Sven and the Art of Spiritual Materialism.

So a while ago I asked a few friends of mine whether I should take the Three Refuges in a formal ceremony, because that's the pattern I'm familiar with when one adopts a religion. You convert. It's a discrete moment marked by recited words and it's all very sober and dramatic. You cry. But instead, I learned and recited the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts alone in a hotel room. In my sweatpants. Typical Sven move.

Taking refuge is a process, not a punctual event. You don't have a flash of insight and suddenly become overtaken by the dharma. We're all up the same creek, but we have oars. We take refuge in a lot of things: friends, lovers, jobs, drugs, experiences, solitude, exercise, food, sleep. None of these things really brings any lasting happiness, thanks to the hedonic treadmill we all run frantically to keep up with. And so we think that rowing harder will gain us happiness. Not so.

Image credit: "Americosmos" by Darrin Drda

The entire world system as it is right now is powered by that treadmill. Entire industries, trillions of dollars per year in aggregate, exist with the promise of alleviating suffering. Advertising, marketing, education and credentialing, the American Dream, the idea of a soulmate for everyone --- all promise but don't deliver, because you build up a tolerance to happiness, and need ever-greater highs to achieve the same degree of happiness as you go on. The hedonic treadmill, in a nutshell!

So --- what's been occupying my mind lately is how to negotiate this rather dramatic set of choices and changes with the consequences of my past choices. It's too easy to slip into binary thinking, and to summarize the fallacy I'm committing here, I think I can either be a 'good Buddhist' and have to forsake everything in my life, live in lonely poverty, be a victim. Or pursue more worldly things, abandon any hope of lasting happiness, be drawn back into cynical anhedonia, but manage to achieve some status and what little security is to be had through that path.

But binary thinking is a trap. Those are not my only two options, and I'm limited only by my courage and imagination. The dharma, after all, is performed to the best of your ability. I'm not likely to wake up one morning and find myself a bodhisattva. That doesn't happen. It takes work, and the kind of work it takes helps me to become a better person --- more loving, more on the same wavelength as others, more compassionate, more honest, more humble, more generous, more focused. I'm never going to soar to the heights of academia or politics or the corporate world, but I'll take my chances and try to make a comfortable living doing something useful, and give to the world that way. That is dharma. Roll with the punches. Leave power to the squabbling gods, and be defiantly human: vulnerable, fragile, bound up in both suffering and happiness but not intrinsically marked by either state.

But what I don't want to do is become someone for whom the dharma is a neat accessory. Have an Alan Watts playlist on Spotify. Wear malas and dress in all white. Find any excuse to bring up some exegesis of a Pali term. Pursue the material and wear the spiritual as yet another part of my identity: Sven, ginger, motorcycle rider, grad student, anthropologist, dharma bum. After all, I took refuge alone in my sweatpants, so any attempt to try to make this improve my perceived sex appeal is futile.

I'm very reluctant to call myself a Buddhist, because linguistically, it doesn't work for me. There is no 'I' to be. I'm a collection of molecules organized in such a way that I can move under my own power and make more of me. I have thoughts and feelings that can be explained in terms of those physical processes. There is no permanent and unchanging 'me' --- personality and habits are all conditioned by realities outside of yourself, but understanding and ultimately freedom comes from within.

But I own my actions, past, present, and future. I do both good things and evil things, but I am not those things. These actions, however, mold who I am, and that's where choice comes in. And so I choose.

Gremlins appeased and thoughts on motorcycle commuting.

The electrical gremlins that have been keeping me from riding seem to have been appeased for now. I replaced the regulator/rectifier unit, and now the charging system works. I'm still breathing a sigh of relief every time I hit the starter button and the engine rumbles to life. I was riding the other day to Home Depot, and a fuse blew, but I managed to walk to a gas station and get a replacement set. I looked at the blown fuse when I got home, and it was just corroded because the case was cracked. It probably hadn't been replaced since the bike was manufactured.

That's the thing with old bikes. Mine's a 2002, and it's been stored outside for a significant portion of its service life. So I worry about things like corrosion on electrical leads, frayed insulation, dry rot on tires and belts, gaskets degrading. Rust. You live in Florida, you're gonna get rust.

There's a persistent oil leak from the head that I've been keeping track of, since I don't have time these days to take off the tank, remove the head cover, and poke around in the engine. Fortunately, I know where the leak's coming from, and I've done this kind of thing before. I'm not going to sell the bike until everything's fixed.

After a year of riding, both as a means of commuting and as a means of recreation, I can say this: a bike is not a car. If all you need to do is get yourself and very little cargo around, a bike is a great way to meet your needs. If you have to be on time anywhere during the rainy season, budget fifteen extra minutes and make sure you have rain gear. I have a full set (pants, jacket, boots) and I keep everything in my backpack in a set of waterproof camping bags. I've ridden from Palm Harbor to Tampa in a thunderstorm and stayed dry.

But if you need to (1) commute long distances, (2) carry more stuff than can fit into a backpack or pair of saddlebags, or (3) carry someone else, a motorcycle is not an ideal commuter vehicle. I've made it work, but your mileage will most certainly vary.

Asking the Internet for answers

Sometimes I'm pretty sure the only reason I keep writing this blog is because I want to make up for years of typing my questions into Google and hoping it comes up with answers. This was a habit that I picked up during a particularly bleak time in my life, and like smoking, it's been hard to shake.

This isn't a question of the time wasted in trying to pick signal out of the massive noise that is the Internet; it's unhealthy because you're never going to find satisfactory answers from other people's questions. No one asks exactly the same questions.

The most important tool in motorcycle maintenance

A notebook.

Fixing motorcycles is an exercise in deductive reasoning and hypothesis testing. Failure to carefully observe and record your observations can cost you hundreds of dollars and long periods of time without the comforting thrum of a motorcycle beneath you. Your moves are only as good as your observations, and recording your observations has a multiplier effect, since you can watch trends. This is particularly true for electrical work and compression tests.

For instance, I've been puzzling my way through a mysterious electrical issue on the Noble Savage, in which the battery would slowly drain out, which would leave me stranded at any number of gas stations in the Hillsborough County area until I could get a jump start. Very frustrating. Fortunately life right now is simple enough that I can ride a bicycle to all my engagements.

Electrical issues on motorcycles tend to involve the following components/systems (in increasing order of complexity/cost-to-fix/pain-in-the-ass):

1. frame grounds
2. battery
3. wire connections
4. regulator/rectifier
5. stator

And electrical problems don't necessarily have to restrict themselves to just one thing. My observations suggest that my issue is a combination of battery (appears to be damaged) and rectifier (one of the wire connectors is fused and probably shorting the system). So my first step is to order a new rectifier and load-test/replace the battery. Fortunately the latter is under warranty, and I save receipts.

The problem a lot of people have in maintaining their own motorcycles is lack of efficacy. Motorcycles are relatively complex machines, and for people not familiar with the principles of internal combustion, electricity, fluid dynamics, and chemistry, cracking open a motorcycle for the first time is a scary experience. You're afraid of screwing up. Understandable.

Safeguard against that by purchasing a good service manual for your exact year, make, and model of bike (for reference and step-by-step instruction), and record everything you do in a notebook. Most service manuals leave a few pages in back blank for note-taking anyways --- so there you go. Use them wisely, so that even if you do screw up, then you phone a knowledgeable friend, you can say something more substantial than 'OMG I SCREWED UP HELP ME'.

The regulator/rectifier is supposed to arrive in a few days. I'm going to (1) bypass the fused wire connector block to eliminate any possibility of a short at that point, (2) check my connections and grounds one more time, (3) replace the battery if it doesn't pass the load test, and (4) install the new rectifier. If none of that fixes my problem, then it's the alternator --- expensive and a pain in the ass to fix, but doable with the tools and time I have available.

The problem with English.

If there's one thing I can say with some authority (as an anthropologist's apprentice, amateur linguist, and sometimes lover), it's that for all the words we've adapted from other languages, the fact that we only have one word for 'love' tells us something distressing about ourselves. Not that speakers of languages who more finely divide the semantic space occupied by 'love' are in any way more likely to be kinder, more compassionate, or selfless than speakers of English, but it makes you wonder about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and how much it might apply here.

For those of you who aren't huge into linguistics or the cognitive social sciences, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language we use shapes our reality. It's overly simplistic to claim that because the Inuit allegedly have fifty words for snow (they don't), they somehow are more finely-attuned to the reality of snow than the experience of this Florida boy, who has only one word for 'snow'.

The word 'love' means a lot to me, but only because I'm so fascinated by it. Its semantic space --- the range of possible meanings --- is nothing short of breath-taking. I love my motorcycle. It doesn't mean that I'm somehow committed to it. But it does mean that I devote a lot of time and energy into maintaining that relationship, since it plays a large role in my daily life (it's my car, basically). And that's one possible case where I can use the word 'love': the result of having sunk a lot of time in keeping something up, and being glad for having learned something by that process.

More to the point, love means about a dozen different things. I love my mother, but not in the same way I love those who I call 'friend'. I love myself, but not in the same way I love the women I've smooched. I love having money, but not in the same way I love knowledge and wisdom. Love is tied up in questions of attachment, status, power, support, dependency, psychopathology, and biology, and yet we only have one word for it.

Weird, huh? We have to resort to borrowing words from other languages. CS Lewis did that when talking about the ancient Greek use of words like eros and agape. Pema Chödrön does that when she's talking about metta. Or using elaborate circumlocutions to describe the different kinds of love: I just did that in this post. Or transferring meanings to other words in our language: the New Testament does that a lot.

Love is all around us, but we can't easily describe it.

Give up your goals.

Give up your goals. You'll find that even if you do reach them, you'll never feel like you've arrived. It seems that we replace one goal with another as soon as we reach it, and that in part can be explained by how the reward systems in our brains work: in effect, it's an addiction. You need an ikigai, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you have goals. It just means you have a reason to get out of bed.

Give up your goals. Focus instead on directions. One benefit of that way of thinking is that you don't feel quite the same need to torture yourself because you set out to do something and continue to do so well past the point of meaninglessness. I liken this to the Buddhist monkey trap parable: a small hole is drilled into a hollow log, a piece of fruit is placed inside the hole, so that when a monkey grabs the fruit, he can't remove his hand from the trap without letting go. And he won't let go because he's attached to the fruit.

Another great thing about direction is that you can always change it when it no longer proves growthful. Or you can keep going down that road, even though you're suffering for it, because you recognize it as a growthful process and not some symbolic measure of your worth as a human being. Journey, not destination. You cannot fail when you abandon your goals and instead seek only directions.

Slash and burn.

I'm in Denver, mountains in sight from the hostel window. I've spent a lot of time lately in the peaks, since it's healthy to go there once in a while and shake off the dust from the valley. I've changed my social environment and my residence, slammed the door on a lot of unsatisfying relationships, and have not made any particular effort to foster new ones. That's fine. But I have to return to the valley sometime.

I had a thought just before I sat down to write this, so I went outside for a smoke. Ran into an old colleague I almost never see. The fact that she was happy to see me, someone she only sees once a year at most, lifted my spirits, and I walked back upstairs. An image came to my mind on my way back up: a meteor punching through our thin eggshell of an atmosphere at a window-shattering 40,000 mph, a small boy standing on a mountaintop with a baseball bat, poised and ready to knock that rock back into space.

I asked myself: whatever happened to that boy?

I call it 'slash-and-burn agriculture of the soul'. Akhilandeshvari, a relatively less well-known Hindu goddess whose name means something like 'never not unbroken', would likely appreciate this metaphor: what I mean by it is that people like me tend to push themselves very very hard in frantic hot-blooded pursuit of a goal, an ideal, a target, and burn their souls to cinders in the process. But like the ashes from acres of macheted and burnt scrub, these are times in my life that ablate everything that needs torn down and rebuilt. Friendships that need to fade, jobs that need re-defined, plans that need re-drawn.

When I got on the plane yesterday, I felt like my entire grad school experience was an unmitigated failure. And, taken from a certain set of standards, it just might be: I have no publications to my name, no awards won, no exotic adventures gone on in the name of ethnography. Anthropology was interesting to me for a while, particularly since it answered some key questions I had when I first pursued it, but dammit, I want to slay some fucking dragons, and anthropology hasn't inspired me to slay any dragons lately. It did when I first moved into the Birdhouse, and I wanted to be Philippe Bourgois. I played chess with drug dealers and shared shitty beer with people who have it way way worse than I do, as a white male (albeit from a less than economically privileged background). It was good. But that time has been over for a while.

As for what's to come now, who knows? It's exciting, like looking at your hometown receding in the distance from under the wing of an Airbus. I might see snow here tomorrow. That's exciting. I didn't bring my boots. That's fine. I'm here with the all the cool-headed detachment of someone who's already broken up with someone, but just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. I'm slashing and burning like crazy these days, and marveling that such green shoots can spring up so quickly from between the still-smoldering cinders. Let it burn.