Beautiful and True: A Review of Andrew Olendzki's "Unlimiting Mind"

How important is graceful and literate writing when it comes to setting out the dharma? One could say, using the old Keatsian line, that if it rings true, it will probably also engage our aesthetic sensibilities. And if it doesn’t excite us aesthetically, well at least it’s still true. But is that really the case?

We’ve all heard umpteen talks about the core teachings, but a skilled teacher can render that all too familiar gestalt of the the four ennobling truths (existential malady è diagnosis è cure è life change) as almost primordially fresh and original. Even the most cursory browse through the online talks on Dharma Seed remind us that we are not lacking for gifted speakers in the Vipassana tradition, which makes sense considering the wholly oral nature by which these truths have so long been transmitted.

The same cannot always be said for writing. I’m thinking particularly of a more recent dharma text phenomenon which attempts to straddle numerous mindfulness-buddhist-positive-psychology-self-help fences all at once, whilst producing something on a page that sometimes resembles the experience of being gently wiped down with a warm face cloth whilst standing in a patchouli scented floral-themed bathroom.

Andrew Olendzki is no such a writer. Again and again, one finds oneself reaching for the pencil to score a mark against a sentence or paragraph that manages to be at once lucid, vigorously-argued, and freshly hewn. Here’s just one or two of my many underscorings.

On selfing: "What becomes clear through this analysis of moment-to-moment experience is that grasping is not something done by the self, but rather self is something done by grasping." (p.133)

On delusion: "As the lamp behind the projector, the shimmer within the illusion, or a reflection in a mirror, delusion shines with a softer light and illuminates indirectly. Delusion can be lovely, which is half the problem; and light doesn't always show the truth, which is the other half of the problem." (p.56)

 So far so good, Olendzki as a Dharma Montaigne, a Dharma William James? The only problem for me of this much-feted volume, is that one is given the sense from the title and introduction that some sort of sustained argument is going to carry you through the book, when in fact it is much more a sum of its (delightful) parts. We sit down for the Unlimiting Mind meal, but what we really end up with is a series of amuses-bouches, almost all of them culled from the writer’s decade-long output of occasional pieces for Tricycle and Insight Journal which he also edits. These 2-3 page pieces are very tightly argued, but without any variation in length, become a tad unsatisfying in their brevity and atomised groupings.

I’m sure there are those who will argue that in some ironically post-modern way, this this may be the philosophical subtext of the whole endeavour. Is not one of the wheel-spinning pinions of dukkha that fact that we all too often attempt to create a cogent, systematic, narratively-integrated object (often a self), out of what is essentially a bunch of fantastically special but unintegrated thoughts, feelings and sensations, arising and passing away moment by moment? In this sense, reading Olendzki almost experientially plays out one of his (and the Buddha’s) main themes: our constant craving and subsequent dissatisfaction with the fact that what is pleasurable and beautifully truthful (in this case, a well-wrought page of prose) must all too soon come to an end.

The two exceptions to this are the introductory essay and the final chapter which examines mindfulness through the perspective of the Abhidhamma. The latter presents a beautifully clear outline of this complex and exhaustive text, showing how mindfulness “extracted from its matrix of wholesome co-arising factors” (i.e. the ethical components of the eightfold path), “degenerates into mere attention”. Looked at in this way, we may be applying our minds, sustaining attention on the breath, perhaps even moved by “determination, joy and a self-less inclination for the well-being of all living creatures”, but still not practising mindfulness.

This feels like an important point to be making in what is increasingly becoming a very secular, ethically-neutral field, where Mindfulness is presented as a discrete “technology”, a psychological tool, rather than a moral philosophy. I almost wish someone at Wisdom Publications had suggested Olendzki start from this premise and work forward, but perhaps this is something he will do in a subsequent volume.

Sincere Materialism: A Review of Jacob Needleman's "Money and the Meaning of Life"

Did you give to Comic Relief this year? I’m guessing that if you did, it was probably done either with the notion that “giving is good”, or possibly: “I give every year, it would not feel right to skimp just because I’m bored with CR, and/or ________ (insert compassion-fatigue excuse).

If not that, then maybe: "I give because compared to so many people in the world I'm relatively well-off."

Or: "Giving makes me feel more serene, gratified, even joyful."

So which of these options get the Buddha thumbs-up?

Well, suprisingly, if we’re going by the Dana Sutta (AN 7.49), all of them land you a “returner” status, which in modern parlance pretty much translates as Epic Karma Fail. The karma Trump card is: we give because “this is is an ornament for the mind, a support for the mind”.

In other words giving, in and of itself is a practice, and a practice quite distinct from all those heartstring-tugging VTs (it was the the slightly wild-eyed and unshaven David Tennant in a hospital in Uganda that finally got me reaching for my mobile phone to "text a fiver"). As a man dependent on alms, the Buddha would have recognised that if alms-giving was predicated on feeling compassionate, then those times our hearts feel squeezed and parsimonious, he and his monks wouldn't eat.

The “ornament” and “support” argument for giving (though not presented exactly in these terms) is something that came up recently in Martin Aylward’s Work, Sex, Money, Dharma retreat. Perhaps because I found myself mentally wrestling with the argument on retreat, I have subsequently been reading Jacob Needleman’s Money and The Meaning of Life, a book which I think fleshes out some of the bones of the Dana Sutta.

Needleman’s thesis is that although we tend to see ourselves as obsessed with money, in some sense we don’t take it seriously enough, because we fail to see how money can be used as a means to understand ourselves better (i.e. as an ornament and support for the mind).

He begins by showing how the earliest coins bore a religious symbol on the one side (God) and a secular symbol on the other (Caesar), acting thus as an instrument for human interactions in the material world, while helping us to remember our dependence on moral laws, the dharma, in buddhist terms.

“The ethical laws governing money exchange connected this activity vertically to the divine commandments; and the nature of money payment in itself was testimony to the horizontal, material dependence of human beings upon each other” (p.60).

The fact that we no longer make this link alienates us, he believes, from the true "meaning" of money: a facilitator for our spiritual and material desires.

If money is the outward manifestation of the human ego, dictating how we deal with all matters material, intellectual, and emotional, then by paying more conscious attention to it (mindfulness), gives the mind greater space and ease in its dealings with money - a taste of anatta. In the process, we also perhaps get greater access to the boundless “wealth” of conscious life, real understanding of ourselves in the midst of work, relationships, and our financial dealings.

Money, he argues is is good at solving problems, but bad at opening questions. Used wrongly, it “converts inner questions that should be lived into problems to be solved”. Needleman’s book opens all sorts of questions which bear further exploration. It is a lovely, warm volume, written at time like a campus novel, at other times like a history of ideas; boldly argued, and studded with arresting insights.