One of the aspirations in lovingkindness goes like this, "May I be happy with things as they are." On the surface, this is a simple aspiration for happiness. Upon investigation, "with things as they are" raises some issues. The aspiration is for happiness regardless of circumstance: happiness when things are going well and when they are going poorly.

            The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life has a quality of "dukkha." Sometimes, dukkha is translated as suffering, and other times as sorrow, displeasure, pain, stress, affliction, anxiety, discomfort, anguish, misery, dissatisfaction, or aversion. The translation I appreciate is unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactory, not least because it is transitory and impermanent (after all, it will end in death!). You don't always get what you want. You often get things that you don't want.

            There are five remembrances in Buddhism. I am of the nature to grow old; nothing can save me from old age. I am of the nature to have ill health; nothing can save me from sickness. I am of the nature to die; nothing can save me from death. All that is dear to me and all those I love are of the nature to change; nothing can prevent me from becoming separated from them. I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind; my actions are the ground on which I stand.

            At first glance, these may seem pessimistic. However, they are meant to motivate; they emphasize the urgency of practice. One Buddhist sutra constructs a metaphor of four mountains. The Buddha told King Pasenadi to imagine four mighty mountains, high as the sky, approaching from the four cardinal directions, crushing everything in their paths, allowing no path of escape. These mountains represent birth, old age, sickness, and death. In response, the king said that he would live his remaining hours with as much serenity and happiness as possible, acting for the benefit of future generations.

            We are all in a situation of urgency. Put a positive spin on it. There is no time like the present. This moment is an opportunity to practice, so that you can have more capacity to deal with difficulty in the future. The problems that you have now may be minor, compared to the problems that you will experience in the future. As Pema Chödrön points out, meditation isn't all about feeling good. Learning how to stay with pain and discomfort in meditation increases your capacity to face challenges in everyday life. When one experiences pain or unpleasantness on the cushion, one can notice the aversion and the tendency to flee, and one can experiment with the instruction, "Stay!"

            Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong." The tendency to be distracted, the pain in your knee, and the stiffness in your shoulders are all opportunities to develop and cultivate your capacity to deal with unsatisfactoriness. As this capacity becomes more of a habit, you become more capable of maintaining equanimity when things become really difficult. The more you can be happy with things as they are, no matter how they are. Pema Chödrön points out that it also uncovers our capacity for joy.

            The Buddha used similes to illustrate points. One simile that he used to describe this situation was a person shot with an arrow and then shot with a second arrow right afterwards. That person feels the pain of both arrows - physical and mental. This is what happens when you sorrow, grieve, lament, beat your breast, and become distraught when you experience pain.

            Suzuki Roshi said, "A bodhisattva should be grateful for problems. When you have a problem, right there is where your practice is." Problems are grist for the mill, as long as you bring an attitude of openness and acceptance to them. Pema Chödrön counsels taking a warrior's attitude towards discomfort. Approach dukkhha with steadfastness, patience, and strength. Catch the emotional reaction, and drop the story lines, and then observe, with detachment what really happens. The idea is that you'll either find that it isn't as bad as you thought it was, or, if it is, you will likely experience compassion for all those that have experienced similar suffering. She points out that, "The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhichitta." Bodhichitta is a quality of openheartedness, an openness to experience.

            Thich Nhat Hanh uses a gardening analogy to describe the best attitude to take when dealing with troubles or things that you might be tempted to judge as negative. He points out that any good garden needs compost. He emphasizes how mindfulness can be used to care for and, in so doing, transform things like anger, turning unwholesome states into wholesome states.

            When sitting, one can mindfully observe how transient and impermanent all things - including unpleasant and painful things - are. When you experience the fact that pain will pass, you become much more capable of accepting it, much less likely to resist it and add an unnecessary layer of suffering to it. You become less likely to hit yourself with that second arrow.

            I’ll leave you with my daughter’s favourite bedtime story.

            Once, long ago, there was an old donkey. He couldn’t see very well anymore, and he walked with a limp. One day, he stumbled into an old, dried up well that he didn’t see. When he fell to the bottom, he found that he couldn’t scramble up the steep wall, so he started to cry and bray and make a terrible fuss. The farmer who owned the donkey came along, and hearing the racket and seeing the problem, he thought, “that donkey is old and frail and no longer of any use to me, and that well is a hazard. I will fill the well in, burying the donkey and putting him out of his misery and will solve two problems at once!”

            The farmer got his shovel and started shoveling dirt into the well on top of the donkey. The donkey was, understandably, alarmed and started making even more of a fuss. The commotion drew the farmer’s neighbours, and they grabbed their shovels and started to help the farmer fill in the well, much to the donkey’s dismay. After a time, though, the donkey became quiet.

            “He can’t be buried yet,” said one neighbor, and she looked into the well to see what was going on. She saw that, as each shovelful of dirt hit the donkey’s back, he would shake the dirt off and step up onto the pile that it made. The farmer and his neighbours continued shoveling, and the donkey continued to shake and step, until he got to the top of the well. Then he stepped out of the well altogether and walked off into the forest, never to be seen by the farmer and his neighbours ever again.

            The moral of the story is that life is going to shovel all sorts of dirt onto your back. When it does, your job is to shake it off and step up onto the pile that the dirt makes.

                                                            Use your troubles as stepping stones!

              This is the second post in a series of three responding to the catastrophic labour dispute unfolding in British Columbia between the government of BC - and its bargaining agent, BCPSEA - and the BCTF. The first post is http://continuumconsulting.weebly.com/blog/shock-doctrine-creating-a-crisis-in-bced.

                Information is shock resistance, and understanding builds capacity to act effectively. The whole approach of disaster capitalism depends on the kind of mind-blanking emptiness that results from electroshock therapy. On a societal scale, the crisis leads to widespread panic and vulnerability. A populace desperate for solutions clings to whatever approach is offered by public figures presenting ways to address the situation. When those solutions are tailor-made to facilitate the implementation of free-market ideology, the implications are important to understand.

                Shock resistance depends on activists and stakeholders understanding what is at stake. These social leaders ca then influence the narrative taking root in society at large. A crucial aspect of disaster capitalism - of the shock doctrine - that people need to recognize is the fundamental neo-liberal priority to privatize social services, to download the costs of social services from government to the people accessing those services.

                Neo-liberal actors - in B.C., this includes the established government - work purposely, using legislation and implementing policy to further their ideological priorities. Private sector partners and sympathetic media cooperate with government actors to implement and advocate for those priorities. In B.C., this takes forms such as the Fraser Institute’s “Report Cards” on school performance and the general tendency for media spokespeople to express negative views and criticisms of teachers and the B.C.T.F. (often refusing to even call it the B.C.T.F. and referring to it as the T.F.).

                When established power and mainstream media both propagate the same general narrative, it can be challenging to counter it. However, expressing and advocating a coherent and compelling counter-narrative is a crucial aspect of shock resistance. Although it is tempting to see it as fruitless to continue resisting government propaganda, it is essential that activists and stakeholders continue to do just that.

                In situations of shock, proponents of free-market ideologies attempt to use the crisis facing society - in this case, one of their own creation and orchestration - to give an opportunity to impose their policy priorities on a disoriented and desperate populace. That is when social leaders need to be forces of stabilization and orientation. Today, in British Columbia, teachers and their supporters need to actively stake their claim in the public sphere and tell their stories, stories of underfunding, overcrowded classrooms, underserved students, and overworked teachers: stories of policies being implemented that don’t reflect our values as British Columbians and Canadians.

                This is an ideological conflict between the values reflected by social services such as health care and education and values reflected by reduced corporate taxes and privatization. Teachers, parents, citizens, and even students need to take responsibility for the direction the narrative goes in. Each of us needs to inform ourselves, reflect upon our values, apply those values to the facts that our research uncovers, and express ourselves to all who will listen. This may mean arranging a meeting with an M.L.A., and it could also involve a conversation with friends over coffee. If we treat these interactions as opportunities to transform the narrative about education and social services, other opportunities for action will reveal themselves. This is how shock resistance arises.

                    There is one more post relating to this topic to come; it will address the challenges of dealing with difficulties like this on a personal level.

            In the Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein outlines a theory of what she calls "disaster capitalism." Her theory is based upon observations and research in places ranging from Chile to Iraq, and the historical scope of her research is similarly broad. The shock doctrine is an approach that sees economic policies - policies that feature elements like the privatization of government services - implemented even when they don't represent the interests or aspirations of most citizens.

            Klein's theory takes insight from C.I.A. interrogation practices and weaves its way through South American military coups and the Chicago School of Economics until it arrives in the present-day environment dominated by wide-spread laissez-faire, free-market economic policies. All of these have shocks and crises in common, situations that make people more impressionable and vulnerable. The C.I.A. interrogators and proponents of privatization both exploit shocks in order to manipulate people when they are most susceptible to such manipulation, at times when they have less capacity to resist and stand up for themselves.

            Investigating C.I.A. interrogation techniques, Klein was struck by how torture, in particular electroshocks, was used to incapacitate prisoners and make them sympathetic to ideas suggested by their interrogators. These techniques involved attempting to empty the prisoner's (or, in the case of electroshock therapy, the patient's) mind of preconceptions, something Klein calls "mind-blanking." She was struck by how this paralleled instances of the application of free-market policies that operated against the interests of the majority of people they applied to.

            Milton Friedman, one of the leading academics of the Chicago School of Economics, even had the audacity to articulate what was happening. "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." His aspiration was to make sure that the ideas lying around after such crises occurred were free-market and laissez-faire ideas, ideas like privatization. In her book, Klein reviews many instances of this happening in real places. Klein discusses examples that range from General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'etat of President Salvador Allende's democratically-elected government in 1973 to the American military response, to the 9-11 terror attacks, to - illustratively for the people of B.C. - the privatization of New Orleans' school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In each example, some sort of crisis, natural or human-created, leaves people in a vulnerable state of shock, and right-wing, neo-liberal economic policies are rammed into place while people are reeling from the shock and lacking capacity to resist.

            The citizens of B.C., especially students, parents, and teachers, are currently suffering from a crisis. Although it has escalated recently and continues to worsen with each passing day, it is a crisis over a decade in the making. B.C. schools have been suffering the effects of reduced funding and reduced services for children since the government of B.C. - led by the B.C. Liberal Party - passed legislation that stripped collective agreements between the school districts and the B.C. Teachers' Federation of crucial class-size and composition language. Teachers immediately challenged this move on the part of government, and they have won cases against the government of B.C. in international court, and now twice in the British Columbia Supreme Court (in 2011 and 2014). The most recent court win found that the government has purposely failed to bargain with teachers in good faith in order to create a crisis that they could manipulate to enact legislation without having to fear public backlash. Since that case, negotiations have continued to stall, leading the BCTF to escalate strike action in order to try to stimulate movement at the bargaining table. The government's bargaining agent responded by locking out teachers from aspects of their jobs and using this action to justify a 10% rollback of teachers' wages. This led to further polarization, rather than movement at the bargaining table. Since then, movement at the bargaining table has been glacial, if present at all. Despite several significant moves on the part of the BCTF, the government and its bargaining agent have steadfastly refused to compromise. They have repeatedly misrepresented the state of bargaining and the nature of proposals in bargaining. The government refuses to negotiate a proposal that would effectively wipe out the hard-fought victories in court on the part of teachers, despite the fact that the results of such wins provide a foundation for improving service levels to students. The government's rhetoric, both in terms of its policies implemented over a decade ago (e.g., choice and flexibility) and its current position (e.g., zone of affordability), all refer to notions cherished by free-market champions.

            The BCTF's latest proposal - to submit to binding arbitration all contract provisions other than those currently before the B.C. Court of Appeal, has been met with continued intransigence on the part of the government and its bargaining agent. The main justification for its refusal to agree to arbitration (something that many had been advocating for just a week ago) is that it will not agree to anything that might result in increased taxes (government spokespeople speak as if the government has no power to make budget allocations, despite their insistence on talking about flexibility in practically religious terms most of the time).

            In the meantime, teachers who want nothing more than to be back in their classrooms are picketing in the streets, with bank accounts becoming more and more empty with each passing day, and many reaching - or having already exceeded - the limits of their access to credit. Students have been out of classrooms for about three months. Parents are at their wits' end, trying to figure out how to arrange care for children while parents work and how to educate children with no access to public schools. In this context of educational crisis - resulting from over a decade of underfunding and now months of job action - the government refuses to accept any possible solution presented by the BCTF, including the radically-risky suggestion of binding arbitration. This makes me wonder what - to use the words of neo-liberal evangelist Milton Friedman - ideas will be lying around in the coming weeks as this crisis continues to escalate.

            It's not all doom and gloom. In the coming days, I intend to write two follow-up posts to respond to the problems described by this post (each coming from a different angle).

You’ve heard of nirvana and samsara. Those words are both simple and easy to understand and profound and subtle at the same time. Samsara means “relative reality,” and nirvana means “ultimate reality.” The both coexist; both are real and valid. In fact, they are lenses through which one can view reality. Nirvana and samsara are really perspectives about reality.

Consider the ocean. There are two ways to view it. It is composed of water, and that water forms waves: the one and the many. Each of the many waves in the ocean has its own, independent existence. A wave comes into being. It forms. It has a wavelength and other characteristics. It is real. However, its lifespan is short when compared to that of the ocean. In the ocean, many waves rise and fall, experiencing transient, brief lives. However, looking closer, one sees that each wave is made up of water. The drops of water in one wave continue to exist after that wave has passed on. Those drops become parts of new waves. The energy of the previous wave gives rise to the new waves, too.

In that way, the old wave - no longer its own discrete self - continues to exist in the substance and movement of the waves that have taken its place. Moreover, if we look back, the wave we are discussing came from the substance and movement of the waves that came before. There is a continuity that literally flows through the waves. This continuity - this flow - takes place on the tapestry of the ocean. The water in the ocean is constant compared to the waves that form on its surface. The wave that recognizes its existence as water - its water nature - transcends being and non-being, coming and going, birth and death.

It is the same in life. Matter and energy flow through each of us. Even though we perceive ourselves as discrete and apart from others and our environments, a little analysis and attention reveals the truth of the matter. We eat to add substance to our bodies and to get energy. We drink to hydrate ourselves. We eliminate wastes and, in so doing, we return matter and water to our environment. Matter and water flow through us. Our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts change, too. We are constantly changing, even if, at first glance, we seem to look the same from moment-to-moment. Most cells in your body die within days, and your body is characterized by a constant process of recycling and regeneration. The components that make up your body - like the waves in the ocean - are constantly dying and experiencing rebirth, even while your body, as a whole, remains relatively constant.

This is no more evident than with the breath. With each inhalation, we take in gas from the atmosphere. With each exhalation, we expel gas into the atmosphere. The content of our inhalations and our exhalations is mostly nitrogen, with some oxygen, as well as small amounts of carbon dioxide and trace elements. When we breathe out, it’s mostly the same as when we breathe in, just with a little less oxygen and a little more carbon dioxide. In this way, air is a matrix that connects us. As others in the room exhale, we inhale some of what they exhaled. Air is like glue, connecting us. From a meditator’s point of view, the breath is like a focusing lens, through which stillness can be cultivated and through which this interconnection can be sensed.

In the ocean, the waves represent samsara - relative reality - where things are seen as separate. The water represents nirvana - ultimate reality - where the interbeing of all things can be glimpsed and understood. Both nirvana and samsara - separation and interconnection - accurately describe reality, just from different perspectives; the concepts interrelate themselves. I am both a discrete biological entity and an evolving nexus and flux of matter and energy, caused by past conditions and the cause of future ones.

Bring your attention to your breath, either in your torso as it rises and falls, or at your nostrils, where you can feel air going in and out. Notice the rhythmic, wave-like nature of the breath. In, out. Over and over, again and again. Your attention has rhythm, too. You focus; you get distracted. Over and over, again and again. Be gentle with yourself; that is the nature of mind. When you are able to, notice how your breath flows through your body. Feel the rhythmic waves of the breath. Let your mind ride on the sensations of breathing as if the breath is the surf in the ocean and your attention is a surf board.

Allow this fundamental rhythm - the waves of your breath - to point naturally to the ultimate reality underlying the conventional reality we are accustomed to perceiving. Allow the rhythmic waves of the breath to direct your attention to the flux of life and your own existence and the interconnection and oneness we share with all things.

Here it is on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/claymcleod1969/breath-surfing

Meditation is training, brain training. In fact, the word the historical Buddha used for meditation - bhavana - means cultivation. Meditation is about cultivating mind and heart states. So much of your present mental state is based on habits. Your mind tends to behave the way it has tended to behave. Sounds simple, but it is deceivingly complex, partly because it is not written in stone. Just because your mind has tended to behave a certain way in the past, that doesn’t mean that it is destined to behave that way in the future. This is what scientists now call “neuroplasticity.” The catch is that, without effort, the habits of the past will determine your mental states in the present and the future. It is only with sustained effort that one can control (somewhat) one’s states of mind and heart. This is how Buddhism explodes the dichotomy of free will vs. determinism: you have volition in terms of the states of mind and heart that you generate, sustain, and allow to continue, but when states of mind and heart arise regularly, they become habitual, and they tend to arise spontaneously. In short, from the perspective of a meditator, free will isn’t willing something to happen just once; for it to stick, one needs to will it to happen again and again, until it becomes a habit that, ironically, determines what happens from that point. Viewed this way, free will is a course change that is taken over a long period, with lots of effort. Good intentions are the incremental course corrections that one does over and over again.

An important aspect of a sustainable meditation practice involves not being attached to the outcomes of meditation. This is another ironic - or paradoxical - aspect of meditation. Since most of what one does on the cushion is training for life, it is helpful to identify how not being attached to the outcomes of meditation practice parallel how to live a life of contentment. The Buddha identified four Noble Truths:

(1) There is unsatisfactoriness in life,

(2) The unsatisfactoriness in life comes from craving for things to be other than as they are,

(3) There is a way to avoid unsatisfactoriness, and that is by letting go of craving, and

(4) There are eight practices that one can follow to put that way into action and let go of craving for things to be other than as they are.

Quite simply, the second Noble Truth explains that we suffer, because we want things to be different from the way that they are. We want to avoid things that we don’t like, and we crave the things that we do like. The simplest way to avoid the trap of unsatisfactoriness is to be happy with things as they are in a profoundly accepting way. The problem is that “things as they are” includes a wide range of circumstances, ranging from the itch that you can’t scratch while meditating to the certainty of one’s eventual demise. One can only avoid suffering by practicing radical acceptance, or by completely surrendering to the way that things are.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

(From http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/zen-stories.html)

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Often, we have trouble starting fresh, because we are holding on to things. As this poster suggests, it can be helpful to wipe the slate clean. Let go of those things that you are holding on to. Release them.


Obsessed

Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She thanked him and departed.

As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out.

"Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!"

"Brother," the second monk replied,
"I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her."
(story from http://goto.bilkent.edu.tr/gunes/ZEN/zenstories1.htm)

As is asked in the retelling of this story for children in the brilliant Zen Shorts by Jon Muth, “have you carried it long enough?” You can always put it down when you notice it is too heavy. This applies to everything: worries, troubles, guilt, trains of thought, the past, the future, the last breath you took. The more you let go, the more you can live truly free in the present moment.

People often wonder about what Buddhism says about rebirth; does it advocate belief in reincarnation? This is too abstract a question to be of importance in the present moment. What is certain is that we will all die one day; this inevitability makes practice urgent. In fact, because of the fluid nature of reality, we are constantly dying miniature deaths. The person you were a moment ago is gone, replaced by the person you are now. This process is happening constantly.

To some, this may seem depressing or negative. Buddhism - or the secular practice of mindfulness - shows how this fact is actually quite freeing and energizing. With every death, you experience a rebirth. Every moment becomes an opportunity to start now on the journey to be the best “you” you can be. The lighter you travel, the more capacity you have to pick up (and drop off) beautiful packages: acts of kindness, moments of awareness, a chance to listen deeply to a wise person or a loved one. Every moment that you travel light and let go, you have another chance to notice the transitory beauty that you might have missed had you been distracted by a heavy load.

As is often the case, work on the cushion mirrors the human condition in everyday life. As you train yourself to travel lightly on the cushion, the habits you form - the neural nets you build - start to be accessible in life. I encourage you to travel lightly, both on the cushion and in everyday life.