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.