Good Vibrations

There are some people that radiate great energy and positive vibrations regardless of the circumstances.  Last night while attending a function in downtown Atlanta I watched a late 60-something Asian woman flit around the room with a hundred other guests at a banquet dinner.  She stood out to me because she carried with her a massive, beaming smile, and seemed to care little of what people thought of her.  To me, she was the walking personification of peace and self-confidence, my favorite two attributes in a person. 

The highlight for me was when the woman raided the dessert table even before people were settling in for their first course.  I laughed and commented that she may have her dinner courses mixed up, only to see her grin and retort, "No, it's everyone else that's mixed up".

Throughout the long evening I watched with great curiosity as this tiny woman continued to smile and walk her own path.  Towards the end of the event she left the function and ventured out into the nighttime on a solo exploration of the botanical garden's orchard exhibit, a wonderful display of moving through life on her own terms.  She made my night.

Boundless Faith

What is the difference between having faith in something and having confidence in it?  Voltaire said, 'Faith is to believe in something which your reason tells you cannot be true; for if your reason approved of it, there could be no question of blind faith.'  On the other hand confidence is an assured expectation, not of something that cannot be touched, observed, but of what can be tested as experienced and understood personally.  This is why Buddhism shuns faith and embraces confidence.  The Buddha stated, 'Do not blindly believe what others say, even the Buddha. See for yourself what brings contentment, clarity, and peace. That is the path for you to follow.'

Theistic faith demands belief in things that cannot be known.  Direct knowledge and experience with the previously unknown now moves faith into the realm of confidence, therefor it can be said that knowledge destroys faith.  Does it work the other way around as well, can faith overcome knowledge?  Now we are in the world of miracles, the unexplained alteration of reality that runs counter to all knowledge.

Faith in my opinion, resides in the soul and is limitless while confidence emanates from the mind and is clearly bound by finite points.  Therefor one's confidence in himself or the world around him extends only so far as his personal observation and experience, while his faith appears to be endless.

Emergency Room For Sinners

Port au Prince's shattered Cathedral of Our Lady of Assumption

On a recent trip to Knoxville, Tennessee I was trying to pull my Jeep out and merge into on-coming traffic that was letting out from monolithic christian church directly up the street.  To no avail, no one was going to let me in among the long line of cars.  In a moment of frustration I edged out a bit earlier than I should have and was greeted by a cacophony of horns.

My first reaction was, "You are all coming from church. Maybe you should turn around and pay greater attention to the sermon on compassion and loving kindness".  I suppose I expected a greater degree of compassion from a crowd that was just exiting a Sunday service. Adjectives that leaped to mind were "hypocritical" and "arrogant". 

Reading Timothy Keller's book, The Reason For God the author offered up this explanation, "Churches are hospitals for sinners, not museums for saints".  It all became clear reading Keller's words.  Why should I expect greater compassion from someone that is a devout attendee of a church service?  Would I expect to find healthy people in the hospital emergency room?  It was a good lesson.

Guilty Buddhism

I was challenged the other day about Buddhism's apparent failure to address the concept of guilt.  I sat with this for a while and read through what some noted scholars of Buddhism have written on the subject, and came to the conclusion that guilt is a man-made concept and not part of the inherent human condition. 

Guilt, as defined by one Buddhist scholar, Rudy Harderwijk, is "seeing or projecting one's mistakes, while not knowing what to do about them or refusing to correct them".  To paraphrase Harderwijk, Buddhism views this as a disturbing attitude, i.e. coming about from the practitioner that is not seeing the situation clearly.  Self-deprecating guilt may be seen as a complicated version of self-centeredness, which Buddhism addresses quite thoroughly.

Going back, the concept of guilt appears to be foreign to the pure human condition, having grown from it's prominent place in the Judeo/Christian tradition, e.g. the original sin.  Guilt of this type is learned, imposed by society and culture.  As noted by Harderwijk, " The Tibetans don't even have a word for it".  If this is the case guilt becomes a culturally imposed type of mental frustration, one which Buddhism teaches us to overcome through practice and seeing reality in its true form.

One Honest Ninja

After parking my Jeep my 6-year old son decided that he was going to exit the vehicle via his open back seat window instead of through the door.  Being a Jeep its a long way down to the pavement so I told my ninja to open the door like a little man.  I few moments later I saw him standing on the ground but I had never heard his door open or close, so I asked him if he had crawled out of the window after I had told him not to. I could see him thinking about it and he finally confessed that he had.  I couldn't have been more proud of my son.  He chose to tell the hard truth instead of the easy lie, his moral compass was aligned correctly.

I've come to believe that morality and ethics have no relation to age nor intelligence.  As a matter of fact, if there is a relationship at all its probably inversely related. As an example, with increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.

How is it that intelligent people loose their moral compass that they once had when they were young?  Do some believe that ethics and morality are inherent within intelligence and therefore any decision that they make must be automatically ethical?  Maybe intelligence trumps morality and a few are somehow smarter than those that have spent lifetimes defining and framing ethical and moral issues.  I'm unsure.  All I know is that there is far too much dishonesty in our world, however we all thankfully have the power to change that, one truth at a time.

Addendum:  I posted to the blog and then went out on a long trail run.  During my jaunt through the woods I began to wonder where on the Spiritual-Intellectual-Physical triangle does morality and ethics lie?  It seems clear to me that they are more aligned with the spiritual rather than the intellectual, which explains why learning ethics in the classroom was so much noise for me.  You can't learn moral behavior and ethics without something touching your soul.

Forgiveness

Not long ago I was the lead paramedic on a cardiac arrest of an elderly woman who had collapsed in her home.  When I arrived the woman's frantic son was looking on as two fire department paramedics and an EMT were starting CPR and additional advanced life-support treatments.  I could see the terror in his eyes as his mother lay on her back in the middle of her living room.  He paced back and forth asking questions, looking to do anything that he could to help, to make a difference.

As the lead paramedic this was my scene to control and orchestrate; decisions were made and treatments started according to the very latest in resuscitation literature and guidelines.  The woman was placed in the ambulance with ongoing good CPR by one of the EMTs; rhythm strips, IV's, drugs, endotracheal tube, shocks, more drugs.  Despite our efforts the woman wasn't responding and was pronounced shortly after our arrival at the hospital.

Sitting alone in the ambulance I worked on my report trying to remember the details of the call.  Quickly I became hyper-critical of my performance, thinking about what I could have done differently, anything that would have led to a better outcome.  I beat myself up for several minutes going over the events in my mind, until finally I looked down at my clipboard and saw the woman's smiling face on her drivers license staring up at me.  I remembered that I had hastily grabbed the card from her son so that at least I would have a name when I arrived at the hospital.  She smiled at me as if to say, "Hey you did the very best that you could, so stop beating yourself up".  In a moment I realized that the call wasn't about me and my performance but rather the woman who was somehow forgiving me, smiling from a piece of plastic.  I pushed my report aside and strode back into the hospital to seek out her son.  I think that's what she would have wanted me to do.

Moments

We've all had them.  They're familiar to us, we recognize them when we're in "the moment".  Some refer to them as the "ahhh moments" of our life, which I believe sums the feeling up perfectly.  More objectively maybe, moments of clarity, greater understanding, perfection, realization.  Without being a poet, these moments in our lives are difficult to explain to one another, however we all know them.

Recently I've come to believe that, at least for me, these "ahhh moments" are the voice of God talking to me in a quiet and deeply personal way, urging me to live in the moment that he has provided for me, sharing it with him.  God has cleared away life's distractions so that I can exist in this very moment of time, where objects, actions and ideas suddenly become clear and understood.

It has taken me 47 years to come to this point of understanding, but looking back I can see similar moments of perfection and peace where the hand of God was fully present in my life. 

 More lists:

• A rainy Sunday afternoon exploring the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• Down in the aerobars, hammering along the sun-scorched roads near Homestead, Florida.  A seemingly unending reservoir of power and strength in my legs.
• My first taste of Laphroaig. 
• Browsing the stacks of a Tampa bookstore and out of no where experiencing my first glimpse (kensho) of understanding the Zen Buddhist concept of "nothingness".  It dropped me to my knees and made me laugh out loud.
• An afternoon meal at La Mar restaurant in Lima, Peru.
• Looking a young Haitian boy in the eyes as he struggles with his crutches. He smiles at me.
• Walking through the dripping jungle directly underneath the massive Iguazu waterfall.
• Coming off the open ramp of a C-130 in the middle of the night with a few hundred pounds of stuff strapped all over me.  Following the "chem lights" down into the darkness.
• A train ride across the Australian Outback at sunset; in an observation car drinking beer with 20 other warriors watching to world clack by.  Someone put on Johnny Cash singing, "I've Been Everywhere".
• An early morning walk in the Maine woods after a snowstorm.  Peace.
• A 16" Brown Trout rising in a misty, morning stream to take a perfectly placed dry fly.
• A recent five days
• My father's laugh
• Standing in the middle of Chile's,  Salar de Atacama on an indigo evening listening to the blood rushing through my ears. A single star, then… breathtaking.

Pilgramage

Istanbul's Blue Mosque

Not long ago I took a trip around the world, and one of the places that I visited was Varanasi, India.  I was struck by not only how dirty the city was, but the overwhelming deep sense of spirituality that seemed to permeate everything.  I asked a co-worker and he explained to me that Varanasi was one stop on an informal route that backpackers often trek seeking to visit the most spiritual places in the world.  This got me thinking, what would my list of spiritual destinations look like?  I've come up with...

• The Vatican:  The ecclesiastical state, center of the Catholic Church.
• Kyaiktiyo Pagoda:  A well-known Buddhist pilgrimage site in Myanmar.  The pagoda's Golden Rock seems to defy gravity, as it perpetually appears to be on the verge of rolling down the hill. According to legend the Golden Rock itself is precariously perched on a strand of the Buddha's hair.
• Jerusalem: A holy city to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
• Mecca's Grand Mosque:  The holiest mosque in Islam.
• Lalibela, Ethiopia:  One of Ethiopia's holiest cities and a center of pilgrimage. The city was intended to be a New Jerusalem in response to the capture of Jerusalem by Muslims, and many of its historic buildings take their name and layout from buildings in Jerusalem.
• Hardiwar, India:  One of the holiest places for Hindus. Millions of pilgrims, devotees, and tourists congregate in Haridwar to perform ritualistic bathing on the banks of the river Ganges to wash away their sins.
• Hagia Sophia, Istanbul:  From 360 A.D. a former Orthodox patriarchal basilica, later a mosque, and now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey.
• Canterbury Cathedral:  One of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England.  The cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Church of England.
• Chimney Rock:  Rising nearly 300 feet above the surrounding North Platte River.  It served as a landmark along the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Mormon Trail.
• Ulura:  Ayers Rock, sacred to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, the Aboriginal people of the area.
• Mauna Kea:  The peaks of the island of Hawaii are sacred, and Mauna Kea is the most sacred of all. An ancient law allowed only high-ranking tribal chiefs to visit its peak.
• Allahbad, India:  A site of Hindu pilgrimage, believed to be the spot where Brahma offered his first sacrifice after creating the world.
• Mahabodhi Temple, Bodh Gaya:  The Buddhist temple marking the location where Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, attained enlightenment.
• Lumbini, Nepal:  The place where Queen Mayadevi is said to have given birth to Siddhartha Gautama, who as the Buddha Gautama founded the Buddhist tradition.
• Potala Palace, Lhasa:  The spiritual home of the Tibetan people. The Potala Palace was the chief residence of the Dalai Lama until the 14th Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India.
• Machu Picchu: The Lost City of the Incas, never found by he invading Spanish.
• Qufu, China:  The hometown of Confucius, who is traditionally believed to have been born at nearby Mount Ni.
• Tsubaki Grand Shrine:  The principal Shinto shrine of the deity Sarutahiko-no-Ōkami and one of Japan's oldest shrines.
• Meoto Iwa:  The Loved One Rocks;  a couple of small rocky stacks in the sea off Futami, Mie, Japan. Joined by a shimenawa (a heavy rope of rice straw) they are considered sacred by Shinto worshipers. The rocks represent the union of Izanagi and Izanami, therefore, celebrate the union in marriage of man and woman.
• Mt. Fuji:  The iconic symbol of Japan and considered one of its holiest mountains.

The Path To Balance

At about midnight last night I awoke from a deep sleep, realizing that my personal journey towards a balanced life is all but complete. I laid in the dark and smiled to myself, happy with the path that I had just walked and continue on today.

"Balance" for me has always been an equilateral triangle with each point representing the Physical, the Spiritual, and the Intellectual.  I seek to spend equal amounts of effort developing the points so that the triangle remains in relative balance.  How many people do we know that are superior athletes, but spiritually or ethically bankrupt; or highly educated that cannot run a single mile?

For me...

The Physical:
My absolute basic level of fitness that I seek to maintain is the ability to, at any given time:

• Ride a solo century on my triathlon bike in under 6 hours
• Swim 3,500 yards in open water with little effort
• Run 8-minute miles all day long

The Spiritual:
My spiritual point of the triangle has always been the most difficult to maintain.  Lately I've worked hard to bolster my previous shortcomings:

• Daily Buddhist practice of sitting or zazen
• Zen Buddhist retreats
• Fly fishing
• Art, specifically photography
• Reading both Buddhist and Christian works, identifying commonalities and considering the differences.

The Intellectual:
My intellectual pursuits are often my favorites and generally pertain to medicine and language training:

• The Difficult Airway Course
• 12-Lead EKG Interpretation
•  Pathophysiology - Never far away
• Blogs and Podcasts that I follow: EMCrit, Dr. Smith's EKG Blog, and ResusME.
• Maintaining my Spanish at an acceptable level, while developing my Japanese, Arabic, and soon Mandarin Chinese.
• I have planned a Ph.D. sometime in my future

God Drinks Starbucks

This morning sitting on the patio at Starbucks I watched an older gentleman wander up and take a seat alone at a table not too far away from my own.  He remained there for a long time sipping his "tall" coffee and reading a Kindle.  By way of description, he was clearly in his mid-seventies, partially shaved head, tan, tall with a very lean and muscled body of an athlete.  Casually dressed in cargo shorts and a polo jersey he sat in the wooden chair  enjoying the sunshine, Oakley sunglasses on the table in front of him.

I watched for several minutes, not able to pull myself away.  I couldn't shake the feeling that I was somehow looking at myself sometime in the future.   A wave of peaceful calm washed over me, like a sudden realization; a moment of clarity, of presence… perfection.  God was speaking to me… softly but he was clearly there in this moment with me.

Soon the man confidently stood, plucked his Oakleys from the table, and turned to look directly into my eyes and smiled.  I somehow knew at that very moment that the best part of my life is still yet to come.

Not Quite Complete

Early dawn in the Middle East

Even a cursory review of recent posts to this blog reveals an author who is searching for something, a deeper meaning of those things around him, a balance within his life, centeredness.   In some respects, that is the purpose of this blog, to document my journey forward.  Over the past month or so I have sat at a crossroads in my life and have sought direction into the future.  I’ve looked inwardly as a Zen Buddhist, and remarkably have found God sitting within my silence.   I’ve re-examined those things that have been important to me, and have made peace with my faults.  It’s been an unspeakable journey of depth and grace, yet it is still not complete.

Things that I know:

God abides in each of us, speaking softly in his own time.  We just have to lessen the background noise so that we can hear him.

Deeds are far greater than words.  I hear too many people just passing gas for affect.  Mean what you say, and do it.

Reduce the noise and enjoy life as it's happening right now.  Our constant dialogue with ourselves prevents us from living in the present moment, a concept that  both the Buddha and Jesus preached.

Impatience is simply an extension of our egos. It's a manifestation of us wanting something, and wanting it right now.  Calm down, breath, and examine the emotion objectively.  It soon goes away.

We need very little;  food, air, sunshine, water, and a place to sleep.  Everything else is a bonus.  Delineate needs from wants. The difference is staggering.

Be critical of yourself, but also be gentle and forgiving.

Don’t be critical of others, but still be gentle and forgiving.

A 16-inch Brown Trout rising out of misty, serene waters to take a perfectly placed dry fly is God yelling at us to smile.

Service

In my wallet I carry my U.S. military retirement ID card; its my go-to piece of identification when required.  Occasionally people will look at it and give me a heartfelt, "Thank you for your service".  I've asked myself lately, what is service?  So many organizations, from schools, churches, the Boy Scouts, and even prisons are preaching service theses days, but I'm not sure what it is that they are preaching.

Must there be personal sacrifice in order for a deed to be considered service, and if so, does the greater the sacrifice lead to a greater degree of service?  Or is it the other way around, can a great good with no personal sacrifice be considered service? 

I've been reading much about service to God. Does he require a sacrifice from us?  What if I tithed $25/week to a church, or spent a lifetime on my back painting the ceiling Sistine Chapel, which is the greater service to God?  I do not know?

I spent twenty years, two months, two weeks, and a day in a uniform, the vast majoring it that time as a Green Beret.  I sacrificed horrendously, but at the same time I gained much in return.  Was this service and to whom?

Tacked up on my old team room wall...

"Men sleep peaceably
in their beds at night
only because rough men stand
ready to do violence on
their behalf".

- George Orwell

Warrior

I decided to brave the 58 degree sunny weather and go for a trail run through the Chattahoochee Hills along the river. The horse trail works its way through the forest, up and down hills, and along the banks of the serene water way.  It felt good to get out and push myself again, I haven't done so  since I hiked the Inca Trail in Peru before Christmas.

It wasn't far and it wasn't fast, but I felt my lungs expanding, my legs burning, and a gentle calm settling over my mind.  I concentrated on my breathing, letting thoughts come and go, not following any of them.  The next thing I knew I was face-planted into the dirt having tripped over a hidden root. So much for moving meditation.  Nonetheless, the fall was a not so gentle reminder to stay in the present moment, nature's (God's?) very own kyôsaku.

I got up, covered with dirt, blood, and probably a bit of horse dung and moved on; ego bruised, but that's a good thing right now.  At the end of the trail I was breathless, in pain, and covered with nature.  I felt like a warrior again.