Friday Night Video (Burroughs Redux)

My Thanksgiving Tradition

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.

Thanks for a continent to be spoiled and poisoned.

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving their carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feelin' their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs.

Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind his own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the memories . . . ("Alright, let's see your arms"). . . ("You always were a headache and you always were a bore")

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

William S. Burroughs (foreground) with Alan Ginsberg and Zenshin Philip Whalen.

Burroughs protecting the dharma.

Burroughs reminding us of impermanence.

Okay, this one is just plain cool.

Wednesday With the Family in Massachusetts

Notes

1.

"Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing." - Yvon Chouinard

It's the same, I would add, with zazen. A useless activity. That is not to say that it does not have merit. In fact, it's merit lies in its very uselessness.

2.

Having said that, today is jump day - the day of my vacation when I get to fly from Atlanta to the frigid latitudes of Manchester, New Hampshire for a few days. Actually, the forecast for the week (mostly rainy, highs in the mid 50s, lows in the low 40s) is exactly what we're having right now in Atlanta, although I expect the temperatures to have a bit more "bite" to them there than they do here. I will be staying at my sister's house in Methuen, Massachusetts and spending the Thanksgiving holiday there with her and her husband and our mother.

3.

Eliot the cat is in a kennel for the week while I'm away - his first experience with that. While it seems kinder than leaving him home alone and unattended for five days, I don't think he's going to like the experience.

Yesterday, I tried an experiment and let him use the trap door for the first time since I shut it down last spring. I figured that with autumn here, there was less prey for him to drag back into the house, but within 90 minutes of letting him out, he "rewarded" me by bringing a live chipmunk into the house, which immediately escaped and hid in my shoe closet. I flushed it out with a broom and chased it out an open door, and shut the trap door again.

4.

Which reminds me that my experiment with vegetarianism is continuing, although with occasional lapses. I ate a chicken sandwich for lunch one day last week as I rushed from one meeting to the next, with little time to seek out vegetarian fare. Old habits die hard. And I cleaned my refrigerator out of the remaining two meals that contained some chicken. After all, I reasoned, the chickens have already been killed - wouldn't it be even worse to then throw away the meal that they died to provide for me? And last Friday, I shared in the office Thanksgiving meal, so as not to insult their effort in putting the feast together. That might sound like a lot of back-sliding and it may be, but all my other meals over the past 12 days have been meat-free and my refrigerator is now devoid of any further temptation, although I will be eating turkey over the Thanksgiving holiday.

5.

Impermanence is everywhere: I see that I have now used up 20% of my Blogger file capacity. Since that 20% has lasted me for 5 years, at this rate, I will have to stop blogging in 20 years (should I live so long). However, it was not until relatively recently that I started posting large-megabyte videos, so my burn rate over the past year has been quite a bit higher than before. I may have only 10 years left to this blog. Although even that seems far off, and it is, the finite capacity is a reminder that everything eventually comes to an end, and that I should use the remaining file capacity wisely and say only that which needs to be said (whatever that is).

In an evening talk, Dogen said,

With regard to actions and speech in society, today in this country many people are concerned with personal fame and reputation. They think good-bad, right-wrong, and consider that if they do one thing others will think well of them or if they do something else others will think poorly of them. They even worry about the future. This is entirely wrong. People in the secular world are not necessarily good.

Let people think whatever they may think. Let them even call you crazy. If you spend your whole life practicing in accordance with the Buddha-Way and refrain from what goes against the buddha-dharma, you needn’t worry about what people think about you.

Tonsei (retreat from the world) means being free from the sentiments of worldly people. Just learn about the deeds of the buddhas and patriarchs and about the compassion of the bodhisattvas, repent of your actions which are secretly illuminated by various devas and protective deities, and go on practicing in accordance with the Buddha’s regulations. You needn’t care about anything else.

On the other hand, it is wrong to shamelessly indulge yourself and do evil things, trying to excuse yourself on the grounds that it does not matter if others think ill of you. Just practice wholeheartedly in accordance with the buddha-dharma, paying no attention to how others see you. In the buddha-dharma such indulgence and shamelessness is prohibited.

Can Meditation Curb Heart Attacks?

"Can Meditation Curb Heart Attacks?" asked a recent headline in the NY Times. According to staff writer Roni Caryn Rabin, recent research suggests that meditation may indeed be good for the heart. "Findings from a study presented last week at an American Heart Association meeting in Orlando suggest that meditation may have real therapeutic value for high-risk people with established coronary artery disease."

After following about 200 patients for an average of five years, researchers said, the high-risk patients who meditated cut their risk of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from all causes roughly in half compared with a group of similar patients who were given more conventional education about healthy diet and lifestyle.

Among the roughly 100 patients who meditated, there were 20 heart attacks, strokes and deaths; in the comparison group, there were 32. The meditators tended to remain disease-free longer and also reduced their systolic blood pressure by five millimeters of mercury, on average.

“We found reduced blood pressure that was significant – that was probably one important mediator,” said Dr. Robert Schneider, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention, a research institute based at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, who presented the findings. The study was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, in collaboration with the institute.

Dr. Schneider's study focused on the practice of transcendental meditation, but my own experience confirms that the same or similar results manifest from zen meditation (zazen). Before I started practicing, every annual physical I had indicated that my blood pressure was too high and that I needed to reduce my cholesterol. Some routine were these warnings that I had assumed that the guidance values for blood pressure and cholesterol had been set unrealistically low, and that no one could be expected to meet the levels. However, since I started zazen practice, every exam that I've had has shown blood pressure and cholesterol levels at or below the threshold numbers, despite the advancing years. No factor other than zazen, such as changes in diet or exercise, can account for this change.

Dr. Schneider said other benefits of meditation might follow from stress reduction, which could cause changes in the brain that cut stress hormones like cortisol and dampen the inflammatory processes associated with atherosclerosis.

“What is it about stress that causes cardiovascular disease?” said Dr. Theodore Kotchen, associate dean for clinical research at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Hormones, neural hormones, cortisol, catecholamines — all tend to be elevated in stress. Could they in some way be contributing to cardiovascular disease? Could a reduction in these hormones with meditation be contributing to reduction in disease? We can only speculate.”

Another recent study focusing on meditation, published in The American Journal of Hypertension, focused on a young healthy population. It found that stressed-out college students improved their mood through meditation, and those at risk for hypertension were able to reduce their blood pressure. Dr. Schneider was also involved in that study, which was carried out at American University in Washington and included 298 students randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a waiting list. Students who were at risk of hypertension and practiced meditation reduced systolic blood pressure by 6.3 millimeters of mercury and their diastolic pressure by 4 millimeters of mercury on average.

Use of so-called "brain drugs" such as Ritalin have reportedly skyrocketed among college students trying to get an edge in their competitive quest for graduate, medical, or law school admittance. These drugs reportedly improve their concentration and mental stamina, allowing them to study harder and longer.

I suggest that they consider meditation rather than drugs, just as some students of past generations turned to Zen as an alternative to psychedelic drugs in their quest for ultimate truths.

Notes

1.

Today was the first day of my nine-day Thanksgiving vacation. I'll be travelling in a few days. but today I celebrated by spending the afternoon at a chan temple (chan is the Chinese form of Zen, the ancestor tradition to the younger Japanese lineage). The temple was new to me, but it had apparently opened on the other side of the city about a year ago, and a friend had invited me to attend an introductory session there with him. It was a beautiful and ornate temple, at least by the austere standards of Zen. I always find it interesting to see Buddhism practiced in different ways, and today was no exception.

2.

In other news, Jessica Watson has crossed the Equator, a major milestone in her solo global circumnavigation. She reports, "No change that I can see. The water is still blue, the waves are still rolling and the wind still blowing." Crossing the Equator at least once is apparently a requirement for a voyage to be considered truly "around the world." As for the effects of isolation and silence, the other day she reported, "Not a real exciting day out here today. . . I actually slept through most of it. I'm becoming more and nocturnal lately because it's so much easier to get anything done when it cools down after the sunsets. It was good to get a few extra catnaps in while I've still got plenty of open water and nice conditions."

3.

According to my scrapbook, twenty years ago today, the Czech government was busy denying the killing of Martin Smid, a denial that turned out to actually be true, but the regime didn't have much credibility. 200,000 Czechs marched in Wenceslas Square, some carrying banners that read "Red Murderers to Court." In East Germany, 200,000 protesters marched in Leipzig, 100,000 in Dresden, 50,000 each in Halle and Karl-Marx-Stadt (think that city's name lasted much longer?), and 10,000 in Schwerin. But meanwhile in Romania, 71-year-old Nicolae Ceausescu gave a five-hour speech declaring that his country would not be following the other Eastern European nations along the paths toward democracy and freedom. He was to be overthrown, tried, and executed by Christmas Day.