Walking Bliss

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

I’ve always loved Carmel-by-the-Sea. Something obnoxiously quaint about it, like a real life version of some Thomas Kincaid painting. But underneath all the glitz is a cool little town with great people.

The small, local bars have stories to tell. The sand on the beach is like powder. The town’s friendliness towards dogs speaks to something kind of cool.

Anyway, the wife, kid, and I will be spending a few days unplugging there. Can’t wait.

Bows.

Tricycle suggests that boredom is a lack of attention. While this makes sense, I would submit that the root of a lack of attention is a mind that is avoiding what is present. Looking at boredom this way adds texture and greater accuracy to the “lack of attention” definition of boredom, since at any given moment, our lack of attention may not necessarily mean boredom has set in.

Just this morning, for example, my avoidance of what was present resulted in a wild display of Cheerio throwing when for a split-second, I lacked the requisite attention needed for toddler feeding. Boredom wasn’t involved here.

I was, however, absolutely bored recently when someone described to me, pitch by pitch, how a particularly long inning went awry for the San Francisco Giants. In other words, I began to lack attention as soon as my mind began the process of avoidance. I wanted out of the exchange, lost attention, and got bored.

The University of Michigan study reports that researchers put volunteers:

… inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) room, and asked them to perform a boring task, namely identify letters that appeared on the walls, for about an hour. He and his team noticed that, from time to time, the attention levels of the participants spiked, so they analyzed those moments to see exactly what happened when their concentration gave way.

They noticed that areas of the brain closely related to self-control, vision and language processing seemed to seize most activity – this gap triggered inattention and boredom. “Attention failed to grease the connections in the brain,” the scientist says, arguing that attention usually acts as an “amplifier” between certain areas of the brain at a time.

This suggests that attention falls or that “this gap” arises once the mind begins to avoid something like doing an hour’s worth of repetitious tasks.

I have always been taken with the final line of the Heart Sutra, where it says: Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha. Loosely translated these words tell us to “go, go, go beyond, go way beyond, awakening … YES!” Or “awakening … Yeah, Baby!” depending upon your preference. Put another way, “go deeper, go further in your search for truth.”

This kind of travel can and should be done on one’s cushion, but I’ve always advocated external exploration as a means of cultivating skills for internal work. Here The Economist puts tested results of expat Upaya into print.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins. They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

Fiat Lux, and Bodhi Svaha!

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At a recent sitting, Michael offered up a poem from Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s book, The Invitation. This is the podcast of that evening. Several subjects were broached including how practice can get heavy the further along the Path we get, as well as how we might best deal spiritually with faltering economic situations. Rather than go to war with our situations, Michael suggests we allow life to tenderize us and then to live consciously from that softened space. As odd as this may sound to the ego, it is a shortcut to realization.

Accepting the Invitation [ 33:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (297)

Cushion Commanderring

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

Okay, given the context today’s New York Times article, this post’s title may be a bit off base. Still, clinging to the belief that we are somehow separate from God, or that God is outside and the “me” is inside, speaks to the most potent of all attachments. Clinging to our sense of separation gives birth to war. The wars may be subtle, they may be overt, but the seeds to all war are sown in the very fertile soil of duality. This isn’t to say that duality is wrong, it’s just incomplete, and allows us to engage in things like hating hatred.

Consider this:

“Words fail,” Benedict said at that time. The pope was born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria in 1927. The son of a policeman, he was inducted into the Hitler Youth and the German Army — biographical details which he has not recalled during his Middle East journey but which some Israelis have.

“In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence that itself is a heartfelt cry to God,” he said in 2006. “Why, Lord, did you remain silent?” he said, his voice trembling. “How could you tolerate this?”

How could God tolerate this? Why did God remain silent? His words beautifully illustrate our tendency as humans to create a split from the natural wholeness and deep singularity of the Universe. “Us is them, ” to quote Walt Kelley’s Pogo, in the same way that God is us.

Why did We tolerate this? Why did We remain silent? And where in our practice might we continually uncover the courage to respond generously to each invitation offered by these lives We lead?

Yes, from the enlightened perspective, everything is recognized full, complete, and perfect, and yet there is infinite room for improvement. My teacher used to tell me that for any of us to fall into becoming a spiritual couch potato, or  “Zen sickness,” as he called it, diminishes our realization. Clinging to non-clinging is still clinging. Attachment to non-attachment keeps us asleep.

Bernie Glassman echoes this:

There’s a state in Japanese Zen that’s called the “Cave of Satan.” It’s that place where you just stay—because there’s nothing to do. And you can get in that state and it can be an overwhelming experience. But the point is to kick the person out of that cave.