Memorial March for Mothers

This afternoon I joined the Memorial March for Mothers, which was a pro-RH bill rally held in front of the CBCP compound inside Intramuros.  It's getting late and I have to wake up early tomorrow so instead of writing a few hundred words, here are a few pictures.  I promise to write a more thorough blog (maybe with more pictures, if you say pretty please!) within the week. 

Some Thoughts On Being A Student Again

Halfway through the second week of graduate school and I've pretty much established a routine.  It may need a little tweaking here and there, but I've more or less settled into a rhythm.  I haven't been a student in years.  And now here I am, going to classes again, struggling at times to pay attention to the lecture, trying (this early) to think of a topic for my MRR (which is a Masters degree thesis of sorts).

This time things are different.  In college, I would look forward to getting drunk with my buddies after class.  Sometimes we'd drink in between classes.  Now, I look forward to quickly scanning my notes for the next class after the previous class has ended.  I look forward to a coffee break while reading.  I look forward to going home to our unit to be with my wife and son.

Some things haven't changed.  We still pass notes and jokes and carry on conversations while the teacher is talking.  But now we're doing it through our secret Facebook group using our laptops.  That's a long way from passing notes surreptitiously or whispering to each other.

Regardless of the goofing off (which helps to keep us sane) I can tell that each of us is serious.  We have a lot more to lose this time than just a grade.  We've had to sacrifice a lot just to be here, after all.  And that's one of the things that keep me studying at night when all I want to do is sleep.

Talking about keeping our sanity, I've started to do daily ten-minute zazen sessions twice a day: once in the morning when I wake up and once at night before I go to bed.  I have a feeling this practice will help a lot in the months to come.

2011 updates

It's time for an overdue blog post.  Let me just give an update on my current living situation:

I am now staying with my wife and child in a rented condo in Makati.  We transferred here a little over a week ago and we'll be staying here for a year while I pursue my Masters degree in Development Management.  We've adjusted pretty well this past week, all things considered.

I've learned some new things about myself.  For one thing, I no longer find accounting and finance that bad - at least not compared to many of my classmates.  Maybe this is because I've had real world experience working with accountants and accountant-types in the corporate environment where I came from.  Back where I came from, any time someone would bring out the financial statements I'd groan inwardly because I knew it was time for yet another discussion in which a lot of the terms would go sailing over my head.  But here, it's not so bad.  Turns out most development managers who take up the course don't have a clue when it comes to finance (with the exception of one guy who got a perfect score during a diagnostic quiz at the beginning).

Our class is the most diverse one in the school, with about fourteen different nationalities.  We can all speak English with varying degrees of fluency.  Some, like the Indians, are really fluent - but their accents take getting used to.  (And that's what I get for always trying to mimic their accent!)  Others, like this one Nepalese guy are practically incomprehensible - I find that I have to listen VERY carefully, and even then sometimes I still can't understand what is being said.  Still, the diversity of nationality and culture was one of the reasons I chose to pursue an MDM instead of the more-expected MBA.  I just never felt interested in getting an MBA.

Anyway, it's almost time for class so I will have to stop.

An Invitation To Practice

I don't believe in God.  I see no evidence for his existence.  But last night I found myself wishing he did exist.

You see, last night I broke down.  After spending several nights with little sleep, getting up every few hours to change my one-year-old's diaper and apply the cream to his diaper rash while he cried in anger and pain, and wondering when the fuck will his intestinal flu go away, I broke down.  I stood in the shower while trying to wash him as he wailed nonstop.  I stopped what I was doing and screamed out of sheer frustration at the situation.  My wife, who was herself feeling ill, had to get up and finish the job herself.  In my mental state, there was no way I could have taken care of him.

Patience has never been one of my strong points.  And waiting for my son to recover ever since he came down with a virus last Tuesday has been torture.  I have started hating - HATING - every farting noise coming out of his body that signals that once again, his diaper needs changing (which he dreads because his rash burns and wiping it apparently makes it burn even more).  Every diaper change has been like a mini-jujutsu tournament where he kicks and screams while I try my best to remove the soiled diaper, gently wipe his body, apply the ointment for his rash, and put on a new diaper - all while desperately whispering reassuring noises and words.

Last night, in my stressed mind, I was practically screaming at his pediatrician "Are you even doing your fucking job right?  Why isn't he getting better?"  Later as I lay sobbing in my wife's arms, I knew: I had hit a wall.

Hitting a wall sucks.  It always sucks.  And because it sucks, it is a huge opportunity to learn about yourself.

I learned that much as I like to think of myself as a rational and reasonable man, I can get pretty irrational when emotionally agitated (like everyone else, I suspect).  After all, I was having an imaginary conversation (okay, it wasn't really a conversation because in my head I was yelling and cursing while the doctor just listened).

I learned that while I don't believe in God, my Catholic upbringing still exerts a powerful influence on me.  I caught myself wondering if I'm being punished for my newly found atheism and Buddhism.  I learned that the belief in a divine being was truly irrational, because it was only in my moment of irrationality that the thought of divine punishment occurred.  I caught myself wishing there was a God.  Then I realized that I wasn't really wishing for a God, I was wishing for a GENIE: someone who would hear my wish for my wife and son to get better and make it happen.  A genie named God who would, with the proper spell or prayer, give my wishes priority over the wishes of those who are suffering from even worse illnesses and situations.  I mean, I am glad that neither my son's illness nor my wife's is life-threatening - but I want them well goddammit!

I also learned why it is that a Zen Buddhist practices Zen:

I practice because no amount of reasoning (no matter how sound it is) will be enough to get me through the tough times.  Because there's a difference between knowing that even pain and suffering are impermanent, and KNOWING this - KNOWING not just intellectually, but KNOWING FULLY that even pain and suffering are impermanent.  With my entire being.  And it is this KNOWING FULLY that is pretty much the point of Zen practice.

To know fully, to truly understand and accept the impermanence of existence; to manifest and express Buddha nature; to live with my walls and embrace them in order to learn from and ultimately breach them; to embrace my irrationality even as I seek to be rational; to hold Life with all its joys and sorrows in my heart;  to live as a Buddha, an Awakened One; and finally to just LIVE: this is why I practice.

That wall was an invitation to practice.  I think all walls are.

God = Purpose = Meaningful Life?

Somebody with the username of dunbar posted this comment on on a certain topic in Filipino Freethinkers:


"I believe we all are created for a purpose. and it transcends than just the "here" and "now". i hold on to the truth that my soul is destined for eternity. i am living in a temporary world, yes for NOW - thriving in a temporary shell/body, but I am created by God for His greater Glory.. now my question to you guys, where will you go after death? is death the end of you?? if you answer yes, then i pity you! you must have not known your purpose afterall! you must have lived in just a boring routinary circus without knowing where it leads you.. my friends, life without God has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning! God loves you, and He cares so much about you!!"


Here was my response:


"I do not need your imaginary Deity to have purpose. My purpose is to live. When I die, my purpose will have been served. I see no reason to make a dubious investment in an afterlife that may or may not exist. If there is indeed an afterlife, then how I will have lived my life prior to death will affect the quality of that afterlife. If there is no afterlife and there is no longer any "I", then there will no longer be any "I" left who will complain that there is no afterlife. Either way, I will have lived a happy life. 

Oh, and I am okay with impermanence. Yes, this "I" will sooner or later end - and what is so wrong about that? We live, we die. It is when we insist on clinging to one state that we suffer. Then we invent all sorts of fantasies to comfort us from the knowledge of our impending death. Fantasies just like yours. 

Comfort yourself all you want, but know that your pity for me and other like-minded people who have chosen to free our minds is unnecessary and a waste of your emotional energy. Your notion that life for a person like me must be a "boring routinary circus" is mistaken, for I am quite happy with the way I'm living."

From Godly to Godless in Ten Years

I just realized last night that it's been ten years now since I first picked up the book that would change my life.  No, not the Bible.  It was Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations With God."  I cringe now with embarrassment, but that time I first read it it really changed my life.  It's true - and I say this with conviction despite my wincing at my use of such a clichéd phrase.

You have to understand that I was a Roman Catholic - born, baptized and confirmed.  I didn't drink the Kool-Aid, I'd been swimming in it ever since I was born.  I believed in God.  I went to Church.  I took Communion, made the Sign of the Cross as I said my prayers, went to confession.  I didn't exactly agree with the  Church's stance on sex, but so what?  I admired Pope John Paul II and envied those who were able to see him in person when he last visited the Philippines - so what if I disagreed with him on some things?  He was still the Pope.  I had zero knowledge of other religions.  I'd never heard of the term atheist.

The previous year I had read John Shelby Spong's "Why Christianity Must Change Or Die", but somehow it didn't move me that much (though I found the idea of God being a "Ground of All Being" fascinating).  CWG, on the other hand, just blew me away.

Why?  Because the idea that "God is so big you can't miss" was entirely new to me.  So was the idea that an unconditionally loving God would never send me to Hell or get pissed off and punish me, or the idea that no church or religion had a monopoly on God.  Of course I'd learned about other religions in Social Studies - but in a Jesuit-run school in a predominantly Christian country, they just had no real relevance to me.  And I couldn't grasp the idea of such godless religions like Buddhism and Taoism.  And nobody ever mentioned atheism, not so much because it was a taboo word, as it was because it was just unheard of.   But I digress.  The point is, prior to reading CWG, there was so much I didn't know about other religions.  As far as I was concerned, religion = Christianity.  Islam?  Well, they were welcome to believe what they wanted.  But Christianity was the best.  I mean come on!  Who died on the cross for the Muslims' sins?  Nope, not Jesus.  We got dibs on him.

I say all this to illustrate just how much of a surprise it was for me.  All of a sudden, everything I knew to be true seemed to be standing on a foundation of sand instead of rock.  And I was happy and excited.  For the first time I felt free.

I eagerly devoured the second and third books of the CWG trilogy, and I didn't stop there.  Within a year I dove head first into New Age, the occult, yoga and meditation.  Looking back now, I think I was lucky that I didn't find myself in a cult.  Because I just kept searching and searching for God everywhere.  I still went to Mass, but it was no longer the same.  My view was, what's the point of going to Mass in a stone building when God is EVERYWHERE?  I'd had enough of meeting (or I should say not meeting) God in church.  I wanted to meet God everywhere else.

The first meditation group I attended was the local Brahma Kumaris.  My teacher was a woman who would later become my first Aikido instructor.  I attended a few sessions where I would sit for several minutes staring at a painting on a wall and listening to a guided meditation tape.  I learned a little about the ideas of Brahma Kumaris: about positive thinking, chakras (of which the most important was the one on the forehead), the different types of yoga, and other stuff that I can no longer remember clearly.  I stopped going after a few sessions.  Why?  Because I learned something very important: meditation is tough.  Not to mention boring for the most part.

My search for the spiritual waxed and waned.  And it mimicked the search of the hippies of the 60's: a mix of yoga, pseudo-science, "Eastern" mysticism, incense, and um.... er... "medication."  We didn't have LSD here in Davao (which is probably just as well), but we had weed.  Lots and lots of weed.  So my search for the spiritual high quickly became the search for the next herbal high.  The irony here is that around that time, my friends and I had formed a weekly Bible study group.  Every Saturday we'd meet at our friend's house where his mom's friend would lead the Bible study session.  Afterwards, we'd have dinner.  Then we'd either stay there after the group leader left or we'd leave for my house.  And we'd get high.  And drunk.  So first we'd get spiritual.  Then we'd get psychedelic.  For a while, that was my world.  From being a vast and mostly unexplored landscape of possibility, it became reduced to a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.

Within a few years I made some unskillful choices and a lot of stuff happened that I don't care to go into detail here.  Suffice it to say that by the second half of 2004 I was angry, depressed, lonely and weed-less.

Without the ability to get high, I turned once again to the spiritual search.  This time, my search took me to paganism and Wicca.  I learned about Aleister Crowley, the Wiccan Rede, pentagrams, athames, the significance and difference between deosil and widdershins, how to cast a circle, how to call the corners, etc.  Over time however, my interest waned.  I felt that I was just substituting one god/dess for another, one religion for another.  I didn't really believe in that stuff.  I WANTED to believe, but there's a difference between wanting to believe and believing.

Eventually my search led me to two godless paths: Taoism and Buddhism.  I initially identified more with Taoism.  But eventually I began to be more and more drawn towards Buddhism.  Something about the Middle Path resonated with me.  Maybe it was the moral code that was both strict and yet liberating, or the attitude that this life mattered - that it wasn't about trying to escape life but living it and thus finding freedom from the very stuff that imprisoned me - or maybe it was both and more.  Whatever it was, it hooked me.

And so towards the end of the decade I became a Buddhist.  And I eventually and a bit grudgingly admitted to myself that I just could not believe in God anymore.  Not only that, but that I couldn't care less about life after death.  It's not that I'm no longer afraid of dying.  It's just that I no longer see any point in wondering about what happens after I die.  Because so long as I'm alive what matters is that I truly live this life.  That instead of living my life now as a dubious investment in a future life, I just live.

So is that it?  Is that the end?  No.  The end of my search for a path, perhaps.  Certainly the end of running around looking for the next high, the next escape - be it spiritual, chemical, or any other kind.  I'm done with looking outside myself.  I'm also done with looking inside.  I don't have to look anywhere.  I don't have to go anywhere.  I just have to live my life.  That's all.  That is my practice.  That is my path.  After ten years of wandering, I've begun to walk the first few steps of my path.

Reading Humanist Manifesto III

I'm currently reading and savoring the Humanist Manifesto III, the successor to the two previous Humanist Manifestos made in 1933 and 1973 respectively.

It starts with an explanation of what Humanism is, which I find appealing to my liberal tendencies:

"Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
The lifestance of Humanism—guided by reason, inspired by compassion, and informed by experience—encourages us to live life well and fully. It evolved through the ages and continues to develop through the efforts of thoughtful people who recognize that values and ideals, however carefully wrought, are subject to change as our knowledge and understandings advance."


What I like about the manifesto is that it does not set things in stone. I do not get the sense that "this is what Humanism is, as it was in the beginning, now and forever shall be, world without end, Amen." It is continuously growing. If you read the previous two manifestos you'll see what I mean. It is an organic philosophy that, like water taking on the shape of whatever container it is poured into even as it retains its wateriness, adapts to the changes of life even as it retains its basic nature.


I also do not find it to be incompatible with Buddhism* - while it is by no means a "Buddhist" school of thought, the following affirmations below do not run counter to Buddhist teachings:


"This document is part of an ongoing effort to manifest in clear and positive terms the conceptual boundaries of Humanism, not what we must believe but a consensus of what we do believe. It is in this sense that we affirm the following:


Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.


Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change.


Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.


Life's fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals."


Well, except maybe for that last line. But not so much in the sense that Buddhism argues the opposite - that Life's fulfillment does not emerge from "individual participation in the service of humane ideals" - as in the sense that fulfillment isn't the point as far as Buddhism is concerned. That being said, there is nothing wrong with wanting to participate in the service of humane ideals. I, for one, choose to participate in this. Just because life is impermanent and life is dukkha (I prefer to use this term instead of the usual English translation into "suffering" because of my Catholic upbringing - the word suffering brings the image of crucifixion to my mind) doesn't mean that it is wrong and pointless to work to improve the quality of human life.  Let's continue:


"Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.


Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.


Humanists are concerned for the well being of all, are committed to diversity, and respect those of differing yet humane views. We work to uphold the equal enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties in an open, secular society and maintain it is a civic duty to participate in the democratic process and a planetary duty to protect nature's integrity, diversity, and beauty in a secure, sustainable manner.
Thus engaged in the flow of life, we aspire to this vision with the informed conviction that humanity has the ability to progress toward its highest ideals. The responsibility for our lives and the kind of world in which we live is ours and ours alone."


Here, Buddhism and Humanism agree. Yes of course there are things and events that occur beyond our control. But although we do not have full control (and we shouldn't even bother trying to have full control if we want to keep our sanity), we do have some degree of control. We are not responsible for the uncontrollable events in our lives - we are however, responsible for how we choose to live.


To read the Manifesto III in full, click on this sentence.


*A disclaimer is necessary here: I am speaking here out of my own understanding of Buddhism.  I do not represent the whole of Buddhism, and other Buddhists may disagree with me.