meditation

When the Hoodoo Trance Takes Me, That’s the Way I Go

By in alan watts, meditation

Brad Warner:

The problem I have with Ken Wilber, as well as others like him, is all about motivation. Ken Wilber seems to imply that his accomplishments indicate that his meditation is somehow qualitatively better than other peoples’ and that without such accomplishments “something is missing” as Brian my commenter asked. While I admit these accomplishments do indicate a commitment to something, I’m not sure it’s something I’m interested in committing to.
To me, Wilber’s goal in meditation appears to be to get more advanced at it than anyone else in the world and to be known for having done so. It’s very competitive. This assumption appears to be borne out by the comment I received when I said that I thought Wilber’s trick with the brainwave machine looked phony.
“Brad, just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean it’s fake,” said the commenter. True enough. Maybe he actually is going into Nirvikalpa Samadhi, whatever the blazes that is. It might not be a fake. But it’s the “just because you can’t do it” part that’s telling.
Wilber may say he doesn’t intend people to take it this way. But that would be disingenuous. He knows full well people are going to take it this way. The message my commenter got is, “Ken Wilber is a better meditator than Brad Warner.” It’s the kind of message I’m sure most people take away from Wilber’s various demonstrations of power.
If meditation is a competition, I don’t want to play that game. But it’s not. So I meditate.
I agree, and so did Alan Watts:

Influenced by the great Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, Watts argued that a determined struggle to achieve enlightenment was more likely to encourage an “ego-trip” than to break it down. Watts did meditate occasionally but not, he said, with the idea of attaining any goal, but only for the “joy of being quiet.”

I don’t even tell people I meditate anymore, because it’s just another word that carries too much baggage; before you know it, you’re arguing with votaries about “regulation” Zen cushions and comparing epiphanies in an “I see through the game of one-upsmanship more clearly than you do” sort of contest. I just like being alone, listening to music, and woolgathering. When I’m able to do it uninterrupted, my thoughts tend to streamline themselves of their own accord. Sitting, driving, or performing monotonous chores, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the music, the weather, the events going on in my life, and my thoughts all harmonize in such a way as to produce a profound sense of rightness. Call it whatever you want.

Whereof One Cannot Speak

By in language, meditation, music, religion

Rob Goodman:

But I don’t want to be so hard on Malick’s failed comforter: there’s painfully little any of us can say to grief, or to any of the other human needs that inspire religious feeling. And I think it’s an inability or unwillingness to recognize that fact that is the deeper mistake of bad religious art: it wants to argue us into faith. It won’t rest without a moral, a message, a lesson to take home. But religious persuasion can’t work that way—because religious thought doesn’t work that way.

When we reach for our most fundamental beliefs—whether these are beliefs about a deity, or politics, or family—we aren’t likely to find words there. We’re much more likely to find images, metaphors, memories, half-felt impressions. We’re likely to find, that is, something far more slippery, more vague, more illogical than discursive argument. Words come afterwards—but the fact that they so often rest on a foundation of images goes a long way to explain why the most seemingly persuasive arguments fail so often: why we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs; why we ignore evidence that does not; why being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter. Arguments rarely touch our central beliefs where they live, and the most perceptive religious thinkers understand this.

All true, and yet, and yet… I don’t think the chasm is quite so wide as all that. Arguments can serve as channels through which all that torrent of desire and emotion can be redirected. They can frame reality in a different way, even if it takes time for one’s perception to adjust, as in artwork where the figure is blended against the ground. People don’t change their minds on the spot when presented with an opposing argument, but given enough time, it may produce a subtle shift in their thinking. Persuasion is still worth the effort, is what I’m saying.

Why does music serve me in the same way as religion as described above? Why does it provide me with comfort, catharsis, inspiration, ecstasy and awe? I don’t know and don’t care, really. Those feelings don’t go away as one becomes more skeptical, and they don’t need to. But “religion” is not necessarily the answer for everything we can’t put into words. Arguments, words, as limited as they are, have made me aware of the futile, inherently confused nature of so many traditional yearnings: for gods, afterlives, and ultimate teleological meaning. I could never go back to those kind of simplistic narratives. But there’s so much more beyond those…

Also, I haven’t actually seen The Tree of Life, but here’s another interesting meditation on it in a similar vein:

For me this film is about how everything is sacred. The film clearly treats every second, every person, every thing as a thing of beauty. Every fleeting moment of life, whether it be the birth of a star or a family meal is as important and intertwined into the fabric of being as everything else. All these moments have an effect on how things unfold, no matter how large or small. The fragility and smallness of human life is blown up onto a grand a scale as the creation of everything itself. The film opens with the question of grief, and responds by showing us the vast complexity of everything, by some way of a non-verbal answer.

Perchance to Dream

By in foolosophy, meditation

“Thought,” Bachelard says, “is reverie brought to a center. Reverie is thought turned loose.” One of the lessons of reverie is that you have to sleep with your eyes open occasionally so that knowledge can find the path hearts take…
Because it generously accords the world the absentmindedness it deserves, reverie is light years distant from being a distraction, which does reality the considerable honor of turning its back on it. In fact, reverie celebrates the rediscovery of understanding and imagination, sets free the secret of disinterest which, because it lets you see beauty without your consent and see nature without ego, invests the world with intense interest.
Work is easing up for me, thank you for your concern. But I still aim to carve out more space for exactly the sort of thing Enthoven poetically muses about here. A lot of my writing comes from having the time to read a plethora of different sources and let the resulting ideas germinate. Even when I have time in the evenings to get online, it takes a while to shift my consciousness into a receptive state for absorbing new thoughts and letting them work their magic in my head. I need to spend a lot of time being useless to the world to feel useful to myself, it seems.

I’m Just Sitting Here Watching the Wheels Go Round and Round

By in identity, meditation, santutthi, work

What do you do?
Same as you do.
What do you do?
Well, I’m fine, thank you.
What do you do?
Man, I just mind my own business, so why don’t you kiss my ass?

— Saigon Kick

Jessica Freeman-Slade:

“What do you do?”

Of course, the question isn’t “What do you like to do?” It isn’t even “Who are you?” that grandest and most open-ended of personal inquiries. It’s the suggestion that we are, as productive human beings, always in a place where we should be doing something, and that what we do with our time is an essential expression of who we are and who we hope to be. Of course, anyone that’s worked a temp job, a data entry job, a telemarketing job, a retail job, a janitorial job, might not say that the way they make money is really who they are. Or they might feel a deep affinity with the clerking, the shoveling, the building, the frying, and declare themselves proudly for it. Because the answer to the doing question is almost always answered with an “I am” statement. I am working. I am busy. I am needed, somewhere.

On the one hand, yes. A human without actions is a vegetable, so of course we’re largely defined by what we do. Of course, when most people ask what we do, they only want to know which narrow skillset we use in the course of earning a paycheck. I work in a sufficiently manly field to impress those who are impressed by such things, and earn good enough money doing so to impress those blah blah, but I don’t take pride in either. You know what I’ve learned in the past month or so? One of the most defining qualities of who I am, one of the things that makes me feel most centered, complete, grounded and fulfilled is having the leisure to daydream. I mean, uh, meditate. Being able to let my thoughts meander for hours at a time is a large part of what powers my writing, and it complements my reading as well. When I don’t have that, I feel like less of a person. My career goal, such as it is, is to get good enough at what I do to be able to do it on autopilot while listening to music and letting my mind roam. Something tells me, though, I shouldn’t add that to my résumé.

I Was Comin’ Down the Mountain, Met a Child and She Had Pin Eyes

By in meditation

Brad Warner:

 

During the discussion, one of the supporters of drug abuse as a way to gain spiritual insight started in with the time worn cliché that drugs are like taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain rather than climbing it. You get the same breathtaking view as someone who has climbed the mountain. But you get there much quicker and more easily. “You can’t deny it’s exactly the same view,” one guy said. But, in fact, I would unequivocally deny that it’s the same view. It’s not. Not at all.

To a mountain climber, the goal of mountain climbing is not the moment of sitting on top enjoying the view. That’s just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view, from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful.

People who think that the pinnacle of the experience is that moment of being right on the tippy-top, don’t understand the experience at all. The poor attention addled things probably never will.

What I am working on in meditation involves every single moment of life. So-called “peak experiences” can be fun. But they no more define what life is about that so-called “mundane experiences.” When you start making such separations, you have already lost the most precious thing in life, the ability to fully immerse yourself in every experience.

 

I wholeheartedly agree that the whole point of “consciousness-raising” experiences should be to cultivate a sense of appreciation for the moments of life that we normally ignore in our rush to get somewhere more interesting where something more important is supposedly happening (the majority of our lives, in other words). I’d also add that, of all the people I’ve known who have used drugs, none of them have ever relayed any profound insights as a result, anything that couldn’t have been arrived at via ordinary thought. Wow, smoking bales of pot and absorbing truckloads of psychedelics have convinced you that war sucks, we’re all one and people need to love each other more? Thanks for traveling to the outer limits to bring us that important news, dude.

Presence

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation

I liked this little Christmas story of Alex Balk’s:

One of the tragedies of our lives is how much we miss out on because we think there’s something more interesting happening wherever were aren’t; it is a lesson always learned too late.

Maybe it’s not the most logical leap, but this reminded me of something John Keats said:

– I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason –

A lot of Buddhist writing talks about how often we fail to be aware, to be present. I’ll spare you that Auden quotation again, in favor of one from Alan Watts:

The peculiarly noticeable thing about the personality of Zen people is the uncluttered mind. When you deal with Zen masters, you have a strange feeling that so long as you are with them and addressing them, they are absolutely with you. They have nothing else to do but talk to you. They are just “right there.”

For me, the common thread here is being able to realize that this, this right here, is as good as it gets. Sure, some details could be better, but some could be worse, and sometimes striving for the former unbalances everything and brings about the latter. The people and places and memories you’re looking at in nostalgic, melancholic hindsight now are the same ones you were looking past at the time, hoping to see something more glitzy, dynamic, captivating, more in line with what you think life ought to be like. And while you’re doing that, you’re dismissing things right now that will seem so much more important later.
I’ve thought about this and tried to consciously embody a more focused presence for years, but I still often find myself unconsciously gravitating toward this outlook. I have to repeatedly bring my focus back and remind myself: I don’t need to know if this or that could be improved slightly. I don’t need to keep trying to have just a little bit more, to make a good thing just a little bit better, to gorge myself on unrealistic desires until I have no appetite or appreciation for what’s available. I have a very good balance right now between the positive and negative in my life. That’s all I need, and I don’t care if I ever have anything more.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

By in meditation, poetry

If there’s anything more sublime than autumn in the mountains, I haven’t experienced it yet.
On the road, as usual, when I decided to stop and meditate on the stark beauty of a view from a mountaintop. I sat with my back to a pine tree and thought about Li Po’s poem, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain”:

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and I,
Until only the mountain remains.

Mentis Fugit

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation, science

io9:

People spend 46.9% of their waking lives thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing. It’s a terribly inefficient use of one’s mind and, worse, it actually seems to make people unhappy.

Letting your mind wander might seem like a bad thing, but really it’s just the natural byproduct of being capable of abstract thought. Humans are capable of thinking about things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that may never happen at all. (As a science fiction blog, we rather encourage doing that last part.) Sure, letting your mind wander is a good recipe for goofing off, but it’s also a necessary part of contemplation and reflection.

I’ve quoted this from Auden several times before, but it just sums it up so perfectly:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,

We anticipate or remember but never are.

But yeah, I think there’s maybe a little more nuance to this. As many have said, especially Buddhists, the future and the past are mere abstractions. We only actually exist in “now”. Alan Watts used the image of a ship’s prow to symbolize this — we only ever exist right there, at the prow, as it cuts through the water, and the past flows behind us in our wake.

If you spend every present moment wishing you were somewhere else, you’re going to feel perpetually dissatisfied, since the pleasures you’re so eagerly anticipating will seem boring once they become actualized, and you’ll already be looking forward to the next one. It’ll never feel like you’ve actually experienced anything fully. You’ve become attached to the wanting, not the having.

But on the other hand, meditation is, in many ways, a form of purposely letting your mind wander, tiring itself out. Personally, I do my meditating while listening to music, and I find it revitalizing, not distracting. It’s like a mental equivalent of a good workout. Sometimes I do it while performing simple tasks that don’t require my undivided attention, like washing dishes or cutting grass, and it seems to me that somehow, the repetitive physical activity keeps me grounded, even though my mind may be on various other things. I’m not sure how to explain that exactly.

Nothing’s Sacred

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, meditation, religion

But as I mentioned earlier, all these prostrations, chants, incense offerings and the rest have an undeniable psychological and physical effect. Even though we may not know where our need for this kind of action comes from, we need to acknowledge it exists. It’s just as strong in any atheist as it is in any religious fanatic. Atheists want to throw away everything about religion, including the stuff that clearly fulfills a real human need. That’s never gonna fly. We need certain aspects of religion to make us feel right.

Brad Warner, from Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

As the philosopher Bugs Bunny said on numerous occasions: He don’t know me very well, do he?

I like Brad’s writing, even if his gonzo metaphors sometimes stray a little too close to Doug Gilesian territory (though obviously Brad is not a three-quarters insane, hypermacho fundamentalist closet case, so the similarities end there), so I’ll forgo my usual umbrage-taking at being authoritatively told by someone else what I really think, deep down in my heart of hearts, and calmly rejoin: No. The religious/spiritual force is not strong in this one.

He doesn’t elaborate, so I have to presume he means what most apologists for religion mean; that even if you don’t literally believe in the old deities and myths, simply going through the rote motions keeps you from killing yourself and others out of boredom or nihilistic frenzy. But what is this “real human need” stuff? Going out on a limb again, it would appear he means “good” things, like a need for comfort, reassurance, companionship, etc. But I would point out that the need to belong and find purpose among kindred has a flip side, and the urge to dominate, destroy, and otherwise violently distinguish yourself from others not of your tribe is just as “real” and widespread a need as any other value we naked apes hold. I’m sure he would agree that we don’t need those urges to be cemented even more firmly in place by elaborate metaphysical justifications, as religious belief has been known to do a time or two.

And let me state for the record that despite being human, all-too-human, I do not need “certain aspects” of religion to make me feel right. Popular music, photos, scented candles and books also have “an undeniable psychological and physical effect” on me. What? Does that sound vaguely insulting, that I would trivialize profound religious experiences by comparing them to ordinary objects and activities, harrumph harrumph?

Well, good. That was the intent. But it was actually only the first step! The follow-up to that is to point out that this false distinction between the profound and the ordinary, the sacred and the profane, is itself a problematic illusion.

Yes, that’s right. I’m saying that this belief, this religious faith, that certain activities and thoughts and feelings are somehow more valid, more meaningful, more elevated, is nonsense. We mistake relative for Absolute. This attempt to set those things above and apart from the rest of existence represents yet another instance of the strange human desire to prove that we aren’t just another kind of animal, to create and hold some kind of stasis where we can have the things we like while shunning the things we don’t, like trying to have the blooms of flowers without the roots.

Contemplation is not the willed stillness of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments. When we turn away from our all-too-human yearnings we turn back to mortal things. Not moral hopes or mystical dreams but groundless facts are the true objects of contemplation.

– John Gray

You don’t need special robes and particular chants and elaborate rituals and traditions that have been passed down over centuries to cultivate and maintain an awareness and appreciation of the literal interconnectedness of all life. You don’t need to treat anger and sadness and all the other “deadly sins” as obstacles preventing you from fully enjoying life. In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it all the more when you realize that while they may adversely affect your ability to achieve specific goals, they are not inherently wrong. You don’t have to enter a special state of mind in special surroundings to realize some special secret. All you have to do is wake up in this moment, as other Buddhists like to say, even if it finds you unshowered and unshaven, naked in front of the computer, and scratching your left asscheek.

Sacred mountains and groves are no closer to the heart of life than carrion and offal. Anyone can find the spirit of life in a flower or sunset. When you can find it in a dungheap, though…ah, that’s the trick.

All That Heavenly Glory

By in meditation


Lee: It is like a finger pointing away to the moon.

::SMACK::

Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!

People frequently hail me in the street. They sez to me, they sez: “Damian, I’m with ya on all that far-out meditation contemplation reflection stuff, but pondering your own death first thing in the morning? No offense, but that’s some bizarre shit, borderline messed-up, you feel me, brah?”

So I sez to them, I sez: “First off, don’t call me “brah”. Only douchebags call people “brah”.

With that out of the way, then I sez: “But yeah, I know what you’re saying. It’s not for everybody. Fortunately, there’s something much less grim you can contemplate. Right above you. The moon.”

I don’t believe in the moon. I think it’s just the back of the sun.

– The Janitor

Well, hey, to each his own. The thing is, it doesn’t even matter. Call it what you want. What’s important is this: that glowing orb has been there since life on earth evolved the capacity to look up and see it. We’ve gone from worshiping it to bombing it, and through it all, there it hangs, obvious yet unobtrusive, staring impassively down at us. This is what I find cool to think about: every person that has ever existed has taken notice of it. Spent some time staring up at it, dancing under it, writing poems and songs about it. Everyone, from homo habilis to you and I. Peasants and kings, heroes and villains, anyone with minimally functioning eyesight. Anyone from history you’ve ever cared to meet has passed the time gazing at it while lost in thought about earthly events. Even animals feel and react to its influence.

Now, maybe it’s just this off-brand oven cleaner I’ve been huffing, but I find that contemplating that for a while really gives me a transcendent feeling of the literal interconnectedness of all life and the endless flow of time. It simultaneously makes my life feel more grounded while reminding me just how transitory and ephemeral my individual existence really is. And isn’t that what meditation is all about?

In My Dreams I’m Dying All the Time

By in foolosophy, meditation, the big sleep

Here’s something strange: for some time now, and with increasing frequency, my first coherent mental activity upon waking has been a vivid sense of my own mortality. I mean, vivid. Like, lying on your actual deathbed-vivid. I’ve always had a strong disposition toward melancholy and morbidity, but this isn’t the same thing. It’s not an intellectual understanding of mortality, it’s a pervasive feeling of it, into my bones, as if the disorientation of sleep has removed all the mental barriers we keep around us so as to be able to continue with our mundane activities. No more distractions — YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, with all the subtlety of a foghorn in your ear.

I can’t really recapture that feeling once I’m up and moving around, so I’ve taken to getting up a few minutes earlier just to be able to sit and reflect on it while it lingers. I don’t think too hard about it; I just try to observe it unobtrusively. Just acknowledging its existence and seeing how it affects me. As you can imagine, this was pretty jarring at first, but I’ve actually come to look forward to it somewhat. Not for any of the usual pragmatic, utilitarian, self-help rationales — I don’t care if it lowers my blood pressure, or gives me a more balanced perspective on trivial irritations, or any of that shit. It just feels…right. Good for its own sake. More real.

The best part of waking up is Thanatos in your cup.

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