Thoughts on Powerlessness

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance,
complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness,
patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

So, I'm laying here, immobilized with the head-cold from hell, and it occurs to me what an ego-killer illness is. My husband refers to these episodes with cold or flu as "hitting the reset button." That sums it up well. These are massive interruptions in the momentum of our lives. You can do little but let everything come to a screaming halt, and even when you recover, you can't just pick up where you left off. Not completely. Some threads are broken. Some projects you wished to accomplish have already passed their freshness date and can't be taken up again. Even if it's a day or two, a chunk of your life is gone, never to be restored.

As I lay here, it's hard not to focus on all the things I cannot do. I need to unload and reload the dishwasher but I can't seem to stand upright for more than a few minutes and even that is torture. Shower. (See previous explanation.) Eat. My taste buds are compromised so everything sounds dreadful. It requires too much effort, anyway. Clean the house. (The standing and walking thing, again.) I'd love to do some yoga, but... the standing... oh, and the forward bends that would cause my sinus headache to reach critical mass. Or, just blog this wonderful article on yoga a friend sent me, but right now, I'm having trouble remembering what I even thought about it when I read it.


Buy at AllPosters.com


With little to do but contemplate the great mysteries of life, I find that even this, my greatest passion, is lost to me. It's as if some giant hand has played 52 pick-up with my thoughts. They're all in a jumble. I'm not sure what I believe... about anything. Now, I'm no fan of certainty, but I usually have some idea, some running narrative in my head, about life, the universe, the myths that shape our reality... Today... I got nothin.' Things I believed a week ago now seem puerile and reductive. I am suddenly overwhelmed, not only by the unmeetable demands of my daily, material life, but by the acute awareness that "the more I learn, the less I know." It all just feels impossible.

Now, on some level, I know that my sense of awareness and capability will return; that I will find the pathways through my mind again. I will remember my sense of purpose. But for now, I'm just a heap of broken circuitry.

This is a mini ego death. I've lost my sense of self, if only for a day or two. And, it occurs to me what a beautiful thing that is. Uncomfortable. Definitely. Assaults on the ego are never pleasant, but they are absolutely necessary. A reset button, indeed. The universe is just clearing out some of the old programming and forcing me back to the beginner mind.

A little over a month ago, I faced a different sort of interruption in the streaming content of my life. My computer died, suddenly, without warning. It was a power supply issue, now resolved. I moved quickly through the five stages of grief, finding, strangely, that it was a relief having that electronic tether cut. I discharged a number of day to day responsibilities and distractions that I have accumulated in my online life. I saw that the universe was, once again, hitting a giant reset button, and forcing me to be still, contemplative, and receptive. I realized something. The internet brings a crushing weight of information. Having the world at your fingertips is as exhausting and overstimulating as it is fascinating. I thought seriously about never reconnecting to the www. But, here, as in all things, the struggle is to find that middle path that allows me to live in the material world without being consumed by it.


Buy at AllPosters.com


The night before my new battery arrived, I dreamt of a bluejay. Bluejay's medicine is "appropriate use of power," if you don't know it. Bluejay and I have a longstanding relationship that started, to my knowledge, when I was attacked by one, as a small child. It dove straight at the top of my head and violently ruffled my hair. My mother insisted I must have gotten close to its nest, but I saw no nest, and it flew from a perch high in an old oak tree. No. Bluejay was trying, even then, to open up my crown chakra. So this night, before my battery unexpectedly arrived, I dreamt that I had a bluejay for a pet. I had saved it from some danger and it came to live in an open cage in my house, coming and going as it pleased. I expect it will take me years to sort out what, exactly, that means. And that's as it should be.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

Even A Broken Clock...

Buy at AllPosters.com

is right twice a day. And sometimes David Brooks writes a really worthwhile column. Today it's nice overview of the bridging of science and mystical thought.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

. . .

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

A Meditation on Suffering

Buy at AllPosters.com


In the most recent Energy Alert from Karen Bishop, "Surviving the Storm" -- Feb. 23, 2008, she invokes the issue of suffering. Like most of her alerts, the issue felt very timely. I know I'm feeling depleted, exhausted, frustrated, and beset by a sadness and anger that, like so many of the collective experiences that Bishop explains so well, has no nameable source. In the alert she gives her explanation of the higher purpose of suffering.

Suffering is occurring to support individuals into making a change. When we are extremely miserable, we are more inclined to be open to doing things differently, or perhaps inclined to let go of internal patterns that have continued to cause us misery for a very long time. And as most of us know, we are the ones who cause ourselves misery, and in this way, we are then empowered to make change, as changing ourselves is what creates the change on the outside as well, and then the ball is in our own court.

It can be difficult and very challenging to watch all this suffering around us. Our hearts go out to those involved. We deeply care. It can at times seem as though the world has gone mad. But we must also remember that each and every one of us is on our own unique journey, and our journeys are what create the needed changes.

In one of those delightful, little synchronicities of which life is so full, I stumbled on some very useful material, while assembling YouTube videos for my bookstore players. In these segments Pema Chodron explains the practice of tonglen; the use of suffering as a means to awakening.



In this video, from an appearance at The Omega Institute, Chodron offers a tonglen meditation on suffering in a time of war.

Massacre of Buddhist Monks in Burma

The peaceful protest led by Buddhist monks against the regime in Burma (Myanmar) has been suppressed in a violent bloodbath.

Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma's ruling junta has revealed.

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."

Mr Win, who spoke out as a Swedish diplomat predicted that the revolt has failed, said he fled when he was ordered to take part in a massacre of holy men. He has now reached the border with Thailand.

In what has been termed the "Saffron Revolution," thousands of Buddhist monks have been leading peaceful marches against the country's military regime.

On September 23, as many as 100,000 anti-government protesters led by a phalanx of Buddhist monks and nuns marched through Yangon (Rangoon), the largest crowd to demonstrate in Myanmar since 1988. Next day, tens of thousands more monks, joined by civilians, marched peacefully through key areas of several Burmese towns. Indeed, since late August this year, monks and people around Burma have been out on the streets protesting against a sharp hike in fuel prices imposed by the dictatorship on a long suffering people, among the poorest in the world.

The protests were initially triggered by student activists, who, lacking the immunity accorded to monks, were immediately beaten up and detained. Min Ko Naing, a student leader and hero of the 1988 failed uprising against the military regime, who has already spent nearly a decade-and-half in jail, was among those arrested.

Today, reports from inside the country are declaring the uprising over and the military junta in control.

Reports from exiles along the frontier confirmed that hundreds of monks had simply "disappeared" as 20,000 troops swarmed around Rangoon yesterday to prevent further demonstrations by religious groups and civilians.

. . .

There, troops abandoned religious beliefs, propped their rifles against statues of Buddha and began cooking meals on stoves set up in shrines.

Words fail...

Legislating Reincarnation

Buy at AllPosters.com

In its continuing effort to crush the influence of Tibetan Buddhism within its borders, China is cracking down on the reincarnation of living Buddhas.

All the reincarnations of living Buddhas of Tibetan Buddhism must get government approval, otherwise they are "illegal or invalid," China's State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) said in Beijing Friday.

The SARA has issued a set of regulations on reincarnation of Tibetan living Buddhas, which will take effect as of September 1.

"It is an important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation of living Buddhas," the SARA said in a statement issued Friday.

The regulations require that a temple which applies for reincarnation of a living Buddha must be "legally-registered venues for Tibetan Buddhism activities and are capable of fostering and offering proper means of support for the living Buddha."

I have to admit, this actually struck me funny when I first heard about it; the idea that a government bureaucracy could administrate the comings and goings of souls. But, it's deadly serious.

The 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs is aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and at preventing the re-incarnation of the 72-year-old monk without approval from Beijing.

It is the latest in a series of measures by the Communist authorities to tighten their grip over Tibet. Reincarnate lamas, known as tulkus, often lead religious communities and oversee the training of monks, giving them enormous influence over religious life in the Himalayan region. Anyone outside China is banned from taking part in the process of seeking and recognising a living Buddha, effectively excluding the Dalai Lama, who traditionally can play an important role in giving recognition to candidate reincarnates.

For the first time China has given the Government the power to ensure that no new living Buddha can be identified, sounding a possible death knell to a mystical system that dates back at least as far as the 12th century.

This continues and expands Chinese policies to wrest control of the Tibetan spiritual practices that largely define the occupied people. Having already decreed that only the government can authorize the appointment of its two most important spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. His holiness the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India since 1959, selected the reincarnate of the Panchen Lama in 1995. But, Chinese authorities held their own selection ceremony and the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama has since disappeared.

Last week hundreds of Tibetans were taken into custody for protesting the detention of another Tibetan protester, who seized the microphone at an official Chinese event and called for the return of the Dalai Lama.

The reports said the crowd of hundreds responded with a roaring yes when Runggye Adak asked whether the Dalai Lama should return.

"If we cannot invite the Dalai Lama home, we will not have freedom of religion and happiness in Tibet," Radio Free Asia quoted him as saying in a report filed from neighboring Nepal. Many Tibetans go through Nepal to reach the seat of the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India.