Random Meanderings

Lunch today at Casa de Luz. I was offered an opportunity to choose my piece of pie. My first thought was to take the biggest piece. I eyed a big whopper that had no pie shape whatsoever. It must have been the last piece in the pie pan. But it was behind the others, and actually did not look that appetizing. It was more of a garbage heap than an appetizing dessert. Then I eyed a pretty miserable little piece in the front row. It wasn't much bigger than the others and was poorly formed, but it spoke directly to my heart. “No one will choose me,” it cried. “I will,” I answered. And I did.

At the park yesterday I came upon a broken and decayed limb that must have fallen from some height in that it had shattered into many pieces. I eyed the arrangement of the pieces and commented to my friend that this arrangement was anything but random. Just because there was no apparent pattern, the arrangement of the various splinters of the limb seemed determined conditions—primarily by the fall.

Similarly, I eyed my plate after I scarfed down that piece of walnut pie. The arrangement of the remains was impeccable. No skilled set designer could fabricate such an authentic configuration of crumbs. “Is anything random,” I remarked, looking at the beautiful swirls that moved in a figure 8 pattern.

Supposedly computers can't generate random numbers. The numbers can be random enough to be useful, but not truly random. “Is anything random?” I asked.

“But we aren't computers,” my friends at lunch suggested. To which I responded, “Oh, I think we are. We have input and output.” Then they started to talk about their friend who was an astronomer. They suggested that he would agree, adding that they were on one side, the astronomer was in the middle, and I was at the other end (wherever that might be).

If “God doesn't play dice with the universe,” as Einstein famously said, then I wondered “is anything not the result of conditions?”

I mentioned my fixation on randomness to a Zen teacher yesterday and she replied that it didn't matter whether randomness existed or not, but what mattered was how I worked with it.

If the universe is the result of conditions, are my actions also the result of conditions? Today I wondered if everything but people is a product of conditions. Am I really free to do as I please? What will I do next? Will I go home after Zen writing tonight, or will I go by Walgreen's and pick up a prescription? Will one choice be the right one, according to my programming, and the other...well...wrong? Will I get an error message?

Now I'm feeling a little self-conscious about believing I'm making decisions. Did the branch decide how it would splinter after the long fall? Did the pie maker orchestrate how the piece of pie looked, shoveled onto a plate?

Am I free at all? Some believe that our unconscious mind (our computer?) decides things before our conscious does. Are we just on autopilot? With enough knowledge, could we have known that there would be an Einstein who would preach that the universe behaves according to its laws?​​​

North Korea/Sony incident

I wrote this as a comment to the North Korea/Sony incident. I try to see the other side of things. It is too easy to take pot-shots from the peanut gallery.

Perhaps in some of these instances the threats remind us that we aren't being kind. Maybe Sony learned that they can't make fun of world leaders and call it entertainment. I understand that the cost of caving in to threats, but I think that the benefit of such actions is that they makes us reflect more on how we are treating others.

My Dukkha

Dukkha (Pāli; Sanskrit: duḥkha; Tibetan: སྡུག་བསྔལ་ sdug bsngal, pr. "duk-ngel") is a Buddhist term commonly translated as "suffering", "anxiety", "stress", or "unsatisfactoriness".

I sit quietly in my chair, thinking how I attach myself to the renegade thoughts floating through my head. Some are easy to resist. I watch them come and go. Others seem to “get me,” kidnapping me until I can escape back onto my seat.

These thoughts that wait around in my head are not strangers. They seem to reside in me, and jump into my conscious mind whenever I pause from the busyness of life. I'd like to call them “old friends,” but, honestly, they are kind of boring.

I hear an airplane overhead. Forgetting where (or who) I am, or what I'm doing, I eagerly board the plane. I scold myself for doing so, but still, I find myself sitting in my favorite aisle seat. Soon the plane noise stops, and I return to me and my seat. And then, just as I congratulated myself for jumping ship and returning to my chair, the noise starts again and I'm back on the ship, looking at the clouds passing by.

Finally the plane quiets down, and other noises in the temple start appearing. They are not so seductive as the plane. I worry that some might not like these noises, calling them distracting. I try to think of them as opportunities for practice. But actually, they were fairly easy targets as they are unenticing, unlike the plane that buzzes through the sky.

I wrote the other day about how active meditation can be. Will the timer go off? Will people be irritated that our environment isn't perfect, devoid of all stimuli? Why do we call it meditation, anyway?

Perhaps crossing a busy street in the city should be called meditation and sitting quietly should be called crossing a busy street. Perhaps I should “just sit.”

The Independent Spiritualist

Robert Hutchins, the architect behind the Great Books, and president and chancellor of the University of Chicago wrote "read critically, think independently, discuss good naturedly the issues of the day."

My classmate from over 50 years ago at the U of C Lab school responded to that quote:

“Problem is that is an impediment to military, group, spiritual situation or condition

Academics have a monumental problem with belief in God because they see surrender to a higher power as weakness. They cannot
accept His teachings as the complete & final word. They cannot accept mankind as flawed…

Academics are roadblocks to group action, unity, because the individual in each questions everything, and yet groups are run often by the dyslexic (legions of history here), the average (Woody Hayes), the mundane, and the sinners, the flawed…”

I can’t say much about the military since my experience was so brief (one semester in ROTC because it was required at U of I). I did ride on the plane with a student from West Point and was questioning him about what he’d do if his sergeant told him to do something that seemed wrong. He said that he’d been taught to do what is right, not what he was told. That’s what we learned from the Nuremberg trials.

Going back to the Garden of Eden, I think that eating the fruit was the beginning of independent thinking. I would like to believe that independent thinking is a prerequisite toward finding and following a spiritual path. That is what Christ, Buddha, Moses and all the other leaders did. And Gandhi as well. Buddha said that if he says one thing, and your teacher says something different, you should follow your teacher. Judaism is not founded on belief but rather on action. It is about humans discovering what is human. What Linji was talking about was that mindlessly following a path is no different than being a prisoner, shackled and bound.

I wouldn’t be pursuing a spiritual path if I thought that meant losing my independence. The fact that paths are ultimately unique means that we must, yes, must, be independent. Otherwise we are simple sheep, doing the right thing, not as humans, but rather as animals.

The surrendering, for me, is seeing our interdependence. When a gear shift grows up, it stops thinking of itself as a gear shift, but rather thinks of herself as an integral part of a car. In the same way, we surrender minute by minute. When we drive in traffic we can choose to be part of the dance of cars, or to drive in our own direction which will likely lead to an accident. Choosing makes us human. But following the crowd blindlessly will lead to a pile-up. We have to be ready for independent thought.

Qi and Air

The Prompt: Mark Strand, Poet Laureate

It is hard to be nondualistic when doing qigong, or when thinking about being separate from the air we displace. We have stale qi and fresh qi. We move out the stale and move in the fresh. I doubt that one qi is better or worse than the other. It is more like how we get hungry or tired.

In Strand’s poem, he ends with, “I move to keep things whole.” In fact, we do the same in qigong, moving qi to keep us energized.

The air moves as the man moves. They switch places for a moment until the air is returned. Is it the same air, having been displaced by a man? It now has been stirred up. It has a little tale to tell its grandchildren.

“I move to keep things whole.” I thought in college sometimes that I’d learn something and then I could ride in this sweet Cadillac and not have to struggle one bit. Ha Ha. That was a joke.

Even a poet laureate needs to move to stay alive. Even the Dalai Lama needs to meditate four hours a day. Is meditation and moving much the same? I think so. And what is movement? When I am still, I really move. My thoughts can be as chaotic as Niagara Falls. And when I move, I am still—busy but somewhere else. Is one better than another? Or are they brother and sister—one complementing the other.

Wordsworth wrote that “Art is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recalled in tranquility.” It is one action for a man to walk around displacing air, and a much different action, after the fact, to remember and admit that one had done such an interaction with the world. It might be a obvious to a very precocious third grader, but not one ordinarily observed by an adult, unless, of course, they were a poet laureate… and a meditative one at that.

All Roads Lead to Rome.

The Romans were great road builders. They saw Rome as the center of the universe, and wanted to make sure that the little towns didn’t gang up against Rome, so made the roads so that they’d only go to Rome. You couldn't go from one little town to another.

Jim Jordan wrote about religions that there were many comic books and they all said the same thing.

Thoreau wrote, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

I think I mistakenly misunderstood each of these maxims. I heard them say that any-which-way is fine.

If you’ve been in a forest you know that there are paths and there is getting lost. There are “not paths” so to speak.

Thoreau talks about “hearing a different drummer.” He’s not saying that you don’t need a beat… a path. You need to step to the music you hear. But you need to hear music.

Jim Jordan said that there are comic books. Which implies that there are also “not comic books.” Buddha’s enlightenment provided for Buddha (and others) a new comic book.

Rabbi Baker said the other day that we pick our road depending on where we are born and who we are. Roads are paths, and they have the three jewels of Buddhism: sangha (others), dharma (teachings), and Buddha (a sense of the infinite). Without the three jewels, one doesn’t have a compass.

Emerson wrote, “…and the great man is he, who in the midst of a crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude,” he wasn’t advocating for walking alone (which he did not do), but rather about not being swayed every-which-way by the crowd. He heard a beat. It reinforced the path that he was on.

It is not our challenge to walk alone. It is not to head off the path and get lost. It is to find our road, lined with the three jewels.

And that road will lead to Rome, which is our center—our Buddha nature, our Atman, who we were meant to be, etc.

I believe Baby Boomers were mistaken that any-which-way was a path. We were wrong and lost.

Camas Lilies and Jerusalem

I'm not into lilies today. I moaned that would be the prompt as I drove here.

Earlier I had heard that the fifth person had died in the attack at a synagogue in Jerusalem. A vicious attack, where their shawls were lying in the blood, like the Holocaust, one of the victims said.

Lilies in the field. Are there any such things? The other day someone was telling me that heaven was on earth, and, gazing out on the lilies, we might believe that. But then this or that happens, and... where is heaven?

I did mention to my heaven on earth friend that the idyllic heaven would be boring. Where would the challenges be? Where would the opportunity be to bloom, if everything were already bloomed like the lilies?

Such contrast. A pristine field of lilies, blooming their hearts out, and the shawls, laying in blood, telling a story we don't want to hear.

Do we walk in the fields and feel the wind caress our faces? Do we watch the news with a box of tissues to catch the tears?

My mom didn't want me to see the hellish side of life. She thought the challenges were enough without the sad. She hid an obituary of someone I admired so it would interfere with my schoolwork. We never went to funerals. She always maintained she lived on “heaven on earth.” After she passed, we read in her diary how depressed she actually was. But she didn't want to share that amongst the lilies. We needed our opportunity to bloom, she thought.

Prompt: lynnungar.com/camas-lilies-2/