Jan Willis, Selections from Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Journey

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. What might be the link, if there is one, between the consecration of statues and the practice of meditation that Willis describes in her essay? Are the two statues--one of the Buddha, the other of a deity known as Vajrasattva--primarily objects of devotion, or do they serve some other purpose? Is it important that Willis obtained the statues through her own efforts? Why must they conform to certain standards of representation?

2. What can be learned from Willis's account about the social organization of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice? How does the social organization of this practice differ from the organization of religions with which you are perhaps more familiar? Can you think of other institutions in the West, possibly secular ones, that operate along similar lines?

3. What might Lama Yeshe have meant when he told Jan, "Mind is like the sky"? Does Willis herself give us any hints about what this sky-like mind actually feels like when it is experienced?

Questions for Writing:

1. Willis tells us that at the height of her meditation retreat she felt her awareness "was consistently lucid, vast, and fully attuned to life. Nothing was a distraction any longer because everything was part and parcel of the great encompassment I had directly experienced." At the same time, however, Willis also recalls that "it didn't occur to me to have Lakshman search out another brand of rakshi." Is it possible that Willis's feelings of lucidity were actually a distortion of consciousness rather than a liberation from illusion? Why was she unable to recognize the causes of her own illness if she had, indeed, caught a glimpse of enlightenment? Shouldn't enlightenment make a person all-knowing, or is knowing just one form of awareness?

2. At the end of the chapter "Decision Time," which recounts the circumstances behind her choice to leave the Black Panthers and return to Nepal, Willis decisively announces, "I had made the right decision." At several later points in her narrative, however, she bears witness to an inner uneasiness. For example, she writes, "I had come to Lama Yeshe loaded down with guilt, shame, anger, and a feeling of utter helplessness." And later she recalls, "Because of my ambition, my overzealousness, I was suffering." Is there any connection between her initial decision and these expressions of self-doubt and self-deprecation? If they might have another source, what could it be?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Willis tells us that at the height of her meditation retreat she felt her awareness "was consistently lucid, vast, and fully attuned to life. Nothing was a distraction any longer because everything was part and parcel of the great encompassment I had experienced." At the same time, however, Willis also recalls that "it didn't occur to me to have Lakshman search out another kind of rakshi." Is it possible that Willis's feelings of lucidity were actually a distortion of consciousness rather than a liberation from illusion? Why was she unable to recognize the causes of her own illness if she had, indeed, caught a glimpse of enlightenment? Shouldn't enlightenment make a person all-knowing, or is knowing just one form of awareness?

2. In "The Ecology of Magic," David Abram argues with great conviction that the deep sense of connection with the world achieved by Balians and shamans cannot be achieved "without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, its patterns and its vicissitudes." Western healers who try to assume the mantle of the shaman "without [an] intimate knowledge of the wider natural community cannot. . . do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others." Judging from your reading of Willis and Abram, is the experience of the Balian or the shaman the same as the experience of the Tibetan meditator? Does an "intimate knowledge" of the "wider" world always assume the same form? Would Abram say that Tibetan meditation brings people closer to nature? Would Willis accept Abram's experience as a form of enlightenment?

More Willis assignments . . . .