More Weird random things I think about (and new tattoo pictures)

1. If you were to walk into a room full of people meditating it would appear a very serene place, you would hear almost nothing and that is a strange thing for us to hear in a room full of people these days. Every time I do,  I am struck by the fact of how peaceful it all feels, it’s a pleasant moment to bask in all that gentle contemplation. If only it were true! The fact is that most (perhaps all) of those quiet mediators are awash in ideas, thoughts, bits of a half-remembered Pink Floyd songs, vague musings on the perfect shape of the neighbors spouses’ rear end, the bubbling resentment of last weeks argument, and very often, the pricking thought about how one shouldn’t be thinking the things that one is thinking while meditating. Certainly it all calms down, gets somewhat quiet in there with time, but I have never yet gotten up and left the zendo when a friend doesn’t look and me shaking his head and say “man, my brain was all over the place today!” With practice we learn to let these brain burps go by unmolested for the most part but the mind never really ceases sending random bits of thought up the pipe.

2. Tracing paper. It can make or break a tattoo drawing experience. I’m not kidding either, when you use as much of the stuff as tattooers do you get very picky about what you use. For me its Canson or nothing, and nothing else has the smooth, durable texture, clarity and erasibility of this stuff. No one, and I mean NO ONE else makes tracing paper like this, its like some kind of top secret formula. When I have to use that mashed potato looking, shredding, shit-paper from strathmore I always feel like someone took away my steak dinner and replaced it with a steaming turd (and keep in mind that Strathmore is my second favorite. . . ) I’m so serious that I order boxes of the Canson stuff when there is an art supply store selling the other brand right across the street from the shop.

3. I am the worlds biggest poopbutt when it comes to putting up a Christmas tree and lights and all that. The practical part of my mind just goes “why!? it’s a lot of energy for no reason!” Then Cara puts everything up, turns the lights on and I’m all “OOOHHH PRETTY!!!” And I remember why I’m not in charge of the world, it’s because I am a wet-blanket.

4. I heard a radio story about the new TinTin movie and remember fondly reading the comics. It seems like one cannot talk about Tintin without having to explain away or apologize for the fact that the stories Herge’ created in the 1930′s and 40′s contain what look to us as racist stereotypes and xenophobic mores. Which is all true but that is looking at the world through 2011 eyes and we forget that Herge’ had only his immediate experience of the world around him long before the internet and our more enlightened sensibilities. Into his 80′s he explained that had he known the world the way he did no in those days that he, of course, wouldn’t have written them that way. Before we turn too hard of a focus on the shameful attitudes of the past we should pause a minute to consider what future generations will say about us! This is, after all, the generation in which half the folks in this land don’t believe that homosexuals should be given equal rights and where we imprison and execute more people than any other nation, where we refuse to control exploitative and polluting corporations and deny the basic necessities of a society like health care and clean water to its poorest inhabitants. I’m not so sure that in 100 years people wont be looking back on US as the deplorable ones who “should have known better.”

5. If you can’t get into the spirit of the holidays listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio then you need a soul transplant. the guy was a musical genius and had a killer mustache to boot. The guy died at 47 and I really miss what I’m sure would have been another 40+ years of awesome, evocative jazz. No one else seems to be able to capture that 10% sad/90% joyous sound at the same time the way he did.

Now for the pictures!

First up is a piece I have been working on for some time. The customer is an avid carp fisherman and had an old panther he wanted covered. He also has arms the size of tree trunks so we had quite a few sessions into these bad boys. As we went along i found out that his wife loves those little green poison arrow frogs and he wanted to get one in there for her, I was thrilled to get the lil squeaker in there with this big ol kois. In this first picture we had finished the lower arm and drew on the much larger cover-up koi with sharpies. For me the trick isn’t to try to place a pile of black over the cover-up, instead I’m trying to camouflage the old work while still preserving as much of the open skin as possible, ideally when its done you can’t tell there is a coverup at all. In my book the only thing that is worse than a bad tattoo is a cover-up of a bad tattoo that looks like a coverup.

So in this next picture is the final piece with only a bit on the triceps and top of the shoulder still healing. This tattoo took about 18 hours to finish. The client is a great guy and like many of these long session pieces we became friends and I learned a lot about his life and he learned to nod patiently as I went on and on like a babbling idiot

This next guy is known in Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu mythology as a Garuda. A sort of half man/half bird who is a protector and steed to the deities. The rainbow one represents the highest order (most protective) of them, i based the body and several illustrations of Garuda but the head I looked at some of the amazing and dramatic carvings from Bali, Indonesia, and the Tibet/Nepal area. this is part of a larger Buddhist themed sleeve that should be done in 2012.

Lastly I did this Indian maiden on a regular customer and aficionado of traditional tattoos. In this business you get to come across all sorts of interesting stories and this customer has a twin sister. I have tattooed them both extensively (and differently but every so often one of them will get a tattoo and within a few weeks the other will want the same subject matter. The trick is to do them differently enough so that it doesn’t look like I got lazy and used the same stencil twice! They both sit great and are wearing some of the best traditional type work I have been lucky enough to get to do.

That is it for now, I have some really cool pieces in the works and I cant wait to show them here soon. I really feel like I’m stepping up another level in my work! At this point i can almost feel when the ten thousand tiny little individual baby steps forward I have made are ready to coalesce into something visible to the casual viewer, I feel like I have been pushing really hard to keep progressing and hopefully it will be evident in my work.

I guess thats why they call it practice

Zazen is full of contradictions. On the one hand there should be “no gaining idea”, no trying to use meditation as a way to “get’ something. Not enlightenment, not peace, not serenity,. . . . nothing. We sit just to sit.  On the other hand its something we should do every day and when we come to it (especially in the beginning) with “no gaining idea” its easy to lose motivation. After all, if we are doing it for “nothing” then why do it at all?

The reality is that if we want end suffering then we need to unlearn some habits and untangle some knots. We need to learn to put down the part of our mind that takes everything around us and says “this is good, that’s bad”. This doesn’t mean that we are trying to become emotionless or give up all our preferences, its simply to able to be aware that such thinking may not actually have anything to do with reality. We prefer to eat chocolate over dog tunds, but the reality is that chocolate isnt “good” and dog turds aren’t “bad” they simply exist til our mind comes along and makes the distinction. By doing zazen we have an opportunity to rest our minds awhile, but unlike sleep we are resting our minds while simultaneously being fully aware of everything.

Here’s where it gets tricky. We spend so much of our lives with an internal babble that when we sit down to meditate the brain freaks out. It doesn’t want to rest because it believes that  if it lets go of control for one second that something terrible will happen. The brain isn’t sure exactly what this terrible thing is, but it sure can make up all kinds of fears of losing your personality, or becoming a robot, or going crazy, or  a devil entering your mind while its “empty” (yes, really). The reality is that nothing much happens, for a long time.

Its really dull.

And that’s the other problem, it gets really really boring sitting there every day staring at a wall. Your legs hurt, your constantly bringing your mind back to the breath while it wants to think about anything that isnt that goddamn wall! So this is why its truly practice. You don’t get good at anything overnight. You dont start out your marathon career by getting up one day and running 26 miles. No matter how strong your will and how much desire you have its going to require some training to make marathons possible. Meditation is the same thing, you dont read a book or hear a talk and suddenly see the world as it truly is, there is too much habit and bias in us already to do that, we need to learn to unlearn , we need to train our minds to let go of every random thought and not play with every single idea our minds cough up, in short, we need to practice.

People who get good at anything practice and they practice regularly. Meditation requires the same thing, a daily effort. Using our marathon metaphor aone more time, real runners dont run 20 miles one day a week and sit around the remaining 6 days, they run 5 or 10 miles every day. If we want to reach any sort of understanding we need to sit the same way. It doesn’t have to be an hour everyday, but it does have to be everyday! At least we don’t have to wear those neon runners shorts.

Zazen

There were birds outside, I heard them though I couldn’t see where their song was coming from. I was aware of them, and in being aware of them it felt like somewhere, out the window, in one of the countless trees they were looking right at me and singing their songs.

Of course they were really singing to each other.

From the basement, 2 floors down came the distant rumble of the washing machine tumbling the t-shirts and underwear of one of my neighbors. Then it abruptly ended, the way only machines can end, before the spin cycle started a similar but distinctly different rumble.

Its not that the washer was particularily loud or that I was bothered by it (or the birds). I was meditating. I sat in my underpants, my belly slightly hanging over them (not as much as last month) my legs crossed in front of me on a large black cushion called a zabuton. My ass was planted on a smaller round cushion called a zafu. I tried not to control my breathe.

It was, like always, annoyingly difficult at first not to make each breath come in or out, to count them or to breathe deeply or shallowly. I was searching for my “natural” breathing, and, of course, you cant ever really look for anything and expect it to behave naturally. I once read that the very act of observing a thing changes it, we dont know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest, but we can be sure that it sounds different if we are not there to hear. So I stop trying and I stop stopping trying.

After a few minutes I forgot about breath and my chest began to rise and fall of it own, unregulated accord. Of course my body knew exactly how much breath it needed and exactly how much force to apply to my diaphragm to get it, my brain just got in the way of a cycle that had begun with that first screaming breath as a newborn and will only end with my final breath. In either case, my brain has (or had) damn little to say about it. I think that might be the deep not-so-secret of meditation, we are only trying to undo all the entanglement and confusion that that 5 pound lump of tissue creates.

Its not really his fault, you know. (I think of my brain as a him for some reason) Its only repeating patterns that have been pressed into its folds over and over and over for my whole life. So I sit here and try to teach it new lessons.  Day after day I gently show my brain understand that not everything it comes up with is necessarily true, that in fact much of what it decides is going on is really just a result of all those years of patterns and training. I try to teach my brain that I am not the only thing in the universe.

I try to teach it that there isn’t really even an I to know this.

Out the window a helicopter whirs in the distance, i hear it and my brain in some shadowed corner of my head whispers “helicopter” but I’ve been sitting for enough years that my brain doesn’t follow it up with a wondering where its going or replayingthe opening scene from Apocalypse now and all its helicopters. Ive taught it at least that much so far. Its enough to note what is going on, there doesn’t always need to be a story to go along with it.

My CD player comes to the end of the 15 minute track it has been playing. 14 minutes and 59 seconds ago it played one chime of a recorded gong and I sat on the zafu and began trying to stop   thinking of birds and breath and helicopters. I don’t recall where in that time period I forgot about trying to think or not think and just began being still with myself, I but I do know that a couple times my brain coughed up some bit of static or another. It tried to tell me that remembering to draw a dragon today was terribly important or that my dog really needed to get a walk before going to work. I just let it say what it had to say, just like I let it hear the birds or the washer and went back to simply sitting there.

As my CD player reaches 15 minutes on its silent track another chime sounds and I stretch my back a bit, another chime and I stand up. My knee is a little stiff. By the third and last chime I am already across the room and turn off the CD player. I don’t even hear the birds (though they are certainly still singing,) I cant hear the thrum of the washer and the helicopter is long gone, I’m pulling on my pants and trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. My brain is once again squawking a line of things to do, worry about, accomplish, remember, and plan for.

These days that squawking no longer drives me like it used to. These days I believe less and less that everything it tells me is the truth about who I really am and that everything it comes up with need to be played with and turned over and over like a worry stone.

In a small way, the lesson has been learned.

The lesson has been learned despite the thought balloons floating everywhere. Its taken years but there is inside of me a piece of that stillness. An awareness that I am connected to all this, everything. That I am, in fact, not separate from everything itself. I am as much a part of that bird as it is a part of me and we are , the bird and I, its song and the helicopter and the underwear in the washer and the dirt that gets washed out of the underwear into the drain.

And we are the drain too, dont forget.

Its in that part of me that is still and at peace with everything, because I sat for 15 minutes.

Delusion pt.2

If there is one misconception that people (including myself) have about Buddhism its the concept of emptiness. Its been used by fundamentalist types for years to insinuate that Buddhism is nihilism or advocates people turning into emotionless, ego less drones. Anyone who has met a group of Buddhists or listened to a zen teacher can tell you that they may be a lot of things, but emotionless isn’t one of them!

The problem is that the Buddhist definition of ‘emptyness’ is far far more nuanced and subtle than our western definition of the same word. Unfortunately language, even when sublimely applied, is a crude tool to try to show something as delicate as a concept that, by definition, is beyond conceptual thought.

But ill try anyway heh heh. . .

When speaking about Buddhism emptiness is used to describe several different concepts, what has several definitions in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Japanese like Saotori, Kenshin, Nibbana, etc are all lumped into that one general word ‘emptiness’ in English. So when we read someone talking about ‘achieving emptiness’ it sounds  a little frightening as if you are giving away or rejecting some part of yourself. Maybe even your personality or soul! Of course Buddhism isn’t about giving up anything that isnt actually part of the real you.

In fact one of the main definitions of Emptiness in Buddhism is simply the state where you see things as they really are, minus all the accumulated biases and fear and desire and modifiers that we have gathered in our lived up to this point. it means to be ‘empty’ of false views, of looking at the world with greed, aversion or ignorance. A state the Chan/zen Chinese used to call ‘seeing with your original face’, the you that exists underneath all the layers of junk we have learned to call ‘me’. When we strip that away and just experience the moment as it really is we are empty of delusion. Does that sound scary?  It sounds pretty sweet to me.

When we live in the world this way we are not devoid of emotion, we are FULL of feeling! Rather we let the world (including how we feel) arise and pass away naturally. We don’t cling to the momentary happy bits or try to run away from the momentary sad bits.  The result is a way of being in the world while empty of the suffering we cause to ourselves and others by that clinging. Its deciding to get off of the roller coaster of joy which turns into fear, its trading chaos for contentment.

The other kind of emptiness that is discussed is the ‘empty your mind” bit which really seems to frighten folks. The truth is that no form of Buddhist meditation will tell you to ‘empty’ your mind, actually its the very opposite! In zen sitting we are there to see things as they are, to experience the moment as it occurs, you cant do this by trying to have an empty mind any more than you could taste soup out of an empty bowl! What we do is to let the thoughts come and pass away without playing with them, we watch and feel without trying to make them go away or change them into something else. The trick isn’t to be free of all thoughts, its not to get caught by one thought over another, its like watching trees go past as you ride a train, we want to watch them go without one particular one catching our attention so fully we have to turn our heads completely around to keep it in view. What we learn is that our thoughts are just thoughts. they are not ‘us” and we don’t have to believe something just because our brain coughed it up, by sitting an observing our thoughts without trying to avoid some or hold onto others we learn to let them come and go without having to act on every single one!

It took me many many years of meditation to understand this. We think of ‘empty’ as such a negative thing that to ‘seek emptiness’ seems dangerous and bizarre, once you see beyond the word itself and the idea most of us have grown up it goes from sounding like something exotic and strange to simply the natural way things really are.

An old zen story tells of a famous zen master who was illiterate. A nun asked him to help with some literature she couldn’t understand.

“well, i cant read,” the Zen master said “but if you read it to me maybe i can help”

the nun was astonished, “If you cant read, then how can you understand what its about!?”

the Zen master simply pointed at the moon. “If I point at the moon this way you don’t mistake my finger to be the moon do you?”

“of course not” the nun answered

“well then, why do you mistake writing for the truth that it is pointing at?”

In other words, dont get hung up on the words, try to understand what they are pointing to. Sit zazen and you will see what we mean by emptiness, it wont happen overnight, but it will happen. Hell, it only took me 5 years to understand what that story about the illiterate zen guy meant! (then again, im pretty dense . . . *sigh* )

Meditation for me?

In my family we have this problem. . . see we just dont ask for help, ever. So when we are learning something new it requires a lot of trial and error, and often something that could be shown to me by a competent teacher i instead muddle my way through taking twice as long to get half as far. This was definitely the case for me and meditation. When i decided to learn about this whole Buddha stuff I had the same preconceptions as lots of folks do and spent way too much time arguing with my mistaken notion of what Buddhism is and what meditation is ‘for’.

eventually through practice, muddling, and reading I began to separate my goofball notion from the reality of the whole deal. Buddhism is both much simpler and much more sublime than the crude stereotypes i had associated with it. One of the main things I came to understand was that Buddhism is something you DO not something you BELIEVE. In fact belief is absolutely besides the point.

So I found this rather relaxed and accurate guide to starting meditation on you tube. I really wish I would have seen this 10 years ago, but hey, its there now. If you have any interest this little quick guide is all you need to know.

heres a few things that confused me about meditation that hopefully i can help you avoid.

1. you arent trying to achieve any special state. You dont need to stop thinking, you dont need to ‘feel peaceful’ or float, or any other wacky trance like shit. a trance is not meditation. meditation is being in reality moment by moment and just being with that moment.

2. meditation is not a way to feel better. it not going to make your bad day go away (though there are meditation-like exercises to help with stress, they arent technically Buddhist meditation) however, after some time with the practice you will find that all that stress simply stops arising and your ability to withstand the blows life inevitable throws your way becomes easier and more natural.

3. reincarnation, god, heaven or hell, all this stuff has nothing to do with Buddhism. they are questions that no person can answer with actual experience so in Buddhism we dont bother to ask them. Is there life after death? who knows!? I guess we will find out after we die, til then there is more important stuff to deal with now.

4. after many years I can tell you that meditation never gets fun. you never get trippy experiences (if you are doing it right) and it never feels like you have ‘gotten enlightened”. Were not looking for any sort of goal, and yet the ‘side effects’ of meditation do have beneficial results, the funny part is they dont show up til you quit looking for them.

5. its not a tough guy contest. its better to meditate for a few minutes every day than for 3 hours once a week. like anything in life worth doing, you build it gradually, stick with it regularly rather than doing it intensely every so often. The example that is often used is trying to make a fire by rubbing a stick against another stick, rubbing the stick for a few seconds here and there wont do anything, but doing it steadily for some time will get that fire lit!