Perfection

With palms together,

Good Morning All,

At the conclusion of the Wisdom Heart Sutra we chant "Gate, gate, gate, paragata, parasamgata, Bodhi Svaha!" Or, Gone, gone, gone to the other shore, attained the other shore having never left, Awaken. Hooray!" Gate, pronounced gah-tay, is the sino-japanaese word for paramita. We translate paramita as "perfection" or "excellence." It is understood to be a reference to attainment. So, this dharani, (short mantra) is saying that attainment is something we already possess, even though we strive to attain it. The "other shore," attainment, enlightenment, is with us right now, right here. It is us. It is the universe.

The combining of qualities and notions such as "shore," "perfection," "excellence," "crossing," never leaving, attaining, etc. is a linguistic way of picking up a hammer and cracking ourselves over the head. All one, yet different. This shore, this moment, this understanding is the same as that moment, that shore, that understanding. And there is no real movement from one to the other because they exist in the same time and in the same space simultaneously.

Our effort to be good people, to sit strong Zen, is nothing more than the sweat equity involved in growing a tree knowing that the fruit, the branches, the roots, and shade of that tree already exist in the seed, in the ground, in the air, and in the water. We still make the effort. We still till the soil, plant the seed and nurse the plant. Yet when we do so with open eyes, effort is bliss.

Be well.

Oh say (what) can you see?

With palms together,

I read a story yesterday on the Associated Press wire, I think it was, about documents that suggest the US Army took wives and children hostage as a tactic to coerce insurgents to surrender. If this story is true, I am appalled. More than appalled. I am sickened. For so many decades the United States has held itself out as the "good guy" in world conflict. We make much ado about insurgents taking hostages, about our not negotiating with "terrorists." Yet, here we are.

Has our moral compass been so thoroughly disrupted? Are we so fundamentally broken? I am deeply worried about my nation. Our people seem to have lost faith. We have seemingly been sold a bill of goods by our government and the conservative, Christian Right who, evidence would suggest are mean-spirited bigots who will apparently condone pretty much any behavior in the name of their values.

Torture, hostage taking, holding "enemy combatants" forever without trial or charges, premptive invasion of another country, domestic spying, corruption, ...all recent Republican efforts. Its as though when they achieved power in government they felt free to throw off the shackles of civilization and live as they saw fit regardless of the rights of others.

What's a good Buddhist to do?

Be well.

Zero Tolerance

With palms together,

Good Morning All,

We have all heard of "zero tolerance" policies. Zero tolerance is a masculine vote getter. It is strong, unbending, decisive. It allows no "wiggle room," no "fuzzy" thinking. It is for communities that "know" what they want, or more precisely, what they don't want. And like art, these communities, "know it when they see it." All of which, of course, abandons thought, dialogue, understanding, and compassion. Zero tolerance disallows forgiveness. It cannot permit gray. It fears examination.

I once worked with a sixth grade child in a Middle School. He was suspended for making a gun out of his hand, as in a pantomime, and "shooting" at another child. He violated the school's "zero tolerance" policy against weapons and violence. Another child suspended for teasingly kissing a girl in the cheek. They were in the second grade. A violation of sexual harassment policy.

From a policing point of view, zero tolerance is a cop's dream. School administrators, police and sheriff departments, and politicians are off the thoughtfulness hook.

From a reality point of view, it is a nightmare, disallowing play and experimentation, disallowing intelligent discussion, a broad horizon of ideas, and an relentless unwillingness to engage differences between cultures.

It is not an expression of the Middle Way.

Now here is where it gets sticky. We will not "negotiate" with "terrorists." We must get a grasp of the language issues here. On the one hand this zero tolerance policy is understandable. Those who employ violence to get what they want should not get it. On the other hand, we are using the label "terrorist" all too easily as a way of avoiding examining the feelings and motivations behind the "terrorist" behavior. From my point of view, for instance, violence is violence. In each case violence is a terror. It injures, maims and kills. It really does not matter whether that violence is dressed in a "good guy" uniform or a "bad guy" uniform or no uniform at all.

Negotiation is what? Talk with a purpose of finding a middle way. A way to resolve differences and discover an equitable solution. When we have a zero tolerance there are no solutions except to silence the other guy. Easy. No thinking, no examination. Just stop the other guy from being a thorn in our side, from putting his finger in our nice little cake we've baked and called civilization. I don't know about you, but when there is tape across my mouth my only wish is to tear it off.

So here is where it really gets sticky. What if we are talking about Hamas. What if we are talking about the "side" that blew up the World Trade Towers. Is it one thing to have a zero tolerance against children pointing imaginary guns in school and another to fly airplanes into building? Indeed. Silly question. The thing is, if we refuse to examine the karma in our world, that is, the linkages between cultural and religious perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as they conflict with others, we are destined not to find solutions. The stronger the effort to not engage, the stronger the effort to engage. People will be heard. It is our job to listen.

Be well.

Just Do It

Good Morning All, This quote from one of my favorite books and Teachers, is very important to keep in mind as we go through our day. I thank Tricycle Magazine for providing this quote for us today. I have been attempting to teach this point throughout my career as a priest and therapist. It all begins with a simple choice: be a buddha. Whoah! Too much? OK, well, then, be good. How's that? Still too much? Well then, be good for ten minutes. Still too much? OK then, try a different tack, don't do bad. Too much? Don't do as much bad. Do as little bad as you possibly can. Here's the thing, when we bring 'doing good' or 'not doing bad' to our consciousness, we are waking up our buddha-nature and giving it permission to exist in our lives. When we think we must "be buddhas" then it is overwhelming and we soon lose hope and go back to our old ways. Recrimination is a poison that erodes our practice. So, strive. Lean toward being a buddha. Turn your boat in that direction and float if you want, paddle, or row hard. Its in the turning of direction and commitment to steer that makes us a bodhisattva. Now, just do it. Be well. Tricycle's Daily Dharma: January 26, 2006 An Ordinary Person A bodhisattva is an ordinary person who takes up a course in his or her life that moves in the direction of Buddha. You're a bodhisattva. I'm a bodhisattva; actually, anyone who directs their attention, their life, to practicing the way of life of a Buddha is a bodhisattva. --Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought

Scents of Life

With palms together,

Good Morning All,

This morning the sky is cloudy. The grass was wet as I walked the dogs. There was moisture in the air. All of these are fresh and common to my senses. Gray, the seeming dampening of color, is soundless, mute stillness hiding the sun's rise across the sky.

I enjoy such mornings. This morning I went outside with small plastic bags and the dog's brushes. I brushed each of them in their turn. Then picked up all the dog waste in the area. I noticed the scent of the water in the dirt and on the grasses and shrubs. Earth. I noticed the feel of the dog's hair as it came off in their brushes. Doing these little jobs keeps us in touch with life. It is one of the things I miss somewhat about life in the forest. Life surrounded us there. Racoons, bobcats, skunks, deer, elk, coyotes, cattle: each with their habits and scents. There, when the dogs went out, they were on a mission to secure the property boundaries. They had work to do.

I would split the day's wood for the cookstove, check the water levels in the tanks, feed the horses and alpacas, and enjoy the wind as it moved through the pines. If nature called, there was no need to do anything but follow the call right there.

Here, there are apartments stacked nicely into geometric patterns. Each trimmed and painted. Toilets wash away the residue of our human processes in a sanitary flash. No scents of life, rather the scent of cleansers and soap permeate the air. The work we do is more the work of withered flowers than of human beings. We sit around, pale reminders of what we were. Still we keep at it.

Now, neither are good or bad. Life's processes are just what they are regardless of where and when. There is a purpose in youth. A purpose in age. A purpose in the mountains. A purpose in the city. It is our life's work to discover them.

Be well.

Not my America

Good Morning Again,

I Just read this article and could not help myself. I felt it was important to post this as widely as possible. This is not my America. It is not what I defended in Vietnam. It is not what I grew up to know about us. This story and the story about the outsourcing of torture by the US as reported by the EU is deeply troubling. We have voices. We should use them.
Be well,

The Other Big Brother

The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.

By Michael Isikoff

Newsweek

Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror links, without obtaining warrants.

Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S. government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public realizes.

It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon spokesman declined to say why a private company like Halliburton would be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the past, Defense Department officials have said that the "force protection" mission includes military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work closely with them and therefore could be in danger.

CIFA researchers apparently cast a wide net and had a number of surveillance methods—both secretive and mundane—at their disposal. An internal CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation recently obtained by William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes widely about military affairs, gives some idea how the group operated. The presentation, which Arkin provided to NEWSWEEK, shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. (The group's motto appears at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide: "Counterintelligence 'to the Edge'.") But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.

That may have been how the Pentagon came to be so interested in a small gathering outside Halliburton. On June 23, 2004, a few days before the Halliburton protest, an ad for the event appeared on houston.indymedia.org, a Web site for lefty Texas activists. "Stop the war profiteers," read the posting. "Bring out the kids, relatives, Dick Cheney, and your favorite corporate pigs at the trough as we will provide food for free."

Four months later, on Oct. 25, the TALON team reported another possible threat to national security. The source: a Miami antiwar Web page. "Website advertises protest planned at local military recruitment facility," the internal report warns. The database entry refers to plans by a south Florida group called the Broward Anti-War Coalition to protest outside a strip-mall recruiting office in Lauderhill, Fla. The TALON entry lists the upcoming protest as a "credible" threat. As it turned out, the entire event consisted of 15 to 20 activists waving a giant BUSH LIED sign. No one was arrested. "It's very interesting that the U.S. military sees a domestic peace group as a threat," says Paul Lefrak, a librarian who organized the protest.

Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity masking" software that would allow the agency to create phony Web identities and let them appear to be located in foreign countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer Sciences Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)

Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 days—unless they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was "improperly stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name). "It was an oversight." In a memo last week, obtained by NEWSWEEK, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its files—and directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department policies.

That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's activities and who it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box [Pentagon officials] don't want opened," says Arkin. "What we're looking at is hints of what they're doing." As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we've already seen too much.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

The Flavor of Your Kindness

With palms together,

Good Morning Sangha,

Each of brings energy into the world. Some bring angry energy, some happy energy, some sad energy, and each of these eneries are expressed through our affect and behavior. It is reflected in the choices we make. People see us and see reflected in us the energy we are communicating. In this way, the energy travels.

It is important for us to understand that which energy is being expressed is a result of the thoughts we have and that these thoughts are based on perception, though in most cases a perception distorted by our memory. Our memory forms a virtual encyclopedia of senses, experiences, concepts; it is our universe and is kept active by a little monkey that seems to delight in stirring the couldron.

The thing is, we have the ability to see directly without the couldron of history. In so doing we see without distortion. We see without our history. In such cases we see exactly and precisely what is there with nothing added; no discrimination, no like, no dislike, no name. When we see this way only Buddha-nature is communicated in our affect and our behavior.

I often rant about the fall of civilization, both western and eastern. I rant about materialism and hedonism. I rant about Wal-Mart and McDonalds, about obesity and (to borrow from another religious tradition) the other deadly sins. These rants contain an expression of affect and are a behavior. They betray, to a certain extent, a standard and a judgement regarding a deviation from that standard.

Where does this standard come from? Is a moment of the cushion or on a walk or in an activity which reveals a clear perception of the buddha within that standard? And if so, what do we do with it?

As we allow this buddha to arise and manifest itself in us, we are manifesting the excellences of our Original Nature. We are the paramitas: generosity, patience, precepts, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. We know that on the one hand, all things are the dharma and are expressions of the universe in process. We know on the other hand that some of these expressions are conducive to the discovery of harmony and compassion, whgereas others are distractions, poisons, if you will, that take us away from a compassionate heart.

It comes to intent. Intent is key to the proiduction of karma. If our rant is for the sake of bringing beings closer to the attainment of perfection, then it is one thing, a noble purpose. If on the other hand the rant is for our personal gratification, to simply "vent" or to prove another is wrong, corrupt, a failure, whatever, then this is a sin, a mis-step along our path.

All of our affect, all of our behavior should thus be evaluated by us as we get up from bed and go through our day. Our practice is to bring our buddha-nature into the world through our compassionate action.To do this we need to recognize our intent and act for the correct purposes. To do this, we need to develop a strong zazen practice. Time with ourselves on the cushion in quiet stillness and serene reflection is a direct patrh to clarity.

With deep love and affection for all.