Iconoclastic?

Noah Levine's new book is out today. It's called The Heart of The Revolution, and it looks like it's going to be a real humdinger. Unfortunately, if you're in the UK, it will be difficult getting hold of one for a couple of weeks, maybe even months, as HarperCollins has informed us that "each copy is to be hand-typed by a Dharmapunx scribe at Against The Stream's HQ on Melrose Avenue, which means that  the book should only be arriving on your shores towards the end of April" [email message received April 1].

Until then, wanting to reacquaint myself with some NL before this weekend's London Insight retreat, I thought I'd revisit his Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries, also entitled Against The Stream, which I'd read a few years back and greatly enjoyed. 

Levine's dharma feels very fresh, even a little iconoclastic. What other teacher would have the title of his book (and this central teaching of the Buddha) tattooed below their right ear and then photographed for the cover of his sophomore volume? Is this not a manifestation in a quite literal way of the don't-judge-a-book notion (further evidenced by the fact that the writing to be found therein is a relatively straightforward, if no less enlightening, serving up of the Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path)?

Levine has often professed to be utilising a punk ethos in his work and life, but considering the amount of care, study and attention he's given to this path over the years, the simile would only really hold true if John Lydon had formed the Sex Pistols after studying guitar with Frank Zappa for ten years (Jack Kornfield as the Zappa of Insight Meditation? Why not!) and then followed this up with an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. 

Where I feel he is truly iconoclastic, an iconoclasm which frames all his work, is the sense that his dharma comes from a very raw and real understanding of how a life can go into a pretty serious tailspin for a number of years before finding salvation in something transcendent, for want of a better word. And don't we all feel like our lives at some point have gone, or are in the process of going into that kind of nosedive? 

To be heretical for a moment, if I'm really looking for a example of someone who's went completely awry before finding their footing again through a spiritual practice, I'm not necessarily going to find that in "Sid - The Rebel Saint" as Levine has dubbed the Buddha. Even pre-Enlightenment, Sid was a pretty serious, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy: studying, various hardcore ascetic practices, fending off Mara etc. Hardly sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, is it? The only misdemeanor I can find in Buddha, The Early Years, was that in modern parlance, he was an absent father, having chosen his own spiritual journey over that of bringing up the child he'd sired.

So strangely, or maybe not so strangely, I find myself, when looking for a lodestar, more inclined to bow in front of the all-too-human Levine, rather than the all-too-mythologised Sid. But I guess my lodestar might turn around, as he does in the Manifesto section of his book and tell me to BEWARE OF TEACHERS!: "Study the texts, study your own mind, and the highest truth will be revealed. All of what you are looking for is here in your own direct experience." 

There's nothing in there about writing blogs, is there?

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.