Living Life As It Is: Looking for Right View in the Fog of Delusion

Introducing a Substack serial book about Right View

I started writing my second book as journal entries in early 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve kept a journal on and off for most of my life, beginning as a child in a small leather ‘diary’ with a lock and key. Journal writing has always been like therapy. Any writing is like therapy. The shock of the pandemic triggered a journal writing therapeutic response in the spring of 2020.

I read somewhere that it was hard to find journals or personal writing reflecting on the 1918 Spanish flu. Those who lived at the time commented that so many were ashamed of their behavior that they wouldn’t share any writing. I wanted to write about how I was behaving; how I was thinking and feeling. I wanted to use my writing to observe my responses to the pandemic, and the responses of those around me and on social media. I wanted to write truthfully about what I was thinking and feeling.

It's now five years later. I have multiple journals filled and an initial Word draft in process. But life keeps coming. I got older. And as life threw twists, turns, shocks, and horrors at all of us, it became apparent to me—from reading my own writing—that the people and things I thought I saw clearly were never what they seemed, and neither was I. As it says in the Lankavatara Sutra, “things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.” And as Padmasambhava, the Indian Buddhist teacher who is said to have introduced Tantric Buddhism to Tibet taught:

"All that appears and exists, the phenomena of samsara and nirvana, arise from the solidified habitual tendencies of labeling."

So here I am still writing what was to be my second book focused on Right View. The stumbling block in getting it done was things in life kept changing faster and faster, and I had no idea whether I had any sense of Right View anymore or if I was helplessly lost in delusion. But I recently had an idea that would help me focus and share my writing in the midst of life and all its confusion and delusion—in the middle of life as it is.

The idea is this: Why not write this long-hoped-for second book in real time? Why not write for my Substack audience, releasing essays/chapters as I go so that you, kind subscribers, can read as I write—and comment too

So if this seems interesting to you, subscribe to my Substack and not only will you be able to listen to my “Words From My Teachers” podcast and read my occasional posts on the “Zen Koans for Everyday” section, but you will also be the very first readers of my second book, Living Life As It Is: A Personal Narrative of My Transformation Through the Pandemic.

My hope, and something I am going to keep to—for you and for me—is an essay/chapter post weekly. As of now, my plan is to release a post on Friday. So, today (2/7/2025), will be my first post.

I am offering this post free to all subscribers, but it will continue as a paid publication. Please consider supporting my Dharma work.

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Introduction

Cada cabeza es un mundo. ("Every head is a world.")
~ Spanish proverb

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Nothing like a global pandemic to mess with your practice. Actually, “mess with” is too mild of a description of how I have been weathering the pandemic and the broader instability in the U.S. and globally. The Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) are a refuge, meaning remembering the teachings of the Buddha, the Dharma, and practicing them; and counting on the Sangha to be your support when you falter. In early 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and my faltering, I couldn’t see the Buddha or remember the Dharma through the haze of my existential dread and disbelief. And the Sangha was in lock-down and just as confused as I was, as we all tried to figure out how to navigate this new life.

My personal life was equally confusing and distressing. The people in my life, both close to me and virtual or real-life acquaintances, reacted to the pandemic in completely different ways—from each other and from me. I felt lost and trapped in my own personal web of horror. That’s the thing about people. About life. You can’t count on it. It acts one way one day and differently the next. Completely different views. Same human desires for happiness. I knew that, theoretically. But when the shit hit, I couldn’t find a refuge, not even in my Buddhist practice.

This book is not about the pandemic. Not exactly. This book is about the first practice of the Noble Eightfold Path: Right View. And there has been no better practice ground for Right View or Right Understanding than living in a global pandemic during a rise in social and political unrest and increasing effects of climate change. I will share my personal experience or battle with Right View and how, after decades of lay Buddhist practice, I saw how deluded my view of life could get, as I lost myself in disturbing emotions.

It’s all fun and games until life gets hard. And I think that’s what the Buddha was trying to teach us.

Life got hard for me—and everyone else—when the Covid pandemic changed everything. I know it hasn’t been as hard for me, personally, as it has for so many others all over the world. And that, too, is what I learned about right view. We may both be looking at the same sky, hinting that rain is coming, but for you the dark sky means your plans for a picnic are threatened and, for me, it’s the promise that the garden is going to get a nice drink, and I won’t have to water. But for someone else, at a different place, it could mean a life-threatening flood.

That’s how the pandemic is. I’m using the present tense to refer to the pandemic, because at the time of this writing, in early 2025, it isn’t exactly over. Public health and disease experts disagree in their assessments, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the international public health emergency in May of 2023. In the words of the WHO chief, they made this declaration “with great hope.” Hope is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t a promise. Worldwide cases, hospitalizations, and deaths had been slowly decreasing, but Covid-19 is still very much with us, causing the WHO to backtrack with this announcement in August 2024, saying, “COVID-19 infections are surging worldwide…and are unlikely to decline anytime soon.”

And catching Covid is easier to do now than it was in previous years when masking was mandated in most places and the vaccine helped contain the spread and criticality. Add to that, the Covid virus itself continues to mutate with great speed and efficiency. As of February 2025, there have been 7,084,010 deaths globally.

And, as Covid-19 continues to be a threat, the science of what the virus is doing to our bodies has gotten better. Scientists and medical professionals now agree that SARS-CoV-2 is not “just” a respiratory disease but a vascular and neurologic infection. The following highlights the dangers of Covid-19, from the article, “Beyond Breathing: How COVID-19 Affects Your Heart, Brain and Other Organs” by Michael Merschel in the publication, American Heart Association News:

Because COVID-19 typically affects breathing and can lead to problems such as pneumonia, many people may think it's primarily a lung disease. It's not that simple, said Dr. Nisha Viswanathan, director of the long COVID program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I would argue that COVID-19 is not a disease of the lungs at all," she said. "It seems most likely that it is what we call a vascular and neurologic infection, affecting both nerve endings and our cardiovascular system."

It's no surprise that experts say SARS-CoV-2 – the name of the virus that causes COVID-19 – is complex, with many of its pathways just beginning to be understood. But some things are becoming clear. One of the best reviews of long COVID symptoms, Viswanathan said, appeared last January in Nature Reviews Microbiology. It detailed the disease's effects throughout the body, including the pancreas, blood vessels and reproductive system.

"SARS-CoV-2 is excellent at triggering your immune system to go from zero to 100," said Dr. Lindsay McAlpine, a neurologist who is director of the Yale NeuroCovid Clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. That revving of the immune response leads to both a "wide swath of inflammation" and excessive blood clotting, she said…. the inflammation that the virus triggers is systemic," McAlpine said.

Since the pandemic began, the threats from Covid-19 range from losing your life, losing the lives of family members, losing your job, losing your health from post-viral conditions, to just a bad cold. And the variety of ways people deal with it is equally distinct. Some people can’t stop looking at it. Others can’t look at it at all. I couldn’t stop reading, doom-scrolling, and trying to quickly earn a PhD in Virology, while most people around me didn’t want to look at all or created an alternate reality that was based on their lives prior 2020.

It’s hard to understand what it looks like from another’s point of view. No one is inherently right nor wrong. That is what Right View is all about. It’s not that there is a single, absolute right view and, therefore, all other views are wrong. The practice of right view is more about understanding that there is no discrete right or wrong. There are only things in the present, things as they really are. Yet each of our views of those things can be very different, making seeing things as they are nearly impossible—especially during the extreme times of 2020 to the present.

That’s what I am going to write about in this book, using my own voice, narrating my own experience. Taking you through my own struggle with right view will hopefully help you and me see how we can do better.

I’ll start by telling the story of how I lost myself in this struggle.

The World Got Crazy and What We Became

When the world suddenly seemed to make little sense ... When it felt like we were about to go careening off the edge … When a culture of tribalism, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, cultism, and apocalypticism made it harder and harder to cope and care, we were left with anxiety, denial, and disaster fatigue, losing our connection and compassion for each other.

Instead of quieting our minds, we went swirling into our personal scary stories, while we solidified a habit of doom- and rage-scrolling. Instead of reconnecting to our why—our meaning—and our good hearts, we buried ourselves in fortresses built of fear, anger, and confusion in response to a world gone crazy. We became so embedded we couldn’t see things as they are. We couldn’t see that the pain we felt was exactly like the fear, anger, and confusion everyone else was feeling. We didn’t know how to see our reality as "their" reality, too.

Losing Minds, Losing People

The pandemic wasn’t the beginning of the world seemingly careening off the edge. It started maybe five to 10 years before, for me and for many in the U.S. It probably started to slowly shift years before that, but because I’m not a sociologist or anthropologist, my study of human behavior is limited only to my personal interactions with the behavior of people in my sphere, in real life and virtually. I’ve read those who do study human behavior and political shifts talk about how we’ve been on the road to increased tribalism, fundamentalism, and authoritarianism for many decades. In hindsight, I can see that, especially politically. But it’s like the boiling frog analogy, it’s been so gradual with pauses of positivity and hope (in the things that affected my life) that I only occasionally experienced the severity of the issues to the point that I was alarmed.

It was in 2010-2011 when I first started feeling things were off, even though the U.S. had recently elected its first black President and, a couple years after, the U.S. made same-sex marriages legal. And as someone on the liberal end of the political spectrum and someone in a 30-year same-sex relationship (as of 2010), it seemed to me that there was every reason to think things were trending more positively and equitably. This was my perspective, the world inside my head.

In fact, though, those two events seemed to turn up the heat and noise from those that perceived a black president and same-sex marriages as signs of moral decline. Those who saw our country on a path of destruction got louder and more aggressive in their communication. With social media as a platform for everyone with an opinion, and for the proliferation of fake news, the stage was set for a tribal war of words.

It was then that I began to be shocked by the things people were saying. People I knew were freely expressing hatred and mistrust of people and groups they considered “others.” They were voicing racist, homophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic views I would never have believed them to hold. And they were doing so openly, without shame. At that time, only Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were major players in keeping up the drumbeat of hate and division, but they were powerful players in creating mistrust and fear of everyone who wasn’t American, white, heterosexual, male, and Christian.

I, like many others, reacted by challenging the opinions of those who were swept up in this worldview. I would try to reason, share articles and facts, and generally try to appeal to the better selves I felt I knew them to be. It took a long time, but I eventually realized this wasn’t working and, not only was I frustrated at my attempts to have a non-charged conversation, I, too, became angry. I started to feel aversion and strong dislike for these people—including some real-world acquaintances, neighbors, and some in my own family.

The suffering I and so many others fell into during those times Illustrates the quotes I began this Introduction with. We were living in the same shifting state of the world, but we couldn’t see that. We could only see what was in our minds. And it wasn’t pretty.

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