Q and A with seekers of absolue truth
May 4, 2011
On my walk I came across a lion unbound
it´s fury sent me flying across the winds against a wall
There I was screaming in pain, but you did not care
You just laughed and I was ashamed
I ran home, locked the door
sat waiting for death to hear my call
It never came for I was too afraid
Hope was left outside the safety of my walls
But in here, there is no light at all
And out there, nobody left to call
My name, my name at all
April 29, 2011
Deep within but right here
is a place of quiet
A place of quiet noice
a place, when there is suffering,
there is peace
An everlasting quietude
A place that wont be disturbed
whatever goes away
It is as if something would be asking,
asking me to come home
A warm radiation of quiet welcome
An offering of shelter, a place of warmth
in the midst of rain
The simplest of desires
just waiting to be acknowledged
To bring me home, back to the fireplace
April 27, 2011
God, the Infinite and Absolute
in whom the whole of creation burns,
may all my heart and mind be upon You.
Every moment unfolds in Your presence.
Every movement expresses Your will.
Guide me to You, my ever present
Source and Home,
each day of my life.
May I watch my mind with detachment,
and may I be shown the false beliefs
implicit within my troubles.
Turn my attention away from
temptation and distraction
and toward Your still voice.
For You are Here and Now
Everywhere and Always
Absolute and Eternal.
Amen.
April 15, 2011
I can’t keep these crumbling walls upright
forever, their punishing weight is crushing
my mind, my soul.
I’m like a man balancing a broomstick
on his nose; the slightest breeze
has me scurrying to retrieve
my shattered pieces of pride. Yet I can’t
help myself, I’d lose this gig in a
heartbeat if I could.
The holding pattern of
wanderers idly wasting their time in this
earthly waiting room is unbearable.
Painfully and delicately spending our last
precious moments trying to sneak
in one more look at our worn-out minds
which seem like old magazines left behind by
a kind soul.
Before my name is called, to relieve me of this
lifetime of waiting, perhaps I’ll step outside
and enjoy the mild autumn breeze. The golden glow
reflecting off the fiery maples beckons me oh so.
But I fear I’ll miss my call, and there,
I longingly watch the swallowtails dance
in the evening twilight, wishing I were
one of them instead.
April 4, 2011
In conversation with my dad this evening he mentioned something an old seminary teacher of his used to talk about regarding scripture study:
There are two ways to read scripture. One way is to lay it on the table, put it to sleep, and do surgery on it. The other way is to sit at the table with it and have a conversation. The first way to read scripture refers to an analytical approach: breaking it apart, examining how it’s built, looking at where the pieces came from and how they fit together. The second way refers to an ongoing, living dialogue.
The point in this differentiation isn’t to say that one method is better than the other. To continue the metaphor of looking at scripture like a person, there is much to be learned from looking at how a person is put together and built. This sort of examination can give an explanation for why they move the way they do, what allows them to make sounds, why their voice sounds like it does. But it is quite another thing to listen to just what the person may say to you when they are awake.
It occurred to me that it’s much safer in a way to keep this metaphorical messenger asleep to examine him. It puts the situation on my terms. But to keep him awake and become involved in conversation with him engages me personally and takes me out of a safe position of control. I am then no longer an objective bystander, but am subject to the effects of the message with which I am engaged.
It also occurred to me that this metaphor might apply to my life story. It is my natural preference to examine things analytically, my own life included. How am I built? How did my past create the patterns that I see in my mind now? Who in my past did I learn my habits from? I still think that there is something to gain from this approach, not in the least being gaining some sense of distance or detachment from my own patterns. But what about this other approach? What happens when I allow my life to actively engage me in conversation? What message is my life speaking to me when I give up a safe position of control and listen attentively?
April 1, 2011
I flew halfway around the world to pursue an understanding of life,
only to be told “God is within.”
I was furious and spent years in depression abroad.
At last I flew halfway around the world to return home,
only to find it no longer there.
I am lost and wandering.
March 15, 2011
It occurred to me yesterday that getting the house “in order” is not an underrated part of spiritual work. Here’s what happened: I had been driving a rickety old car that had served me well for a number of years. The thoughts of what to do about the car, whether to repair it, or sell it, or junk it, or buy a new one, how much to spend on a new one, whether or not to buy a truck or a sedan, whether to keep waiting or act now, whether to buy used from a dealer or used on the private market, whether to wait until winter or buy in the summer, all coursed my mind. Endless, endless thoughts. Triggers for these thoughts were common and included whenever I saw my car, or was driving my car or seeing cars for sale or seeing used car dealerships or seeing cops that might notice the loud exhaust or lack of an inspection sticker. In short, triggers occurred quite often and were numerous.
I pass by a used car dealership on a drive I take multiple times a week. With the car situation in mind I scanned the lot for deals or vehicles I might be interested in. For anyone who’s watched their thoughts and internal reactions many times over knows this pattern: an external percept kicks off an internal reaction which is perceived and reacted upon, and so on. It takes a certain amount of energy, and a certain number of mental cycles. If one is trying to conserve additional cycles and energy from being dissipated then a turning away of the internal head is required to avoid a cascade of, let’s say, tertiary reactions and so on. This reactive process happened each and everytime I passed by that particular used car dealership.
The car issue eventually came to a head, and through some good fortune and financial preparation it solved itself after a few stress-laden days of details. The next time I drove by the dealership I noticed a peculiar thing. My mind reacted to the lot as per its usual habit (the power of habit!) and immediately thereafter the mental reaction was, “Wait, the car problem is solved.” Since this portion of the house had been gotten “in order”, the effort to turn the head from a now far less “sticky” train of thought was very easy and required almost no effort. The mental reaction and boil-over that had been common over the past few months was absent and it all seemed uninteresting. The profound difference in energy spent was notable and I saw the incredible value of taking care of basic disorder in our houses, both physical and psychological. It saves us energy and reduces distractions. For those of us who have become energy misers, this can be a very useful tool.
A caveat: The same which holds true for all efficiency projects holds true here also; the rate of return is largest for the biggest offenders of energy expenditure. That means that if, for example, my financial situation is so bad that I worry incessantly about paying the rent, tweaking how often I do my laundry a week won’t really register in the efficiency column. Getting my financial house “in order”, however, will! Get the idea? Big stuff first!
March 2, 2011
I achieved something I really wanted recently. I would even call it a great achievement. It was one of the wildest dreams that my mind could conceive of come true. It was a hard-won triumph. I sacrificed much, went through much pain, stress, disillusionment. I gave my all. Those grueling years was for that glorious shout of “VICTORY!” Then poof.
When a goal has been achieved, then what? I’m left with nothing. That desire was satisfied and then gone, and I remain empty.
What is this life for? A dear friend said, “keep looking for Completion, and your life will be one without regret.”
March 1, 2011
The AA Big Book asks a simple question in the chapter entitled “We Agnostics.” The question is, “Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?”
My typical reading of this question would trigger all sorts of notions, biases, and preconceptions in my mind. I would read into the word “Power” that what they really mean is the Christian God (who I define according to my biases), and that they’re secretly trying to convert me to Christianity or something. And I can’t let them manipulate me like that.
But for some reason, a recent reading of this chapter, and this question in particular, brought about a different reaction. When I read this question, I read the word “Power” as if it was lowercase: “…am I even willing to believe, that there is a power greater than myself?” Then it struck me as ridiculous how reluctant I was to say “yes” to this question. To say “no” would mean that I believe I am the greatest power in existence.
And in a sense, I do tend toward believing I am in control over way more than I am. I take responsibility for the reactions of others, and I feel a great anxiety about trying to get others to act how I want. I feel shame and guilt about my own faults and flaws, as if I’m responsible for my own upbringing or physical makeup. And I have in the past even felt guilty and frustrated about the state of the world at large. I’ve used the first-person subjectivism of Douglas Harding as a rationalization for why I am indeed the center of the universe (“I’m all that is!”), and therefore extremely important.
But I can’t, of course, honestly say I control it all. As I had to break it to my dad on the phone, I am not actually the one making the Sun rise and set each day. He seemed happy I was so perceptive as to have noticed this. An early spring thunderstorm was another reminder of what is greater and more powerful than myself, bringing with its lightning and strong winds the implication that my very life could easily be taken. A walk through the cosmology department of a local university brought another reminder, where they had created a computer simulation of two galaxies colliding with each other over millions of years, playing continuously on a screen. I’m certainly not the power doing that! I don’t know the slightest thing about making galaxies collide. But some power has brought about this whole thing, and is capable of smashing two galaxies together! And not even just two, but there are millions of these things!
This song by Bjork has been in my head a lot recently:
February 26, 2011
It occurred to me the other morning that habits are a powerful tool. Though most of the time we think of habits as being bad, I believe habits are, in and of themselves, neutral. It may simply be that we have more of, or notice more critically, our bad habits. Anyone who has struggled with a bad habit probably noticed that *we* don’t actually have habits so much as *they* have us. This is why we hate bad habits so much; they seem to have us snookered. And, we only can seem to notice the negative effects after the bad habit has played out. Yet, this post is about the good habits, not the bad ones.
The habit I am most fond and proud of is the habit of waking early(ish). This sounds insane to a natural night owl who could be found reading until early morning hours and would regularly sleep until 11 am the next day. If I “go with the flow” this is the natural pattern which only takes a few days to fully develop into near nocturnalism. I won’t go into what might be creating what’s arguably an *unnatural* circadian rhythm for a human being, considering that for the past million years or so our species woke and rose at dawn along with the rest of diurnal creation. (There is in fact a very small percentage, 0.15%, of the population that may truly suffer from what’s called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome).
I’m sharing all this background because a few months back I decided that I was going to take more seriously a pledge to, let’s just say, “meditate”, on a daily basis. Anyone struggling with performing a consistent daily practice has made similar promises himself. I had found that to follow through with similar commitments in the past consistently, I simply *had* to complete it in the morning *before* the day’s activities began. Otherwise, the odds were severely reduced. To illustrate, I used to have a personal deadline which was to meditate before going to bed. Unfortunately, that deadline often merged with sleep. Now, that being said, I do have a good friend who has set a 2 AM meditation deadline for himself. Also a night owl, he has found if he waits past 2 AM he is unlikely to follow through with his commitment.
And, I have a wacky morning bird friend who once made some suggestions to set an alarm and, without hitting snooze, actually get up. One day I decided to experiment with getting up at 7 AM for just one week, rather than snoozing in until 10 AM. One reason that kicked off this experiment was that a day started off in the morning has always felt better than one started off at noon, despite equal numbers of waking hours. The other major reason was that in an attempt to more efficiently set up the body-mind for a daily meditation, conditioning it to the same time each day made enough sense to outweigh all the counter arguments. So I began the experiment.
It wasn’t long until I noticed several unexpected side benefits. The most significant of which is the hallmark of a habit: mental submission to the behavior of the habit. By the end of the first week (!) the mental arguments against getting up and meditating at that early hour began to subside. When the alarm went off the habit took over and I got up and began the routine. This took a surprisingly short amount of time to happen. I decided to continue the “experiment” and have thus far been subjecting myself to this habit for some time now. At this point there isn’t so much as a murmur of discontent nor argument with what’s about to happen anymore. My body and mind have submitted to the habit.
The other more minor side effect is that I’ve been going to bed earlier. Since I was unwilling to negotiate on the waking time, I’ve found in order to have enough waking brainpower I can’t afford to go to bed much past 10:30 or 11 PM too often in a row. While going to bed earlier seems a harder habit to establish than waking earlier, I have noticed less desire to spend the late evening/nights frittering away my time.
In the game of trying to outwit nature and define ourselves, every little bit helps. I’ve found that this bit has helped a lot in consistently carving out some time to put first things first(er).
Ignoramuses Anonymous 