that's how patience is acquired

Q: For me, Robert, There was something very meaningful about ordering my copy of The Ten Thousand Things beyond the fact that we have met in person and spent a week at the same gathering. While there are many ways we share common thoughts, careers, and approaches, your personal experiences, clarity, and wisdom provide a growing edge for me. There are times when I am faced with the ungrounded lack of existential realness in spiritual circles, that I feel that I am communicating much like you. But in one way we are different. You have much more patience than I do, and that too is a lesson for me.

A: Thanks, Doug. If I have more patience, possibly I have more aches and pains that require patience. That's how patience is acquired--by endurance, and seeing that one has no alternative to what is.

Q: Perhaps then, I will grow into more patience as the body provides the context.

A: As long as you can avoid feeling sorry for yourself, living itself is the best teacher of all, Doug.

Q: Too blessed to feel sorry, so far, and I believe that I have lived life as well as I could. I believe I shared this with you before, and it is a response to life being a teacher: One of my most brilliant professor said, "Some people get wiser as they age, some have cumulated stupidity." So, though life is indeed the best teacher, as always, it is up to the student to learn the lessons. You are a model of a student, and a teacher.

A. Thank you, Doug.

Q2: I loved your reply to the woman who said that you had inspired her to let go of her spiritual beliefs. I particularly liked this part,

“Myth taken as myth, informs, but myth taken as fact bewilders. Thus one can be deeply bewildered while imagining oneself to be following the correct or true path. There is fear behind that dogged literalism I suspect, not wisdom.”

I was taken aback by the conversation with John LeKay. Although disrespected, you kept replying with such patience. I have watched you do the same thing with others over the years. You seem able to hold your course without ever becoming annoyed. Patience like that is something I seem to lack. I wonder what gives you the ability to carry on such conversations. Is there a secret to practicing patience? Could you say something about that?

A: As I told my friend, Doug earlier, the aches and pains of ordinary life are the best teacher if one can face them without feeling sorry for oneself. But I do not consider that I have ever practiced patience. Frankly, I don’t “practice” anything. If you see patience in me you are only seeing an understanding that in this moment things as they are and can be no different, no matter what one might like or dislike.

Except in fantasy, there is no alternative to what is. In accepting that inevitability, one finds oneself free to enjoy what one can enjoy and to endure the rest. Sometimes, there is only a hair's breadth of difference between what one enjoys and what one must endure. From the outside, that might look like patience, surrender, or resignation, but that is not how it feels to me at all. I feel awake.

I did not feel “disrespected." I knew that John and I were carrying on a contemporary version of an ancient conversation in which there is no absolute right or wrong, but only normal differences in perspective. Each of us comes to any conversation with a different background and a differing abilities, so it is not required, or even necessarily wholesome that we all agree on everything. My intention in such conversations is not to convince anyone of anything, but only to illuminate the issues at hand. The important thing is to speak as gently as possible and to listen to others with kindness and an open mind.

John is a determined practitioner of Theravada Buddhism. That system is based upon a set of core beliefs grounded in the notion that the words of Gautama Siddhartha, as reported in the Pali canon, express not just Gautama’s personal experience, but pure “Truth” of a kind that comes to only one special person—a Buddha--in each eon. Therefore, for the Theravadan, those ideas take on an air of complete authority.

The basic ideas are these:

1. All of us have had many lifetimes before this one, and except for a very few humans, will have many more to come.

2. Although one’s experience of living might sometimes feel enjoyable, day-to-day life (samsara) is essentially unsatisfactory (dukkha). However, there is a way to escape that feeling of dissatisfaction.

3. That way is to meditate assiduously while strictly following the eight-fold path of rules about conduct.

4. If one does that, perhaps for many lifetimes, eventually one ends all craving, gains the status of an arahant (knower), and attains nirvana, which means that one will not have to be born again.

My attitude towards what it means to be human is quite different from all that. I do not think that there is a “myself” that has lived before or that will be reborn. I could be wrong of course, but I see no good evidence for it. When I look, I find no “myself” as a fixed entity. I see “Robert” more as an uncontrolled flow of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, body images, etc., that are not happening to me, but that are me, so I cannot even imagine what exactly would be reborn.

As for being a "knower," like an arahant, or a jnani in Hindu systems, all I know is that I, as an apparent focus of awareness, seem to exist. What that "myself" is or isn't, is a mystery.

I am not interested in escaping from ordinary life by attaining nirvana. In my experience, any apparent unsatisfactoriness disappears in any moment of real awakening. In a flash, the inexpressible suchness of being alive in this world of ours shines brightly, whether I am suffering or not.

I see living as a privilege, not a problem to be solved, not prison sentence from which one wants to escape into nirvana (which means “blown out,” the way a candle flame is blown out), but as a once-upon-a-once opportunity to feel gratitude for being at all.

As for extinction, which is another translation of nirvana, that will happen for us all in due time in a natural way: one stops breathing, and out goes the candle.

So John, believing that all kinds of hells and suffering await anyone who is not enlightened according to orthodox Buddhist dharma, aims at an eventual goal, the attainment of nirvana to be realized through effort and mandated behavior, probably encompassing many lifetimes.

I, on the other hand, see that one can be awake here and now without believing anything, and without making any efforts at all, beyond simply seeing clearly without wishing for anything to be different from the way it is.

My view is based on my own experience, not on scripture about what the Buddha supposedly said. And an outlook like mine can be found in Buddhism too, just not the kind John favors. That is why I say this is an old conversation.

Hui-neng, for example, who became the 6th and final patriarch of the Zen school of Buddhism, was an illiterate woodcutter. One day while delivering a load of wood he heard someone reciting words from the Diamond Sutra: “Depending on no-thing, you must find your own mind,” and, the story goes, Hui-neng was instantly enlightened.

So in that school of Buddhism, the way of life is not following precepts in hopes of gradually purifying oneself of wrong desires, but to come awake in moments of clear vision. Of course, speaking as a photographer, a moment of clear vision seems a lovely happening.

Now, unlike Hui-neng I had already read lots of books before my big moment of clear vision but in essence, my experience is not so different from his, which is why I love to tell that story.

If I understand John’s position, he sees that kind of awakening--in Zen called "satori," which means sudden enlightenment--as a good beginning perhaps, but not the whole enchilada.

According to that way of thinking, Robert Saltzman cannot be awake like a Buddha, nor can this be my last lifetime, for if it were, I would be living as a celibate monk, not a married father and grandfather, and would never say the kinds of things I do, such as, “Samsara is nirvana. This is it.”

But I am not the first to utter those words, which is why this is an old conversation—one that began long before either of us was born—so I don’t take any of it personally. This kind of palaver has been going on for many hundreds of years. Still, there is something beyond talk, beyond views and opinions, beyond religions and spirituality, or anything else that humans have invented to try to make sense of being here at all.

So conversing with John requires no patience at all. Because I am not looking for agreement or approval, I just say what I see, and allow John the same space, as I do with anyone who can keep a civil tongue.

I like John. He’s a good egg. He understands a lot, seems kind and generous with his time, and at least he has a sense of humor, which is not the case for everyone who wants to discuss these things. Far from it.

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