, listening, seeing the stars, or watching the sunset."  Iroquois Saying

"Don't fuck with SuperK's coffee."  A Great Truth of the Universe

I asked a new woman a few days ago how her holiday trip to Colorado went.  "It was great," she chirped brightly.  "How was your holiday?"  I had to laugh at our insistence on deflecting attention away from ourselves while resenting the fact that no one is paying attention to us.  Don't make a fuss for my birthday but why didn't you remember my birthday, you selfish asshole?  That kind of thinking.  I really struggled for the longest time with the idea that when people asked how I was doing they did it because they wanted to know how I was doing.  With me everything was a quid pro quo - I asked how you were doing because I wanted to talk about how I was doing and the best way to get that accomplished was to feign interest in you, get the how are you doing part over.

This woman's sponsor finally responded to her repeated assertion that everything was wonderful with this bon mot: "If you don't let me in I'm not going to be able to help you."

"Selfishness - self-centeredness!  That, we think, is the root of our troubles.  Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.  So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making."  Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

When something in our minds rings a bell that warns us, we do well to listen.  Every one of us has a sounding board, an intuition that analyzes the way that we are moving.  It points the right way and we're fools if we don't listen.  To ignore the impressions that are inside us is like trying to go through a door but refusing to use the doorknob.  It's one thing to be dense and another altogether to willfully get lost in the wilderness.  I should listen to my alarm system now and again.