Pointing Out the Great Way

While the subtitle of Dan Brown's massive tome is: "The stages of meditation in the mahamudra tradition", it doesn't really read as yet another meditation map book.  In part, this is because it focuses less on what results the meditator should expect at each stage, than on what the meditation instructions are for that stage.  Of course, you could use it to check off a list of meditative accomplishments and find a rank for your practice in the same way that The Mind Illuminated lends itself to.  But it seems more useful as a guide for how to order a series of techniques so that they point you gradually towards deeper levels of emptiness.  

This view of it is reinforced if you consider how tremendously repetitive the book is.  Crudely summarized, the whole path is just one long series of alternations between stabilizing and letting go.  To give it slightly more detail, we could notice that the major chapters correspond to the "main sequence" Michael Taft teaches in his Vasy Sky Mind class (and which form the backbone of his guided meditations).  

1. Shamata with an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration with Support"
2. Shamata without an object -- "Formal Meditation: Concentration without Support"
3. Vipashyana -- "Special Insight"
4. Dropping the Ball -- "Extraordinary Practice"

Because Brown aims to develop a very traditional account, he gives us way more substages for each of these practices, and includes several (kinda uninteresting) chapters on the preliminaries to formal mediation (like guru yoga), but the basic trajectory is recognizably the same.  While I learned all sorts of things from it, I can't say there's anyone I would really recommend the book to.  The language and presentation are just so specialized that I don't think I would have gotten much out of it if I hadn't already been exposed to these ideas in a more modern and informal way.  Which perhaps means that the book is most useful as a sort of reference manual for people already deeply familiar with the Mahamudra tradition.

Silence

I don't really have anything interesting to say about Erling Kagge's little book Silence.  It's a thoughtful if a bit whimsical and scattershot reflection on the importance of silence, and more generally inner peace, from a guy who has spent some time by himself being quiet in extreme conditions.  Kagge's fame seems to revolve around the fact that he's gone to both the North and South Pole on foot; he describes the solitude of solo-skiing across Antarctica in several places in the book.  Does spending 50 days cold and alone make you an expert on silence?  I suppose more of an expert than most of us.  So what, then does Kagge actually have to say about the subject?  

Basically, the book is a long apology for the value of silence and solitude in a world increasingly obsessed with connecting everything together and making it move as fast as possible.  This speed, this noisy profusion, it sometimes seems, has become an end in itself, so that we no longer even ask why we wanted to clink 'refresh' yet again.  Kagge rightly argues that the key to breaking this cycle is to somehow find a moment in the midst of the color-coded traffic jam of our calendars to actively do nothing.  The silence he has in mind isn't a passive lack in our experience but an active engagement with what's before us here and now in itself, rather than as the mere representative of conversations past or future.  Without trying to experience the intrinsic value of a moment, we are never able to ask what all our ever-so-efficient activity is for.  Unfortunately, while I think this is ultimately a sneakily profound idea, I don't think Kagge's exposition of it really contributed all that much to my understanding of this concept.  So unless you haven't thought very much about the problem, you might want to pass over this one in ...

Dhamma Everywhere

At the Alexis Santos retreat last year, he gave all of us a copy of his teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya's little Dhamma Everywhere book.  It was interesting though strange to be encouraged to read a few pages of the book while on retreat; meditation and words still don't mix all that well for me.  But in retrospect, the exercise was very revealing.  Trying to bring the dhamma to everyday life in the simplest possible terms is the core of Tejaniya's teaching.  What good are fancy concentration techniques and exalted states if they fall apart the moment we have a conversation or even just pick up a book?  Instead of providing an elaborate theory or set of special practices, Tejaniya encourages us just to keep investigating what's happening in awareness right now.  While at first this might sound like mindfulness 101 or perhaps something similar to noting, it quickly becomes clear that awareness is a broader concept than attention or focus.  Tejaniya's goal is an awareness wide open and unfixated, even temporarily.  So instead of focusing on noting the details individual objects, he's really interested in our being aware of the moment to moment quality of our awareness itself.  Is there craving present in the way we're aware right now?  Is there aversion?  The idea is that if we just keep checking what we are aware of, we gradually build up a picture of the patterns in our mind, the habits of thought that dictate not only which objects we are aware of, but how we are aware of them.  Ultimately then, we become aware of awareness itself, so to speak. Which might just be the end.  Or the beginning.

The Overstory

I'd heard praise of The Overstory from several different people, and Richard Powers sprawling Great American Eco-Novel did not disappoint.  While the main plot is just another dose of sober realism about humans running amuck on a planetary scale, I enjoyed the way Powers broke the overall narrative up into what is effectively a novel bookended by two collections of short stories.  The device of introducing the characters individually by capturing the entire sweep of their lives in a sort of flip-book animation was particularly effective at making them sympathetic.  Which was important for me, because I found that the book dragged a bit once the main "trunk" of the story got under way and the characters began to cross paths.  Despite writing that at some times felt too heavy and details that felt unnecessary, the narrative picked up speed as it went.  I also enjoyed the greater abstraction of the denouement chapters, particularly their sidelong brush with the 4 noble truths.  Here again though, I felt like better editing could have tightened things up and left us with a book that, while perhaps less soaringly and breathlessly epic, would have been more philosophically pointed -- the meaning of life is something we don't possess, but merely participate in.  These minor gripes aside though, The Overstory is a book that will stick with me for a long time as another prompt to stop, take a deep breath, and see what's going on.  

Diaspora

I recently came across an interesting article by philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel that suggested a list of 5 philosophically interesting sci-fi novels.  Since I thoroughly enjoyed Stories of You Life and Others, Klara and the Sun, and The Dispossessed, I figured the other two on the list were bound to be interesting.  Unfortunately Greg Egan's Diaspora doesn't hold a candle to these three in terms of writing and storytelling craft.  Egan does broach some philosophically interesting topics like what personal identity might mean for software based life capable of cloning itself at any time, and what existential issues such eternally self-modifiable  gods might confront.  But he's just not enough of a writer to make you feel these questions as anything more than the bland philosophical thought experiments you heard freshman year.  Egan's brand of sci-fi is also so hard that he makes even Liu Cixin's elaborate description of the heat death of the universe look like soft serve by comparison.  Many parts consist of such fantastically complicated reveries departing from real life mathematical or physical problems that by the third paragraph you feel like you're skimming an arvix pre-print.  Sure, Egan might be real smart, but who cares?  

There are at least a few parts that really pull the reader in though.  I particularly enjoyed the description of the neutron star collapse that spelt the end of the "fleshers" (humans who remained on earth in flesh form rather than uploading themselves to become software "citizens" or transferring their selves into the bodies of robot "gleisners").  Apocalypse sells, I suppose.  And there was a certain amount of compulsion in following the citizen diaspora's search for a way to avoid eventually succumbing to the same fate.  Enough, at least, to read the whole thing.  But still, there was a whole lot of novel that could have been short story here.

Blood and Thunder

Hampton Sides provides a truly epic portrayal of Manifest Destiny's long march to the sea.  While it's a well researched and true to life history of the westward expansion of the country in the period between roughly 1830 and the civil war, it's also written with a novelist's attention to detail and storyline that keeps it engaging.  Sides centers his story on the peripatetic life of legendary "mountain man" Kit Carson because the arc of Carson's life intersects so perfectly with the history of the period.  Carson first became famous as a symbol of the rugged freedom of the West in an era when St. Louis was the frontier city.  He traveled all over the area as a trapper, whose experience with the land and the indigenous people later made him an invaluable guide to the expeditions led by John Fremont that established the Oregon Trail.  Towards the end of his life, he served the army in the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, and the various Indian wars that marked the beginning of the reservation system.  

Carson was above all an interesting and complicated character.  He killed a lot of Indians.  He also married several (consecutively).  He became a household name as a hero of dime novels.  But he himself never learned to read.  He was constantly in demand as a famously hard-traveling guide and soldier.  Yet after the age of 30, he appeared to want nothing more than to settle down and be a family man.  These contradictions make him a great character to portray the complexity of the Westward expansion of the US.  Turns out, history is pretty complicated when you look at it with more curiosity than desire to prove your point.  So many forces are in motion at this time -- the crumbling of the Spanish empire, the rise of the North as a manufacturing area, the discovery of gold in California, the beginning of the European immigration explosion in the East, the struggles of various increasingly threatened Native tribes with  existing hispanic settlers and with one another, etc ... -- that explaining the whole works as simply the natural consequence of bloodthirsty colonists appears even more ludicrously reductive than previously imagined.   Not that the colonists weren't quite often bloodthirsty.  Just that they were many other things in addition to that.  

I think just about anybody would enjoy the book.  And I suspect it might be particularly suitable as an audiobook.  If I had one critique, it would be that it could have been shorter.  Sides is generally a good writer, but he embellishes the story with many more details than are necessary to keep things interesting.  He also occasionally gives us too much biographical backstory for characters who remain relatively minor.  I think it would be an even better read if some of its 624 pages were streamlined a little.

The End of Your World

I picked up The End of Your World because my meditation teacher suggested that it provided a clear description of what he sees as the most common path to awakening.   It contains a lightly edited collection of talks that Adyashanti gave back in 2007, together with a long and illuminating interview with the founder of Sounds True publishing.  His central idea is that most folks do not experience complete awakening in one single earth shattering moment.  Instead, he observes that most people at first just get a glimpse of awakening where they see the fabricated nature of the self.  That is, they have a non-abiding awakening.  With time and practice, they can then begin to revisit this awake experience, gradually seeing through deeper and more tenacious manifestations of self until they experience a second, and this time abiding, awakening.  Adyashanti says that in his own case the time between non-abiding awakening and abiding awakening was about 6 years, so this transition period can be substantial.  The book is specifically written to help people negotiate this intermediate period by outlining its overall trajectory and identifying some of its common pitfalls.

As far as I can tell, Adyashanti's non-abiding/abiding distinction mostly corresponds to the first path/second path distinction in Theravadan buddhism.  But I'm not super clear on how all these various maps compare and contrast.  Nor am I particularly interested in maps anymore.  For myself at least, I've concluded that the maps are more a hindrance than a help.  They exacerbate my own natural tendency to practice with a gaining idea, my frequent inclination (confirmed ¡scientifically! by my Investigator/Observer enneagram) towards a sort of spiritual avarice.  

So then, why did I enjoy reading a book that in some sense provides a map of the progress towards awakening?  There are two things that make Adyashanti's "map" distinctive and hence more useful to me than other accounts of meditative progress.  

First, the idea is in a way so obvious that it constitutes a kind of anti-map.  Translated into everyday terms, he's basically saying that while you may grasp the importance of some particular idea or experience in seconds, it can take years to unpack all its implications.  Or, equivalently, that once you have some idea of where you're headed, you then need to correctly practice a skill until it becomes automatic.  Ultimately, these are just generic descriptions of the learning process that apply to any case where we are trying to learn how rather than trying to learn that, trying to cultivate a skill rather than assimilate information.  The only reason that a description like this can appear as a map of sorts is because we so often implicitly assume that learning ideas should be instantaneous.  Adyashanti clearly wants to disabuse us of the notion that awakening is some ideal endpoint we can someday "get".  It's not a state of eternal bliss we are seeking so much as a whole way of approaching our experience, even, perhaps especially, when it's anything but blissful.  Throughout the book, he repeatedly points out that even abiding awakening has nothing to do with feeling good and it does not come with any permanent guarantees of a blissful peace.  Awakening is just the willingness to look at what's happening right now, and now, and now, over and over again, moment by moment.  In other words, Adyashanti's "map" is animated by the same paradox that defines all of Mahayana buddhism -- we are already awake, we just need to realize this.  Our "progress" lies simply in more often realizing where we already are.  It's a strange sort of map that only ever describes your current location, that never asks you to go anywhere, but only to consider why you feel like you're anywhere other than right where you are.

Second, the way Adyashanti describes traversing this map makes all the difference.  Instead of characterizing our progress by what we attain, he characterizes its entirely by what we lose.  And as the title of the book indicates, we have to be willing to lose everything in order to fully awaken.  The process is one of increasingly deep surrender of our sense of control.  Instead of discussing specific steps we need to succeed at reaching, Adyashanti always comes back to the fundamental values of honesty and sincerity in the face of our failures.  The basic question he advises us to keep asking is, "If you know what awakening feels like, what's keeping you from being there right now"?  This isn't a rhetorical question but a tool for constant inquiry into the conditions that cause our self to arise.  It's only when we understand these conditions, and fully accept our helplessness in the face of these conditions, that, as he puts it, Spirit begins to awaken from our ego, rather than our ego attempting to possess awakening.