Monkey See, Monkey Do

so i expect i’ll be going to india sometime soon, for outsourcing client engineering work. i’m almost done with all of the vaccinations that i’ll need for that, but this week i started the live typhoid culture. four pills, you take one every other day on an empty stomach. they said side effects could be fever, nausea, and similar ailment. my immune system has been over excited about all this though. i’m on day three now and yesterday i felt like i had been in a car accident. it came in waves. some moments i’d feel fine, then others i just wanted to curl up on the floor and fall asleep. this makes the tax prep and regular work i was doing a bit tougher. today i feel about as set back, i’m hoping my immune system will finish adjusting today. this weekend i’m assisting with another meditation retreat and it would be nice to be at a 100% for the participants. but i guess i’ll find out tomorrow, and it will be what it will be.

i definitely need to track expenses on a more regular bases, going through piles of receipts now for my taxes is fine but such a long process.

thanks mel for pointing out legislation in san francisco to ban non-recyclable plastic bags in markets. i’ve never been clear on which was better, paper or plastic. but it’s nice to see some sort of effort to make things more recyclable in general. seems quite responsible.

oh, this just in. starting in two days the city of san francisco will implement a central customer service phone number to call for trash issues or what have you: 3-1-1

that’s right, just dial 3-1-1 starting march 29th and they’ll route you to the right folks, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

i wrote to a few folks, like caltrans and the san francisco city, and received nice responses today. one suggested i gather neighbors together for the adopt a street program, in which the depart of public works will provide us with bags, brooms, gloves, and trash pickup for any events we organize. another suggested i make frequent reports of trash in that area, to increase the frequency of city cleaning there. and another suggested i simply take a reusable bag with me as i go, and dump any trash i collect that day into the public trash cans on street corners. overall i’m surprised i received such a quick set of responses and there are options.

Note: if you see anyone dumping things illegally in SF, call 28-CLEAN to report the problem. that’s also the phone number to see if there is an adopt a street group already in your neighborhood.

my mom walks four miles a day, takes her about an hour. she’s been doing that for a year now and it’s been tremendously good for her she says.

since my small office in san francisco is exactly 1.9 miles from my home, i decided to walk today. a two way trip should be about as far, and take as long, and a little extra exercise sounds good for me. funny though that the day i decided to try this is one of the rare days when it decide to seriously rain in the city. next quest is if i can easily walk to the gym and then to home, a total of 4.1 miles, and not be too wiped to work out. might have to resort to bicycle on gym days. ok, sorry for the mundane window into my day. but i thought i’d take a break from the meditation theme.

on a related note, the walk to work was littered with a tremendous amount of trash. it makes me want to bring a plastic bag and gloves on my commute and pick up some of it. i wonder if i can get those orange caltrans garbage bags for that purpose. i have a theory that if a place is trashed, then it attracts more trash and more carelessness, even more dangerous or violent behavior. if people see that a space is not cared for, then doesn’t that invite people to be more careless or feel like there’s less accountability there?

i heard that when curtis sliwa started the guardian angels volunteer crime watch group in new york city, they actually first began as a volunteer trash pickup group and bought their own street sweeper. he saw that to clean up the crime in an area, the way to start is by actually cleaning up the area. that makes sense to me.

a lot of the trash looks like it just blew there, and collected along the fence. it might not be so intentionally deposited on the side of the road. but it wouldn’t take that much effort for the community or just a few people each day picking up a few items to make a huge difference.

so that last quote i posted has been percolating in my mind today. i walked downtown to meet with my accountant, and i passed a multitude of people and a multiplicity of emotions and tensions. mostly i noticed the tension, on people’s faces, in their shoulders, in their gaze. that seemed to be predominant… tension… i think the monkey mind quote is somewhat getting at that. because having a sense of peace, or calm abiding, isn’t to me at a gross level. it isn’t that you’re avoiding conflict or quelling anger. it’s more about relaxing into whatever is arising. that could be relaxing with irritation or anger. so therefore, i don’t mean some happy go lucky going with the flow. shamatha is not like the “it’s all good” stoner or apologist. it seems to be more about relating directly and precisely to what’s coming up in our experience. that could be tension and fear, as so many people on the street today appeared, but instead of holding it all together and holding up the armor i think it would be a sort of relaxing with it. genuinely being upset, though not acting out based on it. genuinely being one’s self, even with all the qwerks and fears and awkwardness of being human. meditation is something to do with that, something to do with practicing genuineness.

The mind is like a crazy monkey, which leaps about and never stays in one place. It is completely restless and constantly paranoid about its surroundings. The training, or the meditation practice, is a way to catch the monkey, to begin with. That is the starting point. Traditionally, this training is called shamatha in Sanskrit, or shi-ne in Tibetan, which means simply “the development of peace.” When we talk about the development of peace, we are not talking about cultivating a peaceful state, as such, but about simplicity. - chogyam trungpa rinpoche

this from his latest book “The Tea Cup and the Skullcup” recently released: a unique collection of his talks comparing zen and tantric buddhism. i should note that chogyam trungpa is no longer alive, but his students edited a series of talks for this book.

though if you believe in the tibetan version of tulku reincarnation, you could say that his next incarnation is alive - he’s a teenage boy named choseng trungpa rinpoche living in surmang, tibet. i donated a small amount last year to help build a school in his region of tibet, a very poor area, and he sent me a small red cord that he had braided. it feels incredibly odd and special to have this small trinket in my office that this remarkable young man wove - halfway around the world.

my meditation community is now using google maps to show you where their meditation centers are located, which is pretty wizzy. when you click on an area on the map you zoom in and see thumb tacks for each center. clicking on a thumb tack presents address and contact info. ultimately all the center’s programs will be searchable so you can find beginner classes and programs in your area - but that aspect isn’t there yet. ultimately that should be much easier for people to find introductory programs in my tradition. good use of technology.

meditation causes enduring change to the human brain, at least according to professor davidson at the university of wisconsin, madison. more specifically, the more hours of meditation correlated with the greater change, and the changes included increased activation in the parts that underly empathy and love as well as greater connections between frontal areas and emotion centers - allowing greater control by higher thought of emotion.

so my question then is, if that’s the case, then does watching TV also have enduring brain effects and impact emotion? or does a continuous concern over self and self betterment also produce enduring effects? it seems reasonable then that narcissism or a continuous focus on one’s self would cause changes in the brain and reinforce habits. much of modern american culture seems to encourage this - with an adam smith-ian ethos that if we’re all out for our best interest then the greater society will be better for it, or at least more wealthy. but what does that do to the emotional habits of our brains i wonder?