Nat

My not-so-secret guilty pleasure is that I love lots of mediocre TV. Tonight’s rerun of “Men in Trees” has a great bit of dialogue. Anne Heche’s character tells how troubled she is by small, short earthquakes in Alaska, and she asks on her character’s radio show, “How do you people deal with living on shaky ground?”

It’s an absolutely great question, since that’s what we all have to do eventually. Or always. When I lived through two very large earthquakes in California in 1987 and 1989, I found the experience very odd and unsettling. For starters, all of the car alarms go off at once.

But metaphorically, it’s an even harder question. How do you learn to handle finding out that things in life are not as durable or solid as they appear to be?

So tell me, How do you deal with living on shaky ground?

Here’s another great quote from Happiness, by Matthieu Ricard:

We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them. We all have the potential to sweep away the veils of ignorance, to free ourselves of the selfishness and misplaced desires that trigger unhappiness, to work for the good of others and extract the essence from our human condition. It’s not the magnitude of the task that matters, it’s the magnitude of our courage (p. 65).

The courage, that is to confront our suffering by facing our own minds. According to the Buddha and Ricard, the external examples of suffering (poverty, war, hatred, loss), can give way to our individual ability to see the causes of our suffering and correct them.

More on this.

I’ve become a big fan of the show, because I’ve always loved the spectacle of humans demonstrating their tremendous skill, the outcome of their great passion and effort. There are several contestants this year, among the women, who achieve great musicality when they sing. They don’t have to sell a song because they can inhabit it.

Tonight, Melinda Doolittle brought down the house singing “My Funny Valentine.” The phrasing was great. Her stage movements were engaging and well connected to the song. Her lower register was deep and vibrant. The judges loved it, and so did I.

I’ve also been thinking about a book I just started reading, “>Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hahn. In it, Nhat Hahn, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist, describes the many similarities between the Buddha and Jesus Christ. It’s very moving to see how he brings together two towering figures who embody different traditions and makes them examples of the same great enlightenment.

Greatness inspires me. Keep singing, Idols.

Matthieu Ricard, a cellular biologist turned Buddhist monk, has written a magnificent book called Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. In addition to his work writing, translating, and teaching, Ricard has participated with several Western biologists in experiments to determine whether meditation changes the structure of the brain.

This book aims to define happiness as an internal quality and to teach the skill of acquiring it more reliably. At the end of the first chapter, he says that happiness is all about a love of life. Then he continues:

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding onewself to the pain and imperfectiosn of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is alos about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

I’ll share more of his insights in future posts, but I’m really encouraged by this one.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

The Buddha said that, and it sounds like a close corollary to the Eckhart Tolle description of sin I quoted earlier this week.

I see plenty of anger, and I feel too much of it myself. I’m sure I cause plenty also, even though I try hard not to. Of all the damaging behaviours, anger is the one I understand best that I should avoid.

Wouldn’t the world be more pleasant if no one cut you off in traffic, shouted at you for making a mistake, treated you rudely in front of your co-workers? So maybe you should avoid dooing those things yourself. That’s what I tell myself most mornings in the car on the way to my office.

I’m happiest on the days when I take my own advice.

Among the many antidotes to sinful behavior that Tolle describes in A New Earth, he writes, “You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge” (p 13, A New Earth). The book gives an entire method for doing this by recognizing and controlling false ego, but today I just want to comment on finding the goodness already within you.

I can be pretty hard on myself, and many of the people I like best are the same way. For the most part, I think we do this with the best intentions: modesty, high standards, a desire to excel.

But it’s also very important to appreciate the strengths good qualities we already display and those that are latent within us. My parents taught me that God finds all of us loveable.

I’ll remind you. God loves you. Happiness starts there.

Eckhart Tolle, the best-selling spiritual author of The Power of Now, has written a great new book called A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. A New Earth promotes a method to end personal suffering, find happiness, and help end suffering and conflict in the world.

Early in the book, Tolle gives a great description of the term “sin”:

Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and mistinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.

His book moves froward from this premise to describe ways to identify the point of human existence, to reduce suffering by overcoming misconceptions about the ego.

Cloud9000 intends to foster this approach to living, as well as any others that achieve the same thing.

Buy the book. It’s a great read.

Michael’s old friend Abraham (as interpreted by Esther and Gerry Hicks in the Art of Allowing seminars) said something on a CD, which really made me sit up and think today: Without questions, there are no answers.

I’ve always been the questioning sort. As soon as I could talk–which happened unusually late–I badgered my poor mother with questions. She would listen to me when I was in my high chair, my car seat, and anywhere else she put me. It was exhausting for her.

These days, it’s mostly exhausting for me. Most are some variant of the question, “What am I supposed to be doing here?”

The answers, Abraham asserts, are coming at us all the time from God, the Source of the Universe. We just need to ask the question and then prepare to receive the answer. The answers come automatically to even the toughest question: How can I get more money? Why don’t I have someone to love me? Should I find another job?

So ask the question and listen for the answer. Here’s the final word on that subject, from Mother Theresa. A journalist asked her, “What do you say to God when you pray?”

“I don’t say anything. I just listen.”

“And what does God say to you?”

“He doesn’t say anything. He just listens.”

Over the months that we’ve been planning the activities of Cloud9000, Michael and I have spoken dozens of times about how people learn to relieve their suffering. It is easy to say that relief begins with the belief that things will get better, but we both recognize that there are pains and burdens that are nearly impossible to shake.

Still, a reliable approach to finding comfort must be big enough to find you no matter the size of your troubles. It has to start with a belief that there is some stronger force than your sorrow and your pain. For me that belief begins with the certainty that Love (call it God if you prefer) is bigger than what it comes to relieve.

In my moments of desperation, I now cling to every memory of being cared for and being made to laugh. There are people I no longer see who once made me feel special. Usually my journal writing takes me back to memories of these people. My grandmother used to give a special massage to my sister, my cousins, and me. She called it the Night Games, and the best part of it was that she talked to us as she touched us, “down the trough, and down the lane, and across the road, and this little wing, and that little wing.”

I will hear her voice saying this to me in the darkness when I am 70, and it will be impossible to feel beyond the reach of love and hope.

Christopher Lydon, the brilliant host of the Open Source radio program, hosted a program tonight in honor of the Harold Ramis/Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day.” It’s one of my favorites and one of my wife’s favorites, which is really nice because we don’t always like the same movies.

Lydon is a huge fan of the movie and feels, as I do, that it will be an enduring classic of American art. The question of the show was, “Why?” Lydon described the observers who call it a Buddhist fable, in which Bill Murray’s character suffers an endless cycle of rebirth until he finds redemption. Harold Ramis, the director and co-writer, talked about the cycles Murray’s character, Phil, goes through when he finds he’s trapped in the same repeated day: hedonism, manipulation, rage, impotence, resignation, and then grace.

Stanley Cavell, the Harvard philosopher, who loves the movie, talked about mourning in relation to the film. Mourning, he said, is fundamentally a condition relieved by repetition. We go back to the location of our pain again and again until we learn how to handle it.

Mostly, they all agreed, it’s about accepting the gift of managing days, experiences, and lives that are fundamentally routine and ordinary on the one hand and beautiful on the other. I think the movie’s point is that desolation yields to generosity.
There is no cheap Hollywood myth here. Instead, there’s the oppotunity to see our ordinary experience as our chance to make something special of ourselves and our world. Murray’s weatherman grows poetic when he finally accepts his fate. He embraces all that Punxatawny is, rather than lament all that it isn’t. I’m going to work on that, my dread of the ordinary.

Ultimately, the commentators decided, we can’t change our circumstances without changing our approach to them.

“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalms 118:24).

Happy Groundhog Day.