Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
Ajahn Chah
Monday, 23 June 2014
So what are we trying to do when we meditate?
Nothing.
Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
Ajahn Chah
Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
Ajahn Chah
Thursday, 19 June 2014
the sense of self, now and back then - part two
The temporary dislocation of the continuity of my ordinary self (see last post) may relate to what neuroscience seems to be telling us: that the ego, the strong sense of myself as a continuing presence, is re-constructed "as we go along," continuously. There is no solid place inside all this flux and change that is "me." "Me" is part of the flux. But that's OK, because out of the flux comes a pretty useful thing: the illusion that "I" is separate from everything else. Well - useful in a social sense, but not actually accurate.
(I don't know what the pretty patterns mean either, but it shows different areas of the brain lighting up, as different patterns of neurons fire, re-making "me" by the moment.)
I think that's what the unusual, alienating, dislocating state of mind I referred to in the last post comes from. Without any analysis on my part, and certainly with almost no understanding, my mind sets aside the usual clatter and chatter and exists in the present.
Although mindfulness meditation methodology has no doctrinal, religious content, it derives from Buddhist meditation practice. And maybe that's because it was Buddha who had the insight (revelation, nirvana, whatever you like to call it) that the self is an illusion - at least, the self as we usually inhabit it.And he did so once he'd given up starving himself and pursuing asceticism and bodily denial because it proved futile. He just meditated, and out of that came his enlightenment, his insights into human suffering and the nature of the self.
Understanding that the self as we usually think of it and feel it - i.e. as a constant entity - is an illusion, and living with that understanding, in the reality of the present moment, seems to yield great benefits. Even the NHS recognises that now.
So there you are - from 12-year-old oddness through Buddha and neuroscience to the NHS. I have linked it all up for you.
Is that my Nobel Prize you're holding? Oh no, it is Nurse Ratched with my medications....
(I don't know what the pretty patterns mean either, but it shows different areas of the brain lighting up, as different patterns of neurons fire, re-making "me" by the moment.)
I think that's what the unusual, alienating, dislocating state of mind I referred to in the last post comes from. Without any analysis on my part, and certainly with almost no understanding, my mind sets aside the usual clatter and chatter and exists in the present.
Although mindfulness meditation methodology has no doctrinal, religious content, it derives from Buddhist meditation practice. And maybe that's because it was Buddha who had the insight (revelation, nirvana, whatever you like to call it) that the self is an illusion - at least, the self as we usually inhabit it.And he did so once he'd given up starving himself and pursuing asceticism and bodily denial because it proved futile. He just meditated, and out of that came his enlightenment, his insights into human suffering and the nature of the self.
Understanding that the self as we usually think of it and feel it - i.e. as a constant entity - is an illusion, and living with that understanding, in the reality of the present moment, seems to yield great benefits. Even the NHS recognises that now.
So there you are - from 12-year-old oddness through Buddha and neuroscience to the NHS. I have linked it all up for you.
Is that my Nobel Prize you're holding? Oh no, it is Nurse Ratched with my medications....
the sense of self, now, and back then - part one.
When I was quite young, maybe 12 or 13, is I think about when I began to note, occasionally, an unusual feeling, or state of mind. Being a state of mind, I find it almost impossible to describe, but I'll try.
The usual flow of thoughts and feelings seemed to have stopped, quite suddenly but for no particular reason. In its place was the feeling that my prior experience had been de-coupled from where I was at that moment. I felt newly-arrived in the present. If I thought back into the immediate past, the feeling disappeared as quietly and quickly as it had arrived, and that's what I used to do at first, because the feeling was disturbing. I felt slightly remote, a little alien to my usual self.
As I grew older and I guess busier with the world, family, people, work, it happened less often. If anyone spoke to me, it vanished, as I turned to engage with them. But in the last few years, I've felt it more often, and it's a welcome guest; it helps me to exist for a while in the present moment.
I can't hang on to it - it disappears, if I try to keep it, or assess it, or "do" anything else to it. All I can do is be in it for a while.
Does this make any sense to anyone else, at all, I wonder?
(I expect Nurse Ratched and the ambulance will be here any moment...)
The usual flow of thoughts and feelings seemed to have stopped, quite suddenly but for no particular reason. In its place was the feeling that my prior experience had been de-coupled from where I was at that moment. I felt newly-arrived in the present. If I thought back into the immediate past, the feeling disappeared as quietly and quickly as it had arrived, and that's what I used to do at first, because the feeling was disturbing. I felt slightly remote, a little alien to my usual self.
As I grew older and I guess busier with the world, family, people, work, it happened less often. If anyone spoke to me, it vanished, as I turned to engage with them. But in the last few years, I've felt it more often, and it's a welcome guest; it helps me to exist for a while in the present moment.
I can't hang on to it - it disappears, if I try to keep it, or assess it, or "do" anything else to it. All I can do is be in it for a while.
Does this make any sense to anyone else, at all, I wonder?
(I expect Nurse Ratched and the ambulance will be here any moment...)
Saturday, 14 June 2014
The Way of the Panda
Those who have absorbed the wisdom of that enlightened being, Po, the Kung Fu Panda, transmitted as it is via the blessed vehicle of DVD, will remember two key moments.
The first one: his dad (OK, his dad's a goose and he's an overweight panda, but that's explicable in the follow-up movie) has told customers at his noodle stall that there is a Secret Ingredient to his delicious noodles. Eventually, he finally admits to Po that there is no secret igredient. (i.e. he just makes noodles his own way and they're very good.)
The second moment (spoiler alert) is when Po finally gets his hands on the Dragon Scroll, source of wisdom, power and general Awesomeness, unrolls it, and finds...the scroll is blank, except for a surface sheen, reflecting his own face. The only real Awesomeness (as you will have guessed, it's an American film) we can find is within each of us.
We love the idea of exclusivity, a secret only we know, the source of in-crowd power. But to engage fully with reality, to be ourselves, now, this minute, we have to realise, and to internalise, the fact that there is no Secret Igredient, the Dragon Scroll is blank. There is just each of us, in the present moment. Living that truth is the only way to be enlightened, whatever that means to you in your own life.
The first one: his dad (OK, his dad's a goose and he's an overweight panda, but that's explicable in the follow-up movie) has told customers at his noodle stall that there is a Secret Ingredient to his delicious noodles. Eventually, he finally admits to Po that there is no secret igredient. (i.e. he just makes noodles his own way and they're very good.)
The second moment (spoiler alert) is when Po finally gets his hands on the Dragon Scroll, source of wisdom, power and general Awesomeness, unrolls it, and finds...the scroll is blank, except for a surface sheen, reflecting his own face. The only real Awesomeness (as you will have guessed, it's an American film) we can find is within each of us.
We love the idea of exclusivity, a secret only we know, the source of in-crowd power. But to engage fully with reality, to be ourselves, now, this minute, we have to realise, and to internalise, the fact that there is no Secret Igredient, the Dragon Scroll is blank. There is just each of us, in the present moment. Living that truth is the only way to be enlightened, whatever that means to you in your own life.
Tuesday, 27 May 2014
Stephen Grosz and The Examined Life
Socrates is credited with saying the "the unexamined life is not worth living;" some wag replied, a lot more recently, that "the unlived life is not worth examining."
Here's a book that helps us to live our lives, and to examine them, or at least to think about them in illuminating and productive ways:
He's a psychoanalyst, and he uses some of his experience with his patients to draw some general ideas about our lives, such as "on secrets," "on not being a couple," "on the recovery of lost feelings."
There is no Freudian jargon, no psychobabble here. He doesn't admonish us or preach to us. He writes clearly, simply even:
"The question is this: can we unhook ourselves by reaching an acceptance of ourselves and our place in time so that we can enjoy our children's pleasures and successes? For at its furthest extreme, envying one's child is a great psychological misfortune, and we stand to lose both our mental equilibrium and our child."
These insights are reached through particular instances, they are never ex cathedra announcements. And Grosz makes plain some of his own uncertainties and difficulties- uses them, even, to add to the evidence underlying what we can learn from him. Like any great doctor, he is a wounded healer.
I found it to be the sort of book that makes you feel a little calmer, more thoughtful, maybe a little larger in the mind, for having read it. I'm certain it will help me relate better, more thoughtfully, to the people I work with.
It's not a long book - about a mid-length train journey's worth of enlightenment - but it's best not hurried.
Here's a book that helps us to live our lives, and to examine them, or at least to think about them in illuminating and productive ways:
He's a psychoanalyst, and he uses some of his experience with his patients to draw some general ideas about our lives, such as "on secrets," "on not being a couple," "on the recovery of lost feelings."
There is no Freudian jargon, no psychobabble here. He doesn't admonish us or preach to us. He writes clearly, simply even:
"The question is this: can we unhook ourselves by reaching an acceptance of ourselves and our place in time so that we can enjoy our children's pleasures and successes? For at its furthest extreme, envying one's child is a great psychological misfortune, and we stand to lose both our mental equilibrium and our child."
These insights are reached through particular instances, they are never ex cathedra announcements. And Grosz makes plain some of his own uncertainties and difficulties- uses them, even, to add to the evidence underlying what we can learn from him. Like any great doctor, he is a wounded healer.
I found it to be the sort of book that makes you feel a little calmer, more thoughtful, maybe a little larger in the mind, for having read it. I'm certain it will help me relate better, more thoughtfully, to the people I work with.
It's not a long book - about a mid-length train journey's worth of enlightenment - but it's best not hurried.
Wednesday, 21 May 2014
A Time Being
There are, according to a classic Zen Buddhist text, a little under six and a half billion moments in one 24-hour day, 65 of them in a finger-snap.
If you snap your fingers and do so 98,463,077 times over the next 24 hours, "you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.
She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.
That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die."
That, it seems to me, is why spending at least part of each day in the present moment, not scripting, planning, looking back, anticipating, etc etc etc - is so supremely important. Being a time being is to be less frightened of time passing because time beings are truly living in and with time.
To understand how quickly time flows is to stop being anxious about it. To accept that everything is always changing, at its own speed, is to let go of what cannot, in any case, be held on to.
The Zen text is Shobogenzo, by Dogen. The novel Jiko and the rest of the above quotation is taken from is :
If you snap your fingers and do so 98,463,077 times over the next 24 hours, "you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.
She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.
That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die."
That, it seems to me, is why spending at least part of each day in the present moment, not scripting, planning, looking back, anticipating, etc etc etc - is so supremely important. Being a time being is to be less frightened of time passing because time beings are truly living in and with time.
To understand how quickly time flows is to stop being anxious about it. To accept that everything is always changing, at its own speed, is to let go of what cannot, in any case, be held on to.
The Zen text is Shobogenzo, by Dogen. The novel Jiko and the rest of the above quotation is taken from is :
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
So what is "natural" about a "natural" burial ground?
There is so much to life that cannot be lived through and by words, and yet words are so important; they are, mostly, where we live, most of our waking hours.
So how we use words, and what we use them to mean, really matters. We mislead ourselves and are easily misled.
"Natural."
What a lot of (fill in your own expletive) this word often covers. E.g: The city is unnatural, the countryside is natural.
Well, this planet peoples, and trees, and lichens, and sturgeons, by which I mean, humans are, obviously, one of the life forms the planet has developed.
We evolved here, just as bower birds and swallows did. Out of raw materials we find in and on the planet, we make very intricate nests where we rest, work, reproduce, etc etc. We put a lot of them together and call it a city.
A city is just as natural as a village - or a swallow's mud nest or a bower-bird's astonishing nest, both of which are made out of raw materials the birds find on the planet. Whether or not our cities upset ecologies and threaten our survival and that of other species is a different issue. It is clearly in our nature to make cities, towns, villages.
Which brings me to "natural" burial sites. People in the funeral business are fond of dividing practice into traditional and ...er... something else. Alternative? I think myself there's only a good funeral, which is one that the family wants and needs, and a bad funeral (which can be bad for many reasons!)
And here we go again - we have "natural" burial grounds, as opposed to "industrial death" crematoria, "gloomy, Victorian" cemeteries, etc. Well, all that is largely a matter of preference, or tatse. Why cloud the decision-making with a spray-on epithet? Why polarise a matter of choice for bereaved people? Enough already with the assumptions.
A "natural" burial ground that I know, and admire in many respects, is simply a cemetery amongst trees, with very small or no headstones. You might think it is more peaceful, or beautiful, or consoling. I might agree, but I don't see what is more "natural" about it than a graveyard.
I don't like shiny granite gravestones either, but they don't make a graveyard less "natural." They make it more obtrusive in the landscape than a "natural" burial ground, which is what I think people often mean when they reach for the handy spray-on word "natural."
As we evolved, we began to put our dead into the ground, with various rituals to give the event meaning, and sometimes we burned them first. All this goes back thousands of years, of course. In that respect, cremating and/or burying a body has become "natural" for our species, as opposed to simply leaving it to decompose where it falls, which is what other animals do.
But if you want to do things differently and need to sell a product - which may well have a powerful and worthwhile belief system behind it - just call it "natural."
I guess the opposite would be an unnatural burial, or funeral. What sort of sense does that make?
This is a lost cause, I know. I wish The Natural Death Centre and the natural burial grounds movement nothing but good, I'm on their side, if sides we must have; but really, we are misleading ourselves, and perhaps even causing unneccessary tensions and anxieties: the title is hogwash!
So how we use words, and what we use them to mean, really matters. We mislead ourselves and are easily misled.
"Natural."
What a lot of (fill in your own expletive) this word often covers. E.g: The city is unnatural, the countryside is natural.
Well, this planet peoples, and trees, and lichens, and sturgeons, by which I mean, humans are, obviously, one of the life forms the planet has developed.
We evolved here, just as bower birds and swallows did. Out of raw materials we find in and on the planet, we make very intricate nests where we rest, work, reproduce, etc etc. We put a lot of them together and call it a city.
A city is just as natural as a village - or a swallow's mud nest or a bower-bird's astonishing nest, both of which are made out of raw materials the birds find on the planet. Whether or not our cities upset ecologies and threaten our survival and that of other species is a different issue. It is clearly in our nature to make cities, towns, villages.
Which brings me to "natural" burial sites. People in the funeral business are fond of dividing practice into traditional and ...er... something else. Alternative? I think myself there's only a good funeral, which is one that the family wants and needs, and a bad funeral (which can be bad for many reasons!)
And here we go again - we have "natural" burial grounds, as opposed to "industrial death" crematoria, "gloomy, Victorian" cemeteries, etc. Well, all that is largely a matter of preference, or tatse. Why cloud the decision-making with a spray-on epithet? Why polarise a matter of choice for bereaved people? Enough already with the assumptions.
A "natural" burial ground that I know, and admire in many respects, is simply a cemetery amongst trees, with very small or no headstones. You might think it is more peaceful, or beautiful, or consoling. I might agree, but I don't see what is more "natural" about it than a graveyard.
I don't like shiny granite gravestones either, but they don't make a graveyard less "natural." They make it more obtrusive in the landscape than a "natural" burial ground, which is what I think people often mean when they reach for the handy spray-on word "natural."
As we evolved, we began to put our dead into the ground, with various rituals to give the event meaning, and sometimes we burned them first. All this goes back thousands of years, of course. In that respect, cremating and/or burying a body has become "natural" for our species, as opposed to simply leaving it to decompose where it falls, which is what other animals do.
But if you want to do things differently and need to sell a product - which may well have a powerful and worthwhile belief system behind it - just call it "natural."
I guess the opposite would be an unnatural burial, or funeral. What sort of sense does that make?
This is a lost cause, I know. I wish The Natural Death Centre and the natural burial grounds movement nothing but good, I'm on their side, if sides we must have; but really, we are misleading ourselves, and perhaps even causing unneccessary tensions and anxieties: the title is hogwash!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
