What do you believe in?

Q: Do you believe in God?

A: No.

Q: So, you are an atheist!

A: No.

Q: Then what do you believe in?

A: As little as possible.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We tend to frame things we encounter into patterns familiar to us. Nowhere is it so obvious as when we regard other religions.

Once, at Sinte Gleska College in Mission, South Dakota, I perused the library for Lakota creation myths. As befits a large and socially complex people, there were several widely disparate stories.

A bit later, at Pine Ridge Reservation, I conversed with a fellow named Red Cloud. He pointed to the car in which his old girl friend sat, telling me she was visiting the rez from Sacramento, where she had moved to work. He told me the three teenagers in the backseat were her children. The youngest and the oldest, he said with chest-swelling pride, were his. Certainly a fellow with a broad view of things, though perhaps it was more a cultural thing than personal. I told him about the eleven different creation myths I had uncovered at Mission. Uh-huh, he said. Which did he believe? Unhesitatingly, he replied, All of them!

The general frame of the monotheisms of the Western culture sees religion primarily as what a person believes to be ultimately true of reality. What you believe determines your tribe, and vice versa. But you can sort religions in one particular way into those based on doctrine, and those based on pragmatic experience. Those that determine your membership in a flock determined by your submission and acceptance of a set of dogmas and the authority that promotes them, and those that are a path you follow by taking up a prescribed practice.

We are used to inquire about religious teaching with, Is it true? Of course, the answer is mostly No! with regard to someone else's religion. But with a religion like Buddhism, the emphasis is more on, Is it useful? Will it help me get down the road to liberation?

The romantic philosophic notion that what is most true is obviously the most helpful, might itself be true — if only proving something true or false were not so often so devilishly difficult, and fraught with distortions caused by emotional bias. Much easier just to try something and see if it works. Best of all is to see what works by transparent methodology and consistent analysis.

At least, that's what I believe.

The Newport Fish

The note on the scarf says:

DEAR FISH!

WE THOUGHT YOU LOOKED SO COLD SITTING HERE SO WE ASKED GRANDMA L. TO CROCHET YOU SOME FIN MITTENS AND A SCARF TO KEEP YOU WARM THIS WINTER. WE HOPE THIS WILL BE THE "FIRST ANNUAL DRESSING OF THE FISH" IN NEWPORT, VERMONT.

LOVE, YOUR FRIENDS
JANUARY 2008

Shy spring has hied back to the shadows of the snow-heavy trees. This is this morning's picture chez moi:

Signs of Spring

Last week, a flock of birds was wheeling and landing on the grain elevators by the railroad tracks in Newport. Last night, I saw these deer cavorting in a field as the sun lowered. Several days this past week had temperatures above freezing.

Perhaps, we can really think about spring without getting our hopes dashed?

The Border

This is the chorus to "Immigration Man" by Graham Nash:

"Let me in, immigration man
Can I cross the line and pray
I can stay another day
Let me in, immigration man
I won't toe your line today
I can't see it anyway . . . "


But you can!

This is a shot westward on Caswell Ave./Valley Rd, just east of Derby Line. The border is just to the right along the road at this spot. Lake Memphremagog is down there, invisible. Across the lake, that's the southern end of Bear Mountain, with the border slash highlighted by snow. And that where the fence will be, if we keep electing Republican oil executives for president.

The Canadians like us, mostly, but they think we're nuts for electing the people that we have.

Snow

The defining element of reality around here (Orleans County, Vermont) is winter. The most visible manifestation of winter is snow.


Not every winter has lots of snow — some are just plain cold. Snow is good for the dormant plants; it insulates their roots and tubers from killing cold. Lots of it this winter. Blame it on La Niña.

Occult mappings of correspondences equate the season of winter with dying and death. Ultimate interiority. Many people get a little crazy with boredom about now, and that's called "cabin fever." Some are fortunate to have pastimes that can make use of the long winter hours, like reading, or crafts, or zazen.

The joy of spring is never so intense in places that have no intense winter. One unkind friend suggested it was equivalent to the relief one feels when ceasing to hit oneself in the head with a hammer. Whenever I visit California, friends ask me if I've come to live there for good, and are perplexed when I answer "No." Winter is as natural to me as breathing out after breathing in, and I sorely missed it when I lived without it.

One can die here in winter without much carelessness. Once I was caring for someone's house and outside it was thirty below, Fahrenheit (-34°C). Firewood was stored in an outdoor shed. I went out to get some. The storm door slammed and locked itself. All I was wearing for outdoors over my upper torso was a hooded sweatshirt. I thought fast. I might have ten minutes before my fingers were numb and useless. None of the neighbors closer than a quarter-mile away were home this holiday weekend. Didn't want to break a window — then I'd have to deal with closing up that hole and paying for a new pane. Then I remembered seeing a screwdriver in the garage. I ran and got it, and managed to pop the door without any damage. I got to the stove just as my fingers began to ache.

It was a social thing with the high schoolers around here to wear as little as possible in the winter. I've seen kids in shorts and t-shirts pumping gas at ten below. But you never know when a car will break down, and you can be rather far from even a stranger's warm house.

Then there's the roads. Some winters I'd spin out five times, ending up immobilized in a snowbank, waiting for a fellow resident to come by with a tow chain. Got to meet a lot of people that way.

After the middle of February, you let yourself think about spring. Not much longer, and the temperatures will regularly be above freezing in the day, and the vast banks of dirty, crusty, stuff that used to be pristine snow will start to shrink. It's a joy to look at the faces of your fellow human beings, then. You know they feel the same joy as you. Even if it is kind of perverse to prefer living in an icebox like Vermont.

Speaking of, around 1994, the following made it's way around the Internet. I don't think anybody's claimed copyright. It does give one a certain, uh, feel for the place.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FLATLANDERS DIARY

August 12
Moved to our new house in Vermont. It is so
beautiful here. The mountains are so majestic and
serene. Can hardly wait to see them with snow. God's
country for sure.

Oct 14
Vermont is the most beautiful place on earth.
Leaves are turning all different colors. Love the
shades of red and orange. Went for a ride through the
mountains and saw some deer. So graceful. The most
beautiful animals on earth. This is paradise!

Nov 11
Deer season will open soon. Why would anyone want
to kill such an elegant creature? The very symbol of
peace and tranquillity. Hope it will snow soon. Love it
here.

Dec 2
Snowed last night. Woke up to find everything
blanketed with snow. Looks like a postcard. Went outside
and shoveled the driveway. Had a snowball fight (I
won). The snowplow came by and we had to shovel the
driveway again. What a beautiful place. Mother Nature
in perfect harmony. I love Vermont.

Dec 12
More snow last night! I love it. The snowplow did
his trick again (that rascal). A winter wonderland. I
like it here so much.

Dec 19
Snowed again last night. Couldn't get out of the
driveway to get to work this time. I'm exhausted from
shoveling. Damn snowplow.

Dec 22
More of that white shit today. Got blisters on my
hands from shoveling. I think the snowplow driver hides
around the corner waiting for me to finish shoveling.
What an asshole!

Dec 25
"White Christmas" my busted ass! More friggin snow.
If I ever get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch that
drives the snowplow I swear I'll strangle him! Why
don't they use more salt on the roads to melt the ice?
Country hicks.

Dec 29
More snow. I hate the stuff! Been inside since
Christmas Day, except for shoveling the driveway every
time "Snowplow Harry" comes by. Can't go anywhere.
Car's burried under a mountain of snow. Weatherman says
ten more inches tonight. Do you know how many shovels
full of snow ten inches is? I hate it.

Jan 1
"Happy Friggin New Year!" Weatherman was wrong
again. Got 32" of the stuff this time. It won't melt
until July. Snowplow got stuck up the road, and the
dumb bastard had the nerve to ask to borrow a snow
shovel. I told him I'd already broken five of them
shoveling all the snow he pushed into the driveway.
Smashed the last one over his head. Stupid ass!

Jan 18
Finally got out of the house. Went to the store to
get food and on the way back a deer ran in front of the
car and I hit the bastard. Did $3000 damage to the car.
Those goddam useless animals should all be killed.
Hunters didn't do their job last November. Next year I
get a hunting license!

May 3
Took the car to the garage in town. Would you
believe the thing is rotting from all the salt they
dumped on the roads? What a bunch of morons. Everyone
knows salt destroys cars. Car looks like crap.

May 15
Moved to Florida. Can't imagine why anyone would
want to live in a Godforsaken icebox like Vermont.
You've got to be crazy to live there!

Pick a Path

I cannot begin to read a volume of the graphical novel Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka, without going all the way to the end. I was midway through Volume 4 at the Newport Natural Foods Store when I thought I'd take it into the "yoga room," a multifunctional space where we also sit zazen on Thursday nights. There's also a small, closed-off office with a door to the yoga room that a red-haired woman of somewhat less than my own years uses to do massage therapy. As her appointments sometimes overlap with preparations for the zazen group, we occasionally have words in passing. The woman, named Karen, was today rather early for an afternoon appointment, when she saw me reading in the otherwise empty room. She struck up a conversation.

I had remembered that yesterday, as I was arranging the yoga room for meditation and commenting on how chilly it seemed, she had suggested we wrap ourselves in blankets. "That's how we did it at the ashram." I asked her about it now. "What ashram?"

She had been involved with the Shivananda yoga organization. A rather unscandaled teacher and institution. We began trading stories about Buddhist, Hindu, and Other teachers, and commenting on the various stripes of spiritual seeker one runs across. We mocked the tone of pretentiously earnest young would-be shramanas, "I am but a humble spiritual seeker, searching after the Truth!" "Haven't found any yet, eh?"

Karen had been to India a few times. She related what one yogi said to some people in her presence: "For goodness sake, pick some path and dig into it! Stop wasting your time asking so many questions! You will only find the answers you are looking for by actually practicing something!"

We laughed. Probably a bit cruel to make fun of such people, but we laughed, anyway.

Skillful Means

I attempt in the following to respond in a useful way to a certain type of complaint I’ve heard a few times. It is only one way of approaching Zen practice, and not necessarily fit for all.

Too Sick to Take Medicine

A friend of mine complained that meditation didn't work for her. She said that her mind was too flighty and filled with thoughts to meditate. This is like saying that you're too sick to take medicine. Americans are not noted for patience.

Yet that is not entirely true. Large numbers of Americans go to the gym and work out, go jogging, and do all kinds of strenuous exercises for fitness and weight-loss. So why is it so hard for some Americans to pick up a meditation habit?

For whatever reason, many people do not see that learning the meditation practiced in Zen is not so different from learning how to lift weights properly. Weird ideas about what meditation is distort their expectation of what they can get out of it, and how soon. When it doesn’t quickly happen the way they expect, they figure it’s not working, they can’t do it, and they lose interest.

You can establish a well-founded meditative discipline without too much strain simply by keeping two major principles in mind:

Zen meditation is training. It requires consistent, reasonable application.

Expectations influence your training. You have to look at, understand, and manage your expectations.

When I was a boy in junior high school, I tried out for football — however, I could barely run just one lap around the field. No one explained conditioning to me then, so I just assumed that I was naturally unable to run as far as my classmate, and I quickly gave up. Observing my body and mind over the years, I learned on my own that Capacity can be developed. It is not an innate and unchangeable quality. With consistent training, one’s personal limits constantly expand to potentially amazing degrees. Of course, people vary according to their genetics and personal histories, but ability can always be increased with training.

Insofar as Zen meditation (or zazen) is a conditioning of body and mind, it functions like any other biological conditioning. Every time you repeat an action, it gets easier. If you want to run a mile, you start by running as far as you can, even if it’s as little as a hundred feet. Every day, you run a little further. It won’t take more than a few weeks for most normal, healthy people to get up to running a whole mile.

Put another way: Levels of difficulty and limitations are only of the moment. The experience of difficulty in zazen is within this moment, and not for all moments. Very few people find zazen easy from the start, but its difficulty is as subject to impermanence as anything else. You may find zazen difficult now, in this moment, but the moment changes. In the next moment, with training, it will be easier. You can count on it.

But what is it for, anyway? Training is an effort. People do not make efforts without some motivation. What do you think zazen will do for you? Will it make you smarter, healthier, fitter, richer, cooler, or even, maybe, happier? Seems to have worked for some people. Unfortunately, for most people Zazen reveals its effects with glacial slowness. People drop practice before any noticeable return on their expectations. Yet expectations can be changed to more modest and more rapidly realized goals.

Beginners not used to stillness usually experience boredom of an intensity approaching agony — ironic, isn’t it? If boredom isn’t enough, there’s pain in the legs, back, shoulders, and neck from sitting a long time in a posture unfamiliar to a generation of slackers, slouchers, and couch potatoes. Many a jogger or weight-lifter is willing to exert themselves despite pain and boredom under the principle of “No pain, no gain,” but positive reinforcement comes much quicker in physical activity than in Zen meditation. Minor passions will not generate the attitude necessary to sustain the heroic efforts you may have read about in spiritual literature. The experience of millennia of Buddhism is that the heroes of that literature make such great efforts because of severe shock, or extreme loss, or great suffering, which generated a great determination and drive to resolve their psychis agony. Lucky for most of us, we can start small.

Don’t overwhelm yourself with unrealistic expectations. You may know someone who can sit for over an hour without twitching a muscle, but you can’t sit for 45 seconds without having to scratch an unbearable itch. You can always discourage yourself by making such a pathetic comparison, but you can also notice that you can sit for 40 seconds without moving. You may feel that you don’t have the patience, determination, and faith necessary to do Zen practice, but your practice need start with nothing more than the intention to develop these qualities.

Instead of setting a goal of, say, sitting for at least 40 minutes with an unwavering mind, concentrate on training your body. Keep your goal simply to sit still and quiet for short lengths of time. An unwavering mind is an abstraction suitable for the abstraction we call tomorrow — invite your body to stillness right now! What does stillness feel like?

Overdoing it by prolonged and tense sitting wastes your energy and determination by giving you punishment instead of reward. Excessive effort can be harmful. Trying too much too soon actually diminishes your capacity for a while. Appreciate your achievements though they seem small.

More important than an unwavering mind or being able to sit in meditation for hours, Sit every day! Even if you can only handle five minutes of counting breaths. Even if all you can do is be mindful of three breaths! If you establish a daily practice, and turn your mind to it every day without fail, your practice will grow practically by itself.

You can’t deal with your life if you don’t know its basics. Fortunately, the laboratory in which you can learn these basics is always present and available to you: your own mind and your life. You engage in zazen and other spiritual practice to learn what it is that you do and how you do it, in zazen or outside of it. This is your life and your practice. There is no need for anyone, including yourself, to judge it at all. Failure is not a relevant or useful evaluation. To sit in meditation is to discover the landscape of your own mind. With that in mind, how can you ever fail to learn something, whatever you do, whatever may happen? No need whatsoever to worry about doing zazen right, if you just keep paying attention.

With all this in mind, how would you work out a program to establish a daily practice without engendering the negative forces of disappointment? As a suggested example, suppose you find that you can sit comfortably for ten minutes, but more makes you antsy. Use a kitchen timer, or something that doesn’t require any attention until the time is up, and set it for ten minutes. Sit for ten minutes every day for a week. After a week, increase the time to eleven minutes. Add a minute every week. After ten weeks, make the increase five minutes. Sit as many days and weeks as you need until you can sit still and quiet for as long as you think is long enough. Vary this formula however you think best, but keep at it every day.

By concerning yourself only with small concrete goals, you will easily develop the skills necessary to engage in the deeper work of Zen. Before you know it, you will not be sit ting like a Buddha, you will sit as a Buddha!