Zen

Stepping Back

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

I’ve been to a handful of silent retreats before, so when my teachers on this most recent one said, “don’t try to get anything out of this,” I knew what they meant. Even just a day or two of zazen and silence will start to yield what feels like results: some emotional problem will crack open right in front of you, or you’ll experience a sense of peace, or union, or deep understanding, that might seem like “the point” of the whole endeavor.

But the teaching is: don’t hold on to it. Don’t think you can pack it up with your luggage and bring it back with you. Don’t try to get anything out of this.

I knew what they meant, but of course I’ve tried to anyway, in the three weeks since I’ve returned to normal life. But holding on to experiences has a particular feeling, a muted panic of, “I need to get myself RIGHT with this,” that I can eventually recognize and step back from. There’s no getting one’s self right with the teachings.

Now, I don’t take this stepping back to an extreme — for instance, on this most recent retreat, I sort of “re-upped” my practice of counting breaths with a little more focus and intent, and brought that into my koan study (a practice in which I focus on a line, poem, or saying from a collection of koans, which are not unsimilar to parables in the Gospels) in a rewarding way. That development of my zazen practice comes with me. Likewise, direction offered by the teachers, either in one-on-one interview or in Dharma talks, comes with me, as does the feeling-sense of the wider community supporting and maintaining me.

Those somehow don’t go away. In fact, they are special in that I don’t have to hold onto them at all, because they live in me now — they’re not separate from me. To call on them is not to reach for something beyond me. They’re not separate from my own sufficiency.

How do I explain this, then — that in trying not to get anything out of it, these teachings instead grew in me? It’s not for lack of effort, because retreat are hard work in their way. The effort is in stepping back from “trying”.

I had a dream before the retreat: I was facing some enemy and battling him with magic. When I tried too hard, put too much energy into focusing my power — my power failed. I was getting hurt and couldn’t protect myself as a result. But when I eased back into the fight, let go of the trying so hard — boom! Magic, power, protection.

This reminds me of something Simone Weil once said about concentration. She said: ask a group of students to concentrate on some point you’re making, and you will see them lean forward and furrow their brows and stop breathing — and a few minutes later, if you ask them what they’ve focused on, they will be unable to say anything. The only thing they’ll have accomplished is contracting their muscles and tiring themselves out, which has nothing to do with attention, or work, as she describes it.

Trying to get something out of a silent retreat is like this. Zazen and silence and the community are all good teachers in just stepping back and letting the experience take up residence in your person. Then, going out into the world, you don’t have to reach for them because they’re there already, and they’re what the world is offering to you, too.

Teaching

PBL: Peoples’ Math and Not-Knowing Math

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

Yesterday, I had my first meeting with colleagues preparing for the new school year. I am still happily entrenched in the pace of the summer (the only tolerable pace right now, as NYC sits in the middle of a 5-day heat advisory), so while a meeting like this has that potential to upend one’s vibe, this did nothing of the sort. Just a change of scenery and a nice little ramble through the Village for a burrito afterwards.

My colleagues and I are coming off of a wonderful summit for PBL-style mathematics, where we got LOTS of great ideas from far-flung teachers doing exciting and inspiring work. It took me a while to recognize it, but Problem-Based Learning answers a number of difficult questions I have always had about the meaning and purpose of math education, every since my earliest days as a public school teacher and grad student. It was only after tossing about for two trimesters at my new placement at a progressive school this past year, that I finally started to pay attention to some of my fellow math and science teachers who were engaged in this approach, and recognized its potential to help student actively engage and create mathematics.

What is PBL? Here’s the definition that Carmel Schettino, the summit organizer offers:

“An approach to curriculum and pedagogy where student learning and content material are (co)-constructed by students and teachers through mostly contextually-based problems in a discussion-based classroom where student voice, experience, and prior knowledge are valued in a non-hierarchical environment..” (Schettino, 2013)

The big words for me here are “co-constructed” and “non-hierarchical”. The first addresses the idea that to be actively engaged in math is to create math, and that this is accomplished mostly in community. The second addresses the idea that math is not separate from us, and rather than being accepted and practiced on the basis of external authority, it is developed by (and in turn develops) our own insight, autonomy, and capacity to make sense of the world. Creating this experience for students is exactly what math teaching is about, what I’ve talked about on this blog often, and what I’ve created in the most fleeting moments you can imagine in my classrooms.

What does this look like? Students work on problem sets in groups and present their solutions to one another. These problem sets are the “text” of the class, but they differ from a typical math textbook. The problems are not organized by type of content and no procedures or theorems or samples are offered to address the problems. Instead, these problems are meant to call upon what the students know already, and are authored and arranged so as to guide the students, step by step, through the interconnected web of mathematics. The teacher’s role is purely as facilitator; significantly, her or she does not provide correct answers. Process is emphasized over product in homework and in writing about what they’re doing. There are tests, but they are one of many different forms of assessment — and they are also (ideally) recognized as opportunities to learn (imagine that!).

There is a lot of struggle, but also a lot of student ownership, when this kind of thing works. In my experience, students will come up with approaches to solutions that I did not anticipate, and they grow more comfortable seeing my approach as one way to come at a problem, rather than the “right” way. This kind of problem-based work — open-ended but with a definite end goal, group-oriented but generally relying on individual difference and participation — most closely resembles the kind of work our students will be engaged in in any field they choose in their professional lives, not too mention their postsecondary training to get there. I speak often of my time in engineering school, where it was clear that group work was necessary to stay afloat, but everyone still had to pull their own weight, working on problems that a step-by-step procedure simply could not resolve. It was jarring and disorienting to find this paradigm dominant in my college, after a very different experience in high school. Obviously college is more challenging than high school, but there is nothing about the pedagogical approach that should be saved for college. Rather, it is best to foster this method of study early, giving students autonomy and building the competency in a more authentic way. This is the basis for the entire progressive education movement.

And indeed as I got a closer look at PBL this year in my junior Precalculus class, I began to call it People’s Math. There is a little irony to this, since I work in a independent school which by its nature is elite. But the school comes out of the progressive political tradition of the last century and is committed to a progressive pedagogy. That means different things to different teachers, but for me it means empowering students to own, create, and critique mathematical thinking for themselves. I call it Peoples’ Math, because it draws on a common mathematical capacity that can be cultivated in all persons — and because the capacity it cultivates will benefit the broadest set of persons for everyday mathematical thinking, an essential component for a functioning democratic society. While People’s Math recognizes the presence of experts, and gives their analyses due respect, it does not cede the mathematical lens to them.

This is math for the People, yes.

Universal education is an unprecedented development in the history of the world, but its purpose is not fulfilled just by bringing bodies into buildings. It’s by actually educating universally. In this context, abstraction and specialized language are not necessarily the goal of math education — they are tools, to be applied skillfully, when the time is right, in order to best produce mathematical thinkers who are both self-sufficient and also comfortable in community. The long goal is to produce a society full of people who can reason mathematically together. This is the promise of universal education, and it is also crucial that at this time in our history, we engineer a society that is ready to take on unprecedented challenges.

In fact, the whole class experience that I intend to create is an immersion in small-scale but still unprecedented challenge — I will ask my students to tolerate a level of not-knowing that most adults would not tolerate if they had a choice. Most students and their families understand math as an objective body of content that can be communicated clearly, memorized, and then presented in some rote manner that is open to easy, quantifiable measure. PBL, with its talk of co-creating math in a non-hierarchical environment, throws a wrench in that whole scheme. If you’ve been really good at math and have good strategies in place for a different kind of math class, suddenly you’re standing on unstable ground: there are no textbook examples, no answers in the back of the book, and no procedure to memorize. If you’ve been really bad at math, you suddenly find yourself called upon to engage with this unpleasant content in a whole different way (though these types of students have the most to gain from this approach, in my estimation). Either way, it’s a significant upending of what students usually expect — and the harder they hold on to what they’ve come to expect, the harder a time they have (not unlike life…).

In Zen, the term not-knowing is used to convey a quality of openness and presence that is free from preconceived ideas. It calls upon an authentic response, rather that a reflexive reaction. It is not the absence of knowledge per se, but rather a flexible stance and freedom of motion and expression that comes before the application of knowledge. It is not an idea, but it is the ground from which ideas can grow. It is more given to heuristic rather than procedure and to listening rather than talking. In a Western cast, it might be called wisdom — a quality rarely mentioned in education policy and debate, but a worthy goal of our schooling.

Above, I used the term not-knowing as something to be tolerated, and that sense still holds somewhat true — because not-knowing is a little scary. It is challenging to dispense with one’s pre-existing assumptions, because they are how we navigate the world and protect ourselves from danger. And while it might seem ridiculous to consider the possibilities of danger in a math class, I invite you to see if you can remember a time that you failed to do something expected of you in a math class at any level. What feelings were attached to that? I bet they were pretty strong. It is not easy to open ourselves to strong feelings.

However, when not-knowing is skillfully and persistently cultivated, students can start to let go of their fixed ideas about how math should go and how good or bad they should be at math. If that happens, even for a moment, space is made for insight. When cultivated carefully and encouraged, these moments become more frequent. And suddenly you don’t have students doing math anymore, you have students mathing math. Or, to achieve complete Zen saturation, you have: math mathing math! I imagine this as the goal of a PBL class — creating a space for the creation and expression of math that flows naturally and authentically from the students, as if they were writing poems or singing songs. And it starts with the ability to tolerate, protect, and sustain an open stance of not-knowing.

 

In this way I think PBL, People’s Math, can also be called Not-Knowing Math. This inches into the realm of wisdom disciplines, akin to philosophy, the humanities, and even to theology — where it should be! Math knowledge and content, so often taken to be the whole of math, become accompanied by a mathematical stance, a pattern-seeking predisposition that playfully and pointedly bounces around a group. Letting go of who’s good and who’s bad at math, and in an environment that supports and encourages persistent effort — beauty, truth, and the good can all be created spontaneously.

Here is Bertrand Russell from Education and the Good Life. What I call the mathematical stance he calls the “scientific temper” — and he suggests a middle way utilizing both mind (“intellectual culture”) and heart (the opposite of “emotional atrophy” which I would call aliveness) that is none other than the attentive openness of not-knowing. He says:

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.  What is should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry.  In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act.  This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy.  But though difficult it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper.  Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatists forget the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility.  Both are mistaken, and their errors, when wide-spread, produce social disaster.

Speaking of social disaster, I also call this approach Math for the End of the World — an end precipitated by our societal inability to recognize patterns and work together effectively. (I suppose Math for the Anthropocene, or Math for the Climate Crisis would work as well, but it’s best not to be coy about the end of the world.) I’ll have to write more about that another time.

Zen

Reflections after a silent retreat

Posted on by Fig Tree / 2 Comments

I returned from my zendo’s ten-day silent retreat just yesterday, called a “sesshin” (which means “gathering the mind”). This is not my first time on sesshin, but it was the longest I’ve been on.

The challenge on returning is to express what was going on there, since the practice while on retreat is so comprehensive — every aspect of your day is given to a form of meditation. Obviously there are the times you are explicitly practicing: periods of zazen and walking meditation, the services and ritual meals, the dharma talks and interviews with teachers, and the work-practice periods. But several other aspects of your experience are pervaded by the spirit of meditation practice.

The most prominent of these is the maintenance of “noble silence” which includes not speaking with anyone casually and keeping your eyes kept at a 45-degree angle to the ground. The purpose of this is to keep your attention focused inward. I find this very easy to do where people are concerned (talking and listening are *hard*), but very challenging when walking around outside — who wants to look down when there are mountains and trees and animals and birds? Especially if you live in Brooklyn? But, as in meditation, the real point is not necessarily to do these things 100% of the time or you’ve failed, the purpose is to commit to returning to them as default stances. In meditation, the default stance is — attention to the breath. In noble silence the default is — attention to the breath! So in this context, you can beckon a fellow practitioner to ask about some part of the schedule, or you can look and see the mist rising from the eastern mountain or the woodchuck scampering into some rocks ahead of you — but when you do so, you do so simply and intentionally and gently return your attention within.

Speaking of the schedule — that is another implicit form of meditation. Here’s the schedule for the eight full days of the retreat:

5:30-7:30 zazen
7:30-8 service
8-8:30 breakfast
8:30-10 rest/exercise

10-11 work practice
11:20-12:30 dharma talk and zazen
12:30-1 service
1-1:30 lunch
1:30-3:30 rest

3:30-4:30 zazen
4:30-5 service
5-5:30 dinner
5:30-7 rest

7-8:30 zazen
9:30 lights out

I’ve wiggled the times a little bit — I think the zazen periods were actually a little longer, since there was definitely less space between the end of the last zazen period and lights out. But that’s the idea. This is a pretty spacious schedule as silent Zen retreats go. What’s interesting is that, early on in a retreat, you find that the rest/exercise/free times are much shorter than you anticipate, so you either need to do a fair amount of planning to do what you need to do, or you need to scale back on what you think you need to do. Here are parallels with noble silence: the schedule is meant to foster a sense of intentionality and simplicity.

And especially with so much seated meditation (a teacher at the zendo describes zazen as being like yoga, but you’re holding one position for the whole period!), you begin to give the free times over to taking care of what your body needs. For me, this meant: 1) naps, 2) bathroom and washing, 3) light exercise and stretching, and 4) sitting with a cup of tea and looking at a field. But to be honest, it’s mostly 1) and 2). 3) feels like a gift when it happens (exercise as a gift! what a magic trick that is). When 4) happens it’s like the most enjoyable kind of meditation you can do because: wind in the grass, tall clouds, and bitter green tea.

I would also give 10 minutes to check my phone for important emails and to make sure the world wasn’t on fire — disappointing, since it mostly was. But then I put it on airplane mode and put it down. Would you believe my cell battery lasted the whole 10 days without charging?

That your free time is given to what your body really needs is a great teaching, as valuable if not more so than any of the dharma talks. And in this context so much of the scheduled activity that isn’t zazen involves taking care of the community — cooking, cleaning, serving, and in general keeping your business relatively together so as to give everyone the space to enjoy noble silence. So when you take care of your body, you are taking care of yourself so that you can continue to take care of others, who in turn are taking care of you. Zen implies that this is what the world is actually like, and we go on retreat to see its activity more clearly.

Communicating all of this is hard, and much of it I couldn’t articulate until I sat down and started to write about it. The comprehensiveness of the experience makes reflection challenging while you’re in it — but then, you’re not really meant to be stepping out to reflect during that time. You are stepping into experience. It’s only when I left and was walking around Bed-Stuy and ran into a seminary colleague of mine, that I found that the retreat experience was precisely not given to theological reflection. That is to say, I sounded like a spacey cult person, focusing on specifics of zen form which were most relevant to me (“you see, the koans are about you” etc.) rather than the wider surround of safety, care, and frankly, freedom.

And while I like this “simply and intentionally” label to describe what is happening on retreat, it comes off sounding a little spartan in a way that doesn’t speak to the reality. The experience does not live itself like lack, but like abundance. Food is delicious, people are still people but generally in good spirits, and as anyone who has ever sat quietly knows, there’s no such thing as silence. Or rather, silence is not the absence of sound, which is never a thing that happens, but more of a relationship to sound and activity. In leaning into silence, you somehow dissolve the boundary between yourself and the sounds and activity of the world. So silence is not a absence of sound — silence is just sound.

Theology

The Author of Violence and Staying Awake

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

In the midst of my theological education, I came to an understanding of why the existence of evil in our world was so often attributed to a conscious entity, called by many names but conveniently referenced as the Devil or Satan or what have you. Evil didn’t seem like an impersonal force at all, but one that made choices to come at us where we were weakest. As a Buddhist, I feel strange to name it this way — but Buddhism identifies energies with personal characters as well, so it might not be so far from the mark.

My education was theologically liberal and politically progressive, so when I talk about evil, I generally accept the views of theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch, Paul Tillich, and Martin King — that evil is most manifest not in sinful actions but in a sinful social order. “Sin is separation,” King quoted Tillich, making the argument in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that segregation was a moral wrong, a symbol of the human’s existential separation from God.

When I am curious to see evil in the world, I generally needn’t look much farther than my Facebook feed, bringing news of the latest of the many the waves of violence that have washed over the country and the world this year, the titles of which become a numbing litany: Syria, Brussels, Turkey, Iraq, Orlando, Baton Rouge and #AltonSterling, Minnesota and #PhilandoCastile, and now Dallas. There is no shortage of that which is opposed to life in this world, and we see it expressed over and over again.

What is so vexing about these outbursts or campaigns of violence is their pervasive presence, and how they seem so often to grow out of developments that at one point in history might have been considered progressive, even liberative.

I think of the development of race relations and the persistence of racial violence in this country through the years.  As a nation we have haltingly and imperfectly sought to redress some of the more dire wrongs that proceed from the legacy of slavery. Slavery becomes illegal, suffrage is extended, laws are written to protect the rights of the black community to vote and to have equal protection and due process. These victories are won at a great cost of effort, tears, sweat, and blood — especially blood. We honor those who have led these movements and sometimes have given up their lives.

And yet — every solution to the problem that is struggled for and finally established as law seems, inevitably, to have the seed of its own spiritual defeat sown into its fabric. The root of the problem, the hatred we wish to abolish, the violence we hope to prevent, the evil that grips communities and destroys bodies — it doesn’t seem to go away, but instead is pushed deeper, goes underground, becomes harder to recognize and harder to agree upon, begins to work in a way that confuses a clear moral cause. It is because of this, I believe, that people stand beside our present crisis of police brutality and mass incarceration for the black community, and say, “but it’s gotten so much better!”

When I engage these people, I find myself drifting deeper into confusion, like a smoke screen or fog of war has descended. And it doesn’t seem to come from with whom the people I’m arguing, who often speak from a place of wishing to honor those who have given their lives to bring us where we are. No, the confusion seems to include them, but they aren’t its source. The confusion is broader, it includes them and me and the situation in general — it arises in exactly the place that clarity is most urgently needed. An attack right at our weakest joint, as if it knew to go right there.

In fact, weighing the heavy burden of objective evidence that the criminal justice system is racist, AND the consistent personal testimony of black persons — families having to give their children the terrifying “talk” about how to escape an encounter with law enforcement with their bodies intact — it’s surprising that there’s any confusion at all about this. And it’s shocking that we haven’t dealt with it already. And it’s shocking that it comes after so many victories have been hard won by freedom-seekers throughout space and time.

When a problem continues to appear with pervasive persistence; when a problem as clear as day seems so given to confusion; when our weaknesses around race and violence are so frequently exploited to further injustice, as if those weaknesses were chosen for their vulnerability — well, this makes me feel like there’s a Chooser. That there is some conscious entity that is maneuvering to play us against ourselves, giving freedom to the violence that seems to seep up from the ground and use us as its hateful tools. Meanwhile a smokescreen is generated that keeps us coughing and blinking — what is its source?

At this point, I imagine some Christian theologians with (maybe) more conservative training than I would speak with some precision about the Devil. And when I see how persistently we must face evil, separation, sin, violence, hatred — within ourselves and within our communities — I see the appeal of that idea. Evil, it seems, has an Author, a deft Manipulator who plays on our weaknesses if we are not awake.

This is not a historical or Biblical argument. I don’t subscribe to a Devil-as-ontological-reality, and as a theologian I don’t feel I have the wherewithal to make such an argument. What I’m lifting up is quality of violence and anger that makes it seem like we’re talking about an agency that is always one step ahead of us. For me, it helps to think of anger and violence as being arranged by an entity, because then I know to look for its footprints (no jokes about hoof-prints, pls). I suppose this is an argument that draws on an engaged spirituality, dedicated to being clearly present to the world as it is now, and a psychological perspective that acknowledges that the violence and anger we see out in the world doesn’t start in any one of us, but also lives and breathes in each of us, if we don’t keep an eye out for it, in ourselves and others.

It takes up residence in us — but it’s not us. It’s not anyTHING, in fact. There is a long tradition in Christianity that evil is not a positive existence, but a privation of the inherent goodness of creation. This was Augustine’s argument. It is not found whole in any given person or institution or nation or religion, but rather is something that feeds on all of those things — parasitical and often subtle, it feeds on life that doesn’t note its presence.

The value in this perspective is found when we try to argue what the hell we’re up against. Because, sure: there are racist cops, and there shouldn’t be. But the current conversation about systematic racism is not about individual discrimination, even to the point of murder — it’s about a whole system that performs racism. But how can a system perform?? Again, this implies a Performer.

This Performer’s trace is made MANIFEST in the actions of some cops, who might or might not be racist, who might or might not even be white — but they are still performing white supremacy, because they are acting as agents of it — puppets, really. Individuals must be held accountable, but this is not a problem to be located only in individuals. It’s larger than that — it’s unconscious, unquestioned; it’s the assumptions that we make without thinking; it’s the way policing and processing and incarceration and schools and poverty and capitalism (and, and, and…) intersect and CREATE conditions for, in this case, a black community under attack. It’s the thing that shows up where we’re not looking, as it were put there because we’re not looking — there are those fingerprints of the Performer.

And it breeds confusion, making similar things look different. The system that destroyed the lives of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile is also implicated in the murder of the five officers in Dallas shortly thereafter. It’s similar, though I’m sure many won’t receive it that way. The first two incidents were a betrayal of the public, of the power of life and death police are given by our society. The last incident was an affront to our society organizing to protect itself against violence. In both cases, something inimical to our individual and collective well-being was enacted. Our responses will vary with context, but they should fundamentally be the same thing: supporting and cultivating life.

Is that confusing? It’s because evil — anger — delusion — sin — whatever religious language you want to use to describe it — exhibits behavior like it is a Confuser. In the end I think this systemic negation of life is too big for us to fathom and too close for us to see, but when we experience it we experience it as an entity, one that has us where it wants us, and confuses and enrages us and tires us out until we can’t act for ourselves and for our true well-being anymore.

So, right, that’s like the Devil. I get you, Christians. Again, I’m not making any ontological claims about this entity, but I never want to shake the feeling that what I’m trying to see in every waking moment is being obscured by something not wanting to be found, hiding in the shadows of my own person, in my community, and in my wider society.

The first move — the diabolical opening, if you will — is the confusion. Our first responsibility is to stay awake and take care of ourselves, and then awaken others. It’s also to be open to awakening from others — a loving and mutually committed community is essential.

Next up, Universal Restoration and Indra’s Net.

Teaching

Teaching for modes of being — play and monasticism

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

I was pretty ambitious, and notably abstract early on. And come to think of it, I will continue to be. BUT, now I have something a little closer to experience.

I spent much of the day thinking about a test I was giving my seventh grade class. It was at the end of the day, but there were so many related considerations to pursue while also doing the rest of my job. A handful of students need extended time, and we couldn’t do it after school, so I had to meet them during lunch and recess. Some students have additional half-time, some students have additional full-time, and some students don’t officially get anything but often they take so long that I feel obliged to accommodate them anyway. I had to find a space in our very cozy middle school — as it turns out, the 6th grade room I chose was going to host a meeting for the sixth grade. Luckily they could do it next door, but almost the entire sixth grade had to walk through our room to get there. With lunch trays. After that, I decided I wanted to make a second copy of the test with slightly different numbers, because our math room leaves little room for spreading out and they’d be right on top of each other. I needed to prepare everything ahead of time, so they could use the full 45 minutes (and then maybe a little after that for stragglers). I often felt some concern and stress, because my students so often feel stressed around any kind of test that I take it on too. I was also feeling a little competitive and jealous of my humanities colleagues, who see my students more hours per week than I do, and how I’ve felt that I’ve lost time to their events over the course of the year.

All this made for quite a stressful day! Luckily, once I’m with the kids, it gets better, because then I’m responding to real people and not just my imagination and projections. I can respond to them and balance their stress with cool, rather than internalizing it. And finally they started to settle in as they took the test — a little anxious, but focused and largely okay.

Then a trumpet lesson started next door.

Now, the students who are easily distracted (a set of students that overlaps significantly with the extended-time students) were quick to cringe and moan over this new circumstance, but I acknowledged that things happen and we can still focus. When other students with a better capacity to center themselves started to appeal to me for action, I knew it was time to do something. So I poked my head into the other room and asked that the lesson move or perhaps be a little quieter — which they were able to do without much hassle. (Of course they had the same problem with space that I did at lunch with my extended-time students — and in fact I had been asked NOT to use the math room for that purpose because teachers would be in the next room discussing class placement for next year!).

All day, while stressing about things, and even through this situation during the test, I was haunted by this concern that I was worrying a lot over something that did not actually mean anything. Testing, of course, draws a lot of criticism these days, and much of it valid, but it has its place in a classroom — still I was feeling like I was spinning my wheels for no kind of good reason for my students. What value was any of this? Why was I so stressed about something that really didn’t have much benefit for my students?

Well, as I returned back from the trumpet situation and the kids got back to work, I saw my whole day like this: I had been fighting like hell to secure for my students a quiet place to struggle a little on their own with mathematics. And once I saw things this way, it felt much better — because I DO find value in that!

I love our little progressive school for its restless activity. There is usually a din in my classroom and in the hallway and in other classrooms and so on. Students are moving, building, painting, drawing, typing, and writing in a variety of configurations that most people don’t see until they live in college dorm. They are talking to their peers constantly, making plans and recording things on iPads and making lists on whiteboards — it’s all very collaborative and often based on something that they are interested in. In my previous placements, that buzz of learning is actually quite a rare thing to hear, and it impresses me every time. I’m trying to think of a name — it’s the discursive model, the dialectic model of learning. Talking, listening, oohing and ahing, playing, creating, moving, sharing. Maybe the play model is better? Or the communal model? Anyway, very important.

But sometimes, you have to be quiet, you have to sit in one place, and you have to struggle with the math — which means you have to struggle with yourself, alone. This is in my mind a monastic model (which is bollocks, monks and nuns are far better defined by their community than their solitude, but the image has power). I think this is the place where one develops focus and a personal relationship with whatever they are learning, and come close to Simone Weil’s discussion of studies and prayer — Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God, in which she says, among other magnificent gems:

The Key to a Christian conception of studies is the realisation that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it….

Although people seem to be unaware of it to-day, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have a certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary….

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles….

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it….

Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.

Oh could I go on. This article very near destroyed me when I read it in seminary — I was almost sick with the idealism of it, having been a math teacher in America in the early 2000’s. I could not imagine how this could even be possible.

But I was young. It is possible. But you have to fight for it. The God part is a distraction, don’t get hung up on that — we’re talking about the attention here. If you’re interested in the God part, God’s in the attention. If you’re not interested in it, there’s only the attention.

It is attention of course that so many young people will struggle with today. I am not as bleak about digitalia as many commentators, but it’s clear it has a pervasive affect that students not aware of at all. But all student maintain the capacity to attend to some valuable effort if it speaks to them and challenges them, but not so much that they feel like it’s out of reach (c.f. the zone of proximal development).

This mode of being has value for young people to achieve and it is right that I fight to make it happen. Likewise the play mode, though I don’t have to fight so hard in that institution to make that happen.

It is intriguing to consider structuring my classes so as create these modes of being as often as possible for my students. The usual approach — of creating a certain knowledge or habit in a student — will obviously inform the content that fills the forms of these modes. But the focus on modes brings all the relevance into each day, and brings my attention to my students right now — it make education about the present experience, and not some idea of a future condition or requirement (like: high school, college, employment). It suggests a constellation of questions that a teacher can always pose to him or herself: Are they learning? What are they learning? How do you know? What are they doing? Are they receiving, creating, sharing? Or are the checked out? This kind of attention, I think, share elements of both the play mode and the monastic mode — it suggests a parallel process, where the teacher shares in the experience of the student while also structuring and guiding it. Quite frankly, I think a teacher should be able to enjoy doing whatever he or she is assigning to students. I think this allows a certain psychodynamic permeability, wherein students start to absorb (introject) the guiding qualities of the teacher, while developing their own capacities — but that’s just a theory! I’ll develop that more when I write about chaplaincy as a model of teaching.

But modes of being as the lens of structuring my class! That’s an idea that’s got some life. Play mode and monastic mode are two that are immediately relevant to math education.

What are some others, I wonder? What other modes of being have value for my math students?

Performance mode? Exploration mode (allied to play mode, I think)? General Assembly mode (thanks OWS)?

The question is: what practice (or is it praxis?) do we seek to create for our students, in this very class, at this very moment?

Praxis might me the right word for all of these.

Justice/Zen

More like you than you

Posted on by Fig Tree / 1 Comment

I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less important or unable to assert my own needs, because they were less valuable than those of others. And so when I encounter or come to understand some way others are marginalized, I feel connected to that somehow. This is a tricky thing, to be an embodiment of many of the dominant paradigms of our culture (I’m white, I’m a male, I’m straight, I’m cis-gendered, I’m able-bodied and -minded, I’m well educated, I’m affluent) but to still feel some affinity for, participation in, even identity with those who are on the margins — nonwhite, women, gay, trans, disabled, affected by mental illness, uneducated, poor. I want to be modest about the implications of this affinity, but I also want to be true, to speak from the heart.

What does it mean, then, to feel an affinity for the marginalized? It means that the experience of one who is not like me, the other, one who is relatively disadvantaged as a result, still reveals to me some part of me I have forgotten, or lost awareness of. “There is no other, over there,” is what Roshi says. Otherness is an illusion — a convincing one, one we have to grapple with because we live in these bodies and only these bodies — but one we must transcend as we live in them, fully.

At the zendo, we were watching a preview for the film “Wretches and Jabberers,” about two autistic men with significant speech impediments who go on a world tour to engage others and communicate from their experience, to help people not living with this particular disability to understand it in a different way.

At one point, one of the subjects of the film, Larry Bissonette, is saying, “more like you than not,” challenging our own perceptions of what our lives are over and against what a life with autism is. Larry speaks slowly, one word at a time, his tone increasing with each word. This forces the listener to pay attention, to find the meaning in the most straightforward expressions — or to let the meaning be apparent, as it is.

As he moved through the sentence “more like you than not,” I could swear that what he was going to say was: “more like you than you.”

This was pretty astounding — even though he did not in fact say that, and it was a projection on my part, I think it struck at something true for my own experience, and that of others as well.

We can, if we are ablebodied and ableminded and not hindered by disability or some other non-normative situation in our physical and mental capacities, convince ourselves that we can do it all on our own. That our abledness is intrinsic, right, and proper. That it’s statistical normativeness is also an expression of some kind of naturalism — it is that most people are ablebodied, and so it ought to be the case that everyone be ablebodied. It’s right and just that I should be able-bodied and -minded. This can relegate those that are NOT ablebodied or minded to either a “wrongness” or a ” suffering aggrievedness”. Either they’re not right and deserving of separation, or they are forever suffering, deserving of our pity.

Stated as such that is obviously a load of crap, but it’s worth noting further that while very few people would consciously express such notions, and while our society would never endorse either view — functionally, both as individuals and as a society, we follow the path that that idea creates. We are unnerved confronting those with disabilities. We don’t want to look at their struggles. Or if we do, we approach them under the guise of charity, in a spirit of giving to the less fortunate. Societally, people who are not ablebodied or living with mental illness are functionally marginalized. Try to be in a wheelchair and access mass transit. Or go on a date.

Have you ever thought of those things and went “thank God I don’t have to do that?” I sure have, because it doesn’t look like fun. And it stops there, usually. But what if you live that way, and what is my response to you if you must live that way. I probably don’t want to look so closely, engage to closely.

I once took a group of students to visit a nursing home, and one of my students reflected with me afterwards that he was uncomfortable because they were just so sad and he didn’t know what to talk about. Who hasn’t has that initial experience of a nursing home?

That kind of reaction — unconscious aversion and avoidance, experienced as a feeling of sadness or discomfort or maybe even irritation — leads me to believe that something is being revealed to us about ourselves. Nothing terrifies us more than that part of us we’ve pushed away and disowned, projected onto someone else. In our pragmatic, logocentric, transactional society, what is more terrifying than the possibility of being unable to move freely, or being unable to speak clearly to relate and exchange ideas? But of course we all experience that sometimes — in many ways we are unavoidably bound and hindered, and find self-expression hard, and struggle to reach out and touch another person. We all have some elements that are disabled, that are autistic, that are weak.

And I don’t just mean it’s something that sometimes happens to us. These are a fundamental part of us. Nothing is left out. It’s not just that I am sometimes like that — it’s that those things are a part of the universe that makes me. It is just as it is, with me and with others. It’s is closer to me than some idea I have of my able-bodied and -minded self. “More like you than you.”

It seems that, when you encounter someone who you initially understand as different in some way, that experience of difference can be seen with some finality (“they’re just different”, or it can be seen as an invitation to see beyond the difference. This is both personal, introspective work and social, communal work. Here I’ve talked about it along the abled-bodied and mental illness axes, but you can see this extended to other dualism: white-black, male-female, straight-gay, cis-trans, wealthy-poor. Whatever. The other is no other but your self, and we share a mutual responsibility to respond to the other as a revealer and hold of our selves.

We are all holding one another in our lack and our wholeness, and no one, not one single person, is left out of that branched and rooted and intertwined holding, of that compassionate, sustaining structure. How do we live in it? What is the quality of our holding and sustenance?

Justice/Theology

Teaching Math at Sing Sing

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate student in an M.Div. program, focusing in psychology and theology. Before graduate school, I had taught high school math for several years. I chose to teach math at Sing Sing for my fieldwork requirement.

My students were 24 inmates, all men. Some could have been as young as their late 20s; at least one was in his 50s or maybe 60s. Of the 24 students, 23 were nonwhite. They were predominantly African American, but there were several Latino students, one Asian, and one Native American.

They had all received their high school diplomas or GEDs, and had to take a precollege program to move on to college classes. Some had not sat in a classroom in 20 years.

On the first day, when I asked them to describe their experience with mathematics, most would talk about the last schooling they had. They said things like: “I got my GED inside,” or “I got up to 8th grade on the streets.” At first I thought the latter comment was a boast (as in, “I was educated on the streets”), but I came to realize that the streets actually meant the whole outside world. And inside meant right there.

Early in the course, I was talking about a homework assignment, and one said to me, “that is not my home.” I don’t know where his home was, but it wasn’t inside.

Getting inside as a visitor is a lengthy process. Electronics are deposited in the armory outside the front door, which is also where visiting cops will store their handguns. After a metal detector, ID check, and a thorough search of your possessions, you shuffle at varying speeds through a succession of locked gates to wait for a bus that carries you 200 yards to the school building. Walking across the grounds is not allowed. At any point in this process, you can wait for a while. Maybe the bus isn’t working, or a large group came in right before you, or a high-ranking officer is visiting and using the bus to conduct a tour.

I usually arrived at my two hour class at least 15 minutes late. Once, I arrived an hour late.

The wait gives you time to think. I would usually reflect on my lesson or some classroom matter, but I’d also gaze blankly about the space and grounds. It looked like any other older government institutional space, but with guard towers.

That is to say, it looked like a public school. With guard towers.

The similarity between our public schools and our prisons works on a few levels.

It’s not just the school-to-prison pipeline that’s a problem (though that is a big, big problem). It’s that public schools are explicitly modeled after systems in which control is prioritized as a prerequisite for any other activity.

That is to say: it’s not just that schools fail to prepare students, giving them few prospects and making them more likely to fall into a life of crime and eventually prison.

It’s that school successfully prepare students for prison, by acculturating them to deference to authority, to being policed and disciplined. The public schools can prepare them to frame themselves as somehow wrong, different, and bad — not worthy of anything good.

Especially when those public schools serves low-income African-American and Latino students. Then the comparison becomes more stark, and the systemic forces of racism, poverty, education, and mass incarceration come into sharp contrast. I often mulled over Dostoyevsky’s observation,

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

I only stayed in the school building, and only knew my class, so my viewpoint was not comprehensive.

But I will note that I had 24 students, 23 of whom were men of color. Black lives matter, indeed.

What of the men themselves?

My students at Sing Sing were the most motivated, curious and grateful students I have ever taught.

Many came with an explicit desire to do something they could be proud of, to “make something” of their lives. Many wanted to finish college so they could be better positioned to find a job after they got out, but most simply expressed a desire to “better themselves” or make their families proud — even to atone for past wrongs.

One said he wanted to be able to help his children with their math homework when they visited — so that they knew that learning was important, and they knew they could rely on him as good role model.

The stakes were high. This was math that mattered.

I was there as a math teacher, and never mentioned my graduate work in theology to the clas. But in my personal reflections, I did not have to search long to find the theological themes. My students, confronting a violent and isolated context, spent four hours a week struggling over math, a subject most people with much more comfort and opportunity keep at an arm’s length. Their gratitude, hope, and effort were palpable.

A casual observer in our room would see a normal adult education class with an easy rapport between students and teacher. The men all wore the same shade of green — some in sweatshirt or hoodies, others in work jackets and jeans. They called me professor and apologized for the gruffness of the guards. They wanted to share their work and were excited to answer questions (like motivated students do), but they also had the easy manner that comes when learning is appreciated and not just endured. Some of this came with their age, but maybe they also felt lucky to be there.

I enjoyed teaching the class.

I was also uncomfortable about my power relationship with my students.

My students saw me as the bearer of objective knowledge that they could only learn by my communicating it directly. They were very receptive to what teachers commonly refer to as the “chalk-and-talk” method of teaching, which is exactly what it sounds like. In such a classroom, knowledge is constructed exclusively by the teacher; the student’s participation is limited to passively absorbing that knowledge.

If you’re of the opinion that learning math is a creative and collaborative activity, then this approach is pedagogically problematic. Paolo Freire says, “…teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from results machinelike memorization.” 

This conformity and coercion is another expression of the prison model of education. No surprise it was so popular at Sing Sing.

The pedagogical critique had a theological component as well. At the college graduation ceremony a year or two before my time, the valedictorian of the class gave a speech in which he reflected on his gratitude for the program. He said,

We deserved nothing. But we received mercy.

This was a play on Mercy College, the institution that provided courses at Sing Sing. It was also an explicit and strong theological statement. No doubt he spoke this word from his heart, and that it flowed from a source of unexpected redemption he found in his life and in the college program.

But I suggest that a black inmate in America in 2016 should not look upon himself as undeserving of self-knowledge and self-development in a higher education curriculum. In fact, he deserved it much earlier than he found it.

If we were committed to actually providing for this — eliminating poverty, educating the youth, acknowledging and atoning for our violent and racist history — if our nation were one in which black lives already mattered — then he would have received not mercy for his undeservedness, but grace that corresponded to his original nature and vocation. I find these words from theologian Christopher Morse:

Christian faith confesses that what justifies our existence is finally not our own efforts or behavior…and not the dominant powers of the present age, which may variously view us with favor or disfavor, and not even the way we look upon ourselves. Faith in justification is faith in the way God looks upon us…as Paul explains to the Galatians, a faith in how we are known by God (Gal 4:9). God sees us as no one else does, as being within the relationships of ultimate love and freedom.

My role called for more than the skillful communication of math content. My task was to develop critical, collaborative, and free learners, to help these men cultivate the Good within themselves and in each other.

Through math! And journal-writing! And having them go to the board and explain their work! And encouraging them to question and help one another!

Whether I was able to successfully achieve this is hard to say, like any question of authentic assessment. How do we measure growth? or autonomy? or healthy skepticism?

The students took their placement test a month after I finished working with them. Of the original twenty-four students, twenty-one sat for the test, (two had been transferred away from Sing Sing; one had his cell-leaving privilege revoked for reasons unknown). Of these, eighteen passed. They continued to their undergraduate work the following fall.

So they learned some math. In fact, they knew a lot of math already. I hope they learned more. At least one mentioned he’d like to end up as a math teacher.

In the last class, the guys shuffled out before I left, and each shook my hand and thanked me. I spent the moment enjoying their warmth and gratitude.

Before they left, I asked them to write letters to their future selves — imagining a time after their placement test, when they officially began they college courses.

One student wrote: “I accept the challenge ahead because…my choices are my own.”

Teaching

Psyche in the Classroom: Teachers and Therapists

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

When I first began studying depth psychology, I couldn’t stop thinking about my years of experience teaching math to high school students. It seemed to me then that there were overlaps between the methods and end goals of both teachers and therapists, and that teachers in particular could take a page or two out of the therapists’ playbook.

On a personal level, there would be some value in teachers coming to understand their own hangups and complexes that they might otherwise impose on their students without knowing. As adult role models and mentors, they could learn to listen to students in a very specific way, recognizing student behaviors as indicative of a deeper layer of meaning. On a pedagogical level, teachers could use insight into therapist methods to create classrooms that were authentic and alive with learning.

Obviously the differences between teachers and therapists are important. A teacher’s primary focus is the development of a student’s intellect, while a therapist’s is facilitating psychological wholeness and emotional healing for their patient.

A teacher is concerned mainly with logos, a therapist with psyche. This latter term, psyche, meant “soul” for the ancient Greeks — so psyche-care is really soul-care, though modern practitioners might resist the designation.

Keeping with the Greeks, a teacher in the Western tradition follows the model set by  Socrates, the proto-teacher committed to not-knowing and questioning uncritically-held beliefs. It involves logic and argument, and is primarily about making intellectual sense.

But we also have to notice there is some overlap between the two roles: both teachers and therapists have “helper” responsibilities to their charges. Both are given some kind of power to exercise in their charges’ best interest. Both have undergone the process that they themselves now mediate: a teacher was once a student, and a therapist should have been in therapy at some point. Further, I think that the success of a teacher or a therapist is in part determined by their closeness to the experience they now mediate — the closer a teacher is to the learning process, and the closer the therapist is to their own therapeutic process, the better they will navigate their beneficiaries’ experience.

Further, both teachers and therapists are fundamentally committed to truth. The oath loyalty we hope all teachers might take would be this: I vow to explore and skillfully communicate the truth as I understand it. This work has the end goal of training free and competent citizens, who will not be so easily swayed by falsehoods and unfounded promises (the present national political scene notwithstanding).

For therapists, particularly those trained in depth psychology, the healing power of therapy is “to address the truth of a life,” which will allow a patient or client to ultimately be free within their circumstances1. That could be a painful emotional process — just as students will endure a painful process of not-knowing and struggling their way out of it — but there is value to the struggle so that a person might live in the light of truth.

These are general dynamics. What about the difference in goals? Is there a more subtle overlap between these two ends?

I remember one of my mentors in grad school warned us to not be armchair psychologists. I suppose there was a danger to explain away or pathologize a student’s behavior, and we were more responsible for holding them accountable and helping them improve themselves. Our role, in his mind, was not to look at our students from a psychological perspective, nor to make idle speculations as to why they are acting like they did.

On the face of it, this position is pretty airtight: we shouldn’t do what we’re not trained to do. Teachers are not therapists, and shouldn’t try to do what therapists do. Different mode, different context, different relationship.

However, this prohibition calls for some unpacking. If we hope to address the intellectual and developmental needs of our students, we know for a fact that we’re going to run into aspects of a student’s development, family, personality, identity, and social context that are influencing that process. Once we realize that learning is not purely intellectual, the tools and theoretical underpinning of psychology become useful, because many of these non-intellectual aspects can be understood through the lens of the unconscious.

How does the unconscious influence learning? What value does considering it have for teachers?

Zen

I know they say this tent is waterproof but I’ve pitched it at sea.

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

On the meaning of the teaching of Origen of Alexandria, from his Of Tents and Wells1.

And so, contemplating in the Spirit these progressions, he calls them the “tents of Israel.” And true it is, when we make some progress in knowledge and gain some experience in such things, we know that when we have come to a certain insight and recognition of the spiritual mysteries, the soul rests there, in a certain sense, as in a “tent.” But when it begins to make fresh sense again of what it finds there and move on to other insights, it pushes on with folded tent, so to speak, to a higher place and sets itself up there, pegged down by strong conclusions; and again the soul finds in the place another spiritual meaning, for which the conclusions from earlier insights have doubtless prepared the way, and so the soul seems always to be pulled on toward the goal that lies ahead (cf. Phil 3:14) moving on, so to speak, in “tents.” For once the soul has been struck by the fiery arrow of knowledge, it can never again sink into leisure and take its rest, but it will always be called onward from a good to the better and from the better to the higher.

I know they say this tent is
waterproof
But I’ve pitched it at sea.

Will my tent float, then?
Be a boat, then?
Be pulled along on tide and swell?

I don’t see an inch of ground for pegs
or for legs;
No way to progress or higher place to rest.

But still lifting over crest, glimpsing meaning in trough,
the fresh spray of Spirit
rewards a moment’s contemplation.

Before the tent is moved upon, and the soul moved along
Across the circle of the sea
Called by the moon to the next high tide.

 

Zen

Why leave the palace?

Posted on by Fig Tree / 0 Comment

As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a great political and military leader, or a great religious leader. His parents, the king and queen, hoped for their kindgon’s sake that it would be the former, and from the very earliest part of his life he was exposed to only the opulence of palace life, without any religious preaching admitted or suffering in sight. I suppose they reasoned that he would never turn to a religious life if he never encountered suffering — which is not so bad a bet.

Well, he grew up in luxury and married and had a child and never left the palace walls, until one night his curiosity got the best of him and he snuck outside with his charioteer. I guess he snuck out in a chariot, which seems a bit indiscreet if you’re creeping. Maybe this is a nod to the Bhagavad Gita? It helps your sales pitch if it seems that Lord Krishna has a subtle hand in your spiritual path.

Anyway. He gets out while being driven in a chariot, which is going at just the right speed such that he can encounter a sick person, an old person, and a corpse. He had never seen any of these before, so his charioteer explains what they are.

Shakyamuni is horrified and dismayed, until they encounter a mendicant, a traveling monk. The charioteer explains to him that this is one who has dedicated his life to finding the truth about life. Upon hearing this, Shakyamuni resolves to follow the path of the mendicant and seek the truth. He shaves his head, throws away his fancy clothes, gathers cloth from the garbage for his robes, and off he goes.

So the question is, why did he leave?

It’s hard to answer this about Shakyamuni, because this story is so overlaid with mythical elements that it’s hard to make sense of his context, let alone his decision (I mean, seriously, he never got a cold?). Still Buddhists take it as a model for entering the path: “home-leaving” is an important first step in practice. When we tell this story, we tell it about ourselves.

It’s about the Buddha — sure — it’s about the practice — fine — but it’s really about ourselves, only each of our individual selves. It’s about our lives.

So why leave home? Why leave security and comfort, even pleasure, in favor of a difficult journey, with no promise of success, and a decent risk of failure (which in Shakyamuni’s case almost surely meant death — and like, death by tiger. Or dysentery. Not pleasant.)? Why take up the pain, rather than keep it at an arm’s length?

I am quick to answer, “Because the truth is there, and what’s here only obscures the truth!”

To which my teacher responds, “How do you know?”

Which is a good question.

Why risk comfort in service of truth, when you don’t even know if the truth is out there? I’ve been trying to avoid it as I’ve been writing, but when I type, “the truth is out there,” it makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. How could you possibly know? Shakyamuni, you paranoid maniac, what were you thinking? What could you possibly achieve out there, with your impulsive searching?

As I reflect on what led me to enter my own spiritual path, I think it had less to do with what was promised at some point beyond where I was — the truth of liberation, somewhere in a different time and place — and more to do with the truth that had been let in just by my life being my life. We see suffering because suffering is here, and our familiar paths, while comfortable and predictable, seem to promise only a deeper surrender to it.

If there’s suffering out there, it only drives home the point further — there’s no escaping it! It’s inside the palace as well as outside of it. When Shakyamuni saw sickness, old age, and death, did he not have to revisit his understanding of his only healthy body, and that of his consorts and wife and friends and parents? of his child? It’s not that the truth was out there — it was that the truth of this world already lived in him and in everyone and everything he knew. There was no hiding from it. There was no self-deception that could find purchase against such a clear truth, so deep was the penetration of what’s-going-on.

If you can’t hide from it, and if you can’t push it away, what’s left to do than to face it directly and energetically? To hold all things, especially security and comfort, in a permanent state of suspicion? And to trust that it’s possible to be, somehow, free?

Whether its the pull of truth or the push of suffering, I don’t think Shakyamuni would have given a good reason one way or another. He came to a place in his life where it was just time to take another step. Maybe for Shakyamuni, home-leaving came like fruit falling from the tree.

For us, what would obscure the next step? What could possibly obscure the truth, of suffering right here and a path to be free of suffering? And if it’s clear, can we just face it?