Sally Ember's Blog, page 135

Feeling stuck in this Human Realm section of my mini #Buddhist retreat on beings of the Six Realms is definitely part of being human. I find the uniqueness of the human experience involves many complicated emotions and conditions I don’t recognize as occurring (although they certainly might) in other Realms’ beings.

The difference between simple desire or lust and attraction mixed with yearning, for example, comes to my contemplation during this phase of my meditation. Also, complicated grief, i.e., mourning someone we also despise or fear, feel resentment for or otherwise experience relief at the passing of, doesn’t seem to happen among animals. I always think of complicated grief this time of year since both of my father’s parents died in their nineties in November and he died in February in the 1990s.

My father, Ira Fleischmann, incorporated a volatile mixture of bravado, greed, insecurity, rage, brilliance, humor, tenderness, violence and fear. He was extreme in his swings and mercurial in his moods. He could make people roar with laughter and cower in terror within minutes.

After he had been dead for about five years (he died at almost 62 of a sudden heart attack in 1991), new research and study I was doing in graduate school led me to realize that he had suffered from depression and anxiety, unmitigated and unmedicated. Western men often exhibit rage and violence instead of the underlying melancholy, grief or depression.

He had been bulimic for a few years when I was in high school, so his brain was definitely mis-firing, as we now know bulimia indicates. From when I was about three and my brother, four, he had been violent and abusive toward both of us and spent much of our childhoods and adolescence beating on one or both of us, pulling my hair and yelling at everyone in our household except my youngest sister. I used to say I grew up in a war zone, but as I got older, I refrained from using that metaphor, knowing more about actual war zones.

Many people thought my sociopathic father was charismatic and appealing. He was brilliant but largely unrewarded and unnoticed for it, short in stature and on money. His creative application of the law and business ethics often veered over into criminal behavior. He was dishonest, easily bored, restless and dissatisfied.

Because of his unmet desires and lust for wealth and status, he changed jobs or started (and failed in) several careers (corporate attorney, insurance salesman, CLU/CPA, pension fund and investments manager). We found out after his death that he had maintained a second identity, maintaining an office and business cards in that name for who knows what nefarious purposes. My sisters and I went to look at it in the days after his death, shocked into giggling at the empty office with the fake name on the door just a few miles from his home.

He was also a hobbyist architect, constantly re-drafting his dream house after taking the family on Sunday drives to inspect mansions that were under construction. We’d pick our ways carefully through the unfinished homes as he’d proudly point out the master suite, the living room, the kitchen as if these were his designs and his houses, strutting through what appeared to an undifferentiated maze of debris and open framing, to me. He was always hopeful that his ship was coming in but ready and willing to steal the cargo, even from friends, when it didn’t arrive.

After his third wife had revealed her secret of alcoholism about two years into their marriage, they had both gotten into co-dependent/AA-style support groups and reading materials. These experiences and information-gathering had helped my father enormously even though he wasn’t addicted to any substances himself. Learning from the books and meetings, my father had developed some insight into his own violent, frightening and financially insecure childhood, coming of age during the Great Depression and World War II (he was born in 1929) as a Jew in the Midwest, USA.

He adored his grandchildren (my brother gave him four and I one before he died) and was beginning to appreciate his life and the rest of his family when he abruptly died. Because of his re-education and intense self-analysis and my own years of therapy and meditation, he and I had been having our first period of peace since my early childhood, enjoying a tentatively harmonious relationship at the time of his death.

I had loved and even admired my grandfather and did not know how much he and my grandmother had hurt and abused my father before he started talking to me about that while examining his childhood. If he had died even a few years earlier, my grief for him and later, for them, would not have been complicated.

Knowledge and insight are useful, but they did instill other feelings into my mourning. Even today, over twenty years after his death and about that long after they died as well, I continue to puzzle over their lives and my own. I see my irritability and quick judgments, tendencies to be arrogant and disparaging toward others, as coming from that side of my family. I am ashamed and humbled by my failings and theirs, unfortunately passed down through generations, even if somewhat improved in each successor.

Like my father, I am quick to anger and resentment, condescending and insecure. I am also untrusting of authority and unwilling to be obedient without question. Unlike him, I have never hit my child or disparaged him verbally, I have not lied, cheated or stolen to acquire money or possessions, and I do not suffer from depression, bulimia or anxiety.

Like my father, I am funny, brilliant, tender and creative, holding down a variety of jobs and having had several successful careers but easily bored and ready to move on frequently. We both were teachers and public performers, good at both math and languages. We both enjoyed knowing a lot of information about many topics and playing softball and tennis. He taught me to swim, play chess, and love the piano. He had a great voice, singing along with popular and operatic songs with equal ease, and I love to sing as well. He also screamed and terrorized people with just a few words; I can do that. I have done that.

What have I learned in these weeks of contemplating my deceased father and myself, indeed, all humanity? How complicated, and, as Sting sings, “how fragile we are.” I wish we could have known each other at these ages. I am close to the age he was when he died; he would have been 84 right now.

Sting sings: “Nothing ever comes from violence; nothing ever could.” But, a lot of learning comes and spontaneous compassion arises from facing our foibles and mistakes and meditating on the Human condition.

We might have talked about all of this for these past twenty years and more. Miss you, Dad. You would have liked Sting’s song. Listen, now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLdJwzSbM-E

This Changes Everything ebook pre-orders FIRST on nook! thru 12/18 @ 50% off $1.99. Share!

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/this-changes-everything-sally-ember-edd/1117444256?ean=2940045417921

This author makes me blush! “Dr. Ember is a delightful person, full of energy and ideas. I do recommend her book [This Changes Everything] because it is a delightful mix of fiction, fantasy, stream-of-consciousness, and humor. She is the Alice Walker of the Spanner[s] generation.”

Visit using the link, below, for more of her opinion and later this fall, a full review!

Thanks, Ria!

http://bitsbitesbooks.weebly.com/blog.html

During each of the current days I am #meditating during this mini-#Buddhist, at-home #retreat, I #contemplate what it means to be human. I examine the emotional, physical, interpersonal, mental experiences I am familiar with myself and then I attempt to empathize or at least sympathize with others’ experiences as deeply as possible: the pains and pleasures, sorrows and joys, defeats and successes, fears and hopes, worries and excitements. What motivates every being is clear: each of us wants to be happy.

However, as I know for myself and observe in others, we often are extremely inept, even self-sabotaging in our attempts to achieve happiness. Furthermore, this happiness is only ever temporary. Impermanence is a fact of existence.

Spending so much time and focusing so such keen attention on humanness intensifies my recognition of these failed attempts on my own part and for others. Also, I become more acutely conscious of my failures to acquire even a bit more comfort.

At the pool, I have my “favorite” swimming lanes. These are the ones I prefer because of their proximity to the inflow jets, which act like those in a hot tub. The pressure from this inflow eases the tightness in my back when I hang in front of it. Or, these are the ones I like because they’re closer to the ropes and have more room around the “lane” (this pool, for unknown reasons, does not rope off lanes, only sections). Or, I like this or that lane because, when I do the backstroke, the line on the ceiling’s architecture exactly matches the line I am supposed to follow that represents my lane (which is faintly painted on the pool’s floor), so I have a fighting chance to stay in my own lane (appreciated by all).

Seems so silly, so trivial, so selfish and absurd when I lay it out like this. Yet, as I enter the pool building every morning, I feel a tightness in my chest and my breathing increases, signaling anxiety. Worried questions hum beneath the surface of my thinking: “Will I get a ‘good’ lane?” “Will I get a lane at all?” “Will the people in adjacent lanes bump into me?” Luckily, swimmers can pre-select our lanes as soon as we arrive, before we get into our suits. My anxiety is relieved as soon as my lane is chosen.

I am told the policy is to choose the lane I want and show my choice by placing an item on the floor above it, signaling that this lane is taken. Then, I go change and return to my “saved” lane and get in to swim.

This system works well enough, usually. When I get into the pool area, I choose a “good” lane, which is empty. I put a kickboard down and go to change. But, yesterday I approached my saved lane and saw that someone else was swimming in it. I waited until she was at the wall and I tapped her: “Excuse me,” I said, “You’re in the lane I saved.”

“Oh, no,” she replies. “There was no one here when I got here.”

I pointed to the blue kickboard on the floor in front of the lane and say, “This is my kickboard. I put it here a minute ago and went to change.”

She looks at the kickboard and up at me and says, “You’re supposed to put something else on the kickboard. How do I know that it’s really saved and not just abandoned by the previous swimmer?”

I look at her, dumbfounded, feeling my anger and irritation rising. This stupid, selfish woman is ruining my swim and my swimming time is elapsing as I stand here and discuss her mistake with her. I am also laughing at myself, inside, and pitying her. But, I am mostly fuming. “I don’t have anything else to put there. Just me.”

“You could have have put your goggles down,” she says.

“Look,” I say. “You made a mistake. Please just find another lane.”

“You could find another lane,” she points out.

“I could,” I say, “but this is the lane I saved and you didn’t. So, please move.” Now, I feel as if we’re in grade school arguing over who got here first. I feel ridiculous, but this is the lane I like, remember? I really prefer it.

“Oh, fine,” she says, irritably. She moves to an adjacent lane and swims off in a huff (I didn’t know that was possible, but she did it).

I get in the pool, hang in front of the jet which is now “mine” and feel horrible. Terrible. Anxious, embarrassed, selfish, tight, ridiculous. What kind of a Buddhist am I? A shitty one, obviously. Completely self-absorbed. Small-minded. A failure. Am I happy now, in my favorite lane? Of course not. I feel bad.

I want to apologize. I want to give it back to her. Even that seems silly. I just swim, meditating on humanness and foibles, mine especially, as I swim.

Eventually, I get into the rhythm of it and calm down. I look over and notice she’s gone already. She probably only swims 20 minutes to my 45 and I could have just waited.

Feeling even more ridiculous and small, I continue my swim. I attempt to offer myself compassion, tenderness, amusement. My attempts are mostly failures.

Few choose the Tibetan #Buddhist or other culture’s #Vajrayana path, even though it makes it possible for practitioners to attain long-lasting, many lifetimes’ happiness in one lifetime. Why? Because we practitioners become unflinching observers of our own minds and behaviors. We commit to, we must continue facing ourselves every day, all day (and all night), in every situation, not just while “formally” meditating. It’s frightening, or at least humbling, to notice day after day what I have not achieved after meditating on this path since 1996. Sheesh.

I have a long way to go in my practice. Good to know. I plan to keep going. And, keep swimming.

#Meditation: it’s not for wimps.

Thanks, Houston Writers’ Guild for posting my Author’s Interview last week. Sorry I didn’t know until this week!

http://houstonwritersguild.org/category/indie-authors/

I was NOT going to go the indie route. I was an indie snob, myself, having grown up around “Vanity” presses and other such unprofessional ways that previous self-published writers had become authors. Their books were objects of scorn, their accumulated unsold volumes gathering dust in their garages, basements and storage areas, testimonials to their misplaced pride, I thought.

Then, the internet and ebooks led to this revolution in publishing. In the last several years, according to many reports, ebook sales have gone through the roof and indie publishing has more than quintupled x 100. Really.

This explosion, which has made available SO MANY books written, edited/proofread (or not), and distributed outside of or alongside of (often, while using) the traditional publishing houses’ and online stores’ routes, means several things:

1) My sci-fi concept, The Spanners Series, which languished in my computer and as various printed-outs in boxes of drafts that never made it past the query stage, is now getting PUBLISHED (well, ebook, This Changes Everything, Volume I is, and I plan to publish the other 9 Volumes as well, via Smashwords.com: thanks, Mark Coker!) mostly due to my own hard work rather than waiting for luck.

2) There is a lot of variety in what is being distributed. Quality is hard to detect. You CANNOT judge the book by the cover, since many indie authors are on tight budgets and covers are expensive. Also, authors purchase or accept only “good” reviews. Paid armies of PR people or an author’s family and friends game the rankings’ and stack the reviews’ “ballot boxes.” PR hacks generally mess with readers. Authors can buy Twitter followers. Marketers blow many other false trumpets to herald a book that is actually HORRIBLE (or might be wonderful). How can any reader separate the wheat from the chaff?

3) Many millions of ebooks are now available. MOST are made free or ridiculously low-cost (under $5) for some or all of their “sales” periods. The sheer quantity and bewildering array flooding the market with cheap and free books make it even harder for any one book or author to get noticed, even those of high quality.

4) Getting our books noticed is made both more and less difficult by the fact that the author has to do all the marketing. I can tell you: it’s exhausting. And, doing all the marketing means it’s hard to carve out time to write, which is ironic, at best and extremely frustrating, at worst. Yes, we are motivated. Yes, we know our book best. Yes, we are committed to its success. However, most of us DO have (or, in my case, SHOULD soon have) other paying jobs and other books or stories to write!

Please read this great article (link, below) by Lia London about the trials and tribulations of and reasons to admire indie authors like me.

THEN: Help out us indie authors! Read reviews, read excerpts, shop around, engage with us. Finally, BUY OUR BOOKS! We need readers to rank us, write comments, recommend and refer to our books. We need readers, reviewers and bloggers! Thanks!

http://lialondon.net/about-indie-authors

Another great opportunity, this time on Andrea Barbosa’s website, for an Author Interview! Check it out and share! Thanks, Andrea!

http://magictrendsreview.blogspot.com/2013/11/books-interview-with-author-sally-ember.html

I honor my root and heart teacher, Lama Padma Drimed Norbu, and thank him during this week of the anniversary of his current human birth most especially for being my precious teacher. May he live a long, healthy, beneficial life filled with ultimate happiness and joy and may all beings benefit.

Glad to leave the weeks devoted to the “Jealous” or “Demi-” gods’ Realm. Too much warring and fighting going on in my dreams those nights! On to the Human Realm.

I would imagine that most of us believe meditation and contemplation about beings in the Human Realm would be the easiest because we are human. Perhaps that’s true for some practitioners, but most of us are trapped in the singularity of our own perspective, only knowing our individual experiences intimately and lacking motivation or empathy to uncover others’ lives.

We also take our privileges and good fortune for granted. This is a chance to be more alert to what it means to be human. A great teacher who recently (July, 2013) passed out of this incarnation, Lama Tarchin Rinpoche, gave a teaching I am quoting, here, and link to at the bottom of this post. Please read, contemplate, meditate, share. Valuable reminders.

“…[Y]ou should be very happy with yourselves. Why? Because you have attained that which is very difficult to get in this world: that is to say, a precious human life. And in this human life you have met with that which is difficult to meet: the tantric teachings. You have met with qualified spiritual masters…

“[A]nd you have the opportunity to practice. These are signs of incredible merit on your part. So you should feel overjoyed at yourselves. You are the vessel for these teachings. You have the opportunity to practice….

“For us to have this kind of good fortune and not make a serious effort to practice would be a big loss. You know we have this precious human life. Human life is more precious than devas or gods.

“People think the deva or god realm is better than the human realm, but actually that’s not so. In terms of temporary experiences of pleasure, happiness and joy, yes, devas have all that. But to reach the final, long-term happiness and joy of complete enlightenment, human life is more powerful even than the gods’.

“Why is this? It’s because of our motivation. We develop the motivation to benefit all sentient beings equally under this blue sky. How many sentient beings are there? Wherever sky pervades, there are sentient beings. Wherever there are sentient beings, there’s karma. Wherever there’s karma, there’s suffering. That’s samsara. We think that we want to empty this samsara and liberate all sentient beings from their suffering. We develop that kind of vast motivation.

“Plus we have the skillful wisdom aspect of Vajrayana, these teachings. And the most powerful is the human body because while normally beings have five elements; humans have one extra called the element of the wisdom of exaltation.

“Though devas do temporarily have some kind of joyful, light body that’s not solid, still that body is based on karma. When this karma is exhausted, they can be reborn in other realms within samsara because they’re not enlightened.

“The human body is the most powerful thing we have for practice. It’s our good fortune to have this precious human life. And according to our positive circumstances, you can see what kind of teacher and teachings we have. We’re unbelievably rich. Then, when we take that essence of our precious human life, it’s most powerful.

“But without recognition, we lose that essence. Of course, we have to have faith. Generally speaking, on an external level, you have to have faith in the Triple Gems [Buddha, Dharma, Sangha].

“And from the point of view of tantra, you first must have faith in your own enlightened nature, your Buddha nature. When you have that faith, then naturally you will have manifestation of Triple Gems, of inconceivable Buddha phenomena, externally manifesting unobstructedly. When these two, your faith and Buddha’s manifestation, come together, it’s very powerful.

“When you’re doing practice, then even though your life is one day longer, it’s most meaningful.”

So, I say (Sally, again, here): If we don’t practice when we know how, when we are capable, we will be horribly regretful when we die. The physical and emotional but temporary agony of practicing, of retreat, of all the thoughts, emotions, distractions and dismay that arise, do not compare to that kind of regret.

So, PRACTICE! Please.

http://www.vajrayana.org/retreats/lama-tharchin-rinpoche-s-talk-on-drupchen/

Review of This Changes Everything by Sally Ember, Ed. D.

11/4/13

Easy Reader, Lynda Dietz

I was recently given a pre-pub e-copy of This Changes Everything , Volume 1 of The Spanners Series, in exchange for an honest review.

What if the world as we know it isn’t exactly as we’d always believed? What if we’re not the only sentient beings in the universe? What if the universe were not “only” a universe, but a “multi-verse” where many timelines occurred simultaneously?

The book’s title really says it all: this changes everything. Clara Branon is visited by the holograms of alien beings one night in her home, and her life from that point on is forever changed. She’s chosen as Chief Communicator, the contact person between the Many Worlds Collective and the Earthers, as they’re known by other species; it becomes her job to tell the rest of the world about the MWC and to help them accept it in order to transform our world into a better place for future generations.

I like the way opportunities for “re-sets” are available—how many of us would go back and change certain events if we could?—but are also shown as not always being the best option. Our life experiences shape us into who we are, after all, and if one or more of those is altered, we may not get what we want in the way we think we want it. I also appreciate the nods to authors like Douglas Adams, with the language-interpreting “fish” reminiscent of the Babel fish in his Hitchhiker’s Guide books.

Because Clara is writing/telling of the events occurring in multiple timelines, all the narrative is in the present tense, even for past or future events, which, as an editor, drove me crazy at first. Eventually, I got used to it, but it was occasionally a distraction…after all, past events require past tense verbs, unless the past is happening during the present or the future, in which case…oh, forget it. You’ll get used to it too, after a few pages.

Since the book is essentially a documentation of the initial visitation and transition time, there’s a lot of narrative with little dialogue, which slows down the pace in many spots. I’m a dialogue person, so the long stretches of complex details in the form of transcripts were a lot to absorb and at times felt like too much for one book. (Note: after contacting the author about this, I was informed that the manuscript had been revised and more dialogue had been added to the version that will be published in December.)

At times felt like it had a definite political slant, with a lot of liberal push, demonizing those who are staunch in their religious or moral beliefs as inflexible and unenlightened, classifying the wealthy as greedy, etc. I have to admit, I didn’t really care for that aspect of it, but that reflects my own personal beliefs and has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself. The novel also has a lot of Buddhist practices and teachings in it, including reincarnation (or ReInvolvement, as the MWC refers to it). I feel the need to mention these things because they’re so present within the book, and many readers prefer to be made aware of any controversial topics or religious leanings prior to reading.

There were parts that really tickled me, such as the explanation of crop circles: teenage alien graffiti, not much different than Earth teens taking a joyride and spray-painting the sides of bridges or boxcars, then racing back home before the authorities catch them. A recounting of an exchange between Clara and her son, Zephyr, over speakerphone had me giggling out loud, because it reminded me so much of phone conversations with my own mother.

The writing is complex and done extremely well. I didn’t see an editor listed, and I’m happy to say that Ms. Ember is excellent at self-editing. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling were non-issues, which was very refreshing in an indie book. There were times when I almost forgot I was reading a work of fiction and not a news account of real events, and I would consider that to be skilled writing indeed.

Because different book sites have different meanings to their ratings, I think of the star system as looking at a scale: did I enjoy more of it than not? Yes. Four stars. Did I like the overall content? Most of the time. Three stars. Was the writing of good quality? Oh, definitely yes. Five stars.

My overall rating: four of five stars.

http://ilovetoreadyourbooks.blogspot.com

Thanks, Janice, for a thoughtful, enthusiastic, complimentary review of This Changes Everything, Volume I of The Spanners Series!

Some quotes, here, and the a link to the entire review:

“What Ember has created is a fascinating concept that addresses the what ifs of the world that we know. Not only has Ember written an exceptionally detailed Science Fiction novel that incorporates all the proper elements, she’s brought it to life in a remarkable manner. This Changes Everything does not follow a standard outline for a novel, as it chronicles the experiences of Clara Branon. The writing is very complex, causing readers to pay close attention; however, it is very intriguing.”

and, “I would surely recommend This Changes Everything to anyone that enjoys a a well-written and researched Sci-Fi series. I will point out that it pushes the envelope, and toys with one’s perception. Well done!

“As I consider the rating, I am torn between 4 and 5. I’ve considered five stars because of the quality of research and overall planning that has evidently been put into this work, also the fact that it is well-written. Four stars because of its complexity.

Then, Janice reconsidered and sent me an email changing the ranting to 5 stars, explaining:

“I decided to change the rating to 5 stars. The review is still

the same…. I welcomed the complexity, but was not sure that everyone could appreciate that fact….Your work has allowed me to raise the bar and increase expectations for future reviews. And that is a big compliment!… your work is exceptional.”

★★★★★

http://jgrwriter.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/review-this-changes-everything-by-sally-ember-3/