Enviroment

Having just moved out to the country I am enjoying nature. I have a garden for the first time in ages and after meditation i walk around it or sit in it. Yesterday i bought a load of seeds to plant and my partner got some herbs. With all the talk of the enviroment at the moment and all the fear about it, it can be hard to see what is going on. One of my thoughts is that the collective soul is at a point where we are suffering so much from being alienated from nature that we feel close to a crisis. As usual our culture literalises this crisis fantasy into an enviromental disaster. I am not disputing climate change or the efforts we are making to reduce carbon emissions and so forth, but what i am saying is that i beleive there is an equally important issue of loss of soul connection to the earth which the mas media is totally uninterested/unaware of. It seems to me that our current situation and therefore how we think about practicing Dharma needs tot ake into account this alienation from nature. Included in this is alienation from body, emotions, inuition, what is termed the feminine. When i first came across Richard Tarnas' book Passion of the Western mind I was struck by his view in the epilogue that a rebirth of the feminine is the way out of our Western pain. I am slowly beginning to understand why he said this and how this lack of the feminine in our culture manifests. Also how the longing for it's presence manifests.

As well as turning our washing machine down to 30 we need to be looking more holistically at how we can bring nature back into our lives.

Dukkha

If the mind is intrisically open and pure, is it fair to say that between where we are now and the full unfoldment of that open awareness lies a layer of dukkha? Then dukkha is almost a fundamental quality of life. Being omnipresent in one form or another. It seems to me that the trouble arises because it is so hard admit just how much things hurt. Our response to pain is almost always one of trying to shut it down and to crave for an alternative, pleasant experience instead. So the pain which inhabits our bodies (I am mainly talking about emotional pain) is hardly ever fully felt. The irony being that just this loving awareness of pain is what is required to heal it. Hence in dependence upon dukkha faith arises and so on. But the mind being what it is would rather create one of another of the six realms to avoid taking reponsability for dukkha. Another problem is that we have no concept of 'skhanda dukkha' in the west. This is the grief we inherit simply by having a body and not being free of delusions. This is felt often as a causeless, inexplicable but very real suffering. I believe that without cultural acknowledgement that being alive hurts and that this is not a personal failing, we are prone to despair. How easy it is for the mind to claim that there is really no valid reason for us to be feeling as we do, so we fight the pain and whip the heart up into a deluded frenzy. So inhabiting the body of dukkha which we carry around with us slowly begins to make us genuine and human.

Fear

See, I don't always get why fear isn't at the center of the wheel of life. You could see Dharma practice as a movement between two directional pulls. The first is love; an opening up to life, and connection and feeling. The second is fear; withdrawing from life using ego defences into one's personal warped delusion. Buddhism is then regarded as a huge collection of resources to aid and give courage to the first direction. Then the criteria for weather we take on a practice or view is if it works in nudging this opening to life. Unfortunately, may Buddhist practices can be equally effective at maintining the closed and defended state.

It seems that there is not much hope of avoiding a period where we use Buddhist practices to avoid reality just as much as we would with 'non spiritual' tactics.

Why Blue?

Today is one of those days when a deep melancholy descends. It comes from nowhere just as it will go to nowhere. Things seem pointless except for feeling. Pulled slightly under the surface, inward. Reading a new book 'If nobody speaks of remarkable things', it too has a melancholy about it. About fading connections and lost love and summers. Maybe this is the feeling which accompanies a deepening desire for love. It is a day when everything, the fabric of life seems in dissarray. At times this hints at being beautiful and profound but all is distant. Distant.

Last FM

Just discovered the joys of last FM on the web. Been finding some nice old beats from the Mo Wax crew. Used to listen to a lot of that stuff when I had not much else to do.

I never thought watching birds would be so transcendant. Rilke talks of the way birdsong affects the heart making walls of self dissappear. Watching them through those little binoculars has the same effect. World gone, problems gone, total focuss on unselfconscoius beauty. Lovely. Also, I drank wonderful champaign. This was a treat, my partner said it was like drinking an oak tree. Full of lightness and substance. I said that wine is a communication from the soul of the earth, it is a communication of the love of quality and nature. To drink and not become drunk with it is the joy.

Trip Bubbles

Maybe I have commited a great blog crime by not posting anything for 6 months!
Maybe some people have actually read this!
Anyway. There are a few topics I am thinking about slowly.

One is about delusion. It is actually based on a fragment from Heraclitus.

The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into his own darkness.

This got me thinking about Chogyam Trugpa's use of the word hallucination, when talking about the six realms. Six styles of hallucination. Six styles of darkness, some brighter than others. The metaphore of hallucination is very effective because of suggests that a true reality is distorted by our minds. The fact that we are all in some kind of hallucintion or other is quite powerfull. Especially when you get close enough to somebody to start to see how your own trip is working. The way you interpret a sentence or gesture to mean one thing when quite another is intended. This is going on all the time. Just this morning somebody came into a room where there was a meeting going on. They said they were struck by the depth of spiritual atmosphere, wheras I just felt really tired! There trip seemed to be that they were in this really electric spiritual group, but where they? Our style of hallucination is the filter through which every event is made meaningful and is falsified. Each of us is in our own trip bubble. It does seem that there is also an awake state which is devoid of this delusion, and as Heraclitus says, it is actually common to all.

I wondered whether this was why Buddhism was seemingly more popular in the 60's. The language and notion of hallucination was more commonplace. There was a zeitgiest which was affected by the acid trip experience, even to people who never did any. Today we have a different notion. There isn't a prevalent myth about liberation. It seems to be much more about security and health. This leads to a spirituality concerned with self improvement and health and being safe. But not to seeking out the sources of delusion. There is a lack of challenge to our perception because we can all have our own truth (our individual darkness) but there is no notion of an ultimate truth ( the common world of the awakened).

Maybe in traditional Buddhist language, our sprituality is about the god realm. Purity, ideals, study, intelect are all very godlike. We have to watch out that we don't just desire a lovely bright darkness.

My Eyes Droop

Having spent forever searching for jobs my eyes are drooping lower than are my knees. Test, questionaires, references. All thrown out into the ether oy space with not a human face anywhere! Is this how we do it now, invisible and computer screened?

My eyes droop so will sleep.

Smoke

There is always something on the baking tray which burns and fills the room with smoke!!! Then you cannot see properly!!! Then the fat from the frying pan leaps out and bites you multiple times on the forearm!!!

I was looking on the Wolf at the Door website. It reminded me that I used to write a lot more than I do at the moment. Every morning I sat at an old wooden desk in Abbey House and wrote from my beautiful fountain pen. Ananda was talking of the importance of narrative, in seeing how we all have a narrative on our experience. I have a story. Hillman talks of how we can see our story from many different stylistic points of view. For example our life can be a comedy or a tragedy or a surrealist nightmare. The real creative skill is to be able to morph between these different styles, to loosen up our tenacious grasp on one single mono narrative. I wonder of the souls deeper movements are the slow transformation of our story, who we are, where we are going, what we are capable of. I believe we are capable of so much more, but that the perpetuation of our story inhibits us. For me it is a queeeezy feeling in my guts that make me feel like I will fall over if I aim too high. But really mind is insubstantial and workable and (if you believe it) infinite. The ability to peel away the old story to let the new freedom in is hard won. I might float off the face of the planet if I were to follow my wildest dreams! But I would be liking that too, it is preferable to leadening myself down with a vast list of 'out of bound' possibilities. It is touching the Earth of what we really are, which is Kingly.

Tea Sleep

Tea with curdled milk. Mind with curdled heart. Sky with curdled clouds sweeping away last year. Blowingthe dead trees down, across the snakeypath. There are two king fishers who live along the snakey path. It could be that their tree was blown down. When you see one of them, you stop breathing and feel that something wonderfull and fleeting has happened. The shyest bird yet the most intensely coloured. Why is that? After meditation class I feel tired and a bit dull. It is easy to think that the class went badly, but it's just the way I feel. You can't truct what you feel to be the truth sometimes. It is lack of appreciation which mutates the one thing into the other.

Tea with curdled milk. Day with curdled night. The nights seem to last too long and have done for too long. When you start to think like this, it is time for fresh tea, and a fresh look at the sky.

I have this book by Jung on alchemy. Have'nt read much of it though. I keep looking forward to coffee and a long time with a book, it has'nt happened yet. Life is built fast and it is hard to get truely lazy again!

Quick grey

Listening to Snow Patrol which I quite like. It's the sort of music I used to listen to when I was a teenager, it still has a certain appeal. The rain is jewelling the window grey gems, it might even be beautiful if I let it. There is a very full sound and the sky is very full of brooding. The day is before me and I am hoping for opportunities to change my work situation. They may or may not come today, whichever I can still do something. I little nudging away from my fixed ways of seeing things. Dharma prctice could be called the path of nudging. I have just begun to wonder about desire, wanting things. It is a big area and I have a lot to work out about being free of desires yet being potent and alive. Are they contradictory??

Bye

Counter

Just got one of those little hit counters added to the blog with the aid of Jayarava. Is it vain putting that there? You can also get a link to true dating dot com if you feel like getting yourself terribly muddled by engaging in internet dating! That was'nt exactly my idea but I don't know how to change it.

Mud Dell

The Yogacara chaps talked about the 3 aspects of reality. It's a while since I read about it so I can't remember the sanskrit words, it is something like deluded aspect, conditioned aspect, perfected aspect. So from where we are, deluded, we see an ego constructed habitually interpreted story of the world. Behind that is reality. We can also see this realtiy from a non-deluded non ego mind. We are seriously deluded. This is not nice and it has consequences for oureslves and others. The world is affected by how we interpret it. If I am deluded, I do not see clearly what is happening. I then add to the openness inherent in reality, I kind of twist it to suit my habitual mind. I think this is why we all experience life in different ways. The Dharma roughly breaks these styles of delusion (halucination) into 6 catagories; the well known 6 realms of the wheel of life. The hungry ghost is oral. He does not beleive he will get what he needs so he is sly. Even when he gets it, he is so used to not getting it that he trashes it to feel 'normal' again. We are addicted to our delusional state. This has been shown to even have neurochemical backing. We recognise our world so we recreate it out of the openness of the situation. Openness drives us crazy so we burry our heads in madness! When we become aware of this we feel worried about our sanity. We hope there is a way out of our madness. The madness is not only of the head, it also pulses around our body. We respond to ghost feelings. feelings of things which occured in the past but which we still live by.

This is all a big muddle!

Bach

I type. Yo Yo plays a mean cello and Bach who is both dead and not dead, well his mind is hear now. A one way mirror across time. My mind is apparantly in potential as wide as the sky. Yet through hoops and loops it shoots. Round wires and along snickets and ginnels and many other types of path which we only have in Yorkshire.

Today I was up against the mind made shakle of fixity As one fine fellow called it. The great difficulty in transforming ideas into embodied reality. The water of creativity becoming the wood and earth of life tactile. The third fetter. Bugger it. It lurks, highly programmed and fully competent and will itself being undeluded, delude magnificently. The mind's underneath, with dark worms and even scorpions I assure you. There are, in caves, both the unbeleivable fullfillment of all longings and the complete kit of self sabbotage. And I think they intertwine most crazilly.

So the mind clouds. It clouds over like a heat haze. It also forms clouds of infered actuality onto the blue sky of open space. Coloured and patterned, but ultimately free open space. And it creates dense storm clouds of catasrophe, of all hell being conjouired from vapour. The image of the rainbow is too pretty to describe it. Yet the image of hell is too gruesome to fashion it. It is kind of, the everyday stories of confinement and habit which we tell ourselves, to keep us cocooned yet recognisable. It is how I emerge dripping with possibiltiy and frzon simultaneously.

Time to sit and breath some.

Then It Fell Open

It was a storm lurking. It was electricity plugged around the lungs. Insults. They store up like a charge in the body. We call this tension and it hurts. It is said that where there is tension there is suppression of feeling. Therefore the tension in the body is the shadow, it is the feelings and views about ourselves that we cannot entertain. So they are locked away in the muscles, the organs, the posture, even the cells. The unconcious is there to be read in the very body. If I can feel the feelings beneath the suface tensions then I can own who I am and I can engage once more in my life, fully and with feeling. If I cannot sit with my feeling I tense it up, lock it away and then it haunts me as unrealistic responses and patterned.non spontaneous life. Rule, routines, petty selfish thoughts of self preservation. And then it falls open. Gushes out and all that force bursts out and we shake and wonder what on earth is happening. So the expansion of life is also the flavour of insanity. The breakthrough is the breakdown and can only be completed with emotional nerve. Very hard.

Sunday

I am hopoing to get my new phone enabled to send photos to my blog. Inspired by Jayagupta, I thought it would be a nice idea to put a few images of what I find interesting or bewildering to share with whomever. I am still getting used to this idea of a public private space, as it appears to me is what a blog is. I fill it in in the comfort of my own room or wherever and anyboddy who feels like it can have a little look. I guess it is very post modern. The desire to connect yet undertaken in a very alienated sort of way. Yet it is desirable. I want somebody to read this and go, oh what a fascinating charchter. Why? I don't know exactly. I once heard somebody say that we read to know that we are not alone. So maybe know we blog or read blogs to know we are not alone.

Sunday is a funny day. The builders upstairs came early to create noise and then left againwhen we were nicelu awake. Very thoughtfull.

Each day I meditate.

I have been doing this for years. I kind of have to. Like breathing, well it is breathing. But what I mean is that it has a flavour of being essential. Like all day I go around being filled up with life and then I need a space to just be with life. Today I was mainly sat with tension around my chest. This is not unusual. People who are new to meditation expect that quite soon they will be able to experience lots of bliss or a mind devoid of thought or some kind of huge expansiveness. I too used to think this. Looking back now I recognise that this is wishfull thinking and it is the desire for there to be an easy solution to the human condition. I don't beleive there is an easy soklution. The big lesson I need to learn and most of everybody else aswel is patience.

In Buddhism this is called 'ksanti' and can be translated as 'patient endurance'. It also has the connotations of receptivity to meaning. Sometimes meditation feel like sitting and waiting to realise that you are alive and that this realisation will be liberating. I mistake life for being ordinary when in fact it is extaordinary. It is like glancing at something so fleetingly that you mistake it for something else, something scary or naff, when in fact it is quite the opposit. However it seems that simply thinking this is not enough to get this truth to sink right into our bones.

On Line At Home

At last, after yonks of nicking other people computer time, I now have one of my own. Maybe this is a chance to do a bit more blogging. I still don't know if anybody reads this stuff, I guess they don't if I never up date it!! There must be millions of blogs floating around. It's all a bit new to me.

Anyway. Huskies, they are lovely dogs are'nt they?

Be well.