The Black Hole of the Mind

The brain is an odd thing. It can take visual information in, recognize it as a certain type of data, interpret it, and then stop.

I went to the Northwestern Health Sciences University website's Continuing Ed page to check out my class listing, and found it on the calendar page. After I noted that it was listed and that the dates were correct, I moved on. A couple of days later, late in the evening, something clicked in my head. Did I really see what I thought I saw? I went back to the website and there it was, the tuition for my class listed at twice the actual rate. It had taken that long for the information to register.

I've done it, we've all done it; read several paragraphs of a book and had no idea what I've read. Drive somewhere and have no recollection of how you got there.

Being present is a many layered phenomenon. There's being physically in the room. There's directing your sensory organs toward the environment. There's turning them on. There is even the act of performing the motions of engaging with the environment. All these things can happen and still, we are not there. We are not present.

Presence is like.....a distillation. A star, collapsing down to a point of infinite density. It is the moment where an alchemical melding takes place, and all things come together to make gold.

Emerging From the Hole to Reach For a Pillow in the Night

You know that scene in the movie "Raising Arizona" where John Goodman emerges, pulling himself from the sucking mud after tunneling out of prison? I sort of feel like that.

One of the things I found useful in pulling myself out into the air and the rain was a talk at the MN Zen Center by Tonen O'Connor on Compassion (thanks Steve and Drew). Sometimes you go to a class or a lecture and it's good because you get lots of new information, and sometimes it's good because it lets you know you're on the right track. This was very much the latter.

Opening with a request for definitions of compassion, I jumped right in with mine ("Yes; Miss Granger?"). I don't know that I've shared it in this venue before: Compassion is a dispassionate state in which one can be completely present with another's suffering.

Tonen jumped right on the word "dispassionate" and referenced it several times, but it seemed to sit badly with some members of the group. With others, I think it went right over their heads.

The use of the term dispassionate in this context is an attempt to dispel the notion that empathy is either necessary or a virtue in expressing compassion. Empathy is he beginnings of making compassion about the practicer. It becomes about feeding the needs of the giver.

Dogen said that compassion should be like a hand reaching back to fix a pillow in the night. In other words, it should be without thought, or doubt. There is a need, and it is filled.

Brad Warner speaks about compassion the way I wish I could (and would, if I was an ex-punk rocker Zen Priest who was free to pepper his writing with salty language) in his blog. But suffice it to say, if you're trying, you're trying too hard.