Burning Electrons

I was looking at the updated page for peripheral neuropathy. I don’t remember some of the things I saw there, but now the more recent symptoms that I have been experiencing make sense. Things like the loss of balance. I had been thinking that it was just because I can’t feel my feet, but I think it is more than that. I think that the neuropathy itself has affected my balance. According to the wikipedia page I can expect a lot more degeneration in my normal functioning. More loss of balance, more loss of muscle mass and strength. More loss of sexual function. More digestive problems, more bladder problems, more loss of feeling in both my hands and feet, well, there can’t be much more in my feet, they already have no feeling.

This is really a bummer because I have been thinking that I the loss of balance I have been noticing when I walk Comet is not really happening. I have been thinking that my ability to just get down the street is not real, its a figment of my imagination, and that I really can walk, but maybe it is real. Maybe I really do look like a spaz when I walk down the street.

I know that I am not walking as fast as I used to walk. I remember when I used to go camping and there was only one guy in our group who walked as fast as I did. Michael Denby Doran. He and I used to just go off on our own and let the rest of the people get them at their own speed. Now, I would be lucky if I could get there at all. Just trying to stay upright on the sidewalk is a problem. I sure hope that I don’t have to cross any streams or anything like that, because I would probably fall in.

Even walking down a set of stairs has been a big problem lately. I know that this morning, going down the stairs at the health club, I felt like I had to hang on to the banister or I wouldn’t  make it. I even have trouble going down the 4 steps on my front porch now. Holding on to Comet’s leash at the same time as walking down the steps seems more difficult now than it did a few weeks ago. I thought that that was a figment if my imagination, but maybe it isn’t.

I wonder how long this degeneration will take. I wonder how long I will take this degeneration.

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As I was leaving the coffee shop this morning, one of the other early morning patrons said something to me about bruises.  I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked him what he meant.  He said “from falling off the bar-stool“.  John doesn’t always have a reason for saying things. Being an old codger, he doesn’t need to have a reason. As I left, I told him that I don’t drink.

But I did drink, and for most of my life I couldn’t conceive of not drinking… every day… at least to go to sleep at night, if for no other reason, to combat insomnia.  Ever since I was a teen-ager, I have had insomnia.  Or I thought I had insomnia.  I have always used some sort of aid to go to sleep.  Alcohol, OTC meds, Prescription meds. But alcohol always played some role in my going to sleep. For some reason, I no longer have insomnia.  Maybe its the morphine and fentanyl that I take for pain.  Do you think?

But I never fell off a bar-stool. At least I don’t remember ever falling off a bar stool.  As I was walking back to my house I started thinking about the time I walked across the Sierra Madre mountains in California.  It was an eleven day trip, most of it spent above 11,000 feet.   We didn’t carry any alcohol on that trip, not even one drink. So when we came out of the mountains at Lone Pine, below Mt. Whitney, I was ready to have a drink.  I was also ready to eat supper with a fork and knife instead of just a spoon. Having been on a freeze dried diet for the whole trip, there was no need for a knife or fork.  After we got to Lone Pine we called one of my co-trekkers girlfriend in Santa Barbara to come and pick us up.  She was going to get there the next morning so we got a room at some cheap, funky hotel in the heart of Lone Pine.  I only remember one street in Lone Pine, so it was along that street somewhere.  After showering and eating dinner at some cheap, but good, restaurant, Jerry and Glenn went back to the hotel, and I, with the $7 that we had left, headed to to a dive bar, where the Budweiser tall boys were 50 cents.

As far as I can remember, I spent the whole $7 on bottles of Bud, but I could have bought a round that wasn’t reciprocated, and I could have left a tip, but I don’t remember. All I remember is that I spent the whole night, until closing (at 2am), drinking and carrying on with the cowboys who I found in the bar.  I do remember that after the bar closed, I was staggering down the street and decided I needed to puke.  Actually, I had no choice in the matter.  I happened to be walking past a U-Haul dealership and staggered into the back of the lot to take care of business. As I walked back to the street, I realized that there was no longer anyone else out there, except, maybe, the police.  For some reason, I got it into my head that I might get arrested for public intoxication if I continued down the street, so I crawled under a U-Haul truck and passed out.

I woke up as dawn was beginning to break, that time when you can see without lights, but the lights are still on, and managed to walk back to our hotel.  Actually, by that time I didn’t feel drunk anymore, and as I recall, I didn’t even feel hung over.  I did feel, however, that it was too early to go up to the room and wake up Jerry and Glenn (there was only one double bed in the room, and one of them would have had to wake up if I wanted to crawl into bed, so I decided to hang out in the lobby until they got up by themselves). It was actually a nice lobby, one of those old fashion lobbies that double as a sitting room where people read their morning papers.

And there was a very pretty, young woman also sitting in the lobby.  I have no idea what we said to each other, but I soon understood that she was a hooker who had no room where she could spend the night. She tried to get me to take her back to my room.  She was even willing to throw in a free fuck if I took her to the room.  I guess her rooms were otherwise engaged and she had no place to sleep that morning.  She was hoping I would give her one, but for some reason I wouldn’t do it.  Even after all these years, I remember that she was a very good looking woman, one that I would normally jump into the sack with, but I couldn’t do that to Jerry and Glenn.  I’m not sure why, I only know that I intentionally turned down a free fuck for some forgotten reason. About three hours later, our ride showed up and we headed back to Santa Barbara.

So, that’s the story of one night that I was drunk enough to fall off a bar-stool.  Over the years there were lots more of those opportunities, but for some reason that was the one that came to mind this morning.

I ride a customized cruiser style motorcycle, it’s the only Buddhist bike I’ve seen, with Acala Varochana (Fudo Myo_o) on the tank, and Avalokiteshvara’s Mantra on the sides, its an interesting machine, but selling  it will be a problem; I haven’t met too many other Buddhist Bikers out there.

I used to sail, and thought I would sail around the world on my 47 foot Skookum ketch, but a loss of balance from a progressive neurological disease made that impractical.

I used to be a river guide on both coasts, but I’m not going to get into which coast is better.

I used to be a radical politico, associated with the Weatherman faction of the SDS.  We tried to make a new world from the ashes of the old, but that was a pipe dream that had been tried before, with people just as committed as we were and they didn’t do it either. But… we did make a difference and can see the changes is Women’s rights and civil rights and the election of a black man to the presidency of the USA, and I know that it was the changes that people like me fought for that made that possible.  We changed the world, but the neocons screwed it up, and continue to screw it up because of their deluded ideas, but it has to be other people who take over making a good  society that is fair to all and gives support to those who need it, I don’t have the energy to do it again.  That is what youth is for.

I was also a scientist with a decent record of getting funded and publishing papers.  I was lucky to work with some of the smartest people in the world, always feeling that everybody in the room was smarter than I, but I think the others felt that  way too.  I got my PhD at the time when Molecular biology was just being discovered and was active in the development of techniques that led to Biology becoming a data rich science, which in turn led to the development of Systems BIology.  Again, I was lucky to have been Lee Hood’s lab manager while this way of integrating data was being developed. It was quite a ride, but my neurological problems took me out of the picture before I would have liked. But is was quite a ride while it lasted.

Now I am learning to be a buddhist because I think that studying the science of our minds can lead one to happines and ease the transition that takes place when we die.  I look forward to being reborn in Amitabha’s pure land, Dewachen, where I can reach nirvana in one lifetime and return as a bodhisattva so I can  help end the suffering of other sentient beings.  That would be cool.

I think the only thing that I would have done differently in this life was to get a MD/PHD instead of just a PhD. That way I could have retired from basic research and joined the Doctor’s Without Borders. That way  I could be treating people who currently have no access to even basic medicine.

That’s what I would like to be doing, however, not being able to do that, I am going on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the Buddha. We will spend nearly 20 days touring the places where the Buddha taught people path to enlightenment.  When I am done with that, I am going to South Africa, to Knysna, on the southern tip of South Africa, about 600 Km east of Cape Town, where I will spend time visiting the Vermak’s, who are some of the nicest people I have ever met.  Hopefully I will be able to sit and meditate on a cliff  where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet.  Maybe the whales will be migrating, but just sitting will be good enough for me.

Now that I am coming to the end of this road, I feel like I have led a decent life. I have done a lot of things that others only dreamed of doing.  I have acted, when others stood to the side, and fought for civil and personal rights and a just society. I have walked across the Sierra Madre moutains, rafted down wild rivers, and sailed in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I surfed before it became crowded,  I smoked dope and expanded my mind with LSD and Mescaline,  and I tried to treat people based on what they did rather than what they looked like,  Of course I could have been better, made fewer mistakes, hurt fewer people, been hurt by fewer people, but I’m hoping that the next time around will be even better.

Or at least I have lost the text in the body of the posts. All I see are the titles and extracts. I would like to go back to the day before yesterday, which was the last time I saw the pages the way they are suppose to be seen.

I have no idea what my animals are going to do when I am on my trip.  They have gotten so used to a predawn walk that when I am not ready by 6:15, they enter the harassment phase and insist that I get out of bed, dressed, and on the road, The people who are house sitting for me (Lars and Mary) are on vacation.  They may not want to get up at 6 AM. I would not blame them if they objected to being harassed before day light. Maybe I am giving Comet and Buster (Dog and Cat respectively) too much say about when and where I an willing to walk them.

I think I am having separation anxiety about going off for a month without them.  No, I know that it is separation anxiety but I am sure that they will be well cared for.

I was driving through dowtown Ballard, collecting some things I need for my trip to India and South Africa when I drove past the shop I used to rent with Scott Hendrickson.  Suddenly, I remembered that when I first moved to Seattle with my last wife, Susan, we had hocked everything we owned so we could raise the down payment on a boat.  We were totally into being sailors, learning all the boat’s systems while working for 10 years so we could sail around the world.  That was my idea, anyway.  (Fade to black on white…)

While we were still in Providence, RI, both of us woefully underemployed, we lived in a little town called Tiverton, RI on the Sakonnet RIver We had access to a Valiant 40 that was moored across from our house.  That was the reason we got inspired to buy a boat and live on it until we were ready to retire and take off around the world.  Susan and I had both been married twice previously, and were tired of having big weddings, so we decided to get married at a close friend’s house in Seattle, before we took off on a whale research cruise up in Alaska. It was an awesome honeymoon.  Jerry Garcia died while we were looking for whales in Alaska, so that gives you the time frame we were dealing with.

I had lived in Seattle when I did my postdoc and Susan really liked Seattle based on several trips we made here. I had also lived aboard a boat in Santa Barbara, so I had a better idea of what we were getting in to than Susan did. Despite that, after the wedding, we decided to look for jobs in the Pacific NW, and I found the perfect job, being Lee Hood’s lab manager (I was supposed to not have to write grants anymore (yeah, right), so I applied for it, and Susan applied for a job as a tumor registrar in Tacoma.  Both places wanted to interview us and paid for us to fly out to Seattle for the Interviews.  I had mine on one day, and then, the next day, so while Susan was interviewing, I walked around Lake Union, looking at boats for sale.

At one brokerage, I saw a boat in the 40 foot range that looked solid and roomy enough to live aboard, but I also saw another boat that was a 47 foot ketch, that had beautiful workmanship (alas, it was wood), and was a good price, but I thought 47 feet was bigger than we could sail comfortably.  But it was a beautiful boat, so the next day, I made the mistake of showing it to Susan, and she decided that if we were going to live aboard a boat, it had to be that one, The Odyle.  We put in a bid that was way under the asking price, but not so far under that it was it insulting, and flew back home to Tiverton.  A few days later the owners accepted our bid, and that set everything in motion for us to divest ourselves of everything in order to buy the Odyle.  At least we thought we were getting rid of everything.  When we finally got here with our stuff and moved aboard, we found that we had enough stuff to fill the boat and then two additional storage lockers with junk we would never use.

But, the point of all this was that between 1997 and 2001, all our effort, or mine, anyway, outside of being a scientist, was put into learning how to live aboard, and sail,  a 47 ft ketch. Not that we sailed a whole lot, but we worked on the boat a whole lot.  It was overwhelming and, in the end, we only did one trip up into the San Juans (a group of islands in the Puget Sound where people go on boats).  Even though we had put so much of our effort into being sailors, I barely remember that it even happened now.  The live aboard culture is very different than the dry land culture, but it was only when I drove past that shop that I even remembered that it happened.  Susan had felt that living aboard was romantic for about two weeks, and all the time after that was spent thinking that this was not the thing that she had signed up for.  I eventually found that the peripheral neuropathy got so bad that I have a very hard time balancing, and the last thing you want to be is off balance when you are on the pitching foredeck trying to shorten sailed in a gale.  It became clear that my days as a sailor were numbered.  Susan’s ended even before mine did.  But we have very few records that that time ever existed:  No momento’s of our time aboard or trips we took.  Not even any pictures.  It all just funneled down the tube and disappeared into some lost time when we thought we were going to be happy sailing around the world.

Completely gone.

I’m starting to get excited about this trip to India.  I leave in one month, 30 days. Do I have everything ready to go?  Well, I’ve got my tickets ready, I’ve got my passport and visa, I’ve paid for the tour (the Tricycle Journal’s In the Footsteps of the Buddha Pilgrimage),  booked an extra days lodging at a Tibetan Buddhist run Guest house in Delhi, and I’ve got my luggage ready, I’ve even done a dry run on packing to see if what I plan to take will fit into the bags I am taking.  I’ve got this real nifty camera bag and its even all packed, although I haven’t managed to find a decent tripod to take with me.  I figure I’ll take a small tripod and a monopod and hope that will make do.  I’ve never prepacked anything before, not sure why I did this time, probably just because I was ready to go about 3 weeks ago. I’m also looking forward to the end of my trip because I plan to spend a week in South Africa, near Knysna, visiting with a friends parents, sitting on a cliff above the souther Ocean, watching the waves and relaxing.

It turns out that this is the year that the Kumbe Mella (not sure how y0u spell that, but that’s how it sounds).  That is the biggest spiritual festival held anywhere, I think.  Apparently, as one of the Hindu gods was ascending into the heavens, four drops of water spilled from his cup and landed on earth in the 4 different places in India where this festival is held.  4 years ago there were reportedly 30 million attendees at the last celebration.  A movie was made of that festival called Fasttrack to Nirvana or something like that.  All the yogi’s and yogini’s and guru’s and every other sort of mystic shows up there.  Heavy on the Vedantic influences, but its something that I would like to go to once before I am done traveling.  I even thought about extending my trip 10 days to go this time, but then I figured that that might be overkill, and that I could better use the time to visit with Chris and Madeleine at Knysna.  They were so nice the last time I was there, when they were still at Francoise’s house in Oobos, when they let me sit on the porch and relax.  I was not in very good shape when I was traveling with Murray and Paul, two guys in their 20’s. They were into partying and I was into kicking back.  Luckily I could take the bus back to Oobos and hang out there and reschedule my flights out of George SA instead of having to go all the way to JoBurg.

So this is the first installment of my journal about this trip.  Hopefully I will get back into writing  a decent narrative on this trip to India and South Africa as it is at least unique in its two destinations.

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Its been so long since I’ve written anything in either this electronic notebook or in my handwritten note that I have fallen into the inertia of inaction.  Its been so long that its easy to find reasons for not starting again. Its easy to say to oneself that restarting a narrative after such a lengthy absence requires a topic of some import, and that what I have to say today just isn’t important enough. Not worthy enough. And so I don’t write anything.

Well, I don’t have anything important to say today, but I want to say something just to get my writing restarted.

It has been a long fall here in Washington.  I have been trying to balance my neuropathic pain with the dullness induced by opiates.  I’ve been losing the battle on both sides, either I am in too much pain to be comfortable, or I have taken to much fentanyl to be comfortable.  I picture this balance as a sine wave moving around a 0 line that represents being able to function and not be in terrible pain.  There is probably a sector of +- 20% around that 0 line where I am more or less normal.  On the -80% of the time I have a hard time sitting still or meditating because of the ants crawling under my skin.  On the other side, the other 80% of the time I am falling asleep or unable to focus my vision with both eyes open due to the effects of the opiates I have to take.  So up and down I go on this roller-coaster ride.

In the meantime, I have been able to work on my meditation and move ahead with my buddhist studies.  I really would like to have the discipline to learn some tibetan, but I am having a hard enough time just getting my reading done.  My class on comparative meditation is over, and it was pretty good, but fairly advanced.  At the same time I have been taking an introduction to buddhism class that is very basic, but whose texts are illuminating all the same.  In fact, the description of impermanence and emptiness and calm abiding, analytical, and placement meditation finally make sense, and my practice instructor has pointed me in a direction that should help me develop better meditation skills.  So that is good and looking up.  In fact, as soon as I hit publish on this post, I will be doing an hours of shamata (calm abiding) meditation, and then showering and taking Comet for a run in the dog park near Judy’s house.

Oh, and one other big thing is that I found some people to house-sit.  Or, more correctly, Susan found some people to house-sit.  From what I have gathered, they are organic farmers from Oregon.  That could leave a lot to the imagination, so it will be nice to get some clarification on what and Oregon organic gardener grows.  I have started to write Lars and Mary emails so they will know Comet and Buster before they get here. I hope that they will take good care of my animals (and my house, of course) while they are here.

Finally, my back is coming along slowly.  I have a feeling that I will only get one more session in before I leave on this trip.  That should get most of the figure above my belt done, leaving only the lotus seat to finish.

enough

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Pain is an intrinsic part of being born in a physical body, as the Buddha has taught. In reality, aging and sickness begin the moment we enter the world. Yet we are conditioned to ward off all pain. We are unwilling to allow the pain simply to happen. There are some important and challenging questions relating to physical pain and our bodies:

• Are we comfortable with the truth of our bodies?
• Do we feel a need to control the changes in our bodies?
• Do we need to change things in any way?
• Can our mind be sufficiently spacious and receptive to allow all that appears to arise without our resistance or aversion?
• Can we be okay with heat, pressure, tingling, cold, and throbbing in the body?
• Is it all okay?
• Can it be workable?

Paradoxically, once we are willing to work with pain, we feel that it is not all bad. Pain is a riveting object of attention; to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. If we leave the breath and direct attention to whatever physical sensation is in the body, allowing ourselves to be present with whatever has arisen, the mind doesn’t tend to wander very much. If we are truly aware of the sensations, we find that pain can focus and calm the mind. There can be a joy that arises with this concentration. We are not scattered. The mind is happily focused. Read the rest of this entry →

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A friend forwarded me an article today from the Journal of Neuroscience that discusses experiments that show that meditation can alter brain function and the ability to train attention. This is something that meditators know subjectively but which has not been validated extensively by the scientific community.

I really enjoy that these kinds of studies are being done. I hope to eventually see a feedback loop develop between this kind of scientific work and the work of practitioners where each reinforces the other. I believe it is possible that scientists may discover the physiological basis for the meditation techniques that have been worked out, through trial, error, and experience, by meditators over the last few thousand years. This may even lead to improved meditation techniques eventually because with a more concrete understanding of what is happening in the brain, we may be able to develop more refined practices that use this knowledge.

Meditation training can enhance the stability of our attention through reducing cortical “noise”

Several groups collaborate to show that meditation training can can significantly affect attention and brain function.

Abstract:

The capacity to stabilize the content of attention over time varies among individuals, and its impairment is a hallmark of several mental illnesses. Impairments in sustained attention in patients with attention disorders have been associated with increased trial-to-trial variability in reaction time and event-related potential deficits during attention tasks. At present, it is unclear whether the ability to sustain attention and its underlying brain circuitry are transformable through training. Here, we show, with dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography, that training attention, as cultivated by meditation, can improve the ability to sustain attention. Three months of intensive meditation training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, as indicated by both enhanced theta-band phase consistency of oscillatory neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Furthermore, those individuals who showed the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behavioral response variability. Notably, we also observed reduced variability in neural processing, in particular in low-frequency bands, regardless of whether the deviant tone was attended or unattended. Focused attention meditation may thus affect both distracter and target processing, perhaps by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms, a mechanism important for controlling the content of attention. These novel findings highlight the mechanisms underlying focused attention meditation and support the notion that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain function.

The Journal of Neuroscience, October 21, 2009, 29(42):13418-13427; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1614-09.2009
Mental Training Enhances Attentional Stability: Neural and Behavioral Evidence

You can read the paper here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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Some of us in my sangha have discussed having Buddhist applications for the iPhone (or iPod Touch). It would be convenient to have our daily service, and the various sutras that we use in it, available easily. Since none of us program in Objective C, it isn’t a project that has gotten very far. (I’m actually partial to the “Monastic Office” book with the rubberized cover that Shasta Abbey put out back in the day as a useful format for carrying around as well.)

I see that within a Tibetan context, someone has recently done this. You can go to http://www.buddhistapps.com and see the homepage for a Tibetan Buddhist application. It is a pretty basic application, focusing on taking refuge, generating Bodhicitta,mantra recitation, and then dedication of merit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/albill/3900314351/

The nice thing about it is that it gives the Tibetan prayers in transliterated Tibetan and they recorded a monk chanting the prayers in Tibetan.

For anyone who has practiced within a Tibetan context in the past, as I have, the way that non-native speakers chant Tibetan is all over the map and is often not very melodious. This makes it a helpful touch.

I wish that this was available as a general framework. I could see using the same structure (with some additional steps) with an app for the Five Mountain Sangha for daily practice as well.

I’d also like to see an application put together to allow for sutra reading for all of the sutras that are available as unencumbered English text. That might be a taller order given the variability in quality of translation.

For those interested in the application, you can get it here though they would like $1.99 for it (which is pretty minimal).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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I read the following quote this weekend:
“The single most important or most basic insight of the historical Buddha is the claim that who we are and what we think exists is a function of our mind and its cognitive powers. In other words, it is our mind and our uses of it that determine how [...]

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Buddhism most closely resembles how I view the world and the way that I live my life, but I do not self-identify as a Buddhist practitioner. For how many of you does this ring true? What is the difference between a Buddhist and a non-Buddhist and where do you draw the line?

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Cool, I wonder if you can meditate and still be stupid?  You might think that meditation and mindfulness would lead to a little common sense. Lets hope so… maybe?

An article appearing in yesterday’s Boston Globe suggests a new trend among young adults: meditation. Taking a break from the demands of Facebook and Twitter, young people are increasingly turning to meditation workshops and retreats to combat stress and refocus their attention. Institutions offering meditation classes, such as Insight Meditation Center (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, [...]

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I couldn’t let this one go by.  Too the American people don’t take the time to think about figures like this.  All they can do is listen to the rabid right wing shouters who are accusing Obama of being a commie simp. And the worst part of all this is that Obama is buckling in to their screed.

The Democrats’ health care plan costs half as much as the two major tax cuts pushed by the George W. Bush administration, according to a report issued Tuesday.
Dems’ Health Plan Half As Costly As Bush Tax Cuts
Posted in Ethics, Health, Human Rights, Metta, Politics Tagged: health care cost

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