Zen and saving money

Brad Warner said that the thought process never goes anywhere.  We can cogitate and cogitate but when it comes time to act, all that thinking will turn out to have been totally irrelevant.  And if we follow a train of our own thoughts, we can’t expect them to lead us anywhere interesting, like a book would, because we’re just making them up.  (of course, the author is just making up the book.  Meaning and structure are relevant in fiction, require thought.  Why should this not apply to our lives?)

This has caused me to think a lot.  And every time I think I’ve got him foiled, think that there is a circumstance where musing or mulling imagining hypothesizing hypotheticalizing will get me somewhere, Brad turns out to be right after all.  All those thoughts are just running me down.  Yet thought is absolutely crucial to the practice of zazen, because understanding is its ultimate goal (I think).  How can we understand something if we don’t think about it?

The key difference is in following your thoughts versus exploring your thoughts.  A product of the practice of zazen would be a greater skill at exploring the currents of thought that come up naturally rather than damming them before they enter your mind and calling it a day, which is maybe how some people might interpret Brad’s comments on the issue.  Memories intrude, my heart pounds, a schedule pops up, plans are wrought and re-wrought in my brain, all without producing any action in the best cases but a lot of times in fact impeding the action of the tasks immediately in front of me, which have nothing to do with the deluge in my mind that’s keeping me from doing them well.

So if I only have a limited amount of money, and several trips I want to go on this year, plus I’m sure many others that haven’t even occured to me yet, how do I decide which plane ticket to buy except by thinking about it?  This is especially difficult because here “thinking” really just means elaborately daydreaming about what I’ll do in all of my potential destinations, even though I know that daydreams never come true, the reality always ends up forgotten, but I mean really forgotten, so that we don’t even have anything to compare our experiences with, if we’re lucky (and have been practicing zazen).

Portland is nice but I like palm trees.

Arrived in Portland early PM Thursday and within four hours was having one of the best nights out of my life, sitting on the floor of a bar called–get this!–Holocene, drinking the most delicious opalette (gimlet with sambuca), playing grab-hands with about fifteen other pretty kids while I held one of five bare wires run through a computer to turn our collective conductivity into a warbling, pulsing audio signal.  The inventor of the amazing gizmo, who called himself Lonely Dragon, invited more and more people up from around the bar to join in and before long we were just one huge mass of sqeezing and giggling print dresses and courdoroys and button-downs and cardigans and the signal swelled and got louder and richer until Lonely Dragon worked the volume down and shouted: “Eats Tapes is up next!” At which point we all gasped and looked at each other, grinning, saying “that was amazing!  That was so cool!” but not for long because at the ready were in fact Eats Tapes, a cute little couple standing at a table with ten different kinds of mixers and interfaces and wires all over the place and out of the speakers was emanating a little mm-cha, mm-cha beat and I spent the next hour dancing my ass off even though I had been so tired before I left the apartment I swore it would be less than half a drink before I sent myself back to bed.

And then friday: the grand majesty of the Columbia Gorge.  Sparkling high clouds and a radiant sunset.

Saturday: drizzly and cool, bicycles everywhere.  Two hours was not enough at Powell’s books.  Fantastic wine and beet carpaccio at the Farm.

Sunday: two hours was not enough at the Powell’s technical store.  Greg and I are going to learn to build a lonely dragon for ourselves.  Three hour delay in the San Jose airport.

Monday: skipped class to hike with Kelly.  All the highs of the weekend faded before the boundless serenity of a hot dry wind through the chaparral and palm trees.  I may toy with the idea of moving to Portland.  I know it is unsustainable, practically immoral!, to live in LA, but it is the only place in the world where I am ever truly happy.

A new theme for Passover

Over the past few years, I have become familiar with Passover as a strictly metaphorical holiday. The slavery and bondage of my ancestors in Egypt is now my own personal slavery–to boyfriends, to coffee, to arrogance–the strength to escape which I might find in the traditional Passover story. As always, familiarity breeds boredom. I was actually kind of dreading the same old discussion this year… what are we slaves to? Did we spend too much money? Do we watch too much TV? Do we worry too much? Of course! Leave me alone! I’ve spent so much energy the last six months on dealing with exactly these questions, the last thing I wanted to do tonight is rehash my goals and evaluate my progress. Too early for that. So I was relieved when my uncle started out the dinner with a print-out from the NYTimes about the staggering gap between rich and poor, how it is widening, how it is wider than it has been since 1928, and how easy credit and hard bankruptcy are ubiquitous factors in any study of the problem. Debt is slavery, and recent legislation on bankruptcy has made it even harder to escape.

The truth is, our global economy is utterly dependent on slavery. Debt peonage, indentured servitude, the legal status of the vast majority of the cheap labor in this country and throughout the West… these are the pillars on which our rich have built their fantastic wealth, and without which an affordable lifestyle for the rest of us cannot exist. There must be another way, a format for the global economy that does not depend on gross injustice.

At least, that’s my hypothesis. I don’t really have any evidence to back it up, even though it’s almost all I ever really think about. I feel like Jonah. God has called on me to preach to Nineveh (or something. I know my job is with the World and its People, even though I’ve turned away from that job), but instead I’m running away to sea. How long will it be before the whale spits me out? And on what strange shore will I land? Am I supposed to be working towards a PhD in economics instead of ecology? Both, obviously. A sustainable, equitable, affordable world economy is going to have to be ecologically sound as well. Better get cracking.

Food and Sadness

Our emotions are tethered to what we eat.  How much we consume, what our food is made of, and what it tastes like and when have a profound effect on how we feel about ourselves and the world.   Conversely, our mood can determine what we are eating, and how much, and even to some extent what it tastes like when we’re eating it.  A person’s outlook on life, over long periods of time and sounding to the farthest depths of his or her character, may be nothing more than the canalizing of certain attitudes based on the long habituation to certain types or amounts of foods.  The channels of thought and action are  eroded deep into the rocks of consciousness by the modest streams of daily activity, the most important of which since the beginning of life on earth being the consumption of food.  And society is the sum of all this character, formed in each person over a lifetime by eating habits, these eating habits also being hallmarks of a culture, and the culture over time evolving, fracturing, inventing technologies, lifestyles, reforming the landscapes and the ecology of the whole planet.  But why should this story be unique to the evolution of human society?  All creatures need to eat.  We know that humans are not the only organisms who experience moods and manias.  If evolution depends on the  interaction of an individual with its environment, extrapolated throughout the population and the community billions of times, and these interactions can be so greatly affected by mood, we have to wonder, is the emotional response to appetite itself an evolved trait?

The chemical pathways involved in mood are only poorly understood.  Developing a model of how food supply affects these pathways is probably impossible