In response to Buddhist teachers who are troubled by those of us who collect degrees

Going on retreat is my annual detox but I'm starting to notice some disturbing patterns within the cannon of current Buddhist teaching that give rise to a couple of questions. First, are we really engaged in some consuming, desperate search for happiness as a means to avoid 'the wasteland of life and what it can do to people' as one teacher recently described it? Second, is there really no joy to be found in my thinking self? Must my critical faculties become redundant, to be replaced by a sturdy gaze at my own navel?

I understand that so much of what we think of as suffering is self-inflicted but I come away from a retreat again with the feeling that a whole week of teachings have just ignored the structural. I could be missing something but sometimes it's not just our emotional habits that need looking at. I would imagine that the pain of a woman who has to now negotiate with her partner because suddenly she is doing all the childcare and house work and helping out on the farm, is more about patriarchy and lack of affordable child care than a lack of understanding duality.

It is interesting that there is always a predominance of women at these gatherings (or maybe it's just the ones that I go to). The examples as a result centre on family and child rearing but not women as managers, as negotiators, as leaders, as individuals that may possibly have a life outside relationships that define them (wife, mother etc). And there is a sense of genuine loss and despair for some, caught between rocks and hard places; finding themselves in impossible positions not of their own making in which something has to give, most likely them; women trying to find a solution that doesn't (or maybe does) involve imploding relationships, repeating cycles of dysfunction, trying to find skilful ways of dealing with life.

But it's not enough, in addressing these challenges, to just turn and face our fear of rejection/failure/our parents didn't love us enough. It's about turning and facing violence, poverty and politics. I know I cannot live only in my head, but I still need to use it. And if cognitive knowledge is not what we need why do I hear teachers now consistently referring to neuro-psychology and quantum physics to justify the ancients ... athough I really wish they wouldn't. The Quantum and the Buddhist are two different ways of seeing the same world and one does not have to be authenticated by the other. I know I'm just a novice in this journey towards, or back to, enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure there should never be, in one or consecutive sentences, the words:

Jung, neuroscience, energy essence, yin nor yang, meridian, Chi, Taoism, Buddhism & electrons.

I know that electro-magnetic force is one of the four that hold our existence together, I'm just not sure that doing my yoga outside on the grass is necessarily going to have much effect on my ions, free radicals or electrons. Must I really wade through any more layers of sweetness and happiness and new age gurus before finding that resonating nugget that I can actually hang onto? Must I really be talked at for hours at a time while in the lotus position, regurgitating memories of being dragged off to Church and made to sit and listen to a sermon foreveeeeer? Where's my interactive powerpoint?


I do have the empathy to realise that I am not one of the walking wounded this time for which I am grateful. And who am I to denigrate anyone else's search for a life worth living which if nothing else demonstrates the grace to pass the tissues around the circle without a word to reach the person who needs them. But I'm not sure I need any more pop-therapy, any more blaming of the family for all eccentricities (some yes, but not all). I'm not sure I need any more affirming aphorisms or Californian songs telling me to 'get it together'. I'm definitely sure I don't need any more love stories. We are saturated with love; true or not, authentic or not. What I need, my teachers, is quiet. Peace. Skillful reflection. Enough with the talk. Just let me be with my cognition, my distractions from time to time. It's good for my soul.

 

How to be good ...

So ten minutes out of Buddha Bootcamp and what happens ... I'm on the train trying to find my seat ... And there's a pensioner sitting in it. What to do? At the sound of her husband's excuse that they didnt know they had to reserve a seat it crosses my mind that he's lying out of his arse ... It's summer in France and this is a train. You don't get on it love without a reservation. I didn't actually say that. Just thought it. That probably still counts as bad karma. I pride myself however on actually saying 'ce n'est pas grave', and walk up the carriage to find a spare seat. Bugger. No spare seats. It's jamboree season and the train is full of scouts. Hell hath nothing on travelling during scout season. Facing the prospect of standing for an hour (as the scouts have taken all spare capacity and show no sign of getting out of their seats for a middle aged woman) I moan to the conductor who finds me a spare place. The husband and wife show no sign of gratitude and I give them death stares all the way to Limoges. That's probably bad karma as well. I am very attached it seems to displays of gratitude but then Buddha never had to travel on a train full of scouts. And besides, the principle of unreciprocated gifts sucks.

I'm not surprised really at such unBuddhistly thoughts popping into my head when even at bootcamp I had an attack of vipassana vendetta after someone sat in my meditation spot. Okay, it was her first meditation and she probably didn't realise that non-attached buddhists do in fact often get attached to their meditation spots when we've spent hours getting the stack of cushions just the right height and found the perfect shawls that are long enough to keep toes warm as well as head, it's not too near the front to attract the attention of the teacher in case he asks any tricky questions about non-duality, and not too near the back to get the drafts from the door. Attachment seems to grow even more stronger during periods of resource scarcity ... Everyone seemed to need at least three cushions (just in case knees started hurting and more height was required) even though we're only actually using two, and the shawls were all gone in 60 seconds. Good to know that when the apocalypse finally arrives the buddhists will be fighting for the last spot on the life raft as well. I'll just do it with a trained mind, in full awareness as I boot a pensioner out of my seat.