Great news! Life has no meaning or purpose!

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I was pleasantly surprised and relieved when I finally figured out life has no 'meaning' and no 'purpose.'

In other words... all that stuff other people say you were put on this earth for? Nah.

I was reading Wen-Tzu again last night. He quotes his teacher, Lao-Tzu, as saying that laws are of men and not from heaven, but are necessary nonetheless.

If nothing else, we need laws to protect us from all the people with meaning and purpose in their lives.

But suffering/dissatisfaction, the Buddha taught, comes from attachment. And that can certainly include attachment to some notion of an external force directing your life while you try to live up to its exacting standards.

Many people seem to feel safer believing that a deity is running their lives and setting their goals. But deprived of the wonderful plan some supreme being supposedly has for your life, you must pursue harmony, inner balance and morality on your own.

My experience is that it's easier that way.

Now as I was saying... self/no self.

So here's your left thumb, okay? And the four fingers on your left hand.

And your left thumb is thinking, "Wow, that index finger is pretty hot. She's probably out of my league. But hey... maybe not.

"But every time I see her, she's with that middle finger. What's that about? Do they have something going on? I'll ask pinky finger... she'll probably know."

So the thumb goes and asks the pinky finger, "So, what's the deal with that index finger? Is she in a relationship with the middle finger? Is she, like, more into fingers than thumbs?"

And pinky finger goes to third finger and says, "You're not going to believe what I just heard about index finger..."

And third finger tells middle finger, and middle finger tells index finger, and index finger is like totally freaked out and confronts third finger, who sends her on to pinky finger, who by this time no longer remembers where she heard that, but she was just reporting what she'd been told.

Meanwhile, middle finger tells thumb, who doesn't realize he's just hearing his own unfounded speculation being repeated back to him as fact. So he gives up on index finger, and decides that all fingers are psycho bitches.

And now there's all this angst and drama and confrontation and innuendo.

But what is it, really, when you tilt your head back a little and look at it carefully?







































IT'S JUST YOUR LEFT HAND.


























But we are a lot like the thumb and the fingers: we may think we're all separate, standalone entities, but we're actually tied together into a huge cosmic hand with several billion fingers. And if we could all stop seeing ourselves as 'selves', and see that we are all one huge hand, we'd make one hell of a banjo player.




Or something.





This concept may need more development.

dzaster, white courtesy phone, please...

Check in or something. We're wondering where you are.

Blog responsibilities

Amanda Joy does not randomly muse as often as I thought she would when I first linked to her blog. (Although she has about a dozen different web sites, I think, so maybe some of the others get updated more frequently.)

And Diatribe 101? Last post on July 5th, 1996. (OK, that's an exaggeration.)

Blogging is like hosting Hardball. Keep yammering whether you have anything to say or not. People want to be entertained, dammit.

Self, No Self

I think I still don't entirely grasp the Buddhist concept of no-self.

Every time I think I have the gist of it, I stumble across something on the web or in a book that gives a new slant on it, and I have to go back and rethink it.

What if there truly is no self? The first time I encountered that notion, it left me a little uneasy. I think that happens to everyone. At first, I didn't want there to not be a me.

But then I thought, 'you know, if I'm not real -- not a separate, independent entity -- that makes things a lot easier.'

Think about all the stuff we have in our culture that goes along with being a self:

Self-respect
Self-doubt
Self-motivation
Self-loathing
Self-love
Self-questioning
Self-sabotage
Self-confidence...

If there's no self, you can wipe all that stuff off the table with a broad sweep of your arm and then have some pancakes.

Someone was right... but I forget who.

Cougar, puma, mountain lion. All the same thing.

Just see.

The goal is to see reality. Or, to put it more succinctly, to see. Because if you're seeing, the only thing you can be seeing is reality. There ain't nothin' else there.

I read something (as usual, I forget where) that really struck a chord with me: our memories are not of our experiences, but of our opinions of our experiences.

I had some kind of weird flashback stuff going on during my three-day school. One session covered a disaster that occurred years after I was out of the news business. I didn't go anywhere near it. But the photos in the Powerpoint presentation were of scenes you'd see in any disaster, and they evoked a certain internal response - a response powerful enough that one of the instructors, who had known me in my reporting days, asked me if I was okay.

But get this: I wasn't responding to the pictures themselves, right? Because I wasn't even there when they were taken. I didn't have any memories of that event. I was responding to opinions and emotional attachments - both positive and negative - formed about some other event which, although it had some superficial similarity to what I was seeing, was actually completely unrelated to it.

So here's the photo of an event that I didn't cover, and bam! I'm reacting to some other event from ten years ago or longer... but even that's not really what I'm reacting to because that event reminds me of something else and bam! I'm thinking about some story where I felt like I had failed professionally and embarassed myself and bam! I'm thinking about being scolded by a producer or chewed out by a news director and how I felt about that and bam! I'm thinking about some snide thing my mother said to me when she was drunk and maybe there are a couple of more bam!s after that but they go so far back in time that I'm not remembering the reality, I'm not remembering the opinion of the reality, I'm only remembering some residual feeling I had about the opinion of the reality.

And now the color drains from my face and I start feeling a little queasy and this guy thinks I look a little sickly. (Well, I look a little sickly a great deal of the time - droopy, puffy eyelids and all that - but this was even moreso than usual.)

This story is a somewhat extreme (but true) example of something that happens to me - and most of us - all the time. We see something, but instead of directly experiencing it, letting it be exactly what it is, we throw it into the Cuisinart of our memories, attachments and opinions, whip it into a fresh, cool neurosis smoothie, and experience that instead.

It takes mindfulness to experience things directly, and leave the Cuisinart in the cabinet.

I frequently refer to the two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree because that was something I saw recently which I experienced directly. I wasn't thinking about some other squirrels I had seen when I was fifteen, or having an opinion about whether squirrels steal food from birds or pondering the concept that squirrels are really just rats with good p.r. -- there were two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and what I saw was two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree and for about 45 seconds that was all I saw or experienced. I was totally there and I can tell it was pretty cool.

When you look at something, try just seeing what's there, without forming opinions or judgements or going back to stuff in the past.

Flashback

I'm going to break my self-imposed ban on writing about my job just this once.

I'm attending a three-day seminar whose subject matter is focused in large part on dealing with the news media in emergencies.

If you've been following this blog for any time, you can probably guess how I feel about this: I don't want to deal with the news media in any way, shape or form. (Nor for that matter, do they have any urgent desire to deal with me.)

I still have regular nightmares about being in the news media. I don't like reliving elements of that part of my life. I was on the brink of a panic attack by the time this thing was over today, and I pretty much bolted from the building when it was over.

There are not many people taking this seminar who have my background, although there are a few who've been through what I've been through and a few who've been through far, far worse. Some of them seem to handle this much better than I do.

I just want to be far away from it.

Maybe my fascination with Cold Mountain has its origin in the need to escape my own past.

Well, what else... ?

I posted my plug for Vino e Donne last night after I'd watched about 20 minutes of it. I ended up going to bed with the DVD unfinished, and watched the rest of it this morning.

The most interesting thing about this for me was getting a better insight to some of the interviewees who I sort of know, but don't know very well.

---

Another subject: a few weeks ago, I was rummaging through old emails and found some I'd sent to a certain someone –– not a long time ago, but not recently, either. I guess I copied them from a previous computer. I rarely delete non-spam email, although I've lost a bunch over the years due to accidental deletions and hard drive failures.

In any event, I was somewhat –– what's the word I want? –– not shocked, really, but more than a little surprised at the tone of these emails. I had quoted Rumi to her. Talked about Zen and Buddhism and Taoism in the way that a person who had read a couple of books about the subjects would talk, which is to say from a self-assured position of near-total ignorance.

I didn't say anything I didn't mean, and I don't think anyone would feel uncomfortable with the sentiments themselves, but the tone in which they were expressed was, in retrospect, rather overwrought and maybe a little creepy.

At the time, I had the idea they were quite moving and meaningful. Looking back, they were the semi-ravings of someone who, while a long way from being completely whack, had significantly lost control over his emotions and let his inner state get pretty far out of balance.

I think a general rule of thumb could be that when you start quoting Rumi to someone, you'd better go look in the mirror and see if there's a crazy person looking back.

And yet, how many people do I know right this minute who are in post-relationship hangovers and want nothing more than to go out there and do it again?

I've heard, of course, the familiar analogy about being thrown from a horse.

But if someone stuffs you in a laundromat-sized clothes dryer, loads five dollars worth of quarters into it and lets you tumble for the whole afternoon, should you at the end of the cycle throw in more quarters and have another go?

Vino e Donne

Here's the plug for Vino e Donne. Fourteen women. Fourteen bottles of wine. Twenty questions.

Get it here.

This is kind of interesting because I know some of the interview subjects, sort of know some of the other interview subjects -- and of course, some are strangers to me.

3:12 am

I'm sort of mulling over the notion that every time I post here, the very act of posting demonstrates that I don't have a perfect grasp of what I'm talking about.

There are some things in this world that, although they seem quite important to a lot of people, don't interest me at all. And there are things, such as politics, that interest me but I see that there are dozens of people who can speak more knowledgeably than I.

If I were in a perfect state, I think, everything in the world would fall into one of those two categories and I wouldn't have anything to say at all.

I used to have an old Dilbert cartoon taped to my cubicle wall. In the first panel, Wally says, "I'm running out of things to say."

In the second panel, he adds, "I'm going to have to start repeating myself just to fill the air time."

In the third panel, Dilbert replies, "You could try letting other people talk." And Wally says, "So anyway, I'm running out of things to say."

That's how I feel about myself most of the time. I could quit communicating altogether and the resulting impact would be negligible. Some of the stuff I talk about –– not just in blogs, but in life in general –– is of no importance at all. And for the stuff that is important, other people have said it far better than I have. I'm just trying to fill the air time.

Sometimes I think I'd like to buy five hundred copies of 'The Taoist Classics' translated by Thos. Cleary, hand them out to everyone I know, and just tell them, "Anything of substance I have to say is already better said somewhere in this book."

---

I mentioned previously that I'd like to have Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for a neighbor when I die and go to heaven. I actually decided this several months ago after reading his final book, "A Man Without A Country."

I came up with the notion that when I die, I would like to live on a street of bungalows and foursquare houses with big wide porches, shaded by rows of sycamore trees up and down each side of the street. Vonnegut would live next door, with Alan Watts on the other side. The biggest, most stately house on the street would belong to Mark Twain, but I would be too intimidated to go near it. H.L. Mencken would live down on the far corner, a sarcastic old misanthrope, and nobody would pay much attention to him.

Seung Sahn would live across the street, and Hui Neng, the sixth Zen patriarch, would be next door to him. Wen Tzu would be on the street, too. And maybe Walt Kelly, who drew 'Pogo'. And Molly Ivins.

You'd think Cold Mountain would be on the list, too, but of course he wouldn't want to live in such a crowded place. He'd be out past the edge of town somewhere, just down the road from Henry David Thoreau, but they'd wander in every so often to visit.

The big question, then, would be: what is a guy who blogs about cat vomit doing on this block?

No... if there is a heaven, I'll find myself in a trailer park with my parents.

If there is indeed a heaven

here's who I want for my next door neighbor.

Speaking of things I don't have to think about:

Have you noticed that in all the news photos of Larry Birkhead today, his facial expression and body language suggest someone who's won the PowerBall?

Did he actually act like that all day, or is that careful (or misleading) photo editing?

Promoted from the comments

Blogblah! commented:

Your squirrels' tree is appropriately phallic for a Freudian response. Is it your love-worthiness or your sexual desires and/or frustrations that are in question?

Asking the right question DOES matter.

The tree analogy actually predates this question. I first used it in this post last month.

So it's more accidental than Freudian.

Lark, Sweeney and Patrizia will remember the long, long posts I put on the Well about this subject –– loveworthiness, that is. I went on and on and on. I remember saying something at the time about always playing the 'affable but oddball next door neighbor' role in people's lives... like Bill Daly or Sid Melton in old TV sitcoms... and ranting about how tired I was of being pigeonholed that way.

Well, that was then –– about ten years ago –– and this is now. The comparison still seems a little apt, but so what? What's the significance? What's the point? There isn't any.

Sometimes, when I'm in a ranting mood, or if I see someone else in a ranting mood, I think about that picture from the Hubble telescope I posted here - the one with the gas cloud and the galaxies glowing in the background. And whatever the rant is that's occupying my thought, I imagine it as a comic-strip type word balloon pointing to one of those stars.

Helps me put the matter in perspective.

But I meant to use the 'love-worthiness' issue as an example, not as the focus of the post. Here's another example: I found myself thinking about something at work this morning –– I don't remember what, now –– but something that first of all, had no bearing on my life one way or the other, and secondly, didn't actually need to be mulled over from the angle from which I was approaching it. So why was I wasting my own internal CPU cycles on it? I actually got myself a little stressed out with this before I realized I didn't need to be thinking about it at all.

The bigger picture is that human beings spend a lot of time thinking about things that just don't need to be thought about. We often approach these things from the wrong perspective, but more importantly, we would often do better to not approach them at all.

Almost any kind of gossip you hear falls into this category. What scandalous rumor have I heard lately that actually required me, for the preservation of the order of the cosmos, to think about it? And as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot better at tuning that stuff out. Obviously, when I was a reporter, I loved gossip and rumor. But now? Not so much.

Back to my ruminations about 'loveworthiness' –– which isn't exactly a non sequitir, but something close to it. It's like thinking about 'baseball fluid' or 'brick grease'... if you'd written page after page of ramblings about either of those subjects, would you look back on it and think you'd done something profound and productive?

The good news is that it is just perfectly okay to not think at all about two-thirds of the stuff we think about, and maybe more than that. Just give our brains a rest, for god's sake. The stuff doesn't require our attention.

Sexual desires? Frustrations? Those at least have some relevance to my life, but I have found that they're not as important as they used to be.

One of the cool things about detachment is that you can do it on a trial basis. Detach, to use the immediate example, from obsessing about sexual desires and frustrations. If it scares you to be without the angst, as it did me at one time, you can always go back to them. They'll still be around.

(What happened to me, although I didn't realize it at the time, was that the obsessing became an emotional substitute for what I didn't have in my life. 'Hmmm. I seem to be out of Tylenol. I'll just take this Liquid Drano instead to tide me over.')

But if you detach from your obsessions ('Just put it down' as Seung Sahn might say) for a day or two –– and once you get past that initial fear that you're going to disappear from the face of the earth because you're not obsessing –– once you get past that point, it feels kind of refreshing. And you discover that you can choose to obsess or not obsess. And it becomes easier and easier to not obsess.

So I don't obsess as much as I did. I still do it sometimes. Habitual behavior, I guess.

Obviously I can still write mind-numbingly long posts.

Worthiness addendum II

In fact, instead of asking, "Am I worthy of being a chocolate doughnut?" one could simply ask, "Am I a chocolate doughnut?"

Except that the second question has an answer: since all things are actually one thing, the answer would be, "Yes. I am a chocolate doughnut."

Wow. I'm a chocolate doughnut.

I don't feel any different...

Worthiness addendum

It occurs to me that if someone had presented the same argument to me ten years ago that I presented in the previous post, I would have been utterly unwilling to accept or even consider it.

I was not ready to think that way in 1997.

Things change.

Worthiness

I went through a rough experience many years ago, romantic in nature, that left me wondering if I was worthy of love.

I went into therapy (because of that and other reasons) and got the usual adult child of alcoholics affirmations and reassurances, which included the reassurance that I was indeed worthy of love.

I accepted that and carried it with me.

Until about a week ago.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would re-examine this belief in light of my Buddhist/Taoist leanings.

Why does there have to be an issue of 'worthy/not worthy'? Why does 'worthiness' even enter into it?

We're always looking for ways to get a grip on things that are so ethereal and vaporous that they can't be grasped, and here we are trying to get a grip on 'love,' something which may exist, or which may actually just be a catchall term - like 'cancer' and 'nervous breakdown' - for a variety of symptoms and/or phenomena which may be related in some way but are not necessarily the same thing.

So if I ask myself, "Am I worthy of love?" is the proper response, "Yes, I am worthy of love"?

Or is the proper response, "Why am I even asking the question? Why don't I ask myself, 'Am I worthy of being a chocolate doughnut?' or, for that matter, 'Is a chocolate doughnut worthy of love?'"

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear here. I guess what I'm saying is that we pose questions to ourselves that have no valid foundation, then struggle to come up with answers to them. We argue, we debate -- in this case we buy a bunch of those Venus/Mars books -- and at the end of the day we don't know a damn thing more than we did to start with because we began with a flawed question.

Am I worthy of love?

I saw two squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree.

That's as good an answer as 'yes' or 'no.'

Sunday

For someone who is thinking about becoming a recluse again, I sure seem to have a tough time being alone. Went to the EE Starbucks this morning, and from there to Jimmy's Egg with Dave, dzaster and Nurse Kathryn. Then home for a nap.

Later, around 5, I got restless. Went to Galileo - the only thing open in the bubble - in the hope of running into someone to talk to. I didn't, so I drank a Sierra Nevada by myself and left.

Now I'm home again.

I could sit, but ehhhh...

I rarely feel lonely anymore, but sometimes I'm bored.

100 Paintings, 100 Days

The 100 Paintings, 100 Days show is underway at Adalante gallery on the Paseo.

A blog with many of the works and a description of the project is here.

---

I stayed home again this evening. I've been spending more time alone lately, and I wonder if this is a temporary thing or another change in my life. I've done this before - had a fairly active social life for a couple of years, then overloaded and become a recluse for a few years.

---

The music's been off for a few weeks now, too. I seem to have lost interest in that.

Words to Wonder

Years ago, I worked for a company whose employee newsletter included a column written by a self-absorbed young marketing executive who was thinking, or so she imagined, deep thoughts. She called the column "Words to Wonder."

Which has that nice ambiance of profound wisdom to it, but actually makes no sense.

So here are some words to wonder:

When I run into Westika at the Red Cup or elsewhere, we smile and nod, but we've never talked. We actually have communicated far more by blog comments than in actual conversation.

---

I've discovered that when I'm sitting at the Red Cup, or Sauced! or elsewhere, I find myself wondering if a certain other person is going to show up. That's the beginning of chaos.

Mayday, mayday. Danger, Will Robinson.

---

I occasionally pass up the opportunity to sit with some friends because there may be one or two other women there around whom it is difficult to act in a rational grown-up manner. At least for me. I don't leer and make suggestive comments -- just the opposite, in fact. I sit still and shut the fuck up out of fear that if I open my mouth at all something awesomely inane will force its way out and parade around the table with a kazoo and bass drum to make sure everyone notices it.

---

I had a conversation with some acquaintances the other day who feel that they have too much chaos and drama in their lives, but also are afraid that getting centered will destroy their creativity forever.

It doesn't work that way. Getting centered is just the first step. Then you have to stay that way. A person is far more likely to slide back into samsara than to find themselves somehow permanently stuck, even against their will, in a calm enlightened (and not necessarily 'capital E enlightened') state. This is why the Buddha talked about mindfulness - it requires constant attention. Staying in the moment and all that.

---

But the slope is getting a little slippery for me right now. Not real slippery, but a little slippery.

---

Words to wonder.

Coals to Newcastle.

Kirk to Enterprise.

Hart to Hart.

Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Somewhere out there is the great zen master

He doesn't hit people with sticks or yell at them. He may not wear vestments.

He doesn't advertise in magazines or get endorsements from Ken Wilber.

He doesn't have an online store.

He has about six students, and hardly anyone else even knows who he is.

Cold Mountain, yet again

One of the first Buddhist books I ever read was Buddhism Is Not What You Think by Steve Hagen.

Someone sent me a quote from it the other day, in which he talks about the poet Han-Shan, or Cold Mountain.

I'm not going to copy and paste it here, because it's rather long. But the gist of it is that when Cold Mountain the poet is talking about going to Cold Mountain the place, he's not talking about his cliff dwelling in the mountains... he's talking about his own zen state of mind, which has nothing to do with where he lives.

Some of you have heard me use the expression 'The Buddha is not in Nepal,' which is another way of saying the same thing: what you find you will find within yourself, not in a temple or stupa or zendo, whether it's in Nepal or Japan or Warr Acres.

And yet...

Something drove Cold Mountain the poet to take refuge in the wilderness, far from any community. Something led him to isolate himself from the world at large.

One of his translators, Red Pine, has suggested Cold Mountain was a fugitive who had to flee the city after participating in an unsuccessful uprising against the government. Maybe so - the fact is we know almost nothing about him.

How does one know when it's time to retreat?

Monday PM

Took off work a couple of hours early (I'm maxed out on accumulated leave - whatever I don't take now, I lose) came home, changed into shorts and an aloha shirt, and headed over to Sauced!

The patio was full.

Sat down with Andre, Ron F and Kelley O and had a beer and a pizza. The Mayor of Slackerville arrived and sat with us awhile.

The air was warm, then cooled at dusk. We were under the awning, out of the sun.

It was another of those evenings where everything seemed just right.

Can't get hooked on it... they don't last. Impermanence, non-attachment and all that. But if you can sit on a just-right evening and eat pizza with friends, why would you want to do anything else?

Sunday PM

I don't have much to write about. I have the sense that I will not have much to write about for awhile. I am at a point where nothing seems particularly important or interesting.

I know that's supposed to be a sign of depression. I think in this case it's just a sign of realization.

I mowed the front yard over the weekend. I cannot say enough good things about my Black & Decker cordless electric mower. I left the thing sitting out in the back yard all winter. It was rained on and snowed on. I rolled it out Saturday and flipped the switch and it came right on. The battery was low, which was to be expected, but in every other respect it was ready to go.

I threw out a ton of old crap in my back bedroom - enough to fill the trash can that goes out to the curb. If I can do that, oh, 20 more times, that room may become habitable.

I ordered a 750 GB Seagate hard drive Friday. It should be here by the middle of the week. I almost can't imagine 750 gigabytes. I got into computing rather late and my first hard drive was 210 megabytes on a 486/33.

I also got my meditation bench in and have tried it. It does make sitting more comfortable. Now if I could just give more of a shit about meditation.

I finished my two FEMA NIMS training courses for work. I don't remember what NIMS stands for, which tells you how much I got out of the classes. National something.

Butthead the Cat is dead and in the landfill somewhere.