An excerpt from a friend's writing:

"Lack of synchronicity is nothing to be overlooked or overcompensated.
Rather, it is a clue that it is time to get OVER something.
A certain alignment of circumstance is necessary in the fluid progress
of plans and people.  

...I think that giving to someone who is not ready to receive, even if they
might benefit from what you have to give, is ultimately an act of
selfishness." 

Good things to be reminded of.

Today Chi Sing, a guest facilitator at the weekly meditation group I attend, shared a story about an awakening experience he had in the form of a dream.

At the opening of the dream Chi saw himself in Tibet, in front of the temple where the Dalai Lama used to practice.  While gaping at it, he was ushered inside with a group of other monks.  He took a seat on a cushion, posed in the lotus position, and cast his eyes downward. He was given strict instructions not to look up or make noise at any time, because the Dalai Lama would soon be coming in.

The immensity of the situation washed over him.  He had been a practitioner and facilitator full-time for a number of years, sure, but did he belong here in this room with such experienced monks?  Footsteps came by, louder and louder, and he became afraid that his thoughts, his distractedness, would read like an open book to someone as advanced in the arts of awareness as the Dalai Lama.  His arms and neck grew tense with concentration. 

Just then, he heard a giggle coming from less than a foot away.  And then felt a small hand touching the top of his head.  Instantly, he felt saturated to the core of his being with a warm, liquid love.

He looked up, and saw in front of him the figure of the Dalai Lama-- as a five-year old, beckoning, Come Play with me!

He saw that he had been taking his practice too seriously, and began laughing with relief, and at the beautiful absurdity of it all. 

He laughed so hard in the dream, that he woke himself up.  And then continued laughing, with tears wet in his eyes, from the revelation.

I have to admit, I'm welling up a bit with Schadenfreude over the news that James Watson (Nobel Prize for structure of DNA) is being stripped of his title as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because he recently told a newspaper that there's no hope for Africa because "all the testing" says that black people aren't as intelligent as white people.

From everything I've heard from anyone who's ever met the guy, he's an insufferably pompous asshole. One woman that a student committee I served on in college was interviewing for a faculty position told us about going to a speech by Watson and nearly walking out because of all the misogynistic comments he was making about his wife and women in general.

Of course, the right-thinking Buddhist in me realizes that his pomposity and dismissiveness comes from insecurity and suffering. He was a mere grad student when he made the discovery that made him famous for life, and more than ten years younger than co-discoverer Francis Crick. What might the rumors be-- that he was not a full partner in the endeavor? Just a junior tag-along? That, in any case, his discovery was just one lucky break; a matter of being at the right time and place to tackle the right problem? No doubt it must be intimidating to feel you have to live up to a reputation for brilliance for an entire career afterwards. Would his own mind come to torment him with just such doubts on any and every night after a fruitless day in the lab? Imagine the energy it takes to suppress such doubts, to deny yourself permission to consider your weaknesses for fear of where such thought circles might lead. Imagine the pressure of facing ever fresher and sharper generations coming to you for insight-- or worse, to dethrone you; to score one against the legend?

And then, there were the controversies about whether due credit had been given to others. Watson and Crick offered co-authorship of their breakthrough paper to the head of the crystallography lab that had generated key results and insights; but the offer was modestly demurred. This didn't stop unkind rumors from circulating, and Watson was apparently so bothered by these that he published a book in the popular press to set the record straight. (And what was all this noise about that _woman_, Rosalind Franklin? Wasn't he acknowledging her work sufficiently by offering to acknowledge the head of her lab? Not to mention that it would be difficult to figure out proper citation for her work, which at the time remained unpublished).

Nonetheless, as much as I get, cognitively, that his sucky nature is it's own punishment, the feeling remains:

I'm glad the asshole got what was coming to him.

Today on my run I came across a posting that explained why yawning tends to be contagious:

[V]iewing someone yawn evokes unique brain activity in areas that play a role in self-processing and self-awareness, which suggests that yawning may be part of a neural network involved in empathy, or the connection of self to others.

I had read explanations to that effect before, but not in these terms. 

Empathy. Of course.

We understand it as a metaphor; this ability to put ourselves in another's shoes, but it is underpinned by concrete circuitry.  Empathy depends on a capacity to distinguish between self and other, plus a capacity to attribute mental states to others (known collectively, with some other capacities, as "theory of mind"). 

Anyway, I'm drifting a bit.

What I wanted to get to was the image that leapt into my mind upon making that poetic association of yawning as empathy:

A monk in Burma, yawning next to a soldier in a mentally unguarded moment, who reflexively yawns himself.

"Ah!" the monk would remark with quiet warmth, "You yawn as well.  It is still there inside you; your empathy waiting to be awakened.  It wants to come out, you see."

Sigh.

It is a very, very, very small thing, but it made me smile.


...

So much seems so impossible; but then, this is the essence of where Nelson Mandela started with his jailors, so many decades before apartheid was finally dismantled.  Person to person, coaxing out instinctive human kindness, tangibly winning only an extra blanket or ration here and there, but intangibly winning so much more.

Time is a bitch.