Going Beyond

What's a materialist to do?  After denying the reality, even the very possibility, of the supernatural and the metaphysical, there is still the human condition.  Living is messy, mostly out of control, and often painful.  Of course there's more to life than atoms in motion.  Unlike the less-evolved biological species, we can remember, make predictions that occasionally come true, and form intentions that lead to actions which sometimes achieve the result we wanted.  Is this enough?

Well, no, not if you're still tempted by the religious impulse (or is it an instinct?).  For a couple of weeks I've been grappling with the thoughts of Karen Armstrong, reading and heavily underlining her latest book, The Case For God (my copy published in America lacks the British subtitle, "What Religion Really Means").  For this ex-nun who has written over 20 books on the topic, religion has been since the cave painters of Lascaux a practical discipline that leads to compassion for others which results in an "apprehension of transcendence."  Somewhere around the beginning of the modern era in the 16th century, religion took a wrong turn and now we have fearful fundamentalists of every stripe and superficial atheists who each interpret scripture literally, consider "belief" to mean assent to dogma, and imagine God as a being like us, only Supreme.  Armstrong, who calls herself a "freelance monotheist" and says her prayer is scholarship, wants to reinstate compassion and transcendence at the center of every religion.

"Transcendence," however, sounds metaphysical and mystical, and seems to imply a dualistic separation between body and spirit.  And yet it also seems to offer a non-theological alternative to ground the hunger and yearning for something absolute that appears to be universal.  What if, for example, we use the word poetically and mythically?  In the glossary to her book, a rare treat, she defines the transcendent as "that which 'climbs beyond' known reality and cannot be categorized."  Transcendence can be apprehended but cannot be known as a piece of information (the modern hubris).  One of Armstrong's major arguments in The Case for God is that until the triumph of science and reason in the 16th century, the only way ultimate reality could be approached was through the "cloud of unknowing."  Only apophatic statements -- "not this, not that" -- and silence, together with the practice of rituals and morality, could produce a transcendent awakening such as that experienced by the Buddha.

Religion's task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: morality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.  Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage.

That's her core claim in a nutshell.  Whether the "God" pointed to by various religious symbols was true, real, or exists, only became a preoccupation of theologians and nonbelievers after the Reformation and Enlightenment.  Armstrong wants to recapture what has been lost, what she calls the "knack" of religion, a learned skill that could lead to "an ekstasis, that enabled you to 'step outside' the prism of ego and experience the sacred."  In the glossary, she defines this Greek term as "going beyond the self; transcending normal experience."  For Armstrong, the desire "to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic."

The trouble with these practical disciplines of the sacred (and they no doubt took many different forms) is that in time they suffer from hardening of the spiritual arteries.  Rituals are legislated, the transcendent becomes first a being and then an idol, and priestly castes presume to understand what the common people are too stupid to know.  Politics and economics take over, palaces of worship are built under the patronage of rulers whom the gods support, and morality is replaced by laws.  And then intolerance, the dark twin of compassion, rears its ugly head and believers are ready to slaughter those they consider unbelievers in one of humanity's frequent "Crusades."  For the "new atheists" -- Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris -- the worst of religion's abuses are attributed to all.  Armstrong accuses them of reductionism, of assuming "that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical of either Christianity or religion as a whole."  They treat present religion at its absolute worst and engage in remarks "as biased and untrue as some of the religious rhetoric" they condemn.  Besides being theologically illiterate, their "rejection of the Enlightenment principle of toleration is new."  Armstrong believes the danger of a secularization of reason "which denies the possibility of transcendence is that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants."

Transcendence seems to mean going beyond ordinary reality and the language we use to describe it.  Armstrong uses art and music as examples of transcendence, and explains that "one of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp.  We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence."  Music, she says, "goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything."  Transcendence could be used to speak of the enhanced feeling of being or joy we feel in nature, or at peak moments of experience, say, at a wedding or the birth of a child.  Armstrong speaks of the Catholic philosopher Karl Rahner who taught that when we struggle to make sense of the world, we constantly go beyond ourselves in our search for understanding.  "Thus every act of cognition and every act of love is a transcendent experience because it compels us to reach beyond the prism of selfhood."  This results in a spontaneous feeling of compassion toward another which takes form in action rather than thought.

The critics ask: why do we need to transcend anything?  Isn't this life enough?  The answer, I believe, is because it makes us more fully human.  We are not transcending the body or reality, but the ordinary everyday experience of being ourselves, blinded by our petty, self-centered concerns.  I can remember the peak moments of my life, the joy I felt among friends and lovers, the awe I experienced listening to and playing music, while really seeing a painting for the first time, hiking in a redwood forest or looking down upon the magnificence of Yosemite, or even San Francisco Bay on a gorgeous day.  There is a particularly poignant joy that is felt in the midst of disaster, after news of a friend's death or a diagnosis of cancer, that makes no sense whatever but is nonetheless real and enobling.  Shared tragedy can result in a kindness more intensely felt than a simple pat on the back.  We act out the Golden Rule without thinking about it or calculating the advantages whenever we see another not just as in need but as part of our very own self.  In her many books, Karen Armstrong looks past the sectarian divisions and dogmatic differences to the heart of every religion where she finds compassion and the Golden Rule (traced back to Confucius as well).

Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule "all day and every day" demands perpetual kenosis [self emptying]. The constant "stepping outside" of our own preferences, convictions, and prejudices is an ekstasis that is not a glamorous rapture but, as Confucius's pupil Yan Hui explained, is itself the transcendence we seek.

On Holiday in Hua Hin

Coming up to the third anniversary of my arrival in the Land of Smiles, I am beginning to repeat myself.  It was a holiday weekend, with people taking off work during the start of what is called "Buddhist Lent," and Nan and I considered our options, the goal being surf, sand and sun.  Ko Samet was our destination of choice, but the owners of our favorite spot had jacked up their prices, creating a "middle season" between low and high for July and adding a 400 baht a night surcharge for the "busy weekend."  Since we'd visited Pattaya recently, where our hotel had been under noisy construction, this time we headed south to Hua Hin to swim and eat.

It was my third trip to the popular but aging beach resort town on the northern end of the Malay Peninsula and the second time for the two of us together.  The railroad came here in 1921 and the station is a national landmark.  King Rama VII built a summer palace which he named Wang Klai Kang Won, "Far from Worries."  That sounded like a good idea.  This time we arrived without a room reservation and the paucity of tourists confirmed my hunch that a continuing State of Emergency and the beginning of the rainy season takes even Hua Hin off the holiday map.  We walked from the bus station down to the waterfront and first looked at Fulay Guest House on a pier over the sea which is recommended by Lonely Planet.  Their cheap room was a closet and the cute "Thai Room" was overpriced.  Not far away we discovered The Fat Cat Guest House owned by a Danish expat about my age and took a lovely recently refurbished room overlooking the water for less than 1000 baht a night.

Our home away from home was close to the seafood restaurants and a short walk to the rock-strewn beach in front of the dominating Hilton Hotel where visitors recline under umbrellas, take rides on one of the many ponies for rent, hunt for sea shells, or venture out to sea on a "banana boat" pulled by a crazy jet ski driver intent on tossing them off.  We dozed and read, sipped our refreshing drinks, paid too much for an al fresco lunch and waited for the clouds to relent and let the sun come out.  It never happened.  Nor did it rain beyond a brief evening shower.  The umbrellas were sparsely populated, mostly by Scandinavian tourists with big families, and competition was keen at each section.  Our chairs were free so long as we bought food.  The frequently passing beach vendors had an air of desperation.  Even wading in the water was not appealing because of the underwater boulders and the sharp shells.  Last year I got a nasty cut on my foot.  So we simply rested, far from our day to day worries.

Shopping was always an option.  I remembered the town's only mall, Market Village, which I'd visited on my first trip there because my guest house was close by.  So on our first afternoon, Nan and I took a songthaew (pickup truck bus) south and browsed through the many chain stores with a few tourists and hoards of students in uniform from the Catholic school next door.  We snacked on gelato atop a waffle, checked movie times at the cinema (unfortunately "Despicable Me" was not playing), and browsed for bargains; July is apparently the month for sales.  Nan found her nirvana at a two-for-one sale and I practiced patience while she selected the perfect outfits. 

If we couldn't enjoy sunny weather, we could at least eat, and the seafood cuisine in Hua Hin is justly famed.  On our first night we returned to The Moon Terrace, with its sign advertising "Where the Romantic Begins," and ordered a whole fish and several appetizers.  It wasn't the same; the original magic we recalled was not repeated.  Last year it rained and we couldn't sit outside on the pier, so we were given a candlelit table with rattan chairs inside.  It was just us and the fish by dim light and it was memorable.  From where we sat this time we could see several other restaurants on piers and the following evening we chose the one most crowded, Chao Lay.  It didn't disappoint.  The fried sea bass, squid in garlic and lemon sauce, baked scallops (called hoi like all members of the clam family) and the shrimp appetizers were incredible.  The restaurant was packed on a Saturday night and the customers were mostly Thai.

After dinner we aided our digestion by walking up to Hua Hin's Night Market and there found all the missing foreign tourists.  Food and clothing booths predominated and we were on a mission to find the perfect vacation tee shirts.  Nan wanted them to say Wang Klai Kang Won or some variant.  We found hers at a stall where customers oohed and aahed over the owner's cute baby.  My shirt was discovered not far away, but we rubbed shoulders and elbows all the way up to the end of the market and took in its delightful sounds and smells.  We ended the evening with a refreshing honey lemon drink and cheese cake at our favorite Vietnamese cafe. 

Hua Hin is a short three-hour bus trip (at a cost of about $5 each way) from the southern terminal near our apartment.  The island of Ko Samet is about the same, but the bus leaves from the eastern terminal an hour away.  Still, Samet has a nicer beach, more inviting surf and fewer (none?) Scandinavian, Danish or German restaurants.  I'm always on the lookout for a cheap and uncrowded beach destination where I might live out my final days undisturbed with a clear view of the sea.  Ko Lanta at the end of the slow season came close.  It's not quite the same, but my 9th floor window which overlooks the dramatic and cloud-entangled skyline of Bangkok provides hours of contemplative enjoyment. Nan's mom is buying more land in her northern village in the hope that it will tempt us to live there when our time and money run out in Bangkok.  Of course Nan must finish school first and then she'll probably find a better paying job in the city for a woman with a college degree in business and computers.  I kept busy in Hua Hin by reading two Lee Child mysteries, and now back home I'm pouring over Karen Armstrong's wonderful book The Case for God which I recently finished.  She has the knack for capturing the changing face of religion in words.  And she makes the human yearning for the transcendent seem so natural and shows with remarkable clarity where religious writers in the last two hundred years have gone off the rails by competing with science and focusing on propositional belief rather than discipline in compassion.  I've still got students to teach and many mysteries to explore, and so I'm not yet ready for that beachside dénouement. 

Two-Cake Birthday

After 70, what's to celebrate?  Nonetheless, I casually mentioned one day to my students that soon I would turn 71, and during the last class before the Khao Phansa holiday (described as the Buddhist "Lent"), they turned out the lights and brought me a cake with many candles.  I had to teach them the proper way to sing "Happy Birthday" (they have the tune down but just repeat the words "happy birthday"), and said a few words about how I'm still 18 in my heart until I look in the mirror.  I was very moved by their kindness. 

On the actual day of my birthday, I stayed at home and watched three movies ("The Ghost Writer," "Aching Hearts" and "Fish Tank"), and in the evening after her English class Nan brought me a lovely cherry and chocolate cake with white icing and many candles that contained the inscription "Happy Birthday Will 71st."  Her love keeps me young.  As birthdays go, it was a very sedate affair: no cards, no presents, no other friends or family, a couple of email good wishes.  When none of my friends on Facebook sent greetings I checked to discover that on my new page I'd neglected to make my birthday public.  Once unchecked, the greetings came in a rush from friends old and recent, near and far away.  I am now beginning my 72nd year.  In Thailand, where birth dates are calculated by a solar calendar and the 12 zodiac animal signs (I'm a rabbit), the first and sixth cycles of 12 years are most important.  My natal anniversary next year will be most important. 

On the morning of my actual birthday I received a "fuck you" letter from someone I've known for over thirty years.  We met on a job and discovered a mutual fondness for discussing philosophy and religion over lunch.  Calling himself a "Zen Catholic," he introduced me to the writings of Thomas Merton and took me on my first visit to a monastery which would influence my intellectual and spiritual path for some years.  At the time I was an atheist who was excited by the philosophical implications of quantum physics, and our conversations were frequently heated.  I respected his knowledge and experience if not always the scrupulosity of his moral views.  A few years ago we found each other again on the internet and have resumed our dialogue via email and Facebook.  He had expanded his spiritual horizon to encompass Tibetan Buddhism without leaving Catholicism and he explored both traditions in depth with the intensity of a scholar and the fervor of a true believer.  Intelligent and articulate, he bombarded me with information, an extended monologue on the virtues of multi-faith practice.  I encouraged him to write a blog which he tackled with manic glee.  My views, however, did not engage him.  He was open to neither criticism nor skepticism, the present coin of my realm.  When I praised on Facebook Philip Pullman's retelling of the Jesus story as the "real deal," meaning it compared with Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" in its perceptive critique of the institutional church, he commented that to say this was "stupid" and "a lie."  Now I'm sensitive to being accused of lying, and I sent him what I thought was a very polite email saying that since he had no interest or respect for my views, perhaps we should stop talking for now.  His response was a long, angry, and vitriolic "fuck you" that attacked me from every direction.  He even quoted my son from a recent blog post who said I was the most self-centered person he had ever met.  There was a conspicuous absence of either compassion or kindness, the marks for me of a real Buddhist.

Since this is the second letter this year like this from someone I once thought was a friend, I should give it some credence.  Both accused me of hostility to religion and put me in the category with its currently popular despisers: Hawkins, Hitchens and Harris.  Both are serious Buddhist practicioners and are offended by any criticism or skepticism about their faith or their teachers.  One was angered when I wrote that a monk's talk he liked was not inspirational and the other apparently took offense at my linking of feudalism in Tibet with that country's ritualistic and hierarchical religion.  This blog has chronicled my evolution in matters of the spirit, from a determined acceptance of the Catholic faith based on its teaching about social justice to a rejection of the Ratzinger Church and all metaphysical views that privilege the next world over this one.  In Thailand I am learning about an all-pervading and deep-rooted popular piety and the multifaceted relationships between Buddhism, animism and superstition, not as an objective social scientist but as someone looking for a satisfactory and dignified way to live out the years I have left.  I have always tried to own my criticism rather than to judge the practices of others, and in my writing I have done my best to be gentle and generous.  But obviously my words have also pushed sensitive buttons and I must accept the consequences.

Thank God I'm not Mel Gibson.  That man has some serious issues to deal with, not least that he's become the laughing stock of the internet.  I finally succumbed to the barrage of stories and listened to some of the tapes of phone conversations with his wife on YouTube.  Christopher Hitchens has an interesting diatribe on Slate in which he blames the actor's sexist, racist and etc-ist rants on his extremely right-wing Catholic faith.  Gibson's father, known for his holocaust denials, founded a schismatic group in Australia to the right of an already conservative Pope.  The younger Gibson's bloody "Passion of the Christ" was an advertisement for these anti-Semetic fundamentalists.   According to Hitchens, for whom ALL religion is anathema, Gibson's "every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church."  Hitchens has criticized Pullman's fiction of Jesus and his twin-brother Christ as the work of a "Protestant atheist" because his book raises the possibility that "Christianity can be salvaged from itself, or at any rate from its later accretions, by a sort of 'back to basics' revisionism."  But nothing can save Christianity in Hitchens' mind.  Pullman's science fiction trilogy, His Dark Materials, is acknowledged as a strong attack on the Catholic Church.  But "this latest attempt to secularize Messianism," Hitchens writes, "is a disappointment to those of us who can never forgive the emperor Constantine, not just for making Christianity a state dogma, but for making humanity hostage to the boring village quarrels and Bronze Age fables that were drawn from what remains the world’s most benighted region."  Now I would never be so harsh about the stories and fables that provide meaning to the world's million who do not happen to be intellectuals or online critics.

I am spending way too much time in disappointment these days, disappointment that my good will is misunderstood, that my financial affairs are in disarray, that I can no longer maintain long-distance relationships, that teaching is a joy but dealing with school administrators is a headache,  that Thailand's brief democratic spring is turning into an authoritarian winter, that my horizons are shrinking as the years pile up, that metaphysics remains a temptation despite my materialist goals, and disappointment that I am not as grateful and loving as I long to be.

Family Values

"If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

--Luke 14:26, New American Bible

I was raised on family values in the 1950s that were best exemplified by the Nelsons, the Andersons, the Cleavers, the Stones and even the crazy Richardos, those perfect families that we watched on our black-and-white TV while eating dinners in the living room on TV trays. My brother and I should have been Ricky and David, or even Wally and the Beaver, but my father was a pale imitation of Robert Young's Jim Anderson, and mom was no Donna Reed (sometimes she more like Lucy at her craziest).  Though we were outwardly the ideal nuclear family of four living in a California ranch-style house with an orange tree in the front and a swimming pool in the back yard, I felt like I was living with aliens.

There's probably a good reason why Jesus seems to hate the family.  Maybe it was because he had an absent father, an over-protective mother, and siblings whom he refused to discuss.  Christian apologists work hard to give this verse a positive twist.  But when he went to preach in the temple of his home town of Nazareth he was driven away by an angry crowd that could only conceive of him as the poor son of a carpenter.  "No prophet is accepted in his own native place," concludes the passage from the book of Luke.  In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is seated in a crowd of people and someone comes to tell him,  "Your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside asking for you." He replies, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" And looking around at those seated in the circle he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Blood ties matter here less than friendship and appropriate actions.  It's hard to see how conservative Christians could turn these words of Jesus into instructions about family values and a creed that praises the nuclear family and condemns working mothers, adultery, feminism, premarital sex, abortion, and gay and lesbian relationships, to name only a few of their no-nos.  Despite Dan Quayle's condemnation of the non-traditional family values of single (TV) mother Murphy Brown (which he claimed were a cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots), western politicians continue to praise the family as the primary source of moral values and the foundation for democracy and freedom in the world.  They have apparently forgotten that western civilization begins with the Biblical story of Cain, the farmer, murdering his brother Abel, the hunter-gatherer. It's been all downhill since then.   In history as well as myth and fiction, parricide, the killing of a parent, is common, from Oedipus and Norman Bates to Lizzie Borden and the Menendez brothers. Children are not infrequently killed by their parents (Singer Marvin Gaye was shot by his father and Peter the Great of Russia tortured his son to death).  Clearly there is a dark side to family values.

Let's not forget Rosemary's baby and all the other celluloid spawns of Satan.  There's a misguided notion that genetics must dictate familial relations, a modern update of the blood tie myth.  In the debate over nature vs. nurture, the jury is still out.  Identical twins are not clones and frequently turn out to lead very different lives.  It's impossible to raise children on an assembly line and often siblings from the same background turn out to be Cain and Abel redux, or, as, Yogi Berra put it, deja vu all over again.  There is no accounting for families, except in the blog world where we must try to explain why we felt like aliens growing up and why we are estranged from our families.  Despite conventional wisdom, they are NOT the ones who MUST love you.

Our father was a traveling salesman, a big man not given to many words.  After coming home late from work with a strange smell on his lips, he would fall asleep in his big easy chair while watching Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show.  Mom kept to her kitchen which was off limits to the men of the house, so I never learned to cook or wash dishes.  Sometimes we would hear her screaming in the bedroom at our father, hysterical nonsense words behind a closed door, but the storm would soon blow over.  My father built things in his garage workshop, a cabinet for the TV and a whole cabaña for the pool, but nothing was ever completely finished and he didn't teach me how to use his tools.  I was forced to share a bedroom with my younger brother, an indignity beyond words, until our grandfather died when I finally got some privacy.  The kid was scrawny and surly and our father spent more time with him because "he doesn't have your personality."  After he started lifting weights and going out for sports, he outgrew me.  Our mother read Reader's Digest condensed books and our father listened to a recording of the Warsaw Concerto, the only music in our house until I discovered rock and roll.  I was mortified by their plebeianism, and moved out of the family home just as soon as I was able. 

I became a father by accident on a trip to Europe with my young wife at a bed-and-breakfast house in Scotland.  Several years later it happened again and my second son was born at a 7th Day Adventist hospital in Los Angeles where I had to go outside to smoke.  The only model I had for parenting was my father so I didn't say much and laid down the rules as the boys grew up.  But my wife was even more hysterical than my mother and I left her with the children because I thought she might kill herself without them.  Big mistake.  My second family was more intentional.  After a long courtship we created a daughter which had been my strongest desire at the time.  For five years she was the apple of my eye, until she discovered rebellion and we began a struggle that remains to this day.  Our second child was a gift to my wife who felt single children were deprived.  But after he was born, she resigned as a lover to become a full-time mother and I was cut adrift.  Silent, rule-giving fathers were not appreciated in that house.  I tried to change, to become a sensitive man during that age of women's liberation, but early imprinting was too strong.  I gave my youngest son the most time of any of my children, but he grew to see me as always angry and ineffectual.  When push came to shove, I lost it.  This time, however, at least I stuck around until the kids were almost out of the house. 

My family skills haven't improved much since then.  During a brief hiatus in the 1970s, my brother and I got along, perhaps because I was working in the music business and we had similar tastes, more from the zeitgeist of the time rather than genetics, I expect.  He grew up arguing about sports with our father and became a lawyer who raises his voice to make a point.  After the death of our mother, we argued bitterly over every facet of the estate settlement.  I tried to develop close relationships with my children but I just wasn't very good at it.  As I grew older and they grew up, any respect turned to disdain and I felt constantly apologetic.  I was closest to my second son, probably because we both made serious mistakes the others criticized; when he died of alcoholism last year I was left alone.  One of the many reasons I moved to Thailand was that I didn't want some day for my children to have to care for me.  Trying to establish a long-distance relationship from here with them by various technological methods of communication is difficult but the results are the same as when I lived in their neighborhood.  Mostly silence and disinterest.

I'm reluctant to blame my parents for not teaching me, or providing a good example of, parenting.  Most of my friends have terrific relationships with their children, even when living far away.  And I don't want to blame my children for their lack of compassion toward me or interest in my admittedly strange life as an expat in Southeast Asia.  My oldest son's last message to me was, "You are one of the most self-centered people I will ever know."  I resisted mentioning that it ran in the family, but only said "I won't bother you again."  I left him and his brother at an early age and deserve his accusations of abandonment.  And I resigned inwardly from my second family when my wife, a supermom, left me little to do because she could do everything better than me.  I found my curiosity and passion at the university and was reborn as an academic scholar.  And if the marriage hadn't ended at my wife's request, I never would have traveled the world and found another life here in Thailand.  For all of that I'm thankful and have few regrets.

But family, aye, there's the rub. 

Endlessly Searching

They call me "The Seeker"
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

--Pete Townshend, The Who

Much of my life I've described myself as a seeker, on a journey or pilgrimage in search of capital-T Truth, wisdom, salvation and enlightenment. In the "About Me" section of this blog, I have been calling myself "a spirit-seeking citizen of the world."  I've sought sainthood as a Roman Catholic, a vision of the divine as a Hindu devotee, and nibanna as a Theravada Buddhist (although not as a monk like this Cambodian exploring an ancient stone text at Angkor Wat).  I've prayed, sung, chanted and meditated in monasteries, churches, ashrams, sanghas and temples around the world.  And the end result of all this searching, on the eve of my 71st birthday, is: nothing much.  I think it's time to lay this label to rest.

Focusing on nowhere
Investigating miles
I'm a seeker
I'm a really desperate man

Seekers of whatever hue share with each other a dissatisfaction with the present world.  "Is this all there is?" they unhappily ask.  "I want something more."  It should be said that seeking Jesus, God or Krishna is preferable to seeking forgetfulness and oblivion through alcohol or drugs and other destructive behavior because of a dissatisfied life.  Religious seekers, however obnoxious and self-righteous they may become about having the only true answers, do little obvious long-term damage.  But what are the consequences of denigrating and denying this life and the bodies we inhabit for something better somewhere else, like after we die?  

These thoughts have been prompted by reading two amazing books by Don Cupitt, a professor emeritus of philosophy and theology at Cambridge and a retired Anglican clergyman.  Sometimes books come to us when we need them to articulate our incoherent thoughts.  For years I have been dissatisfied with otherworldly religion, both Christian and Buddhist, that promises salvation or an advantageous rebirth after death.  This physical world dominated by Mara is a veil of tears which we should despise and our material bodies, the realm of flesh, only hold us back from achieving our true reward.  Monks and nuns, both Catholic and Buddhist, flee worldly temptations by trading their possessions and fashionable finery for robes and a lifetime of denial.  Sex, the act that keeps humanity going, receives the most severe denunciations and in most spiritual disciplines men and women are kept rigorously separate.  The upshot of this is to make ordinary people think their everyday lives are insufficient and somehow wrong.

For Cupitt, the fatal assumption is that our life is a riddle to us.  We are exiled from our true home.  And we want to know the Meaning of Life and the Point of It All, two BIG questions that Cupitt notes are ridiculed beautifully by comic writer Douglas Adams in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and also by "Deep Thoughts" on "Saturday Night Live"). For me, the guiding questions have long been: Who am I, and what am I to do in this life?  Under Cupitt's withering critique (and remembering some of the cautions made by Wittgestein when I studied his writings 20 years ago), I can now see that these puzzles are only linguistic and lead nowhere.  Even the Buddha advised against asking metaphysical questions in favor of practices to relieve present suffering.

Nietzsche, recalls Cupitt in Emptiness & Brightness, called Catholicism "platonism for the masses."  It was Plato who theorized that what we see is only a representation of the metaphysical reality that our senses cannot see.  We see through a glass darkly, and it's what's on the other side that's important, not the dirty glass.  On the contrary, says Cupitt, nothing is hidden and we must give up the idea of a knowledge available only to the elite.  He calls his philosophy "anti-realist" to deny that life is static and ready-made before humans entered the picture in order to discover it.  "The world of life is beginningless, endless, outsideless, and in ceaseless change," Cupitt writes.  Reality is "never more than provisionally constructed within an endless open conversation."

I can barely explain how liberating this feels.  We only have this life to live and when it's over we're fertilizer for the plants, a memory in the minds of our friends still living, nothing more.  We're animals with language, the possession of which is very important for Cupitt's argument which lists three aspects of life: Be-ing, Language and Brightness.  The last attribute means "the world's vividness and beauty in our (and only our) conscious awareness of it."  We humans are embedded in language, reality is a consensual story produced by linguistic communities, and we constitute each other through language which, in fact, precedes thought. In a more recent book, Above Us Only Sky, Cupitt writes:

You can have more-or-less anything, provided only that you understand and accept that you can have it only language-wrapped -- that is, mediated by language's secondary, symbolic and always-ambiguous quality...We just are our lived lives in our life-world, and our life is lived within our living, moving language.  You are what you say: you are your part in life.

This echoes Wittgenstein who said that "meaning just is use." A word means not what it refers to but how it is used.  It also recalls pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty who argued against the idea that the mind somehow can represents nature, which pulls the rug out from under metaphysics.  "The old idea of a metaphysical self, an immortal infinite spiritual substance, is dead," claims Cupitt.  "The self is radically linguistic and historical.  And with the concept of the soul dies also the belief in the saint or genius."

The two small books of Cupitt's I've recently read, a small sample of his large corpus devoted to delivering a message not of atheism but of a decidedly this worldly religion, are filled with the eloquence of a secular preacher.   Calling his writings "an induction course -- as training in religious thinking," he says the message in each book is the same:  "give up the quest for objectivity, give up the antediluvian idea that 'the truth is out there', and give up the desire for timelessness.  Instead, say Yes to Be-ing, Yes to pure contingency, Yes to life, and Yes to the life-world as a self-producing, self-renewing work of art that forms in us and pours out of us."  If this sounds closer to Buddhism than to Christianity, it is.  He calls Buddhism "the most intellectually formidable and challenging of the faiths," but he also has harsh words for institutional Buddhism "with its emphasis on loyalty to the sangha and obedience to an authoritative teacher from a sound lineage."  Tradition, he adds, "is not the only way to truth and religious truth is not always hard to grasp.  It can be blindingly easy."

With Cupitt's help, my seeking days are over.  Giving up the metaphorical journey is not easy, however, since it's the story I've been telling myself about who I am for a good fifty years.  When I left California six years ago to see the world, I did it as a pilgrim, and everywhere I went, from Guatemala to India, it was with the unseen in mind.  Where could I find it, the elusive butterfly of spirituality?  My friends on that journey may find this new story disturbing.  Have I given up?  I see it differently.  The challenge now for me is to say Yes to this life, the only one that I have made.  There is no point in going back over it with a magnifying glass to see where I might have made better choices.  What's done is done (my mother use to love that cliché).  I resolve now to be as present as possible to those I am in conversation with, my lover and my friends. 

And life, in my experience, is nearly always a roller coaster, or perhaps a rigged contest like the episodes of "Wipeout" I have been watching with Nan, a "reality" show in which slipping on a a banana peel becomes an even lower art with the aid of technology.  And, excuse me, but it's always hilarious to see an ambitious person fall on their face.  The monsoon rains have arrived in Thailand and most evenings we are treated to a spectacular son et lumiere show outside our 9th floor window.  Nan is loving her university classes three nights a week, and I've taken on a new English class on Monday and Tuesday evenings at my university's campus in Wang Noi near Ayuthaya, an hour's commute out of the city.  At our first meeting last week, I had eight students, three monks from Burma, two from Laos, and two nuns from Vietnam, as well as a layman from Thailand who works at the Jaguar automotive factory.  Over half are in the international Master's program in Buddhist Studies where classes are taught in English.  I am using the New Headway Pre-Intermediate textbook from Oxford Press and have the leisure to spend nine hours per chapter rather than the rushed three hours I give my Wednesday students, all of whom are majoring in English.  Next month I will teach a special four-Saturday course for graduate students in Public Administration at an MCU campus east of Bangkok with Dr. Sman, a Thai teacher my age who has been helping this old farang find additional work.

I am now a part of Nan's family, and she keeps me informed of their drama.  Her sister Ann is determined to get a boob job, the dream of every flat-chested Thai woman and gender-challenged ladyboy.  I try through Nan to convince her otherwise.  Even in Thailand it's expensive, about the equivalent of $3,000.  If it's not breast amplification, it's whiter skin.  Thais are definitely dissatisfied with their image, and the shapely white-skinned models in advertising and on TV feed that unhappiness.  Fortunately, Nan seems reassured by my compliments; she is perfect just as she is.  This morning her cousin Bo called to say she was back in Phayao, no longer working as a bar girl in Bangkok.  She did not say if she is still pregnant.  Today Nan is playing with her new toy, a Blackberry mobile phone (although in her case it's a whiteberry).  She was quite envious of all that my new iPod Touch could do, and now I've been effectively one-upped since what it can't do is make phone calls.  Last weekend we went to see the new "Twilight" franchise, "Eclipse."  She loves Robert and I loved the cheese popcorn and big Coke.  I've tried to follow the FIFA World Cup 2010 matches but unfortunately the finals are telecast at 1:30 am Bangkok time so I satisfy myself with reading news stories about the games the next morning.  Go Spain!  And, finally, it's also time for the new season of Academy Fantasia, the 7th year for the spectacular Thai TV talent show.  Everything is delightfully over the top, costumes, lighting and staging, and the contestants are overly made up and not entirely talented, but wonderfully eager.  The audience is filled with fans waving neon cards with their favorites' names and numbers in different colors.  Nan tells me we can get tickets to one of the weekly Saturday evening extravaganzas before the top prize is won in six weeks, and I'd love to go.  I will be the only one of my kind in attendance.

What I probably will not be doing, at least in the short term, is writing much about politics in Thailand.  I continue to make comments and share stories on my Facebook page, but the current situation is not open to critical perspectives.  The State of Emergency continues in Bangkok and much of the country and the jails are filling with critics and opponents of the military-backed royalist regime, increasingly more authoritarian every day.  The future event which cannot be discussed is a dark cloud over the current phony blather about "reconciliation."  Those whose voice is being left out of the national conversation have yet to make known their future plans.  The rest of us watch the World Cup and Academy Fantasia 7.

An Anarchist History of Civilization

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to conventional understanding, hill tribe peoples in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia are seen as living museums of prehistoric life, the way we were before becoming civilized. The Virtual Hilltribe Museum Online, from whom I borrowed this photo of their staff members, describes them as immigrants, highland ethnic minorities who "have been entering Thailand for more than a century." But political historian James C. Scott, in a new paradigm-shattering book, argues that "wave" theories of migration have been discredited for lack of evidence and that these are non-state rather than pre-state peoples who have lived in a large region he calls "Zomia" for over two millennia in tension with the various dominant states. Most Thai, he says, are ex-hill people. "The "just-so" story of civilization confounds "civilization" with what was, in fact, state-making."

Civilization is not all it's cracked up to be, we learn in Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The Yale professor has written numerous books about state formation and resistance to its predatory practices in which he stresses the agency, or choices, of the poor. In his latest book, he claims that "ethnic identity was more a political choice than a genealogical given" as people fled to safe upland refuges to evade incorporation into valley states. They became "barbarians by design." Once we accept that many people might decline to accept the blessings of servitude, taxation, forced labor, military conscription, and disease, "the standard civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly." For Scott, today's named hill tribes -- the Wa, Hmong, Karen, Kachin, Lahu, Akha, Yao/Mien, Palaung, Lisu/Lisaw and others -- are political identities chosen in the past from a portfolio of cultural possibilities by fugitives fleeing oppressive states. These identities have come over time to acquire their own history, Scott explains. "The longer and deeper this history is, the more it will resemble the mythmaking and forgetting of nationalism."

For most of known history, states were exceptions rather than the rule. "Living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition," Scott writes. States in Southeast Asia developed 3,000 years ago when the invention of wet rice cultivation in the valleys enabled the powerful to concentrate people and production in a small area where the surplus could be appropriated to support an elite. Rulers borrowed the trappings and rituals of their Chinese and Indic neighbors (what the author calls "cosmological bluster") to establish an identity and attempt to secure loyalty from their subjects. Scott cites extensive evidence to show constant flight from state cores due to the intolerable conditions that threatened to destabilize these early states. Since the region was land rich but people poor, states relied on warfare to seize captives, and slavery, "the most important 'cash crop' of pre-colonial Southeast Asia," to replace those who had run away to the hills where they could not be easily found. This picture is "radically at odds with older prevailing assumptions of a primeval population in the hills abandoned by those who moved downhill and developed civilizations..an aboriginal population that had failed, for one reason or another, to make the transition to a more civilized way of life."

"Zomia" is the name coined a few years ago by a Dutch scholar to describe the Southeast Asian massif above 250-300 meters which stretches from the Vietnam highlands to the Tibetan plateau and contains 80-100 million people. At 2.5 million square meters, it is the size of Europe, and was at one time, according to Scott, the "largest mosaic of relatively stateless people in the world," a region of "bewildering ethnic and linguistic complexity." He calls it a "shatter zone" comparable to similar stateless areas in the Caucasus, Balkans, highland West Africa and South America, as well as Appalachia, the Great Dismal Swamp and the Iraq marshlands. These fugitives became non-sedentary by choice to avoid capture and came up with various escape strategies. First was the location in inaccessible terrain and second was mobility. For subsistence, they practiced swidden "slash-and-burn" agriculture and planted root crops that were easily hidden. Their social structures were small, dispersed, egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Religious practices were in opposition to the culture they had left, animist and Taoist rather than the Theravada Buddhism that legitimized the large states. Only a few tribal peoples have writing and most have legends about how they lost it. Scott believes the abandonment of literacy might have been one escape strategy when writing is seen as a form of state control and enforced orthodoxy. The Gypsies, he recalls, have no writing, history, shrines, ruins, anthems or monuments. "They are the ultimate bobbing and weaving people."

The relation between valley and hill people invariably involved a to-ing and fro-ing. "Lowland states have always existed in symbiosis with hill society," Scott writes. "It is crucial to understand that what is being evaded is not a relationship per se with the state but an evasion of subject status." From the beginning of state formation, states captured and coerced some people while others got away. Each group, however, depended on the other for trade in valued commodities. While valley systems were centripetal, gathering people together, hill systems were centrifugal and fragmented them, multiplying identities as they pursued different varieties of escape strategies. As Scott writes several times for emphasis: "Ethnicity and 'tribe' begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end." Scott's work will make it harder to ground histories in nation-states, and even in regions like "Southeast Asia" without considering cross-border ecological and social relations, and his radical construction view of ethnic identities no doubt will trouble anthropologists.

The entities represented as "tribes" seldom exist with anything like the substantiality of state imaginings. This misrepresentation is due not only to the official identities cooked up by the state but also to the need of ethnographers and historians for social identities that can serve as a coherent object of description and analysis. It is hard to produce an account of, let alone govern, a social organism that is continually going in and out of focus.

Scott is not the first to invert the "civilization/barbarism" binary opposition and show the ideology behind it; environmental philosophers like John Muir have used it to score points against the destructive dominant culture. But the charge that hill people are backward still carries weight in Thailand. Nan, who comes from a northern province where many live, often in resettlement villages, believes they are dirty and deal drugs (some supported themselves by growing opium poppies, a practice now outlawed and relatively controlled). I am sure this is what she has been taught. During the Vietnam War, many hill people were killed by Thai troops looking for communists and homegrown liberals who had fled into the hills from Bangkok after bloody anti-government demonstrations in the 1970s. Because Thai identity is predicated on loyalty to King, Buddhism and the nation, hill people (as well as Muslim insurgents in the South) are excluded from most definitions of "Thainess." They are sometimes classed with migrants and refugees, housed in camps and denied the all important identification card required for most national services. Even when included as citizens, their schools and infrastructure do not receive equal funding. As Hjorleifur Jonsson pointed out in Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand (a book Scott considers an influence on his work), hill people nevertheless revere the King, play football, celebrate Thai festivals and worship the same pop icons as their valley counterparts, while retaining some traditions that distance themselves from full control of the state.

The history of Zomia and those who got away ends after World War Two, Scott admits, when states embarked on a conscious strategy of engulfment and eventual absorption of the hills. To extend control completely to its geographical borders, states employed "distance-demolishing technologies": railroads, surfaced roads, bridges, airplanes and helicopters, telegraph and telephone, forest-felling, defoliation, modern weapons, satellite photography and GPS, as well as the internet. Thongchai Winichakul's insightful Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, tells the story of how the imaginary nation of Siam became geographically solidified. The "entire globe," Scott writes, is now "administered space." The future, he says, lies in the "daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it."

Scott's work has been criticized for the usual reasons, over-generalization and use of secondary resources in English to buttress his arguments. One thorough critique is by Mandy Sadan from the School of Oriental and African Studies whose research focus is the Kachin people. She sees the book as a paradigm for thinking rather than an accurate history about the hill people. Because of it, "it will be impossible to discuss the uplands of Southeast Asia in the same way again, and some who had never discussed them before will be discussing them for the first time." She will be a participant and Scott will be the keynote speaker at a conference in Chiang Mai next November on "Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation," sponsored by the Asian Borderlands Research Network, which takes it's theme from Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed. I'd like to attend.

Almost all graduate schools ask their students in history to choose a field of study from a nation state or a region composed of several states, a requirement that can hold them back from exploring interconnected issues in politics, agriculture and history, as Scott does. I hope (but doubt) his challenge will be heard by university history departments. Finally, his work denaturalizes the state (Benedict Anderson did the same with the nation state in Imagined Communities), and it should no longer be possible to blindly assume that this method of exercising power and organizing people is the final stage of social and political evolution. The only alternatives now to the nation state are cross-border associations and regional governments like Catalonia, and they should be investigated. Anarchism today, or what might be called coordination and cooperation without the hierarchy of a state, no longer seems possible under the prevailing regime of control. Civilization, in its national and ethnic guise, reigns supreme.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilization, replied: "I think it would be a good idea."

The Absence of Angst

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

The monks listened carefully as I played "America" for them, Simon & Garfunkel's ode to existential angst, Their task was to fill in the blanks with ten missing English words and mine was to explain what drove the two young people in the song to leave their homes and seek fulfillment on the road. It wasn't easy without cultural points of reference. I decided against mentioning Kerouac and instead talked about the backpackers they've seen in Bangkok, young wanderers from America and Europe in search of something in the mysterious East far from home. In Paul Simon's telling of the mythic journey, two companions decide to "marry our fortunes together" and, carrying "some real estate here in my bag," set out to look for America. More likely, they were looking for themselves, far away from the place where they felt they did not fit. Joseph Campbell popularized this undertaking as a "hero's journey," and seekers in the West have come to see life as a journey or pilgrimage which requires leaving home in order to achieve their goal.

My students were polite but uncomprehending. Why would anyone want to leave home and family other than to get an education or a job? All but one of the three dozen monks come from small villages in Thailand, Cambodia, Burma and Laos. The lesson that day from the American Headway 2 text I use was "The Way We Live," and for their weekly oral presentation I asked them to speak about their experience coming to Bangkok to study and what they missed from home. While they appreciated the conveniences of Bangkok, with a 7-11 on every corner and technological gadgets easily obtainable, they missed everything from their parents and childhood friends to their rice fields and buffalo. I'm learning about Southeast Asian culture through their stories and nothing is more different than the way children are raised. I was taught to be independent and to leave home in order to make my way in the world. Asians are taught to be interdependent and, at least metaphorically, to never leave home and family. I suspect that these young men, rooted in place, have never felt either lost, empty or aching.

I attempted to explain these feelings, so common in the west (the Dalai Lama was reportedly amazed to learn of the widespread condition of alienation in the West), with reference to the presence of dukkha, often mistranslated as "suffering," which begins the Buddha's analysis of the human condition. Suggested translations of the Pali word range from "dis-ease" to "angst" and "pain." The difficulties caused by birth, illness, aging and death are universal, but the numerous disstisfactions created by our minds I suspect are culturally varied. Asians truly care about, and for, their parents, even when they're gone. (Nan recently dreamt about her grandmother who died six months ago and we went to the temple the next Sunday to make a gift in her memory.) Westerners celebrate the cutting of family ties and rarely look back. After I left home, my parents were reluctant to invade my privacy, even by phone, and I was careless about keeping in touch with them. We want to create ourselves anew without any debts to the past, orphans in deed if not in geneology. Asians, on the other hand, embrace that debt to the pair who gave them birth, even when (I've heard of this often) their parenting was not very admirable.

I know well the mind-forged manacles of existential angst. My life has been a journey, often a flight, from stability and respectability, lured by the siren's call to adventure and occasional disgrace. Success I usually interpreted as a call to move on. My father lamented the fact that I switched jobs frequently (he grew up at a time when employee loyalty was expected). My two wives and four children suffered from the many unrealistic dreams I pursued, often under the cover of a spiritual pilgrimage. I've turned icons into idols and held on to ideas as if my life depended on them being correct. And I've frequently felt lost, aching and empty, unable to determine why. At my lowest point, I turned to drink and drugs to mask the pain. This misguided strategy killed my son Luke last year.

Despite all the wrong moves, all the fruitless seeking in the wrong places, and all the self-centered justifications that make friendship and interdependence difficult, I have someone managed to end up amazingly in Thailand. I thought about calling this blog post "Found in Translation" to indicate that different languages and experiences need not separate us (as in Sofia Coppola's movie "Lost in Translation" set in Japan), because I've found a home here in this Southeast Asian country, thousands of miles from the land of my birth, despite and maybe even because of the exotic strangeness that surrounds me every day. A month shy of my 71st birthday, and two months before I celebrate three years in Bangkok, I am reminded daily, every time I walk out of my apartment building into the blooming, buzzing confusion of the street, how blessed I am to be here.

I'd like to write a love letter to Bangkok and to Thailand, but too often I get distracted by philosophy, psychology or politics. Besides, I could never top Janet Brown's wonderful Tone Deaf in Thailand for its earthy appreciation of the city that has charmed us both. Now that I seem to have burnt all bridges leading back to the place that produced me, I want to sing of the wonders of my new home and how every stroll through the streets and the shops and the byways of the city reveals some unfamiliar truth that enlightens my life, how even the messy sadness of urban poverty can inspire the very interdependence and compassion that escaped me before. If I were the poet that I wished I were, I would sing about the fluttering flocks of school kids in their uniforms (all in white shirts with boys in dark short pants, girls in short-short skirts), the waves of pastel-colored taxis, the slow saunter of pedestrians dodging motorbikes on the sidewalks, movable carts selling fruit and barbecued meat on a stick, vendors on the overpass with their small selections of flip-flops and phone chargers, the smelly canals that once ferried travelers but now collect garbage, multicolored buses disgorging and accepting passengers in the middle of traffic, flower sellers stringing garlands for Monk's Day, territorial soi dogs badly in need of a cleanup and a vet, indecipherable signs (for me at least) in that incredibly graceful Thai script, the broad waters of the Chao Phraya River clogged with the invasive water hyacinth and styrofoam, and toothpicks on every restaurant table. Failing that, I take pictures.

My life here is full to bursting. It's hard to remember that it once felt temporary. While I encounter the strange and mysterious every day, my apartment now is home and Bangkok is a place as familiar as anywhere I've lived. Nan has begun her classes at Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University three days a week in the late afternoon and early evening. She is delighted to be a student again. This term she's taking an English class (of course I'll be her tutor) and one, I think, in Thai and global sociology. I'm not sure about the third, perhaps business computing which is her major. She's made new friends, and last weekend we bought her a desk and a bookcase for her study corner (mine is in the bedroom and we share a printer). I am teaching the same group of students for the second term and have been awarded with an air-conditioned classroom, one of the few in the temple building where I teach. But it's on the fourth floor, a sturdy climb, which almost cancels out the advantage. I could use additional work and have been contacting people at Mahachula and other schools, but I fear my age now is a disadvantage despite how much my current students seem to like me (and I them). Dr. Sman, a Thai man my age with whom I taught a Saturday class last term, has signed us up for a four Sundays English class at a temple south of the city in August. And at the Day of Vesak conference last month I met an Englishman who volunteers as a teacher at MCU's campus in Chiang Rai. He told me there is a bigger campus in Phayao near Nan's village that might like an English program. Now Nan and I are thinking that in the not too distant future we may leave Bangkok for northern Thailand and a much different experience of my new home.

The curious saga of Nan's cousins continues. To recap, Nan's late grandmother's sister, Sa, has two wayward granddaughters, Ben and Bo (far right in photo). Ben has a son named Bag, now two, , fathered by a boy five years younger than she. Ben's father has worked for many years in Taiwan, and while Sa and Ben's mom raise Bag, she's been working as a bar girl in Chiang Rai, and recently suffered a miscarriage. Her 17-year-old sister Bo ran away last September to Bangkok to become a lesbian, but Sa and Ben came to fetch her back (when this photo was taken) after Nan alerted them. A month ago Bo ran away again, stealing a selling a valuable necklace of her grandmother's, and the lesbian friend got her a job as a prostitute in a bar not far from our apartment. She told Nan was was taking ya ba (speed) and living above the bar. Her father called Nan in distress for help, and a couple of days ago Sa and Ben returned on the overnight bus from Phayao. They confronted Bo who had that day learned she was pregnant. She's certain the father is a 19-year-old boy from Ubon who works in another bar. Bo came back to our room with Sa and Ben for a tearful night of talking and little sleep. Yesterday, however, Sa was unable to talk Bo into returning to their village. She wants to stay with the father who said he wants her to have the baby. "Bo's life is very dark," Nan told me. Some people, I added, are just self destructive and no one can figure out why (thinking of Luke).

Looking for My Self

Long ago I concluded that the most important questions in life were: "Who am I?" and "What am I to do"? The second is pretty much a closed book now in old age as I slide toward oblivion. Cleaning up the messes I've made is certainly a high priority. But the first question still has me stumped. You'd think, after writing over 400 blog posts here in the past four years, that I'd have a clue. I can think up long lists of attributes and accomplishments to go with the name my parents gave me. But when I compare my sense of self, of who I am, with the feedback I receive from others, cognitive dissonance arises.

The Buddhists have the notion of no self, anattā in the Pali, which denies the existence of an unchanging essential or metaphysical self, a soul, that transcends the body, although there is a certain something that accumulates kamma through good and bad actions and determines consequences, usually after rebirth (if you believe in that sort of thing). This empirical self is personal but not eternal. The self that lives in this world attached to this body is the the product of sensory input, mental intentions (mind is one of the six senses for Buddhists) and actions taken, a veritable stew of individuality with nothing left over at death.

These philosophical ideas, however, provide little comfort from the slings and arrows of judgment and rejection. Someone my age is bound to have accumulated a few enemies. The little boy I hit with a pipe when I was five probably never forgave me. I've had my share of disagreements. My friends have possessed many and varied temperaments, some so different from mine that I've had to juggle my reactions and dissemble my thoughts in order not to offend them. But finding compromise in a relationship is like dancing; sometimes we step on each other toes. I learned at an early age to avoid confrontation as best I could, and have gone to great lengths to placate and pacify my opponents. Much of my stubbornness unfortunately oozes out in a passive aggressive manner. I do lose my temper, frequently, but the best I can say of it is that it soon passes and I am quick to beg forgiveness. I have been a faithful friend, loyal to those I made in my youth with a fierce possessiveness. Facebook has reunited me with quite a few.

What of the people closest to us, those as near as our jugular vein (to misuse a Koranic verse)? From long familiarity, it seems they should know us as well as we know ourselves. They've been there through thick and thin. Often, though, it is they who are most judgmental, holding us to a standard from their past we can no longer achieve. The fact is, we are not transparent to others. All they have to go by are our words and deeds. The complicated mental gyrations we spin, the moral intentions we intend, are invisible to them, and our attempts to explain are often misunderstood. How can we articulate our mental representations, often resembling dreams or even nightmares, to another person? In the end, all we are left with are misconstrued hunches and guesses.

I think I'm a good person, but I'm hard put to prove it. My intentions are ever kind and generous. I seek to avoid doing harm to anyone. The five precepts of Buddhism are a good guide, better than the God-centered Judeo-Christian 10 Commandments with obedience is the key. Buddhists pledge to avoid killing, lying, stealing, sexual misconduct, and indulging in mind-altering drugs and alcohol. When I was 10 I killed a bird with my BB gun and swore off hunting forever. I've never killed a person; thankfully asthma kept me out of the war in Vietnam. In Thailand eating meat is accepted so long as you don't kill your dinner. Lying and stealing are more complicated when you think about not telling the truth to avoid hurting someone, or violating copyright laws on the internet. As for sexual misconduct and use of intoxicants, I am guilty as charged, but sorry as hell. It's clear to me that my offenses are largely attributable to selfishness and self-centeredness, not to mention ignorance, greed and anger, and now that I'm in my twilight years I want to change that.

It hurts to discover that my intentions are misunderstood and sometimes only my faults illuminate my persona. When criticized, I can immediately churn out a whole raft of justifications. Because I am a word person, I'm pretty good at it. I can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my mother would say. My shit can smell as sweet as the output from my Oregon cousin's compost toilet. But those who know me best see quickest through my verbal disguise. Or at least they deny the truth of the justification, no matter how true it might seem to the inner me. Who knows me better than I know myself? And this gets back to the original question: "Who am I?" Do I really know? Can I ever completely know? For of course Freud and a host of followers and innovators of the discipline of psychology have discovered innumerable ways in which we are a mystery to ourselves.

Since I no longer have any faith in metaphysical answers to unanswerable questions, I am on the lookout for a moral grounding to my actions, one that will give me confidence to say I am a good man. My friend Jim subscribes to a "do the right thing" philosophy which affirms the findings of cognitive psychologists that children intuit at an early age in their culture how to tell right from wrong. In Spike Lee's film of the same name, a violent confrontation in a minority neighborhood reveals two separate answers to the problem of racism, the ideas of Martin Luther King and those of Malcolm X. On violence, they are incompatible. I think Lee's answer is that morality is messy, like life, and there are no perfect actions to use in every situation.

I know the times in my life when I did wrong. I also understand most of the inexcusable reasons for what I did. I've asked forgiveness, and sometimes have gotten it. Christianity has an edge on forgiveness, claiming that the divine offers to forgive everything if you ask for it (and believe). There are people I've hurt in my life who can't forgive me. And there are others whom I can't forgive for what they did to me. I think forgiving and forgiveness go together and unless and until I can give up my own judgments I will be subject to the judgments of others. But I can't prove this.

This blog post I've discovered is really about the lack of forgiveness I feel in my life. And the response I think is in how I live the rest of my life.