Here I am, in beautiful Belfast, Northern Ireland! Yesterday's Belfast Telegraph had an article about me titled Meet Brad, the Bad Boy of Zen. I'm also called an enfant terrible, which I don't even know how to pronounce. I think that's a type of suppository.I had my first talk here yesterday at the Black Mountain Zen Center downtown. It went swimmingly. It was kind of trippy to speak to a native English-speaking audience for the first time in two months. When I lived in Japan and worked with mainly people from other Asian countries who spoke English as a second language I got used to having to speak to people in ways that could be easily translated. That is to say, I knew that the things I said were being translated into Chinese or Korean or Thai or Japanese in their minds, so I had to phrase things in a way that would make sense when transferred into another language -- usually a language I did not know at all myself (other than Japanese).
I'm still doing that even in Northern Ireland. So I probably sounds like a kindergarten teacher.
Yesterday I led off my talk with a discussion of attachment. The discussion was based on an email I wrote to a friend of mine who has been having some rocky times with her boyfriend. She asked me if I could say something about attachment. So I wrote the following (I hate quoting myself, but I'm also lazy. Suck it.):
Basically the Buddhist view of a person is not that each of us is a fixed object. A person is a set of general tendencies. And those tendencies change.
Attachment is when you start to believe that things can or should remain one way forever. That way you always relate to the same "person" as time passes.
But the people you relate to change, as you change. So your relationship with them changes. And this is never easy. But if everyone involved can accept the fact that these changes are occurring, the transitions can be easier.
Sometimes it's irreconcilable. But I think in most cases you can somehow accommodate or acclimate to the changes and carry on.
So it's not that you are attached to Allan. The "Allan" to which you are attached doesn't exist. That "Allan" is a figment of your imagination. It's an image in your mind based on past experiences and filled in with your own inventions (assumptions like "if his expression in like this he must be sad" etc.). These accumulate over time and form a picture that is easier to relate to than the real person is.
It's not easy to drop this stuff because you've been conditioned to do this. This is how you navigate your way thru the world. The brain has evolved specifically to do this kind of thing. So it's not just like you can say "I now drop this" and be done with it.
But at each moment, when an idea appears of how things "should be," you can remind yourself that this is just an idea and not necessarily a fact.
Ugh. What a pretentious wanker I am as a friend!
I raised a stink on this blog a while back with my ideas about attachment. So maybe people will get upset with me again. But I really feel this idea is deeply misunderstood. The word "attachment" is particularly loaded and prone to misunderstanding. I really hate the way lots of people who are "into Buddhism" these days make great efforts to be as aloof and "detached" as possible in order to fulfill what they see as Buddhism's demands for "non-attachment."
Anyway, blah-blah-blah....
It's a sunny day in Belfast and I ain't gonna waste it on the Internet! Neither should you, wherever you are and whatever the weather is like there!
Tonight June 16, 2010 (Wed) from 6.30-8.30pm I'm at Bookfinders Bookshop and Cafe in Belfast near the university. See you there, I hope!
Bye!
