… if you are to attain liberation, you must understand and fully experience how your life is entwined and defined by dukkha, meaning your mental experiences of discomfort, pain, stress, instability, inadequacy, failure, and disappointment, each of which is felt as suffering in your mind…

The first kind of dukkha is the obvious suffering caused by physical discomfort, from the minor pain of stubbing a toe, hunger, and lack of sleep, to the agony of chronic disease. It is also the emotional suffering that arises when you become frustrated that things don’t go your way, or upset about life’s injustices, or worried about money or meetings other’ expectations…

… a second type of dukkha … is the suffering caused by the fact that life is constantly changing…

… an underlying unease about the future … is a manifestation of the third type of suffering the Buddha identified — life’s inherent unsatisfactoriness due to its intrinsic instability…

How often in your adult life have you experienced the queasiness and unease that come from a sense of meaninglessness in your life? Think of all those occasions when you felt as though you were wasting your life, or sleepwalking through it, or not living from your deepest, most heartfelt sense of your self. Remember the times when you felt as though there is little you do each day that has any real, lasting significance. We’ve all fallen prey at some point in our lives to such constricted, dreaded, almost unbearable dark times of self-doubt and existential angst.

[ANP note written above the above paragraph: DECONSTRUCT. Except I no longer have any idea to what I might’ve been referring.]

What Buddha is pointing to is that suffering is an experience of the mind. He’s not offering you relief from pain; he’s offering you relief from the extra mental reactivity that causes your misery… Our ancient wisdom-bearers knew life was hard, and they too discovered that there was a difference between the pain of life and your reaction to it.

[ANP note: Victor Frankl; Soren Kierkegaard]

• Phillip Moffitt
• Shambhala Sun

Dept. of Breadcrumbs:

Bright kids are used to fending for themselves in America. Dweeb, dork, brainiac, nerd: to be young and brilliant here is almost always to be a figure of some derision, to accept isolation as a condition of existence…

“Teaching them [gifted students] is like driving a Mercedes.” [says Georgetown graduate student Bill McGeehan] …

“Intelligence is less about knowing than about methods of thought,” a thirteen-year old Egyptian named Amine told me, his fingertips tracing the beginnings of a beard. “Descartes said that others had greater minds than his, but that they accomplished less because their method was not as good.” …

“I used to think that I.Q. almost guaranteed success,” Stanley [”Julian Stanley founded the Center for Talented Youth” … “eighty-six” … “Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard”] told me. “But I found with bitter experience that it’s not true. It can almost be a burden to you.” …

If society really wants to find the next Einstein, teachers should stop asking which students are the brightest and start asking which are the most eccentric and single-minded. “Who is the oddest ball here?” [suggests “Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who originated the theory of multiple intelligences.”] …

“Part of the point of acceleration is to get you into a warmer environment, where people can appreciate you,” he [”Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at Caltech” … “forty-four” … “one of the oldest alumni of the Johns Hopkins program”] says. “Geeks are more comfortable being geeks in college.” By the time he was in his early twenties, Camerer had earned an M.B.A. and then a Ph.D. in economics…

Hunter [”Andrew Hunter” … “fifteen … an avid programmer”] was so quick and bracingly blunt that he was often taken for rude.

“It’s not like I’m beaten up for ostracized or anything,” Hunter said, when I asked him about the public school he attended… “But I often feel like I don’t belong.“…

“The I.Q. test was designed to find mid-level bureaucrats to administer an empire,” Howard Gardner told me …

This “rage to learn,” as one psychologist puts it, is what really distinguishes the gifted from other students. Their minds may be no sharper at birth than anyone else’s, but they spend their lives continually, compulsively honing them. “We start with little differences, but they snowball over time,” Robert Plomin [”a psychologist at King’s College, London who is studying the genetics of intelligence”] told me.

Asterisk ODubz for putting this article on Radar_ANP.

• Burkhard Bilger
• The New Yorker

… when we are unable to find composure in the face of impermanence, we suffer.

…

Anything you base your security on may fail. How do you feel as you walk around? Do you feel secure? Do you feel that you have stability? And what is it based on? What is real security based on? …

In the word “composure,” the root -com, from the Latin, means “together, being with, being connected.” The -posure part comes from a Greek root that means “pause,” or “stop.” Remember to pause together, to stop together, and to awaken in this pause with many beings, the myriad things. Don’t doubt the value of the contribution that you make just by being willing to find composure, even by simply recalling the thought, “How can I find composure in this challenging situation?” And also to help each other to do this. This is maturity of mind. This is actually the manifestation of what we call the vow of the bodhisattva, to help beings mature, to help beings be fully present in themselves.

Thought_ANP: we are human beings, not human doings. So why is it so challenging to simply feel the joy of being?

… even a “happy” moment is tinged by dukkha. That is because neither the moment nor the experience is stable. Since the quality of happiness arises in dependence on external factors, it fades away as those factors disassemble. And in that gap is felt the trace, however subtle, of underlying dukkha. Since, furthermore, our lives are successions of such moments, dukkha is said to be “pervasive”…

… Our English term would have to have the following colorings (on an increasing scale of intensity):

faint unsettledness, irritation, impatience, annoyance, frustration, disappointment, dissatisfaction, aggravation, tension, stress, anxiety, vexation, pain, desperation, sorrow, sadness, suffering, misery, agony, anguish

… It is obvious that each of these qualities involves some degree of unease, so “unease” is how I translate the term for general usage.

• Shambhala Sun
• Glenn Wallis

… Buddhism teaches us that if we cultivate the right attitude and are able to look simply into ourselves and our perspectives, predilection, and habit patterns, we can reduce and ultimately eliminate the avoidable forms of suffering.

… The sufferings we inflict on ourselves due to our undisciplined mind are avoidable, but other forms of suffering, such as old age, sickness and death, are unavoidable.

Once we have accepted that we are subject to forms of dukkha that can be avoided, there are two parts to the solution: (1) looking at the causes of dukkha and (2) finding the means of reducing or stopping it. When we look into the causes of dukkha … must look closely at the mental states, habits, and attitudes that produce what we consider to be our moments of joy, happiness, or satisfaction. One of the profound insights offered by Buddhism is that we cannot rely on our own immediate experiences to tell us whether we are experiencing well-being or misery. Just because on the surface we feel we are happy or satisfied, or just because everything seems to lead to doom and gloom, these impressions may not necessarily reflect the true state or affairs. We need to look deeper.

We may discover, as the Buddha tells us, that the lack of substantiality or permanence in all that surrounds us gives rise to unhappiness and pain…

… our mind has been conditioned by ignorance into thinking that eternal happiness can be obtained through things that are ephemeral and transient…

… We can continue to wallow in our own suffering and misery or take some initiative, such as making the practice of dharma, which enables us to see the true nature of our experience, part of our everyday life.

… When we feel loss and we grieve, we can do so without the emotions overwhelming us, opening the door to despair and depression. We can also learn how not to generate further suffering by accepting the unavoidable suffering of old age, sickness, and death… Pretending one’s illness is not serious does not make the illness go away… There are conditions that are beyond our control. Trying to control them leads to suffering.

…

Even though we suffer as human beings, we do not have to suffer without purpose or meaning… Painful experiences can teach us a lot. Buddhism treats life as a school where we learn from our painful experiences… It is about utilizing our painful experiences, the truth of suffering, with fortitude and dignity, and thereby making ourselves stronger and more mature.

• Shambhala Sun
• Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

1. Writing

Getting Started

… books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life — wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

Short assignments

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

Shitty first drafts

Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I’m on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don’t come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it …

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And son on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want — won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shotting them all in the head. But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism … will keep you cramped and insane your whole life... I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die…

… Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up… Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspected animation …

… when we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation and from infection… I would need to use these muscles if I wanted them to relax again…

… something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds — the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both — to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us… They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. So how do we break through them and get on?

… awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage…

… we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here …

School lunches

Polaroids

Character

… from a short story by Abigail Thomas:

My mother’s first criterion for a man is that he be interesting. What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture. Robbie is about as interesting as a pair of red high-top Converse sneakers. But Robbie points to the mattress on the floor. He grins, slowly unbuckling his belt, drops his jeans. “Lie down,” says Robbie.

This is interesting enough for me.

[Quoth ANP: I’m with the mom on this one.]

Plot

Dialogue

Set design

False starts

[ANP notes in margins: remember the lady on the flight from Miami. “Whose coat is this in the overhead bin?” “It’s the law. You’re not supposed to put your coats in the overhead bins.” “I travel every week.” “Notice the difference between the people who fly out of JFK and LGA. I hate flying out of JFK. Those of us from Westchester and Connecticut prefer LGA.”]

Plot treatment

How do you know when you’re done?

2. The writing frame of mind

Looking around

Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others…

… The conscious mind seems to block that feeling of oneness so we can function efficiently, maneuver in the world a little bit better, get our taxes done on time. But it’s even possible to have this feeling when you see — really see — a police officer, when you look right at him and you see that he’s a living breathing person who like everyone else is suffering like a son of a bitch, and you don’t see him with a transparency over him of all the images of violence and chaos and danger that cops represent. You accept him as an equal.

Obviously, it’s harder by far to look at yourself with this same sense of compassionate detachment. Practice helps. As with exercise, you may be sore the first few days, but then you will get a little bit better at it every day. I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence…

… There is ecstasy in paying attention…

… To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has it head up its own ass — seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

The moral point of view

… I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.

Broccoli

When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. God forbid you should have your own opinions or perceptions — better to have head lice. If you asked innocently, “Why is Mom in the bathroom crying?,” you might be told, “Mom isn’t crying; Mom has allergies.” Or if you said, “Why didn’t Dad come home last night?,” you might be told brightly, “Did did come home last night, but then he left again very early.” And you nodded, even though you knew that these were lies, because it was important to stay on the adults’ good side. There was no one else to take care of you, and if you questioned them too adamantly, you’d probably get sent to your room without dinner, or they’d drive a stake through your ankles and leave you on the hillside above the Mobil station. So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.

… You get your confidence and intuition by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side …

… You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

When I post more I’ll drop the next section’s URL into the comments.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Imaginative knowledge resists the tyranny of life…  Literature is a resistance against the tyrannies of the reality we impose on ourselves…

Leave conclusive evidence that we have existed …

I could always take refuge in my make-believe world…

Notes scribbled onto a very small envelope with a very temperamental pen at the Lit Partners Benefit Gala on Monday night.  Last sentence from her upcoming work, “Things I Have Been Silent About.”  

• “In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.”

[ANP:  Which comes first?  Cause / corr.?]

• “The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought.  “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything.” explains M.J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will…”  and Ms. [Dawna] Markova’s business partner.  “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity.  Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”
• [Says Ms. Ryan:] “scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”
• [Continues Ms. Ryan:]”"Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain…  If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do.”"
• “We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t… If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.”

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