February 28, 2016
Rev. Matt Alspaugh
Words on Desire
Many years ago I was involved in putting together a legal document to form a small business partnership. A lawyer prepared the papers, and after I read them, I turned to him and said, “this seems so negative — it’s all about the bad things that could happen!”, and he answered me, in his lawyerly way, using a lot more words, since he was on the clock. He said essentially, “well, when good things are happening, you don’t need a legal document. It’s only for when things go bad.”
I’ve come to realize the same thing is true of many lasting religions. They have more to say about the bad stuff — loss, pain, suffering, failure. Buddhism, for example, focuses on dukkha, unsatisfactoriness or suffering, and how we might relieve this unsatisfactoriness. Hinduism sees rebirth as a negative thing, a direct result of our actions, or karma, as we try to maintain the illusion of our separate selves.
If there is a common thread connecting this bad stuff in these eastern religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism — it is that our selfish desires, our cravings, our clinging onto things is what leads us to trouble. We saw that in many of the readings we had earlier.
In their different ways, these religions take note of the fact that we all have cravings, things we want and become attached to, as well as things we dislike and push away; aversions. Our attachments might be as diverse as those $300 flowers in the yard, or yearning to get to know that attractive new person at the office, playing powerball when it’s at stratospheric levels again, making the world’s hottest chili, working to attain those six-pack abs — I know, pretty hopeless at my age.
And we might find aversions in a dog that won’t learn not to dig, or our fears about strangers much different from us, or the worry that every minor pain is a sign of impending cancer, or that anxiety about the world that keeps us helicoptering over our kids, never letting them run free.
Along with that thread, these eastern religions offer similar practical ideas for managing those cravings and selfish desires. You might call it ‘mind control’. I don’t mean mind control in a negative way, but simply that a key focus of these religions is learning to control our own minds, our thoughts, our sensory perceptions, and in particular, our desires.
These religions each offer their own particular wisdom, as we heard in the readings. Yet there is great similarity in what they have to say, because these religions emerged together, branching from or engaging each other. So Hinduism, represented by those ancient texts of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita arose first as a commingling of a great variety of local religions in the Indian subcontinent.
Buddhism emerged in part as a reform of Hinduism, an attempt to simplify and clarify the Hindu teachings. Buddhism too, broke into its own divisions, and was informed by local cultures in the regions where it settled. So Tibetan Buddhism is full of gods and ghosts and auspicious days and acts. But as Buddhism moved to the west, through China, it picked up Chinese ideas, particularly from Taoism, and took on the more spare forms of Zen, as represented in our reading from Seng T’san. Zen Buddhism crossed the ocean to America, where it was reshaped again, into forms and practices like Insight Meditation, Mindfulness practices and even online groups like Buddhist Geeks.
All of these various eastern forms have a common thread — they continued to address the question, “How shall I live?” by focusing with the issues of attachment and aversion. They ask, how can we “have few desires”, or “attain calm”, or “loosen the knots that strangle the heart”?
I may be oversimplifying, but all these religions suggest we experiment with the mind. They invite us to explore how we might control these cravings and revulsions that arise in our minds. For the most part, we do these experiments through meditation. So rather than talk about meditation, I want to lead you through a meditation, a simple guided meditation of maybe 6 or 7 minutes.
Guided Meditation
(this was not from a text)
Words on Liberation
How was that meditation for you? I know that for most of us, Americans especially, taking time to be alone with our mind is a loathsome task. We do anything to get out of that. We put on the radio, we grab our phones and open Facebook, we pick up an abandoned copy of yesterday’s newspaper from bus stop bench, shake out the crumbs and chicken bones, and read the ads — anything to avoid being alone with our mind. I’m sure you’ve heard of the study from a couple years ago in which people were willing to take electric shocks if they could just avoid sitting alone with nothing to do but think. This all sounds amazing, but it’s not new — the Buddha knew that (well he didn’t know about electric shocks). He said, in the Dhammapada [ch. 3],
As a fish hooked and left on the sand thrashes about in agony,
the mind being trained in meditation trembles all over,
desperate to escape the hand of the tempter.
[http://www.easwaran.org/the-dhammapada-the-blessing-of-a-well-trained-mind.html]
For some of us, new to meditation, the mind does feel like it’s thrashing around in agony. I remember that – and it still comes up occasionally.
The Buddha goes on,
[It is hard to] train the mind,
which goes where it likes and does what it wants.
But a trained mind brings health and happiness.
The wise can direct their thoughts, subtle and elusive, wherever they choose:
a trained mind brings health and happiness.[ibid.]
I’ve been meditating regularly for about 15 years now. Like Gina, I started because I was looking for something — anything — to help me deal with anxiety around work. Over time, I’ve found it has allowed me, very gradually, to get some control of my mind. You can imagine that my job, ministry, can be very stressful at times. You would be right, though I think I hide it very well! Sometimes the stress, the anxiety comes to me in the middle of the night, and I find myself thinking about church. My practice has allowed me to take a step back from that, and say, “Matt, do you want to think about this now?”, and often I’ll answer, “no”. I then choose something far more pleasant to think about, or I just do some horizontal meditation, scanning and relaxing my body, following my breath. Sometimes, though, I may answer “yes, I do want to think about that”, because I know that good, creative ideas are bubbling up. But the key is that I am in control of my mind, or at least I think I am, and I’m ultimately less anxious, more calm, and more at peace.
Now, how about those of you who want this kind of mind control, this relief from anxiety, from cravings, but don’t find meditation all that appealing? There are other practices that can help train your mind.
Just the other day, I began reading a book by the inventors of Zentangle, which is a kind of structured doodling. One of the creators is an illustrator, and she realized that of all her work, the act of filling in illuminated letters was most relaxing, even meditative. Zentangle emerged from that, as a kind of sketching that is free of perfection, judgement, good and bad. You might talk with Becky or Kristina, both big Zentangle fans.
Being out in nature is also a great practice. The key is just being, not doing, not going, not accomplishing. Just find the time to walk, or sit, without worry of the time or your destination.
For that matter, many things can be done mindfully, without thought to the next thing. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells us,
“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes…. If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.”[quoted in http://www.mrpositive.com/washing-the-dishes/]
So with some thought, we learn to give each thing we do our full attention, and we become more mindful and more accepting of what is before us. [http://www.mrpositive.com/washing-the-dishes/#sthash.Amz1kczA.dpuf]
You might also consider taking a day of unplugging from technology. This Friday and Saturday, March 4 and 5, is the National Day of Unplugging, where we are all encouraged to take a vacation from our digital devices for 24 hours. Go to nationaldayofunplugging.com.
Some of you who want even more structure in working with cravings and desires, here’s a practice suggested by Ram Dass, an American teacher in the Hindu tradition.
If you want to play a little bit …, pick some desire that you encounter every day. You decide which one: the desire to eat something or other, the desire for a cigarette, whatever it is you want to play with. Pick something that you usually give in to every day — like, let’s say, a cup of coffee in the morning — and for one day, don’t do it. Then the next day, do it much more than you usually would — have two cups of coffee. Start to study your reactions. Notice the difference in your feelings toward the desire on the first day and on the second day.
… Try to be very attentive to what’s going through your mind about it. If you’re keeping a journal, write about it in your journal. Start to relate to your desires as something you can scrutinize rather than as things that totally suck you in all the time, things that consume you. Get into a friendly relationship with your desires. Play with them, instead of being driven by them all the time. Desires get to be fun, really, once we’re observing them instead of mechanically reacting to them.
[This is] an experiment in how quickly we can extricate ourselves from being attached to our desire systems. Notice that it isn’t a question of getting rid of desires — that’s a misunderstanding. Trust me, the desires will stay around! We’re just loosening their hold on us, getting clear enough of them so we can see them in some sort of context. [http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/practices/view/21722]
At UUYO, our theme for next month is liberation. Let me end by noting that all of these practices — meditation, mindful practices, experimenting with desires — offer a kind of liberation, freeing us from the the knots that strangle our hearts, freeing us from being controlled by our cravings, from confusion, from clouded judgment.
Who knows where our liberation will allow us to go? Maybe calm, maybe peace, maybe inner enlightenment. Maybe even that unchanging state of nirvana, that beyond time, beyond past, present and future.
May we find, through whatever practice fits us, a way to be free.