Reclusland

The individualism of the 60s and 70s gave rise to the freeing of the self, in good and bad ways. This lead us to the state we currently find ourselves, where the upper class seeks personal fulfillment to greater and greater degrees, thus cutting themselves off from the lower classes who support them.  As the article explains, it’s the apartheid of the American Dream.

Gravity (i.e.: attraction-at-a-distance, remember the space fire?) shows us why this is a bad idea, and the I Ching reminds us: “What is below is decreased to the benefit of what is above. This is out-and-out decrease. If the foundations of a building are decreased in strength and the upper walls are strengthened, the whole structure loses its stability.”

Currently, the US (as well as everywhere else) is going through an “economic downturn”.  “The United States has allegedly been in economic “recovery” for over two years, and yet 15 million people cannot find work, or cannot find as much work as they say they would like. At the same time, up to two thirds of workers report in surveys that they would like to work fewer hours than they do now, even if doing so would require a loss of income.” To me, this points to something deeper than just economic woes.  It’s easiest to frame in economic terms since that’s the direction from which the pain is hitting us at this moment.  We always notice new pain over old pain.

But if the argument “society has failed the working class” and the argument “people are just lazy” can both (to a certain extent at least) be made, my guess is that the actual cause is deeper than either of these.  Perceived paradox points to deeper truth.  We’re not in a depression, we’re depressed. We want meaning in our lives and it’s just not here to be (easily) found. Society (i.e.: us) has neglected the cultivation of meaning to the point where the meaninglessness of everything we do overwhelms our ability to do anything. Part of us knows this is true, and that part is digging its heels in, hard.  Our economic troubles are simply the latest symptom of a decades-old disease of the soul.

This need not be a bad thing though, so long as we use the opportunity to pay attention to the forces and drives within us.  This (and all suffering) is a call to arms for the seekers, the openers, the gatekeepers, the scouts into the territory of novelty and meaning.  Because meaning isn’t actually gone, we’ve just forgotten where to look for it.  And until we re-learn how to find it within this life, within this society, all the struggle in the world won’t save us.  Even if we manage an economic recovery, without a corresponding spiritual recovery, the symptoms will just pop up somewhere else.   Basic psychology says a lot about this kind of repression, and the diagnosis isn’t good when everyone’s in need of treatment.  We’re burning so many straw men we’re raising the global temperature…

Still, there are some hopefully glimmers around the edges of this shadow we’re confronting.  Things get worse before they get better, and at the height of their “worseness” lies the capitulation to their demands that opens the door to redemption.  Whether you’re a Buddhist or not, Hokai Sobol points to an interesting cultural pattern emerging from massive high-pressure-meets-low-pressure storm front that is the East-meets-West dynamic playing itself out in our lives today: “Genuine innovation is a burst of creativity, and according to Graham Wallas’ model creativity proceeds in five stages, namely preparation, incubation, intimation, illumination, and verification. While others have suggested Western Buddhism has reached adolescence, seen as a cultural trembling with a variety of undercurrents this particular meeting of East and West exhibits definite features of the intimation stage. It is the stage in creative process at which person or community becomes sensitive to the creative brewing, and begins to acknowledge that solution is about to appear. Frustration turns into anticipation, and curiosity naturally wells forth.”

Which is all well and good, but how are we to go about carrying this through?  Well, we are in a pretty blessed place right now, though we are not exactly as aware of it as we could be.  We are working towards a world where a lot of the sources of meaninglessness can be taken care of by machines.  “Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing”.  Technology is nothing but a tool, and morality is applied to tools, not inherent within them.  “Human beings must ride technology with their critical intelligence, rather than be ridden by it. For our future, it is important we keep this balance.”

Our problem is basically that we have more and more freedom to do whatever we want, but we’ve forgotten what exactly it is that we want.  Or perhaps it’s more a combination of being unaware of where to dig for meaning and of being scared of what we’ll find if we start.  All good hidden treasure is guarded by monsters, and we know this.  What we forget is that these are the very same monsters chasing after us every day, tormenting our inner souls, begging for our attention.  They are us, and they want to give us their treasures.  We just have to learn how to ask for it.  It’s not so much a quest as a question.  And the more people try to do that within this very life, the more hope we have.  No effort is wasted, so long as we make it unconditionally.

Morality is key here too though, as morality is the test for whether our grails are True Grails or not.  Not laws, not dogma, for laws are a sign of a society lacking an inherent morality and will never serve as a pathway to regaining morality.  But morality as compassion, as a true seeing of the reality of the other, a true suffering with.  Not pity, which is suffering for; it is weak and it is harmful.  The more that we can be as moved by another’s feeling as we are by our own feelings, the more our own feelings become morally trustworthy.

The best news is that this, at its heart, is not a question of pushing and suffering.  It’s about learning to be open, feeling the subtle flutterings with us, and letting them flow through and outwards.  It’s not something we have to know or do, it’s simply something we have to learn to attend to and allow.  “I wanted badly to have that sense of flow and power—which I didn’t have at that time. But I would watch people and would find that there were some people that had a deeper intuition about things. I found that what was almost invariably true with these people, was that they had less agenda than others. They had a fluid ability within the structure of their lives to change, to go in different directions, and that seemed to be a constant.”

And it will feed us as assuredly as it will feed those around us.  “We open at those moments to that force and have it flow through us to help heal or help teach or help change. I have to honestly say—and not out of any kind of humility—that it really never feels like I have anything to do with it. It feels as good for me and as healing for me as it feels for participants because of this thing that’s flowing. And sometimes it does feel like maybe I’m being used, but maybe they’re also being used to give it back to me. “

The true hero does not wait on society to cast off its many weights before he or she goes forth.

For society is almost always a taming, though it doesn’t have to be.

And do not shout for God to help, the Presence is everywhere and always.

Move forward as the sun, shining equally on all in the silent vastness of space, and let society be the moon reflecting in your wake.

(pulling this out of the comments in my last post, because it deserves better than that)

Being in-the-moment can open up a dimension of timelessness that gives us a sense of the Infinitely-Full.  And within/alongside that seems to be the partially full, into which we will likely drop back, again and again. To be partially full is to be caught in the attempt to “know” things and the striving-for-wholeness this engenders.  Seeing this, I have to wonder: what if what I’m really looking for is a way to hold these both together in one loving embrace, to combine them more and more as my life goes on, and then to release it all and slip back into the Infinitely Full when the times comes to do so?

It seems as if this would create an ongoing, ever-changing, imperfect-but-always-reaching-toward-perfection striving THAT WOULD BE FUELED BY PERFECT FULLNESS.  How joyful!  Is it only when we get bogged down by the “known” that we begin to fall into any real trouble at all? Allowing for both creates a sense of tremendous outpouring…

Being caught in the “known”, trying to know/interpret things so as to find the “best” understanding, isn’t that the Knowledge of Good and Evil that gets us kicked out of Eden? And isn’t this the very thing for which Zen prescribes “don’t know mind”?  Can “don’t know mind” get us safely past the angel with the flaming sword, and back into Eden again, back to that fruit of Immortal Life?  That’s the stuff that makes us “like God“.  Do not the Sufis claim “I am God“? Isn’t this Union with the Beloved?  Isn’t that beating the drum of the Deathless?

Peter Kingsley in his “A Story Waiting to Pierce You” talks about waiting for the sun, and waiting for the moon. It is a choice one must make, the moon will never turn into the sun.

I have also heard it said that the particular thing  Samsara is known for is its endlessness.  It is a circle we walk around, never looking up to the trackless land beyond.

I have been inspired by many things today.  They include:

The perfection of this-moment-without-interpretation, as thrice described here.

The inability of interpretations to ever be THE right interpretation, as described here.  And also from here is the call to make each interpretation a creative, brilliant performance of ones own.  Memories flash of Martin Prechtel’s insistence that the Holy is fed by our grand and massive failures, by our eloquence, and by our beauty.

This, from an article on Phillip K Dick from the NYTimes: ”We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction.”  Truth is created, as is fiction, by looking at reality with fresh eyes.  Caught in the illusion of the “known,” we are suffering from Truth withdrawal.  And how sad, when we are the very beings responsible for the manufacturing of the Truth and Meaning upon which our very souls depend!

And this, from a friend’s re-translation of the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was a Word, and the Word was in the presence of God, and God was the Word. This was so in the beginning in the presence of God. All things have been made through the selfsame agency and without Him nothing has been made which has been made.

It was the true light which illuminates every human coming into the world. It was in the world and the world was made by the selfsame agency and the world did not recognize Him. He came into His very own and His own did not receive Him.

The Word, which is of God and from the start was in God’s presence (which, note, is not the same as being God) is what creates all things (breath moving out over the waters, remember?  It is translated as Spirit, but the word used is ruach: “breath, wind, soul, spirit.”)

And It illuminates all beings that come into this world, and It comes into the world, which It created, but It is not recognized. And the Gnostics got confused by this and called It the evil Demi-urge, simply because It cannot be perfect.  It is an emanation of God, It is of God, but It is not God.  Remeber? No graven idols, no God but God, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao.

(note, if you will, that “there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger“.  Messengers bring the Words, do they not?)

And then this: God’s word in the Old Testament is an active, creative, and dynamic word. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6). “He sends forth his commands to the earth; his word runs swiftly” (Psalm 147:15). “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29)? The writer of the Book of Wisdom addresses God as the one who “made all things by your word” (Wisdom 9:1). God’s word is also equated with his wisdom. “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth” (Proverbs 3:19).The Book of Wisdom describes “wisdom” as God’s eternal, creative, and illuminating power. Both “word” and “wisdom” are seen as one and the same. “For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of thy authentic command” (Book of Wisdom 18:14-16).

Compare that with the Buddhist ideas of the Dharma, and the sword of Manjushri…

And this: “It may be that interpreting Nietzsche will have to be something like housework, work to be done over and over again by a whole series of people, who read, and re-read Nietzsche.” Except, do not say “Nietzsche”.  Say “Reality”.

Nietzsche, it seems, successfully embodied reality well enough that people now get confused between the two. Which I doubt Nietzsche would have liked, but there you have it.

And not to make a direct comparison of Nietzsche to Christ or Muhammad (more to place them on a sort of continuum), but confusing Reality with the descriptions of someone who successfully embodies Reality sounds awfully familiar.

Actively engaging and interpreting Reality for yourself (which, to borrow a term from the same friend who re-translated John above, we might call “The Reinvention Club”) seems like a worthy description of the Goal to me. And all we have to do is keep at it; this is why Reality has kept us humans around: we are its way of creating definition/meaning within Itself.  And when we get stuck with a specific definition, we have failed at our task, we have stopped naming the animals.  When we stop, even if it is because we think we have found, we become a broken part within the Machine.  But this doesn’t mean the universe isn’t doing something great and huge and difficult and holy through us.

And this: “This is a culture full of market relations, where the construction of meaning becomes the burden of a newly constructed catagory: the individual. The bourgeois individual.  The individual of modern life.  The individual competitor on a market.  No longer a member of the Community of God, in the board sense of the feudal period, but someone who must construct the meaning of their lives in singularity… And that is a tax that Max Weber though would overburden them.  And it is a task the Nietzsche thought almost impossible, but one he undertook…”

Thank goodness we now have industry and computers, to do the work for us so that we can turn our attentions toward resurrecting that activity called construction-of-meaning.  Doing so while in touch with Infinite-Fullness (or if you prefer, since it is actually the same thing: allowing Infinite Fullness to use us as Its tools-of-meaning-creation) seems like a Worthy Aim, a Great Work, to me.  You might say that those industries and computers are ruining us and our world, and I would agree, but how how we to correct this if all we do is continue to wait for the moon?

The talk on Nietzsche goes on to discuss how the Enlightenment (European this time) and the “bourgeois” tore down all the previous mythic structures, to the shouts of “we won’t be free until the last priest is hung by the gizzards of the last king!”.  (And I see we have just turned the thinkers of the Enlightenment into spiritual Mongols, barbarians coming from the Steppes to break up from our deadening gyre.  How interesting…)

This, in turn, leads to the American Revolution and all the revolutions that followed it.  And the talk continues to say that Nietzsche feared that this death of ritual, this giving up of a connection to the cosmological spiritual ecology, would lead to humans whose only desire would be to want to no longer wanted to want.   That is what happens when we pretend not to have a need that we very much have.  Ignore the need, and the desire to do something about it becomes unbearable.

Which creates quite a conundrum in me.  I am very much against the bourgeois, and the spiritual impotency of the Enlightenment, and the death of Spirit, but I am very much for the Revolution it gave birth to, the values espoused in the Constitution and the things we have gained from it.  If only we hadn’t thrown out the Spiritual to get them!  Because I see it: many of us don’t want to want anymore.

And I cannot hide that I have hated such people for a long time, “how can you be so vacuous and empty?”  Now I find my heart breaks for them, these walking wounded, these entranced zombies, bogged down in something they never created, something they partake of only because the alternatives have been neglected so long they are almost entirely forgotten.  And can I truly claim to not be one of them?  I wish not to be, but how can I claim otherwise, growing up as I did from the same poisoned and infertile soil that is our culture.

If I have been lucky enough to have my eyes open for one minute, to have one drop of the living water fall upon my tongue, let me never cease speaking of it until everyone longs for the sea!  Put down your boat blueprints people, I have some things to speak to you about…

Our culture seems to be in its death throes from the cognitive dissonance caused by the belief that we must give up connection-to-divinity in order to have freedom.  This is pure foolishness, a mistake caused by confusing the advice of wise men (poorly filtered through the centuries) with the unstatable Truth of Divine Law (evernewandfresh).  It is easy to point fingers and cry “fool!”, but I know these beliefs are buried deeply within the code-language of the CultureOS I use to navigate this wilderness.  Simply crying “error!” does nothing expunge errors.  It simply is a reflection of the somewhat cowardly hope that maybe if you shout loud enough, someone else will actually figure out how to go about fixing things…

We must re-learn to combine the two, to be reminded of the freedom we posses, and, from that freedom, to reconnect with Truth-as-Infinite-Fullness.  No longer can we take refuge in Truth-as-Grand-Narrative (for as my same translating friend has pointed out, all Grand Narratives are a form of fascism). But instead, we must find within ourselves the already-existing individual connection to Truth, and we must make it is a connection which also allows-and-supports all others individual connection to Truth.  This is a task that is truly never accomplished, though mainly because we take “accomplished” to mean “finished”, and for this kind of thing “finished” means “failed”.

And because it cannot be finished in this way, we should create no tension in seeking it.  This is why we sit quietly at the edge of the abyss, waiting for the sun: the tension is already there within us, we’ve just forgotten.  To hope to become free of that by creating any more tension is pure foolishness.

Another way to say this is that we simply need to see clearly.  For how can “the already-existing individual connection to Truth which allows-and-supports all others individual connection to Truth” not always-already be the way of things?

Still, we must be careful.  The danger is as the Tao Te Ching reminds us: “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut your hand.“  So, tune into the infinite fullness (or if you cannot, wait for a hint of it at the edge of the “abyss” that rests beyond the “known”). Open like flowers to the sun of this very moment and wait patiently.  That which is within you will ripen and come out, building, cell-by-cell, whatever is needed in this very moment.  All you need is: this moment, belief, endurance, and love.

And the greatest of these is love, because love is the fertilizer on the field, it is the octane in the gasoline.  The more conscious-love-felt-truly-for-others added to the mixture, the stronger the growth.

And that, I think, is the end of things here.  With it comes two warnings:

1)  Take care of yourself, for That which is within is the Word of God.  It is “like fire…and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces”.  Do not be the chopped wood.  Do not be the rock-which-must-be-breaking.  Release these things in yourself, as you are made aware of them by the suffering Reality uses to bring them to your attention.  Be calm toward this process.  The old things are smashed into pieces, do not mistake them for your self or your give to them any of your worth as a being.  You are worthy because of the fact of your BEING, this rests on nothing at all.  Let the new arise within you.  Let this very moment express itself through you as it is already doing, but let it do this more so, and more so, and more so.

2) Do not expect that the new-which-is-built-from-within will not also be swept away.  Do not let the new become the old.  Or, let it become the old, and in doing so, release it.  Be OK with starting over again, every time, again and again and again.  Each moment the Word creates a brand new All-And-Everything.  And the Word is God made manifest (and it is not God).  Let it bubble up within, and do not grab at the “things” that come along with it.  For they are of God, and in the presence of God, and they create the whole world, but they-by-themselves are not God.  God has loaned them to you for this moment.  Rejoice in them when you have them, and return them to him when he asks, so that he may give you something new in their place.

The abyss.  Seemingly standing at the ever-growing-edge of the “known”, it is an infinite emptiness created by the heart’s (true) belief in the existence of infinite fullness. When this belief comes up against the felt “fact” that fullness cannnot be found here amidst the “known”, it creates the abyss.  We think, if it is not here, it must surely be elsewhere, well on beyond the edge of the known.

For beyond the edge of the “known” can only be the unknown, that infinite empty abyss, and so the infinite fullness we long for must lie on the other side of this empty-abyss-at-the-edge-of-the-”known”.  Or so we think.

But in truth, it is only that the infinite fullness for which we long is forced to appear to us as an infinite emptiness because of our insistance that we are trapped within the limits of the “known” (the known-which-might-yet-reach-to-fullness).  And we, clinging as we are to this “known”, feel the tension used to deny the infinite-fullness (and hold it prisoner inside of us as “I”), and we mistake that tension for fear of the infinite emptiness, though this emptiness is in truth the-mask-that-infinite-fullness-must-wear because we cannot acknowledge our insistance on keeping it our prisoner.  And for this same reason, we confuse the release of that same tension with the death of “I”.

Given that we seem unable to break away from our belief that we can only exist as the “known”-which-longs-to-reach-fullness (aka the “I”), and given that we insist upon approaching the infinite (ha!) as this “known”, we can at least hope to recognize that a frenzied journey into the abyss will simply create further abysses, infinite abysses, abysses without end, through which will have to travel forever and ever, seeminly searching and seeking, but actually just running away.  And this happens because the infinite must remind us of it’s presence in whatever way it can, it must throw it’s existence into our faces again and again, using whatever masks we make available to it, so that it can appear before (ha!) us in some form, because it is impossible for it not to do so.

Therefore, if we are lucky and unlucky enough to find ourselves facing that empty abyss, our best chance is not to travel into it.  Instead, we must let the infinity of that emptiness point us toward where the (true) infinity of fullness is longing to be set free within us, longing to gather us up in its arms.  If we can do this, we will be carried across that infinite abyss in less than an instant.  But this is not a powerful release of the lifeforce, because if that was possible, it would have happened for you long ago.  Instead, you must sit silently upon the shore of the known and wait.  That is the only way home.  To sit silently and let this infinite fullness dig itself up from within you.

Sounds boring, does it not?  Wouldn’t we rather jump and sing and dance, be joyful and alive?

Such a clear and unresitricted release of the life force is a worthy thing, but it is a thing that cannot be achived from within the seeming-fullness-of-the-”known” (aka the someday-to-be-full-”I”).  It must be done from within a point of view that allows all “others” to exist as they are prior to the release of life force, and it must also be done in a way that does not bring harm to any “other”.  The “I”, by its very nature, cannot do this, while the true infinite fullness of the lifeforce cannot cause harm.  If it is “my” lifeforce, it is diminished, restricted, and mis-used, and this can only lead, at best, to wasteful results, and at worst, to damaging ones.  Because all “others” are already all within the lifeforce’s play (how could they not be?), and to not see that in the very moment of release is to release a high and great power ignorantly and disrespectfully.  And chances are, it won’t let you do that.  And chances are, you’re doing that already.

It is true, this is a high benchmark indeed, one that almost seems to require that we achieve the goal before we are allowed to start along the path.  But it is one that repays true, heart-honest attempts with a loving allowance of failure.  And at the same time, it is one that repays failure-to-attempt with heavier and heavier insistance.

Before getting started, though, it is best to know, this will bring with it a feeling of restriction.  But tension caused by a restriction of the life force is actually a good thing, a goad to further growth, to true maturity, though we must choose to work with the tension, not to run from it.  The tension becomes a trick, something the infinite fullness does to our selves in order to bring about the growth that we need.  One even might argue that inhibition is required for any sort of growth, that there is no growth without restriction, no movement without friction.  But then, we must also be sure to keep in mind that restriction-without-growth is merely stagnation and death.

Perhaps movement without friction is possible, but how would ”I” ever know “I” was experiencing such a thing?  After all, how could we know anything was happening unless there was friction to cause the sensation of ”hey, something’s happening”?   The existance of a self necesitates friction, it cannot do otherwise.  To truly feel no friction, to truly live without tension, we would need to release (not remove) any felt sense of self, and let the universe dance us freely.  But we are placing no value judgement here upon the idea of tensionless-living, it is simply meant to point out that such a tension-free existence necessitates a lack of anyone to feel tension.  Whether one wants to seek that out is truly up to you.

But, we can know:
- tension acknowledged leads to growth
- tension ignored becomes chronic
- chronic tension leads to death
- all life is tension
- not all tension can be acknowledged simultaneously (for it would tear us apart)

So, if life is a mass of tension, and ignoring tension means death, and we all die anyway, what tension will you choose to acknowledge?  Where will you choose to spend your attention?  How will you grow the lifeforce we all share, and will you allow it to dance you home?

May these questions point us both toward that struggle of the infinite within us, for if they do not, then this has simply been an exercise in growing the “known” within us.  And if that is all this is, then it has failed.

With many thanks to many friends, who through conversation, brought these ideas out into the open.

And now for something a little different.  A free-write, of sorts, which I will be leaving up for a while (ie: no new posts), so as to give people a chance to read it.  Let me know what you think…

A vast dry wasteland, nothing but scrub horizon to horizon, the sky distant above. Blue canvas, white smears, intentional perhaps, but only subjectively so. A wind arises, not a “languid” wind because “languid” implies sensuality. “Apathetic”, perhaps, but oilier than that. “Unctuous”, but less morally abhorrent. This very wind oozes out along the plane, picking up tumble weeds here, turning on itself in the sudden frenzy of whirling there. Grains of sand are blown about, scattered like refugees, so used to these sudden abductions that they are numb; empty husks in the hands of the careless wind. Above, the clouds stir restlessly, like a lover, horny but only in the half-dead way brought on by a hot summer morning spent over-long in bed.

I should not go back over and read this, because it does not matter what it says, it only says what it said when it was saying it, and now it is saying this, and now it is saying this and now it is saying this. To hold a concern what it was saying moments ago is to make this into something other than it is. This is a wet cough of a paragraph, that is all. A white space filled with phlegmy goo. Want to see? Well… I didn’t want to show it to you anyway. There should be an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence, but there’s not. Or, I should say, it might seem like there should be an exclamation point, but there shouldn’t. This is fun, this endless falling, flailing through the void that is a blank page. What does one think about when one feels the terror of falling, but at the same time, feels pretty sure that hitting bottom isn’t actually an option? How absurd the terror that simultaneously knows its existence and its own untruth. You have to feel sorry for it, in a way, even if only to avoid the social gaffe of laughing at its dilemma. Not a good habit to get into, laughing at the absurdity of terror.

So then terror is put soundly to bed, occasionally giving out cute little wheezings, but otherwise pretty much satisfied, a little smile on its face. Such a happy guy, you want to tousle its hair a bit. You refrain, but now what? At one point, perhaps boredom peeked in around the door, but boredom can only be a momentary companion at best, so long as one is aware of one’s constant falling. Perhaps the scenery doesn’t change, but you can’t claim to be bored by the constant wind whipping past your face and your limbs flailing about in all directions. So no, no boredom, unless you go back to sleep, and that’s not really an option, is it? What else is around then? Ah, I see. Pride. Pride rises like a sun within, warming seeds, bringing forth the first green shoots of future plans. I see, indeed. A precious thing, this pride, though impossible to trust, because while watching and watering those green shoots, it’s all too easy to slip into a dream about gardening, and then what? You forget you’re falling, that’s what, and forgetting your falling (even though you’re still falling) is cutting your self off from that vast void. “Only the doors to emptiness support the hive”.

But hey, look, I seem to be doing a bit of the old “holy fool” act here. Arid wasteland is turned into root-of-all-that-is. Or is it? Actually, no, you see, the wasteland’s not healed if the king’s just having pretty dreams. The dude needs to wake up and start fixing shit. Pride’s just the last (the last?) defense of good old Mara. If he can convince you you’ve won before you’ve actually won, you’ll spend all day polishing your trophy while the other racers decay around you.

Sadly, here is where the real world comes in. I’ve been distracted, you see, pulled away from the blankness. Maintenance, both physical and emotional, is requiring attention. But then, is there ever really anything else? What does it mean to be satisfied? How does satisfaction differ from death? Movement requires friction, and if all life is dukha, then what’s satisfaction? How to spend what is given to you when it is both priceless and worthless? But I wander into the dangerous shores of solipsistic speculation here, and while extreme close-ups of my bellybutton lint might hold some small possibly being of slight interest to perhaps one or maybe two people, but they don’t really help anyone much, do they?

I have a tendency, just like that wind, to either pick up tumble weeds and play with them idly, or turn inwards in a sudden frenzy of self-chasing (and what happens when you catch your self, that ever-fading echo of after-image?). Meanwhile, the sands of my emotional life are thrown hither and thither, numb by the tireless movement of it all. Perhaps they’d sprout, if they could just sit in one place long enough to get some light and perhaps put down some roots…

But then, are these more dream flowers, or are they the real thing? Now I’ve cast myself as Grail King it seems, but is it pride or masochism to take on the archetype of The Divine Sufferer? Or is it neither? God sends his son, ever minute of every day, to be crucified at the crossroads of the here and the now, and most people just sit and stare blankly: “Oh my, look at what their showing on the TV!”

If awareness voluntarily takes on form, why does it do so? It seems the best to consider this as done-for-the-purpose-of-healing, but that which is healed is only ever injured in the first place because of word-taking-flesh having seemingly gone awry. It’s as if we’re little psychic platelets, coming to patch a wound in the universe’s side, except that on coming out of the wound, we only make it wider when we harden into scab. It’s a gross picture, but there you have it. I can find no source this wound , it seems.

Still, I must do something, mustn’t I? Looking at things from the perspective of the wounded seems like it might be a good way to go about healing said wound, perhaps. After all, when “things-as-they-are are perfect only we don’t see it as such”, perhaps we are the one who’s wounded. What’s a God but a blown up picture of a man? It wasn’t Satan who rebelled from God, it was the ego, but the ego’s still God nonetheless, it just doesn’t know it. And the Garden of Eden, well, that’s going on every moment of every day. In everything we do there is the Garden and there is Good and there is Evil. And never the three shall meet (though is it three or only two? is it two, or only one?) Can the garden ever be truly left behind, or is it spread across the earth and we just do not see it? Bah. Hall of pretty mirrors. When will you reflect clearly? When I am both reflected and reflector, it is hard to get a complete picture, but when I am neither, how do I see?

So there you have it: there is no self. Buddha was right. Then again, such philosophies can create a false sense of doneness and this scares me more than anything else. And all this here? Simple more grass in the hole. I look around, I check my downloads, I pull out my storage cases. Having doesn’t mean understanding, and understanding doesn’t mean being able to recall, and being able to recall doesn’t mean skillfully using. Why not just jump to that last step, since there is no guarantee any one of these will lead to the next? Oh, because you might hurt yourself (or someone else)? Hmm… Good point. Can that, then, be avoided through the means of utter sincerity?

I wish to do more descriptions but find myself at a loss. Trees, this time perhaps. More fitting for my surroundings anyway. Fronds on trees. Bark puckered by the moisture, flowering. Moss abounding everywhere, its softness joyfully greeting your touch. Or maybe better vice-versa: your touch joyfully greeting its softness. Everything is wet here, everything drips, everything gleams. Everything is ALIVE. You feel like a bubble full of noxious gas in a children’s softly scented daycare. Afraid to let go the horrors you cling to inside, but longing for your deep tortured-bits to be touched by that humming song of life-full-ness.

And they tell me I have to de-humidify the building! Bah! Let me live in the mould and the mildew. Let the ferns and moss sprout on every wall, give me the trees beneath my feet, the rain in my hair, and the world as my room. But leave me a small dry corner in which to start a fire, yeah? Cause there’s no reason to make it one or the other. Is it two or is it three? Or is it one-with-two-faces-which-we-confuse-as-three? Or does it need to be anything at all? Perhaps it doesn’t, but try to tell yourself that when it’s cold and there’s a hole in your wall that the whole damp forest spills through, and you’re too afraid it’d be another social gaffe if you brought out the matches so you sit shivering.

This is fun. I like this. I hope to do more of this, yes, much more, and maybe at some point the whole thing will spontaneously burst into form, noise into signal, or better yet, noise into symphony. Yes. Let us keep our fingers crossed, and our rabbit’s feet fondled, eh? First-planted-seeds seem to grow the quickest around here, but, as always, there is the question of maintenance. Work is needed, struggle. If it were effortless, you’d be always satisfied, and if always satisfied, there’d be no friction, and if you were frictionless you’d be dead. What joy is there in death? But then, what joy in endless trips to the dungeon just to enjoy the light on your face when you finally remember how to get out? None, to my mind, and besides, you only forgot the way out in the first place because it’s no fun to trying to escape a dungeon when you already know all the exits. Bah! Another stupid game.

But then, what to do if it’s the only game in town? Go to a new town? Now there’s a step into the unknown. I’ve heard it said that there are only ever two real stories: A stranger enters town. Or someone leaves town. And yet here we are making a heads-or-tails decision out of a single coin again. We’ve escaped from the dungeon game into an exact and identical copy of the same thing. New towns might hold new games, but learning a new game means you’ve just built another dungeon around yourself. It’s not “the only game in town” it’s town-as-game, civilization-as-sideshow, but when the genii’s out the bottle how can it possibly be pushed back in? How can we convince it to stop distracting us?

The only way out is through, the only way forward is to pick up our tools where they were left (by ourselves? by others? it doesn’t matter) and carry on. The work continues, and we are only given the instructions as we need them. The blueprint’s too big to carry, so we get a page at a time and even that gets taken away when we get confused and start endlessly building door-frame after door-frame, instead of putting in a hallway. But they let us go on, regardless. After all, it’s our house we’re building. We have to live in it. There ain’t no one else ready to do the building, and it’s a sunuvabitch to train a new work-crew.

You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. (emphasis mine) – Wormwood

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.

The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.

So the pain body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.

If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane. – Tolle

Many I’s is a term which indicates the different feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ in a person: I think, I want, I know best, I prefer, I am happy, I am hungry, I am tired, etc. These feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ usually have nothing in common with one another, and are present for short periods of time. They tie in directly with Gurdjieff’s claim that man has no unity in himself. This lack of unity results in wanting one thing now, and another, perhaps contradictory, thing later. – Gurdjieff via wikipedia

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. – Bible

Remember the animals?

The seventh consciousness is called klesa mind.  It is a mind-consciousness (the sixth type of consciousness).  It is the ignorant moment of consciousness that immediately follows a sense consciousness, causing outer perceived and inner perceiving aspect to appear as separate entities.  The first moment of sense consciousness is free from this ignorance, but it is so swift, one is not aware of it and all one’s conceptual notions follow on the basis of the following moment, the klesa-mind. – KTG Rinpoche

1) Barriers often bar our path, sometimes for many years.  It can take a lot of work to get ourselves to the point where we feel ready to tackle them.  For sometimes, the root of the barrier exists in a place we dare not look.  Yet, upon climbing over a hated barrier for the first time, we often make the mistake of clinging to it with our back, huddled against the very thing you sought to escape.

2) We are so angered by the presence of a barrier in our life that we refuse to let it go, once we have climbed over it.  We must work to accept the thing we once fought against, for without accepting the fact of its existence, we do not feel safe letting it go.  After all, if we let it go, wouldn’t we just come upon it again?

3) Our very inability to accept the barrier, coupled with our desire to be rid of it, ties us to it deeply, in places we cannot bring ourselves to look.  In this case, the repetitive nature of the barrier, the fact that it comes up again and again in our lives, shows that this barrier is actually a friend, albeit one wearing the mask of an enemy.  It has come to show us just how deeply we have allowed this thing we dub “enemy” to sink its claws into us.

4) Coming to a bar across our path, we may eventually leap over it, but afterwards, we often rest the back of our knees against it, like a child hiding his unwanted diner underneath his chair.  We can end up carrying many heavy barriers behind our knees this way, and not even know they are there.  And then we wonder why they keep showing up in our lives.

5) All too readily, this leads to the loathing of the barrier, and sadly, this loathing is nothing more than another layer of pearlescent moulding we excrete, tying ourselves more tightly to this barrier that is enemy-friend.  We cannot bring ourselves to trust a reality in which such a barrier is allowed to exist.  And yet, our very inability to accept the barrier’s existence is what brings it back again and again.  Because despite our unwillingness to accept it, it does exist, otherwise, we would not be blocked in the first place.

6) If we cannot accept the existence of this truly existing thing, then the only thing we seem to be able to do is keep it around and willfully blind ourselves to it, hoping to ensure that it can never take us by surprise.  And so, it is obvious to see why it does take us by surprise, every single time.

7) Thus does clinging spring from hatred, desire from dislike.  Thus does the wheel spin without traction, bringing us the same challenges, over and over again, dressed in slightly different costumes. Can we ever break free of such things?  How could we, when we have built up such a pattern of willful ignorance to the very existence of the roots that give rise to these things.  Still, it could be possible, yes?  I do not presume to answer this, but I leave it up to you, who wish to, to try to see that weight they carry, and in seeing it truly, drop it without hesitation.

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton lately, as yesterday’s post makes pretty obvious, and there is a lot in that little book about surrendering to God, letting God come into your self and light you up from within. That we should not cling to “created things” but should seek God’s Love only, and let it permeate our whole being. This feels intuitively to be true to me, and I admit, I do enjoy the God language. If that’s not your thing, you can always switch the word “God” with “Reality”. It’s my belief that a proper understanding of either makes the difference between the two very small indeed.

However, as much as I like Merton’s idea of surrender to a higher power, it brought about a conflict in me when I first read it.  My teacher in the ways of the shaman, Malidoma Some, often points out that Spirit doesn’t like it when we approach It as one with an attitude of groveling, one who is somehow in deficit, with an attitude of “please sir (or mam, if you prefer), if it’s not too much trouble, could you please perhaps take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and possibly help me with this one small little request I have, please, I’m sorry, please please please?”.  He points out that, when confronted with such a request, Spirit will just ignore you, because Spirit prefers to deal with people who show competence and strength.  This too has felt intuitively true to me.

And this leaves me rather at an impasse.  Does the divine want our submission, our recognition that it is higher and that next to it we are as nothing, or does the divine want us to show it our strength and competence?  It seemed both couldn’t be true at the same time.  Was it simply a problem of mixing traditions?  Perhaps, but this really didn’t feel correct either.  I wasn’t mixing traditions so much as I was trying to understand the underlying truth that both traditions point to, and if there’s something wrong with that, kill me now, because that’s all my life is about, really.

While out for a jog a little later,  I was ruminating on Malidoma’s insistence that we not appear weak before Spirit, and I kept pondering the idea of what it means to be strong.  And then I remembered the Tarot:

The Strength card shows a lion, docilely allowing it’s mouth to be opened by a woman.  And this picture from a friend’s Facebook feed points to the same idea:

This is how it came to me to be understood. We are full formed beings, and it is our job in this life to integrate and re-member the different parts of our body/heart/mind/soul/spirit/whatever.  And we are to grow strong in this manner. But in the end, these things are all, and have always been, part of the Oneness of the Whole.  As we integrate ourselves, we integrate aspects of the Whole, and then we have to sacrifice this whole self to the Whole Self, allowing the Reality of the Divine (or the Divinity of Reality) to flow through us, offering up all in strength, humility, and modesty to that higher power that needs our strength to be strong in this world.

God
dissolved
my mind – my separation.
I cannot describe my intimacy with Him.
How dependent is your body’s life on water and food and air?
I said to God, “ I will always be unless you cease to Be,”
And my Beloved replied, “And I
would cease to Be
if you
died.”
-Teresa Of Avila

This love sacrifices all souls, however wise, however “awakened”
Cuts off their heads without a sword, hangs them without a scaffold.
We are the guests of the one who devours his guests
The friends of the one who slaughters his friends….
Although by his gaze he brings death to so many lovers
Let yourself be killed by him: is he not the water of life?
Never, ever, grow bitter: he is the friend and kills gently.
Keep your heart noble, for this most noble love
Kills only kings near God and men free from passion.
We are like the night, earth’s shadow.
He is the Sun: He splits open the night with a sword soaked in dawn….
-Rumi

Except the thing is, it’s not really a sacrifice, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the Truth of the Way things already Are.  And this process of building and dissolving, building and dissolving, goes on and on, possibly without end, until we die and are forced to admit that same very Truth.  And even then, we don’t have to if we don’t want to.

From “Pilgermann“:

“Every action is under His control,” said Firouz.  “How can that be, really? Think of the dreadful things that are done in this world every day.”

“The child is under the control of the parents, is it not,” said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘ yet must the child creep on its hands and knees before it can walk, and when it first walks it can only go a step or two before it falls.”

“True, true,” said Farouz.  “That’s all we are: little children creeping on our hands and knees.  The parent, however, doesn’t punish the child for falling, while Allah the Watchful will surely punish the sinner, will he not?”

“The child who falls when learning to walk has not the choice,” said Bembel Rudzuk, ” but the sinner has.”

“Then what was the use use of bringing the child into it at all?” said Firouz.  “It’s a useless analogy, it’s no help whatever.”

“It’s a perfectly useful analogy, ” said Bembel Rudzuk: “the consequence of not being able to walk is to fall and the consequence of not being able to maintain moral balance is also to fall.  How could it be otherwise?”

“To be in a fallen state,” said Firouz, “that isn’t so dreadful; all sorts of fallen people ride about on good horses wearing fine clothes and who can tell the difference?  I’m thinking about later, I’m thinking about the Fire where one burns and burns and is given molten brass to drink.  Do you think that’s really how it is?”

“I think the Fire is in the soul of each of us,” said Bembel Rudzuk: “those of us consigned to the Fire burn every day and every night.”

“Everything is burning,” said the Buddha, “burning with the fire of passion, with the fired of hatred, with the fire of stupidity.” (Vin. 21)

From “Pilgermann“:

My being was grating on this day as the teeth grate on a stone in the bread.

Many, many Americans come to me and ask for an African initiation, but I tell them no, that they should look into their own lives and the place to look is your suffering.  I’ve come to realize that there is some close affinity between what I may call the organized, indigenous initiation, and the almost random, unpredictable chain of suffering and pain that befalls just about everybody, whether it is here or elsewhere.  What I learned from it is that the similarity between the two is in the pain and the suffering—it does indeed serve a purpose.

I would like to believe that a major illness has to have a purpose; it has to have a function; otherwise, it wouldn’t just come like that.  My sense is that in the absence of what I may call organized initiatory pathways, somehow the individual spirit is strong enough to invoke its own initiation!

All this talk of “animals” has got me thinking.  If our desires and thoughts can be compared to animals that, when seen clearly, run about fairly randomly within the wilderness of our own naked awareness, what does that say about the whole “free will vs. determination” debate?  When desires, which are the source of any “willed” action, are seen to be separate, impermanent, component “creatures” which come and go as they will, can the idea of a personal will even exist?

Gurdjieff would have said yes; BUT in his system, the ability to “will” or “to do” was something only possible for a very realized being, impossible for most of us standard grade three-centered-beings.  The Buddha (and please do correct me if you think I’m wrong on any of this) would have said no; no-self + dukkha + impermanence leaves little ground for a “will” to take root.  Christians have the whole “thy will be done” thing.  And Hindus, I believe, are sort of all over the map about that, depending on which school of Hindu thought one subscribes to.

Since there is no unity among the great religions and traditions, we standard level folk can’t point any fingers and say “well, everyone says it’s like that, so it must be so.  And it’s more fun that way I think (which might be why they’ve done us the favor of disagreeing).  However, while appreciating the fun that comes along with any good mystery, I also kind of have my own opinion on the matter, one that was recalled to mind recently by the quote on “animals” from Herbert and Daumal.

To whit: “free will” takes as its base the idea that we can do what we want.  Yet this doesn’t take into account that we do not choose our desires.  That is, discovering that we desire a certain outcome, we cannot then choose to change desires and begin to desire a totally different outcome.  We can choose to act on one or another of our many desires, and we can choose the degree of free rein we allow them, but this is not the same as choosing what it is that we will. Given that we cannot choose to will, I do not see how we can actually claim to have anything a personal will.  If anything, we are engaged in a supremely difficult balancing act of different desires while things change around us at a rapid, rapid pace.  Not a good basis for saying that we control our own fates.

For me, this pretty much wraps up the whole “free will vs. determination” thing, in a fairly logical manner, without resorting to any sort of dogmatism.  Total free will is impossible, but, at the same time, it does not follow that everything is already 100% determined.  It’s a false argument.  Stuff just comes up, be it “external” stuff or “internal” stuff, and all we can do is choose when and how they react with each other.  There is choice in that, and some room to exercise a bit of will power, but only within limited options.  And chances are, we are much more limited by the options than we care to admit.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

So yeah, that’s my thoughts on the matter.  However, I do think there’s a good chance I’m missing something in the argument.  Does it hold weight?  Is it water-tight?  Since I personally quite like the whole explanation, it says to me that I need an outside opinion on that matter.  So, what do you say, oh wise and learned readership?  Am I missing any logical circuits there?  Anything unnoticed dimensions that make the whole thing much more ambiguous than what I’ve laid out above?  I’d actually like to see this picked apart here, so please, do me the favor of doing so.

A man, wandering late at night through a dark wood, came upon a large house.  Inside the house, there appeared to be a great celebration going on.  Lights, music, cheering; the man could smell food cooking and hoped to soon be inside, enjoying himself with all the other guests.  For with such a grand party, how could they turn away one lonely traveler?  The man searched around and around the house, looking for a way into the house.

On his third trip around, he finally noticed a small door, at the back of the house, away from the lights and sounds of the party.  This, it seemed, was the only way into the festivities.  He stepped up to the door, knocked once, sharply, and stepped back to await for the door to be opened for him.  He dusted off his clothes and rana  hand through his hair, hoping to make a good appearance.  Minutes passed, but no one came to the door.

He stepped back up to the door, knocked again, louder this time, and stood there waiting, looking up at the window over the door.  Still, no answer.  Desperate to find a place to rest his feet, fill his stomach, and converse with other human beings (for he had been alone in the woods a long time), the man turned his attention back to the door and began knocking and knocking and knocking.

Eventually, just has he was beginning to grow tired and his hands to sore, a light went on in a second story window above the door.  Revived by the hope that someone might hear him, the man renewed his pounding.  Still, though he hammered with all his might, no one came to the door, nor even to the lighted window on the second story.

A long time after that, when his hands were numb with the repeated efforts of banging on the door, he heard a faint noise in the hallway behind the door.  He grew frantic and began to bang and knock and hammer for all he was worth.  The muffled sound continued from behind the door, but still, no one opened it to let him in.

He pounded and pounded, until his hands were raw, and the door was stained with his blood.  At this point, he was so tired and hungry that all he knew was the knocking, the continual knocking against the door, and that he must keep it up at all costs, until the door was opened and he was allowed into the house.  At that point, he heard the rattle of the lock being turned back and saw the door knob jiggle back and forth.  A voice was speaking on the other side, but the man could not make out the words.  He fell to his knees in front of the door, begging, pleading to be let in.  But to no avail.

At last, the man gave up.  Cursing the house and its happy occupants, he turned around and began to walk back into the dark woods.   And just as he was about to step outside the warm glow of the light from the second story window, the door slowly creaked outwards and the master of the house stood in the doorway, a lighted candle in his hand.

“Good sir!” he cried. “I must apologize, for all your troubles, but I could never have hoped to open the door with you standing so close.  And even if I could, with all your knocking and pounding, I did not know what manner of guest you were.  Now I can clearly see you are a poor traveler in need of shelter.  Please, come and join our celebration, we have more than enough to provide for one more.  And we must bandage those wounds on your hands as well!”

So the man entered the house at last, had his wounds bandaged, and joined the party.  However, he did not make the best party guest, at least, not at first.  He could not easily shake the foul mood of being locked outside the house for so long, his hands were bandaged, and the other guests were startled by his tendency to knock repeatedly on any wooden surface within his reach.

Wind, Sand, Stars (Terre des Hommes in the original French title) is the telling of the real-life aviary exploits of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Price, when he was flying mail across North Africa and South America during the early years of air exploration. Which may sound boring but is soon revealed to be a riveting tale of humanity venturing blindly, but willingly, again and again into the unknown.

The resolution and strength with which these journeys were undertaken, given how little they had to go on once above the clouds, never ceased to amaze me. And still, they went, smiling, into that unmarked expanse of blue, over the cloud-hidden mountains, and, when they were lucky, landed safely at their destinations only to fly out again soon after.

Saint-Exupery’s narrative wanders in and out multiple stories, creating an abstract collage of beerhall-tales, bonhomie, and bona-fide wisdom. Yet he maintains his golden thread of wonder throughout, building to a pensive but hopeful climax with a call for the rebirth of the Spirit of Greatness in man, for “Only the Spirit, breathing on the clay, can create Man”.

Ah, just go read it it already; I’m done trying to sell you on it. And come back over the next several posts for several tasty excerpts.

Wisps of cloud flow by

Foam on an ocean of sky

My head opens wide

Purple monkey wrenches, flung through the air by red baboons.
Done they are, with working on the master’s cars.
Time travel and the pyramids fill their thoughts. Lost continents…

Whence Atlantis? And why Atlantis?
Too much said already; the dryness comes.
Descend, oh seeker! Lower yourself into the watery depths.
Soak, become muddied, deluded, diluted. Disillusioned.

In the bamboo forests of the mind, peppered with blind ninjas,
Thoughts crash and slash each other, when by random chance they meet.
Such a war of double speak. Can you contain these multitudes?

More importantly, should you?

I feel the desert returning; the jungle people are growing tired.
The sea people are laughing as they ride the tides away.
The desert people sit, staring dully at the whispering sands around their feet.

Is this, then, to be the source? The chrysalis and the butterfly?
Perhaps we are better off without such dusty butterflies…

But if not this, not now, not here…
Then what, when, where?

It is not as if it can’t happen. But will it ever happen?

To retain our relevance, we must grow within and out of.

Have we not learned by now, how birth is a bloody, horrible struggle?

Labor pains, and in the seventies, the water broke.
More blood, more struggle…
Now we must push! And breathe!

Let them tell you it can’t be done. Let them tell you it is not worth the struggle.
Let them continue to stare at the dust, these desert people.
We will reclaim our jungle. And if it is not to be reclaimed, we will build it anew.

The kingdom of heaven is inside you and all around you.
Why will you not-see-it?

So, here’s one attempt at capturing a moment from my sesshin session last week.

During a sesshin (in the Mountains and Rivers Order, at least), the resident teachers or senior students will give a talk each day, around mid-afternoon, between lunch and dinner, in the middle of the day’s longest period of meditation.   At the most recent sesshin I attended, Ryushin Sensei, Abbot of the monastery, gave two linked talks, both about the first Chinese Zen master, Boddhidharma’s student Hui K’o.  For those unfamiliar with Zen lore, Hui K’o was reputed to have studied all the different traditions of his time and still felt his understanding was incomplete.  Then, in a dream, he was told to go to Shaolin (yes, that Shaolin) in search of a teacher who had come from India to spread “Chan” (the Chinese name for Zen). He came to the temple at Shaolin and found Bodhidharma seated in meditation, facing a wall. He asked to be taught by Bodhidharma and was completely ignored.

Undaunted, he stood outside in the snow all night, refusing to be turned away. The next morning when Bodhidharma saw him still standing in the cold, he asked Hui K’o what he wanted. Again, Hui K’o asked to be taught, and again Bodhidharma turned him away. So Hui K’o took out a sharp sword, cut of his left arm, and presented it to Bodhidharma as an offering of his sincerity. Bodhidharma, as Ryushin put it, shrugged, and said “I guess you’ll do…”

Although a harsh story, one has to keep in mind that this is a bit of a legend, and as such, should be taken as being “more true than it is real”, in a Joseph Campbell kind of way. Hui K’o, it was later pointed out, would become Bodhidharma’s only enlightened heir.  Towards the end of his life, he gave up teaching at Shaolin entirely and retired in anonymity to a nearby city, where he taught and worked as a toilet cleaner. Supposedly, he loved cleaning toilets. Later, he ran afoul of a more prominent teacher on the local scene, and was ordered to be put to death, to which he went calmly. (Night)shades of Socrates…..

In any case, the point at hand was how we cling to things, to ideas, self-images, and how acting as if these things are really our self is what makes us suffer. An example was given of an (unnamed) student who had lost their black-berry, and how the loss of that black-berry caused so much stress because of how much identity had been placed into it.  This was not meant as a condemnation, more as an example of the way the mind works.

And yet, even if, like Hui K’o we were to lose something much more intimately connected to us, like an arm, we continue on, still a whole being, while the arm lays there, dripping blood on the carpet, yet clearly not a part of us any more. How much less should a blackberry or a self-concept be clung to as a form of identity, when we can clearly let it go much more easily than we can an arm, and still remain what we are: a complete being.

Also up for discussion in a different talk (given by Shugen Sensei of the Temple here in Brooklyn) were some writings of Dogen’s, where he says to “sit in zazen, and when a self-concept arises, enter into it, with eyes sharp and ears sharp.” This interested me, as the basic instructions we receive in Zazen are to focus on the breath, and, when a thought rises, to see it and let it go, bringing our focus back on the breath. This something I’ve been struggling with for a few years, despite my feeling of having been helped immensely by my practice, I’m still not quite sure I’m doing it right.

Dogen’s advice seemed to imply a deeper level for me in the practice. I am not just a self watching my thoughts arise, I am an awareness, watching for self-concepts to arise/solidify. Entering into them with/as awareness, “eyes sharp and ears sharp”, I watch them, investigate what they are, and then, low-and-behold, they simply fade away. This felt much more effective to me than simply watching the thoughts arise and pass away (which so far has felt more like flipping the channel but remaining parked in front of the TV).

So, having come to this conclusion from the talk, I wanted to immediately sit and begin put my insight-into-practice into practice. But no, sadly, after the talks, we go for walking meditation outside, up and down the mountain.  After all the sitting, its a great way to get the blood flowing again, so I didn’t in any way begrudge it. But the whole time spent walking, Ryushin’s talk and the investigation of the self-concepts turned around in my mind.

Then, coming down from the mountain, back to the monastery, we were walking through the parking area when I looked down and saw a snakeskin on the ground. And it hit me. All ideas of self, all concepts we hold on to about who we are, are really just sensations that have arisen inside of us, in response to something that was occurring in the moment.  We have taken these things to be “what we are” when they are really just a form that “what we are” has taken on in response to the moment. Like a snake, we need to let these self concepts pull away, or else we will constatly be snagging them on things as we go along. This causes suffering, and we were better off just letting them go and moving on. Nothing to hold on to here folks, move along….

Or to be a bit more pithy about it, it’s the skin that gets stuck, not the snake.

So, big insight there. Very happily I bring it back into the zendo to sit, and it slowly begins to occur to me that a large part of my self-concept is that of “someone with a spiritual practice”, “someone who wants to be enlightened”. And has been pointed out to me on tumblr “By definition you can’t get what you want.” Because in order to want something, you must necessarily be defining yourself as someone who doesn’t have it.  A self definition you clearly must give up, if you ever want to experience having anything.

Anyway, we could argue semantics about that little insight for weeks, I’m sure, but that’s what struck me, and it’s really made me re-examine my practice and my motives behind it (an ongoing theme for me, it seems).

At the end of a sesshin, back in the old days, you would have something called Sozan, where you would go before your teacher and present a summary of your experience over that sesshin. Maizumi Roshi, the teacher of Daido Roshi (Daido Roshi being the founder of the MRO), changed that when he started holding sesshins in LA. It became “Open Sozan” where, during a period of meditation, anyone in the group could speak out about their experience, sharing with their fellow practitioners. Which is nice, because this is the first time the silence is lifted the entire week, outside of speaking with the teacher during face-to-face dokusan during meditation.

So, during open Sozan, I told my little story of the snakeskin, not in so many words as I have here, more a quickly spouted, rather emotional bit a speech. I was happy with how it turned out then, and I’m pretty happy with how its turned out here as well. And with that, this sesshin story is pretty much over.

Oh, except for one last thing. Later that morning, after Open Sozan, I went out to the parking area to check on the snakeskin. It took me a while to find it again, but when I did, I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t a snakeskin after all. It was, in fact, an entire snake…

This morning, I read the latest post up at Ann Seeker’s blog, where she’s been summarizing her experience of reading David Appelbaum’s book The Stop.  I bookmarked the article for later reading because I thought it was interesting.  In it, she says:

He is talking about an awareness of a “movement of energy” that takes place before our “our inner activities” take form. These activities or functions are our thoughts, desires, judgments, self-will, etc. These are functions that take on forms and we perceive them. But prior to the taking of form, there is a movement of energy and this can be perceived as well. He says, “This is the Life of our life, that which is a source for particular undertakings of functional life. Perception thus takes note of how percipient energy enters life on our ordinary level, how it animates forms of life, and how it remains distinct from these forms.”

The idea that there is an action of energy already in motion that our conscious mind responds too, which we experience as making a decision ties in with some of the early stages of Buddhist Vipassana meditation, as outlined in Practical Insight Meditation by Mahasi Sayadaw:

With further progress in meditation, the conscious state of an intention is evident before a bodily movement occurs.  The meditator  first notices that intention.  Though also at the start of his practice, he does notice “intending, intending” (for instance, to bend an arm), he cannot notice that state of consciousness directly.  Now, at this more advanced stage, he clearly notices the consciousness consisting of the intention to bend.  So he notices first the conscious state of an intention to make a bodily movement; then he notices the particular bodily movement.

Which to me is basically saying that though we think the body is moving because we are thinking about moving and moving the body, there is a subtle mistake here in that first the intention to move arises on its own, in response to conditions, and then our body moves accordingly.  I’m slowly reading through this book, though not very quickly as I’m trying to assimilate each stage before moving on to the next one.  As my meditation practice lately has been slacking, I can’t say I’ve made much progress.  Plus, the Burmese Vipassana seems to be at odds with my Zazen, so I’m still working out how to proceed there.  But the book does come highly recommended, so if anyone is interested in starting a meditation practice, I’d offer it as a clear and easy-to-read guide to Vipassana.

Anyway, the really interesting thing happened when Max posted a comment today linking back to an old post at Tim Boucher’s blog, where Tim discusses Aldous Huxley’s take on the brain as behaving as a sort of reductive-valve:

Henri Bergson has suggested that one of the main functions of the brain and nervous system is to eliminate activity and awareness, rather than produce it.

(tie that in with my last post on Dr Dan Siegal’s definition of mind…)  Tim goes on to say:

Huxley explains that our mind has powers of perception and concentration that we cannot even begin to imagine. But our main business is to survive at all costs. To make survival possible, all of our mind’s capabilities must be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain.

Some researchers are studying this effect. They believe that this reducing-valve effect may be very similar to the jamming equipment used to block out offensive radio broadcasts. The brain constantly produces a kind of static, cutting down our perception and reducing our mental activity.

This static can actually be seen. When you close your eyes, you see all sorts of random pictures flashing through your mind. It is impossible to concentrate on any one of them for more than an instant, and each image is obscured by a host of others superimposed over it.

That static is what is toned down through meditation.  See Kenneth Folk’s handy little flash graphic here.

and then Tim goes on to say:

Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” talks about a “reducing” valve in the brain that limits the amount of sensory stimulus that brain allows to be processed. This reducing value, in part, may be the thalamus. In schizophrenia, that reducing valve is more open than it should be; thus a person with schizophrenia receives too much stimulus and their brain has a hard time interpreting the inputted sensory stimulus. This may result in the positive symptoms (hallucinations and psychoses) we see in schizophrenia. When sensory overload occurs, some brain functions may shut down resulting in the negative symptoms (poverty of speech, withdrawl).

So if anything, following this breadcrumb trail of information that seems to have been thrown my way today, it seems that the experience of schizophrenia might be fairly likened to being enlightened too early, to having the connection to Mind-At-Large opened before we’re ready to handle the loads on information that pours at/through us.   I can see this creating a sort of feedback loop, where the mental program of consciousness, our sense of self determination that somehow seems to float above what’s actually going on inside our brain (as shown by the Mahasi Sayadaw quote above) is pushed away from the center of existence where it usually rests, resulting both in the positive and negative symptoms mentioned above.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m getting at here, but it all seems to point to something.  I do know one thing though: it’s not really about schizophrenia.

One other thing this brings to mind is this short little movie (which won a shit-ton of awards).  Watch it, it’s heartwrenchingly beautiful:

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.

I’d originally found this film over at Imagining the 10th Dimension, where Rob had posted it a few weeks after he made his own post about schizophrenia and the effect of time on the brain (except remember, this isn’t actually about schizophrenia).  From Rob’s post, where he is quoting a New Scientist magazine article:

Schizophrenia certainly seems to affect people’s perception of time. If someone with schizophrenia is shown a flash of light and a sound separated by 1/10th of a second, they typically have trouble discerning which came first. Such people also estimate the passing of time less accurately than most others. Now a flurry of studies has shown that if you upset the internal clocks of healthy people, you can create some of the symptoms and delusions associated with schizophrenia.

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane’s response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players’ performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects’ strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That’s uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Rob goes on to explain his opinion on the subject:

Fascinating! I found this particularly interesting to think about within the context of recent studies that show people can form their decisions to do one thing or another well before they are consciously aware of their decision: in Is Creativity a Quantum Process we briefly looked at some articles (like this one from the Wall Street Journal) discussing the recently published work of psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya of London’s Goldsmith College. Amazingly, Dr. Bhattacharya’s brainwave monitoring experiments revealed evidence that people can have arrived at a solution to a problem as much as 8 seconds before their conscious minds become aware of it!

There have been arguments proposing that results such as these demonstrate that our free will is an illusion, because the neuro-chemical activity that forms our decisions may be some inevitable “behind the scenes” process which we interpret as our free will by the time we consciously feel ourselves choosing (and persons familiar with this project will know that I strongly disagree with any conclusions that free will doesn’t exist).

I tend to agree with Rob on this, that just because our free will might not be quick and immediate as we think it is, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Its just that our consciousness is not exactly in touch with the core process at work in our being.  Becoming aware of these process, it seems would both destroy the feeling that we were somehow separate from them, but also give our free will a better, more holistic expression.

Our brain is a perfectly reflecting gem, and its always perfectly reflecting.  We just have to clear out the conscious static (caused by our mind’s very real and correct desire to survive) so as to get in touch with that place inside our self where the truth of what is, is focused.  Zap, moon in a dew drop indeed.

The inner “I” is in touch with reality but cannot see outside of it.

The outer “I” is aware of possibilities, but loses touch with the real.

Oh, this fourth dimensional existence!

What can we do but partake in the active while keeping within the passive?

From this then, perhaps the fruit will come forth,

and then can the fattened calf be killed for the feast.

I recently expressed an opinion in the comments on Avatar (which, as the post title implies, I haven’t seen yet) saying I wasn’t too excited about it, other than to see the special effects (I hear they’re groundbreaking, yes?).  After all, I saw Pocahontas when I was younger, so I wasn’t expecting anything all that new from the story line.

The basic stance most reviewers seem to have taken on it is that this a story about  “civilized” man reconnecting with the natural world.  The corporation/marines attempts at rape and pillage are foiled by one of their own who “went native”.  And yes, there is a racial/colonial subtext going on here as well, but really, just a more divisive take on the same idea.  Ran Prieur wrote up a pretty thorough debunking of the whole “White Messiah” aspect of the movie, which I suggest reading if you’re interested in exploring that aspect of it.  For the sake of the argument I’m making here though, I just want to focus on the soldiers representing a technological, rationalistic society and the Na’vi representing the natural world (or perhaps “representing being in touch with the natural world” is more precise).

This seems to be the main dichotomy of the movie, the core conflict with which Cameron engages the audience and attempts to get his message across.  Not a very complex message, it seems, and certainly one we’ve all come across before elsewhere.  After Titanic (and despite its success), Cameron was not a director I expected to really break any new mythological or memetic ground (whatever it we want to call the nourishment that a good story provides).

But then I remembered an article on a movie blog I read regularly, where Cameron was quoted as saying (in regards to Sigourney Weaver’s character):
“Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Here, Cameron seems to be exploring a dichotomy that’s the exact opposite of the first.  If this is the metaphor being explored here, then the Na’vi become characters in a video game, and, supported by the massive special effects, their world becomes one of those virtual reality playgrounds we were all promised way back in the 90′s.  The marines are only downloading themselves into the Na’vi bodies and exploring the digital world, which makes their rather obvious callousness toward the Na’vi people more easily understood.

(plus, where have I heard the phrase “NAVI” before…?)

Granted, this metaphor does seem to break down when we consider that mining a virtual world for resources seems at first rather unreasonable.  However, there is one thing that such a highly developed model of reality could offer that would make this virtual reality metaphor more believable:  What they have is information, the information created by an entire virtual world made to run as a model of our own, and the need to go into that world in order to collect it while the program is running.

The more I thought about these two opposing metaphors, the more I realized that though each seems to explain the movie well enough, it does so to an unsatisfying degree.  It’s already in the top 5 films ever made (or whatever, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and neither really seems to validate its popularity.  Movies don’t have this kind of effect on people unless there’s something really new at the heart of the story, a message that people didn’t know they needed to hear.

It wasn’t until I started overlapping these two metaphors that I really began to understand what I’ve come to think this movie is about (and why I want to go see it).  It is the equating of nature with a programmable environment.  And it is done in a metaphorical/mythological way that people can grasp on a subconscious level without needing to understand the specifics.  To be there to watch those two memes combine into one is something I do not want to miss.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is some sort of conspiracy enacted by Cameron (and/or some group of shadowy figures), rather that this could be seen as an important part of our global cultural story, something we had  a desperate need to to develop and digest at this point in our history.  Maybe if we can learn to stop seeing nature as an enemy, to befriend it, and to understand that we can control it and program it, we’ll stop needing to destroy it so much.  Cameron does much here to combat our instinctive pre-historic need to see nature as always “red of tooth and claw”, and I would guess that this is why the movie has proven to be so popular.  This, to my mind, makes it a story we all very much want and need to hear right now.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan said way back in 1970, the invention of the satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” We’re just finally catching up to this now, and I want to be there to watch as it happens.  Who knows where this is going to lead to as it unfolds; I just hope we still have a chance to make use of what learn here.

Just finished reading a great post over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension”: Consciousness in Frames per Second.

In it, Rob Bryanton discusses the “frame rate” of human consciousness.  He explains that it likely varies person-to-person but is “in that magic range somewhere between 20 and 40 cycles per second, (where) we do indeed seem to have just such an experience, where things start to blend together into a seamless stream.”

Go and read the article.  In fact, subscribe to the blog and check out the animation as well.  Rob’s work has done a lot to help create my current conceptual framework.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Where this leads me though, is back towards meditation and enlightenment, perennial topics at Reclusland.  Here’s a recent post over at dharmaoverground that gives a good explanation of where I’m coming from.

Jarrod posts:
“The guided portion (of the meditation) ended and I felt compelled to continue my sit, but started to just note sensations (rising, falling, sitting, etc.) Pretty quickly the noting went into auto-pilot and picked up pace significantly. I just let it go and tried not to get in the way. At the same time a distinct pulsing sound/sensation began that was acting like a metronome to the noting. The whole process fell into a nice rhythm with probably 2-3 pulses per second and 3-4 notes per pulse. Each breath was noted by “rise, rise, rise, rise” “fall, fall, fall, fall” in this distinct rhythm plus additional notes between the breaths.”

Then Jackson ellucidates:
It sounds as though your shift in to “auto-pilot” noting was a shift from 1st ñana (Mind & Body) to 2nd ñana (Cause & Effect). First, one comes to know directly that both physical and mental phenomena are “objects”. Then, one notices not only that intention precedes action (and that both arise on their own), but also that noticing occurs automatically as well, and only when there’s an object to notice. Things start to speed up, just as you described.

A more in depth analysis of the 1st and 2nd ñanas can, I’m sure, be found in Daniel Ingram’s book.  I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but it is online here for those who don’t mind reading the entire thing off a screen.

Anyway, the point being that somewhere along the meditative path, assuming that you are working with a practice of “noting” (that is, watching the rising and falling the breath in the abdomen, or naming/labeling  all sensations as they arise, or any other practice where the focus in on change, I believe), the process apparently speeds up, and the practitioner must let go and simply allow the rising and passing away of sensations as they occur on their own.  This seems to happen as we try to bring our focus onto more and more distinct “things”, deliberately creating “frames” within our experience, while at the same time, pulling our awareness back from the thing thus framed.  As Rene Daumal says in Le Contre-Ciel: “I am that which thinks, not that which is thought.”

And now back to the 10th Dimension post, where Rob says: “some humans operate at a more accelerated “frame rate” than others, and that our frames per second experience of time is directly related to our state of mind and our health.” This, to me, points to a connection between the Buddhist conception of equanimity and our ability to actively notice smaller and smaller “frames” of consciousness.  That what truly makes us unhappy are the things which we miss happening, things that fall between the cracks of our awareness.  Places where the radio station fuzzes out, and we miss a few bars of that song that’s always playing, regardless of whether we listen to it or not.

Neuroscientifically speaking, this is likely related to what is know as our “working memory”.  This is the sort term memory that we use while performing tasks such as remembering a telephone number or a series of words in a sentence, similar to the RAM memory of your computer:

“working memory is a chalkboard on which we rapidly scrawl and erase information…..When we hear the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a cluster of neurons fires during each word. When one cluster fires, it suppresses the others momentarily, preventing the sentence from coming out scrambled….As the neurons for “It,” “was,” “the,” and “best” fire in sequence, the brain creates pathways from one point, or brain state, to the next. The more powerfully each excited cluster can inhibit or suppress all others in the sequence from firing, the more solid these pathways….As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That is normally not biologically feasible. “Synapses can’t be stronger than that, the brain is a very complex biochemical machine.”…Mathematical models like these may seem removed from the gritty reality of gray matter and neural chemistry, but they provide a critical connection between what people actually experience and the hidden mechanisms inside the brain.”

Working memory is crucial for cognitive control of emotions: It allows us to consider information we have and reason quickly when deciding what to do as opposed to reacting automatically, without thinking, to something…mothers whose negativity was most strongly linked with their child’s challenging behaviors were those with the poorest working memory skills. The authors surmise that “for mothers with poorer working memory, their negativity is more reactive because they are less able to cognitively control their emotions and behaviors during their interactions with their children.”

Try not to get too caught up in the number 7 mentioned in that first link.  Instead, just keep in mind that the more things you hold in your working memory, the more those things must suppress the rest your mind in order to continue existing.  And the more suppression going on, the worse we are at controlling our emotions (and the further we drift from equanimity).

The practice of noting then, can be seen as a purposeful digitalization of something that is, at heart, an analogue process: the experience of being an awareness-within-reality.  The practitioner is attempting to break through the digitizing process, to fall-between-the-frames so to speak, and realize that, as Buddha said, “All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting.” thus coming into the direct experience of that which is non-digital, non-component.

Am I saying that we should all go watch high-frame-rate movies, and try to catch the individual frames?  Stare into the flickering light of the projector until we can catch the black space between the still images? No, not really.  That’s the wrong direction, entirely too mediated.  The point is not to train your mind with a movie camera and then to bring that trained mind back into real life with your newly developed “super powers”.  The point is that real life is already the ultimate tool for training your mind in this way.  You just have to pay close attention: closer, closer, fall between the cracks, identify as the space between the cracks, and bam! there it-you is-are.

But if you do want to watch a movie, here’s a good one. (I very much want to embed this, but it’s been disabled…)

“Reason calls the grave a gateway of peace: and instinct shuns it.”
- T. E. Lawrence [The Mint (Penguin Books 1984)]

I went to a screening of Lawrence of  Arabia a few months back.  Got to see a full color print in an actual theater (B.A.M. Rose Cinemas, for any fellow Brooklynite’s out there, which only heightened the experience of being back in an old-timey theater).   It’s an beautifully shot movie, all the more so because it was filmed in 1962..

The movie was full of great quotes too:

(context: Ali has just shot Lawrence’s guide at a deserted well in the middle of the desert)
Sherif Ali: Have you no fear, English?
T.E. Lawrence: My fear is my concern.

(context: Lawrence has just put out a match with his bare fingers)
William Potter: Ooh! It damn well ‘urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

I like these, not because it’s typical bad assery, but because in both scenes, the level of focus Peter O’Toole was able to portray as Lawrence is palpable.  His is scared, and it does hurt.  But he’s holding his focus while inside that, and it shows.

My favorite, though, was this one, where Lawrence breaks down and gives up on his winter campaign after being tortured (but not recognized) by a leader of the Turkish Army:

T.E. Lawrence: A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants!

He says this, and follows it with “and what decides what he wants? This!” and he points at his skin.  But to make this into a racial statement is to miss an opportunity for something much greater I think.  After all, what does decide what a man wants?  In all the talk of free will versus destiny that I’ve ever heard, no one’s ever brought up the fact that we do not seem to be free to choose what we want.  How can it be free will if there’s no conscious choice of desire?  Theoretically, for true free will, we would be able to pick a desire, and then allow it to begin to act on us, to move us to it’s music and make us dance as we want.  It should be a tool, not a drive to give into or to resist.  Show me someone able to do that, and I’ll believe in true free will.  : )

Anyway, long story short, it’s an awesome movie, go watch it.  It also made me really interested in T. E. Lawrence as well.  If this is what the movie business makes of his life, the real story must be a lot more interesting.  I’ve considered reading his massive autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph“ but it seems the best edition of it (closest to what he wanted it to be) was the 1922 unabridged Oxford text.  Which is conveniently both out of print and not for sale used. (If anyone has a copy they’re looking to get rid of, hit me up!)  I know I won’t read it twice, so I’d rather make sure it’s the right edition if I do read it.

That’s Lawerence, second from the right.
The guy in the front is Obi Won Kenobi Prince Faisal I of Iraq

I’ve been meaning to do this for a few weeks now, but reality seemed to keep conspiring against it.  But I’m betting that’s because, on some level, I’m rather loathe to reveal any details of my actual, real, analogue life on here.  Which I need to push through, I think, as I’d like to have a little more life in my writing . As Robert Frost said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” (thanks for that, J)

So, to that end, a quick wrap up on my Ango Training experience.

- I’ve kept up the Chi Kung in the mornings, more regularly, I have to admit, than I’ve kept up my actual meditation practice. I feel I’ve reached a kind of plateau with this which I’m really happy with right now.  The quick energy boosts I used to get from running through the forms are no longer quite so strong, but my energy’s comfortably at a higher level more often, and I managed to fight off what I thought was going to be a rather nasty cold, while still managing some late nights, too much coffee, and too much wine over Thanksgiving.  It was rather strange to recognize all the symptoms that I usually take to mean the low energy and listless of a cold are about to sink in, only to find out that they simply never did.

- I also managed to keep up with the weekly yoga class, and I think that has benefited me as much, if not more, than the daily Chi Kung.  I was lucky enough to find a really wonderful teacher, who’s been teaching for quite a long time, and, well, I’m not sure what else to say on that, other than that I’m really grateful to have stumbled into the class.

- My meditation practice has deepened as well, I believe.  Although there were days where I didn’t sit, this is the most regular I’ve ever been in my practice, and I’m really starting to understand what it means to be with the breath.  It comes and it goes, but when I hit it just right, it’s pretty great.  I am somewhat aware that this is probably more a bliss/concentration state than anything else, but I don’t think it’s quite as cut and dry as that with Zazen.  Next big thing on my list is to wade into Danial Ingram’s “Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha,” so hopefully that’ll clear some stuff up for me.

- As for my writing project, I did manage to write every day of Ango up until the day before the art presentation, and I hand copied them out into a blank book.  I decided to call it “Liber Quintus Ignis” (or, “book of the fifth fire”) after a school of mysticism contemporary to the Buddha, that would sit inside a cross of four fires, and stare up at the sun until they went blind (the sun being the fifth fire).  This supposedly lead to enlightenment.  Clearly kind of a stupid practice, and I never actually stared at the sun, but I did manage to get some poetry out of it that I’m fairly happy with.  I’m considering what I want to do with it as far as publishing it, but I don’t think I’ll do it on this blog.  It wouldn’t really fit the content of what this blog has become I think.  Perhaps I’ll start another…  A happy side of effect of copying out 72 poems by hand while in a somewhat meditative state, over a period of several days, is that my hand writing (which has always been graciously described as chicken scratch) has improved greatly, particularly when I bring consciousness to the act of writing by hand.

- Finished all the reading I planned to and more, and I do recommend all the books I mentioned.   I think next time, I’ll need to make a bigger list, if I want it to sustain me through the whole period.  Also, I have a newfound respect for the depth of Dogen Zenji’s thought.   It is no wonder that Zen has lasted so long, coming from such a mind.

- I made it to the Reggie Ray retreat, and I highly recommend sitting with Reggie. His combination of mediation and somatic body work is great, and I think, pretty unique.  I got to learn a lot about the Vajrayana tradition (as taught by Chogyam Trungpa) as well.

- I did not make it to the Ken Cohen Chi Kung retreat, as I decided last minute to save the money and vacation days.  From what I’ve heard of Mr. Cohen, it would have been an a great retreat, but I still stick by my decision at this point.

- For my take on the Thich Nhat Hanh talk, see here.

All in all, it was a great experience.  What I took away from it the most was the amazing degree to which, when you take your practice seriously, it’ll lift your life up in ways you’d never imagine.  I’m definitely signing up again in the Spring!

In the meantime, my studies are bringing me into a more Gurdjieffian territory.  I’m researching some of his lesser known pupils, mainly William Segal (who was a student of both the Gurdjieff Work and Zen Buddhism) and Rene Daumal (a poet who died at the age of 36 after a lifelong search for truth).  It seems there’s some steps being taken to make “The Work” a little more well known, which is something I’m definitely in favor of.

I do plan on continuing to post here as well, but I’m also feeling some trepidation as well.  As much as I enjoy putting my thoughts out here for you all to read, I’m having some sense that maybe silence might be a better option for a while.  Or at least a limited silence.  I’ve noticed how quickly delusion can be expelled, and how that can change things on a pretty deep level, as far as what you consider important and unimportant (or worse, harmful).  As that Ajahn Chah quote I posted kind of hinted at, I’m not looking to be the guy who needs to know everything about the person who shot him with an arrow, before he pulls the arrow out.  “We must arrange our lives to support good practice”, and I don’t want this to come between me and my practice.  I want this to be one aspect of my practice.  Something I’ll have to keep working on, but don’t worry, I have no plans to shut things down here (didn’t I just mention something about starting another one of these? jeez…)

So stay tuned, kiddies.  It’s great having you all here.  A strong practice to all, and to all a good night.

It has been said that the more you study physics and biology, the more amazing it becomes that anything exists at all.  That the universe exists and that we exist to experience it is seen as a more and more unlikely occurrence.  Once you come to understand how different things would be if, say, the weight of a proton was just a tiny bit heavier, or if the force of gravity was a little more forceful, the more obvious it becomes that there could just as easily be nothing here at all.

However, like a lot of things that seem highly unlikely but still undergo the formality of actually occurring, there’s a different way to look at this that cuts like Occam’s Razor through the unlikeliness: Perhaps things are the way they are because there’s life here.  Perhaps it’s not that consciousness, at some point in the distant past, sprang out of matter.  Instead, perhaps matter exists because of consciousness.

Maybe, as reality came into being (however you want to explain that, be it “fiat lux!” or a BIG BANG), consciousness had to feel things out, had to reach out into the dark and wait until it could grab onto something solid.  In Zen, there’s a saying that enlightenment is like grouping behind you in the dark for a pillow.  I imagine the birth of the universe could have been something like that, a blind fumbling in the dark until suddenly, “ahah!”  consciousness touches space and space wobbles into a wave of energy and vacuum, which them complexifies into matter, then into life, and then into humanity.

A similar comparison would be the tuning of a musical instrument, trying to find the exact right pitch.  Once one string is tuned, you move onto the next one.  Perhaps the laws were kind of like that, with consciousness pushing further into space after each law dropped into place.

Alternatively, it could be said that the universe exists as a broad spectrum of possible laws, and that life only exists within the slices of the spectrum with the laws to support it.  Either way though, whether there’s only one storyline or a whole array of branches, it doesn’t matter because the end result’s the same here: life and the laws that support it are indivisible.  Whether universes exist where the physical laws make life impossible is kind of a moot point, I think, at least while we’re still alive.

The view that the reality exists the way it does because it springs out of consciousness (rather than consciousness springing out of matter at some point), is currently known as Biocentricism, which I first head about this over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension” (thanks Rob!).  Robert Lanza, who first proposed the theory, has 7 main priciples behind it:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Which (as wikipedia seems to suggest) is a bit close to solipsism.  But that’s only the case if:
1) Consciousness only exists inside human beings.
2) All human beings actually are conscious (and don’t just hover on the borderlands of consciousness).

If we don’t accept both those two premises, then those 7 principles deserve another reading…

The point here is that, as recent conversation on this blog have lead me to think, this same urge, this fumbling in the dark, might be what’s responsible for everything.  It’s something we’ve labeled as “evolution” and mistakenly described as the ability for a species to successfully exist and procreate.  There’s never been a “why” behind this.  Why procreate?  Simply to procreate?

Perhaps there’s more to it than this.  Perhaps consciousness is something that has existed all along, somehow apart from the material world, and that as it comes into the material world, it “evolves” the material world  to better allow for the further embodiment of consciousness within it.  When I said above that “consciousness touches space”, perhaps a better way of saying this would be that consciousness and space broke away from each other, so that one could observe the other.  And that since then, consciousness has been trying to build itself back into space, for the sake of interacting with it.

Anyway, what originally got me thinking about this was a comparison between the laws of the universe and karma.  Past behavior creates an inertia that allows for present existence.  Within the human mind, this works as memory, but within  the physical/animal world, it works as DNA.   In the physical/mineral world, it works as molecules/atoms.  Beyond that, it works as the laws of physics.  Each gets locked into place, simply because it has proven, so far, to be the best way for allowing consciousness to embody itself in matter.  And what we are to do every moment with our thoughts is to try to find a way to further combine the two within ourselves.

In a way, it’s like God split in two, and each half is seeking to combine with the other in such a way as to create little pockets of wholeness throughout, to experience wholeness within splitness.  Except that God never actually split, so this whole thing is really more of a game than anything else…

But that’s maybe a little too esoteric for my liking.  So instead, I’ll leave you with a song and a picture.  Because in the end, my attempt here is at a new kind of poetry, not a new kind science.

(cause we all shine on, all the time)

Just a shot in the dark with that title…

As pointed out this article in Wired UK (found via Klint Finley’s Mutate!),  Google recently unveiled that their NAdroid phones will use a new internet protocol known as DTN (delay tolerant networking, something created with the help of the JPL).  This is an alternative to the current TCP based internet that we all know, love, and run rampant on every day.  As the Wired UK article points out, Google was “eventually forced to acknowledge that TCP simply couldn’t cut the mustard, with massive delay and data loss caused by celestial motion rendering TCP useless.”

“There was a little problem called the speed of light,” joked a typically playful (Vint) Cerf, as he outlined the idea to the OpenMobileSummit conference in San Francisco. “When Earth and Mars are closest, we’re 35 million miles apart, and it’s a three and a half minute trip one way, seven minutes for a round trip. Then when we’re farthest apart, we’re 235 million miles – 20 minutes one way, 40 minutes round trip.“

So Google went looking for something that didn’t need a reliable connection.  DTN was just the thing, as it sets up to buffer (you know what that is if you’ve ever watched a video on the internet) all communications until a stable connection is established.  Basically, it’ll hold your email to Mars until it’s sure the Martians are able to pay attention.

Exciting stuff; the idea of a space based internet system is a good one.  Although the Wired article claims that “most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication”, not everyone thinks so.  In fact, DARPA is looking to build just such a (albeit groundbased) system for inter-satellite communication by 2012.  A recent (and lengthy) comments conversation with Reclusland regular Speedbird explores the topic from a slightly different angle.  If you want to read through the conversation, you can start here.

We (or at least I) tend to get a bit overly mystical when talking about this stuff, but that’s just a personal penchant for trying to clarify connecting patterns seen between the “post-information-scarcity” technology revolution we find ourselves in the midst of,  and older, mystical/numinous ways of seeing the world and our place in it.  There are too many parallels between the two for me to ignore them.  Maybe it’s just an attempt to see the dharma through the age of a new lens, but hey, I enjoy it.

Anyway, one conclusion drawn from that discussion, that’s relevant to this post, is the idea of a sort of global wi-fi/ubiquitous/ambient computer network.  Sure, anything like that seems to be too far away in the future to dream about, but technology has a funny way of evolving way quicker than our common sense expects it to.  This points to “a truly distributed field where all the computers can access all the other computers equally at all moments. Each computer would be a holographic representation of the entire internet, because the entire connected net of other computers would be accessible instantaneously from that one computer. The whole internet reflected in a dewdrop, so to speak.  Do that, make the computers something that can be carried on a person at all times, that can interact with each other wirelessly in real time regardless of distance, and make file exchange near-instantaneous, and bam, thats it.”

“It” being an idea that’s been bounced around a lot in the more fringe cultures in the past few decades.  Marshall McLuhan called it an “echoing land” or “global village”, when all of humanity would share enough of a common culture to have it’s subconscious aspects manifest more directly within it, as it did/does in smaller isolated tribes.  I like to think of this as something akin to the Australian Aborigines’ “Dream Time“.  Teilhard de Chardin called it the Noosphere.  I’ve also drawn parallels to the Age of Aquarius as well, where man pours water out over the world, water being a symbol for mind (And Aquarius supposedly rules electronics as well, for what that’s worth).

Basically, with such an easy and instantaneous way for people to interact and communicate, enough of the outside worries are taken care of that the inside can manifest itself more fully into the consciousness.  Sort of shot at a Mass-Maslow-self-actualization.  That’s the dream anyway.  And you know what Google says about dreams: “When a great dream shows up, grab it!”

The teacher does not sell water by the riverside.

He simply sits and slowly sips, waiting for you to join him.

Watch his movements, learn their meaning.  That is all.

When it is time, your thirst will move you.

And all life is thirst. How joyous!

As mentioned previously, I had recently a chance to see Thich Nhat Hanh give a dharma talk at the Beacon Theater (which is one of the most beautiful theaters I’ve ever been in).  On the surface, the talk was rather bland, typical new-agey, meditation advice. Between that and the fact that the speakers weren’t working on my side of the theater, I had a hard time getting into his talk.

But as I paid attention (and once the speakers got fixed) I could get into it a little deeper, and the depth of his wisdom began to became clear. He wasn’t mouthing platitudes, he was speaking from the truth that platitudes are trying to emulate.  As the Tao Te Ching says, “the greatest wisdom seems childish”.  The one that spoke to me the most was the phrase, “no mud, no lotus”.  That is, you can’t have enlightenment without suffering, and it’s out of the very mud of suffering that the lotus grows.

(TNH’s calligraphy, links to source)

I think the link between mud and suffering is fairly obvious, as I am sure we’re all very familiar with suffering.  But what’s the connection between the lotus and enlightenment?  The obvious answer is: it’s a flower!  It looks like an enlightened mind should look, opened to the world, it’s inner essence fully on display, living in immediacy with the world.

This is where we see Thich Nhat Hahn’s wisdom really begin to shine, in his ability to capture an entire teaching in a simple four word slogan.  He explains a little further in an interview:

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That’s why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…”

And yeah, that’s true enough.  A flowering kind of mind would definitely feel like enlightenment, I’d bet  But then, the is true of all flowers, not just the lotus.  Why not, “No Mud, No Flower”?  That would work well enough for that comparison, but actually, there’s a deeper metaphor at work here.  The idea of equating the lotus isn’t a TNH original.  It goes all the way back to the Buddha himself:

As a blue or white lotus is born in the water,
grows up and is unpolluted by the water,
so too has the perfected one grown up in the world,
has risen above the world
and stands unpolluted by it.
- samyutta nikaya 22 94

So why does the lotus remain unpolluted by the waters?  It’s not actually the lotus flower that does this, it’s the leaves.  And it’s due to something called the lotus effect (which has come up here before).   Basically, due to the unique structure of the lotus leaves, water beads up and runs right off of it.

It’s not the water that pollutes the leaves, instead it cleans them of debris.  Because there is no clinging between the water droplets and the leaf’s surface, the water washes over them with no hindrance, cleaning away any filth or pollution that might have settled.  Scientifically speaking, “due to their high surface tension water droplets tend to minimize their surface trying to achieve a spherical shape. On contact with a surface, adhesion forces result in wetting  of the surface: either complete or incomplete wetting may occur depending on the structure of the surface and the fluid tension of the droplet.  The cause of self-cleaning properties is the hydrophobic water-repellent double structure of the surface.”

This is the basis for the technology behind those stain resistant pants from a few years back:

And now, “a NASA team is developing a transparent coating that mimics the self-cleaning properties of the lotus plant to prevent dirt from sticking to the surfaces of spaceflight gear and bacteria from growing inside astronaut living quarters.“   Awesome.  Now you really can tell that person you’ve had your eye on that they’re wearing space pants…

Anyway, so what’s the whole thing all about?  Well, if you combine those two metaphors, what you have is something that starts out as a seed hidden under the mud (suffering), which begins to grow from that mud and eventually sprouts leaves.  Those leaves, if any mud happens to get on them, simply do not cling to it and the mud washes easily away.  And from that, the flower blooms.   All life is suffering, as the Buddha teaches, and so all life is the opportunity for enlightenment.

But no mud, no lotus.