Meditation, Stuff ... and Other Stuff

For those of you with a short attention span, and don't care to read the following post coz it's too bluddy long, here's another song - one I've posted before, but ages ago, so I'll post it again:

I Pick Myself Up #3

And for those who want to read the post, I apologise for it's length, but I can't seem to do short posts.

It’s a worry ... you see, I’ve been writing this book, a novel, and it’s taking a terribly long time. I began it in 2004 just after my first novel, ‘Levin’s God’ was published. I had the beginning of the story in my head, and the kind of book I wanted it to be. I went to China to work, and spent a year writing the first draft, then came back and applied for a grant, which I got, and kept on ploughing forward, then stopped.

I stopped because I hated it. But that’s entirely normal. Most writers hate their first draft. So I let it go for a year then resumed and I like it a lot now. The characters are my friends and their world is a little hologram in my head, and everything is as it should be.

But still I am having trouble finishing it. I mean, it'll definitely be finished, but ....well... it's taking longer than I thought. I’m having trouble grappling with the sentences, the paragraphs and chapters of it, the whole mountain of details that all refer to each other, the sub-texts and sub-sub-texts ... and I don’t really know why it’s so difficult to finish.

But then, I do. It’s something totally removed from the book. It’s about the endeavor itself.

You see, I’ll occasionally visit a bookshop, Borders or Dymocks or somewhere, and there’s all these books. Hundreds of thousands of books. And I’ll browse and think how wonderful some of the books are. Then I go away for a month, and when I come back the hundreds of thousands of books will be totally new books - different to the ones I saw the last time I was in. And when I connect the terribly short life the average book has to the time and energy it took to write it, I am somewhat demoralized.

I mean, I used to write pop-songs in my previous life, when I was in a band. And it made sense that my pop songs would only last about a month or two on the radio then disappear, because some of them only took a few minutes to write. And out of the hundreds of songs I wrote and the forty or so that were recorded, only one is still played on the radio - but that’s okay, because as I said, they only took a few minutes to write.

But books. They’ve slowly developed the same characteristics and turnover as pop-songs - they’re not precious anymore. Along with everything from food to clothes to cars, they’ve become utterly disposable.

And I’m finding it hard to justify the effort and time it takes to write them.

Added to which, I realise now that I’ve changed. All the endless months in the monastery meditating has made something terribly obvious, that was not obvious to me before.

You see, I used to be a compulsively creative person. I created for three reasons - because it took me outside the hell of myself as I was - because it expressed the explosive tensions in my psyche - and on a more mundane level, because I felt guilty if I didn’t.

All my life I’d been told I was talented, along with the other observation that I was inherently lazy. So when I left home to make a life for myself, these two things pushed and pulled at me - the drive to realise the ‘talent’ that so many had observed in me, and the other drive to prove to the world that I was not lazy - that my father and all the teachers were wrong. So I created compulsively, even when I couldn’t create I’d create, filling notebooks with gobbledygook and dead stream of consciousness, simply to assuage the terrible fear inside me that perhaps I had nothing to say - perhaps I was NOT talented, and maybe they were all right, my father and teachers - maybe I AM lazy.

Horror of horrors.

I remember the darkness of that horror - the rare days when I wouldn’t have done anything - not written, or painted or played my guitar - I used to get so depressed, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep, tossing and turning because I’d wasted the day.

Then, in 1991 I went to the monastery for the first time to meditate for two months - to sit in a hut with NOTHING TO DO!!!!!!! Except meditate.

And I discovered nothing. I learnt to do nothing.

Each day was the same - rise at 4, meditate and keep on meditating until breakfast, then meditate and keep on meditating until lunch, then meditate and keep on meditating through the long hot afternoons, until sleep came about midnight. But I couldn’t sleep! My mind kept screaming, ‘you’re wasting so much time!!’.

Eventually I managed to placate the tension by keeping a journal - an interlude of a minute or two writing between each meditation session. It was the only way I could set the devils of my hyper activity to rest.

Those first couple of months were hell. All the compulsive habits of 35 years kicked and screamed, “time is passing, life is leaking away!!”

But I kept on going and eventually began to settle down. Time ceased to be so important. Activity for its own sake ceased to be so compelling.

Where before activity arose from the stream of activities before it as a continuum in which I seemed to be running very hard, now activity arose from stillness, and finished in stillness.

And when I looked around me at the cats and dogs that lived alongside the huts in the monastery, I saw that this was indeed the way they lived - everything they did arose from stillness and returned to it.

I realized as I meditated throughout those months, that time, if the space is created to experience it as it passes, has a music that is extraordinary - of arrythmic clicks and creaks overlaid with motifs of bird calls and dogs barking, the laughter of children, traffic coming and going, wind hissing and leaves rustling - a music that never ends.

I was effectively doing absolutely nothing each day - simply sitting - but as my mind slowly responded to the openness of time and space, to stillness, it changed the way it functioned. My manic attention eventually stopped struggling with nothing to do - it receded and softened until there was simply an awareness of ‘things’ coming and going - memories, ideas, thoughts fluttering about like sparks in the dark - mysterious tides of feelings and subtle emotions.

And as the stillness continued these things become more transparent, softer - and the mind became like many shimmering veils appearing, then disappearing. Eventually time disappeared until there was almost nothing except vivid sparkles of sound, vision and sensations - not pain or pleasure, but nameless sensations of simply being alive - exquisitely, delicately, magnificently alive.

Freed from the incessant fidgetiness of my previous mind, I realized I could see so much more - colors were so vivid, marks on a wall so aesthetically perfect, textures of leaves and water so unspeakably beautiful.

I realised then that the inherent ‘greyness’ of my life, that I had always sought to colour in and imbue with meaning with my books, paintings and songs, had simply been a conditioned blindness in which my senses didn’t perceive what was already there because I was so busy doing things.

I came home after that retreat and I was inspired. I realised that life is more than what I do. It’s more than what I achieve and strive for. It’s more than the superficial satisfaction of having done a hard days work.

I had done absolutely nothing in the monastery, in terms of 'making' or creating something, and yet it had been eminently satisfying. It had been satisfying because I saw that things as they are were already more perfect than anything I could create - magnificently designed and profoundly meaningful - I just had never seen it before.

In that I finally had some understanding of the Australian indigenous people who struggle so much with Western culture. I finally got a glimpse of understanding of how they could sit for days in silence. How they could have wandered the vastness of Australia for 40,000 years and leave nothing behind them other than a few rock paintings.

For them, perhaps perfection was already there - they had no need to attempt to add to it, or try to create their own. The world was perfect as it was, and they simply communed with it.

Space; nothing; the void; the unformed - it had everything they needed and much better left as it was.

And so I came home, hopeless infused with the remainder of this magic that I had found in meditation, to what seemed like a mad, enraged chaos of activity in my life back in Australia. And it was shocking. The speed with which the world hustled and bustled, the manic laughter and jokes, the chatter, music, TV - the clutter of many things in compulsive motion.

I hated it and my girlfriend of the time worried that I had come back from Thailand with a sickness.

But conditioning is not so easily lost, and within two weeks I was back to my hyperactive life.

Though I kept going back to Thailand to spend a part of each year in the monastery, my habits of always needing to do something persisted, simply because the culture I live in does not acknowledge, or speak to ‘doing nothing’.

And each year I would go back to the monastery and meditate, and then make the confusing transition back to this world, which requires a mindset almost diametrically opposite to the that which I had worked on in my meditation training.

Very confusing.

But I managed - with one difference.

Gradually, as the years passed, I have been finding it harder and harder to justify to myself, the spending of so much time and energy on so-called ‘creative’ things - songs, books, painting, drawings. The creation of these inherently useless things has become more and more absurd, even perverse as time goes on.

For a number of reasons.

I’ve realized that the things we create are so terribly flawed when compared to that which already exists, created by the universe around us. A mark on a canvas has none of the incredible immediacy and perfection of a scuff on a wall. The music of time and space and environment when listened to, is far more profound, even moving, than the relatively sentimental twiddlings of Mozart or U2. The level of inspiration in a calm, resting mind doing nothing is far more entertaining and informative than most books or TV shows.

We already have all we need around us, and inside of us - the food, the music, the brilliant ideas, the entertainment - but we don’t know it’s there.

We are oblivious to the paradise around us because we never sit down and learn to be still enough to discover it.

It’s a cultural problem really - from the time we learnt to make tools and give physical form to our ideas, rather than keeping our talent as a useful tool, we have gradually been suckered into slavery to it. Our entire culture, for over a thousand years has been in service to a credo of progress - progress of knowledge and material form.

And this culture does not acknowledge or speak to the ‘unformed’. Our life purpose has always been to give form to the unformed. And in this culture it’s not enough to live well - we have to BE somebody - a writer, a businessman, famous, rich, handsome, religious.

So we are born into the marathon of incessant creativity and progress, manically giving form to the unformed, whatever it is - and if we don’t keep running we get lost. And we have been doing it for so long now, the propensity is probably genetic by now - we’re born with it.

No wonder people find meditation so hard.

So here I am, straddling two opposite minds - the mind that creates because that’s how it defines itself, and the other mind, that just wants to do nothing, be still, taste to luxurious perfection of naked time and space.

And I suppose that’s why I’m having trouble finishing my novel. As I said at the beginning - a part of me just cannot see the point of it. After all, it’s a much better book in it’s unwritten state than it is in the written. In my head it’s complete, magnificent, perfect. On paper it’s a pale reflection.

And I’m thinking that the mind that finds things as they are sufficient - that is happy to leave things unformed, unmade, uncreated - is the mind of the future.

After all, consider that everything we give form to uses energy, material.

In painting a picture we utilize pigments, mediums, canvas, animal hair in the brushes and so on. A new computer has within itself a wealth of the earth - the sweat of many brows and the burning of many furnaces and dynamos - the carbon footprint of its genesis runs close to half a ton when everything in its creation is taken into account, from the mining of the minerals to its delivery.

Then there’s the cars, the houses, the flavoursome food - all the stuff we have given form to over the thousands of years of our presence on earth.

With the number of humans on earth now, this can’t go on.

In fact, the whole notion of progress - of ‘giving-things-form’ must be turned on its head. Perhaps leisure and doing nothing well are becoming ecologically essential.

Consider this - dogs, cats, birds, reptiles and insects have created nothing on this planet. Each of them lives, dies and is not remembered, and left no indication of having existed. But in doing nothing, and being nothing - being born, living and dying so invisibly, they have given the greatest gift of all - they didn’t take more than they gave. They left the perfection exactly as they found it.

But we don't do that. We're obsessed with leaving our mark on everything.

For all the beauty and magnificence of our civilisation's, inventions and art - those things we regard as setting us above the dogs and cats and birds - most of the things we’ve created have necessitated the destruction of the paradise we already had. The paradise of wind, rain and water, of silence and bird-calls, the rustling of leaves in a breeze, the drama of a lightning storm, the comedic struggle of an ant dragging a morsel into a tiny hole, the huge star strewn sky, the many moods of the moon and the sunsets. None of these things need to be created - it' s already here, and everything we’ve done is reduced to a pathetic and very tawdry sideshow in comparison to it.

Perhaps nothing is everything.

A friend compared this years New Years song with last years one, saying last years was better.

Personally I don't give a damn, but they could be right ... anyway, seeing as it's an issue, here's last years New Years song.

It's called 'Friends':

Xmas songhalfharms

Actually, it just occurred to me that 'Friends' was not last years song at all ... it's from 2006 ... not sure what I sent out last year ...

And in my searching through the archives I found this one too ... I'd forgotten about it .. I quite like it.

'Dreams':

Dream song #6.sng_mixdown-final

Happy New Year everybody ... onwards ... into the big horizon ...

Hi there everybody ... I've been very very slack with my posting this year I know, but I've been preoccupied. 
It's been a horrible year actually, but I'm thinking it's going to be much better soon. 

Anyway, I've got a sort of personal tradition, to do a card and write a song for my friends and family each year. 
So here is this years offering. 

Hope you all have a wonderful year ...

New Year Song

 

Had an interesting meditation today, which I think might be a beginning for a new direction for this blog.

I've written a heap of posts over the three years it's been going, on the more general aspects of meditation (and other things), so now I think I'll begin writing an ongoing journal about my own meditation practice - the things that happen, the problems, insights.

You might think that sounds utterly boring but it's not. Trust me.

The thing with meditation is it's always different. The things that happen, the things that change ...

Unlike the popular view of meditation as a kind of static, almost oblivious 'bliss', in which we 'relax and zone out' (a misconception fed by the popular media), with the methods I practice and teach, meditation is always a dynamic and fascinating exploration of mind and body, in which the knots and tangles created by life are investigated, unraveled, soothed - known.

As such, I never know what I'm going to find when I meditate, and it's always interesting ... to me anyway.

If you want to know more about these methods, download either of my free pdf books, 'Happy to Burn' or 'Love & Imagination from HERE

So here it is ... my meditation this morning.

I'll describe it in the stages I went through.

On sitting down and closing my eyes, first thing I noticed was my attention was particularly skittish. The effect of this was I felt unfocused and fuzzy. So I watched the skittishness, and in watching it, my attention found itself and settled down.

Having established mindfulness of my attention, I scanned the body, building a sensual 'picture' of it - that is, a feeling of it as a whole in the mind, built from all the sensations - this picture is built from everything - aches, muscular sensations, organs, hearing, feelings, emotional formations, pressure sensations, weight, and so on, as well as my sense of the room I'm in and possibly more - a sensual soup of being swirling, changing texture and shape, some parts soft ands subtle, other parts coarse.

Of course, the thinking aspect babbled and raved as it usually does, but I've long learnt to ignore it. It's a bit like having an idiot savant mumbling in the corner of my mind who, though sometimes useful, never stops making noise. So I leave him to it.

Once I have assembled a feeling of the whole body I bring the attention into the breath, then rapidly perch it on a small part of the breath - the movement of the belly - a place for the attention to rest and be still.

At that point the entire body and the room I'm sitting in is a dynamic 'shape' of sensations around this focal point of the belly, and my mental energy is evenly divided between attention on the belly and awareness of my body and the environment.

I always try to keep this 50/50 ratio of attention and awareness throughout meditation for a number of reasons:

• Because it keeps the attention from  being hypnotised by the breath.
• Because it keeps the attention light and agile and ready for anything
• Because it provides a 'theatre' of awareness, in which the attention remains always in contact with here-and-now reality  - I think this register of  'nowness' is an essential aspect of meditation

So now, with my attention lightly following the rising and falling belly, within the sensual theatre of a constantly changing awareness, meditation began.

At that point, I noticed pain in one side of my neck kept pulling at my attention so, rather than ignore it, I let go of the belly and went to that new object.

My intention was to examine this pain and see if I could cause it to resolve itself.

So, as I held my attention to it, the pain began 'speaking' - by that I mean, it began to change qualities - sometimes becoming sharper and more pointed, and other times spreading up to my skull, and down to my shoulders.

Of course the thinking aspect of mind was babbling about this pain, going, "...maybe it's the way I cross my legs when I sit ... or maybe it's yesterday when I was slouched on the couch writing .. or maybe .. maybe ...maybe.." and so on.

Not important.

The ultimate reality of something is simply the sensation of it. Everything else is speculation,and meditation is always to do with ultimate reality - not the relative reality of thinking.

So I kept my attention on the sensation of this pain. And it kept changing - from aching to burning and then to piercing.

Always changing.

Then it connected with other sensations in one side of my jaw, going up to my temple.

Aha, the plot thickens I thought, as my attention kept contemplating them.

At that point images began to come up in connection with the sensations - not visual images, but ... it's hard to explain. Mental images that the mind generates as it goes about resolving the phenomenon I've trained its attention on.

The images were many and varied ... a cat clinging with its claws to the back of my neck ... hot oil pouring down one side of my face ... hundreds of ants biting ... and so on. Like smoke from a fire, shattered thoughts and images pour out and disappear.

The rest of my body, and the room was still as it is ... a mist of sensations that swirled and changes constantly, relaxed, settled, aware.

The pain I'd been contemplating became more intense. A good sign, meaning it was getting ready to let go.

And sure enough, a short while later the pain in my neck disappeared and the whole chain fell apart - the tension in my temples released as did the tightness in the shoulders ...and there was just a subtle, tingling sensation where it had been.

Took my attention back to the belly and resumed what I was doing before.

It's so amazing how responsive the mind and body are when we pay balanced attention to them.

I love meditation ... it's so damned fascinating

CU

It's been 40 years since Martin Luther King gave his prophetic last speech, the 'I have been to the mountaintop' speech, in which he spoke of a wonderful future ... presciently noting that though he wouldn't make it, it would be magnificent when it came.

He was assassinated the next day. 

I dare to believe now, that with Barak Obama, who so much resembles Martin Luther King with his celestial rhetoric and presence, that vision has come.

For such a long time I've been reluctantly anti-American, and I have to say, as someone who feels uncomfortable with being anti-anything, it felt terrible ... it's felt like a decade of holding my breath.

My god ... only a decade?  

No, it's been longer.

 I remember when I was a kid ... only ten - even here in Australia there was a magnificent euphoria when John Kennedy became President.  Somehow the world seemed full of hope and optimism - whether because my mother and father talked about him a lot,  I don't know.  But I knew about him and Jackie and I thought they were gods.

And then, when he was assasinated, I knew about that too - because all the adults around me seemed panicked and upset. I knew a terrible thing had happened.  

And then four years later Martin Luther King was killed and Robert Kennedy, and again my mother and father were greatly affected, and it felt as if the forces of darkness were closing in ... killing off all the beauty and dreams in the world.

So now,as I think about it, it hasn't been only a decade - it's been forty years I've been holding my breath, waiting for the same feeling of hope and optimism to come back that I had as a child, when my mother and father admired a man who spoke sincerely about unity and a vision of a better future.

Because after Robert Kennedy died, who certainly would have been a magnificent president, the princes of darkness, the inept, the cynical and the pale pretenders kept coming - Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush ... then Clinton who brought hope and inspiration, but was shackled by his own weakness and a Republican Congress ... then Bush the younger .... the most hideous of all.  

But worst of all was the growing cynicism of my American friends.  

It felt terrible because though they're wonderful, intelligent people, most seemed to give in to their cynicism and disengage.  

And though a part of me understood their position -  that the extraordinary heart and intelligence of America was constantly being overshadowed and dominated by the fear, greed and insularity of what had seemed like a majority who were always more vocal and more demanding and able to mobilise - still I felt my friends should be looking further than just themselves.

So though I understood their disillusionment, I couldn't understand their retreat into apathy - their prevailing view being that even if a Democrat visionary was voted in, they'd only be hamstrung and stifled by the labyrinthine machinations of the American political system, and the massive power of corporate lobbyists, so what was the use.

I couldn't understand their self righteous resignation from the only power they had to effect change - their vote.  And in part I saw it as a betrayal of all of us who are not Americans - because whether we acknowledge it or not, Americans not only have a responsibility for electing their own president - by virtue of America's immense power they also have the responsibility for electing the leader of the world. 

So each international disaster that followed Bush's election - the two wars, the polarization, arrogant rapacity and hatefilled rhetoric, I slated to them - because they had, by inaction and a self centered rationale, helped to create it all. 

But they couldn't see it - so I lost faith in them - and America - and in the darkness that followed Bush's first election, I hoped that America would at least have the grace to self destruct quickly, because self destruction seemed to be their sub-conscious desire.  At least then, with the Yanks gone, the rest of the world could pick up the pieces and have a chance for the future. 

So I've watched this election with a mix of fear and hope - fear that the Yanks would fuck it up again, whether through assassination or apathy ... and hope that now, at the most critical time, they might just be desperate enough to do the right thing by us all. 

And they have.

And as I watched Obama's victory speech, I felt an intense relief and renewed hope because it felt as if I was finally able to breathe. 

Because in Barak Obama, I saw the Yanks had finally elected a good human being as their leader - not a narcissistic smartie-pants, nor a master of the universe, or a prince of darkness - but a good hearted human being, possessed of intelligence, integrity and great purpose.  

Finally.

Whether we like it or not ... Barak Obama's election affects us all. I just hope he's got the strength to do what needs to be done. 

Welcome back, America ... welcome back to the world.

VICTORY SPEECH Part 1

VICTORY SPEECH Part 2

I got an interesting email from someone (a bloke) who read the post preceding this one titled: 'Happiness is a Curse'

In part he said (permission was given to quote):

"I find your posts self serving, furry minded and much too long for the little they have to say. For example, what are you saying in this post? That happiness is bad because it gets people excited so they do great things because of it? Then you go on and talk about yourself and how you let go of happiness. What a crock. The human race wouldn't have developed to such an incredible extent without the pursuit of happiness. Animals get happy. And I imagine it gives you happiness to write your posts. Without the possibility of happiness no-one would get out of bed in the morning ..."

And so it goes ...

I don't usually get emails about my posts ... but this one had some good points - particularly regarding length. I do try to write short posts, but they always get big ... which makes me long winded I suppose. Oh well ... we all have our cross to bear (or is that bare ... I'm never sure)...

But I think the writer missed my point a bit, which was that the pursuit of happiness has become a pre-eminent motive in our lives - and I think it is a sure way to anxiousness and disappointment.

I'm not saying happiness is bad. In my world nothing is bad, just as nothing is good. Things just are what they are.

And I agree, the pursuit of happiness gives us very intense motivation to invent and progress - all of it toward the mirage of perfect happiness. But running counter to this is that perfect happiness, like the Christian heaven, is a terrible myth which keeps us always striving for something other than what is here right now - for perfect partners, perfect children, perfect breasts, perfect noses, perfect societies, perfect people .. perfect, perfect, perfect.

With this kind of view we become like anorexic staring into mirrors, seeing a distortion of reality based on our misguided desires, but not on reality.

And my point about animals - I never said animals are not happy - I simply said that they don't pine for happiness. They live with what they are NOW.

And ditto for me.

But ... I do take his point that I have a tendency to use my own experience as example. I think this comes from my view that, in my life I am the only experiment. Though books inform me, I never believe anything until I've tried it out on myself. Hence the strange and unlikely life I've lead, I suppose.

Anyway, it's great that he took the time and energy to write, because it means he contemplated what I said ... and that's all I could ask from anyone.

CU
Mr Furry Mind

I’ve been contemplating the nature of happiness for a while now, and the more I think about it the bigger it gets.

I've come to the conclusion that the pursuit of happiness is a dangerous addiction.

And I have to say ... I feel much better now ... though it's very hard to explain.

So let's see if I can make this work ...

For almost all of us, particularly in the West, happiness is a cultural pivot - a driving principle of our lives. Read any tabloid newspaper and tunnel down to the central notion within each of the articles about fame, success, wealth, divorce, crime - and you'll find the pursuit of happiness as a principle criterion.

And it’s been this way since the ‘60’s when happiness supplanted other life motivations like duty, service and religion.

Yes indeed, there was a time when such things were considered more important than individual happiness - where the notion of 'self-sacrifice' was all important and the pursuit of happiness was considered a decadent personal trait.

But we got rich in the '60's and things changed. And that's entirely natural. The pursuit of happiness has always followed extraordinary prosperity in Western cultures - from ancient Rome to 1920’s England to post WWII America and more recently the entire pre-credit crisis world. Whenever we have easy money, people’s focus turns from survival issues to happiness.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, except for the parallel fact that at no time in our history has unhappiness and depression related illness been so ubiquitous as now, when the pursuit of happiness is at its most frantic, and pervasive.

So I’m wondering what is it about the pursuit of happiness that creates its opposite.

But first I should define the kind of happiness I’m talking about.

I’m talking about manic happiness - that Disneyland, ‘oh what a beautiful morning’, whooping, jumping up and down,‘everything is wonderful’ kind of happiness. The excited kind of happiness we’re sold in advertisements and on TV as the optimum state of being.

For most of my life this culture of manic happiness has been everywhere - everywhere it seems, but in people’s hearts - because when I look around at friends and acquaintances, though most are in almost continuous pursuit of happiness, with money, holidays, cars and homes, pets, children and god knows what else - most are profoundly unhappy with their lives and with life itself.

The worst part of it is, we’re constantly sold the notion that if we’ve not excited and happy - like, grinning like a lunatic - then we’re not as alive as we should be - which creates this terrible compulsion for people to at least LOOK like they’re happy.

I saw it a lot when I was in the United states, where it seems as if the culture of individual happiness has been taken to an extreme - people grinning all the time even when you know they feel like dogshit on an icy road - that frantic grin many of them have that doesn’t reach their eyes.

It’s frightening to behold, because it seems to come with a weird disconnect between what their mouth is doing and the signals their face is sending - like, on a financial program I saw, there was this newly bankrupted company directer coming out of an administrators meeting - and on being asked how he felt, he grinned frighteningly into the camera and said, “Me? Ohhh, Ahm just starting’ to have fun.” And what I remember were his eyes. They were terrified, as if he was looking into an abyss a second before falling.

Such pressure to at least look happy - its exhausting.

But then, a huge part of the cult of America is to do with this requirement of happiness - the pursuit of happiness is even in their declaration of independence. But Americans have taken it further - they expect happiness as a right, as a rule of life even -like, they have to be happy and if they aren’t, something must be wrong.

And we Australians are not far behind.

We too have a culture of happiness - perhaps not as frantic as the Yanks, but nevertheless, it’s there. Throughout our entire lives, happiness is THE central issue of our life by which things, events and people are judged by their potential to deliver it to us.

And it's got to the point where very little else is considered

We’re this way because it’s the way we were brought up - us baby boomers and their offspring, anyway.

And even though our parents had service and duty more deeply imprinted into their characters, nevertheless, they were still devoted to creating a world in which the pursuit of happiness could become the main object of life. This is what they fought for - and I suppose it could be said that the last few thousand years of human history in the west - since the great ancient empires of the West - we’ve all been devoted to the getting of happiness.

It’s probably genetically imprinted within us now, each generation selling it to the other.

Our parents sold happiness to us when they encouraged us to be happy, implying that if we weren’t then something was wrong. The notion of 'having fun, life should be a holiday' largely comes from family.

Then our schools sold happiness to us by favoring extroverted smiling images of the ‘perfect student’ (check out every private school advertisement - all big smiles, jumping and laughing. The image of the victorious footie team pumping the air with their fists and whooping - happiness in success. Happiness in striving to win.

Not to mention the continuous propagation of the cultural sub-text - that is, the key to ‘HAPPINESS’ is to work hard, be good, obey your betters, get married and have kids.

When in groups we’re obliged to be happy (don’t be a ‘downer’). If we’re not smiling we’re asked, ‘why the long face?”

People apologize for crying, or expressing unhappiness, and are made to feel wrong if they become depressed.

And if that’s not enough, to hammer it in, the media keeps selling this tedious subtext of happiness to us. Everywhere we go, on billboards, radio, TV and print, there’s the constant, stupid notion that every product we DON’T yet have, is all we need for happiness.

The whole bigger and better, onwards and outwards mythology of our culture is driven by the pursuit of excitement and happiness - the need for the new and unique in every form of consumption, from travel to TV shows to food - all to make us squeal with happiness. The pressure is constant and utterly insidious, such that our entire life's purpose is reduced to the pursuit happiness and its siblings, fun and excitement.

I suppose in this happiness thing, I'm a bit like a reformed alchoholic - because I did take it to extremes ... happiness I mean.

When I was a kid, I developed a powerful happiness addiction, simply because I was so utterly thwarted and depressed. Too complicated to go into, but like most unhappy kids, my beleaguered parents were largely to blame because they weren’t delivering to me the happiness I was conditioned to expect.

They weren’t like all the other ‘normal’ parents - we weren’t rich, didn’t have TV or a nice house, and Dad was very eccentric which embarrassed the hell out of me - coz he wasn’t normal - because like most children, I equated ‘normality’ with happiness. As such, I had the mistaken impression that all the other kids were having the happy childhood I SHOULD have been having, simply because their parents looked normal.

The notion of ‘normality as happiness’ was another value we all were sold by the prevailing conditioning of our culture.

But anyway ... as children, I think we all form a ‘happiness dream’ - a vision of how it’s going to be different for us - how we’re going to find the happiness that has seemed to elude our parents.

For me, the happiness dream was connected to the dream of escape - that magical day when I would leave home and finally be free to do all things that made me happy.

So when that time eventually came, I went into full-time manufacturing of happiness, in the most direct way - sex, drugs and rock and roll. I drank too much, took drugs, went to every party I could find and slept with every girl who would have me.

And I was very, very happy.

So intense was this happiness, there was nothing else I was interested in except the making of happiness. I served no-one, had no sense of duty, and couldn’t give a damn about anything except my happiness. Daytime and jobs were simply downtime in which to recover from hangovers and make enough money so I could do it all over again that night.

So it was no surprise that I would end up in a band - happiness machines, in which the out of control, beautiful, drug-fucked rock star was the epitome of happiness for every teenage of the day (70’s and 80’s).

So the manufacturing of happiness went on.

We had a bit of success - enough to be happy anyway. We were played on the radio and television, toured and went overseas, recorded, signed autographs, made money.

I should have been happy.

But in actual fact, the cliché was the case - the more happiness I got the more miserable I became. And it was made all the more tragic by my knowledge that, logically speaking, with all I had, I should be wildly happy and excited. But I wasn’t. So not only was I unhappy, but I was terribly unhappy about being unhappy - because it was utterly unjustifiable.

Like, I didn't have the RIGHT to be unhappy.

Stupid, stupid stupid. But then, I was an idiot in those days, so I didn't know any better.

So that’s part of the reason I ended up in a monastery meditating for months on end.

Originally I went to seek the source of my unhappiness - to work all the bugs in my system - so I could be happy.

Silly me.

I didn’t know it then, but to meditate with any expectation at all, whether of happiness or enlightenment only creates a mind that is constantly seeking, and not meditating - which creates anxiety.

And to meditate anxiously is a sure way of turning the meditation into a very unpleasant experience.

So meditation only made me MORE unhappy!

And I felt betrayed. All the peace, calm and happiness I had been lead to believe that meditation was supposed to create for me - it wasn’t happening!

So I tried harder, meditating anxiously until I was a tight ball of frazzle - grasping at every moment of calm, every moment of peace in the hope that HERE IT IS!! ... only to see it evaporate even as a grasped it, and once more collapse into the dark, pain filled hell I was making of meditation.

Those first months in the monastery were simply awful - all because I couldn’t let go of my expectation that it would lead me to happiness.

Though I didn’t know it then, meditation was teaching me a valuable lesson - becoming a mirror of my life, in which my constant grasping for happiness was driving me mad with anxiety. So it was inevitable that, meditating as stupidly as I was, I would eventually crack beneath the pressure.

And that moment when it came, changed my life.

One stormy night, while sitting sweating on the bench in anxious knots defiantly meditating, though every cell in my body craved for me to stop and run away from the monastery - at a point of utter despair, I had a realization.

I realized I would NEVER be happy.

And in that luminescent moment, I gave up all my expectations of happiness.

And the relief I felt in my mind, and in my body, was like flying. I felt as light as the air, and my heart became calm.

And all the neuronal skitters in my head, that had been dedicated to the getting of happiness, they all dissolved, leaving empty space.

And in that space there was no happiness.

But there was no unhappiness either.

It was empty. And the emptiness was tranquil and deep. And I realized then that throughout my entire life to that point, happiness had made me its slave - and I was now free.

Like any junkie, most of us are addicted to endorphins, those subtle but powerful opiates of happiness. And if we can’t get the drug from everyday life, we drink alcohol, take drugs, have sex, bungee jump, have parties, travel to exotic places, and all the other happiness things.

Thing is - animals, reptiles, birds and insects - they don’t have the addiction to happiness that we do. When they aren’t happy, they don’t pine for it, or try to manufacture happiness. If they’re depressed, they be depressed - and if they’re happy, then they’re wonderfully happy. Happiness and unhappiness come and go like the sun and rain, and however they are feeling - they behave with grace and wisdom - resting if they’re depressed, celebrating when they’re happy.

But us?

We’re so terrified of unhappiness we immediately start worrying if it’s not present, which only makes it worse. Then we hate it for not being here, which only creates its opposite - unhappiness ... and so on.

We feel betrayed by life if we aren’t happy, so we’re either running after the mirage of happiness, or running away from its opposite, whichever it might be - sadness, grief, unhappiness, depression and so on.

Not only that, but our yearning for happiness makes us susceptible to control by ‘happiness manufacturers’ - politicians, corporations, religion - every snake oil salesman trying to sell us something. They'll all promise heaven, and be believed simply because people WANT to believe that perfect happiness exists ... somewhere ... usually somewhere where they aren't ... but where they have to get to in some way.

So I think we should bugger happiness off. Get rid of it. And Fun. Chuck that out too.

Maybe then the human race might stop running the happiness marathon - settle down and take stock. Have a holiday. Lie in the sun and weep about all the things we never wept about but should have. Give something away. Talk to a neighbor about compost. Look at an ant.

Do sweet nothing and not give a damn if we feel happy or bloody awful.

Because whatever we feel, it's all so very sweet.

The friction of life. Whether suffering or bliss, it's always fascinating.

CYA

For Mira who asked about my books and anyone else who's interested, they are:

'Levin's God - novel - pub 2004
'Happy to Burn' - about meditation - pub 2004
'Love & Imagination' - about meditation - to be published
'Acrobat' - novel - in progress

Actually ... I'll go the whole hog and tell you all about them.

All things must come to an end, and as many of you have perhaps surmised from the fewer and fewer posts, I've run out of inspiration for this blog for the moment. And there's nothing worse than an inspirationless blog.

Added to which, I'm back writing my novel after six months break ... everything goes into that.

So this is the end, my friends, the end, until I begin a new blog ... when I think of what it will be ... until then ... much love
Roger

‘Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.’

Friedrich Nietzsche

The world is such a filthy place and I love it that way ... it's a wonderful, grand adventure. It's not a matter of whether I approve of the filth - I don't, and if I could have a clean, glistening perfect world, perhaps I would ... I don't know.

But things being the way they are, it's at the very least interesting ... it's great

I don’t mind the filth of advertising and the Hollywood pornography of violence in the films, computer games and on DVD’s; the filth of bad music and signs everywhere; the filth of clear-felled forests, genetically altered sheep and caged chickens; the filth of corporate greed and pollution; the filth of arguing, ineffectual politicians, of war and starvation when I have so much to eat; the filth of the so called drug war and prisons which only create more of what they profess to ameliorate. The filth of hypocritical moralizers and religious freaks trying to stamp their ruined, black and white world view over the gorgeous rainbow of life.

Like everybody else, I live in all this filth and I am, as each of us are, even responsible for some of it. It’s not a perfect world. It’s chaotic ... and, as I said, it's wonderful because it's chaotic.

I accept that.

And for that reason, I do not approve of censorship of any kind especially of the arts which, of all the 'filths' of the world, even at its most obnoxious and obscene, always massages the spirit.

But I understand that bucket-heads everywhere will take exception to what artists get up to, and start prattling about 'sending a messge' by trying to ban it and publically crucify the artist. A notable example if this was a photo called 'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano - it wasn't my cup of tea, but I loved the fact that it exists, my reasoning being, of all the 'filths' of the world, at least 'Piss Chirst' had a sense of humor.

But bucket-heads will keep on being bucket-heads, and recently they all put on their buckets and did it again ... out with their pursed lips, complaints, paranoid rationale and dirty minds, trying to ban another artist and his work.

It's a lethal cocktail of judgement, hysteria, fear and interference that is becoming much too common in the world ... and now it's happening here in Australia, yet again. IO had hoped we would have grown up a bit since 'Piss Christ' but we haven't.

And one of the most amazing things about all this is it's my generation - the baby boomers - who are behind it - we were the ones who experimented with everything from bad moustaches,'mutton-chops' and mescaline to free sex and nakedness, so one would have thought the massive amount of experimentation we indulged in throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's would have put paid to our silliness with regard to sex and nakedness now we're all grown up.

But no ... like reformed alcoholics, we've gone all self righteously prim in our old age and nakedness, making love and genitalia are back on the ban-agenda - signatures of evil, but with a new spin.

So what am I referring to. Well ... Bill Henson of course.

Coming out of the very serious revelations of child abuse and paedophilia that have been piling up recently, the latest triggerpoint for our ageing paranoia is this photo - CLICK HERE - and the artist who created it, Bill Henson.

Though the photo was made many years ago, it was recently a part of an exhibition, and used on the cover of a circular, which elicited complaints ... and yada yada yada, as they say.

Bill Henson's photographs have been a quiet, but extremely influential part of our public aesthetic for decades, and his photos and their subject matter have been well known for years, all over the world. Hes one of our greatest artists, yet now, because of the wording of a particular law, called 'The obscenity law', he’s being charged and hounded in the press, accused of creating pornographic images of naked 12 year old girls and boys for the purpose of exhibition. Not only him, but the galleries who exhibit his work are also being prosecuted, and the works in question impounded as evidence.

"It's filth!" they all cry. A newspapers spinning the issue out for everything it can make of it.

Now, bear in mind that the particular image in contention has been around for over a decade - in fact, the 13 year old girl in the photo is now a 30 year old mother who has said publicly that she had no problem with the sessions all those years ago - that Henson was wonderful to model for, and her mother sanctioned the shoot.

The public reaction has been shrill and hysterical, all to do with the notion that the images are pornographic because they portray naked adolescence - and that the subjects of the photos have been abused by being photographed naked.

Social workers are building horror stories of all the terrible possibilities - that these images could spread to the web where pedophiles sitting in the light of computer screens in darkened rooms will have their horrid ways (as if they’d bother, with the plethora of much more overt pornography spattered all over the web) - all in a sudden fit of protectiveness for the ‘victim’ - who as I said, has already stated that she has no problem with the images.

This furor is so hysterical it's become ridiculous, particularly considering the photos themselves. I mean, aside from obvious nakedness, whatever sexual connotations they may have are clothed and largely overpowered by more aesthetic qualities of mood, light and the magically infinite resonance of a perfectly suspended moment.

So what is it that deserves a charge of obscenity? The bare fact of adolescent nakedness?

Well then ... if that's the issue, why not get out the hammers and smash up Michelangelo’s ‘David’, slash Michelangelo de Caravaggio - ‘St. John with Ram’, a blatant testament of adolescent bestiality as ever I’ve seen - not to mention all the naked bare budded cupids that float all throughout the sentimental heavens of Rococo art?

And what about all the statues from Renaissance, Classic Greek, Roman, of pre-pubescent boys and girls - are we to secret them all away as well, lest some stray pedophile use them for a covert wank?

And what about all the dogs penises and cats bumholes all around the place ... they’re everywhere. Surely if we are to spirit away the photos of Bill Henson, we should also be running around putting underpants on dogs and cats. In fact, we should put underpants on the entire world. It's all filthy.

Yes I know I'm being ridiculous, but no more than the hysterical reactions to Henson's work.

All this silliness reminds me of a story in Zen Buddhism which goes like this:

‘An old monk and young monk, on approaching a flooded river saw a gorgeous woman in rich attire standing on the bank wondering how to cross to the other side.
Now, it is a strict rule of the Vinaya (code by which Buddhist monks live) that physical contact with a woman is forbidden for a monk. The young monk, mindful of this rule, ignored the woman and, walking right past her, waded across to the other side.
The old monk however, stopped and asked the woman if she'd like him to carry her across. She said she would appreciate the assistance, so he lifted her up and carried her across the water to the other side where she continued on her way.
The two monks continued their journey for some hours before the younger monk finally gave voice to what was concerning him greatly.
"We are monks," he said. "You know the rues .. we shouldn't be close to a woman, let along touch her. Yet you, a venerable old monk, in clear breach of the rules, touched a woman! Why did you do that?"
The older monk laughed."What woman?" he said. "I put her down hours ago. Why are you still holding her?"

So I suppose what this says is, the obscenity is not with the photos, or Bill Henson. It's in the minds of those who see it in these exquisite photos - the ones screaming and pointing their fingers.

I think, in this wonderfully toxic world, the one thing we have that protects us is choice.
We do not have to look, or participate, or be influenced by what we find objectionable ... if we don't want to.

We all have choice.

So ...if you don’t like Henson’s works, the answer is easy ... don’t look. If you see it on the internet, change the page.

"Ahh," comes the predictable cry. "But what about the kids who were the subjects of these obscene photos? And the manipulative predator with a camera who conned them into it ... did the kids have choice? After all, they have to live with these pictures of their nakedness blah blah blah ..."

Of course they had choice, as did their parents, who gave permission for these images to be shot.

Can't be bothered with this anymore .. it's too stupid for words.

CU later with other things ...

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PS ... It's now a week later and finally we've have come to our senses --- with the rueful headline: 'Henson porn prosecution unlikely'.