What I didn't know - part 1

What I didn't know before I began this project:

-- Practicing a faith is as much about choosing a community as it is figuring out what you believe.

-- People raised in a faith rarely know why they do what they do. They just do it.

-- People who religiously practice a faith seem to find a comfortable way to navigate the schism between the way their faith tells them to interact with others and the way life actually unfolds, the way people should behave and the way they actually do.

-- It is very easy to use one's faith, the rites and rituals you are "supposed" to do, to feel bad a lot of the time for not "measuring up" to some ideal. My gut is that this is the source of a lot of the judgement of others' insufficiencies.

-- I have a lot of experience creating strife in my own life simply by thinking I know what the "right" answer is, or the "right" course of action. Get a group together, especially one trying to solve a problem, and my favorite defect appears in almost everyone.

I know that this sounds silly but, not having been raised in a faith, I just assumed that it would be different "there," in communities of the devout. It isn't....at least so far, partway along in this project's arc, whether it's people of a single faith who are trying to work together or interfaith organizations who want nothing more than to help and to understand each other. Is it any wonder people of faith are at odds with each other on a global level when in meetings everywhere, every day, we all suffer through all the ways in which we fail to work together in an open-hearted manner?

Or perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding what "getting along" looks like, what it feels like. I want no one to argue anywhere, ever. How idiotic is that? Perhaps the flip side -- of not expressing an opinion if it differs with someone to avoid an unpleasant conversation -- is just as destructive as imposing my "right" answer on everyone. I'm still very confused about all of this, but I cannot stifle my urge to run when discussions turn to community minutiae. I've gotten enough of that in the jobs I've had. My interest in what faith is and how it works in different religions was, I thought, completely unrelated to that. I'm beginning to think this is yet another misunderstanding I had before I began.

Under "religion," do you check "none?"

Here's a pretty interesting look at the beliefs of those in that very large category: "None."

Some of the study's findings:

-- None's make up 15% of the population and that, given their rate of rapid growth, they might surpass the nation's largest denominations.

-- The rise of the Nones is usually decried by religious leaders as a sign of secularization or atheism's ascent but get this: 51% say they believe in God.

Here's a link to the Trinity College study ...
http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/NONES_08.pdf

And an article on BeliefNet that mentions it...
http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2009/09/deism----its-back.html

Tenets or actions, which come first?

I've started reading Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Armstrong's writing about the remarkable period she calls the Axial Age (900 and 200 B.C.E) in which most of our major religious traditions began: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Just a few quotes from the introduction:

"It is common to call religious people 'believers.' as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics... All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age...discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but..most of them refused to discuss it."

Armstrong says the essential spirit of the Axial Age was this:

"What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved."

The Path to Purpose

So someone asked me to take a look at The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, a new book by Stanford University professor William Damon. I didn't think I was going to end up writing about this but I can't help it.

Professor Damon's going after a critical problem in our society: the lack of meaning, the absence of a sense of purpose that so many of us feel. Of particular concern is the "generation of disconnected and unhappy kids" whose inner emptiness, whose lack of purpose is widespread. In his interviews and surveys of people between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, he says "almost a quarter of those we interviewed...express no aspirations at all. In some cases, they claim that they see no point in acquiring any." Damon links this to an increase in the rate of suicide and attempted suicide. The reason? Professor Damon writes: "I am unconvinced by the 'stress' explanation. Hard work and competition have never broken the spirits of young people as long as they believe in what they are doing."

This might be easy to dismiss as a developmental phase if Damon didn't see evidence of a life-long problem emerging from this aimlessness in young adulthood. "In the long run, that lack of purpose can destroy the foundations of a happy and fulfilled life."

As a parent and as someone who's interviewed a lot of people just out of college who want an entry-level position, I couldn't stop reading this book. Professor Damon is describing something we all know in our gut is true but hadn't quite recognized with such clarity.

Professor Damon's thesis is that schools and parents are failing to teach children how to find their purpose, why they're learning what they're learning. My guess is that's because most of those parents, teachers and administrators may not have figured out their purpose either.

I remember a friend of mine in school - you probably had one like her, too - who always held up class room lessons, demanding to know why she should learn algebraic equations or about the Teapot Dome scandal or how photosynthesis worked. She wanted to know what possible difference it could make to her life. I'm not sure any answer would have satisfied her but Damon suggests that such moments could provoke a more meaningful learning experience. "Incredibly, in all my years as a scholar of youth development and education, I have never seen a single instance of a teacher sharing with students the reasons why he or she went into the teaching profession."

In my very first documentary as a baby producer when I was just twenty-two, I spent months with a gang in San Jose, California, and the police who were working hard to curb their criminal activity. I can tell you that the very first sense of purpose those gang members ever had in their lives, they got the day they joined that gang. I spent more than four months talking to those guys. When I asked them what they envisioned for their future, I might as well have asked in Swahili. The future did not exist for them. They had no future picture of themselves nor any hopes or dreams. But, because of the gang, their day had structure, meaning, and purpose and, as flawed as those were, it must have been an enormous sense of relief to go from nothing to something.

Going one step further with this: I wonder what role a purpose-void plays in those who commit violent acts they say are based on their faith.

I remember the panic I felt before I graduated from college, wondering what I'd do for a living. I was clear that my choice couldn't just be about what might earn me the money to live. I needed to believe in what I did, that I had to feel that it might make a difference. That thinking led me to choose to learn how to tell stories for a living because what little meaning I found in my life had come from what I'd learned from the stories people wrote or told me. I wanted to learn how to do the same for others. The incredible relief I felt when I hit upon my purpose I can still remember, I can even feel it, physically, in my body today. But I also remember how I felt before I figured it out, how desperate, lost, and hopeless I felt and how eager I was for someone, anyone, to tell me what my purpose was.

I was lucky no one ever did. I was lucky no one ever tried to make my purpose serve their purpose.

The central impetus for The Heathen has been my bewilderment about the conflict between people of faith. William Damon's The Path to Purpose has got me wondering if some of the source of that conflict comes from people desperate to find a purpose without knowing how to do it for themselves making them ripe for false clarity.

The Heathen gets a recommendation!

Hey, fun news! The Heathen was listed as a recommended by the North American Interfaith Network. Here's what they said:

The Heathen Marley's Journal - A Leap

Blog recommend by Bill Lescher and Bettina Gray

Marley Klaus, a former 60 MINUTES producer was raised outside any religious tradition, yet felt a deep sense of need to explore a personal spiritual path that had not been encouraged by her family. In the face of her own children’s questions and “a world war over issues of faith” she took a leap and started exploring Hindu and Buddhist teachings and teachers. In October 2008 she started this blog which is taken from her notes. It is an unpretentious and honest chronicling of a personal journey.

Here is her post following the Mumbai attacks:

Mumbai

Does this really have anything to do with faith? With religion? If someone robs a bank but says the devil made him do it, or Jesus, or God, a jury sees that for what it is and convicts him. We don't blame the faith the bank robber happened to choose to use as an excuse for his indefensible acts, right?

In the middle of the chaos, Mumbai still under siege, a woman interviewed on the radio pleaded for all people of faith not to use this crisis to pull apart from each other but to join together, to use it to rise above, to see what we share not what divides us. I hope her voice is heard and her prayers are answered.

You can browse other entries at http://marleytheheathen.blogspot.com/

The Bowing Controversy - or To Bow or Not to Bow

I knew I had a hard time with the whole idea of bowing (see the end of the Path of Love) but I thought it was just my personality quirk. Then came all the hullaballoo over President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah on April 2nd. You'd think President Obama had floated the idea of making the king a cabinet member.

I thought it was my little old outsized ego that kept my spine rigid, unwilling even to try out this bowing thing just to see if I could at least come to appreciate why it's so important in both Hinduism and Buddhism but here I find it isn't just my problem, it's cultural. We're all raised to think bowing down before someone implies weakness or, worse, fealty or subservience to another.

It seems to me that how we greet one another is less important than that we do. I know that when I'm concerned more about how someone else sees me, more about making clear my power and its importance to me, more about making sure my position seems dominant from the get-go, my relationships don't go very well. I've lived most of my life with that first in my mind and, boy, was that a waste.

All I can say is, the whole angry storm over the President's bow at least made me feel that I am a real American, not just a real egotist.

(In case you're interested, here are links to previous posts with some of my bowing challenges: Hemu's Morning Rituals, First Teacher, Path of Love, Doing It, The Destroyer of Time...there must be a few more but, you get the idea. Most of the bowing is at the end of the posts...)

Dinner Party

So, what do I tell people I "do" now?

He should lift up the self by the Self
and not sink into the selfish;
for the self is the only friend
of the Self, and its only foe.

Bhagavad Gita, 6.6

I hate dinner parties but I keep forgetting that. I may have always hated them but, since I’ve started going to houses of worship in earnest, doing nothing else but that, they’ve really begun to fill me with dread. But I didn’t know we were going to one when Marisa said, “Come on over for dinner. Ken and I haven’t seen you in ages. Sunday night at seven?”

Ken and Marisa were safe. They knew what I was doing and weren’t too freaked out. “Sure! We’ll be there.”

But on Friday, when I called Marisa to say, “The lemons in our back yard were great so I made a lemon chiffon pie and I’m bringing it.” Marisa said, “Oh, I guess we’re going to have a lot of dessert then. My friend Lissa is going to cooking school and she’s bringing a dessert, too.”

Strangers. I was going to have to talk to strangers. At some point they were going to politely ask, “So what do you do?” That question was kind of fun to answer when I worked for Ed Bradley at 60 Minutes. Now? "I'm going through the conversion training for the seven major religious traditions?" That's a conversation starter.

I made it all the way until dessert without the subject coming up but then Marisa, who thought she was being a good host, said, “So, Marley, tell us what’s going on with your work.”

I’ve gotten the explanation down to a few sentences and I can usually turn the conversation around to get people to talk about their beliefs and family traditions, about their experience with faith, but I wasn’t lucky that night. These were kind, thoughtful, curious people who went right for the jugular: “What’s happening to you? How is it changing you? What are you feeling about it so far?”

I could feel my eyes blink as I looked into Lissa’s sweet earnest face – she really wanted to know something of my insides. I could feel my eyes blink…and blink again. It was an overture of friendship, of intimacy…and I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

My feelings? What am I feeling? Heck if I know. Maybe spending so long as a journalist has made me incapable of accurately seeing myself. Maybe there’s such a thing as being too open-minded. I’ve presented myself, arms flung wide, over and over and over again hoping to feel the irrational tug of faith. I’m even oddly fascinated by my obedience to this uncontrollable drive to do all of this and feel like my own lab rat sometimes but how can I say that? It sounds almost disassociated.

“But you must have found yourself changing in some way, haven’t you?

I wanted to scream: I have no idea what I’m feeling, what’s happening to me, so I cannot tell you what I don’t know myself. And I am okay with that until I am asked over and over and over again to report in: ‘Marley, how is this affecting you? How is this changing you?’ I don’t know. But I’m going to find out if I can, but back off and give me time.

I need to do this, to see if taking these actions will change me, change my perceptions. But is it change I’m after? Or do I really want knowledge? But if it’s only knowledge I’m,after, wouldn’t I have just kept reading books?

No, knowledge alone isn’t it. Perhaps the desire to find out about all of them, all of the faiths, is a workaholic’s way to avoid coming to know anything deeply, a sophisticated dodge, like Swami Sarvadevananda said you dig ten feet here,then ten feet there, you never get any water. I don’t know. Maybe. But when I went looking for someone else’s description of what it felt like to practice each faith, hoping to start this journey farther down the road, I couldn’t find it in any form I could understand, in any form that started from the very beginning for those of us with nothing. How can I go deep if I don’t have any idea where water is likely to be …for me?

What has changed is I can’t give glib answers any more. I can’t pretend to know something I don’t. I can’t talk about feelings and change I haven’t identified and feared I’d never identify. I can’t chat, can’t entertain, and I certainly can’t trot out my innards over dessert. All I can do is hope that, by writing all of this down as I go along, all the facts, the actions, the confusions, the moments of connection, maybe one day I’ll be able to come to understand for myself what changed, what was changing, what I was feeling and be able to do more than shrug and stammer, “So, how did you grow up?” in the effort to make it safely through one more dinner party.

Other people's lives

Attachment is the cause of suffering. Here I am, the summer is gone, and I’m beating myself up, using my picture of what my work life, my work output, is supposed to look like and doesn’t. While I’m typing these very words, I’m mindlessly knocking back a cup of coffee while chomping Famous Amos oatmeal cookie crumbs all over my keyboard. That’s after buying and eating a chocolate MoonPie at the convenience store when all I meant to buy was milk for the coffee I’m now drinking.

Sure great how those eight grueling days of mindfulness training made a real difference in my life.

So what has filled the void? What stories have moved in to the vacuum left by those I'm not telling? Luke, sixteen year-old Luke, may be breaking up with Amy after a year. I'm like a gossip magazine addict or a mangy dog waiting for the crumbs of information that fall off the table. I'm obsessed. Better than feeling what I feel when I'm not.

Attachment sure does cause suffering. I suffer when I don't measure up to some yardstick I imagine, then I flail around looking for anyone else's plot twists to agonize over because anything's better than feeling what I feel.

What a whiner.

Enough. Just type.

Learning how to eat

I thought I knew how to eat…

By taking the short end of the stick, you can cultivate virtue.
By putting yourself in another’s shoes, you can develop compassion.
By accepting things as they are, you can be carefree.
By enjoying without attachment, you can always be happy.

Venerable Master Hsing Yun
Humble Table, Wise Fare: Living the Dharma

I was looking forward to dinner. I was hungry.

Our suite of six, led by Ven Miao Hsi, walked in a line arrranged by height down the hill, across the courtyard and into the dining hall. Wherever we walked all week long, we always walked in that line, facing the same back.

Dinner turned out to be a lesson in how to eat for the week, the rules.

In the dining hall, rows of narrow metal tables topped with clear vinyl faced a center aisle where Venerable Hui Sheng, the Director of Social Education at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple, sat on a higher platform to eat. There was so little space between the tables, so little space between the chairs, it wasn’t easy to sit down especially when we were supposed to do so in utter silence. As in no sound at all. No sound when you pulled the metal chair out from under the metal–legged tables, no sound when you slipped your body between two chairs while a couple of hundred others were doing the same, no sound when you pulled your metal chair back under the table - across the linoleum right next to those metal table legs - while sitting on it. And, once you were as close to the table as possible, you had to sit upright, never leaning on the chairback, and still. Utterly motionless. Looking at nothing.

I am not a quiet person.

I am not a motionless person.

I love looking at other people. Love it.

Once we were all in place, Venerable Hui Sheng began our first meal together by explaining Buddhist etiquette, about the reasons for all of the rules. He talked about the importance of mindfulness in all we did, about not disturbing the mindfulness of another, especially another monastic. That was, afterall, what we all were about to become for eight days, Buddhist monks and nuns.

“Now imagine what this hall would sound like if each of you made even a little bit of noise. There are so many people here, it would be very noisy indeed.” So he taught us how to eat so we would disturb no one.

We had two small plastic bowls, a small plastic plate, and metal chopsticks lying right in front of us on a paper napkin. He pointed out that, if we simply picked up the metal chopsticks they would clang together and make noise. To avoid that, we were to hold down the eating end of the chopsticks with two fingers of our left hand while putting the first two fingers of our right hand on the each of the ends of the chopsticks, lifting them up and apart from the other before fully grabbing onto them with our right hand.

Next came the bowls and the plate. During the lengthy prayer we chanted after sitting down, the left bowl was filled usually with soup, the right bowl was usually filled with rice and the plate with an assortment of vegetables and soy-based protein.

Once the chopsticks were in hand, we were to take one side of the left bowl with our left hand and the other side of it with our chopsticks – metal chopsticks against hard plastic – and move the bowl to our right side, closer to us. Then we were supposed to take the bowl of rice on the right, moving it across to our left side.

We then were supposed to pick up our bowl of white rice with our left hand, fingers underneath the bottom, and lift one bite of plain white rice to our mouths. “Don’t dip your head to the bowl or look around. Chew carefully. Taste the rice.” We were to do this two more times before eating anything else at our place. Venerable Hui Sheng told us to eat from the rice bowl, putting whatever else we wanted to eat first into it. There was an elaborate system of communicating if you wanted more of anything as we weren’t allowed to speak or even to have eye contact with the people serving us. Drinking water wasn’t poured until you put one of the food bowls back, empty, near the far edge of the table, signalling that you were ready for it to be filled with water.

No matter what, at the end of the meal our bowls had to be clean. For those of us with no better than B+ chopsticks skills, doing all this without making any noise was pretty near impossible. Our clean bowls were supposed to be silently stacked and neatly lined up with everything else, along the far edge of the table when we were finished. We were then to sit erect, hands in our laps, looking straight ahead at nothing, until we were told the meal was over.

Eating was just plain scary. Every bite, every gesture, became a potential attention-grabbing embarrassment. That we were each responsible for the serenity of every other person in that room seemed to make beans more slippery and bowls of soup more sloshy. Far from being mindful in the sense of methodical and serene, my mind was a battleground of fear, confusion, and desire to excel (read: to please). I wanted to be the best but feared I’d be the worst. If attachment to ego is a cause of suffering, my uncertain eating skills put me deep into it.

Even worse, there was no hiding, no space to make a mistake because they’d put us English-speakers right up front. When I first saw where they put us, I was happy; I like to be able to see what’s going on, up close and in detail. But, not only wasn’t I supposed to be doing that, it also meant that they, too, could see me, up close and in detail. I guess it was so they could easily give us the extra help we were clearly going to need but we were so close to the monk presiding over the large room, every mistake felt huge. And it wasn’t just my imagination. Our mistakes were noticed and, on occasion commented on. “It is important not to make scraping noises with your chopsticks when you clean out your bowl.” “You must ask yourself why you want to eat some food and not eat other food. It is practice to take what is offered.” “Please do not look around. What is there to look at?”

What was there to look at? What wasn’t there to look at? Everything was new. Everything was something I felt I needed to see. Plus I look at people when they talk to me. I could hear my mother’s voice saying, “Marley, look at me when I talk to you! It’s just plain rude not to.” My mom’s first assessment of someone I’d bring home was often, “I like him. He looks you right in the eye when he’s talking to you.” But there, in that room, in that situation, my need to look was even more extreme: how would I know what to do and when if I couldn’t look at everyone else? For goodness sake I couldn’t understand Mandarin and had to wait for the translation of directions that were often issued as immediate commands. It just seemed plain logical to bolster the lagging information with visual cues. Logical, but wrong.

Facing us, right across the aisle, were all of the men with their newly shaved heads. If I’d been able to look at them I would have relied on what they were doing when I wasn’t sure. I would also have tried to figure out who they each were and why they were there. Without conversation or real information except what my eyes could see, I would have filled my empty mind with stories spun from the slightest shreds of visual information, fantasies about who they were and what their lives outside the retreat were like. One was only fourteen years old. I’d have followed his progress all week long had I been allowed to look.Was he having a rough time? Was the guy next to him helping him or did he feel burdened by feeling responsible for someone so young? Maybe the boy was his younger brother. Did they look like they could be brothers? I could have wasted a lot of the retreat in these irrelevancies, none of which had the slightest chance of being true, and all of which would have blocked what the retreat was meant to do, make us collide with ourselves, with the clouds in our minds.

The cost? I would have lost the awareness of what was happening to me – something I do a lot. And I wouldn’t have been able to watch myself panic and rebel; to recognize my dependence on the distraction of others, the way I use them to avoid myself; or to notice, for the first time in my life, that white rice actually has a taste.


7 July 2007

I knew...

...it was time to move on. I thought I was writing two different, unrelated posts. I was wrong.


Post 1

The clearest vision of Brahman is possible only in this life.
As one sees one’s reflection clearly in a clean mirror, so one sees Brahman in the buddhi…the intellect purified by self-control and contemplation. After death…the vision of Atman is indistinct…since one is engrossed there in the enjoyment of the fruits of past karma.

Katha Upanishad II, iii., 5

Reading this was a revelation. Here’s why.

Swami Sarvadevananda sat in class, his legs crossed under the low wooden table he used for the more formal evening classes, slowly moving through one of Swami Vivekananda’s books on the purpose of devotional worship. Every week, the same people sat scattered throughout the chapel, one, maybe two to a pew. When the subject of heaven and hell came up, Swami Sarvadevananda said, laughing, “We’re very organized, we Hindus. There are many, many levels to heaven, many levels to hell!”

While I can tell you I have experienced moments of heaven and hell in my life right here and now, I can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of a single, literal, afterlife heaven or its opposite, let alone an entire hierarchy of heavens and hells. But Hinduism’s concept of heaven and hell seems different from the Christian idea of heaven and hell. While Hinduism does believe in an afterlife and in a fairly complex and stratified heaven and hell, these are all only waystations, intermediate steps on a multi-life journey, not a final destination.

The swami cheerfully described a heaven where those who wanted to be rich, for example, could go to heaven after death and, assuming they’d done good during their lifetime, enjoy their wealth. They could even return in their next life as a wealthy person.The catch is: desires like these, for wealth, for human love, for good health, even for a long life, keep us subject to the law of karma, meaning, we keep coming back over and over again until we fully enjoy and no longer want these things.

I’ve had glimpses of that truth. I’ve worked past reason, I’ve knocked people over, trying to get to some goal, some new rung on the imaginary ladder I chose to climb, only to get it and realize it wasn’t The Answer I thought it would be, that it didn’t and could never make “everything all right.” Buying stuff, owning stuff has never mattered as much as it did when I was, say thirteen. Getting rid of stuff feels pretty good but that feeling doesn’t last either. Financial concerns come and go but, if I’m honest, I can get pretty disconnected from my own life when I’m comfortable and, while I don’t want financial anxiety especially when my parents are aging and my kids are about to go off to college soon, my life has often actually improved during the stress of those times.

There’s some glimmer of “it” inside the decision to worry less about what other people think of me and also in the very real love I have in my life – two sons who have remained people I admire and a marriage to someone who knows everything about me and yet still loves and likes me. Our marriage has weathered inconceivable storms.

I am a very, very spoiled person with unfathomable good fortune so Hinduism’s description of the limits of heaven actually makes some sense to me. But the Hindu notion of heaven is even more radical than that. Swami Nikhilananda, in his commentary (CHECK) on the Katha Upanishad, says that “The clearest vision of Brahman (of the Infinite) is possible only in this life.”

This life? This flesh-and-blood life? This is the only time we can have the “clearest possible vision” of the Infinite? The passage goes on… “As one sees one’s reflection clearly in a clean mirror, so one sees Brahman in the buddhi…the intellect purified by self-control and contemplation. After death…the vision of Atman is indistinct…since one is engrossed there in the enjoyment of the fruits of past karma.”

See, according to this passage, the entire point of being alive is to finally come to realize the truth: that there’s nothing but (insert your name for God here), nothing but the Absolute. And, you need to be alive to truly see this, in other words, not asleep, not dead, not even in heaven. In fact, in heaven you’d be too busy enjoying your stuff to see much of anything else. “The clearest vision of Brahman is possible only in this life.” However, “this life” can only function as a clear vantage point if our “buddhi,” our higher mind, is free of the clutter and confusion of what we tend to think is important in our day-to-day existence.

If you think about it, this pretty deftly deals with the question everyone asks any spiritual leader they can get their hands on: why does bad stuff happen? Why is there evil? If you believe that our job here, in this body, in this lifetime, is to “clean our mirror”, to purify and cleanse our vision so we might see “Brahman” reflected in us, then any challenge we face could be seen as a squeegee for that mirror, right?

- - -

So here's the other entry I wrote that day...

Post 2

One of the enormous and, as yet, unanswered questions I’ve had in this project is: how will I know when it’s okay to move on to the next tradition? It’s absurd to think that I will ever be “done” with Hinduism so, what yardstick, what sign, am I looking for? Maybe this is part of the answer…

There’s a library where I went to college whose main floor is actually the third floor of the building. There are two floors above and two floors below the entrance level. It was utterly confusing at first. I didn’t know how to find what I needed in it, where the card catalogue was, or whether to go up or down if something was on the “second” floor. But, by the end of the first few weeks, I knew. I didn’t know where everything was and I certainly hadn’t read more than a handful of books inside it, but I knew, generally, what subjects were housed there and how to find what I needed, and that I walked downstairs if I needed to get to the first or second floor. I could then focus on digging into the material instead of dealing with the logistics of finding it.

I’m starting to know where the card catalogue is in Hinduism. I don’t have a mantra but that’s probably as it should be. I do know how to get one. And I know why I should want one.

- - -

When I finished typing up these two entries, it was time to go home. I turned my computer off, cleaned my tea cup, tossed a pitcher of water into the ficus, took out the trash, and locked my office door. But, in the middle of the night I found myself waking up, laughing. (My poor husband.) The tradition I plan to concentrate on next?

Buddhi-sm.

I got this much clarity: I’m not moving on, I’m adding. It’s time.

Later that morning, while taking off a windbreaker with elastic bands at the wrists, Hemu’s magenta puja string broke and fell off.

I tied what was left of it to my keychain.

12 March 2007

86 hours of silence

Can a man get pearls by floating or swimming on the surface? He must dive deep.

Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna

Silence and withdrawing for a period of time are an important part of Hinduism but I am one of the loudest, least solitary people I know. Don't get me wrong: I actually like being alone, at least, I think I do, but most of my working life I've spent in television news and, aside from a couple of years in my twenties, I've never lived completely alone. And the house I grew up in was loud: had three querulous brothers and we lived in a neighborhood filled with guys who never seemed to stop yelling, laughing or teasing. Now I live in a house with two boys and a husband, none of whom could be described as quiet. But I have liked being alone. The very first few words I put together on this project came when a girlfriend backed out of a cross-country skiing trip we were supposed to take together and, instead of canceling, I went alone. So, I figured it was time to see what a few days in the Vedanta Society's retreat house might be like.

With a letter from Swami Sarvadevananda, I got permission to go to the retreat center in Olema at the very end of January for four nights. It seemed like a good time to go, given that Luke’s and Matt’s finals were over and Kevin had just finished a project making that week a light one for him. Four nights meant I was going to have to keep my mouth shut from Tuesday dinner through Saturday at dawn. But it wasn’t just no talking: the rules of the center said no cell phone or computers either.

The retreat center confirmation also said to bring towels, linen, and all of my own food, that the kitchen was well-stocked with utensils and plates but “retreatants” were on our own for just about everything, including cleaning. So, on Tuesday morning, I dropped Luke and Matt off at school and drove six hours north through farmland and alongside the state’s endless aqueducts to Olema.

To get to the Vedanta women’s retreat center, you have turn onto a dirt road just outside the intersection that is Olema and follow it past the farmhouse that serves as the men’s retreat center, then through uncertainly fenced fields with muscular black cattle chewing in them. At the very end of the rutted road was a fairly new building built expressly for its purpose.

The kitchen was, indeed, well-stocked and cleaner than almost any kitchen I had ever seen. The open dining and living room had polished wooden tables, couches and armchairs and opened onto a wooden deck with a view of pastures bordered by trees. There were eight bedrooms off two short corridors, each opening directly to outside and a carpeted meditation room, Just off the kitchen, there was a small room for the caretaker – it was Noelle while I was there - who gave me keys to front door and as well as a “silence bead” to let the other women know that, even in the few hours we were allowed to talk (around dinner time), that I would be silent.

Not talking for eight-six hours is a lot easier if you’re in a beautiful place without cell phone service or internet or anyone you know. I brought nothing in with me except the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,

the puja kit Hemu had encouraged me to buy, the small handbook Swami Sarvadevananda had suggested – Worship of Sri Ramakrisha - and a journal, although I was determined not even to write in that. And I kept my meals simple: nuts, yogurt, some spinach salad, fruit, nothing that required major preparation.

Not talking wasn’t so bad; not doing was my problem. Watching the day flow by from a bench on a hill instead of being immersed in it was hard. I do so I don’t feel. I do to convince myself there is a point. I do to distract from the fact that doing isn’t the point but I have no idea what is. Days directed by sunlight, wrist stripped of its handcuff of time, were long, deliciously long when you stopped fighting them. When the to-do lists and the doubts came, I simply watched the storm clouds gather, the mental winds whip around and then pass. Thoreau and his sunlight kept coming to mind as I sat overlooking the valley, measuring time by the shadow’s spread from one tree trunk to another, by the layers of clothing needed to stay warm, by the herd of exotic deer’s slow climb from the valley into the hills just after dawn. The deer’s ancestors were left behind more than fifty years ago by men who planned to hunt them but now they overrun the place.

Comic relief: the first two mornings my wake up call was a gang of wild turkeys gobbling and complaining just outside my window as they scuttled across the grass at first light.

I tried to use the puja kit but its complexity, even with plenty of free time, even with the help of the step-by-step instructions in the Worship of Sri Ramakrishna, stumped me again although there was one revelation: in the directions for the daily ritual, devotees are directed to dip their fingers into purified water and then to draw a triangle inside a circle and then a square around both on the ground.

Sound familiar? It did to me. At home, I googled: “Alcoholics Anonymous symbol” and saw, on an AA-related website, the very same image (minus a square around the outside) and the following statement quoted from AA literature: “That we have chosen this particular symbol is perhaps no accident. The priests and seers of antiquity regarded the circle enclosing the triangle as a means of warding off spirits of evil, and A.A.'s circle and triangle of Recovery, Unity, and Service has certainly meant all of that to us and much more." I had forgotten, until seeing this image, Swami Sarvadevananda’s telling me that the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, had been a devotee of this particular form of Hinduism, at least for a while.

But most of the time, when I wasn’t wandering the grounds or trying to meditate, either inside the meditation room or outside on the bench on the hill, I read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

He sure was tough company. The Gospel is really more of a biography or journal written by one of Ramakrishna’s devotees under a single initial: “M.” What’s interesting about it is the degree to which “M” simply took notes rather than making a concerted effort to mythologize the man he came to believe was an actual incarnation of the Divine. It has a warts-and-all feel, a very human picture which, for me, made it all the more difficult to consider the idea that this man could be a “capital I” Incarnation. I mean, this was a man who shamelessly guilted some of his married followers into living away from their wives and children for months at a time; who was unschooled, perhaps close to illiterate, and who spent the first years of his adult life weeping at the feet of Kali, sometimes without clothes on, demanding that God actually appear before him, live and in person.

Who can measure up to that standard? Do I want to literally see God, if such a thing were possible? Sure, I’m driven to do whatever it is I am doing – I sometimes feel like a carcass and an intellect being dragged along by this drive of mine – but to weep for it? To stand naked in a temple and demand a Visit? To threaten to kill myself if God didn’t seem interested in complying? It isn’t just that my passion isn’t strong enough to follow Ramakrishna’s example, to disregard all inbred societal norms. If I’m very honest, I’m not so sure I would choose to see God even if I believed such a thing were possible.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the terrifying passage where God finally revealed just part of Itself to Arjuna, made me not so certain any of us really would choose to see the Divine if we could. That awe-filled description takes my breath away. I was clear on this point: at that moment I felt wholly incapable of even imagining myself ever having the courage required to have that kind of desire, that absolute and laser-beam faith. Alone, for days of silence with Ramakrishna, the mountain of faith felt too sheer, too high to climb, without better spiritual equipment than I had.

Perhaps it’s enough, in any given moment, to act on faith “indifferent to results, content with whatever happens.” Or take the actions of a faithful person just to find out something I might not learn otherwise.

When reading Ramakrishna got too much, I wandered around the woods, following overgrown paths wherever they led. At one point, so many branches had fallen, the path was impossible to follow. Clearing the ones I could move, I wondered if it was possible my purpose might be just that, to clear those branches on that particular day so that some modern day Ramakrishna might be able to find his or her way to their bodhi tree, to their epiphanous spot, and it was just my job to move those branches without ever knowing the effect. Could that be enough? Would it matter if it wasn’t?

By the time Saturday morning came, I was packed up in my ice-coated car, waiting for the caretaker down at the men’s retreat center to open the gate at seven in the morning, the moon still high in the early morning sky. I was going to meet Huston Smith. When I got to an area where my cell phone had reception, I was relieved to find no message canceling our visit.

"I don't want to have to rescue you..."

It never crossed my mind that what I’m doing might affect my family…maybe even scare them a bit....

At the beginning the aspirant should go into solitude now and then. Spiritual discipline is necessary. You want to eat rice; suppose you sit down somewhere and say, ‘Wood contains fire and fire cooks rice.’ Can saying it cook the rice? You must get two pieces of wood and by rubbing them together bring out the fire.

Sri Ramakrishna
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

I'd decided to go to the Vedanta Society’s retreat center in Olema, California, near Point Reyes National Seashore. It required a letter from Swami Sarvadevananda and permission from the swami in charge of the retreat center – and I’d gotten both. The women’s center allowed no more than eight women at a time so, on a Sunday afternoon, I brought it up with Kevin. “The retreat center said it would be okay if I came up so I have to decide when to go.”

Kevin was at the sink, filling up the tea kettle. He’d gone straight from the gym to the farmer’s market without a shower. The late morning sun was coming through his wild, early silver hair. Sundays are sweet, sleepy; each of us usually puttering somewhere in the house in the comfort of communal solitude.

Kevin walked from the sink to the stove with the kettle and said, teasing, “I’m not going to have to come rescue you from a cult or anything, am I?”

A messy pile of newspapers was on the yellow-and-blue tablecloth in front of me along with the tops of a few strawberries on a small white plate. There was so much light coming from the windows near the table, Kevin hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on over the stove, the darkest part of the kitchen. We were both in our Sunday best: sweats and shorts, loose shirts, shoes meant to be worn, not looked at. Kevin put the kettle down on a burner.

“It’s just a silent retreat,” I said. “There aren’t any group events or talking or even eating together. You even have to bring your own food.”

His back was still to me as he bent down to make sure the gas was turned on under the correct burner even though he knew those burners by heart.

This wasn’t a joke. He was actually worried.

I got up because I couldn’t think what to say. I started to take some useless receipts and out-of-date school lunch forms off the refrigerator door when the kitchen door slammed open. Luke never could just open a door; his entrance was always an event. “Bertrand Russell’s a fucking idiot.” He paused, looking for a reaction, but then barreled on without one. “You think Mickey Morgan would mind if I called my essay: ‘Bertrand Russell’s a Fucking Idiot’?”

Luke was standing in his boxers and socks. There was no muscle, bone, organ or hair follicle in his body that wasn’t straining and stamping towards adulthood but not always at the same time or in the same direction. Still in front of the lichen of promotional magnets, yellowed receipts, a half-full grocery notepad and ancient school announcements, I was torn, between life and lists, between loving and organizing. I gave up on the fridge door. What were my options? Deal with the words or with the passion? Teacher Mom or Etiquette Mom? I hate Etiquette Mom. She ‘s a priss, and pretty ineffective, too. Of course, there was always Tired Mom or Distracted Mom or Keep-to-the-Schedule-Mom or I’m-Talking-to-Your-Father Mom.

Maybe it’s time to experiment with no official role at all.

I turned from the fridge door and said, “I think you have a perfectly grabby title without that one word.”

“Yeah, but he is, he’s a fucking idiot.”

I decided to concentrate on the fact Luke was, well, talking about homework, at least. “What’s this essay about?”

“God.”

“God?”

“God.” He swiped a glass from the cupboard and got between me and the refrigerator to pull the cranberry juice out of it.

I threw the papers I’d taken off the door into the trash and said, “How long is it supposed to be?”
“The usual. Two to three pages.”

That made sense. God, in two or three pages. By Wednesday. My insanity is spreading.

Or maybe he’s just fifteen.

When I was fifteen I took a stance that all music was bad, that it filled up space in brains like so much cotton, protecting people from the sharp edges of their thoughts. I took it mostly to see what would happen. It was thrilling standing out there alone on a plank, seeing what passion I could stir up just with words and stubbornness.

Kevin, who’s usually game for debates, was staying focused on his tea-making so I bit: “So why is Bertrand Russell an idiot?”

“He takes the position that Thomas Aquinas’ Prime Mover theory – you know the one that says that of course God exists because nothing can start moving without something making it move?” He waited, glaring. He’d even stopped mid-pour. When I nodded, he continued pouring but not before roughly wiping his long hair off his face - with the hand with the cap to the cranberry juice bottle still in it. “Well, Russell says that’s bogus because nothing can exist without a cause. Just because he can’t imagine something that could create itself doesn’t mean it can’t exist. I mean, if God is omniscient and omnipotent and infinite, then why couldn’t God create itself?” He threw the bottle of cranberry juice back in the fridge door, turned back to me, and said, “Om – ni - scient. Om - ni - po - tent.” He snorted and then took a swig of his red juice.

This was the child who, at six, announced that he knew there was no God because he thought the Big Bang theory made the most sense as the origin of the universe. Now, he's God’s advocate. Of course, his younger brother, Matt, whose answer when he was four years old to Luke's Big Bang thesis was , simply, that God did exist and who has insisted on saying grace before every meal before anyone can eat since he was five, now thinks he's Wiccan.

I took hold of Luke’s forearm so I could stand on my toes to sort of kiss his scruffy cheek and said, “I know you’ll figure it out.”

“What-ever.” He wheeled around, long hair flying, pounding the living room floor as he left for his room. Just before his bedroom door slammed shut, Kevin and I heard, “Fucking Bertrand Russell.”

Kevin and I just looked at each other in the stillness Luke left behind, the question and answer didn’t need to be said out loud: did we just do the right thing? Not reacting, not going after the language? Probably not, but who knew? Kevin scooped some loose tea from one of his tins of Chinese tea into a small pot.

I said, “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ve stayed away from any temple where they looked way too happy.”

“I’m not sure what that means, but, okay. I just don’t want to have to rescue you.” Kevin was on the other side of the butcher block island slowly pouring the boiling water over the dry leaves.

“Boy, don’t worry. It’s still me.”

Seeing God...

This passage of the Bhagavad Gita freaked me out when I read it. Don't judge, just read and imagine what it describes...

Arjuna said:
Tell me now, in detail,
the divine manifestations
by which you pervade these worlds
and grace them with so much splendor.

How can I know you, Krishna?
Which of your many forms
should I visualize, Lord of Yoga,
as I focus my thoughts on you?

Give me some further examples
of your glorious manifestations;
for I never can tire of hearing
your life-giving, honey-sweet words.

The Blessed Lord said:
All right, Arjuna, I will tell you
a few of my manifestations,
the most glorious ones; for infinite
are the forms in which I appear.

I am the Self, Arjuna,
seated in the heart of all beings;
I am the beginning and the life span
of beings, and their end as well.

Of the sky gods, I am Vishnu;
of the heavenly lights, the sun;
Marichi, chief of the wind gods;
among stars, I am the moon;

of the Vedas, I am the hymns;
Indra among the gods;
the mind among the six senses;
the consciousness of all beings;

of the storm gods, I am Shiva;
of demigods, Kubera;
Agni among the bright gods;
and Meru, highest of mountains.

Know, Arjuna, that among
priests I am Brihaspati;
of generals, the war god Skanda;
of waters, I am the ocean;

of the great seers, I am Bhrigu;
of words, the syllable Om;
of worship, I am the mantra;
of mountain chains, Himalaya;

of trees, the sacred fig tree;
of divine sages, Narada;
of the high celestial musicians,
Chitraratha; of saints,

the wise Kapila; of horses,
Ucchaishravas, Indra’s
favorite, born of the sea foam;
of elephants, Indra’s winged

Airavata; of men,
I am the king; of weapons,
Indra’s thunderbolt; of cows,
Kamadhuk, the wish-granter;

Kandarpa, the god of love;
the king of reptiles, Vasuki;
of divine serpents, I am
Ananta, the cosmic serpent; Varuna

among the gods of the ocean;
of the blessed forefathers, I am
Aryaman; of the controllers,
Yama, the god of death;

of demons, the devout Prahlada;
of things that compel, I am time;
the king of animals, the lion;
Garuda among the birds;

of purifiers, the wind;
of warriors, I am Rama;
of sea monsters, Makara;
of rivers, the holy Ganges;

of creations, the beginning and the end
and the middle as well, Arjuna;
of knowledge, knowledge of the Self;
of orators, I am the speech;

of letters, the first one, A:
I am imperishable time;
the Creator whose face is
everywhere; death that devours all things;

the source of all things to come;
of feminine powers, I am
fame, wealth, speech, and
memory, intelligence, loyalty, forgiveness;

of chants, I am the great Brihat;
of poetic meters, the gayatri;
of months, Margashirsha,
the first month; of seasons, the flower-lush spring;

of swindles, I am the dice game;
the splendor of the high and mighty;
determination and victory;
the courage of all brave men;

of the Vrishi clan, I am Krishna;
of Pandavas, I am Arjuna;
of the sages, I am Vyasa;
of poets, the sublime Ushanas;

of punishers, I am the scepter;
the astuteness of the great leaders;
the silence of secret things;
and I am the wisdom of the wise.

I am the divine seed
within all beings, Arjuna;
nothing, inanimate or animate,
could exist for a moment without me.

These are just a small number
of my infinite manifestations;
were I to tell you more,
there would be no end to the telling.

Whatever in this world is excellent
and glows with intelligence or beauty –
be sure that it has its source
in a fragment of my divine splendor.

But what need is there for all
these details? Just know that I am,
and that I support the whole
universe with a single fragment of myself.

Bhagavad Gita, 10.17-10.40

Eat and run...

The relation between Hinduism and what is called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni (Buddha) was a Hindu. Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism.

Swami Vivekananda
Address to the Chicago Parliament of World Religions, 1893

Classes at night, services on Sundays – my temple obsession is cutting in to our family time. So, when Kevin said he wanted to go to the Thai Buddhist temple’s food market on Sunday to eat lunch, I agreed to take a day off from Hinduism, figuring Kevin, Matt and I could hang out together (Luke was out, as always, with friends) and I might be able to check out the monks, too. Buddhism’s next – that is, if I ever figure out when the time is right to move on from Hinduism. Pretty hard to imagine how I will ever be able to move on given how little I know now in spite of all my efforts.

The Wat Thai Buddhist temple is in North Hollywood. Now, North Hollywood might sound glamorous to some but its reality is anything but. It’s a haphazard section of San Fernando Valley full of straight anonymous streets with low, practical buildings so the temple, with its red roof edged in gold stands out. Its Sunday food bazaar has dozens of stalls selling grilled seafood and meat, noodle dishes, sticky rice and mango, and that sweet milky iced tea – with and without tapioca balls. Kevin loves going there.

It was crowded as usual when we got there so we had to park blocks away. Matt moved some noodles around on a plate as cover for his main meal: tapioca balls. He sucked those sweet black chewy balls through oversized straws. Sitting together, chewing and chatting, usually felt good but I was so distracted I was hardly there.

Matt wanted another boba. “Mom, can I have another dollar?”

I was thinking about the monks inside and whether or not I was going to walk up those steps to try to meet them.

“Mom?”

“Here, Matt,” Kevin said. He handed Matt what he needed then asked me, “Girl, what’s up?”

Matt stayed.

“I’m nervous. I don’t know why but I am.”

“Why?” Matt asked.

“I don’t know. I want to go in there, I know I should, but I don’t want to. It just feels too hard, like I don’t have it in me today.”

“Just do it,” Matt said, happy to be giving advice. “You always tell us to just do it.”

I might have been more careful with what I said to my children if I’d known that they’d store everything I‘d ever said to them – wise and foolish – to toss back at me with those gotcha smiles when I least wanted to hear it. The only compensation is it makes them very, very happy.

“Girl, we’ll just walk around a bit while you go in.” Kevin said. “It’ll be fine.”

Fine.

When I started this project, I knew it was going to be ridiculously hard to do but I was only thinking about logistics: how long it would take, how little I knew, how impossible it was to figure out how to even begin. I thought I was just going to learn about various faiths. It never crossed my mind how much I was going to have to deal with me, with my own fears and limitations, with the rising suspicion that I’m not fully aware of all the reasons I’ve become so determined to do this.

I picked up my cup, the pile of balled up napkins in front of me, and my paper plate and tried to tuck them into a stuffed trash barrel so they wouldn’t fall out on the ground, then walked towards the steps to the temple. What is my problem? I’ve been a journalist all of my life; I’m used to walking in to new places, meeting new people, yet there I was with the same dread I felt when I was a kid, when I’d waited too long to write some school paper. It felt like I was trying to lift my own dead weight, like I needed skills I just didn’t have, skills I knew were missing but couldn’t even name. Okay, so maybe I’m making this far more complicated than it needs to be, maybe I don’t have to plumb the depths of my being to figure out what, if anything, each tenet might mean to me – a lifetime’s task (a Hindu might say a task of several lifetimes) all jammed into months. Ridiculous. Just find out the rituals, do them, and see what happens, what I learn. I can do that, can’t I? Just do it. This belly-aching self-doubt is useless.

I walked up the stairs, looked inside… and stopped. A plump Thai woman with a jug of free orange juice and a plastic bag full of fruit was sitting on her folded legs, chatting with a monk on an orange cushion. A few other monks were scattered around the room. One look and I just turned right around and walked back down the steps again.

Kevin and Matt were just starting to walk towards a display near the Wat Thai school when I walked up behind them. Kevin said, “Oh! You’re already done?”

“For today.”

He put his hand in mine and the three of us walked back to our car.


(8 October 2006)