We’ve passed the two year mark of the beginning of Covid, and I haven’t been able to read a book in months and months and months. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it does happen periodically. Maybe in this case it is because at the beginning of Covid, I was so terrified and my working had stopped for a minute that I dove into novels like virtual reality oases. Any reality was better than the one we were living in because at least it wasn’t real. Now I am just buffeted about by reality like a dumpster fire. Roe VS. Wade. Three hundred mass shootings since January. The mind doesn’t know how to handle this information, the suffering seeming deep and endless and any drop of assistance seeming impossible to conceptualize. My attention is shaky and anxious, and I can’t hold myself still enough to have my eyes cover 200+ pages of a book. But thanks to our driving to Texas from Georgia for the 4th of July holiday (our sixth cross country trip during Covid), it occured to me that there is this thing called audio books, and maybe that it would be easier for me to handle listening to a book than reading it. Then I saw an ad on Facebook for a course by Pema Chodron called Embracing the Unknown, and I thought instead of enrolling for that, I will just buy the audio book of the same title.
Do you know Pema Chodron?
She is an American Tibetan Buddhist nun who studied under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a wild character who founded Shambala Buddhism and Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Chogyam Trungpa was a controversial, renegade figure. The exact opposite of the calm and composed Pema Chodron. Two of my favorite stories about him are when they cut the ribbon on Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired university in the US, he stepped up to the podium, made a few brief remarks and then stated, “We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do.” and walked away from the podium.
My other favorite story about Chogyam Trungpa is that allegedly when Ram Dass, world famous guru of yoga, psychologist with Timothy Leary and author of Be Here Now declared on one of Chogyam Trunpa’s retreats that he had gotten rid of his ego, Chogyam snuck into his room that night and cut off his dread locks. When Ram Dass came into the dining room enraged the next morning, Chogyam pointed out that his ego was showing.
So Pema Chodron probably didn’t drink and drive or have sexual relations with her students like Chogyam Trungpa did, but she is still an interesting spiritual leader to read and listen to, and I decided that in the face of Roe VS. Wade and mass shootings, I needed some Buddhism.
She has a very soothing voice, Pema Chodron, and this book is actually a transcript from a course on the Tibetan Book of the Dead that she teaches on weekend retreats so it’s interesting because you get to hear students’ questions and how she answers them in addition to her lecture. I like it that she repeatedly points out that the ideas about what happens after you die that are presented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead are culturally and historically specific, and she doesn’t expect you to adopt these beliefs in order to get something out of them. I think this postioning, having the capacity to listen to perspectives without having to glom on to them 100% or having to discredit them totally, is something we have completely lost the ability to do in general in the US, if we ever had the ability in the first place. We are the land of true believers or true naysayers, much more likely to have a crush on Jim Jones (Jonestown suicide of 909 people some of whom were forced to drink the Koolaid) than listen reasonably to a complicated and well documented argument.
Buddhism is really complicated. In times of trouble like abortion rights are overturned and there are so many mass shootings and the Supreme Court is like Jim Jones with a gavel and all the power, I need to keep things simple so I have been saying to my partner, “Remember: according to Buddhism, all we have to do is be relaxed and friendly all the time including in the moment of our deaths.” This seems a lot easier to accomplish that doing any one thing that will have any impact on the minds of Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett so I am trying. Take a breath. Listen to a book on tape. Make the concepts of Buddhism overly simplistic for your needs. Relax. Be friendly. Go about your day.
So I was trying this morning to do that. Wake up, feel fresh, approach the disappointment of the world like a friend I should get to know, and I am sitting on the couch next to my almost ten year old son who uses Youtube videos as his coping mechanism for dealing with reality. Oh the YouTube videos I have seen in my days! It’s unfortunate that my son also has the impatience of the media generation so just when I’m really into something (like seeing who is going to win $500,000 from Mr. Beast by being the last to leave the painted circle) he turns into another video and I don’t get to find out. So I may not be able to have any impact on the Supreme Court but I can keep myself from being irritated and frustrated by not being able to see the end of Youtube video that my son is in charge of, so I put the headphones on to listen to Embracing the Unknown as my son is watching a Dude Perfect video.
If you would like to experience profound disjuncture today, I would encourage you to listen to Pema Chodron while watching a Dude Perfect video. Listen to her dulcet tones encouraging you to relax and open not only for your sake but for the sake of all sentient beings as Dude Perfect with his masculine well trimmed coffee colored beard and mustache falls onto his knees every 3 seconds and screams in agony because a piece of mechanical equipment he has purchased or assembled (a drone, a rocket, what have you) has gone up into the air and smashes down into a million pieces. I don’t know why watching young men scream in agony over completely inconsequential things (like veering off course in a video game, right Jelly? (Youtuber who makes millions of dollars for having the most annoying scream in existence)
is the thing our youth (and non youth) has chosen to focus our days on, but in the spirit of Pema Chodron’s friendliness and openness instead of decrying media or toxic masculinity or any of the other things I could easily decry, perhaps I could just assert that perhaps Jelly and Dude Perfect and all the others are onto something. Perhaps they are marching into disappointment full tilt, with the volume up as loud as humanly possible so that when they are devastated by a broken drone, by a failed contest, by crashing their car in a video game, this is simply preparation for the ultimate disappointment of dying: all the elements of ourselves dissolving into the vast clear sky of the mind, the infinite and unending, endless, eternal realm of being.
I am pretty sure that’s what they’re going for. Maybe later today I will create an altar and put pictures of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche, Dude Perfect and Jelly.
You know what? I do actually feel better.
Inspiration and Information for Immigrant Advocacy 