Simon Singh, the science author and TV producer, has recently triumphed in his battle with the British Chiropractic Association. They sued him for libel when he claimed, truthfully, that some chiropractors promote “bogus treatments”. English libel law is such that the fight could easily have cost him millions, but in the end he won the right to use the defense of fair comment and the BCA dropped the case. Things might not have turned out so well for Singh and for other critical scientists or writers – even if they are telling the truth. The case highlighted – again – the oppressive nature of English libel law.

This week is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the problems with English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.

The English libel law is particularly dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

The publishers have decided that the title is not good enough and I can see their point. Arguably I wrote the book only because I thought of the title and liked the alliteration, but their argument is that they want it to appeal more directly to neuroscientists and others working on the problem of consciousness. So it needs a different cover and a different title.

They have suggested all sorts of (in my opinion) rather good possible titles, but I’d love to know what you readers think about them. Here is a list of their suggestions.

Consciously Zen

Zen and the Conscious Mind

Zen and the Meditative Mind

Zen and Your Conscious Self

Zen and the Art of Consciousness

Contemplating Consciousness: Ten Zen Questions

Contemplations on Consciousness: Ten Zen Questions

The Meditative Mind: Ten Zen Questions

Your Brain on Zen

Do please comment on any or all of these suggestions, or add some of your own. Also, if you have noticed any errors or problems with the text, now is a good time to tell me about them. I have to submit any changes (which can, of course, only be small) by the end of this month. Your help is much appreciated.

She began her own blog on Psychology Today. The Daily Mail picked this up and printed a story about it (not totally false but with inaccuracies and a “tough love” theme which was certainly not how I saw it). Then ABC and other sites took it from there and finally I wrote up my own brief version for the Guardian’s CommentisFree. This has gone up today and is open for comments for 3 days only.

Oddly enough they (like the Mail) invented a headline that was way off the point. They wrote “The greatest challenge for the parent of a child with an eating disorder is holding onto the person in the grip of the disease”. Holding on? I would have thought it was fairly obvious that I was never trying to hold on and indeed that I thought this would be counter-productive. You cannot hang on. Anorexia takes them away.

I was also practicing Zen throughout all these ten years. I have no idea whether it helped, but it certainly encouraged me to accept what was happening and to “let go” rather than to “hang on”.

Chapter 8 asks “Are you here now?”.

I like this question a lot because at first sight – like “Am I conscious now?” – the answer seems as though it must be an emphatic “Yes”. And yet my meditation experiences led me far away from “Yes”. This is not just because I have spent so much time questioning the nature of consciousness that I no longer have any idea what the word means, but because the whole sense of a persisting self has taken so many knocks.

In this chapter I describe a retreat which was extremely painful in many ways and included an interview with John which left me quite disturbed. He didn’t seem to understand me at all, and I didn’t really understand why not, or why he reacted the way he did. I suppose I was expecting a certain kind of help from him and that is not what I got. The way I have written about it makes it seem much less dramatic than the interview described in Chapter 6 but it was just as disturbing.

John clearly thought so too. In the “Response of a Zen Master” which follows the rest of the book, he writes “The interview on  p. 132 was a disaster for both of us. I failed to show you a way beyond your intellectual fixation and you persisted in a partial viewpoint that was intellectually convincing to you.”

If you’ve read his response you might like to comment – for I still don’t know what to think about it all this time later.

The other news is that I have at last finished the book. so once my room is cleared up and the heaps of other books all put away, I shall be able to get back to the Zen questions.

I guess the final conclusion for the retreat was that the next day, after that upsetting ceremony, Reb gave another of his extraordinary lectures and talked about the choice the historical Buddha faced.

This choice was between saying nothing because he knew that the truth could not be put into words (vehicles, stories, instructions and the like) and making up ways of  saying something, such as ways of pointing people towards the unsayable truth, giving them prescriptions to follow that might help them follow the way he had taken, and so on. What to do? Hence the story that the Buddha thought we are like lotus flowers rising out of the mud and his teachings might help people still down in the pond slime.

My instinct is always to prefer the truth in the silence – but then I would never have learned to meditate or practice mindfulness had someone not begun explaining it to me and urged me on.  So – very, very reluctantly – I accept that that horrible ceremony and those impossible vows may have some justification.

But … to other things.

To all of you out there reading this blog (the graph tells me there are quite a few of you!).  Shall I now stop? You have all seen enough of the book, and had a chance to join in an interesting discussion, and that might be quite enough. Shall we call it a day ??

Or does anyone want me to put up the last few chapters and carry on to the end? Let me know!

Sue.

In an interview I get the chance to ask Reb at last. We are sitting facing each other in the library with the great trees and Gaia House’s lovely garden outside the windows. He is attentive, alert and his eyes seem to contain the whole universe.

“So who gets out of the burning house?” I ask him.

“The one who made it” he says in a matter-of-fact tone. I’m shocked. He’d already said that there is no creator, no maker of the universe.

“But no one made it” I protest “Wasn’t it just made by the whole universe tangling things up together?”

“Yup” he says “and that who gets out – the whole universe gets out.”

“So the white bull and the computer that never crashes are all a con too?”

“Yup”. He smiles.

I am so relieved I want to hug him. I feel such a weight of confusion clear away as we go on to explore the parable and its strange implications.

But this con is a serious one – not just for me I realise as the retreat draws to its close. On the last night there is a ceremony in which four people take the precepts. I notice there are a few visitors and even some children sitting at the back of the hall to watch them take this great step in their lives. I begin to feel uncomfortable.

The whole process is done with precise coordination and seriousness, with the four lined up in front and Reb presiding. It reminds me of going to church but without the lovely music and beautiful surroundings. Here are four people, with deadly seriousness, dressing up in special robes and taking vows that are – by any normal standards – completely ridiculous. Not killing is fine unless you accept that by simply being alive and eating food you are responsible for others dying. Not intoxicating oneself or others is fine if you really think you’re going to live without drink, smoke, or any interesting drugs for the rest of your life (and don’t count tea, coffee, or those nice cold remedies that send you off into a woozy sleep). I suppose not misusing sexuality is fine if you have a clear idea of what use and misuse are in the case of sexuality. But I shiver at the whole idea of taking these sacred vows, and intending to become a Boddhisatva and live your life forever more for all others.

Worse than the impossible vows is the apparent clash with everything we have been learning. Didn’t Reb say that the mind of intention is wrong mind? Why then pile on all these intentions? Haven’t we been learning that we are nothing other than all beings in the first place, so vowing to work for all beings is superfluous. Hasn’t he explained that the inside and the outside of the burning house are really one and the same, and the promised mega-computers and fancy vehicles are just a trick to lure the children out? Why then dress up in fancy robes, put silly bits of cloth round your neck and make all these promises?

I didn’t want to be there. I really, really didn’t want to be there watching all this yuk unfolding …

With my new found tendency to notice pride I realised that at least part of my revulsion was due to pride. I didn’t want to spoil the occasion for others by creeping out. So I stayed, and watched, and listened, and wished I didn’t have to. I remembered Reb’s book on the precepts and how he make sense of them all but I went off to bed understanding for the first time in my life what it means to have a bad taste in one’s mouth from something that never touched a mouth.

The next day a lot became clearer, and I’ll write about that soon.

One day a man struggles to understand Reb’s lecture and begins talking about the Creator. No, says Reb. In Buddhism, unlike in the monotheistic religions, there is no creator, he explains. The universe is self-moving. “This means we can play with the scientists” he concludes, which delights me. How wonderful it is to find a practice like this that does not entail believing things that are scientifically rubbish.  I keep sitting, keep working.

The three fancy vehicles are a con, we learn. When the children find their way out of the burning house there is instead one grand carriage drawn by a great white bullock that flies as fast as the wind; the one Buddha vehicle. Aha. And the gateway is oneself. Or another way of putting it is that everything is both the burning house and the way out of the burning house. Even the outside is really the burning house and the way out; being out is really only knowing that you are in the burning house. I suppose that flying like the wind on that great one vehicle is also really being inside the burning house. I begin to see everything around as the burning house, as the world of delusion.

“We seem to be sitting here, silent and still” says Reb. He urges us to sit wholeheartedly with body and mind. Indeed we must do everything we do wholeheartedly with body and mind. I had never thought of sitting meditation as something you do with the body but obviously it is. Being wholehearted about what you do now seems to me to be the opposite of having pride. As I sit the pointless conversations with myself sometimes start up but now I can see them too as more pride; things I want to tell other people – more pride, reasons why I did things in the past – more pride. It is amazing to me how pride there is!

In one session I go up to the platform and, like others, find the experience daunting (not like giving lectures to hundreds of people which I’m perfectly used to!). I tell Reb that I have seen all sorts of little examples of pride and almost feel ready to face the bigger prides – not just the little ones here on retreat that can’t hurt anyone, like being annoyed with people during kinhin. He is quite sharp with me and tells me not to judge pride as small, medium or large, or to decide in advance which will be easy or hard, or which will hurt people and which won’t. “People are easily hurt”, he says. “Right here being annoyed about kinhin all by yourself can hurt people”. I see his point – we are easily hurt, aren’t we!

We are easily hurt in this burning house; this world of delusion.

(I’ve got one final post to add about the retreat – troubles with a ceremony)

In the early mornings, up at 5.30, meditating by 6, we sit in silence and suddenly Reb’s voice is there. Clearly and slowly, in his soft American voice he says (as closely as I can remember it)

 “The early morning breeze has secrets to tell
Silent and still.
You have to say what you really want
Silent and still.
Beings are moving back and forth at the threshold where the two worlds meet
The door is round and open
Silent and still.”

The early morning rooks and blackbirds are starting up. All 60 or so of us keep sitting, silent and still? Not really – rampaging through thoughts all too often, still being horrified by all that pride, but sometimes silent and still.

The mornings are easy. There are only a few half-hour sits with the morning service (I cross my fingers in all the religious bits), the work period outside weeding and digging under the trees, and then Reb’s long talk and question session. It’s the afternoons that are tough. From 2 p.m. until 5.30 there is relentless sitting and kinhin with no break. I make it through every day, missing only one 10 minute kinhin to get a fast cup of tea and go to the loo. Lots of people miss several of the half hours I notice. Ah there comes the pride. I am so much better than them. I don’t miss any. And yet the funniest thing is happening. Now that I am noticing and labelling the pride it seems to lose its power. Oh – there it is in a new form – and whatever it is seems to fizzle out as I stare at it.

Last year I was SO annoyed by the people who walked too fast or too slowly in the kinhin, or didn’t start walking quickly again when the end bell sounded. This time I am not annoyed at all. They still do the same thing but I laugh at myself for feeling superior and thus getting into all that ridiculous anger. It’s only slow walking! And the same is true with the people who clatter their plates when Reb has told us to eat silently.

I move a little more slowly too. I am always rushing everywhere and realise that that too is a kind of pride – I can do everything faster than you can so there! So I enjoy going more slowly (still probably rushing quite a lot) and feeling all the people around me as all those beings we can love – whether we like or dislike them – and how can I really like or dislike people when we are all in silence and all working hard without looking at each other.

“When our minds dwell in delusion we are turned by the Dharma flower: when our minds dwell in enlightenment we turn the Dharma flower” says Reb, “Fully appreciating this teaching is the Dharma flower turning the Dharma flower.” Ah – so this is the point of the retreat “Dharma Flower turning Dharma Flower”

This flower is in fact the entire universe, he says, so when we are deluded the universe turns us and vice versa. I am confused by this. It feels to me as though I am always struggling to control the universe – isn’t that a deluded me trying to turn it? Yet I know enough just to wait and see how these difficult idea clarify as we go along.