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.