Just the other day I was at a social/business gathering of people who are going to be teaching at the University of New Hampshire this summer. I mentioned to one of the other teachers that I have a book coming out in October, and of course she asked what it was about.
Oh, oh! I launched into a several-paragraph long explanation of the book, knowing that once again, I’d failed to put my finger on the pulse of my own book.
I wrote Living as a River because I’m fascinated by the Buddhist Six Element Practice, and I wanted to communicate my explorations. But my book isn’t really about the Six Element Practice, which is really just the framework for the explorations it contains.
The Six Element Practice is a way of exploring the nature of the self, and how we cling onto notions of what we are. It’s a way of letting go of our clinging so that we can, eventually, lose our clinging and find freedom. But that’s not an very adequate description of the book either.
But those are the kind of descriptions I keep giving people. I just couldn’t think of a pithy way of expressing what the book was about that wasn’t too narrow or long-winded. I needed to find a “pitch.”
You know that when an agent is trying to get a Hollywood studio to buy a movie, they have a one-sentence opener to provide a “hook” and to describe the essence of the film. So you’ll get things like “Jaws on Paws” (a real-life example about a rampaging dog), or “You’ve Got Mail meets Blue Velvet” (to give an example I made up).
A couple of days my last flailing attempt to describe my book, it finally came to be how I could describe the book in just two words: “Embracing change.” So that’s what the book’s about. It uses the structure of the Six Element meditation in order to face up to the reality of change, and to help us let go of clinging so that we can embrace impermanence.
It’s strange it’s taken me so long to figure out exactly what my book’s about! You’d kind of expect that I’d know that before I wrote the book. In fact it probably would have been handy to have had “embracing change” in my mind as a theme while I was writing.
On the other hand, I think that idea was in my mind the whole time, even though I never quite articulated it, so it’s not as if I’ve suddenly realized I’ve written the wrong book.
I’m just relieved and glad that when an interviewer asks me what the book’s about, I can now express its essence in just two words:
Sounds True recently sent me the copy for the back cover of Living as a River:
“At a time when it’s increasingly challenging to find clear and honest direction on the spiritual path, Living as a River offers contemporary insight into an ancient practice and wise counsel we can trust. This book is both beautifully written and useful to all serious seekers.”
—Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
To face reality is to embrace change; to resist change is to suffer. This is the liberating insight that unfolds with Living as a River. A masterful investigation of the nature of self, this eloquent blend of current science and time-honored spiritual insight is meant to free us from the fear of impermanence in a world defined by change.
The primary vehicle for this journey is Buddhism’s traditional Six Element Practice, a deconstructive process of deep reflection that helps us let go of the belief in a separate, static self—the root of unhappiness. Bodhipaksa takes readers through a systematic yet poetic analysis of the self that supports the realization of:
A sense of spaciousness and expansiveness that transcends the limitations of the physical body
Profound gratitude, awe, and a feeling of belonging as we witness the extent of our connectedness with the universe
Freedom from the psychological burden caused by clinging to a false identity
The relaxed experience of “consciousness, pure and bright”
Engrossing and incisive, Living as a River is at once an empowering guide and a meditative practice we can turn to again and again to overcome our fear of change and align joyfully with the natural unfolding of creation.
Ask people what might constitute the basis of a permanent self, and often they’ll point to their memories. We tend to assume that a memory is like a DVD recording — stable, permanent, and unchanging. But research on memory shows that this isn’t the case. Smithsonian Magazine highlights the work of Karim Nader, who has suggested that our memories are in a state of flux.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works. In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories.
Much of his research is on rats, but he says the same basic principles apply to human memory as well. In fact, he says, it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way. Nader thinks it’s likely that some types of memory, such as a flashbulb memory, are more susceptible to change than others. Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them.
For those of us who cherish our memories and like to think they are an accurate record of our history, the idea that memory is fundamentally malleable is more than a little disturbing. Not all researchers believe Nader has proved that the process of remembering itself can alter memories. But if he is right, it may not be an entirely bad thing. It might even be possible to put the phenomenon to good use to reduce the suffering of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, who are plagued by recurring memories of events they wish they could put behind them.
Shelly, on the the publicists at Sounds True, has been pushing my forthcoming book, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change, at Book Expo America in NYC. (I’m sorry for using the phrase “The Big Apple.” It’s tacky and I promise not to do it again.) Anyway, Shelly kindly sent me a couple of photos of the book from the expo!
Mariana Caplan just gave this glowing recommendation for “Living as a River.”
“At a time when it’s increasingly challenging to find clear and honest direction on the spiritual path, Living as a River offers contemporary insight into an ancient practice and wise counsel we can trust. This book is both beautifully written and useful to all serious seekers.”
—Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
Living as a River is a book about our interconnectedness with all things. It’s not primarily an environmental book, but a perspective of valuing the natural world does tend to crop up!
Here’s an interesting video on our relation to the water element…
Book extract: Although our world is drenched in water, we rarely appreciate just how little water there actually is. As we look at a globe and see 71 percent of the world’s surface covered in water, we rarely consider that it is spread in an incredibly thin film over the planet’s surface, less than a thousandth of the diameter of the earth at its deepest point, and on average three ten thousandths. If the earth were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball, the average depth of the ocean covering it would be 65 microns, or about twice the thickness of a grocery store plastic bag.
Based on “Global water and air volume” (Adam Nieman, Science Photo Library). Photograph credit: NASA
The image above gives a graphic representation of the size of the Earth, its total water supply (the white sphere), and the accessible fresh water reserves (the tiny, dark sphere at 9 o’clock relative to the white sphere). 97% of the total water on Earth is salt water, roughly 1.7 percent is locked up in the ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow, and a similar amount is soaked deep into the earth. Approximately 0.007 percent of all the water on the Earth is available for direct human use, including water in rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and accessible aquifers. You may have to look at the diagram above very hard to notice the tiny dot representing this.
Here are two recent stories illustrating some of the problems we’re facing because of our lack of respect for the Water Element.
The people who brought you “The Story of Stuff” have a new feature coming soon on the bottled water industry. The video above is a trailer. “The Story of Bottled Water” looks like it’ll be really fascinating.
“You may think of your body as a fairly permanent structure, but most of it is in a state of constant flux as old cells are discarded and new ones are generated.”
Even your bones, which you may think of as static and non-living, are full of cells called osteoclasts and osteoblasts that are forever (respectively) breaking down and rebuilding your bones as they adapt to the stresses they’re subjected to. (This is why bed-rest or being in weightlessness results in bone loss).
A fascinating article from the New York Times highlights the work of Doctor Jonas Frisén, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who hit on a method to estimate the average age of tissues. The method involves measuring the amount of Carbon-14 in the DNA of various tissues.
A pulse of artificially-generated Carbon-14 was created in the atmosphere in the years that above-ground nuclear testing was allowed, and since then the level (which was double the normal background level) has been slowly returning to normal. This Carbon-14 entered the food chain as plants absorbed it and incorporated it into their bodies, and from there it percolated into all living things, including us. The amount of Carbon-14 in the DNA of our tissues reveals the average age of the cells making up those tissues, since the DNA is fabricated at the birth of the cell.
Frisén’s work, and that by other researchers, tells us the following:
“The epithelial cells that line the surface of the gut have a rough life and are known to last only five days. Ignoring these surface cells, the average age of those in the main body of the gut is 15.9 years.”
“Red blood cells, bruised and battered after traveling nearly 1,000 miles through the maze of the body’s circulatory system, last only 120 days or so on average before being dispatched to their graveyard in the spleen.”
“The epidermis, or surface layer of the skin, is recycled every two weeks or so.”
“An adult human liver has a turnover time of 300 to 500 days.” This means that you have a new liver just about every year!
“The entire human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so in adults.”
“The average age of all the cells in an adult’s body may turn out to be as young as 7 to 10 years.”
About the only pieces of the body that last a lifetime, on present evidence, seem to be the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart. But even there, it’s the age of the DNA that Frisén’s method measures. There are ongoing processes that replace individual components of the cells around that DNA, meaning that even in the cerebral cortex and other “static” tissues, there may be considerable change taking place. And other work has shown that new neurons are in fact generated in the cerebral cortex, although presumably not in numbers sufficient to show up in Frisén’s work. Additionally, although cells in the brain may be long-lived, they still change; brain cells have a life-long ability to develop new connections with each other. This is how learning takes place.
The upshot is that the body is continually changing.
And yet we are attached to our bodies. This brings up the question, how can we be attached to something that is constantly changing? How can we cling to something that doesn’t remain the same from one moment to the next? Well, we can’t. We identify with our bodies, thinking that if the body fails, we fail. We think that when others judge the body, they judge us. And so clinging (or trying to cling) to something impermanent leads to suffering.
The Buddhist tradition encourages us to regard all things as being like mist, or flowing water, or a mirage — what the mind takes to be solid, substantial, and graspable is actually ever-changing and characterized by impermanence. The Six Element Practice — the subject of my new book, Living as a River, is a way of developing an experiential appreciation of the transience of the body. This helps us to let go, stop identifying the body with the self, to suffer less, and to experience a profound sense of freedom.
It’s remarkably difficult for us to perceive change, because of the relative poverty of the brain’s processing power compared to the sheer volume of information is has to deal with. This causes a failure to notice changes that we might think would be obvious, and so we consistently over-estimate our ability to detect change.
This, I argue, in Living as a River, is one of the reasons we think that we have a static self. If we can’t notice something “obvious” changing, like a building being there one minute and gone the next, how are we going to appreciate less tangible changes on our own being?
Here are a few examples showing how hard it is to detect change. In each of these movies, two photographs will alternate, separated by a blank slide. It’s surprising how many times we have to compare the two photographs before we can see the change. (Warning: these photographs are strobe-like. They give me headaches and I’d hate someone with epilepsy to have a seizure as a result of viewing them).
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