Lama Rod Owens has long been fascinated by the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. As an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, he has worked at the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice, exploring how activist work and spiritual practice can support each other. Recently, he’s been grappling with the question of what freedom looks like in our current political context and how spiritual practice can support us through our current crises.

In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, Owens draws from the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements to put forth the notion of the New Saint. “The New Saint is a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now, with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “It’s about the contemporary experience of people in a world that seems to be on the edge of catastrophe.”

Shaheen sat down with Owens on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Read an excerpt from their conversation, then listen to the full episode.

You refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices: the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. Can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care? Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. We traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind, but I would say that it’s the magic of the bodhisattva. It’s this view of deep connectedness and deep empathy, where we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free.

Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

When I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint, I began asking myself, What is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta? The first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, holding space for everything and wishing for everyone and everything to be free. I also experienced compassion, tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. The other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose to benefit beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness and space.

When all of this is streamed together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.” An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us don’t really believe that we deserve to be free from suffering. Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

You write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. So how is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation? [The author and filmmaker] Toni Cade Bambara has this notion of wanting to make revolution irresistible so that it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. In awakened care, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self, and that’s going to bring me into a more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. In a way, we can describe it as the cultivation of virtue.

When we practice goodness, it becomes a habit, where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment. We’re just attuned to choosing what will reduce harm. For me, that’s another way that we get swept up: we’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

One stream of awakened care is love, which you describe as a form of radical acceptance. Can you say more about how you’ve come to understand love? It’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening, and so the first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. This is how it is. I don’t have to like it; I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that profound radical work of love is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. When I let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” my heart breaks, which is the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment.

Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are; I know how things are. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena and all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

Another aspect of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So how can beauty help us access the sublime and the transcendent? When I surrender to beauty, I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand, and I’m letting go of the sense of who I think I am, and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening. And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But it’s not about materialism. And so instead of accumulating luxury goods that I can’t afford, I connect to the energetic expression of beauty, which feeds a deeper sense of self-worth. That self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

Let’s go a step further and talk about desire. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. How have you learned to work with and channel yearning? You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold, and to go beyond that threshold, we have to let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am training myself to yearn for things that lead to freedom, liberation, fluidity, and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that create rigidity and separateness. And the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity but the experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for experiences of liberation.

The post The Magic of the New Saint appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When Tenzin Dickie was growing up in exile in India, she didn’t have access to Tibetan stories. “We grew up in Tibetan refugee communities that were in the process of settling down, and the first order of business was to worry about survival,” she told Tricycle. “Literature and art came later, so those of us born in exile grew up orphaned from our literature.”

Now, as an editor and translator, she is working to center and elevate the hidden stories of Tibetan life in exile. In the process of tracing these histories, she has come to view Tibetan literature as written in political and territorial bardo, marked by both pain and possibility. “The bardo is a stage of roaming in between destinations,” she says. “For Tibetans right now, we’re living in political bardo. It is a place of loss, but it is also a place of possibility. It is where change can happen.”

Her new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, features essays from twenty-two Tibetan authors from around the world, offering a powerful portrait of both the pain and the hope found in exile. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Dickie spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, about the history of the Tibetan essay, the complexity of exile, and how modern Tibetan writers are continually recreating the Tibetan nation.

​​In the introduction to the book, you share your first experience trying to write an essay as a middle schooler, and your brother said to you that an essay is a piece of writing that is true. How have you come to understand this statement, and, to turn your own question back on you, why does it matter if writing is true? It matters because we can tell when something is true. It speaks to us. We can feel its power, and we can feel it affect us. You know when someone is writing something that changed them—when you are reading it, it changes you too. The best thing about an essay, especially if the writer has put their whole heart and soul and artistry into it, is that it feels like a very true thing, and as you are reading, it’s a truth for both the writer and the reader. 

You draw from the Buddhist notion of an act of truth, or a satyakriya. So what is an act of truth, and how does it create reality? An act of truth is basically a declaration of truth. It’s like an oath or a statement of truth that enacts itself and creates itself into being. What is being said is not just an expression—it’s also action. Perhaps the best way to talk about this is to look at how Buddhist literature talks about acts of truth.

In the Jataka tales, there is a story about a woman who goes to hear a teaching. She becomes so entranced by the teachings that she completely neglects her child sitting beside her. He goes off and is bitten by a snake, and he gets poisoned. The child is now in mortal danger. The parents are distraught, and they try to look for a way to save him. A monk tells them that the way to save this child is through acts of truth.

The parents start one by one. The father says, “By the truth that I’ve never seen a monk who was not a scoundrel, may this boy live.” The truth of his words indeed has a medicinal effect: power starts withdrawing from the boy’s body, and his legs become free of poison. Now, it’s the mother’s turn. She says, “By the truth that I have never loved my husband, may the child live.” Poison withdraws from the boy’s trunk, so now only the upper part of his body is still filled with poison. Finally, the monk says, “By the truth that I’ve never believed a word of the dharma and thought it only to be nonsense, may this boy live.” Lo and behold, the child is now completely free of poison.

Now, these are expensive truths. It costs something to express them. And the point of the act of truth is that it works. The truth has this enormous power that no one can deny. Thinking of the essay as an act of truth has so much resonance for me, especially when it’s a deeply personal essay that costs the writer something. The word has so much power.

You say that acts of truth transform both the writer and the reader. So how were you changed by writing and reading the essays in the book? When we were growing up in exile in India, if we wanted Tibetan stories, we couldn’t find them. Working on this book was a very special experience for me because it felt like I was privy to this hidden Tibetan history. There’s so much that is unsaid and hidden about the Tibetan exile experience, so much that I think we are only now beginning to excavate and appreciate. And it needs to be written now because otherwise, all of that memory will be erased. If we don’t record these stories now, they will just be lost. Reading these essays, it was incredible for me to really learn what older generations went through as the first settlers in exile. It makes me appreciate all the more their enormous achievement in creating this vibrant Tibetan exile.

If people don’t write their own stories, then we can never know this history. We can never know that experience. Especially for Tibetans, so much has been said and written about us, and very often it is not by us. The truth of Tibetan life is so important and so crucial because of where we are in our history right now. All of this makes Tibetan tellings of Tibetan stories all the more important because we have to say what happened to us. I feel like all Tibetan writing, to some extent, becomes witness statements.

You write that to write as Tibetans is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation. What does this look like? Especially for Tibetans outside, we don’t have access to Tibetan land. So what we have access to is the cultural content of our lives. For me, in this time and place, Tibetan literature serves as a placeholder for the Tibetan nation. I can’t live in Tibet, but I can live inside Tibetan literature.

You refer to Tibetan literature as written in the bardo. So what does it mean to write in the bardo? The bardo is this intermediate stage between death and your next life. It’s a stage of roaming in between destinations, of homelessness, of wandering, but also of possibility. For Tibetans, right now, we’re living in political bardo. We’re living in territorial bardo. That’s what exile is. Tibetan writing in exile—in the bardo—is at a crossroads. It is a place of loss. It is a place of pain. But it is also a place of possibility. It is where change can happen.

Many of the essays in the collection focus on the complexity of living in exile, and you explore this dynamic through the lens of what psychologists term ambiguous loss, or a loss where it is extremely difficult to find closure. So how has this loss shaped Tibetan writing, and what role does writing play in trying to create a sense of closure? You know how things that are born on the internet are called “born digital”? I feel like Tibetan writing born after 1959 is “born exile.” After 1959, Tibetan writers became bilingual simply because of their political situation. For exiled Tibetan writers, there is an enforced distance from older Tibetan literature simply because of the fact that we were born in exile. We grew up in Tibetan refugee communities that were in the process of settling down, and the first order of business was to worry about survival. Literature and art came later, so those of us born in exile grew up orphaned from our literature. Exile defines not just our lives but also our literature.

Exile permeates what we read, and it permeates what we write. There’s an essay in the book by [the Tibetan writer and activist] Woeser about the Dalai Lama‘s Gar dancer, Garpon La. He learned how to dance Gar, and then, for the next twenty years, he was in labor camps, and all the dance was beaten out of him. It was violently stripped away and destroyed, and he couldn’t even think about getting back to dancing. For him, it had been a way of life, and he couldn’t even conceive of getting back to it because of the trauma that he had suffered that was associated with it. It took coming to India, visiting the Dalai Lama, and receiving a blessing from the Dalai Lama commanding him to bring back Gar dance that Garpon La was able to remember how to dance. Not only did he dance it himself, but he also taught it and revived the tradition of Gar dance.

This goes to show that there are many different forms of exile that Tibetans suffer from. I think we’re all trying to find some way to live in samsara in exile and make art at the same time. That’s our act of truth.

That’s a remarkable story, and I wonder if the writing in this book is a similar effort to connect again and to establish the reality of Tibet again. I would say yes. Part of the reason for this book is as simple as saying we’re here. We’re still here, and we will continue to be here. I hope that when people read the book, they understand what Tibetans go through as they live their life with exile as their daily habitat. The book is an assertion of our identity, an assertion of our existence, and an assertion that we will continue.

The post Writing as an Act of Truth appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. They came carrying religious pamphlets and bibles—as well as telescopes, globes, maps, magic lanterns, and other “world-conjuring devices” that Burmese Buddhists had never seen before.

According to religious studies scholar Alex Kaloyanides, this was the first time that Theravada Buddhism and Baptist Christianity came into contact with each other—and the encounter was transformative for both traditions. Although Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism, they nonetheless engaged with the material objects that the missionaries brought, reimagining both Buddhism and Christianity in the process. In her new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom, Kaloyanides examines some of these objects and what they reveal about power, conversion, and religious material culture. 

Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, spoke with Kaloyanides on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to learn more about the religious landscape of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religion solely through texts, and what it means for objects to hold sacred power.

You say that the material dimensions of religion can often be overlooked. What are we missing when we think about Buddhism only through written texts? The first thing we miss is the way that so many parts of society who are not literate have engaged with the Buddhist tradition. For so long, texts have been the possessions of a very small elite minority of monastics and so on. If we focus too much on canonical texts, commentaries, and scriptures, we can start to think that we are seeing a bigger picture than we really are. These texts were really the production of a very educated people with a lot of royal resources. The [turn to] material culture is a way of talking about what other people have done. 

Studying material culture also reminds us that we are embodied people. Retreats, for instance, are not just about the text of a dharma talk—it’s about the whole experience of the space. So to try to understand what Buddhism was like for people in different times and places, it’s really telling to focus on some of the different sensory experiences of the tradition.

You write that the objects you found often bumped up against the familiar stories that have been told about the religious history of Burma. What surprised you about the objects you came across, and how did they resist easy or familiar narratives? The first actual physical object that I found was this Buddhist manuscript called the Kammavaca. It comes from the Pali canon, and it’s made up of excerpts for monastic rituals. It’s a beautiful lacquered manuscript, sometimes made with gold, pearl, and silver. What I began to notice about this manuscript was that not only was it carefully preserving ancient scriptures and ritual formulas, but it had all these illustrations. Some of the oldest ones had these beautiful designs of flora and fauna and interesting geometrical designs.

Later on, especially toward the end of the 19th century, the manuscript changed—not the text itself, but in the margins, these spirit creatures emerged carrying weapons and swords. These creatures become a kind of belligerent presence in these manuscripts. I realized that something was happening with these objects beyond ordination rituals—these objects were conscripted into Burmese war efforts to defend themselves against the British, and they were imbued with a certain kind of power to defend a Burmese independence. If we just look at the texts themselves and not the material qualities or artwork that happens in the margins, sometimes we miss the power they had and the reason they were produced in such a way or ended up circulating outside of the country.

You talk about how Theravada Buddhism places special import on holy objects, as worldly materials “can mediate a relationship with a central figure who is absent from this world.” So can you walk us through the role of religious media in this tradition? Theravada Buddhism is distinctive from Mahayana in the sense that there’s an understanding that the Buddha really lived, and he really did become unbound through nirvana and no longer exists in this world. And so in the absence of the Buddha, what do followers do? We have relics and pagodas and special objects that are said to have some of the Buddha’s power, or anubhava. Objects themselves become a key place for people to experience the Buddha even after his parinirvana.

There’s no Buddha anymore here on Earth. Objects themselves become these really powerful figures that both help point people to the teachings of the Buddha, but then they themselves are also powerful in and of themselves. They can help transform the people who are devoted to them.

What does it mean for an object to contain the Buddha’s power? Is it the power to move us toward liberation? It’s been interpreted in the material that I’ve looked at both as a power to remind someone of the Buddha’s teachings, to recommit them to a certain path. But there’s also this overwhelming special power in those places, where someone can get closer to understanding the Buddha’s teachings than they would in other settings. In this presence of the Buddha’s power, one can progress toward enlightenment and have a kind of connection there that would be transformative in a way that other objects do not have the power to do.

So those places can also hold power in terms of practice: a certain momentum of practice might propel a person forward on the path. Is that right? Yes. Scholars of ritual and sacred space would also argue that there’s something about being in community and being with other people. That collective effervescence that comes together in those particular spaces doesn’t happen in other places—there’s something sacred there that is able to move people in new directions.

The post What Does It Mean for an Object to Hold the Power of the Buddha? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a pastoral counselor, chaplain, and activist, Pamela Ayo Yetunde has witnessed both our capacity for enlightenment as well as the ways that our humanity is distorted by forces of oppression and ignorance. She believes that our true nature is to care for one another, yet distraction and delusion keep us from this natural impulse. Drawing from Buddhist and Christian teachings on mutuality and liberation, Yetunde lays out a path for how we can become better caregivers to ourselves and our communities in her new book, Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, she spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg about the ancient Vedic image of Indra’s net, what she has learned from Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of mutuality, and how we can practice nonviolence in our everyday lives.

James Shaheen (JS): What is Indra’s net?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde (PAY): Indra’s net is a concept that comes out of ancient Vedic teachings. It was believed that Indra, the god, had a net that he used to capture his enemies and punish them in something that they could not escape from. Over time, Indra’s net has become a way of understanding our interconnectedness and interdependence, as well as our capacity to reflect one another’s goodness back to each other and rely on one another to make it through hardships.

When I talk about casting Indra’s net, I’m talking about each one of us pouring out the love from our hearts into the net for the benefit of all. It’s a practice of lovingkindness in its abundance. This lovingkindness is not limited by my one body. It’s at the level of imagining that you are in the field of lovingkindness and that this field of lovingkindness is without bounds—for all beings throughout space and time, throughout the universe, throughout the multiverses. The practice of casting Indra’s net is really about imagining that everyone and everything is in the field, yourself included.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You draw from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he describes us as living in the “inescapable network of our mutuality.” Could you say more about what you’ve learned from that vision of mutuality and how it relates to Indra’s net?

PAY: I can say about mutuality that when I feel it, I feel whole, I feel connected, and I feel appreciated. I feel like we can have an exchange of equals, and I already know we are equal. As equals, there are going to be times where I need to reach out because I’m vulnerable, and there are going to be times where you need to reach out because you are also vulnerable.

I’m not saying that our relationships have to be tit for tat, reciprocating one act of kindness with another act of kindness as if we’re tallying up our kind acts. The nature of being human is to care for one another, and there’s no shame in that. Oftentimes, we don’t get it right, and I always encourage people to try not to dwell in the fear of not doing it right to but err on the side of compassion and then apologize if you don’t get it right.

SS: You say that our task is to reflect our mutuality with as little distortion as possible. So can you say something about what gets in the way?

PAY: What gets in the way…so many things. One is our self concept. There’s a part of us that is—some would say that has to be—a little narcissistic in order for us to get out of the bed in the morning and believe we can accomplish anything. This can cloud our view of others. When we become so self-absorbed, making sure we get everything we want when we want it, then we can’t see anybody else. We can’t feel anyone else. It’s not possible to feel the resonance of another, even when you’re in the same space. One of the beauties of Buddhism is the practice of decentering yourself so that other people can have space. When we decenter ourselves, then that creates the capacity to mirror one another better.

SS: You suggest that we broaden our understanding of caregiving to a communal and national level, learning to become caregivers to our community. Can you say more about what it looks like to apply a spiritual care approach to society as a whole?

PAY: As a chaplain, one of the things that I’ve learned is that when we are working in public, pluralistic settings, we should treat people not based on our own proclivities but based on the fact that each person has their own story, their own history, their own culture, their own commitments, and their own causes and conditions. They are in a state of vulnerability, and so are we. But from chaplain to patient, it is understood that the patient has not chosen to be in the situation, and the chaplain has chosen to be in the situation. Therefore, the chaplain has more power. In order to reduce the chance of abusing that power, we bracket the power. We recognize that we are vulnerable. Hopefully, that leads us to be humble and therefore open to all these people who have come to this place through their own journey.

We are not able to care for everyone all the time. But we can adopt a posture of nonharming toward almost everyone. And that’s what I’m suggesting we begin with: all of us adopt the posture of nonharming, recognizing that most of the people who are ill are not actually in the hospital. Most of the people who are ill are in the world. And so why not treat the world as a place of healing and ourselves as agents of healing?

We can’t do this by ourselves. We’re not superheroes. We are people just like everyone else. The more we can create communities of care where we share the responsibility of caring with each other, the greater chance we have of living our best lives, our most connected lives. And that is another way of casting Indra’s net.

The post Communities of Care appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Psychotherapist Mark Epstein is often asked how he incorporates his Buddhist practice into his therapy sessions. His latest book offers an answer to that question. In The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, Epstein documents dozens of therapy sessions over the course of a year, tracing the Buddhist themes that arise. Weaving together psychoanalytic theory, Zen poetry, and the music of John Cage, Epstein presents a compelling model of therapy as spiritual friendship.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen sat down with Epstein to discuss the improvisational nature of therapy, composer John Cage, and why we turn away from joy. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here. 

You often refer to the composer John Cage in your work. How does the music of John Cage inform your approach to therapy? As a musician, John Cage was deeply influenced by Buddhist thought. He went to hear D. T. Suzuki teach at Columbia in the early 1950s. Cage said that he wasn’t going to start meditating because he had already decided to devote his life to music and any more sitting would take too much time away from that. So he decided to try to adapt Suzuki’s teachings to his music. He started not to screen out non-musical sounds from musical sounds and instead to hear all sounds as music. I found that deeply inspiring because it’s such a Buddhist notion: not to screen out or push away the unpleasant and not to cling to the pleasant, but instead to help people dig down into themselves and be kinder and more accepting toward themselves. That’s what I’m trying to communicate as a therapist—the idea of not pushing away the unpleasant emotions, feelings, and thoughts and not clinging to the pleasant.

John Cage was playing when I was at Berkeley, and I went with a childhood friend. It was amazing because as all of these sounds began to erupt, many people started getting up and leaving. When I was reading your understanding of Cage, I realized that I was witnessing something there: they were turning away from the sounds in the same way I might turn away from a thought or emotion. When you talk about the quality of mindfulness that you bring to your therapy sessions, it’s a way of letting it all in, not turning away from and not moving toward. And yet it’s so easy to say and so difficult to do. What is it that doesn’t allow us to let it all in? What doesn’t let us let it all in is what the Buddha described in his first noble truth as the universal experience of what’s difficult, or dukkha, generally translated as suffering—mistranslated, really. When you take the word dukkha apart, kha is face, and du means difficult. There’s always something in life, even in a good life, that’s difficult to face, so dukkha is that which is difficult to face. We naturally don’t want to deal with the unpleasant—in the Buddha’s language, with old age, illness, death, separation, and loss. Even for people who get through most of their lives without having to face the unpleasant, there’s still old age, illness, and death. We have to train our minds to be able to do that difficult thing, which is what Cage was trying to show his audience.

In your psychotherapeutic sessions, it seems that both you and the patient are training to allow for what you call the unobstructed flow of emotional energy. It seems very clear to me why I would turn away from the unpleasant, the painful, and anything that reminds me of my mortality. But you also talk about how, counterintuitively, we’re turning away from joy and happiness. Why are we afraid of experiencing joy? That is more mysterious. Why do people pull back from those kinds of feelings? I think there’s a loss of ego or a loss of self or a loss of control that happens when there’s bliss, when there’s joy, even when there’s some simple happiness. To fully experience it requires us to at least momentarily let go of all the defensive ego mechanisms that we’re employing to hold ourselves together in this scary world that we find ourselves in.

That’s one reason. Another reason might be cognitively that those experiences challenge deeply held convictions that we have about ourselves as inadequate, ashamed, insufficient, unworthy, or unable to love. I remember one of my first meditation retreat experiences when I was just watching my breath, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, I was filled with these sensations of love. I had no idea where they came from, and then they were sweeping through me. I’ve been chasing those feelings ever since. It’s not like they happen every time I go on retreat, but it was very profound. I remember Ram Dass, who was one of my early influences, saying, “You’re not who you think you are.” I always love that because I thought I was only who I thought I was. The subtitle of the book is “Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life,” and I was thinking a little bit about that experience of love, that lurking within all of us are these capacities for these kinds of experiences.

As you were speaking, I thought of a student of Tibetan Buddhism who was with her teacher driving through the Rockies. Everything around them was quite beautiful. She couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my God, that’s so beautiful,” and her teacher finally turned to her and said, “Is it too much for you?” Because it’s hard to be with something that powerful. It requires that you let go of who you think you are. There’s a famous story in Freud’s writing in a little essay called “On Transience.” It’s one of my favorite things Freud wrote. He’s hiking in the mountains in Switzerland where he used to go in the summer with an unnamed poet (who people say was the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke). The poet couldn’t open to the beauty that was around him, and Freud asked him, “What’s wrong with you?” and tried to figure it out with his psychoanalytic mind. It was the same kind of thing where the beauty of the surround was too overwhelming. Freud ends the essay by asking, “Is a flower that blooms for only a single night any less beautiful?” I thought, wow, what could be more Buddhist than that?

♦

The post Why Do We Turn Away from Joy? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Over the course of the past few years, Zen teacher and writer Sallie Tisdale has watched 37 of the 40 seasons of the reality TV show Survivor. In her latest book, The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and the Endless Gaze, she brings her keen eye and characteristic wit to the series, which she calls “a little microcosm of greed, hatred, and delusion with the occasional moment of grace.” Weaving together her background as a Zen Buddhist practitioner, her intricate knowledge of Survivor and its fan base, and the writings of philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Tisdale offers an insightful critique of our culture’s fascination with perception and appearance.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief James Shaheen sat down with Tisdale to discuss what Survivor can teach us about performance, deception, and our own urge to self-display. Read a few excerpts below, and listen to the full episode here.

On Survivor and seeing each other

Survivor is one of the earliest and most influential of what are called “elimination game shows.” A group of strangers is taken to a remote place, divided into groups called tribes, and left to fend for themselves. They have to figure out how to make shelter, get food, and take care of themselves, and then, one by one, they vote each other off until only one remains. The show weaponizes our fantasy of being on a tropical island—and our deluded belief that we would succeed in extreme circumstances. Many of us don’t have a clear sense of who we really are under stress, and people can watch this show and imagine how they would act without having to actually go through it.

When are we really seeing each other? Are we ever?

In some ways, Survivor is an example of how our culture works: the contestants show up, pretend to be somebody while really being somebody else, and see each other pretending to be other people. The cameras capture all of this, and the post-production team edits it into a story, which is not really what happened. Then we watch it and respond with new ideas, judgments, and storylines. I’m interested in these layers of projection, appearance, and deceit: When are we really seeing each other? Are we ever?

On false revelation and rediscovery

Erving Goffman, the great sociologist of the mid-20th century, says that being present in the world is “potentially an infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery.” As people of practice, we are openly agreeing to make self-examination a central part of our life. When we come together in a sangha with other people, one of the foundational agreements is that we are all trying to show up as ourselves in an authentic way. We want self-revelation, and then we spend decades discovering how many layers of false revelation there are. We realize how many ways we show up as a false self in front of our teacher, in front of our community, and in front of the wall in our meditation.

We have so many deeply embedded patterns in our interrelational selves. From the time we are born, we are conditioned to respond in particular ways to particular triggers, and we develop very complex patterns of response, reactivity, and protection. At the base of everything is the fear of the extinction of the self, and here we are engaged in a practice in which we are investigating whether it’s true that there’s a self at all. Is there a self? If there is, what is it? We have a fundamental fear about the falseness of the self at the same time that we’re trying to let it go. Our false selves repeat themselves over and over out of our habitual conditioning. A person may be trying to be truly authentic, but a trigger can stimulate a repetitive response pattern, and suddenly they’re hidden behind that false self.

We have a fundamental fear about the falseness of the self at the same time that we’re trying to let it go.

As a teacher, I see this all the time when students come into the interview room. They come in ready to present themselves in a particular way, which Trungpa Rinpoche called “showing up in your Sunday best.” He said that students want to come and be seen as their ideal student self, but the teacher knows they’re naked. When I read that as a student, it was really scary. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe my teacher was seeing through some of my presentation. Now that I’m in the other seat most of the time, I realize I am seeing through a lot of presentation that people are not even aware that they are engaged in.

On love and recognition

There’s a Zen phrase of arrows meeting in midair—that something in me that is true recognizes something in you that is true. You and I, as conscious, identified selves, may not have anything to do with it. The ego is momentarily out of the way of what is true. My own experience of when that true self arises is that something is moving through me—it’s not my conscious self that is doing it. When I can let that conscious urge to manipulate the environment fall away, when I can just be present, something true can come out and meet the other.

Hannah Arendt says that the fundamental human condition is the urge to self-display. We self-display in order to protect ourselves. We self-display what we think others want to see or need to see. What is the safest self I can be with you right now? Sometimes we retreat altogether. Honestly felt love is the ability to let another person through those layers of self-presentation. When I see through your self-presentation or my self-display drops and you see me, love is the only response we can have—what is true in me meets what is true in you, and it is the same. Our natural response to that is love.

♦

Read an excerpt from The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and the Endless Gaze here.

The post The Samsara of <i>Survivor</i> appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen spoke with meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, the cofounder and guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts with whom he had recently completed an online retreat. “I’ve sat with Joseph on retreats before, but what really struck me this time were the repetitive patterns playing out in my mind and body,” Shaheen says. In the episode, Goldstein discusses some of these patterns, and how to break free of them. Find a collection of excerpts from the podcast below, and listen to the full interview here.

On creating energy via investigation

Our usual way of thinking is that we need energy in order to make an effort. But actually, it’s just the opposite: making the effort creates energy. A very simple example, which most people will recognize, is if we’re feeling tired and lethargic, and then we make the effort to go out and exercise, the very making of the effort to exercise brings about energy.

So investigation takes a kind of effort. It’s obviously a more subtle effort than going out to exercise. But it means coming out of our habitual way of being with things. And instead of simply being subsumed by it, we arouse the effort to investigate. And that very effort to investigate brings about energy. And so the whole system wakes up—becomes more alive. So I think that’s really helpful for people to understand—that we don’t have to wait for the energy in order to make an effort, to investigate. That very effort will bring the energy.

On understanding selflessness

Impermanence is easy to understand, even if it’s on the conceptual level. And we’re all familiar with suffering—one form or another—at different times. But the notion of no self—selflessness—is really counterintuitive. It takes time to really absorb the meaning of it.

I found one way of pointing to it in a way that’s much more accessible. If we think of it in terms of lack of self centeredness, I think that’s easier for people to understand. When we’re not self-centered, it’s the deepest meaning of that phrase. It’s a lack of self at the center, but we can approach it in a more ordinary understanding of that phrase. 

On having a sense of humor

For me, over all these years of practice, a sense of humor about my mind has been so helpful. Sometimes it’s hard to access, but we can always come back to it, even if it’s a little after the event, and just look at what the mind was doing. When we’re interested in our minds, we can see the humor of it all.

There’s a book that was popular back in the 1960s and the 1970s, Zorba the Greek by [Nikos] Kazantzakis. And there’s one line in that book—I forget the character who says it—but the line is, “Self-knowledge is always bad news.” From a meditator’s point of view, to understand that with a sense of humor, that, yes, as we pay attention to our minds, we’re going to see the whole show. We’re going to see all the skillful things and we’re going to see those things are not so skillful. But can we hold it lightly?

On easing self-judgement

Self judgment is not uncommon, and sometimes on retreat, it really gets magnified. It feels like all we are is a massive self judgment. So if people come in and are reporting that experience, sometimes I suggest that they spend one day simply counting the self judgments. “One self judgment… 598 self judgments… 5,056… At a certain point, the mind is going to start smiling. When you get up to some ridiculous number, you just see how ridiculous it is and the mind starts smiling. Just the shift of attitude can make a huge difference.

On finding joy

Joy has a lot of different connotations. Sometimes when I think of joy, I think of a very exuberant feeling. That can happen in meditation, and sometimes it does, but there’s a deeper kind of joy that I think is more pervasive. It’s the joy of a deeply flowing river that doesn’t have a lot of ripples on it, or waves, and this is really the joy of peace. 

The Buddha at one time said peace is the greatest happiness. We might call it a quiet joy, and that quiet joy can be underneath all the waves, because there will be waves—the ups and downs, times of exuberance and times when we’re feeling low.

Those waves are just a part of our lives. But I think what the practice brings is a deeper understanding of the dharma. Living it, we really settle into this quiet joy. That’s underneath all of it and is, I think, a very fundamental way to really give meaning to our lives. When we’re experiencing that to some extent, we’re either explicitly or implicitly sharing it with others because the more peaceful we are, even if we don’t say anything about it, that’s what we’re transmitting. So there’s this beautiful flowering of the dharma within ourselves and then, you know, in our relationship with everybody we’re with. For me, that’s the kind of joy that really is emblematic of the Buddhist teachings and of our own meditation practice.

♦

These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to Joseph Goldstein’s full interview, “Tired of Pretending to Be Me,” on Tricycle Talks here.

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