This is the fourth week of Lent and we are continuing our series “Stories of Lent” which leads up to Easter Sunday. This week we look at the practice of restraint in a contemporary culture with a surplus of enticing distractions and indulgences. Lent is an opportunity to scale back for a couple of weeks and evaluate the types of things we have accumulated and how much. The title of the talk is “Accidental Enticements.” The service will be available at 10AM on our YouTube Channel followed by Zoom check-in and coffee hour at 11AM. You’ll find the links listed below.
Next Sunday (April 3) we plan to start recording the UUHoulton Weekly Service on Sunday mornings at 10 am in the parlor with a limited number of attendees.
The church leadership is currently planning for our first in-person service on Easter Sunday, April 17th (circumstances permitting). Leading up to Easter we are limiting the number of attendees to twelve people. If you would like to attend one of the services please email me at dave@backwoodsblog.com and I can supply you with additional information and add you to the sign-up list. This is one way for us to ease back into regular in-person Sunday Services.
Have a good week-end everyone.
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S SERVICE(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UUcoffee hour and check-inTime: Mar 27, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/89696774681?pwd=ZEZ5MTFZRkxUTS9BOHpDdFo4b01Cdz09
Meeting ID: 896 9677 4681Passcode: 579750
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions. Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
You Can Take Refuge Right Here
BY PAUL CONDON|
Paul Condon draws on traditional Buddhism and Western psychology to show how the act of taking refuge is available to us in every moment, wherever we are.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I love you.”
My grandma Corriene died in January 2018 after suffering from dementia for years. My last visit with her was an awkward, failed attempt to interact. But as I said goodbye, something shifted, and there was an effortless, joyful, simple connection as she said those words: “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I love you.” We resonated for a moment longer, maybe not even for thirty seconds. In my mind, I can still picture her presence and how I felt as she beamed at me with love and curiosity while I put on my winter coat and hat. Years later, I realized that this simple moment of care could be the basis for meditative practice.
To take up the Buddhist path begins with taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the accomplished sangha—other people and beings who embody qualities of awakening. In Buddhist cultures, taking refuge in Buddhist figures, lineage teachers, ancestors, and sangha provides a communal basis of support for meditation, which empowers practitioners in the challenging task of extending unconditional care to others with increasing unconditionality amidst the inherent difficulties of practice and life. In modern cultures, however, refuge in these communal sources of support can be more fraught—to ask a Western practitioner to take refuge can pose challenges due to prior traumas with family, communities, institutions, or difficulty connecting with religious icons from another culture.
Dialogue between Buddhism and modern psychology reveals a fresh way that practitioners can immediately access the benefit of refuge—to experience ourselves within a field of care and to be seen in our deepest potential, beyond our ordinary conceptual impediments. The objects of refuge mirror the enlightened potential in us, which helps draw out our capacity to extend care to others with more inclusivity, sustainability, and unconditionality. Concepts from Western psychology help reveal that sources of refuge have been presenting themselves throughout our lives, in many small moments. These moments can be drawn on as communal support for meditation—even in the absence of an in-person, flesh-and-bones community.
Grit and Willpower Are Not Enough
Like many people in the modern world, I first learned meditation by reading a book and attempting a daily practice, on my own, with the occasional support of recorded meditations. I conceived of meditation, without knowing it, as my own autonomous, self-help project. The other elements surrounding meditation—prayers, chanting, sacred art, and group meals—were nice, but in my mind, the most important focus was my effort to sit for long stretches of time.
I struggled my way through weekend retreats. Though I left with a feeling of spaciousness, each retreat included days of wrestling with difficult thoughts and emotions before any ease came. That seemed to me the essence of practice: with grit and perseverance, allow thoughts to exhaust themselves until a feeling of spaciousness dawned. Success seemingly came as the hours and days increased in my meditation app. But I continued to struggle, and I later came to see my limited understanding of meditation as part of my cultural conditioning as a citizen of the modern world.
Recent historical scholarship has revealed how Western meditation practices were adapted from communal forms of traditional practice into individualistic forms that reflect Western ways of thinking. In modern Western cultures, people tend to think of themselves as individuals that exist prior to any relation to others—as atomistic selves who choose whether or not to enter into any relationship or community, as David McMahan states in The Making of Buddhist Modernism. In contrast, people in premodern and Asian contemplative cultures have understood persons to be constituted by their relations to others within communities. For traditional Buddhist communities, a practitioner’s orientation to meditation focuses not just on efforts by oneself to generate qualities of care, equanimity, and so forth. Rather, they envision a field of refuge that includes buddhas, bodhisattvas, teachers, and other inspiring figures who bless and sustain them and their world within qualities of love, compassion, and wisdom. In this way, the person taking refuge learns to become an extension of that field of refuge by progressively extending the same qualities of love and compassion to others, to become a refuge for them.
There are many vivid examples of practices throughout Buddhist traditions that express a communal basis of support for meditation. The Buddha’s words in the Vatthupama Sutta (“The Simile of the Cloth”), for example, invoke the extension of love for all beings: “He [the bhikkhu] abides pervading one cardinal direction with a mind imbued with loving-care, likewise the second, the third, an the fourth: so above, below, around, and everywhere, and to all as to himself, he abides pervading the all-encompassing world with a mind imbued with loving-care, abundant, exalted, immeasurable.” By reading these words, we can implicitly experience ourselves as recipients of the Buddha’s love and that of his followers, who have taken up practices of all-inclusive love before us. Buddhanusmrti and sanghanusmrti, the practices of recollection of the Buddha and sangha, involve bringing attention to the enlightened qualities embodied by the Buddha and the accomplished sangha. To imagine these qualities is to experience oneself as blessed and supported by the qualities of their practice.
In Mahayana scriptures, these practices are extended to an experience in which buddhas and bodhisattvas gaze into the meditator’s enlightened potential and into the destructive thoughts and reactions that obscure it. These powerful figures serve as models for practition-ers to take up the bodhisattva vow, as in Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara: “Just as all the Buddhas of the past have brought forth the awakened mind…Likewise, for the benefit of beings, I will bring to birth the awakened mind.” In Vajrayana traditions, a teacher’s job is to see into and resonate with students’ enlightened potential, empowering them to transcend their reductive impressions of themselves and others by joining in the deeper seeing by which they are seen (dag snang, pure perception). In his authoritative manual Moonbeams of Mahamudra, the Tibetan scholar and teacher Dakpo Tashi Namgyal repeatedly invokes teachers and holy beings as support for calm abiding (shamatha) and insight (vipashyana): “Rely upon spiritual mentors who have unerring knowledge…and who have shamatha and vipashyana realizations.” In this way, refuge is not only a starting point but also the basis for the deepest level of insight into the nature of our mind.
Concepts from Western psychology reveal that sources of refuge present themselves throughout our lives, in many small moments. These can be drawn on as support for meditation—even in the absence of an in-person, flesh-and-bones community.
These practices illustrate that there is an enlightened dimension to each of us. By calling to mind others who have actualized the enlightened dimension of their awareness, their qualities act upon our own enlightened nature, mirroring that dimension within us, even in the absence of their physical bodies. To keep our attention at that level is the key to the process of awakening—to recognize that a level of communication between beings is happening, and to become more receptive to it. By calling upon spiritual ancestors or other such benefactors, we learn to join them in relating to others in their awakened nature, rather than identifying with our superficial reactions to others as the final reality. This can empower us to relate to the buddhanature in others and in turn build a retinue of connectivity—a sangha—that supports further practice. This type of communication and connectivity has been happening since the beginning of Buddhism. With this foundation in place, meditation can reach much greater depth compared with an attempt to generate love and compassion as if on one’s own, from scratch.
Refuge and devotional practices pose clear challenges for modern Western culture. The rise of modernity has centered on increasing individualism and a growing mistrust in society, institutions, and family. The shift toward privatized religion leaves individuals free to adapt and make use of any element of a tradition they so choose. Yet the very notion of individuals engaging in meditation practice to strengthen capacities of love, wisdom, and compassion through their own willpower and grit can ironically reinforce that which Buddhism has always aimed to transcend: attachment to an autonomous, enduring self. Without the practice of refuge, we miss the experience of being seen through the eyes of our spiritual lineage—of being known through their embodied wisdom and compassion.
How can refuge and devotion be recovered for practitioners in the modern world? One avenue of support comes from the concepts and research findings of modern psychological science, which can help us experience patterns of traditional practice from Asian Buddhist cultures.
The Science Behind Refuge
In 2013, I attended the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute at the Garrison Institute, along the Hudson River in New York. The event featured a rich dialogue between contemplative scholars, practitioners, and scientists, and time for meditation practice with well-regarded teachers. One of the teachers was John Makransky, a professor of Buddhist studies and a lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.
John’s scholarship and teaching has focused on adapting devotional and refuge practices for modern practitioners. Importantly, his teaching illustrates that the essence of ritual and devotional practices can be immediately accessed by anyone through the qualities of love and wisdom evoked by simple moments of caring connection.
During his teaching, John asked us to recall and reinhabit a simple moment of caring connection, so as to experience its unconditional felt sense of love and care, of being seen in our deepest worth and potential. I thought of college professors who inspired me and moments from childhood when an uncle took joy in my presence. It dawned on me that John’s work directly paralleled lessons from attachment theory, one of the most influential perspectives within developmental and social psychology.
Attachment theory suggests that for better or worse, the care we receive as infants stays with us and impacts how we see the world and how we care for others. Ideally, attachment figures serve as a secure base from which children branch out and explore the world, and they serve as a safe haven to return to in times of need or distress—just as the three jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the accomplished sangha have served as a safe haven from samsara and the mental afflictions for generations of Buddhists before us.
A secure attachment style emerges when infants experience sensitive and consistent care, establishing the feeling that the self is worthy of care. An insecure attachment style, such as an avoidant pattern, dismisses the need for care because a person has come to believe that they will not regularly receive care. Attachment patterns accrue throughout our lives from all kinds of relationship experiences. These experiences get imprinted in the mind, like attachment karma, and influence how we perceive moments of caring connection.
Research also shows that our attachment patterns are not locked in. By calling to mind simple moments of caring connection, we can temporarily increase feelings of security. Researchers call this “attachment priming.” Makransky’s meditations provide a way to recover the spirit of refuge and devotion by integrating attachment priming into meditative practice.
The last moment with my grandma is one such moment that is particularly vivid, but there are many more such moments that I’ve been able to recover through repeatedly engaging the caring moment practice: students laughing at my jokes, holding my newborn daughter at night before she fell asleep, simple gestures of kindness from other practitioners on retreat, feeling the warmth of the sunshine, and so on. These moments can be revisited within meditation to evoke qualities of care and draw out an inner feeling of security. Devotion and refuge practices have served that very purpose—to offer a place of security and protection in which our difficult emotions can unwind and reveal their own enlightened potential right from within, and to empower the capacity to be present to others’ suffering and offer a healing presence.
Because of “selective attention,” many of us are conditioned to dismiss moments of care. A famous study explains why. In that study, people were asked to count the number of times that a basketball was passed between players on one team. During the video, a person wearing a gorilla outfit walks through the middle of the court, waves at the screen, and leaves. In some versions of the study, up to 50 percent of people do not notice the gorilla. A similar finding showed that radiologists failed to detect an image of a gorilla superimposed onto CT scans of a pair of lungs. We are conditioned to see things in our environment based on our goals. For those of us growing up in a capitalist, modern society, with our attention centered on economic and competitive strivings, we might fail to notice simple moments of care.
The invisible gorilla effect also makes sense within the scope of attachment theory. Because of accumulated moments of insensitive or nonresponsive care, we have been conditioned to dismiss or ignore many genuine moments of care. The dismissal of care is a survival script we have learned as an attempt to control our environment and to protect us from the vulnerability inherent in opening up to care. Unfortunately, these scripts interfere with our ability to relax and let go into the enlightened dimension of our deepest nature—the unity of empty cognizance, self-aware wakefulness, and compassionate capacity. We prefer to cling to those familiar scripts instead.
A new practice, then, is to learn to become more receptive to moments of care, noticing the felt qualities that come with those moments, and to allow our hearts and minds to be infused with those qualities. Over time and through repetition, this can help us discover that qualities of love, care, and wisdom are immediately accessible from within the mind and heart. At first, a particular caring moment may not immediately come to mind. But if we continue to practice in this way, we can recall many such moments, and in essence, rediscover our life and experience our world and others as expressions of buddhahood. One day in meditation, after practicing this way for seven years, I recalled saying goodbye to my Japanese host family after a cultural exchange program. It was a joy to reconnect with that moment. By paying attention to simple moments of caring connection in our own life, we can populate our own field of care analogous to the fields of buddhas and bodhisattvas that Buddhists have always relied on.
Caring Moments Are Grounded In the Body
The caring moment practice imparts an important lesson that is further revealed by dialogue with cognitive science: the presence of those who have passed before us remains accessible at any moment, and they can continue to empower our capacities for care. Consider this reflection from Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a twentieth-century teacher, who speaks of the blessing of calling to mind Longchenpa, a thirteenth-century teacher:
By seeing his representation in form, by hearing his speech, and by remembering him, we can receive the blessing that will bring about the realization of the ultimate meaning of Dzogpa chenpo, which pervades all beings in samsara and nirvana, and so he is never separate from us. All we need to do is to open our hearts in genuine devotion, and his blessing is immediate and utterly within our reach. By praying to Longchenpa, we can awaken the intrinsic, or absolute Longchenpa within us, the wisdom of our own rigpa, present within the nature of our mind.
—Nyoshul Khenpo, A Marvelous Garland of Rare Gems
This may at first feel foreign, but concepts from psychology can enhance our ability to relate to Nyoshul Khenpo’s devotion to Longchenpa. Theories of embodied cognition suggest that when we imagine the presence of teachers, bodhisattvas, or the experience of caring moments, we are simulating those experiences throughout the body’s systems—including perceptual, motor, affective, and visual systems. Imagining these figures is not merely an aspirational practice; it is a doorway to embody such qualities in our heart, body, and mind.
Simulating memories of caring moments produces patterns in the body and brain similar to when that moment happened in the past. This process allows us to re-embody moments of care in the present. If we have a felt connection with someone like Longchenpa, as Nyoshul Khenpo does, we can connect with his presence simply by imagining him and by reading his words. Or we can call to mind moments from our own life that evoke a felt quality of care. By collecting caring moments from our own life, we can begin to catch on to the embodied feeling that parallels Nyoshul Khenpo’s recollection of Longchenpa or other spiritual ancestors.
Simple moments of caring connection from our own life—with benefactors, ancestors, strangers, pets, and the natural world—have already been imprinted in the body, and by imagining them again, we are reconnecting with them with the body. By scouring our life for benefactors and caring moments, we can populate a field of refuge with our lived caring moments and benefactors, experiencing our fellow beings as expressions of buddhahood and as an ongoing communal support for practice, even when separated over space and time. This kind of practice can also serve as a doorway to better connect with traditional imagery within refuge practice—combining caring moments and benefactors from our life with the icons and figures from traditional Buddhist cultures.
The Ultimate Refuge Within Our Mind
During summer 2020, I came to rely on a nearby pond for refuge while raising my one-year-old daughter in the middle of the pandemic. The pond and its inhabitants—ducks, frogs, a great blue heron—had become a field of care for us. Each time we arrived at the pond, Lena rejoiced as she pointed and called out to the ducks. I felt nourished by the peace, simplicity, and beauty of this spot, and by the bond that we formed through the pond.
At the end of the summer, a fire started in our neighborhood and ravaged through nearby towns, destroying over two thousand homes and businesses. After evacuating for one night, I came home and visited the pond. Amidst the stress and collective trauma for our community, I felt grief over the destruction to the natural landscape.
Later that week, I relied on the pond within meditation. Visual-izing the pond, ducks, and frogs, while being there with Lena, brought an unwavering feeling of simplicity and comfort that was indestructible and untouched by the fires. Although access to the pond in relative reality was not available in that moment, the qualities that it evoked remained immediately accessible, simply by calling it to mind. The refuge of the pond felt stronger than ever before, because the qualities that it evoked were not dependent on something external.
The experience with the pond reveals an important lesson: we can cling to the things in our life that evoke feelings of happiness, peace, and so on, trying to preserve and hold onto them. Or we can allow these experiences to mirror our enlightened nature back to us, and learn, as Buddhist cultures have before us, to become more receptive to it.
By calling to mind a place like the pond, an inspiring figure like Longchenpa, moments of deep practice with other practitioners, or any caring moment, we can resonate with the qualities they embody and reunify with our basic nature. Although Nyoshul Khenpo did not meet Longchenpa in relative reality, they are undivided at the level of ultimate reality, in the nature of mind. Likewise, despite the challenges of physical isolation because of the pandemic, we remain connected with our spiritual benefactors, ancestors, brothers, and sisters at the level of nature of mind. This is a sangha we can always come back to.
ABOUT PAUL CONDON
Paul Condon is an associate professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and a visiting lecturer at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal. His research areas range from attachment theory, to the impact of meditation on compassion, to the dialogue between psychological science and modern meditation programs. He teaches meditation practices adapted from the Tibetan Nyingma tradition.
Will Europe Rush even faster to Electric Vehicles to escape dependence on Oil?
JUAN COLE03/18/2022
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sean Goulding Carroll at Euractiv.comasks if Europe can defund the Russian war machine by turning to electric vehicles. It should be noted that in part because of the EU carbon tax, already 29% of new car purchases in Europe last December were EVs or plug-in hybrids, so consumers are already stampeding in that direction. Putin may just have given the industry a big lift. While EV prices have jumped momentarily because of the crisis, it may cause governments to give more incentives over the medium term to escape dependence on Russia.
Carroll points out that slightly over a quarter of all petroleum consumed in the European Union states comes from Russia, earning Moscow $110 billion annually. That money is funding the Russian war machine in Ukraine, where Russian troops are targeting civilians and hitting hospitals and cinemas used for shelters, as well as apartment buildings.
The EU had already slated a ban on the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles for 2035. It may well be that the Ukraine crisis, in addition to the already severe impact of the climate emergency, will cause them to move the deadline up. One hurdle has been European disputes over EV batteries, which the European parliament appears to have just settled. The new framework will make EU batteries the greenest in the world and the most recyclable, with plans to recover some 90% of the nickel, copper and cobalt used in them, and 70% of the lithium. Since Russia is a lithium producer, recycling will help keep Europe from becoming dependent on yet another Russian export.
Even in France, where there has been less interest in EVs than in Germany and elsewhere, the high gasoline prices are changing consumers’ minds, according to Franceinfo. One man at a dealership tried driving an EV for the first time and after some calculating, was completely won over. He figured his fuel cost would fall from $440 per 1398 miles to $60.
French President Emmanuel Macron is campaigning for reelection and a recently added plank of his platform is a new government-backed lease-to-own program that will make it easier for middle class consumers to buy electric.
Ford is planning 3 new electric passenger vehicles for consumers in Europe within two years, according to Anmar Frangoul at CNBC. Two of the plants for the production of the new lines will be in Germany, with one to be opened in Romania. Ford intends to sell 600,000 electric vehicles a year to European Union countries by 2026. The some 449 million Europeans are buying about 12 million vehicles a year nowadays, down from 15 million before the pandemic, so by this measure Ford alone would be supplying 5 percent of all car purchases in the form of EVs in only four years.
Tesla is way ahead of Ford, in already dominating the EV market in the EU. In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, Tesla sold 309,000 of its EVs to the bloc, an astonishing increase of 71% year on year, according to Jennifer Jacobs Dungs at Forbes. Tesla EVs for the first time outsold diesel vehicles in Europe that quarter.
In December, 29% of new car registrations in Europe were electric or plugin hybrid, writes José Pontes at Cleantechnica. Fully electric vehicles came to 19% of the market. So Ford is targeting the two-thirds of purchasers who are still buying ICE vehicles at present. In 2021 only 9% of US new car purchases were EVs or PHEVs.
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
There was a tragic fire on Mechanic Street in Houlton on Wednesday. The apartment building is a total loss and a temporary emergency relief center was set up at the John Millar Arena by the Red Cross to house the residents. The Red Cross also has additional funds to house residents for several days in a local motel until new housing can be found. Our UU friend Jeremy Hardinwas one of the residents in the building. More details to follow. Currently donations can go directly to the Red Cross.
Prayer List
For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of Maine
Local emergency personnel and hospital staff
For our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisis
For those working for social justice and societal change
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation
Prayers for those in Ukraine as the war continues
Pray for peace
Prayers for those who lost their home in the Houlton fire
Prayers for Jeremy Harden who was one of the residents
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.
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