subscribeThe Seven Points
by Guy Zimmerman
Each day my wife visits the Kali machine at UCLA. The techs lay her down on a metal pallet and bolt to her head a hard white plastic mesh that’s been molded to fit her face. The linear accelerators of the IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) device, big as a small car, start up. Seven beams of X-ray radiation target the zone beneath her right ear where the parotid gland used to be. This gland, the largest of the salivary glands, was surgically removed in January, along with the malignancy that had grown within it. Any cancer cells that lingered in the wound would eventually sprout into new tumors, so they need to be destroyed. Each day the X-rays of the Kali machine tear into the exposed DNA of cells in the process of replicating. Since cancer cells do almost nothing but replicate the X-rays kill them off with great efficiency, leaving the delicate surrounding tissues damaged but capable of regeneration. The Kali machine hums and hovers around Jenny’s head for about fifteen minutes and then the techs unbolt her and we drive back East toward Silver Lake.
Merciless and potent, tongue protruding, Kali dances with a belt of skulls dangling from her waist below her many blue arms. The destructive aspect of the divine feminine, Kali takes away what currently exists in order to open a space for what will come. She dissolves form to reveal an underlying “emptiness” full of potential. Cancer cells, meanwhile, with their blind, obsessive self-copying, strike me as the ultimate triumph of “form.” A single note tapped over and over, cancer replicates with endless uniformity, confronting us with the monomania of the death instinct in its purest manifestation. By ending death’s sovereignty Kali, paradoxically, is a bringer of life.
When I first heard about the seven beams of IMRT my mind immediately turned to the Seven Points of Mind Training, the Tibetan meditation sequence that has been a part of my sitting practice for half a decade now (a good translation is important). First brought to Tibet in the 11th Century by Lord Atisha and written down in the 12th century by the Kadampa master Chekawa, Mind Training turns the engine of the self into reverse, amplifying the experience of compassion and presence. The idea is that we cut ourselves off from fully experiencing our lives by pushing away the things we don’t like and by clutching the things we do like too tightly. This pattern of aversion and attachment becomes a fixed and rooted structure of separation, a false self progressively alienated from authenticity. With Mind Training you practice the opposite: giving away what you’re attached to and taking in what you don’t want. Counter-intuitively the result is an energized presence that reminds us of our innate freedom, a rising up out of the meaningless struggles of samsara. Deceptively pithy, the adages of the Seven Points interconnect with a subtle logic, like a complex and beautiful score one can only begin to appreciate after long exposure.
In the waiting room I sometimes unpack the parallels between the seven beams and the Seven Points. Implied in the comparison is the notion that the emotional patterns and self-images composing the reactive ego echo the replicating monomania of cancer cells. In left-brain thinking mode we impose a single interpretive straightjacket over all our experience – must be this! Can’t be that! We view ourselves as separate and apart and continuous in time, blinding ourselves to the imbalances and dysfunction we create in the world around us. The path of practice involves a steady engagement with the retreating forces of the ego, which sprout everywhere, cancer-like, distorting the energy of the awakened aspects of mind. In this view the purpose of practices like the Seven Points is to search out every hiding place of the reactive self – paging Sidhattha Gotama, head oncologist.
Opinion is divided on the extent to which the current prevalence of carcinoma is the result of environmental degradation, but everyone knows toxicity plays a role. On my iPhone as we make the trip across the LA basin I tap into satellite imagery of the globe as it appears from outer space. The healthy greens and blues are shot through now with the necrotic tissue of asphalt and concrete, the socio-economic carcinoma of 21st century human development. On a geological time frame this burst of growth is abrupt, beginning back only three hundred spins around our small star. The black spot would have started in the mill towns of Southern England and spread quickly East and South before jumping the blue Atlantic (on trade ships loaded with textiles and slaves) to metastasize in the fertile tissue of the resource-rich Americas.
And yet tonglen, the Seven Points, and all the other Asian imports (Zen, Theravada, Tantric practices of all kinds) come to us via the era of unprecedented wealth and plenty created by that same fire. The oil fat post-War American consumer paradise generated enough light to crack open the fortress of the Western mind. In its pragmatic materialism liberal democracy produced a sustained experience of what the Buddhists mean by the “Human Realm.” One of the six “realms” of samsaric existence, the Human Realm is defined by the pursuit of mundane material satisfactions. The satisfactions may be real enough…but so is the disappointment as time continues on, sweeping us along. As sure a recipe for suffering as the other five realms, the Human Realm is different in one regard – in classical depictions it’s where the stem of the lotus of Nirvana – non-dual awareness – finds its roots. The Human Realm is where we enter “the way,” in other words.
It’s important to understand this today because the stem of the lotus is delicate and under attack. The neocons and other proto-fascists, whose moment was the presidency of George W. Bush, are devoted to shifting our political realities in the direction of the lower realms. Descendents of Thomas Hobbes, who viewed humans as inherently evil and life as a war of all against all, the neocons embrace the solid feeling that comes when the self is under attack. They are denizens of the Hell Realm, in other words. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they recognize the utility of scarcity. Scarcity propels us into our brain stems toward reptile mode where we are easily controlled. The neocons have an advantage in that scarcity is easier to generate than abundance, and the coming short fall in oil reserves, to choose just one example, will provide them with a wealth of opportunity.
Hobbes counterweight on the left would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau’s ideas took a hard hit in the mid 20th century as the idealistic revolutions in Eastern Europe and China gave rise to totalitarian forms of state socialism. As a result, the emotional reserves of the left are in much worse shape than the last time Capitalism faced a crisis like ours – the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But Rousseau’s ideas seem less foolish when viewed from the perspective of non-dual thinking. The concept of private property, to choose one example, stops making so much sense when we abandon our determination to separate from the underlying contingency of our lives. If you give a man a way of relating to this aspect of experience, that man will stop wasting precious time amassing a huge fund of private property and then rigging the game to protect it. Great private wealth is famously useless in the end, a false promise that has seduced many lives into a compromised existence.
My hope is that a new mode of thought will emerge to help us ride out the assorted crises confronting us. A series of questions announce themselves: how could the bedrock of laws be modified to retain all the creativity and energy of a capitalist economy but in a more balanced way? What socio-political practices would allow us to mitigate the trashing of the planet? My sense is that the shadows created by the harshly analytical Western mind may yet conceal solutions to the complex of interlocking crises on the horizon. The empirical traditions of Western science remain a potent tool for correcting the imbalances we have created. I write this as a man who feels as grateful right now for the medical technology of the Seven Beams of IMRT as I have felt for the transformative power of the Seven Points.
