Meditation, Stuff ... and Other Stuff

Nothing is Everything

2009-01-26T12:57:43+01:00

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.

Comments

Due to Popular Demand ... well, sort of ...

2008-12-31T17:31:29+01:00

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 ...

Comments

Happy New Year ( when it happens)

2008-12-24T02:20:24+01:00

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

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It's all in the Sensations

2008-11-20T05:48:15+01:00

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

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At Last They've Done it Right

2008-11-06T04:01:49+01:00

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

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Happiness is What it Is

2008-10-20T03:41:28+02:00

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

Comments

Happiness is a Curse

2008-10-17T05:51:57+02:00

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

Comments

My Books ... in case you didn't know ...

2008-09-30T04:03:08+02:00

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.

'LEVIN'S GOD' (published 2004)

This was largely based on the life I and many of my ratbag friends lead throughout the '70's and '80's, when I was a singer in a band ... another life.

As the cliche goes, the first book is always semi-autobiographical, and indeed this is, though, not specific to me, so much as 'me and friends' all rolled up in a big ball of stories, that revolve around a central driving narrative.

This central narrative is the story of how a schoolyard friendship slowly evolves into a destructive conspiracy, in which one becomes predator, the other victim - the nature of which which only becomes clear at the end of the book

But I suppose the entire book explores the nature of friendship in all it's permutations. It was very cathartic to write, and apparently, from all reports, very cathartic to read - especially for those who lived through the glorious madness of the '70's and '80's.

Now, at this point, I should address issues of content - the book is a frank account of the mischief that me and my friends got up to, and in the writing of the boom, I didn't want to be coy about it. I hate 'coyness' in writing.

I wanted it to be as raw and ruinous as it sometimes was - but also as full of a lust for life as it often was.

So all I'm saying is ... for those who have stupid issues with language, drugs or sex, DON'T BUY THIS BOOK.

And for those who have issues with a meditation teacher writing a book of this kind (some of whom sent me very judgemental emails when it was published) - I have only this to say:

Though I practice meditation, I'm not a monk!

I'm a guy living in a toxic world and I love it - the whole ridiculous circus - so whatever fiction I write is bound to reflect everything I love - the humanity, courage and frailty of us all as we grapple with life as it appears to be, and then die.

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The reviews were very good here in Australia - of the 'a writer to watch' kind.

Oh ... one more thing - just found some reviews on the Campusi book selling site ... how nice.

I'll paste them here ...

5 star A great book. 2005-06-19 00:00:00
One of the few truly interesting Australian books I've read.
Set in the thriving rock music scene of late 70ties Melbourne, it details the spiritual journey of a young musician, Levin.

This is a story of sex drugs and rock'n'roll in gory detail, but also an amazing insight into a young man's psyche with a surprise and uplifting ending.

Highly recommended!

5 star An amazing journey 2004-10-31 00:00:00
I read this book because a girlfriend recommended it. Now, I don't usually like the books she recommends but she nagged me to read it so I did. And I'm glad I did.

I have to say, this book is without a doubt, one of the most engaging, humorous, thoughtful, interesting books I have ever read. It seems to span a whole lot of different genres, being like a cross between 'Trainspotting' 'Siddharta' and 'Gullivers Travels' if you can imagine that.

You can buy it from HERE

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'HAPPY TO BURN' (published 1997)

This was my first book on meditation - written in response to what I saw (at that time) as a dearth of books explaining meditation as a practical skill. I had wonderful teachers in this - Acharn Thawee, Phra Manfred and Mae Che Brigitte - all of who took care of me so well throughout the months of my initial struggling with meditation.

They all spoke of meditation, and my problems with it, in very practical terms, which was just what I needed. So as the lights slowly went on in my head, and my body slowly acclimatised to the new psycho/physical paradigm that meditation creates, I found myself wondering why this practical kind of information about meditation was not available outside of Theravadin monasteries. So I decided to re-language what I had been taught and what I had experienced, to make a bridge between the monastery and everyday life.

I'll leave it up to you to decide where I was successful or not.

You can get a FREE pdf copy of it from HERE.

Or, you can buy it from HERE

This book also has a CD of the three main meditation excercises, which can be bought with the book as a package from HERE

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'LOVE & IMAGINATION' (to be published - any suggestions?)

As my own meditation practice developed, and I began to teach it, I began to realise other potentials in meditation, and in particular, to understand the true nature of our difficulty when it comes to doing it.

For the average Westerner meditation, though essentially a simple act of being still - something any dog, cat, bird or reptile does at will - is terribly hard to do. This is because the habits of analysis, nervous energy and languaged thinking, which we've developed to deal with our anxiously though-filled culture, all push against the kind of mind we need to meditate. So in this book my objective was to come to grips with those problems and extend the methods to deal with them.

I wrote this in 2002, and it's basically finished - but I never got around to finding a publisher for it because I got a deal for my novel and got diverted into fiction writing. But those who have read L&I have said it's very 'illuminating' - so I assume it'll be published soon - well, as soon as I can get around to it anyway.

So if you're a publisher, I'd definitely be interested in hearing from you ... save me having to look for you, wherever you are.

I have made it available for FREE from HERE

Or, if you want to buy a copy, you can get it from HERE

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And my new book is titled 'Acrobat'.

Enough said about that for the moment.

CYA

Comments

The End Until

2008-06-15T07:38:44+02:00

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

Comments

The Dogs of Fear

2008-05-27T13:38:19+02:00

‘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'.

Comments

Monopoly Game

2008-03-25T08:54:10+01:00

A few years ago I played a game of monopoly with my sister and her family. It was as intense as some monopoly games can be. The whole game became about keeping Mayfair and Parklane separate so my nephew couldn’t begin building on them ... and the strategies went to and fro as properties changed hands and players went tearfully, resentfully bankrupt. Very stressful, with all the arguments and tears. As I said, it was intense.

Halfway through the game we took a break.

I walked out to the garden with a glass of wine to stand beside the pond they have out there and look up at ghostly clouds skidding overhead in the night sky, and inside the house I could hear a bitter argument over the loss of something ... and some kid’s victorious cackle of laughter at the gain of something else, together with my sister raising her voice trying to placate the emotional residue from the game.

The cloud I was watching became two clouds ... then reformed to become one again ... and the trees all whispered around me, their leaves swaying and rustling in the breeze .... and the dog that was asleep on the sun-lounge lifted its head as another dog barked far away ... and I realized that the world is so big, and unconcerned with things so small as the loss of Park Lane, or Mayfair ... right then in Somalia child soldiers were smoking dope and cleaning their guns ... in London smart young things were doing coke off the lids of toilets .... lovers were strolling hand in hand along the banks of the river Seine ... people everywhere on the planet were living, dying, working, sleeping, laughing, making love ... plotting scheming ... and all the while the clouds kept dividing and reforming, disappearing and appearing while the world spins silently through space ...

Standing there watching the clouds, the bizarreness of I'd been doing came over me ... that when I was playing this game of monopoly, nothing else had existed but that tiny little game. The game had formed its own tight horizon around me, encapsulating my life - and in that tiny little flurry of activity, for all of us grouped around the board, time sped up and blood ran hot - we argued and schemed and plotted and felt the disappointment of loss and the euphoria of victory. For those few hours there was nothing else ... no clouds, no pond ... no war in Iraq, no bombs in Israel ... no birds, reptiles, oceans or stars ... the rest of life had disappeared ... my entire perception of the world suddenly constricted to a square board littered with paper, cards, two dice and a whole lot of plastic houses and hotels.

As a faint Autumn breeze ruffled my hair, I took another sip of wine and felt quite silly because it had all seemed so important.

I wondered if this is what dying is like, if only for an instant, the sudden expansion of perspective, as the game fades away, we see the bigness of everything, and realize how much the tiny little game we had played for our three-score-years-and-ten had been the master of our life instead of ourself.

All the victories and losses, the all encompassing heat of it all.

How utterly engaging it is ...

... perhaps because its the only game in town ... life, that is.

After all, what the hell else is there for us to do with all this time and energy except play the game we’re born into?

Comments

Forgiving the Monsters

2008-03-16T06:26:05+01:00

A while ago a friend and I were talking about our parents - all the mistakes they made that continue to bug us even now. And how, of all the things that happen in the life of a human being, it is our parents mistakes that made the most indelible marks on our souls.

Inevitably the conversation turned to the notion of forgiveness.

Not whether to forgive our parents ... but how to forgive them, because to forgive is often difficult - particularly with parents.

I think this is because very often their transgressions and failings have created a subtle kind of childish rage within most of us, which is so close to our bones, and which we’ve lived with so long, that no matter how we want, we cannot let it go. It’s almost as if the rage has become a part of our self-definition and to let go of it would seem almost like a betrayal of everything we are.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was free from this kind of residual rage however veiled beneath filial regard it might be. And those who think they are free of it are often simply unaware of it - having lived with it for so long it has become a characteristic of their perception of mundane ‘normality’.

This rage often comes out as the childhood war stories that we entertain each other with - those stories of family lunacy which either make us squirm or scream with laughter - those moments that only children experience where they are profoundly at loss to explain why one or both parents are doing what they are doing. At its most extreme, a violent argument between mother and father, while relatively insignificant to adults, can seem to a child as if the entire universe is collapsing. Death, divorce, violence, or simply the lunatic idiosyncrasies of an average adult - before them a child feels small and utterly out of their depth, and they all leave a mark of some kind.

No childhood is ever free of the effects created by the madness of adults.

I’m not saying this is bad - but simply a fact of life. In fact, one could say it’s these stressors in childhood that create the emotional resilience we all need to cope with the life we enter as adults. After all, adult life can seem like we’re a kid stuck in the middle of a bad marriage sometimes - when we feel so very small in the middle of universal forces in collision, and it’s all we can do to hang on until we understand.

I think even those parents who try to to be perfect will inevitably stuff it up as far as a child is concerned.

I remember when I was a counsellor, I had a bloke come in who, in one stunning declaration expressed utter hatred for their father while at the same time extolling what a wonderful parent he had been. Somewhat perplexed, I asked, “So ... if your father was so loving, generous and easy going, why do you feel so bitter?”

The answer came back: “No boundaries!! He let me do whatever I liked!! He never criticized me ... so how the hell was I supposed to grow! And what makes it worse is I have no excuse to complain because he was such a perfect father. All my friends loved him!!!”

‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘what a bastard.’

Many children might have flourished with the unconditional love and trust of a father like that, yet here was this guy utterly fixated with his own unique spin, which came out for him a how his father had disempowered him with love. He interpreted his father’s liberal approach as indifference ... and chose to hate him for it.

And me?

Well, I hated my father all the way through the first thirty years of my life - loathed him utterly until at the age of thirty, sitting on the huge pile of my own mistakes, I realized I was just like him - a foolish and very flawed man trying to do the best with what I had.

I realized then that my hatred largely arose from disappointment, because my father had not fitted the template in my head of how the perfect father should be. So now I have accepted him ... the man - a terribly flawed, foolish and unique human being ... just like me.

In that I suppose the light of my own folly shines very kindly on him.

But even so, no matter how much I have understood the man he is, and no matter how intensely I could love him, I don’t think I can ever totally expunge the rage at what happened in my childhood - not because my father was bad man but because my own feelings of outrage run so deep within me they seem somehow untouchable, permanently burning, like the molten core of the earth. And even though I have reached an intellectual reconciliation, there always seems to be a more visceral part of me that is profoundly inconsolable.

It’s very strange to have a head that is entirely cool with the events of my childhood and has let it go, and a body that still is utterly unforgiving in relation to its history.

So then, as I said at the beginning, this friend and I were talking about forgiveness.

His own parents had been a nightmare - narcissistic, violent and judgmental. His childhood war stories were a litany of often bizarre public spectacles between his parents that all children abhor. He’d been beaten in anger, abandoned, told he was no good, and so on. If anyone had cause to hate his parents, it was him.

So there we were, swapping war stories, laughing ourselves sick at how horrifying it had all been, when he stopped and said, “but seriously, how do you free yourself of this darkness?”

I thought about this for a second or two.

“I don’t think you do.” I said. “You just learn to live with it I suppose. You forgive them.”

“Forgive them?” He guffawed. “Not a fucking chance!” he declared.

But still, the notion took our attention. In further discussion we decided that the only way we could forgive was to look further on down the line than the relationship between us and them - to taste a little of what our parents had experienced at the hands of their own parents - and their parents before them. Only then could we see that our parents had been as much victims as we apparently were.

At which point our exclusive claim to victim-hood might disappear, simply because we see that the perpetrators of our own suffering were themselves victims. And not only that, but it might also be seen that the thousand year battlefield of ‘children-becoming -parents-of-children-becoming-parents’ is littered with the best of intentions, most of which failed, simply because all humans are so terribly flawed.

All down the line from the first to the latest, I think most parents try their hardest to do the very best that they can .... and really, isn't that enough? To know that?

But it was at this point in our discussion that we came into difficulty, because we realized that, okay ... we accept that our parents tried hard ... but if we are to forgive our parents in this manner, by understanding them as they were made, then we must by logical extension, forgive everybody!

... (unless of course, you believe in the notion of innate evil, which I definitely don’t)...

We must forgive all the monsters of history ... the onmes we love to hate ... the mad sadistic emperors, the deluded dictators, monsters, serial killers, rapists, paedophiles ... all of them were once victims - before they became perpetrators, the all suffered at the hands of some other victim, playing out their rage.

All monsters were children once - innocent, their characters formed by their parents and their environment. Just as I am who I am because I was made this way, all of us are products of who and what came before.

Take Hitler for instance. Alice Miller Phd, in an article titled ‘The Nature of Abuse’, puts it well when she says:

“ ... the monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster. He was not sent to earth by the devil, as some people think, nor was he sent by heaven to "bring order" to Germany, to give the country the autobahn and rescue it from its economic crisis, as many others still believe.

Neither was he born with "destructive drives", because there are no such things. Our biological mission is to preserve life, not to destroy It. Human destructiveness is never inborn, and inherited traits are neither good nor evil. How they develop depends on one’s character, which is formed In the course of one's life, and the nature of which depends, in turn, on the experiences one has, above all, in childhood and adolescence, and on the decisions one makes as an adult.

Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a monster. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called "child-rearing" and that I call "the concealed concentration camp of childhood," which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.. A terrible childhood, abusive father, violence and so on. An enraged little child beat at the walls of his heart and he did terrible things, along with all his enraged mates. And millions of people died in horrible ways ...”

So then, could Hitler have been a monster and innocent all at the same time?

Can such a thing exist?

I think it does ... and I'm aware that a huge number of people would vehemently disagree with me. The notion of innate evil is, after all, a moral premise of our time - (I would say, among the most damaging, but that's another post).

And just as this paradox of opposite values describes Hitler, so too I think it also applies to us all. We are all within ourselves, the villains and victims at the same time ... so, as Jesus is reputed to have once said, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone ...”

So then, back to our parents ... and forgiveness? How do we do it?

After all, there is no denying that many of the things parents have done to children have been dreadful. Open any tabloid and the sins of parents are daily grist for the mill of public outrage.

We ( mew and my friend) came to a conclusion that the only way we can forgive is to make it an act of unconditional love rather than a judgement.

By this I mean, in forgiving we are not in any way validating what was done - nor are we discounting the terrible effect it might have had on us.

All we are doing is acknowledging the innate fallibility of any being, and in acknowledging the fallibility of others, we are also then able to grant it to ourselves.

Because there is a terrible burden that comes with judgment - the possibility that in different circumstances, we ourselves might well become whoever we judge.

As Nietzche wrote:

‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

Comments

Strange the Death

2008-01-27T10:04:34+01:00

As I said in a previous post, I recently lost someone close to me. I had thought to keep it to myself, but since then has been so interesting I think I'll come clean and talk about it, perhaps because someone else out there might have had similar experiences.

So here it is. Five weeks ago my son Rafik died from an aneurysm - a vein ruptured in his brain.

It was a terrible shock.

And all the clichés come to mind - how he was just finding happiness and peace for the first time in his life - about how he was finally getting on top of the long lived problems he'd had - how he was loved because he'd made himself into such a good man - about how he'll be missed. All those clichés that one hears on the television when someone dies, and arrogantly thinks , 'couldn't they have come up with something more original than that?' But then it happens to me and I find myself uttering those same clichés - simply because they're so damned true.

And then there's all the other clichés, from people all around: 'I'm sorry for your loss', and the like. When heard from a distance, they sound so trite - and yet how meaningful they become when one's own heart is bursting with loss. And you are so appreciative of the heart that those words came from, that felt so deeply it has to be carefully controlled, and packaged in the safe haven of a cliche, for the benefit of you both - to honour the fact that they cannot possibly know what you're feeling; and to keep from breaking down because so much has yet to be done and tears are not useful now. Until Rafik died I never realized all this - the beauty and care of those carefully given clichés.

Superficially, I have no problem with death - no illusions or fears. Death doesn't spook me, nor does it particularly worry me, and I'm not particularly fussed about my own oncoming death, whenever it happens.

I've been close to death a few times - those times most people experience in the course of a life, when death flitted past just a millimetre away - when if I had have been a second earlier, or later - or taken a left turn instead of a right, I would have been dead in a flash.

In those times, as I listened to the imperceptible shuffle of death’s slippered feet fading away, while giggling insanely from the adrenalin rush of my escape, I've always been amazed by how profound the effect was of that proximity to my own death. Nothing brings such unspeakable clarity to the inexpressible exquisiteness of life as a brush with death. As Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully".

As one who has always been curious about death, I had the opportunity a number of years ago, of watching an autopsy (research for a book). A friend who was an ambulance officer at the time dressed me up in one of his old uniforms and signed me in as a trainee. It was fascinating. I saw a large man about 30 years of age, lying on a gurney with his eyes open and I could swear he was still breathing. And even as he was slowly gutted and de-brained by a medical examiner, still I could swear he was breathing.

So when the examiner extracted his heart and took it away to a nearby bench to be dissected, as he lay there his abdomen splayed open, I went up and looked down into his eyes, and I could have sworn at the time they were looking right back into mine. I kept thinking any minute he would sit up on the gurney and say, 'Bloody hell, what's going on?' - that it was all a mistake.

These uncanny hallucinations, of him still breathing, of his eyes being about to blink, all indicated to me that my brain was having great difficulty making sense of the stillness of death - the incredible incomprehension of a lack of life.

What made this all the more odd was, when I’d been a kid living in the country death was everywhere - as most country kids can attest. I’d seen ailing sheep shot. I’d killed thousands of rabbits, some with a gun, others with my hands. And though sometimes I’d paused after breaking their necks and felt their hearts speed up with the last burst of life, falter and stop, still I'd not given it much of a thought - just slung them onto the wire with all the rest of the dead rabbits and walked on. But then, as I think about it, perhaps it had been that in my ignorant country-boy universe of the time, it simply seemed normal for animals to die, yet utterly unbelievable for humans.

So too is it still unbelievable - even now, five weeks away from Rafik’s death.

The strangest thing is, in my surface intellect I have rationalized that shocking event and packaged it neatly, ready to be stored away. When I look into my thoughts now there are no more tears or grief. And if someone were to ask how I feel about Rafik being gone, I’d be likely to say, ‘I think I’m cool with it now’. Because I think I am. I understand I’ll never see him again. The gone-ness of his going is fully comprehended now. Superficially, one could say I’ve let go and am ready to move on with the rest of my life

But wait. There’s another level to all this, but it’s not something I can express, or even understand with the mind I’m used to understanding things with.

It’s a body thing. It's like my whole body is thinking, and digesting this recent event at its own pace, quite apart from my mind/brain.

Like, it feels as if there's a deep, deep rumbling right down in the subterranean caves of my being - an immense back and forth tidal movement as if the entire inner core of my personal planet is still in turmoil as it tries to find equilibrium, while all is quiet on the surface.

And this inner dissonance has profound surface effects - I find myself feeling such ridiculous things - sudden and intense rage with no source or focus, sadness for no reason, exhaustion that comes down in an instant, inexpressible despair which, like mould in the tropics, appears from nowhere and covers everything.

So I meditate on it. I deep sea dive down into the sensations in my heart and in my body and, where usually I can manage to find the source and open it up - this strange ruction of my being appears to have no source. It’s almost cellular and as as such I cannot quantify it or even say for sure that it exists, except that I feel it.

This silent rumbling and clashing of rocks deep in my private universe - it’s so much a force of nature I am awed by its power, and by how little I am in control of it. I feel almost humbled by it ... and somewhat embarrassed, because I am reminded that when I was a counselor, I had a number of clients who came to me with similar reactions to the death of someone close, and though I suppose I might have asked the right questions, I know now I never really understood the depth of what they felt - and how confusing it must have been for them.

Because there is no explanation!

I feel such intense things, yet I cannot explain - and that’s what makes it so strange. The disconnect between the event of Rafik’s death, and what I feel is so incredibly profound that if I was of a panicky kind, I would think I was going mad - because there is no control of this force. There is not even a sense of being able to predict its patterns because it doesn’t appear to have any.

Another interesting thing is how isolated one feels - an intense loneliness that is not the fault of anyone, because it’s not about the lack of people. It's something else I can't get a grip on. Profound loneliness.

Very strange, because I’ve never felt lonely before. Not really. I’m not the lonely type. I never pine for people, because I”m very happy with my own company. But now I have these surprising moments when I pine for the company of others. Yet I cannot imagine who I’d want to see, or what I’d say to them if they were to come.

I think, ‘what do I want from all these people whose company I don’t usually need? Why do I pine for their company?’

I don’t know. And that’s terribly confusing on its own.

So ... there you go. This too will pass, but all the same, it’s very interesting while it's here.

Thanks for listening. It’s nice to talk ...

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Thresholds

2008-01-07T15:03:35+01:00

Life doesn’t move in a straight line.

It progresses as a wave form, modulating between opposites around a middle way - or as the saying goes, ‘sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes sunny, sometimes rain.”

And just as life moves in a wave form, so too does everything IN a life.

As any athlete knows, there is a wave pattern to their training progress - not only in physical prowess, but also in their levels of aptitude and motivation. The first progress wave is slow, but steady. There is always a freshness of mind in beginning any enterprise, which gains momentum as confidence grows. Then comes the elation of continued progress, in which the athlete feels like a master of the universe.

Then, right at the peak of confidence and prowess comes the lapse - an apparent decline in ability, progress and motivation.

This is followed by shock at the decline, and (if there is no coach to enlighten them) failing confidence as the athlete becomes demoralized. Then, right at the point where things seem darkest, comes the beginning of the next wave up.

It’s the same in the share market - any trader knows that the market moves in waves - the wave up being made of three smaller progressions, then two progressions in the inevitable wave down. And that entire movement forms the progression a much larger wave, also of three up and two down, which is a progression in a larger wave and so on. Waves within waves.

Anyone who has read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ or any of the voluminous material available about Fibonacci numbers or the aesthetic notions of ‘The Golden Mean’ or ‘Golden Section’ would know that this wave movement of all things, and the proportions in which the waves move seems to be universal - roughly 1.6 to 1. Nobody seems to know exactly why the universe moves in this way, but everything in it seems to obey this ratio, from art to the flux between peace and war in the world arena.

The same movement can be seen in our own emotional phases and moods - and the way an emotion rises, plays out, then fades - beginning, consolidation, intensification, extinction burst, then dissipation.

From making love, to the ebb and flow of oceans, to the rise and fall of empires - everything moves in waves.

For myself, a perfect example of this wave pattern became apparent when I was a songwriter.

Though I didn’t know about wave theory at the time, I got to know that there were certain thresholds I had to pass through to craft a good song. It’d start of from a small core idea - a chord progression, riff or feel - or perhaps a key lyric of about one or two lines. Usually this first wave would come spontaneously with the intimation of a complete song already resonating within it - I’d almost be able to hear it just a few steps away, somewhere in the ether.

So I’d start jamming around the the idea, collecting more ideas around that central core - and, in a flurry of inspiration, this wave would gain momentum - the most pleasurable part.

Confidence would grow as the ideas spilled out faster and faster together with feelings of happiness and invincibility - thoughts like, “this is the best thing I’ve ever done”, and “I’m a fucking genius!”

Then, right at the peak of this euphoria, would come a brief but intense realization of confusion as all the parts I’d come up would suddenly seem not to fit. It would be as if all the incredible beauty I had seen before had evaporated, and I was left with the mess of its remains.

Shock and dejection would follow as I’d look around at the all the un-matchable lyrics scattered around the floor, and listen to the hurriedly recorded bits jangling in the speakers, and as the initial dream of the song faded to nothing, I would feel hopelessness and desolation - thoughts like, “I hate songwriting”, I’ll never write a song again”.

In later years I learnt that this was the time to walk away - but in the stubbornness of youth, I often used to exhaust myself trying to write my way through this valley of the spirit, only exhausting myself in the process.

The next stage would come after a break, whether voluntary or enforced. Whether an hour or a year, it’s amazing how a break can clear a congested mind. I’d come back and immediately see something new in the mess of what I’d done. So, though the original dream would be gone, a new one would arise like a phoenix from its ashes and the next wave up would begin, usually resulting in a finished song, and my confidence as a songwriter would be vindicated.

At the time I called these phases ‘thresholds of pain’ and as I became more experienced I got used to them, even predicting when they would occur. And in conversation with other songwriters, as well as authors and painters, I learnt that they too, all had their own strategies for surmounting these thresholds.

This wave formation is innate to the learning of any new skill - and it’s especially present in learning how to meditate.

When I was training people to meditate, I watched so many pass through the usual wave patterns - elation, then the subtle arrogance of ease, then having it all fall in a heap as their practice and motivation seemingly dissipated - at which point some would give up right at the time when it seemed most hopeless - which was usually, ironically, just before the next breakthrough.

For me as a trainer, it was excruciating when a trainee would decide to give up. As they reiterated each others plaintive declarations of defeat, saying, “It’s just not for me”, or “I’m just no good at it”, I always knew that right at that moment of defeat, they were closest to the next breakthrough and it was up to me as a trainer to help them see this. So the hard work would begin - the battle to keep them going through their valley of doom, even as their mind told them it was hopeless, they don’t have time, and so on.

Because the conscious mind is such a tawdry politician. It will always ‘follow the polls’, so to speak, chanting the litany of whatever temporary phase is happening in the mind/body - particularly negative phases, anxiety or pain, because they are the most compelling.

Mountain climbers and marathon runners say their greatest challenge is not the physical task they undertake, so much as it is their conscious mind - the hysterical mess of thoughts screaming for them to stop. These thoughts are a part of any endeavor and they do a bad cop good cop routine with the more subtle and soothing thoughts that tell you you don’t need to do this: “my life is complete without this” , and “I could be comfortable at home” ...and the most compelling of all - “it’s obviously not the right time for me to do this”.

All of these thoughts, the viciously demoralizing ones and the soothing procrastinators, are designed to get you to balk at whatever threshold you’re stuck at - to stop you passing through the fire to victory at the other side.

In a book I wrote on meditation practice,’ Happy to Burn’, I said of this:

“The ego is threatened by meditation because it fears change. It equates change, even if it is positive, with danger and the possibility of death - not necessarily death of the organism, but death of itself. It is of no matter that many of our habits limit our life, or even threaten our survival; the Ego will always try to keep the status quo, because that’s all it’s ever known.

Its operating creed is: ‘The way things have always been is best because it works. How do I know it works?

‘Well, I’m alive aren’t I?’ That is all it cares about - survival, not quality, or happiness, or satisfaction; just brute survival.

So the ego will resist any attempts that are made to change the way it functions, and in this campaign of resistance it has all our conditioned habits of laziness, procrastination, fear, desire, guilt, anger and hatred to draw on as an arsenal of coercive weapons. We all have conditioned weaknesses in our personalities, and it is these that will arise in practice of meditation.”

I’ll finish with a quote that always sits at the back of my head, reminding me of what’s important - it was said in an interview by Peter Brook, a British stage director:

"Never stop. One always stops as soon as something is about to happen."

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When Looked at from a Distance

2008-01-04T06:52:34+01:00

Was going to blog about other things then changed my mind and decided to give you a picture of thinking, and a thought I've been thinking.

It's interesting the thoughts that a death creates. Sort of burns a new set of neural patterns into the head that alter everything, sending old predictable thoughts in entirely new and surprising direction.

Thinking

When looked at from a distance, a life often seems like an unsolvable puzzle that can only be worked out in retrospect. Like, we live relentlessly forward, pushing our way through a ceaseless hail of the new, most of which seems totally chaotic.

And all the while we have very little idea of what’s going on until we stop to look back.

It’s only in this process of review that we can clearly identify the sequences of cause and effect that lead us here, to this point. We look back and see a coherent stream of events that give our life sense and we draw solace from that. We draw solace from the knowledge that at least now we can identify why things happened the way they did - and that makes life seem to make sense I suppose. In remembering we’re able to imbue our life with the logic we require of it. After all, we have a brain whose intrinsic nature is to make patterns.

But really, this sense of logic we get from retrospect, is illusory. Any path we took would make sense when looking back at our footprints. It's just that, in looking back, we forget that each step we took was taken in the dark - not knowing what was going to happen, or what coincidences might arise from what we were about to do.

The future is chaos, the past makes sense, because we give it sense.

But regardless of whether the sense we make of life is actual or illusory, perhaps it is the only reward of growing old. The closer we get to death, life seems to make more sense simply because their is more of the logical past, and less of the chaotic future. With only the past stretching back behind us, life finally begins to sit nicely within the neural patterns of the brain ... and it all begins to make sense.

Perhaps it’s this quality that makes old age a wonderful reward - the prize at the end of the long obstacle course we run in the dark, when we finally give up the struggle to understand why we live.

Sorry about these maudlin thoughts ... (actually, that should be morbid thoughts) ... I'll spark up in a while ...

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Death

2007-12-23T15:30:54+01:00

Death never makes sense.

Though all of us are inexorably headed toward it, and though we know it is happening all around us, it doesn't make sense.

Though we reassure ourselves with religion, science - beliefs in reincarnation and the afterlife - still, when death appears it never makes sense.

Someone close to me died the other night. We watched him, in the hospital, breathing with the help of a machine, comatose, his brain flooded with blood.

For eight hours we waited and watched, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes whispering in his ear, telling him we loved him, telling him he could let go now, that it was alright.

And all the time, though I knew his brain had effectively died five hours ago, and I knew his body was going to die very soon, still my mind couldn't accept it.

I couldn't accept it because his body still breathed, the chest rising and falling - the pulse in the hand I held was still strong, and his body was still warm. He was alive. That face I had spoken too, and shared thoughts with, that body I had hugged hello and goodbye. He was alive.

Then the doctor came and after making sure he had permission, he ushered us out while he and the nurses disconnected the breathing apparatus. We waited down the hall until they called us up, and as I walked back up I saw his body struggling on the bed as it clung to each breath.

His eyes were half open and in the dim room, they seemed to be looking into mine though I knew they saw nothing. And again we waited, holding his hands, his feet, hugging his struggling body as each quivering breath came, then went ... came then went ... until the body couldn't do it anymore. One spasm, then another ... then one more.

Only then, in the incredible stillness of death, did I finally realize that this body before me was no longer him. It was already an empty thing.

He was dead, and it still didn't make sense. For all the incredible insights I've had in my life, the thinking I've done, the intelligence I've built and fed with information - this death still doesn't make sense.

Goodbye Rafik. You'll always be missed.

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Xmas Card for U all

2007-12-14T06:03:23+01:00

Gee, the year is nearly ended.

To all my blog friends, thanks for being out there, and such good people. I sometimes imagine all the good people I know, all over the world, as being something like Indra's net.

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions.

In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net's every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.

If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.

Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite
the Avatamsaka Sutra

Francis H. Cook: ‘Hua-yen Buddhism : The Jewel Net of Indra’

So this card, which I sent to all my real life friends, is also for all of you, the friends I've never met, all the jewels in Indra's net.

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The Amazing Windmill Stumblebum

2007-12-01T07:30:44+01:00

Every so often in a life one meets an exceptional being, someone so unique and inspiring they enhance life simply by being who they are. There’ve been a couple of people like this in my life, but in this special case, it was a very small and emaciated kitten with paralyzed legs who inspired me.

I found some photos of him the other day, which reminded me of what an extraordinary creature he was. His name was Windmill Stumblebum, and I thought I’d write this post for him, because I’ve never forgotten him.

I hope you enjoy this story of our short friendship and the place it happened in.

Windmill looking misty.

I got to know Windmill over four months in 1992 at the Sorn Thawee Meditation Center in Chacheongsao, Thailand, where I’d gone for a four month meditation retreat - the second of many over the coming years.

I’d say at that time, in a compound covering about 20 acres, there would have been, at a rough estimate, about 30 or 40 full grown dogs - and the same number of cats - none of them neutered, so in breeding season they all give birth at a prodigious rate.

It’s like this in most monasteries in Thailand. In general, the Thai people are not kind to stray animals, so most animals without homes gravitate to the monasteries. There, the Buddhist monks and nuns, while not exactly encouraging them to stay, nevertheless give what they can to any animal that needs it.

As a result the monasteries of Thailand are home to a large population of wildlife, all jostling and competing with one another for space and food.

I arrived in June, the hottest time - the worst season to be in Thailand - a time when only mad dogs and stupid ‘farang’ like me were out in the sun. Sweating like a pig under the weight of a huge back pack, I wandered in through the gates of Sorn Thawee to find an explosion of new life. It was the end of breeding season, so the entire monastery was jumping with pups, kittens and chickens, squawling, tweeting, yapping and mewling from under stairs, bushes, everywhere.

For most of these new-born creatures, life is very, very hard. Though the monks and nuns give leftover food, the sheer number of animals competing for these scraps makes it likely that at least half of the new-born will be killed off within a month. But during August and October it’s even harder. As the wet season gets underway, most of those who survived the Summer are killed off by the huge range of diseases that come with the extreme humidity of the rainy season. At those times the smell of death is everywhere as creatures born only months ago curl up in quiet places to die, becoming food for ants, flies and bacteria.

But the monks and nuns step lightly though it all - this yearly drama of sex, birth, death - seeing but never interfering because after all it’s simply nature. They give what food they can and that’s as far as it goes - nature takes care of things in its own way.

No food left

The day I settled into the hut I’d been allocated, I could smell death coming in whiffs through the window. Looking around outside, I found the swollen body of a dead kitten under the bridge nearby. It was being consumed by a heap of red ants. Standing next to the corpse was another kitten so starved and diseased it too was almost dead. It was swaying slightly as it idly batted at ants with its paw.

To save myself from the smell I decided to move the corpse further down the bank of the pond. But when I went to pick it out of this mass of ants, they swarmed up my arm, biting viciously. So voracious were these ants, I noticed they were already hard at work consuming the tail of the sick kitten who'd settled nearby - and it wasn’t even dead yet.

I finally managed to move the dead kitten further down the bank of the pond.After a short period of confusion the highway of ants soon found the new location, as did the sick kitten, who followed the body of its friend. Though I tried to coax it away, it seemed not to want to move, so I left it there to its fate. With so much death around, and no resources to save it, there was nothing else I could do.

The next day it too was dead and covered with ants.

Over the following days, during afternoon breaks from meditation, I would go down to see how long it would take the ants to pick the two dead bodies clean, and I noticed a fascinating thing.

By the second day the ants had picked the legs, eyes and tails clean, but left the torsos intact. I found this strange, particularly because both were now filled with maggots.

I wondered why the ants were allowing maggots to consume their property.

The other thing was, I would have thought the maggots would be perfect food for ants, so again, I couldn’t work out why the ants were ignoring them.

By the third day the ants had totally disappeared though the torsos were still seething with maggots, which were now so plump they looked as if they would burst.

Then, on the fourth day it all became clear. I came back to find a long thick highway of ants carrying the maggots away. How smart is that? Rather than going through the fuss of dismembering the kitten themselves, the ants let the maggots do all the work, then took them - each one a perfect package of food.

I could write a lot more about the amazing ways of Thai ants, but I’m trying to keep to the point, so maybe I’ll do that another time.

'Mama' cat with the kids

The next day, after the morning meal, I was just resuming practice when I heard an adult cat snarling and spitting. This in itself was not unusual. It’d usually lead to a full-on scuffle then be over - another cat fight in a day punctuated by many.

But the growling and spitting went on for the next half an hour. And considering how hot it was, and the difficulties I was having staying awake as I meditated, it became extremely irritating.

On opening the door of my hut, on the bank of the pond, I found a ring of seven tiny kittens crouched around a big gray cat who I assumed to be their mother. I assumed this because she was pacing up and down, growling and snarling at them, and if one of the kittens dared move or even twitch, she’d clout it over the head with a paw. Like a chastened child the kitten would crouch penitently down, flattening its ears and glancing surreptitiously at its siblings as if to say: “We are sooo in the shit.”

Over following weeks I found this to be her usual disposition when any of her brood were nearby. She seemed to hate the sight of them. Like a jaded suburban mother who’s absolutely had it with kids, she’d snarl and spit and slash if she saw them.

Of course, the kittens, being very young, were still in the habit of following her about, all perky and playful - until she’d spin about and give them another piece of her mind, when they’d immediately crouch, eyes averted and ears flattened until she wandered on, still growling irritably - then they’d perk up again.

But as irritable as she was, it turned out this gray cat took her mothering very seriously.

The monastery kitchen

On any typical day, around mid-day, a kitchen-woman would bring food for the animals - usually a large tray of left-over rice and vegetables from the morning meal. She’d walk across the bridge and put it on the bank of the pond, close to my hut.

Of course, a large collection of dogs and cats would have collected around the kitchen in expectation of this event, and they’d all be jostling around her as she came out with the tray. But this mob from the kitchen would never make it more than halfway across the bridge, because the gray ‘Mama’ cat would position herself at the head and put on such a ferocious performance it’d stop them in their tracks. With her hair standing on end, ears tucked back and fangs fully bared, potential challengers always thought it much wiser to wait than to take her on.

Mama’ cat would hold her position there on the bridge as her kittens leapt headlong into the food, and she'd stay until the last of them had finished. Only then would she back off off and, after taking a few bites of her own, saunter away, snarling wearily as if to say:” “Kids!!! Who’d have ‘em!”

This was exceptional, but her protectiveness went even further than that.

Sometimes, particularly when I first began feeding my leftovers to the kittens, she’d make sure to check the food, attacking any kitten who got to it before her. At first I thought she was being greedy, keeping the food for herself, but she never took anything - just sniffed it to check it was okay, then she’d wander off with the usual snarls and growls, leaving the crew to dive in.

Bumhole looking sultry

Gradually over a few weeks, natural attrition whittled this group of seven down to three kittens I named Bumhole, Whinger and Butch ... Windmill Stumblebum joined a little later to make the fourth in the crew.

Bumhole had some sort of wasting sickness, so she was all bones and skin and her fur was very thin. And she had some kind of distemper that had taken away her voice - she couldn’t meow - just croaked.

I called her Bumhole because her rectum was so distended it poked out from beneath her tail - it was sort of a feature of the kitten.

Strangely enough, as sick as she looked, her grip on life was quietly tenacious. She was still alive when I left, when other, more healthy looking kittens had died.

Whinger and Butch asleep

Whinger is a ginger kitten, personality as the name I gave her. Though relatively healthy, she didn’t like to play or muck about like the other kittens - she’d just whine and whinge at my screen door all day.

Butch, (black and white) was the strong one. The rare times Mama cat wasn’t about, Butch was the one who would stand and fight no matter how big the assailant. Once I saw her stand up to a tomcat five times her size who’d wandered into the kittens territory - a huge scarred brute.

Butch put on a magnificent show, crouched with her tiny back haunches primed to attack, ears down, teeth bared - a minute puffball of fury spitting and swiping with her barely formed claws.

The tomcat paused for a few seconds, looking down as if in mild surprise. With a single clout it sent Butch spinning over the easement into the pond where she immediately began scrabbling her way back up to have another go.

Such an impressive little thing was Butch - always quietly confident, and protective of her kin.

But then there was Windmill.

Windmill in possession. This particular day, Windmill had stolen a small fish from the kitchen. He came bumbling over the bridge with it in his mouth and wouldn't let anyone, not dog, human or cat, take it from him. Check out the look in his eyes.

I never knew where Windmill came from. He sort of stumbled in from nowhere, seeming to have no family, no mother, and no territory. He just appeared, instantly noticeable by his strange gait.

You see, Windmill had some kind of spinal injury - at least that’s what I think it was, because he had no control over the back half of his body. He was filthy for that reason, because with his disability it was impossible to clean himself.

But somehow, being the resourceful kitten he was, he’d survived the obstacle course of the monastery and taught himself to walk - an incredible feat on its own considering most able bodied kittens died just trying to survive.

Bumbling along dragging his injured back half behind him, if he wanted to pick up the pace he’d get this set look in his eyes. Then, lowering his head and jutting it forward he’d just go for it, back legs wind-milling madly and his bum veering from side to side like a drunk sailor bouncing off walls. From that point until he collided with whatever he was headed for, it was a momentum driven exercise, determined by the set focus of his eyes.

But what was most amazing was the blind obedience of his ruined back legs which, spinning madly, followed the brute will of his head, wherever he went. Hence the name I gave him, Windmill Stumblebum.

The other kittens hated Windmill, because he didn’t belong. And yet he wouldn’t leave. Once he’d decided that this was the place to be (and it was, considering the constancy of food), he stayed on, regardless of the snarling, growling and slashing from the other kittens. He slowly insinuated himself into the crew over a number of weeks, simply by always being there, mooching about in the background or scrabbling along behind the pack.

As well as being the most persistent creature I've ever known, I think Windmill was the most aggressively hungry of the kittens I’ve known, because the first time I went to pat him he began gnawing at my big toe, obviously thinking it was meat.

And whenever food appeared he’d go totally mad, darting about in front of the crew with lights in his eyes, back legs spinning impossibly, like: ‘Where’s the food! Where’s the food!’ As soon as the food hit the ground, no matter if there were six or seven other kittens there before him - he’d launch himself through, plunging in head first, chewing before he’d even got a mouthful.

Of course, this manic behavior around food caused the other kittens much aggravation, but he didn't care - just kept eating.

One time I saw two kittens swipe him so hard from either side of where he was wolfing down their food their claws got stuck in his skull. But Windmill kept right on. The two kittens went into a panic trying to extract their claws but they were embedded so deep they couldn’t, so in the end they gave up and went back to eating with their claws still stuck in Windmill’s head.

Windmill’s tenacity and will at those times was absolutely stunning.

As inundated as the monastery was with animals and birds, other than leaving left over food, the Thais felt no need to care for them. To them animals and birds are like trees and insects - they feed them simply because they were alive, in the same way as they water plants. But rarely will you see a Thai person pat a stray dog or a cat or play with them - they consider animals too dirty to touch.

So it's fair to say that before I arrived these kittens had never been touched by a human, or played with. It’s understandable then, that when in my afternoon break I began feeding and playing with them, I awakened a thirst for affection that was almost unquenchable.

My teacher, Phra Manfred, asked me why I did this. I told him it was kindness. He shook his head wearily.

“This is not kindness,” he said. “You are creating suffering, because you are creating attachment in their hearts. One day you will be gone. What will they do then? They will suffer.”

He was right. I hadn’t thought that far ahead and in that I was guilty of sentimentality and self indulgence. But I figured it was too late now. The damage was done. The kittens had adopted the bushes around my hut as their territory and me as a friend, so I figured I might as well give them what I could over the next months.

Windmill taking a break from trying to walk.

Usually I’d only leave my hut twice each day - once to go to the daily interview with my teacher, then at about 4.30 PM I’d step outside to stretch, walk or play with the kittens for an hour before going back to work.

So the crew got to know that this was the time to party. About 4 PM they’d begin congregating around my wire screen door.

I’d know they were there because Whinger would bat at the screen with a paw, making it rattle, then she’d start whinging, opening and closing her mouth, bringing forth the most extensive vocabulary of meows I've ever heard. The others would just sit waiting in a ring as if listening closely as Whinger told the screen door about her day.

When I eventually came out, the whole crew would start milling about, jostling with one another, purring and curling up beneath my hands as I stroked them.

Only Windmill would hang back. I found it interesting that as badly injured as he had been, Windmill was the most independent of them all. Never once did he lose himself in an anxious thirst for my affection like the other kittens.

At these times it seems, his interest was not in me so much as inclusion in the gang. He didn’t want to be patted. He wanted to play - to be accepted by the other kittens.

So he'd sit back watching them mill around me for a short while then, overtaken with a fit of brotherly enthusiasm, he'd think to get a game going. Crouching down behind the crew with a bright playful look on his face, after wiggling his bum for a bit, he’d leap ineptly onto their backs.

Their reaction seemed never to be what he expected - they’d throw him off with much snarling and slashing of claws. Repelled so abruptly, he’d immediately pretend disinterest, becoming fascinated with a nearby leaf as if that had actually been what he was interested in. He’d prove this by batting it about for a while, then bumble off to the side to wash his paws for a while.

Having saved face in this manner, he’d then take to mooching about in the general vicinity until something else caught his interest. And something always did. Unlike the other kittens, Windmill was never at a loss for something to do.

One day, after he'd been spurned by the crew once again, Windmill lost his footing on the side of the path and tumbled down to the edge of the pond. Having spent most of his life on the paths around the huts where the action was, I don't think he'd ever been so close to water, because he immediately became fascinated as he discovered there were fish darting about just below. I was watching him, and it was if he’d been given an electric shock, his fascination was so instant and so strong.

Ignoring the fact that he had no power or control in his back legs, he edged down to the concrete rim of the pond and, teetering precariously, began reaching down to paw at the fish. “He’s going to go in,” I thought and sure enough, ten seconds later, plop, he disappeared into the water.

By the time I got to him he was already submerged, front legs paddling in vain as his paralyzed back end sank beneath him. I remember looking down at him looking up at me, and his yellow eyes seemed to be glowing up from beneath the water, more from surprise than fear.

Reaching in, I grabbed him by an ear and pulled him out and, spluttering and sneezing, placed him back up on the path. He sat shaking his head for a second, looking even more pathetically scrawny than usual, then he tried to shake the water off but only succeeded in falling over because his back legs collapsed.

When next I looked he was stalking a leaf he'd found dancing in the wind.

Two months later the relentless heat gave way to the wind, thunder and lightening of the rainy season which came like an invading army. And though the inundation of rain transformed the parched monastery into a verdant paradise, the accompanying humidity brought disease that killed off many more of the animals.

The remnants of the crew however, survived, largely because of the bad tempered care of their mother. And Windmill, the interloper, was also a beneficiary. Though still filthy, he was not so scrawny as he had been when he first began hanging around the crew, and though they still tried to ignore him, the other kittens now reluctantly accepted that he was a part of their crew - so didn't make such a fuss over food.

Windmill at the door

It took about a week of solid rain to fill the lake at the center of the monastery. It was amazing to behold, as what had previously been a fetid, lifeless mud pit quickly filled with with new water and fish magically reappeared.

But these were not like fish I have ever seen. These fish walked.

It happened one morning after a particularly heavy downpour. For the last week, the entire surface of the lake had been exploding with fish, flicking themselves into the air as if incredibly happy. So that morning I was on my way through a moderately heavy rain to the morning interview, when I found a couple of these fish wriggling on the path.

Thinking I was helping, I picked them up and threw them back into the lake, only to find more fish further down the path, again wriggling about as if stranded.

It was only then that I realized that the fish were jumping out of the lake, flicking themselves out through the rain onto the banks, then using their fins, they were struggling up to the path, then ‘walking’. Using their gills and fins, they’d struggle along, seemingly set on going somewhere - I'm not sure where.

All the monks and nuns were out in the rain, stepping over them and laughing. I found the Acharn standing by the lake with his hands behind his back, and he too was laughing at all these fish promenading along the paths.

“What’s happening?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he said
“Why are the fish walking?”
Through a big grin he threw out his arms in the rain and said, “Because they are happy fish.”

I walked away thinking in my ponderous Western way, ‘Can fish be happy?’

Then I saw a big one - about three feet long. It leapt out of the water and landed on the bank, thump, to start scrabbling away from the water up the bank toward the path.

Whole families of fish were flicking themselves out of the water to wriggle and flip their way along the bank and the paths for up to quarter of an hour, before rolling themselves back down into the water - though some were found up to two hundred meters away, up in the pine forest, either lost or extraordinarily adventurous - but strangely, still alive.

It occurred to me then that perhaps the Acharn was right. After all, human beings are happy to dive into water to swim in the watery world of fish - so it makes an odd sense that when fish are happy, they should leap out of the water to walk about in the airy world of humans.

But ... sorry, I digress ... back to Windmill.

A part of his physical disability was that he’d get constipated because his back part was paralyzed - yet he kept on stuffing food down, joyfully disregarding the consequences. So if he ate a particularly big meal, for the next day or two he’d stagger about looking like a furry black balloon. Sometimes he’d be so painfully swollen I expected him to explode in a shower of catshit and fur, but Windmill never seemed fussed by it. He’d go on bumbling about as if it was nothing exceptional.

Eventually he’d return to his original shape, though I never saw him have a shit - I saw a lot of tries, but nothing ever came out.

He’d go through the elaborate prelude of finding a spot, scratching at the ground. Then after falling over and repositioning himself a couple of times he’d squat expectantly, concentrating for a few seconds, during which absolutely nothing would happen.

After a while he’d turn and check behind him to see what he’d created, searching fruitlessly when nothing appeared, then turn around, squat, and go through the whole thing again. I realized later that he probably had no sensation in his read end, so couldn't tell if anything had happened unless he checked.

Eventually he’d give up. But the lack of completion never deterred him from scratching a pile of dirt over the spot then giving it one more wishful sniff before he left.

As I said, Windmill was finally accepted by the crew. I think Butch, Whinger and Bumhole just gave in to his persistence eventually, because Windmill never gave up. He always came back no matter how much they mauled and insulted him.

But what was more extraordinary was that as months went by I realized that Windmill was accepted everywhere.

You see, pressure of population made the patchwork of territories very complex, and very tight. Every animal had a very small area to move in without coming into violent conflict with another animal. I’d seen cats get viciously attacked if they ventured too far from my hut - dogs would kill each other for minor transgressions.

But Windmill - when he wasn’t mooching around my hut I realized he was floating around all over the place - Over the four months I was there I spotted him all over the monastery - up near the Acharn's house, down by the rubbish pits, across the lake, or over where the great hall was being built.

He was everywhere.

Where all animals here by necessity had a territory, Windmill had none, yet all territories were open to him. An impossible thing for any animal in a place like this, yet for this crippled little skerrick of life it seemed no boundaries existed. An incredible thing.

Not only that, but also unlike the other kittens, he played with dogs.

One day I saw one of the dogs follow him as he bumbled across the kitchen, then knock him over with its nose. And just as I thought to intervene, with Windmill lying on his back beneath this dogs mouth, the dog scratched Windmills scrawny little belly with its teeth.

That in itself was amazing, particularly considering the dog was ten times the size of Windmill. But more unusual was the incredible trust Windmill had when the dog grabbed him in its mouth and started shaking him upside down.

Somehow Windmill knew the dog wouldn’t hurt him, just as he knew he could go anywhere in the monastery and remain untouched.

Just as the kittens had accepted him, so it appeared had every other animal in the monastery. Windmill was impossibly loved. This tiny, crippled kitten from nowhere seemed to create kindness, trust and good heart wherever he went.

Windmill eventually learned how to get into my hut while I was meditating.

There were two doors, one a heavy wooden door, the other a light, wire-screen door. I usually kept the wooden door open all day and the screen door closed with a sarong slung over it, and Windmill discovered that if he took a running head-butt at my screen door it would slip out of its catch and open.

So for the last month I was there, he got to coming and going as he pleased. I’d be sitting meditating on the bench and I’d hear ‘crash!’ and know that Windmill had arrived.

Then I’d hear ‘scrabble, scrabble’ as he crossed the floor ... then ‘fall, slip’ as he struggled to get a grip on the edge of the bench ... then ‘scrabble, scrabble, pant, pant’ as he pulled himself up onto the bench.

Next would come the pungent odor of garbage as Windmill’s hot little body insinuated itself into my lap, settling himself down, then purring as he fell asleep.

Windmill on the bridge

After four months of meditation, I left the monastery.

A year later I returned and Windmill had disappeared, presumably dead. Another generation of kittens was fighting to survive. No-one remembered him, or spoke of him, except me.

When I'd arrived at the monastery I'd been full of self pity and doubt, and he had shown me something I'd forgotten. The worth of courage, a strong will and a good heart, and for this I regard him as one of my teachers.

Comments

More Pitcha's

2007-11-19T08:52:27+01:00

Been at my scanner again, scanning old drawings and stuff. I used to draw cartoons, some for publication in a student mag back then, some not. I think I was flirting with being a cartoonist.

Not sure why I've suddenly become so fascinated with these old sketchbooks.

Perhaps it is that I think I'd be happier if I went back to painting and drawing ... but I think it's too late. And I'm not one for hobbies.

And besides, I have writer's mind I think. I love words and sentences, and the rhythms and nuances that appear when I write. They tickle my brane.

But when I look at these drawings and remember how amazing it was to see things unfold out of the end of a pen, I get an itch to go back. Pictures are so much more gratifying than writing. And I think they say so much more ... but that's just coz I'm going through a period of hating to write. It happens.

My only problem is they can get a bit ... um ... twee I think the word is. Something to guard against, like sentimentality in writing.

But nonetheless, I quite like them.

There's captions which I'd better make clear because my writing is terrible, so I'll add them underneath each picture in italics.

Don't ask me what they mean because I can't explain.

Sometimes the heater misbehaves, but life's like that ... sometimes.

I like it when it rains ...
... all that water.
The sound of it beating
on the tin roof.
I feel safe
when I'm inside
and it's raining ...
My love
will come
home soon

The chain of my mistakes ...
... I know it's there
... it always waits.

All my friends are buried
deep in my wounded heart

Comments

Awareness not Attention

2007-11-17T08:28:00+01:00

Been a while since I posted about meditation so, considering this is a blog primarily concerned with things meditation, I suppose I’d better.

I’ll begin with an interesting quote from the man himself, Gautama Buddha:

"Foolish, ignorant people indulge in careless lives, whereas a clever man guards his attention as his most precious possession.”

It’s interesting, because most people don’t consider their attention as particularly problematic. I, on the other hand, consider our hyperactive and uncontrollable attention to be at the root of all our problems.

And it is specifically the attention that is affected by practicing meditation.

So let’s go into that ….

There are two active aspects to mind. Attention and Awareness.

I’ll deal with Attention first.

Attention is the tool that we carve our life with, while awareness gives us the perspective and positioning we need in life, so we know how to use the tool of our attention well.

You are paying attention to these words right now. It’s a bit like a beam of light - information streams from whatever the attention is focused on, into your personal realm, where it is processed – and where decisions are made about whether it’s interesting or not. If not, then your attention will go somewhere else.

The attention can only do one thing at a time. Sometimes it may seem as if it’s doing many things – but in actuality it is simply switching from one thing to another.

For instance, if music is playing in the background, your attention will be switching from these words to the music and back. Being divided in this way, your comprehension of both will be half as vivid as if you had paid attention to only one.

And if you were eating lunch, while reading and listening to music, then your enjoyment would only be a third of what it could have been if you had have done one thing at a time.

As the mind only has so much energy, depending on how many things the attention is given to do, that energy is divided up like a pie – the more pieces, the smaller they are.

Added to which, the more things the attention has to switch between, the less coherent is the information.

The other thing is, attention uses up a lot of metabolic energy, because it creates so much machinating and thinking, and triggers so many body reactions.

Awareness on the other hand is effortless – it elicits no body reactions and no thinking.

Awareness doesn’t think – it knows.

If you touch only one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

If anything is sacred in meditation and life, it is our awareness – it’s the most fundamental aspect of our sense of being alive – and the most important.

Our attention arises from our awareness, and darts about within its spread. In this, the awareness is a little like our private universe – the personal realm we carry around with us.

Our attention picks out tiny parts of what we are aware off, but it never has the breadth and depth of awareness.

For instance, as your attention busily connects with these words, your awareness takes care of everything else – positioning you in time and space. All around you, you are aware of things – the texture of the air on your skin, sounds, qualities of light, other people, the walls of the room, the chair you sit in, and so on.

And that awareness, on the other hand, is passive – because that is a pre-eminent quality of awareness – it is always passive.

The moment you are actively involved with anything, indicates your attention has now switched to it and connected it to the active aspects of mind.

But awareness does not create thoughts, it does not have opinions or views, and is relatively free from conditioning. Because awareness does not think, it also has no memory. You cannot remember what you have been aware of in the past … the only thing that remembers is the attention

For instance, you may be aware of a noise behind you as you read - the moment you start thinking about that noise, judging it and reacting to it, indicates that the active part of your mind, the attention, has now switched to it. You will now remember the noise.

If however, your attention had have remained on the reading, and not engaged with the noise, there would be no memory of it – the noise, that is.

For the instant that your attention is evaluating the noise, it is not engaged with what you are reading – until it switches back – or flickers between the noise and the words – in which case, it is, as I said before, a divided attention.

Other mental qualities that come from awareness are intuition (gut feelings) and insights, those rare and luminescent comprehensions that come instantly, leaving us gasping like fish as we search for the words to express it.

So then, what has this to do with meditation?

Well, most of our problems in life are directly related to our over-use of attention, and subsequent lack of awareness

There is never a problem with awareness per se – it simply ‘is’.

Ideally, a well balanced mind should have both attention and awareness in equal ammounts. We should be able to turn our attention on and off, resting in awareness when there is nothing to attend to.

But unfortunately, given the demands of survival in the frantic and technically complex world we’ve built, our attention has become much too strong, such that we put all our mental energy into our attention – and the perspective and insight of awareness are rarely felt.

From the time we’re born we’re told to ‘think about it!’ and ‘pay attention!’ At school, only our attention is exercised – information, argument, numbers, memory, rules, parameters, building, acquiring – all attention. We’re taught the technical construction and deconstruction of everything from building blocks to the surgical dismemberment of mice and frogs –again, all of it the use of our attention at the expense of awareness.

When are we taught to NOT pay attention? Never.

The only time we’re allowed to switch off our attention is when we go to sleep, and unfortunately, in the unconsciousness of sleep, awareness disappears as well.

And so, as adults, we’re launched into a world which only speaks to our attention – work, media, advertising, building, acquiring and competition.

As such we have learnt to live in our attention – with all its thought loops, anxiousness short-termism, lack of breadth and vision, its rigid logic and lack of intuition.

We forget that true genius doesn’t exist in the attention – it comes from awareness - the mysterious aspects of mind.

Consider these two quotes:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science ... The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
- Albert Einstein

Brain researchers estimate that your unconscious database outweighs the conscious on an order exceeding ten million to one. This database is the source of your hidden, natural genius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter than you are. The wise people regularly consult that smarter part.
- Margaret Fuller

Our attention is entirely about conscious mind - about what we think we know. It works with and exists in the realm of the conscious – what we have learnt. It works with information and memory to repeat exactly what it has learnt from its past, over and over again.

When we are in attention we are in an anxious state, manipulating information from the past to try and fit the present.

Awareness on the other hand exists beneath language, numbers and conditioned structures. When we are in awareness things arise in the mind fully formed and effortless. And though we use our attention to turn it into thoughts so we can communicate it, still, in its orgins, all inspiration arises from awareness.

As I said before – awareness doesn’t think – it knows.

So, aside from questions of inspiration, why is our overactive attention a problem?

Well for a start it's intensely exhausting.

It’s okay when we’re young – we have the metabolic thrust to cope – but as we get older, the energy is just not there to keep up the frenetic amount of mental activity we have gotten used to.

This is because we never switch the attention off and let the mind sit in awareness. When the mind rests in this way it clears itself. Redundant information is filed into the unconscious as mind reorganizes itself.

But we rarely allow the mind to do this essential function. So the deeper mind never gets a rest. It never gets a chance to clear away the backlog of yesterdays information - it simply leaves it and piles more information in on top.

We don't notice the exhaustion, because like the frog in heating water,it comes over us so slowly we don't recognize it. It appears as rigidity, decreasing humor and emotional numbness.

Added to which, an attention as habitually energized as ours has learnt to be is very hard to control, which creates its own set of problems.

Such as:

Depression and anxiety – doctors see them as physiological illnesses, quite ignoring the fact that in their origins, they are both problems of the mind. I believe both of these illnesses are simply extreme forms of worry – in which the attention is so intense and so out of control that it cannot let go of certain closed loops of reactive thinking. There is no peace when the attention gets caught up in circular reactions.

Emotional reactiveness - we tend to get lost in our opinions, thoughts and emotional reactions – to the insane extent that we will fight each other over disagreements of world-view. This is caused by a lack of awareness, and an attention that is too intense. To use a cliché, our attention only sees the trees, the awareness sees the entire forest.
And much more – but I’m sure you get the idea

So where does meditation fit into this?

In meditation we practice a simple thing.

Whenever the hyperactive laser beam of attention fixes on something – a thought, a memory, a reaction, and itch - we practice letting go. Whatever arises – we watch the attention and make it let of of whatever it attaches to.

The thought or feeling might remain in our awareness, but so long as the attention is not stuck to it, it doesn’t matter. Awareness being what it is, things always disappear.

The more we practice this constant and persistent letting go (though it is very hard at first) the more the mind ‘softens’. That is, the attention loses intensity and begins to recede back into awareness. Awareness becomes more noticeable, and over time, the ore we practice and get used to this new state of mind, the more it seems 'normal'.

Mental balance begins to appear, first in the mind, then slowly filtering through our actions into our life. Energy that was previously allocated to the attention is reassigned to awareness, which becomes more vivid, brighter.

The way we comprehend things changes. Instead of thinking about things, as we used to in our attention-heavy head, now, with increased awareness, we find ourselves simply knowing. Not thinking – knowing.

And because awareness uses less energy, we feel calmer and more expansive. Giving comes easily because we feel more connected with the world around us – people, animals, situations. This enhances our mood, and so on ... you get the idea.

Meditation softens the attention and brightens the awareness – creating a mind that is able to comprehend without thinking - more able to see beyond its own sense of Self to the whole.

I’ll finish with another quote, this time from a wonderful Thai monk, and great teacher of meditation, Acharn Chah:

"Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha."

Comments

The Kiss

2007-10-26T09:00:26+02:00

Time for a brief post. It's nothing to do with meditation .. or anything ... just something I find interesting.

I’ll really try to discipline myself on this one and keep it short.

I found this drawing in one of my folios, of two people I met a long time ago. Most of my drawings are of nobody in particular, but this couple and the brief acquaintance I had with them was so strange I remember doing this drawing to document something I couldn't explain -and still can't.

One night in the 80’s, when I was a singer in a pop band, a strange couple appeared at a gig in a club we were playing. I'd seen them as we played, standing up the back of the room. They looked like they'd stepped through a portal from the 1930's, him in what looked like a tweed suit with his hair slicked back, her in some kind of frock with rigidly permed curls flattened like a helmet. Among the suburban new romantics and Kmart kids, they were very noticeable. I heard later that he was very rich - inherited a fortune from his parents – something to do with chocolate.

Anyway, we finished playing and they must have schmoozed their way into the dressing room, apparently to see me, because they totally ignored the rest of the band. Herded me into a corner, where they began talking at me with bored nasal voices, long streams of words as if their mouths had brains of their own.

And it was very odd, because even though I was (perhaps rudely) signaling disinterest, boredom, impatience, to get rid of them, they seemed not to notice, their mouths talking softly from below lidded eyes which gazed watchfully from above, as if I was a long way away, as if I were one of their own thoughts.

So little of import was spoken that I can't remember ever knowing their names, though I'm sure they must have introduced themselves. The stuff they were telling me was totally disconnected, self enclosed - about friends I didn’t know, places they’d been overseas, parties they'd recently been to. I couldn't work out why they were telling me. Like, I remember them saying how they’d been skiing in Switzerland the month before, then stopped off in Paris.

"Have you been to Paris, Roger?"

"No ..."

"Oh you must go, it’s gorgeous, like a tiny-town ...," and so on...

They told me they were holding a party the following week: ‘you must come ...’
So after writing their address on the inside of a torn up cigarette packet, they tottered off and disappeared.

I was intrigued to say the least.

So the following Saturday I went, taking my girlfriend of the time, and it was the strangest party I’ve ever been to.

The house was a huge Edwardian pile in Toorak (a wealthy suburb here in Melbourne), though the grounds were all overgrown and the pool was filled with green sludge.

Inside was wood paneled walls, pile carpets, paintings and mirrors, and that mahogany and velvet furniture that seems to lurk about like weird stuffed animals. If it were not for the dust, the filth embedded in the carpet, and the sour reek of cigarettes and grime, it would have been very impressive in a dark, solid kind of way.

As we pushed through the double doors into a huge darkened lounge, milling to the distorted noise of a small stereo turned up past 10 were hundreds of the most grungy and opportunistic street trash I’d ever seen gathered in one place - punks, musicians, junkies, barflies and western suburbs hot-boys in stretch jeans and sneakers – I knew some of them from around the traps, but never seen them all together like this. And there were the hosts - still attired in the post-war tweed suit, brogues shoes and pearls they’d been wearing when they cornered me at the gig – only now he was smoking a pipe.

Seemingly oblivious to the mismatched dregs they’d filled their house with, the two of them were swanning about the place, she with a ciggie held out to the side, him with his pipe clutched between his teeth – and as they passed like ghosts from another time through the roil of grimy guests, they scattered inaudible small-talk to the air in front of their faces, eyes unfocused and faraway, their smiles inanimate and seemingly oblivious to any reason for existing.

As we passed through from room to room, it was mayhem.

In the kitchen the slate floor was awash with spilt beer and wine and broken glass, the white walls were marked with footprints and cigarette smoke swirled like murky water. There were about four bins filled with iced bottles of beer and wine, and lined along the bench were bottles of every spirit you can imagine and trays of glasses, half empty, together with a box filled with 10 pack cartons of cigarettes that were rapidly being gutted. They'd obviously spent a fortune on the essentials.

But the music was so loud and distorted that conversation was impossible unless it was shouted into the ears, which had the effect of making people drink and smoke more, glancing at each other then looking away. Nobody danced to the music, and nobody was laughing. They just drank as the host and hostess kept circulating like programmed apparitions.

We only stayed for about 10 minutes because the atmosphere was so leaden and dissonant. I didn’t even have a drink. We thanked the host and hostess for inviting us, to which they graciously mouthed things I couldn’t hear, then we left.

But the most extraordinary thing was when I glanced back as we opened the front door.

Having waved us goodbye, they turned away, linked hands and pulled each other into an embrace - then they kissed, and it was such a beautiful kiss.

I think a lot can be learnt about people from the way they kiss. Some kisses are hungry, some greedy, some possessive and unkind.

But theirs was none of these. Their kiss was light and affectionate, and full of love - taken as if everybody had momentarily disappeared and they were all alone.

Then the door closed and I followed my girlfriend up through the garden to the front gate.

Many years later I saw the two of them in the society pages of a local paper - they'd donated a whole swag of money to a hospital, and they hadn't changed a bit - still dressed in their tweeds, brogues and pearls - the same impervious, faraway smiles, the same unfocused eyes.

Cya

Comments

Thoughts, Reality and the Whole Damned Thing …….

2007-10-23T08:19:54+02:00

Sorry … it’s another long post. But it’s about something I find fascinating … concerning thoughts ... and reality.

Since the 1970’s I’ve lived with this indigestible notion that’s made its home in one of the neural slums in the back of my head, and it won’t go away, because it’s so … interesting.

Put simply it is the notion that our thoughts create reality – not just our perception of reality, but the actual physical stuff of it.

It’s been around for a long time … first became popular in the ‘70’s when a rash of books came out connecting Quantum physics to a new metaphysical view. And now there’s a couple of movies around, made a year or two ago, that peddle the same bike – ‘What the Bleep’ I think they’re called.

For myself, I first came across this notion in 1982 when I read a book called ‘Seth Speaks’, in which an entity called Seth, (channeled by the author, Jane Roberts), kept reiterating all through the book that thoughts create reality.

I remember finding the book largely indigestible – but this notion alone was worth the read. I’d never heard of such a thing – that I alone was responsible for the personal reality I lived in – the luck, the events, even down to the way things looked. It was both shocking and incredible - literally.

At first I rejected the notion out of hand, but the evidence seemed to pile up, as more and more authors reiterated the so-called science behind this notion.

After reading books like ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’ by Gary Zukav (1979), ‘The Tao of Physics’ by Fritjov Capra (1975), and a lesser known, but fascinating book , ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum’, by Itzhak Bentov (1977) , in which they all laid out the science behind this lunatic theory, it began to make sense.

You see, up till then I’d always lived in the opposite view - that reality was constant and totally unmalleable – and I was subject to it – it created me and my thoughts. And this reality was created by things beyond my control – history, other people, and so on.

This is the reality most people live within - solid, historically determined and unchangeable. But everything I was reading began to open up a totally reverse view of a reality that was as changeable and responsive as our own minds.

I suppose, for the sake of those unfamiliar with the theory I should try and explain it. I mean, I’m no scientist, so I can only give you my understanding, but I’ll try … and be as brief as I can.

Basically the theory arises from questions that have arisen from the relatively new science of Quantum Physics – questions about the nature of things, and how it all comes to be.

And what it all seems to indicate is that, when you penetrate matter beyond the sub-atomic level, you find the same thing within everything – even the space between everything - a ubiquitous electro-magnetic field which all things, both material and non-material, have in common.

In this field everything we view as ‘things’ exist as interconnected patterns of energy. And given that our thoughts are also patterns of energy in the field we know as our mind, the connection between the energetic events of our mentality are intimately interconnected with the energy events of the space/time/material reality we consciously perceive.

This is nothing new.

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, who died in 1944, observed:

‘The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

Many scientists call this field the ‘Mind of God’, and others call it the ‘Quantum Hologram’.

In particular, this view is substantially supported by the theories of David Bohm, one of the world’s most innovative physicists. He described the universe as existing in a state of what he called "undivided wholeness".

To illustrate this, Bohm likened the universe to a hologram, a remarkable feature of which is that if a holographic plate is cut into fragments, it is found that each fragment contains within itself a complete scale image of the whole object it was a part of.

Bohm proposed that the universe exists as what he called a "holomovement"
- in which, like the holographic plate, any part of the universe, no matter how small, contains within itself an identical order of the whole.

In his book, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ he said: "We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent 'elementary' parts of the universe are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within the whole."

Bohm’s proposition was supported by a remarkable experiment performed by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect in 1982, which tested quantum interconnectedness.

The results of this experiment clearly showed that subatomic particles, the most fundamental ‘stuff’ of the physical universe, are profoundly connected to one another by an element that is intangible and immeasurable. As such, particles are able to respond to each other instantly over infinite distances, in ways that cannot be explained.

‘…two entangled particles, no matter how far they are apart, are not really separate at all. Measure one, and as its spin becomes definite this triggers the other to respond. Its indeterminate spin also becomes definite, in the opposite direction to that of its partner. What is astonishing and disturbing is that this response happens instantaneously--even if the particles are separated by huge distances. Consequently, quantum theory requires action at a distance. What happens in one part of the Universe can have instantaneous "nonlocal" consequences in other parts, no matter how far away they might be…’ (‘Why God plays Dice’, by Mark Buchanan, New Scientist Magazine, 22 August 1998)

So all things in their smallest parts are profoundly interconnected, both within themselves and with each other, by a phenomenon that is as yet totally undetectable by any measuring device we have.

And just as interconnectedness is undetectable by the instruments of science, so too it remains undetectable by our cluttered, sense specific minds.

After all, we cannot hear interconnectedness, or see it, or taste it, or smell it, nor is it is specifically a sensation. The ‘language’ of interconnectedness exists outside of our five senses, so we are usually oblivious to it.

Of course, there are many other theories running in parallel to the ‘Quantum Hologram’ theory, which seem to support and verify it, the most notable being Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields.

Sheldrake, as one of the world’s most innovative and controversial biologists, postulates a multi-layered field of memory (electromagnetic in nature, similar to gravity) which exists as a ubiquitous essence to everything in existence – from which everything draws its form, habits and attributes.

Sheldrake says: ‘Morphic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of non-local resonance, called morphic resonance.’

So this field of memory not only encourages the way things evolve, but it itself evolves in response to the behavior of those things it has given form to.

In his books, writings, and on his web-site, Sheldrake gives an enormous amount of evidence to verify his theories, largely because so many in the established Sciences have so vehemently tried to crush him.

Here’s one particularly compelling example that he uses:

“… Until about the 1950s, the caps on milk bottles were made of cardboard. In 1921 in Southampton, a strange phenomenon was observed. When people came out in the morning to get their milk bottles, they found little shreds of cardboard all around the bottom of the bottle, and the cream from the top of the bottle had disappeared.

Close observation revealed that this was being done by bluetits, who sat on top of the bottle, pulled off the cardboard with their beaks, and then drank the cream. Several tragic cases were found in which bluetits were discovered drowned head first in the milk!

This incident caused considerable interest; then the event turned up somewhere else in Britain, about 50 miles away, and then somewhere about 100 miles away. Whenever the bluetit phenomenon turned up, it started spreading locally, presumably by imitation.

However, bluetits are very home-loving creatures, and they don't normally travel more than four or five miles. Therefore, the dissemination of the behavior over large distances could only be accounted for in terms of an independent discovery of the habit.

The bluetit habit was mapped throughout Britain until 1947, by which time it had become more or less universal. The people who did the study came to the conclusion that it must have been "invented" independently at least 50 times.

Moreover, the rate of spread of the habit accelerated as time went on. In other parts of Europe where milk bottles are delivered to doorsteps, such as Scandinavia and Holland, the habit also cropped up during the 1930s and spread in a similar manner. Here is an example of a pattern of behavior which was spread in a way which seemed to speed up with time, and which might provide an example of morphic resonance.

But there is still stronger evidence for morphic resonance.

Because of the German occupation of Holland, milk delivery ceased during 1939-40. Milk deliveries did not resume until 1948. Since bluetits usually live only two to three years, there probably were no bluetits alive in 1948 who had been alive when milk was last delivered. Yet when milk deliveries resumed in 1948, the opening of milk bottles by bluetits sprang up rapidly in quite separate places in Holland and spread extremely rapidly until, within a year or two, it was once again universal. The behavior spread much more rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently the second time round than the first time. This example demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of collective memory due to morphic resonance …”

So … I’m wondering what other people think of all this, because, no matter how I try, I cannot bring myself to actually believe it – I just can’t.

I mean, I’ve had the incredibly synchronistic phone calls as I was thinking about a friend. I’ve had the psychic moments with lovers, and turned to find someone staring at me behind my back. And I’ve felt the exquisite unity of spirit of a football crowd in mid cheer, the exquisite merging of minds that happens when a roomful of people meditate. But my conditioning is too strong to make the leap to believing that we, and everything else are all aspects of the one energy field.

A cynical voice within says it’s too beautiful, too poetic, and out of whack with crusty old one dimensional space/time reality that I've been conditioned with - the Newtonian reality that is so unforgiving and in a perpetual state of dying.

I suppose in this I’m a bit like a Catholic agnostic – I want it to be true and I hope it might be, but in the end I have no faith.

So is there anybody out there who can pull me over the line?

Because I would so love to bask in that new and affectionate reality, the one where I actually feel the connection with the birds, trees, insects and soil - where I live it in every second of my life - the field of everything that shimmers with the same luminescence as my thoughts.

Let me know if you've crossed the line ... coz I'd really like to know how you got there ...

Cya

Comments

Sum Pitchers and Pomes

2007-10-02T13:56:19+02:00

Sigh ... can't think of a thing to say today, and I know it's time to say something.

That's the trouble with a blog ... it's like a very demanding mistress, always wanting something new.

So here's a couple of pitchers I did with Chinese water colors when I was in Daqing in 2002. The colors were strange, because, being cheap chemical pigments, they always dried in hues different to how they'd come out of the tube ... which was great, coz it made painting quite an adventure.

And I think I'll bung in a couple of poems as well ... though you must forgive them, because I'm not much of a poet ... but they keep the paintings apart ... so they don't argue with one another.

Death of a Friend

Finally there is an end
A slow darkening
A falling of veils
Each one falls slowly, softly
To cover up the stage
On which we played it out
Those scripts we wrote
So cruel, so vehement
Poisoned, and unfulfilled
Such that what remains now
Is a slow submerged fear
That it could happen
All over again.
That nothing would be different
If I knew you again
But there’s no point to such things.
Though the mind tends to stray
It’s definitely the end
Such an awful abyss
The black empty space
Of beginning again

A dance of sex
And then a death
Are all we get
For eighty years
And a billion breaths
It seems so little
But it takes so long
I wonder if I’ve enjoyed it?

Comments

The Amazing Power of Words

2007-09-26T06:58:44+02:00

I’ve been thinking ...aren’t words are amazing?

The way they all seem to have their own little neural pattern, firing off tiny explosions in our head, each with a unique coloring of feelings and thoughts.

Like ... consider this, one of my favorite words:

GOSSAMER

This word is the tiny tip of an iceberg of memories and feelings - like, when I was a kid on a camping trip with my family, looking into the glass of a pressurized kerosene lamp , and wondering at the way the delicate filaments of the gossamer wick thing (don’t know what it’s called) glowed with a steady white light. How it seemed so strong when it was aglow with flame, yet crumbled when later, I reached in and touched it.

The way early morning sunlight reflects in the thousands of tiny drops of dew clinging to spider-webs, outlining their gorgeous patterns among the trees.

Smoke curling up through a ray of sunlight.

Words are amazing.

Through the mindbody connection, each word is like a little hook into the subconscious, pulling up past experiences, triggering tiny hormonal cocktails, giving feelings that ripple through the brain and the body. The electromagnetic field around us must shimmer as we speak, or read, or think.

So, recently I’ve been experimenting with words, using them to change the way I feel - change the chemical/hormonal mix I’m working with in my body, and the effect of words is very noticeable.

It’s a game. Every so often throughout the day, I’ll think of a whole slew of words of a particular type. Sometimes I’ll chose all the dark words - the nasty ones - keep flicking through them, sort of mentally tasting each one as it passes, for about five minutes.

Then later I might choose all the light words - the ones that glisten and sparkle, and do the same thing with them.

I’ve been doing it for the last couple of weeks, and every time I can feel the change come over me according to the different word tones.

Kristen tried it as well, and it’s immediately noticeable, the change that occurs when different words are playing in the mind.

Try it:

Contemplate the following block of words for a minute, and as you do, notice their effect in the mind and body. It’ll be subtle, but noticeable:

CUT, SLASH, CONSTRICT, RUIN, FAIL, CRUSH, GRIND, ANXIOUS, SLICE, SPIKE, BURN, DESTROY, WOUND, CRACK, STRANGLE, COLD, HAVOC, SAD, FILTHY, POVERTY, SEAR, DECEIT, CRUDE, DEPRESS, GREY, CHOKE, CONVULSE, BEAT, OPPRESS, BREAK, GASH, ASSASSINATE, AWFUL, DEATH.

Now, try these words.

FLY, KINDNESS, AIR, SOAR, WIN, KISS, SMILE, BEAUTIFUL, HUG, FORGIVE, FREE, WARM, LAUGH, INSPIRE, SERENITY, WONDER, TRANQUIL, EXQUISITE, CLEAN, COLOR, MIRACLE, WEALTH, SINCERE, LOVE, DELICIOUS, GIFT, GORGEOUS, PEACE, COOL, FLOW, LIFE

Feels much better, doesn’t it. In fact, every time I think of these kinds of word I find myself sighing - a strange combination of relief and ... a sort of peaceful optimism arises.

It came up in a conversation that this was similar to the use of affirmations.

Now, I’ve always been very much against the use of affirmations. As I’ve said in previous posts, our mind is not an idiot. It cannot be fooled. So when we feel terrible, or have a prevailing belief that we don’t like, in my view, it is not only pointless, but destructive to begin affirming against it.

For example, if one feels unloved and lonely, a typical affirmation people might use would be: “I am loved”.

The theory goes that if we rotate this phrase around the upper mind, the deeper mind will eventually come around to the same view.

But as I said - I don’t think the mind is that stupid. After all, it is both the affirmer and the affirmee - and I'm sure the affirmations would provoke a simple stream of logic.

"Why would I bother trying to convince myself that I was loved, if I actually was? I would only do such a thing if I wasn't loved. So ... I must be un-loved."

I think the problem with affirmations is that they encapsulate a desire - by repeating the affirmations, we are trying to get something that is desired, or escape something that is feared. The thinking goes that, in some way, by 'programming' the mind, it'll sort of magically 'create a new reality'. But I don't agree with the new age proposition that reality is created by thoughts.

It's not.

It's created by intentions crystallized as action. So in my view the use of affirmations only serves to emphasize just how desperate and powerless the affirmee has become.

So this begs the question - how different is my idea of using random words to influence mood, from affirmations? Surely the act of circulating disconnected words in the mind is similar to an affirmation?

But I don’t think it is, largely because the words do not embody a specific hope or wish. They’re simply disconnected mental triggers provoking hormonal effects - a cheap way of influencing the body chemistry, similar to a sweet drink, or taking a shower.

I could be wrong ... but still, it's all very interesting...

Comments

Give a little ...

2007-09-18T14:07:02+02:00

I was looking through my journal from Thailand today and I found something that made me smile - a vibrant little note hurriedly scrawled about something I’d realized – something important ... something urgent.

It made me smile when I read it, because it encapsulated the peculiar naiveté that settles like fairy dust over my thought processes whenever I shut myself in a hut and meditate for a while. Every retreat I've ever done, I've come home with all these urgent little notes to myself, about things that seemed so important ...

It’s like, the subtle cynicism I'm usually shielded with, (which perhaps we all use to keep disappointment at bay in our lives), falls away when I'm in retreat.

The mind sees glistening possibilities which, though seeming so obvious in the peace of the monastery, become child-like, even silly when one brings them out into the harsh light of this pounding, crashing, brutal world we live in.

And though these little notes and ideas always make me smile when I read them, I can't help but also feel a quiet sadness as well, because I wish life was as simple as it seems when my mind is in that mode.

The journal note I made on the 10th of August said:

“I’ve figured out the solution to all of our (humanities) problems. It came in a flash and can be encapsulated in one simple phrase.

‘Always give just a little more than you take.’

Just imagine if everybody in the world gave just a fraction more than they took – a minute more work than they’re paid for, a dollar more than is asked for or earned, a place in the queue, a little more food on some one else’s plate than our own, a spontaneous smile, a greeting to a stranger, a small gift that has no reason. To clean up a little of someone else’s mess, wash someone else’s dishes; fix something broken by someone else.

It's common to think that a gift always has to be a big deal - something impressive - because we don’t have a habit of giving, so when we give, we give too much.

But if we gave just a little all the time, everything would change. It’d be a slow spreading explosion of good-will that would feed on itself. It’d be amazing!”

Hmmm ... wouldn’t it be wonderful ... don't be an idiot Roger!!!!

Comments

In a Lighter Note ...

2007-09-15T11:40:37+02:00

In a lighter note, (or should that be 'on a lighter note' ...) I was riffling through some stuff in the clutter of my study, and I came across a folio of about 60 pen and Chinese ink drawings I used to do in another life, about two decades ago.

So I thought I might as well let a few of them out of the folio for a romp ... so I scanned them and here they are ...

I had a habit of scrawling odd thoughts and bits of verse in pencil on the back of each drawing - things that came to me as I drew them I suppose ... so I'll put those in too, though they don't seem all that topically related to the drawings, so much as odd pieces of verse that might have occurred to me. I really can't remember ... but they make interesting commentaries nonetheless.

Though I did heaps of them, I never did anything with these drawings ... though now I come to think of it, I did have an exhibition of some of them in a cafe here in Melbourne at the time ... Mario's. Sold a couple and found the experience of selling them much too painful, so from then on I just did them and kept them all in this folio. It's strange the attachment I have to them ...

There is no world here that I recognize,
Just the static of moving pictures and sound,
An immaculate silence of itself,
In which I become vapor

Hang on to me darling,
coz I'm hanging on to you..
and we'll fly this baby in...

Nothing really existed
It all just accumulated
So take another pill
To make it go still
And maybe, just maybe,
It'll all fade away ...

No-one can see me
Falling down
My face is empty
My mouth it
makes no sound

There was no caption on the back of this one.

The power of speech
Is such a stupid thing
It gasps like an idiot
And forgets how to sing
Whenever I try to tell you
The way I feel

I hope you enjoyed them as much as I remember doing them ...

Comments

Expand, expand, expand …

2007-09-09T09:07:03+02:00

Well, it’s wonderful to be back, which is not to say it wasn’t wonderful being away. It was, very much so. It was magical … in a Thai sort of way. It’s the sort of country where each day you’re sure to witness at least three or four beautiful moments.

So it was, as always, like a wonderful trail of sublime moments – from the thundering streets of Bangkok to the silence of Ban Sawang Jai in the Khao Yai national park, where the routine of each day was to the accompaniment of chattering birds and insects, the occasional yapping of dogs, and sunlight flickering between the curtains of my hut as I meditated.

The weather was not hot, it being the rainy season, (though not much rain appeared) and the days seemed to merge in a sensual continuum of strange and fascinating things.

While meditating in the forest one day I opened my eyes to find a small green snake had settled beside me.

And I was befriended by a dog whose way of greeting was to silently lean against my leg and look up into my eyes … and so on.

So many small things that made the heart sing ... I might write about them in later posts

And then there were the friends I made over there - Frank, Martin and his wife Amporn, Jimmy and Jeffrey, my old friend Mae Che Brigitte, (who it was wonderful to see again), and of course, the exquisitely graceful Acharn Tippakorn, (who I must thank for letting me practice in my own way) and, of course, the Thai people, whose faces light up in smiles at the slightest excuse.

It was good this time because there were not that many people staying at Ban Sawang Jai, so I was able to maintain uninterrupted silence – which made meditation all the more absorbing, and fascinating.

I loved it … such that when I eventually walked back in through the arrival hall of Tullamarine airport in Melbourne last week, and heard the broad Aussie accents of the customs officers, I felt like I’d been sublimely naked for the last month and half, and now I had to clothe myself again ... tuck myself back into myself and become an actor again.

But enough bellyaching … what’s been happening while I was away?

Bugger all it seems. It’s strange, but every time I go into one or other of the monasteries I have attending over the last 15 years, and close the door of the hut to meditate for a month or two or three, I always expect that when I come out, the world might be different.

Not necessarily better, or worse, just different.

Seems a bit narcissistic I suppose, to think that one’s absence from a world of nine billion other people is going to have any effect at all … but I always think it nonetheless … and I’m always surprised to find nothing has changed when I come out.

Oh well, let it go. I’m here now.

What else can I talk about?

Hmm ... I’ll tell you about a thought I had about meditation just before. I was sitting meditating in the sun outside and, as happens sometimes, I had a small revelation.

It came out of an email exchange I had with a guy called Matthew, who contacted me with a question the other day. He spoke about how whenever he meditates his breath tightens up to the extent that it becomes quite painful … saying in part:

“… whenever I observe the breath, either at the nostrils, in the chest or the rise of the stomach, I get very tense. I notice the tenseness in my face and particularly around my eyes. In my early days of meditating, I'd just push on with this and didn't pay it much attention. I'd often get very frustrated, but carried on anyway.

More recently, I've noticed that my observation of the breath causes it to change in some way. I'm thinking that subconsciously I make it harsher or stronger so that it's easier to observe. I can't seem to just let the breath arise and allow much mind to 'rest' on it. It just seems to want to grab the breath and control it in some way.

This problem has caused me to give up meditation for many years at a time because it was just too stressful and difficult …”

He asked me what I thought he should do. So in my reply I said:

“Your problem is quite common among Westerners. In fact, I too had this happen to me in the early days.

I put it down to our habits of control. We seek to control whatever we pay attention to. When we're not paying attention to it, the breath is fine, but then we pull our attention around to it, and suddenly it's like we're ordering it to march in step and in time to some false idea of 'how the breath should be' and the end result is a tightening and very uncomfortable reactive loop, in which we tie our self in knots around the simple act of breathing.

The other thing is, it indicates that you are trying to control the act of meditating - that you are trying to make it match some kind of expectation in your head, of 'how it should be'. I could be wrong, but in my own problematic relationship with meditation, when I looked into what I was ACTUALLY trying to do, that was indeed it - I was trying t5o control it.

So ... the purpose of meditation is to learn to let go. To teach the mind to be aware, know, and let go as one comprehensive action. Very hard for a Western mind to do.

So I cured myself of this insidious habit by spending a couple of months simply re-conditioning my relationship with the breath, and with the act of meditating. The way I did this was, every time I found the breath tightening, I let go and expand my attention to the whole body - feeling the whole body sitting, noting 'sitting, sitting' to myself ... until the breath loosened and relaxed, then I would gently pull my attention back onto it ... lightly, as if my attention was a feather falling onto the back of an elephant, I would begin to follow it again ... until it began to tighten, when once again, I would let it go and contemplate the entire body.

Gradually, my attention learnt not to be so controlling - that it could contemplate a body-phenomenon without meddling …”

So I got to thinking about this exchange, and from out of this thinking I had a small revelation … (Actually, can a revelation be small? Maybe not. After all, the very nature of revelation is that it is big, otherwise it wouldn’t be a revelation, would it … oh well).

So let’s call it a realization.

Put simply I realized that meditation is a profoundly expansive act – that indeed, it HAS to be an expansive act, otherwise it isn’t meditation.

But let me explain from the beginning.

I began by thinking how there are basically two states of being, and one inbetween.

We are either expanding, or contracting ... or in a state of balance, in which we are doing neither .. but we won't concern ourself with that right now.

Expansive states are love, happiness, kindness, generosity, innocence, surrender, serenity, and so on.

And of course, the contractive states are the opposite - fear, control, depression, animosity, greed, anxiousness, neediness, defensiveness … that sort of stuff.

With the former we expand out from ourselves, creating feelings of wellbeing, largely because the body’s response to an expansive feeling or action is to release endorphins, which create a pleasurable feeling of well-being. It’s similar to when we’re in love, when our entire body sings with pleasure. We’re creating the same physiological conditions as being in love, or receiving a kind act – but the lovers are us and our Self, and the giver of kindness is also us and our self.

And in those times when we contract in fear, or in a mean-spirited action, or lapse into depression, we feel profoundly deadened, and we suffer.

So, I realized that when we meditate, we are practicing a similar kind of expansiveness as when we are in love..

We are in effect, creating a sense of love with our Self - listening to our Self, touching our Self in a way similar to that of a loving parent with their child – all of which creates well-being.

So – let’s get down to details - how does one practice meditation expansively?

Well, one of the most common mistakes people make, and which I made as well when I first began, is to treat meditation as another task in which we must achieve something, or get something – calm, peace, relaxation or whatever.

For us Westerners, the notion of ‘success’ and ‘winning’ is so deeply inculcated in us, that when we come to meditate we naturally assert these same habits, attempting to use meditation to gain control and subjugate our minds so we can get all the stuff we were sold in the advertising, or the magazine article on meditation – that being calm, relaxation and so on.

So when the meditation teacher blithely tells us to ‘still the mind’, we go at it like a bull at a gate, wrestling with our Self and creating a terribly contractive state in the process.

The worst thing you can do in meditation is to try and ‘still the mind’ by force. After all, how can a mind be still when, for the other 23 hours of its day it’s allowed to romp madly about its limitless landscape doing whatever it wants to do? No chance. Habits are habits. If the neuronal highways in the brain are about busyness and distraction, then that’s what the mind will do.

The only still mind of that kind is a dead mind.

So of course, faced with adamantly ‘un-still’ minds, people resort to force, doing either of two things:

1. They try to stop their mind thinking and get overwhelmed, resulting in tension, pain and an increasingly defiant mind intent on running away with itself

2. They try to hide from their mind by burying their attention in the breath, desperately hoping that their raging mind will magically disappear, with the same result – tension, anxiety ... or that blank and heavy unconsciousness that many people think is meditation, but which is actually just what it is – unconsciousness.

As I said, when we try to control meditation, or force any part of it, or try too hard to ‘get’ whatever we think we should be getting (calm, stillness, tranquility and so on), essentially we are in a contractive state – and the result will be suffering.

We cannot, nor should we ever try to control meditation or the mind, largely because it’s impossible to control either.

It’s all about attitude. If we treat our mind and Self as a good friend, a lover even, with whom we are in a dance, the mind, like a beautiful woman, will dance with us, instead of fighting to get away. And like a good dancer, we don’t try to lead by force, but lead and surrender at the same time.

To meditate expansively, consider these points:

1. As you focus on the breath; don’t get too close to it. Always focus on it from a distance, and try always to keep a peripheral awareness of your whole body and the environment around you. Remember, there are two parts to your perception: Your attention, which interacts with things - and awareness, which is passively … um … aware.

2. A well balanced mind allocates an equal amount of energy to both. So when you bring your attention to the breath, don’t concentrate so hard that awareness disappears. Keep your attention light and affectionate – such that there is still a passive awareness of everything else around you. After all, meditation is not a closed, contracted and unconscious state – rather it is a bright and aware state – an expansive state, in which the attention is still (on the breath) and awareness is momentary and fluid.

3. Attitude is everything. Treat the meditation as a kind of meeting with your Self, on your Self’s terms – listening to the body ‘speak’ with its sensations, without being judged or suppressed. Every action we make in meditation should, of all things, be affectionate – such a beautiful word. No control, only affectionate and detached interest.

4. Remember, there are no enemies in meditation – thoughts are not the enemy, and pain is not the enemy. Both of these things, commonly seen as annoyances, have a right to be there, because they were caused by our own habits. So they should be seen simply as things happening, then not happening (if you allow them to disappear by not reacting to them).

5. There’s no need to do battle with anything in meditation. If something takes the attention away from the breath, regard it with affectionate disinterest - let it go to either fade away, or flutter about your cranium as it wishes. Even as you remain aware of it, take your attention back to the breath. There’s no forcing things to disappear.

6. Allow things to change and don’t expect anything. Like, don’t expect to be calm, or peaceful as you meditate. If you feel shitty, then allow the shittiness to be there. Accept it with the same affectionate disinterest that you give to everything else, and it’ll change. Accept whatever is happening now, and if the mind begins lapsing into habits of judgment or complaint, then simply bring the attention back to the breath and start again. The mind may continue muttering and whinging to itself in your peripheral awareness, but so long as your attention is on the breath, eventually the thoughts will disappear.

7. If calmness is here, then don’t expect it to stay. Allow it to disappear if it wants to, and accept whatever happens next. The mental environment of meditation is not static – it is as dynamic as life and the weather - until mental and physical equilibrium eventually appears, and even then things will always be coming and going, and they should be allowed to do just that.

8. The key to expansiveness in meditation is to learn to do three things as one instantaneous action: KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW, ACCEPT IT and LET IT GO, always taking the attention back to the breath and starting again.

In time this simple and constant enacting of affectionate restraint and redirecting of the attention will create a stronger habit of letting go.

As the habit gets stronger, the letting go gets faster, such that, though the mind still thinks, the thinking is coming and going so fast it’s almost as if there was no thinking at all … it’s like, the words all disappear, leaving only the knowing, and changing patterns of thought energy, feeling like clouds forming and reforming in the head. The end effect is of silence even though the mind is still thinking.

And the only other thing I was going to say is that the expansiveness of meditation doesn’t stop when we open our eyes and stand up.

Every expansive action we make in our lives, where we give kindness, or generosity, or even simply acknowledge someone else with a smile, lights our entire physiology up, relaxing the body and causing pleasure, however subtle.

So I think meditation is primarily a place to practice qualities of expansiveness, partly to infuse ourselves with the right balance of hormones to have a good day and in part because our actions in life are so important. Through cause and effect, each of us, through the smallest action, is capable of changing the destiny of so many other people. So why not make sure our actions are coming from an expansive spirit.

So that’s it … sigh … the punk part of me finds all this talk about love and kindness kind of icky, (a left over from my defiantly rude youth) but … well, it’s what I think … so what the hell.

I hope you’ve all been well ...

Comments

The Time has Come ...

2007-07-13T03:13:21+02:00

Well, the time has come. I'm off to Thailand to meditate for a month.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning, so I'll be away from this blog until I get back on the 27th of August.

I'll be living in a small monastery up in the Khao Yai national park called Ban Sawang Jai, where a wonderful monk lives and teaches.

His name is Acharn Tippakorn, and he's an extraordinary man.

He's quite young for an Acharn, in his mid 40's, and quite unique, in that before he ordained, he had a breadth of life experience that is unusual for most monks.

I'll give you a short precis of his life, taken from my good friend Mae Che Brigitte's bio of him, which she wrote for the Ban Sawang Jai website. (Thanks Brigitte ... I've tried to keep faith with what you wrote, while adding a little of what I know as well)

In his youth, Acharn Tippakorn was a guitarist and the singer in a rock band in Bangkok, and then he joined the army and was sent to fight on the Cambodian border, where there was trouble with cross border incursions at the time. He received the Medal of Honor for his activities there, leaving with an honorable discharge.

On his return, he ordained as a monk, not through any sense of vocation at the time, but because, like any other Thai man, he was obligated to. In Thailand there is a tradition that a young man should ordain as a monk once in his lifetime to repay his parents’ kindness - it gives the family great honour, and is considered very good karma (Pali meaning: 'action').

For this reason Acharn Tippakorn ordained, and eventually went to practice meditation with Phra Acharn Sangwahn Khemmako, a venerable teacher known for his unique, and largely self trained skill with meditation.

Now, it's interesting that, of all the many tens of thousands of Thai men who ordain each year, only a very few take to meditation, to develop some understanding of where Buddhist mind comes from. Most Thai men simply do their time in the monastery, taking part in the rituals, waiting until they can leave and continue on with their lives.

Acharn Tippakorn was one of the few who took to meditation, experiencing insight and peace such as he had never encountered before in his life.

So, unlike other Thai men, he did not disrobe after a single rainy season, but stayed for the first three years of his monk hood at Wat Nong Pai, Suphanburi Province, Thailand, keeping silence and meditating in his small hut.

Then he went to another teacher, this time in Sukhothai Province, and stayed there, living with just an umbrella and a mosquito net, which is common in the Dutanga (Wandering Forest Monk) Tradition.

After that year he went to Mae Hong Sorn Province, where he lived on the top of a mountain near a Meow hilltribe village. In the beginning he stayed in the forest with just his umbrella for protection. The people of the hilltribe weren’t Buddhists, but after a while they developed faith in him and built him a small hut up in the forest some way from their village.

At that time these people lived mainly by growing opium, trading it for the necessities of life and, as is common, the whole village had become addicted to opium - so Acharn Tippakorn decided to help them.

He provided them with nutritious food and medicine during the time of their withdrawal, teaching them about sanitation and nutrition and how to live without opium. He introduced them to planting trees, and encouraged them to protect the forest, to create an area were the environment was left in as natural a state as possible. By the end of the four years that Acharn Tippakorn spent there, the whole village had stopped cultivating drugs and taking them.

He spoke to me of this time the last time I was there, in 2005, while I walked with him through a Zoo in a town we had stopped off in on the way back to Ban Sawang Jai one day in January of 2005, when I was last there.

I'll reiterate what I wrote of this conversation in my journal at the time:

"As we were walking past the gibbon reserve, where a cute grey gibbon with long arms pleaded for food from the visitors - strange looking animal - little old man's face in the middle of all this grey fur, like an ancient midget caught in a long thin fur covered body of some other creature - the Acharn appeared beside me and, in his soft voice, with halting English, he told me how, when he'd been living in the forest, he'd found a baby gibbon, just like the one we were looking at, whose parents had been shot by hunters. So he took it into his care, feeding it on mashed banana. He called it 'Saam (Thai meaning mischievous and innovative one).

He had this monkey for three years, and when it grew, he let it rove in the forest around the village. The villagers knew it was his gibbon, distinct from all the others, because he dyed the fur around its neck with the same jackfruit juice that he dyed his robes with, so they did not hunt it like they did with the other monkeys.

As we stood looking at this little gibbon pleading for food on the other side of the fence, I glanced at the Acharn as he spoke, and his eyes glistened as, carefully picking his English, he spoke about this monkey he had formed a friendship with - describing how this monkey developed a skill of pick-pocketing visitors so quietly and efficiently, that the Acharn often found himself, days later, having to return the things it had stolen.

"Is why I call it Saam," he said with a smile.

Then his smile faded as he told me how, one day the monkey wandered too far, to a place where people did not know it was the monk's monkey, and it was shot."

When Acharn Tippakorn returned to Wat Sanghathan in 1998, the Venerable Luang Phor Sanong Katapunyo, the abbot of Wat Sanghathan, asked him to take over Wat Thamkrissanadhammaram (also called Ban Sawangjai - meaning: 'House of a Mind Full of Light') near Khao Yai National Park, where he remains today, living quietly as one of Thailand's loved and respected teachers of meditation. Each month, many bus loads of Thai people come to Ban Sawang Jai to meditate and listen to him speak, with the exquisiite reverence and affection that Thai people have for the Acharns they respect.

Acharn Tippakorn still visits the village where he was each year, bringing medicine, warm clothes, and toys to the villagers."

So ... that's where I'll be until August the 27th.

I hope when I come out the world and yourselves are more happy and peaceful than now.

All the best
Roger

PS: Here's a few more of my pictures about nothing to be going on with, until we meet again ...

And if you're interested, you can see and hear Acharn Tippakorn here, on this You Tube video:

BYE!!!!!!

Comments

Thoughts While Washing Dishes

2007-07-07T10:27:00+02:00

I was washing the dishes just before, while looking out of the kitchen window at two magpies down below, mooching about on the lawn. They were standing in a pair – large black and white birds, immaculately groomed, gleaming feathers, sparkling eyes.

They hopped about together, sometimes stopping to gaze into space, before pecking into the grass to pull out a choice white worm. Occasionally one would lift its head and warble, or garble in their particular magpie way, then go back to hopping about looking for worms.

Lovely way to spend the day.

Then I saw a cat, lying across the top of the fence, watching them. Again, immaculately groomed, relaxed, quiet. No urgency, no worries. Graceful and secure in its place in the world.

And up above in the trees were three fat pigeons, fluffing their feathers, cooing and looking about, beneath a sky of grey clouds, sodden with rain.

Looking out at this peaceful collection of creatures, I remembered a comment Kristen, (my girlfriend) made the night before, as we were watching television. In this film, a busload of Western tourists was coursing through a poor village in some Middle Eastern country, and she said, “Gee, you really notice how physically distorted Western people are when you see them next to people in less developed counties.”

And she was right. The Westerners looked odd – as if they were all crazy-mirror images of who they should be – their bodies pappy and oddly shaped, anxiously clothed in expensive casuals, muted colors, perfectly creased and clean – their faces scrunched with anxiety – mouths chattering below hungry eyes as they gazed out through the windows of the bus at the villagers.

The people in this village, on the other hand, though their faces were deeply lined and weathered, and though they wore ragged, grimy clothes – still they all had straight backs, walked with grace and strength, and wore the clothes they had with an unselfconscious style that was almost aristocratic.

But the thing that really annoyed me was the mindless arrogance of the Western tourists – their attitude to the villagers. They seemed oddly abstracted from where they were, almost as if it was a video, or a Disney theme park, in which the actors had all been paid for. So they didn’t feel the need to exercise empathy, politeness or generosity of spirit. Their eyes seemed to consume this little village, and these people – to lock them away to be taken back home and regurgitated as dinner party stories, sentimentalized memories and photos to be amazed at.

And, in thinking about that, I remembered that it was the same thing that had always irritated me about tourists in every country I have traveled too. It’s as if they are all enclosed in some kind of cocoon, a force-field of self and nationality. And they look out from this cocoon like they’re looking out through the windows of a space ship at some odd thing – and though they see, they cannot hear or sense what is actually going on, because they’ve tucked themselves all away.

So, looking out the kitchen window this afternoon, as my hands did the dishes, I got to thinking about how misplaced our arrogance is.

We in the West have a habit of looking down on less ‘civilized’ people - attempting to bestow the ‘benefits’ of our ways upon them, such that, over the last few hundred years in particular, this patronizing arrogance has had incredibly destructive results.

The indigenous peoples of Africa, America and Australia are perfect examples of how destructive our arrogance has been. We have stormed into the delicate ecologies of their lives, waving bibles, guns and money, and totally ruined them on every level.

And we’re still doing it.

President Shrub, spreading ‘freedom and democracy’ to the East – this from a country that has the highest rate of imprisonment in the Western world – whose ruling class of Ivy league shysters, lawyers and corporate reptiles is as elitist as any of the old aristocracies ever where. The arrogance and hypocrisy is mind boggling.

And I suppose, it’ll soon be the turn of China or Russia, to strut the world telling everyone and everything that ‘they know best’. And no doubt, they’ll make as much of a mess as America, England, Germany, Holland, Portugul, France, Spain, and the Romans and all the other tragically overstuffed empires before them. Every nation or race who ever made a mess on our planet, has done it from an insufferable sense of superiority.

For as long as history, whichever humans considered themselves most civilized at the time, have strutted about this planet slaughtering, cutting things down, enslaving, and raping – all from within the illusion of superiority.

And sometimes I think, maybe, if all the slaughter, pain and loss of our history had have made this a better world, and all of us happier and wiser, it could possible be said to have been worth it. We could look back and say, ‘well it was a hard road getting here, but look at this glorious view.”

But when I look around at the mess we’ve created, both of ourselves and the planet, and the kinds of leaders we choose, the debacles we allow them to lead us into, I have to say, it has not been worth it at all.

The other thing is … as bad as all this human folly has been, it wouldn’t be so bad if it had have been restricted only to ourselves. If the rest of nature could have been left to go about their business while we got down to slaughtering, raping and ruining ourselves, maybe that would be okay.

But the trouble is, we assert our arrogant selves over everything in existence. Secretly believing ourselves to be masters of the universe, we seek control over everything, even the most fundamental blueprint of our biology. And our supreme arrogance is that, regardless of the billions of confident fuck-ups we’ve been involved with in our past, we STILL don’t believe we’ll fuck it up – genetic engineering, splitting the atom, biological insecticides and additives.

We take upon ourselves the rights of the ridiculous gods we worship - to kill, cut down, dig up, ruin and pollute whatever we like – sometimes just for the fun of it. Our incredible ingenuity has made it such that whole swathes of forest can be consumed by one huge mobile milling machine, hundreds of screaming, terrified cows and sheep can be herded into automated assembly lines to be slaughtered each day, plants can be sterilized or genetically altered, fish gracelessly scooped out of the ocean by the ton. And nowhere in all that is there any thanks given to all these creatures and things we consume. Nor do we pay homage to them, or even give second thought to their having existed.

We simply consume them, then spit out the bones.

At least our primitive forebears had the grace to thank the trees they cut down, and paid homage to the animals they killed.

So … here’s my point, as I watch the magpies go about their business, and the cat, who is now sleeping, crouched on the top of the fence. They’re so neat and clean. Perfectly groomed. And the magpies hop about the lawn peacefully pecking at the earth, the cat lies in the sun, and the pigeons coo in the tree-tops – no entertainment needed by them to alleviate boredom, no anxiety, no worry about the past or future.

All these creatures are highly successful, simply being just what they are. And the trees spread their leaves to the sky, which brushes by in the whispering wind, and everything is as it should be, because everything is in tune with its place in the big picture.

And it occurred to me that, for all our obsession with success and failure, the only failures in the vast panoply of nature are us – human beings.

We have failed abjectly at the most fundamental requirement of existence – we’ve failed at ‘LIFE’.

For all our penetration of atoms, exploration of space, philosophies and spiritual posturing, I think the success of one single swallow gathering sticks and building its beautiful nest makes a mockery of all our achievements.

At least the nest is essential.

And if the cat, being true to its nature, should kill and eat all the swallow's chicks, the sparrow doesn’t go into therapy, or become hopelessly depressed – nor does it swear out terrible revenge, or go to war. It simply lets go and continues with its life, because it, like every other creature, plant and tree, knows that this is simply the way of things as they are. And in that instinctive knowing, it is enlightened. In its deepest core it knows how to live, and how to die.

And the ultimate grace of all these creatures and things who are our fellow travelers on this planet, is that they do not resent us, or hate us, or even wish we were gone. Though for sure, they might have learnt to be wary of our madness, they are simply indifferent to us.

As our civilizations have appeared with much pounding of chests, then gone with much wailing and bereavement, the animals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants have gone about their quiet, successful lives – always perfectly groomed, not complaining about the heat or the cold, dying and regenerating without fanfare or grief, or resentment.

And it reaffirmed my belief that every creature on this earth is my teacher – that that there is no guru, spiritual teacher or life coach as insightful and wise as the magpies on the lawn, the cat asleep on the fence, the dog barking two houses down … the pigeons cooing in the tree … which rustles its leaves in the wind, as the rain sodden sky rushes past ...

These were my thoughts as I washed the dishes, and looked out of the window ...

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The LIFE of WHY

2007-07-04T09:16:04+02:00

Got nothing to say at the moment, about meditation or anything else, so I’ll babble about ... um ... what will I babble about?

I know. I’ll babble about life, and see where life takes me.

Let the fingers do the walking – go for an excursion, tap out a few words for the hell of it ...

Aaaah, LIFE!!!!!

Even the word resembles a breath, one of the billion or more, or less I’ll take in this three score and ten which mum and dad gave me half a century ago. (Gee, sounds a lot when I put it like that).

I suppose I’ve spent most of my life wondering about LIFE. And most of what I’ve done in my life has been to see if I could see a new view of LIFE.

Take drugs, for instance.

When I was a skinny, somewhat androgynous twenty year old in the 70’s, drugs were the rite of passage, the place where we tested ourselves. Whatever it was, we'd eat it, smoke it or snort it. But though we took drugs largely for fun, for me there was also the adventure of it - I think I was more interested in seeing what might happen. So I often preferred to take drugs on my own, locking the door to my room, and using myself like a laboratory, where I could experiment - to see what would happen to LIFE if I took this or that, or mixed the two … or took too much of one or the other.

And sometimes, boosted or changed by whatever substance I’d taken, LIFE would freak me out and I’d have to go and hide in the toilet for a couple of hours. For some reason I always felt safe in toilet cubicles when I was freaking out – I suppose because it was simple, sparse, with a lock on the door, and small - so I could see into every corner to make sure there were no surprises.

Or I’d get sick, and have to go outside into the fresh air, to find a bush at the back of the garden, where I could hide like a sick dog and sweat and quiver and convulse in peace ... then sleep, often waking chilled to the bone and sodden with dew.

But every so often, on one drug or another, I’d find what I was looking for. A doorway would open to some extraordinary place, and I’d be fascinated for a while, and LIFE would become an exciting and limitless thing. And I’d wonder where it all came from – the colors, patterns, sensations – and it would amaze me how malleable my perception of reality actually was.

But eventually, as I passed through each drug, it all seemed a bit silly, these chemical distortions of sense and brain. The novelty wore off leaving only hangovers, kidney aches and clenched jaws the next morning. And unlike some of my acquaintances, I was not prepared to up the doses and frequency simply to keep it all going. Every party has to end sometime.

Of course, the next step after recreational drugs was smack, which, in the 70's, with Lou Reed, The New York Dolls and the Stones strutting aaround doing heroin chic, seemed very attractive. But though I idolized Keith Richards (silly man – he’s just a walking caricature – great rhythm guitar player though), I could never quite get it together to be a junkie, though I affected the look.

Being a junkie seemed much too much work – scoring, shooting up and so on – and besides – I hated needles. I figured it worked for ‘Keefie’ coz he was rich … and famous. He had lots of people to pick him up when he fell down, and buy his drugs for him and take care of him. You have to be rich to be elegantly wasted - otherwise, being a junkie is a dirty filthy LIFE.

Plus I dislike the people in junkie LIFE. Ugly reptiles with powdery skin all trying to out-cool one another, talking from the backs of their throats, nodding off and being sick all over the place. Pathetic.

But really, after all that, it had never been the drugs I was interested in. They were simply doorways.

Rather, it had always been the big ‘WHY’ of it all that interested me.

I had discovered “WHY,” when I was a kid and it had affected me enough for it to become a life-long direction - though I have to say, it has been a problem sometimes.

For instance, I found out that employers don’t like WHY, and neither do police and various dull-eyed people. So, for most of my life I’ve been substantially unemployable by anyone but myself, and only recently have I learned to be careful with whom I use WHY on.

But WHY can be wonderful with the right person. As I intimated in a recent post, very few people ask questions of each other - I mean REAL questions. Most people ask the kinds of questions that are simply stepping stones to them telling you more about themselves.

But a well asked WHY with the right person forms a doorway to an immaculate joining of mind and spirit that is transcendantly intoxicating.

Such a magical word is WHY.

I remember the day I discovered WHY – I was very young, about 5 years old I suppose. It was a hot day, and I was trailing my mother home, dawdling along the footpath watching my feet.

And as we passed a milk-bar, the sumptuous smell of lollies, ice-cream and milkshakes reached out and made me pause. I called after my mother for her to buy me an ice-cream.

“No,” came the flat answer, and she kept on walking.

“Please?”

“No.”

“But I want one.”

“Well you’re not getting one,” came the emphatic declaration as she kept walking.

I ran to catch up and taking her hand, I asked the question that would change my life.

“Why can’t I have an ice-cream?”

My mother sighed and as we trudged through the suburban afternoon heat waves, she embarked on a fascinating expedition with me, a journey of WHY.

“You can’t have an ice-cream because we’re poor,” she said.

“Why are we poor?”

She thought about this.

“Because we don’t have enough money.”

“Why don’t we have enough money?”

“Because your father’s job doesn’t make enough money.”

“But why doesn't his job ...” and so on. You get the idea.

It was an epiphany for me to realize that WHY had no end. No matter what my mother said, nothing could stop it. There was always another WHY.

For over half an hour, she kept trying to cauterize my WHY with a conclusive answer of some kind, and each time, there was always a brand new WHY to open another door.

Eventually, in desperation she said, “Because God said so.”

Now, this was a big one. I’d heard of God. Some old bloke with eyebrows and beard who lived in heaven with little baby Jesus with the blonde hair and fluffy lambs.

But nothing stops WHY. Not even God.

“Why did God say so?”

Letting go of my hand she stopped and turned.

“Look Roger! He just did, right? So you’re not getting an ice-cream.”

But I’d forgotten about the ice-cream. I was more interested in WHY.

“But why can't I have an ice-cream?” I said, and there it was! We were back at the beginning again. To my child’s mind, it was the first experience of infinity. I was amazed at how, for every answer there was, there also came another question, and it fascinated me, and still does.

I was now genuinely intrigued, not so much with why God said I couldn’t have an ice-cream, but with how absolutely unstoppable this WHY juggernaut actually was.

Anyway, eventually WHY took me to the monastery where, I meditated for much the same reason that had attracted me to drugs twenty years before. To find out what lay just beyond.

Beyond where?

There. And there. And there. All the beyonds, particularly the beyonds of mind. To see another view.

That was my initial intention anyway, but meditation tends to purify the mind, and I rapidly realised that meditation and drugs were polar opposites.

So it was in the monastery that I lost WHY. Each month I spend meditating, WHY became more irrelevant.

The madness of it all gradually became more and more obvious - questions giving birth to questions - a wheel of lives unending. I realized I was strangling myself, suffocating myself with WHY. After all, why ask WHY when everything simply IS.

And it IS because that’s the way it is.

WHY fades away if IS is seen clearly.

And IS is the way it is BECAUSE.

And there it is! The definitive answer to WHY.

“BECAUSE”

Now … at that one could move into the tenuous world of “WHY BECAUSE?” , but I wouldn’t recommend it. WHY BECAUSE is a question much like a snake eating its own tail, which can only lead to a wasted life and madness.

So, there it is - I finally let go of WHY, for much the same reason I had become addicted to it when I was a kid. Just as it had been exciting to discover it, now it felt wonderful, and exciting to let it go - to not need a reason for this or that, or the lack of it. It was like flying through unending space, from nowhere to nowhere, forever.

WHY is LIFE?

Stupid question.

BECAUSE LIFE simply IS.

WHY IS it?

Just BECAUSE.

See? Doesn’t that feel good?

Well, thats the end on the post, but at the risk of boring you, I thought I'd reprint a bit I wrote in China, when I was in Daqing in 2002, about the vagaries of WHY.

You see, it's a very dangerous word to use in China ... and here's why ... ????

"…But Why?

With most of the foreign teachers, when they first arrive, the chaos has a profound effect on them. It causes a sickness of the mind, which saps their energy and causes many circular conversations, at the centre of which is one single word.
And that word is, ‘Why?’

Case 1.

Kingsley, an Australian teacher I work with in the middle schools here, goes to Sar Tu, a shopping hub in Daqing, to get a Kung Fu suit made (don’t ask me why). They spend an hour measuring him up, then take 150 Yuan off him, and tell him to come back in three days.

So he comes back in three days, expecting a perfectly fitted Kung Fu suit, as one does.

He asks the woman behind the counter for his suit, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. After much huffing and puffing, eventually the manager comes out and takes care of things. After listening intently to Kingsley tell him that he has paid for a suit, and where is it, the manager unrolls a bundle of cloth, cuts off a large portion, wraps it up in paper and hands it to Kingsley.
"What’s this?"
Apparently he had to take it somewhere else to get it made up.
"But why was I measured?"
They had to know how much cloth to cut off, so his suit could be made.
"But why was I told to come back in three days?"

Nobody’s sure about that one. But you see the thing? The question ‘why’ can cause problems.

Case 2.

Imagine this – you’re woken from a deep sleep on your day off by Mrs Li, the boss, ringing to tell you to bring your passport immediately to the front counter. So you throw on some clothes, and dragging the bags under your eyes behind you, you do it. You do it because you’re still asleep, and this is just another dream.

And when you get there she says, "You give me photo’s now"
"Wy…I gave you photo’s last week?"
"Need four photo’s please?"
"I don’t have them…"
"You go with driver to photo shop…"
"But why?"
"Visa."
"But I’ve got a visa."
"You go with driver to photo shop…"
"But why?"
And so it goes.

And as you sail through the traffic once more with Uncle doing the Hong Hu Dance beside you, you look down at the passport that’s still clutched in your paw and you start wondering, ‘Why, if she wanted photo’s, did she ask me to bring my passport?’
Again, that evil word, ‘why’.

So I have to remember to tell myself now, to cease, desist. Do not venture there white boy, for when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

A number of teachers here are, at this very moment, in the slow process of self incineration, trying to work out that interminable question "WHY?" that confuses most foreigners here.

Faced with chaotic scheduling, lost drivers, disappearing, then reappearing classes, not to mention the maids who leave your bathroom dirtier than when they came in and cause bed sheets to magically disappear, the foreigners are coming up with all the conventional Western tools, the logical ones that we like to use to combat chaos - schedules, suggestions, lists of demands, agreements for management, and so forth. And they’re getting all messed up when, after being thanked profusely, and told that things will be different, everything reverts to the old chaos.

And what is all the more galling is that, like the traffic, the chaos doesn’t stop, or explode, or go wrong – it just keeps rolling along. It was here before they came, and it will still be here when they are gone.

So right now, all over this hotel, are a scattering of white boys and girls, slumped on the sides of beds, looking vacantly at themselves in the mirror, muttering, "….but why? Why? Oh god, please tell me…Why!!!!"

And they are suffering greatly as a result of that word."

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