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yesterday my karma class concluded; that which has a start has an end, or as Shibata Sensei said “hello means goodbye”.
my favorite part of class was the time we spend reviewing the buddhist view of consciousness and feeling, including how consciousness forms, how it relates to feelings, and how thoughts and attitudes spring out of that process. the abhidharma or buddha’s teachings on this go into incredible detail.
the twelve nidanas, it turns out, describes how moment to moment our consciousness forms from nothing, reacts to the perceptions of phenomenon, forms a positive, negative, or neutral opinion of that phenomenon, then jumps to a conclusion about how things should be and habitualizes the result.
we also studied the five skandas, each a mental process which all combined make up what we typically consider self or ego. the formation of the skandas is part of the nidana cycle, the fourth nidana in fact, before sense perceptions start to make contact with the phenomenal world. the consciousness skanda is paramount, but is supported by the skandas of form, feeling, formation, and perception. form constructs distinct views of the world, feeling just provides a very basic positive, negative, or neutral opinion of things, perception processes what we perceive, and formation pigeon-holes things into categories for us.
the importance of these teachings is deep. when Pema teaches about ‘learning to stay’, this comes from the wisdom that the cycle of karma can only be interrupted between the seventh and eighth nidanas - between feeling and craving. once we’ve gone from feeling to actually thirsting for something then we’ve continued a cycle that ends with a further strengthening of ego and solitification of our world view. but if we can learn to rest in feeling (the seventh nidana) then we can interrupt the habituation of ego. in fact, that’s the only way we can work with it and stop the karmic momentum. by karmic momentum i mean the quality that our feelings lead us to action which then sows the seeds of future suffering - in this case the habituation and solidification of our ego-centric view of the world.
trungpa rinpoche also gave an interesting teaching on the skandas and enlightenment. he taught that the skandas in an enlightened being are still there. what’s different is that they aren’t connected. meditation cuts the tight connection between the skandas. then he went further to say that it’s not really a connection that you’re severing. really the skandas are just crammed together by our speed. we hate to experience space, our world feels unsolid in space. so we keep our mind running quickly so we don’t notice that there is a small gap between each skanda. so meditation lets us slow down, and then increase the gap between the skandas or in other words so we can see the large expanse of space which is already between them.
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so there’s some guy building a keyword based index of the web right now, and i’ve gotten a few automated emails from him for my web sites. i’m not interested in joining his index but i thought his take on this site was funny. when have i ever talked about adoption papers? i look just like my mom and dad, but maybe he’s trying to tell me i’m overlooking a family secret.
Relevant keywords of “owlmonkey.com”:
adoption papers
clown porn
redwood trees
laughing place
cape cod style
news clipping service
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this morning was another great train ridding story. at the stop right after mine, a man got on and sat next to me. the train was almost full. he started reading a book called “the key” that I could tell, by peeking while he was reading, had some great ideas. I asked him about it. it was written by a zen group he explained. he was on a page talking about the origin of consciousness. i was also on a page in my book about the origin of consciousness. we talked more.
our trip down the peninsula covered thoughts on meditation and practice, retreat centers in the bay area, and then onto my experiences in college staffing a student phone hotline.
at MIT we had a phone line that students could call to get information about things on campus, or to just talk about what was troubling them. i spent a couple years volunteering and answering the phones. i’d staff a couple times each month. most calls were just for what movies were playing in the student union. but the reason we were there were for the longer more intimate calls. “i think i might be pregnant”; “i’ve been here for a semester and i don’t have any friends”; “i just feel numb. i can’t feel anything.” it breaks my heart just thinking about the people i talked to and how much sadness and trapped feeling there was.
we staffed from 7 pm to 7 am each night. we called ourselves nightline, and we had the name before ted koppel. we had a mantra, a banner on the wall that was a reminder not to avoid the difficult emotions and conversations, it just read “Steer Toward the Pain” when someone called I would try to think of the things that were probably on their mind but hard to talk about and touch in on those. and then just be there with them. no advice. no judgment. just someone to be there in the midst of all that pain with them. someone willing to stay on the phone as long as they wanted. someone anonymous. just someone.
retelling those stories to my new friend nearly had me in tears. college is so difficult, people don’t know who to turn to. everything can be so difficult, and it leave us feeling trapped. i feel really lucky that i’ve managed to make it through life so far without major catastrophe, but even the small things can be so overwhelming.
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sony just announced a product using new paper like displays. i wonder how applicable this type of display is for images that change more frequently than reading pages of a book - like for a laptop. but even just this would be great for me riding the train or taking classes. like using iTunes, i could download books from the web and then carry all of them around with me all the time. but unlike a laptop, they’d be lighter and more readable. they probably need to up the resolution even more though, i’m not sure my eyes could handle reading 170 dpi all the time. 300 dpi perhaps but less might give me too much eye strain.
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The MIT class of 2008 (yikes!) received their admissions letters this week. Only 16% of those who applied were accepted. Each year since I moved here I interview high school students in the San Jose area for their MIT applications. I write a recommendation letter for them similar to one a high school guidance councilor would write. The last two years the interview process has been optional, so were before I would interview more than ten students now it’s a much easier load of three or four. Of my students this year one was admitted and two were wait listed.
This time of year always reminds me of what it was like to receive my acceptance letter to college. It created such a shift in my life. Before that I was an angry, frustrated teenager who couldn’t wait to get out on his own. I applied to college and left home a year early primarily to escape life with my parents. As soon as that acceptance letter came, though, the frustration and anger disappeared. I then knew I only would have six more months with them and I began to cherish the remaining time.
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last night i brought presents for everyone in karma class. guess that will cause me more karma. i duplicated the flash cards that i made for myself - to help learn the three subcategories of this and the five types of that, etc - and made just enough copies for everyone in class. a couple people commented after class that they thought they knew the material pretty well until they started flipping through the cards. it’s so hard for me to memorize so much detail, that’s probably the only way i’ll do it. just making the cards helped too though.
my current plan for meditation retreats this year is roughly this:
- 10 day retreat mid May in Colorado (at Shambhala Mountain Center)
- 14 day retreat mid July in Vermont (at Karmê Chöling)
- 28 day retreat for November in Vermont (at Karmê Chöling)
all of these are an even mix of meditation and dharma study. i’m not sure if i’ll be able to make it to all of them, but i’ll be really grateful if i can. i feel really grateful that i have the conditions in life (the karma if you will) - with flexibility at work and a good salary and a supportive set of friends - that i can plan to take time off in retreat. i hope it continues to open me up to my friends and to my world.
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went for my third run this morning, and i felt yet stronger. i had an even harder time keeping my heart in my training range though. this time it kept spiking to 186 bpm. i’m guessing that on my first run, my leg muscles were so unprepared that i just couldn’t burn enough oxygen to get my heart rate that high and feel ok. now as my legs adjust i’m able to push my heart more and it’s going to take more mindfulness to keep it below 160 bpm.
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starting running again this week, first a long run on sunday then a shorter run this morning. they went better than i expected. this morning i ran with a heart rate monitor. it surprised me how helpful that was. during this morning’s short run on two occasions my heart rate jumped up to 180 bpm. my ideal training range is about 130-160 bpm. i would look down at the wrist readout of my heart rate and think, “damn! too fast again” then slow down and take it easier. i have a tendency to run at a speed that feels like effort but that seems to be above my target range.
please send me healing thoughts for the abuse my knees are about to go through…
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the economist had an interesting article recently about the life expectancy of older women and how that might relate to grand children. a finnish researcher used census data to analyze how many grand children a matriarch might have compared to how long she lived, and proposed that being closer to her children and living longer promoted more grand children. the presumption is that extra support of having one’s parents around or another factors encourage more grand children. she factored out other possible explanations.
what was odd for me was this was framed as an argument for why women live past their child bearing years. from a narrow focus evolutionary view as soon as you’re unable to procreate you’re DNA should spontaneously explode or something. the article proposed the larger picture that extended family helps support the survival of the second generation. which makes sense to me.
this then makes me think that there would be evolutionary pressure for other non-reproductive roles in an extended family to exist. like an uncle or aunt that doesn’t want to have kids. if their presence helps the survival and proliferation of a clan more than having their own kids, then perhaps our DNA even promotes a few people in each family to not want to have kids and that would make evolutionary sense. (don’t worry mom, i do want kids still)
i’ll go out on a limb here, what do you think of this evolutionist argument as it might be applied to homosexuality in species?
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i didn’t think science would develop these super strong nanotech fibers into longer strands so soon. but the process sounds both easy and cheap to make super strong rope. that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d need for a space elevator.
the cost of getting to space is terrible. thousands of dollars of fuel and rocket maintenance for each pound sent to space. so sending yourself to outer space costs millions. less if you’re a thin thread of a man like i. the aerospace plane projects are designed to reduce the cost by almost an order of magnitude, but it will still be expensive until we have an elevator.
imagine a space platform tethered to the surface of the earth - probably attached to the top of a tall mountain - by a super strong set of woven cables. then a sort of elevator could climb and descend the cables and reduce the cost of moving material to space by another order of magnitude or two. these cables need to be stronger and lighter than what we can make today. that’s why nanotube fibers are so exciting. they are just the stuff we would need.
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