I am just back from London and Oxford and the huge and very happy event of my daughter Alexandra’s marriage. As often with great things, it’s best to ease in by way of a few seemingly minor or even unrelated observations–and not just the expected ones, that at moments this Mother of the Bride (or M.O.B.) felt brashly, heart-on-my-sleeve American in the English setting. As I rose to make several longish narrative toasts, I felt how true it is, that placing ourselves in new surroundings gives us fresh impressions of how we are–that what we take to be true is really just our small perspective. What rises to the top this morning is a detail heard and glimpsed the day before we went up to Oxford for the great event. Alex and her now-husband Anthony took her parents for a bit of London sight-seeing, a walk over London Bridge, a trip to Borough Market (http://boroughmarket.org.uk) for some amazing food, the the most delectable grilled cheese sandwich I have ever had, and finally a tour of the Globe Theater on the south banks of the Thames (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre). And here is the detail. Gesturing around the open-air Globe as the sunset, commending the way the theater (theatre) was rebuilt to be as nearly like the original as possible, our actorly guide explained that a real canon was fired in one of Shakespeare’s productions. The playwright hoped for a grand effect but the blast caught the thatchy roof on fire and burned the Globe to the ground. Shakespeare retired shortly after. Later, as we walked back across the Thames on the beautiful Millennium Bridge, watching the twinkling lights of London, Alex and I marveled to think of poor Shakespeare retiring, thinking that this unfortunate incident would shadow his legacy–that people would concede that he wrote some amazing plays but wasn’t he also the guy who burned down the Globe? What has this to do with marriage, or indeed with liberation and letting go, the theme of Parabola’s wonderful latest issue? I come away from taking part in this wonderful trip more convinced than ever that our greatest deeds don’t consist in what we have done but in what we have consented to take part in. Real liberation doesn’t come in kicking over the traces, breaking away from yoke of convention and doing something wild, like firing a canon in a theatre full of people. It comes when we consent to take part in a greater truth. In Shakespeare’s immortal words, “The readiness is all.”
Category: Blog Posts
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Boom!
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Take Off the Bubble Top
One November day awhile ago, I was dispatched by Publishers Weekly to Washington, D.C. to interview the famous newsman Jim Lehrer, who just had a novel out. My editor insisted the interview take place at his home not far from the National Cathedral, not his office. This to create a feeling of intimacy, including details about all the bus memorabilia he collected in honor of his father, a bus driver, etc. Lehrer kindly complied, rushing from his office in Arlington, VA, where he was preparing to interview the Assistant Director of the FBI.Sitting in his pretty, unwashed living room, Lehrer gave the impression of having stopped on a dime. Lehrer’s famous face, as ordinary and noble as a farmhouse on a Western plain, composed itself in a look of alert waiting. His way of being with me, forthright and decent, was a lesson in how to conduct interviews–and also in how we can be with one another.Lehrer was used to living in the present moment under intense scrutiny. He was used to asking questions designed to draw out the truth without shouting or intruding, without the questions screaming for attention themselves. He recalled driving his daughters to one presidential debate he was moderating: “I told my girls in the car, if people remember the questions, I haven’t done my job.”It was excruciating to watch the trampling of time limits, the ignoring of questions to “stay on message,” the blatant lying, in the last presidential debate Lehrer tried to moderate. I felt like I was watching a decent man witness the seeming loss of our ability to have a civilized (not to mention honest) exchange in this country.But this is beside the point today. The point is this singular memory that Lehrer shared. He worked as a young newspaper reporter in Dallas in the late 1950s and 60s. On November 22, 1963, he was dispatched to ask the Secret Service man in charge of security President Kennedy’s motorcade whether the President would be riding with the bullet-proof bubble-top on his limousine on or off. As fate would have it, it was a beautiful day.“Take off the bubble top!” Lehrer heard the man command. Later, inside the Dallas police station, the shattered agent whispered the same words to Lehrer again. Lehrer wondered how many times the poor man had thought of those words since. May he have found peace.Our lives are made of moments, some indelible, but each dependent on causes and conditions beyond fathoming. What happens to others and to ourselves, what arises in a moment, binds us to each other and to a greater whole.
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Seeing with Generous Eyes
Buddha Eyes Years ago I learned an important lesson while following a Buddhist nun through the woods in Western Massachusetts. She was a different kind of Buddhist nun (not that I had encountered that many) and it was a different kind of walk. In the first place, she was not silent. She asked kindly questions and made friendly easy comments about the weather and so on, exhibiting none of the expected nun-like reserve or shunning of small talk Far more striking, however, was how quick and light she was on her feet.
She wasn’t walking fast in her own lights. As member of a small and little-known sect of Nichiren Buddhism, Nipponzan Myohoji, Sister Clare Carter spent months every year walking the globe with her fellow monks, beating a hand drum and chanting for peace. Sister Clare and her brother monks were part of sect dedicated to total non-violence and total non-aggression in any sense. “There is tremendous selflessness, which is very moving,” explained Paula Green, a peace activist and neighbor who introduced me to Sister Clare. “There is no pushing people to do this or believe that.”In the past year, Sister Clare, who was then in her late fifties, had walked from here to Washington, D.C., and then from Hiroshima to Tokyo, praying for peace. She walked about twenty miles a day at a very fast clip, but on that day she was slowing down the pace for me. Sister Clare was leading me to a Peace Pagoda in a clearing. Built on donated land by the tiny sect along with volunteers from the area , the pagoda is a strange yet graceful thing, like a vessel that has gently landed there from space. As we approach, Sister Clare stops chatting and starts chanting; Namu-myoho-renge-kyo.It took me years to fully register that Sister Clare chanting this phrase was not superstition or wishful mumbo jumbo but actually an extraordinary act of generosity. To Sister Clare chanting this phrase from the Lotus Sutra with a mind of faith contains all the teachings and all the merit of all the good practices of all the Buddhas. It embraces all phenomenon, transforming everything, me included into the total liberation of the Pure Land. In the words of Princeton scholar Jacqueline Stone, to the faithful the chant contains “three thousand realms in one thought moment, the entirety of all that is.”But at the time, I was ignorant of this, limited by my own narrow perspective. I was taking in the way she walked, the chanting, and a judgement blazed up. I remembered walking next to the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn, who glided along silently and slowly, as if he was on rails. The way he moved was once famously described as a cross between heavy machinery and a butterfly, and I confirmed this. Walking beside him it was as if he were made of some super-concentrated, super-heavy material that could never be moved, and yet there was this exquisitely delicate way of talking. I thought this was what enlightenment looked like, felt like, sounded like.I realize now that I was struggling with the difference between slow and stately “progress Buddhism,” and Sister Clare’s leap of faith. I realize now that clear seeing requires generosity, a willingness to embrace all that is unseen as well as what is seen.
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Wait
“The first rule in answering, if there is one, is to wait,” writes Lillian Firestone in the new issue of Parabola, “Liberation & Letting Go.” This brief, powerful essay stopped me in my tracks when I first read it because I happened to be on the train coming home from teaching a beginner’s meditation course. I had just answered quite a few questions. “The part of our brain that has the ‘right’ answer for everything is a dull place, built of endless chains of associations, everything we knew in the past. This knowing may be factually correct but there’s a problem with it. It is dead.”To respond in a way that is alive takes courage because it means waiting, not saying the “right” answer, but sitting there open and vulnerable and not knowing, hoping a response unique to the moment might arise.Riding home on Metro North that cold night, I realized Firestone was right. And more. It dawned on me that liberation does not consist in letting go of our connection with others and with the world around us, but in letting go of our separation. Liberation begins when we can be still and know that if we restrain ourselves from saying any old thing that happens to stacked up under the dust in the kingdom of our own mind, there will be more. A fresh response from a new impression from the living world will come from a deeper place.
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Big News!
In May 2001, in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, a Tibetan Buddhist monk donned a cap studded with hundreds of sensors that were connected to a state -of- the- art EEG, a brain-scanning device capable of recording changes in his brain with speed and precision. When the monk began meditating in a way that was designed to generate compassion, the sensors lit up in a way that registered the shift to regions of the brain that activate in a state great joy. “The very act of concern for others’ well-being, it seems creates a greater state of well-being within oneself,” writes Daniel Goleman. When I read that and wrote about it in Publishers Weekly about fourteen years ago, I pictured the monks brain sensors lighting up like those photos of the earth from space that show twinkling lights in the darkness. Hard scientific proof that compassion leads to joy! This was the kind of news flash I wanted to help spread!Before I came to Parabola, I was a journalist and book reviewer for big mainstream publications, including The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. I kept at every chance to write about books like Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman. I lobbied to make sure the book review received a special tinted box and a big red star, the better to draw attention to a book about then-new breakthroughs in the neuroscience of emotion, the scientific study of consciousness, the fruits of collaboration between leading scientists and Buddhist monastics including the Dalai Lama in a still-ongoing series of dialogues called Mind and Life.Reviews for PW, which then went up on Amazon, had to be compact so I worked really, really hard (too hard) to drive home how awesome it was that Western Science and Buddhism were joining forces. My mission as I saw it was to make Goleman’s important book stand out before it could be lost. This was my final sentence: “Goleman travels beyond the edge of the known, and the report he sends back is encouraging.” Thanks to the magic of the internet that review is still up there on Amazon (isn’t it strange to think that everything we write , every little exclamatory burst, is still out circulation like space junk or stored in vast unknown repositories). Over the years, I came to meet and admire Daniel Goleman, his wife Tara Bennett-Goleman, and many more leading Buddhist thinkers and teachers. Yet the almost panicky urgency about helping get the word out began to ease. As I practiced, just the simple daily practice of sitting down, breathing, being still, I began to see that the deeper truth is always here, waiting for a chance to arise.“The mystery of seeing. This is what Meister Eckhart brings for our edification,” writes David Appelbaum in Parabola’s new issue “Liberation & Letting Go.” “The gateway is to be found in the releasement from what Eckhart calls the ‘me and mine.’” I love “releasement,” a firm, solemn, formal word, as if a prison door is swinging open, allowing us to walk out into a bigger world. A friend in my weekly sangha once shared this insight about wisdom: it is the same in every tradition. This is because wisdom is not a formula–it is truth seen in the midst of life, live, wild truth. Wisdom must cannot really be given. It is a way of seeing that must arise in your own life. Yet there are guides and timeless guidance. It is all there in already. We just have to actually DO what is said. (This is why I love Parabola so much. It treats the timeless like news).Seeing is the way. Seeing lights us up inside. No detail is too small. For example, we may think it’s very unremarkable, not really worth noticing at all–the way we automatically tag every impression with “I, me, mine” or “like, dislike, neutral.” Yet it turns out that this incessant automatic tagging, this involuntary clutching at our experience–especially our feelings–is what keeps us imprisoned. In a timeless collaboration, the Buddha and Meister Echkart take us beyond the known.
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Trick or Treating with Lou Reed
May the Force be With You Days before Halloween, the rocker Lou Reed who urged us to take a walk on the wild side. The two were already mingled in my mind because years ago, I plucked my daughter from trick-or-treating in Brooklyn (and Hallloween is a very big deal in Carol Gardens and Cobble Hill) to perform in a “Transformation Ball,” created by Reed’s partner Laurie Anderson. Alex was a last minute addition. Somehow the show, a parade of contemporary Buddhist figures portraying Buddhas and scary deities and great and fearsome ones, lacked a Buddha of the Future. I was called and poor Alex, who was happily wearing a shiny white store-bought Princess Leia costume was whisked away from the playfully cobwebby , vampire-ridden brownstones of Brooklyn to tromp down a runway in a dark and cavernous space in downtown Manhattan. As Lou Reed looked on, managing to look cool and adoring at the same time, Laurie Anderson wrapped up her cool show with Alex. Speaking in a spookily amplified, ethereal voice, she dispensed with “Maitreya,” the traditional name, to announce “Princess Leia, the Buddha of the Future.”
Alex swished down the runway as fast as she could, a mix of embarrassment, wonder, and fury on her face. Watching her, I knew it felt like an abduction, that being to this strange dark place and put on display ruined her innocent Halloween. Some day she would look back and think this was cool, being Buddha of the Future in a show created by Laurie Anderson, being at a party with Lou Reed. But it’s the funniest thing. All these years later, this quiet little inner revolution has taken place. Living from the inside, from the depths of our own living experience feels much cooler to me now than being at a supposedly cool party.Running down the street dressed as as a warrior princess was Alex’s own way of walking on the wild side. Halloween was a night to play with fear, to let go of the known and open to the unknown, to let something other arise in us. This takes an attitude of allowing and letting be, an loving friendliness towards ourselves in all our manifestations, that is very different than being in someone else’s show.One of the coolest things about Lou Reed was the way he allowed himself to transform over the years, the way he kept letting go of what he used to be. A friend at a similar party years later told me she watched Lou Reed enter, check out the scene, and slip right back out the door. This is the way the mind works: I think of him trick-or-treating on a wild Halloween night. May he go beyond.
Tracy Cochran 