Confessions of an Aspiring Buddhist

I am an idiot.  I think it is important to get that statement right out there, from the beginning, so that anybody reading what comes next understands how amazingly dumb I really am.

I started reading up on Buddhism for the same reason I tended to do anything when I was younger – for a girl.  Well, okay . . . for a woman.  I was desperately in love (unrequitedly) with a woman for whom Buddhism had become very, very important, and I decided to learn about Buddhism so that I could understand better what she was thinking about.

And it was an easy sell for me.  Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated with the idea of consciousness.  What does it mean to be self-aware? What does it mean to be sentient? Can we create artificial intelligences and, if we do so, will we recognize them when they speak to us? What does it mean to be human?

These are all heady questions, and yet the same basic ones we all have been asking for millennia.  We dress them up with code words like “epistemology,” “ontology,” and “consciousness,” and we give out degrees for stringing the correct words together in the correct way, but really they are the same questions that any reflective person asks as a child and for which we have yet to find a completely satisfactory answer.

In Buddhism I discovered an unbroken tradition – stretching back 2,500 years – devoted to thinking about these very things.  I was hooked!  I have spent more than a decade since studying and reading Buddhist teachings, and I am constantly amazed at the insights these teachings have about the nature of consciousness, reality, and perception.  I cannot think of a sutra that has not made me sit back and think, Whoa . . . . that’s a new way of thinking about it.

The thing is, I’m not a Buddhist myself.  One of my standard lines, whenever somebody is so gauche as to ask me about my religion, is to tell them that I am an “aspiring Buddhist.”  It is kind of a funny line, if you think about it, because in itself it indicates that the speaker recognizes the value of Buddhism, but also acknowledges that the speaker doesn’t quite think he is worthy of claiming the title.  It is like saying one is a “lapsed Catholic,” but in reverse.

Now, here’s the thing . . . it is impossible to study Buddhism strictly for the reasons I did.  (And I’m not talking, now, about the girl.)  Yes, Buddhism does have an unbroken tradition stretching back for millennia questioning the nature of consciousness.  But that isn’t Buddhism’s main concern.  It is impossible to read and study Buddhism without being powerfully affected by what it has to say about compassion.  Compassion is the center of Buddhist teaching, and it is the core of everything the religion/philosophy is about. 

I began by explaining that I am an idiot, but even I am not so idiotic as to fail to take away at least something from Buddhism about the compassion we owe each other.

Cynicism

Via Kay, at Balloon-Juice, I see this:

When I was reporting out my New Yorker piece, I spoke with Akhil Reid Amar, a leading constitutional scholar at Yale, who thinks that a 5-4 party-line vote against the [Affordable Care Act’s] mandate would be shattering to the court’s reputation for being above politics.  “I’ve only mispredicted one big Supreme Court decision in the last 20 years,” he told me.  “That was Bush v. Gore.  And I was able to internalize that by saying they only had a few minutes to think about it and they leapt to the wrong conclusion.  If they decide this by 5-4, then, yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud.  Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t.  What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.”

(empasis added).

Uhhmmm . . . yeah.  It’s sad that Professor Amar is having to go through this, but it is only what I went through years ago.  If you devote yourself to a profession like the law for any reason other than money, then you are a fool and a naif and real people should kick you in the ribs and laugh at you.

Nursing and Surfing

So I was walking my dog Sunday evening; I was trying to adjust my sleep schedule so that I can be awake in the mornings again.  I slept away most of Sunday afternoon and hoped to get some more sleep later before I had to show up for my eight o’clock Monday morning class.

These days I spend Friday night/Saturday mornings and Saturday night/Sunday mornings at the local hospital, where I work as a Certified Nurse Aide.  I became a CNA I about a month ago, and am still in school for the CNA II.  But my school does clinical work at the local hospital, and apparently I made enough of an impression that they wanted to hire me before I finished my program.  And so for the past two weekends I’ve been working at the hospital whilst I finish learning all the stuff I need to help the patients for whom I am caring.

It has been an interesting experience, this actually doing the job for which I am still being trained.  It is exhilarating, for one thing, that sense of flying by the seat of your pants when you know that you don’t really understand yet what you are doing but have to pretend that you do anyway.

An Old Man in School

Well, I'm back.  The frequency of posting obviously has gone down since the nursing classes in which I enrolled actually started.  The classes themselves consume 30 hours a week, and I am still juggling professional responsibilities in the Life from which I am slowly disentangling myself.

Also, a lot of my free time has been consumed by a bunch of additional extraneous errands necessary to get through the nursing program.  First, I had to get my shot records, which I was unable to find anywhere (I have never really had a regular doctor) and so just this Wednesday I ended up getting hit with about 6 different vaccines all at once and was sick as a dog for two days.  I also had to get a brief physical, which, it turns out, you can't get unless you can produce your shot records (had the physical today, and am in good health - if not great shape - thank you very much).  And finally - for some reason - a dentist has to say that my teeth look alright (I'm taking care of that Monday afternoon).

All of this is in addition to getting CPR certified (taken care of last week) and passing the criminal background check (which, between you and me, is the only one I was worried about and yet the easiest one to get through . . . mostly because it didn't require any effort on my part.)

Oh yeah . . . and I've moved again, which involved relocating myself, a good deal of my possessions, and the dogs.

So while I've been keeping abreast of recent goings on I haven't really had an opportunity to comment much on them.  And I intend to, shortly, but first I thought I'd talk about one aspect of my experience in the nursing program:  being the oldest guy in the class.

Making a Life Change

Well, I’ve not been around for a while.  Real Life, as they say, has gotten in the way of blogging.  If anyone’s missed the running commentary, I’m sorry ‘bout that and I promise to try to do better in the coming weeks.  Although that may not always be easy.

I’m trying something new these days, and it is gripping and exciting and very, very different than anything I’ve done before with my adult life, but it is also demanding quite a bit of my time, so blogging may be a bit sporadic until I get more of a routine down.  I’ll tell you about it, but let me first back into it by telling you a bit more about me and how I came to be where I am today . . .