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Bittersweet: About Karma

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Earl: “Look! Shampoo that’s not tested on animals. I feel bad for those lab animals running around with dirty hair, but if it’s better for the environment, that’s the sacrifice they have to make.” Jason Lee as Earl Hickey, MY NAME IS EARL Karma is a funny thing

 
There are some humorless men in my life. A few months ago I sent an email to two of them. It was pretty funny: UFO’s, aliens, subliminal programming with muzak, ex-CIA agents who can be hired to forcibly waterboard someone, without their consent, and beating my rascally middle daughter with a stick in Riverside Park were all mentioned. Admittedly, my sense of humor is offbeat and irreverent. Still, this email was juicy. But did they respond to it AT ALL? Oh, nooooooooooo. They just pretended it didn’t exist.
 
This current husband of mine read the missive before I sent it. “Don’t send that,” he said, with a flat expression. Hmph. My third husband will have a rich sense of humor. He will be able to laugh with me. At me, okay, that’s gonna happen, alas. Even I spend plenty of time laughing at me. (Definition of ‘rueful,’ anyone?) But, definitely, also, with me.
 
Over the last few years I’ve been working with Buddhist concepts and with the Bhagavad Gita. In the spirit of “what goes around comes around,” I have to wonder, when did I not laugh at people that has reached fruition with this overabundance of humorless men in my life?
 
Should I rack what’s left of the gray matter rattling around my cranium to recall anyone whose joke I did not get, then make a list, seek them out, and make restitution by letting them tell me their favorite jokes, which culminates in my laughing uproariously? Will that plant new seeds for me, seeds that will sprout into men with some sparkle to their personality?
 
Maybe it’s a past life thing. I was an uptight guy in the 17th century who inflicted lethal self-seriousness on the long-suffering women in my life. Now I’m reaping my just rewards, and there’s no going back to pull the poker out of my former derriere. Karma’s a complicated thing, and hard to navigate exactly. Those of us like me who aren’t enlightened can’t parse it.
 
It’s easier to see the working of karma in other people’s lives. I tread carefully here, being mindful of Rabbi Jesus’ words, “Why worry about the mote in your brother’s eye when there’s a beam in your own?”
 
But I am a careful observer of people, both because people are a novelist’s raw material, and because I’m fascinated with human beings, those conscious and inconsistent creatures. While not positing myself as a perfect person, I can discern. I can learn from others.
 
There’s a man I know who’s recently had many business reversals. He’s brilliant, educated, competent, personable. Indeed, he exudes a charm that many people can’t see through. I’ve watched with breathless awe as he’s snowed them totally. It’s a virtuoso act.
 
Unfortunately, the charm obscures a negative side. He’s acted from that negative side over the last several years, threatening me and others with litigation, co-opting tactics of bullying and intimidation, twisting reality to suit the ends of malice, never using a kind word when hostility will make the point for him. And there seems to be no one in his life who will call him on his stuff. His family has always lent him blind entitlement, and his close friends only affirm his better points, of which there are many.
 
I suppose this is when I am grateful that my close friends hold me to a high level of personal accountability. “So Traci,” my friend Gerda will say, in her patient voice, “are you acting out of negative intent? Are you acting out of fear or out of love?”
 
Or even my friend Marcia will ask, “Yes, but is that about your self-esteem? Can you phrase that in a way that’s less ambiguous?” Rachel usually foists a zinger, with less concern for my vulnerability and more concern for the bull’s eye of painful truth.
 
But I don’t think the benighted man in question, may all the gods bless him, has anyone speaking this way to him. Nor does there seem to be anyone reminding him about the Law of Return, that whatever you give out inevitably comes back to you. So it is no surprise to me that, despite his many talents, he is suffering business losses that cause him personal anguish.
 
Not that he would or could ever see the relationship between his abusive actions and the unfoldment of his life. It’s hard for all of us. There is the real cause of things and the apparent cause. What is apparent is the economy, the paternalistic government, the state of the world, etc. But in this view that seeks to go deeper than appearances–and even the Talmud talks about “measure for measure” and “As one does, so they do to him”–we are all guided toward spiritual forces of cause and effect.
 
Which leads me back to the lab animals with dirty hair, making sacrifices for the environment. I can only hope they transmigrate species, and reincarnate as higher beings. Perhaps humorless men.
 
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Google Etiquette

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Google Etiquette

Of late I listen to an audiobook: Paramahansa Yogananda on the Bhagavad Gita, as explained by his disciple, Swami Kriyananda. The Gita is one of the great scriptures of enlightenment, a conversation between Krishna the God of Love and Arjuna the universal devotee, right at the moment when Arjuna beholds a civil war in which he is supposed to fight.

“Brother against brother, cousin against cousin, how can I fight in this terrible battle?” Arjuna asks, his heart breaking. Krishna has an answer, and Yes, Arjuna is supposed to fight. This life is a play of shadows, rebirth is a certainty, consciousness is evolving, at one level, we must live out our dharma.

I’m not sure I totally agree with Krishna’s answer. One scripture or another is always in hand, and I always debate with it in my head. I am on a journey and I don’t have answers, I have questions, and boy oh boy, do I have a lot of opinions. Just because some holy person centuries ago wrote something doesn’t mean I have to buy it. Used car salesmen, the lot of them. Prophets, scribes, proselytizers, and disciples, all selling their brand of God. As if God could be a brand. Or defined by any one person, one path, or one book.

My husband Sabin finally forbade me to read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying at bedtime, because it riled me up. I’d try to draw him into a debate and then sleep restlessly, arguing in my dreams. But I don’t think we’re supposed to take any gospel literally. It’s my opinion that we’re supposed to struggle with the words of God, all of us like Jacob wrestling the Angel of God. Finally, a blessing is bestowed.

Another of the great scriptures that has a longtime spot on my nightstand is The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. I like Patanjali’s work because it’s methodical. He gives a practical curriculum for advancing in consciousness. I want to get there from here–don’t ask me where ‘here’ and ‘there’ are, what progress consists of, or how it is measured. I’ll send a postcard when I’ve arrived. Meantime, there are these paths. Ahimsa, nonviolence, is one of the crucial ones.

For the last few years I’ve undertaken ahimsa in my language. Specifically, refraining from the violence of dishonesty. Honesty comes easily to me, but sometimes too bluntly. I tend not to tell lies. But I can tell truths with a sharp edge. So the deeper, more textured layers of this issue fascinate me, eg, the small dishonesties that pass for social courtesy. Because kindness matters, too. Kindness is the crux.

How do I tell a scrupulous truth without hurting someone’s feelings? For example, how do I refrain from saying that a haircut or dress is flattering, when it’s butt ugly? How do I negotiate my simultaneous responsibilities to the truth and to kindness?

Which put me in a sticky situation recently, when I visited with someone who I knew had googled me. This person asked me what I did, as if it were unknown. Well, the spouse had googled me. Marriage being what it is, I assume the spouse had shared information about me.

There is a crude but effective invisible hit counter on my website. It gives useful stats about visitors to my site: how many page loads, what state or country. Usually the information is pretty anonymous. I can tell that someone using Verizon internet in New York state was on my site, for example. It’s great fun to see hits from distant countries.

Sometimes a large company or institution names their ISP network after themselves, so the name of that institution or company appears. For a while, my middle daughter had my website set as her default Safari page on her macbook. I knew when she took her computer to school and played on it, because a user on her school’s network would pop up on my counter.

The day before the visit with my new acquaintance, who is a lovely person, my counter showed the name of the company where the spouse works. Now, this isn’t a small company; it took me a while to figure out who at that company might have been interested in me. But it’s not that hard. I went to the company’s website and took a look at the page on their employees. One of the names matched a name on a list of people I’d been given, some of whom I’d also googled.

So, out of truthfulness and kindness, what am I supposed to do when someone pretends they know nothing about me, but there’s an indication that they’ve googled me?

In this instance, surprised, I opted to play dumb. I said that I was an author. And then eventually the conversation came around to spouses, and since I’d taken that first step into the shadows, I asked what the spouse did. As if I didn’t know. It was distressing to be in this position, holding hidden information like a steaming potato. I felt like a liar. That’s not who I want to be.

But if I admit to googling, do I seem like a stalker? If I admit to googling and the other person doesn’t, do I position them as dishonest, which is unkind? If I mention that I know that they’ve been on my website, is that a violation of privacy, another unkindness?

What are the rules of kindness and honesty in the world of immediate information via google and statcounters? What would Krishna or Jacob’s Angel have to say about the virtual world?

The day after that visit, I had a business meeting with a married couple who told me straight out, up-front, no BS that they’d googled me, been on my website, and watched the video clip. It was a great relief. It made me like and trust them. It seemed to me that the universe had sent me this latter experience as a foil to the prior one, to illustrate for me the way that I was supposed to follow. The Universe works that way, with care and great intelligence, for seekers and strugglers.

From now on, I’ll confess straightaway to my nefarious googling and statcounter information. Hopefully I’ll be able to do it with courtesy and tact. That’s my growing point.

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The Fighter Pilot and the Monk

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 The fighter pilot and the monk
The Fighter Pilot and the Monk

Someone on the Barbara Brennan Healer’s Listserve to which I belong posted a notice about two evenings of free talks given by John Foley, a former Blue Angel pilot, and Geshe Michael Roach, the author of The Diamond Cutter. The talks concerned “Fearless success in business and life.” Well, I’m a fan of fearlessness and also of success, and my husband Sabin calls himself a Buddhist, so I registered us for the lectures.

And what a treat! I came away, as everyone in the audience seemed to, inspired and encouraged, challenged and impressed. I came away thinking. I came away witnessing my life and my actions in a new way.

Foley was a Navy pilot, and my dad was a submarine sailor in the Navy. Despite the air/sea rivalry, I was predisposed to like Foley. Moreover, I saw the Blue Angels as a kid in Tennessee. I can still remember watching them zoom so close to each other during loop-de-loops that my pounding heart wanted to fly up out of my chest. The Blue Angels elicit awe and amazement. Those planes perform some maneuvers at a distance of only 18 inches, Foley told us. Can you imagine piloting a top-of-the-line precision aircraft weighing 22 tons, while another 22 ton craft rides your belly, and then you flip upside down so the other plane is on top, while maintaining that mere foot and a half of separation?

Intriguingly, Foley didn’t call the maneuvers dangerous. He said they were just inherently unforgiving. What a fascinating perspective!

Most impressively, Foley, who attended Stanford Business school, had thought about what the Blue Angels taught him about high performance. About getting the most out of yourself so you climb up the high performance zone, that wondrous area between where you are and where you want to be. He has a system that’s smart and useful. I’ve been thinking about his 4 steps all day. I’ve been saying, “Glad to be here!” and meaning it.

Geshe Michael Roach was the first American to make it all the way through the 20 year training within Tibetan Buddhism and become a lama. He’s a medium sized guy with a scraggly fringe of hair that reaches almost to his shoulders, he wears the ocher robes of a monk, and his face radiates kindness and intelligence. When he took the stage, everyone leaned forward with an indrawn breath. This is no slight on Foley, who is a dynamic–utterly riveting–speaker. It’s just that Geshela (as they called him with affection) has this aura…

More than a decade ago Geshela’s lama told him to get a business job, and Geshala dawdled for a year or two, delaying carrying out his teacher’s command because he didn’t want to be a businessman. Finally he surrendered. He joined a tiny, fledgling company that was just starting out with a $50,000 loan. Geshela wasn’t supposed to let anyone know he was a monk, but he was supposed to apply the Buddhist principles he’d learned at the monastery. He did so. Not too long ago, the company was making over a hundred million dollars a year in sales, and then Warren Buffet bought it. For a quarter billion dollars.

Geshela’s point was that the Buddhist system works, and he’s proved it. He wants to share it with people so they stop being so anxious about the economy.

So what is this system? Essentially, it comes down to the seeds you plant in your mind with your own actions and thoughts. The mind is always recording everything you do, say, or think. So what you do, say, and think creates your present and future. Specifically, you give money away, knowing that to do so creates money and that every living person is benefitted. Thus a seed for prosperity is planted in your mind. The seed takes a little time, as seeds do, but then it sprouts into a financial opportunity.

We could call it karma, but Geshela says he’s not allowed to say that word in a business setting…

He began his talk with a discussion of emptiness and projection, though he says he’s supposed to call it ‘potential’ and not emptiness or the void.

It made me muse about how much I project onto the world, and what kind of seeds I want to plant in my mind.

Foley also supports charities and “giving forward.”

Geshe Michael Roach mentioned a charity called Three Cups of Tea, which builds schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am intrigued. Peace through education: what a beautiful, important seed to plant, not just in my mind, but in the world at large.

Ho’oponopono and Happy New Year
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Ho’oponopono and Happy New Year

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ho'oponopono

As a spiritual seeker, I welcome these qualities of gratitude, reverence, rectification, and transmutation that arise from the prayer/meditation of Ho’oponopono cleansing: “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” I’m working with this technique, which has come recently into mass consciousness. It reminds me of the Lord’s Prayer, another tool of reverence, gratitude, rectification, and transmutation. Or the Om Tryambakam, which has a similar sensibility. Or the Amidah in the Shabbat liturgy. Good stuff.

And Happy New Year to any who come upon this blog. May 2009 bring you joy, peace, love, beauty, good health, friendship, prosperity, and all the sweetness and more that your heart can absorb. My best wishes to You and Your loved ones. I honor the God that You are.
Love’s Hidden Symmetry: Hellinger’s Work (part 1)
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Love’s Hidden Symmetry: Hellinger’s Work (part 1)

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Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 6.26.02 AM

Of late I am reading Bert Hellinger’s book LOVE’S HIDDEN SYMMETRY: What makes love work in relationships (Zeig, Tucker & Co, Phoenix, Arizona: 1998). This book is amazing. I read it with a sense of wonder and delight, a feeling that at last there’s psychological work that deals honestly and practically with the deepest issues of the heart.

I’ve undergone a lot of psychotherapy, most of which I now view with suspicion. It isn’t that I didn’t get a lot out of the work. It isn’t that I don’t see how useful a compassionate witness can be. I grew from my nearly 18 years in therapy, and I have many times taken solace from, and given it as, a caring and non-judgmental presence.

However, there are some serious flaws with the way most contemporary therapy is practiced. To begin with, every shrink I know as a person, not professionally, is completely daft. Why do people become therapists? They want to fix themselves. Let me say, every shrink I know in a secular way needs all the help they can get. I look at these people while we’re socializing and think, Wow. People pay you to muck around in their psyche?

I don’t exempt myself. I was a healer for many years because I wanted to heal my self. That wasn’t the only reason, of course. Just as it isn’t the only reason people become therapists, psychiatrists, etc. They also have compassion. They mean well.

And they want to earn a living. They have a stake in their clients/patients staying crazy, not healing, in order to continue to earn a living. I am a big fan of people making a living, but I wonder about the conflict of interest here. Which leads me to one of the other distortions in modern psychotherapy, which is: it takes too damn long. That benefits the therapist but not the client.

The last few years I was in therapy, my therapist did a lot of the energy therapies with me: EFT, TAT, EMDR. I hear good things about neuro-linguistic programming, too. These techniques work well. They’re quick and elegant, and they cut through the bs like the sword cutting the gordian knot. More and more, it seems to me that all that talk therapy, regurgitating the same stuff about your mom and dad, serves mostly to re-wound people. Say it once, twice if it was a life-changing trauma, then move on–otherwise there’s a very good chance of falling into what Caroline Myss calls ‘woundology.’

Then too there seem to be plenty of people using talk therapy as an expensive and elaborate narcissistic crutch. They go to session as a means for rationalizing the most absolutely atrocious behavior. I’ve seen that a lot: “I have to talk to my therapist,” says someone, before behaving in a way that is criminally unkind.

Kindness matters a lot. Niceness not at all.

So, with these criticisms about psychotherapy, I turn to Hellinger’s family constellation work. I don’t agree with everything he writes. I’m probably never going to agree 100% with anything, including myself, because I use the tools of critical analysis at my disposal. That is, I discriminate: I separate the wheat from the chaff. The highest octave of this ability is discernment, something that modern psychotherapy, in its overly convoluted quest for a blithe blankness masking itself as neutrality, seems to be trying to eradicate from the contemporary mind. I also form opinions. Some are wrong, some are right, and most are strongly held. This is where I’ll quote Dante: “The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” And we live in a time of great moral crisis.

In my opinion, Hellinger’s work is some of the most real and authentic work I’ve ever come across. This is a long post, so I’ll continue with why I like Hellinger in another post.

On Transparency
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On Transparency

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Ramana Maharshi advocates inquiring into the self to find communion with God. He teaches that if you keep asking “Who am I?” deeply enough, persistently enough, and intently enough, you will shatter the incarnational illusions of “i,” the separative little ego, and get to “I am all that is.” It’s a path of discipline toward liberation.
When I ask myself, “Who am I?” I just don’t get that far. I’m still on the journey, I guess. Not disciplined enough. Caught up in the murk and mire of embodiment.
But the journey is worth taking, and it’s fascinating to me to witness the answers that come up at different points in my life. “I am a mother,” is among the top two responses that arise these days. There was a time…before dinosaurs roamed the planet…that I wasn’t someone’s mom. There’s no going back to that time; having had children, I can no longer imagine my life without them. If something suddenly happened and my children were gone forever, I wouldn’t want life. Every parent knows exactly what I mean. Life is demarcated completely and irrevocably by this universal, simple act of having a child.
And so the heart is tangled into a web of love and caretaking, expectation and responsibility, hurt and joy. Does that tangle bind us more deeply into the earth plane, into the opposite of liberation? Isn’t it supposed to be one way out?
So it is with all these questions that I watch as my oldest daughter struggles with her demons, and projects many of them onto other people, as we all do from time to time. By other people, I mostly mean me, her mom, the one nearest at hand, whom she knows will always be there for her, no matter what she says or does. It’s partly her process of individuation; she’s off to college in seven months. She’s got to define herself as separate from me in order to have a distinct core in which to stand when she finds herself on her own. We both know it’s coming.
It hurts to watch her struggle. She shoots herself in the foot, accomplishes miracles, sabotages herself relentlessly, goes out and makes a concrete difference for better in the world, commits acts of extraordinary compassion and cruelty, all at the same time. All while frequently blaming me for both real and imaginary hurts, all while wanting my approval and hating herself for that want.
And how do I respond as she does her thing? At the launch party for IMMORTAL last week, I spoke openly of looking for communion with God in every moment. I then apologized for sounding hokey, because it does. I’ll have to find a less embarrassing way–for me and whoever’s listening–to phrase this sentiment. How do I reconcile my spiritual pursuits with my human responses? Isn’t that always the question?
My friend Vedic astrologer Komilla Sutton, knowing I am undergoing the dreaded transit of Saturn to my moon, called sade sati in Vedic astrology, and that my daughter has the difficult transit of Saturn to her Venus, had a puja done for us at a temple of Saturn the last time she was in India. I had sent money for only one puja so the priest lit a single candle during an ancient and lovely ritual. He commented that my daughter has a very good moon, and then something rare and wonderful happened: the wick split into two, so there were two flames off the one candle. Komilla wrote me that it was very beautiful. But perhaps, in the moment of the wick parting to make two lights, it felt a flash of pain.