The Tired Mind

A new message dropped down the long chute from the Unknown, one of several just like it. One of the tireless busy-men running about the place opened it and read it off: “Itch! Back of head.” He walked from the chutes over to the big machine at the center of the room and dropped the message into a slot at the top. It was a miracle that this big hunk of machinery worked at all. It had a tangled shape to it, too wrapped around itself for any onlooker to figure out how it worked. It shook furiously, spewing steam, oil, and the occasional expletive as it processed the new message. Finally, just as it seemed like the thing would explode, it suddenly stopped with a ding and popped out its verdict. “Lift right arm. Scratch itch with finger. Don’t bump into guy on right,” the last bit a reference to an earlier incoming message about an irritable fellow apparently to the right somewhere “out there”. If one looked closely enough down at the bottom of this output directive, there was another message in small print: “…but I’d really like to go Home now.” These little messages had been showing up a lot recently, stuck down in the corner of the directives spewed out from the worn out old machine. “Turn left at next light…but I’d really like to go Home now.” “Walk to kitchen. Get glass of water…but I’d really like to go Home now.” “Keep up appearance of being professional and capable…but I’d really like to go Home now.”

Poetry from a solitary retreat

The Stream
When I was a kid I liked to build dams in the stream.
When I grew older I preferred to tear them down.
– But the stream never cared.

This Path
This seemingly endless path,
stretching out into infinity,
where can it end,
but right here, right now?

Ten little egos

Here is a song I wrote during a solitary retreat. If you would like to sing along it’s based on the melody “Ten green bottles” and feel free to add or subtract as many verses as you like, but don’t make the mistake of adding so many that you never get to the last one.
Enjoy!

Ten little egos
Ten little egos
Standing on a wall
Ten little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be nine little egos
Standing on a wall

Nine little egos
Standing on a wall
Nine little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be eight little egos
Standing on a wall

Eight little egos
Standing on a wall
Eight little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be seven little egos
Standing on a wall

Seven little egos
Standing on a wall
Seven little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be six little egos
Standing on a wall

Six little egos
Standing on a wall
Six little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be five little egos
Standing on a wall

Five little egos
Standing on a wall
Five little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be four little egos
Standing on a wall

Four little egos
Standing on a wall
Four little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be three little egos
Standing on a wall

Three little egos
Standing on a wall
Three little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be two little egos
Standing on a wall

Two little egos
Standing on a wall
Two little egos
Standing on a wall
And if one little ego
Should accidentally fall
There’ll be one little egos
Standing on a wall

One little ego
Standing on a wall
One little ego
Standing on a wall
And if that little ego
Should accidentally fall
Just answer the question:
Who’s looking at the wall?

Longing

Call me to You, oh my Source.
Let me stumble into You, losing my self.
How can my pride compare with Your Beauty?
How can my weakness stray from Your Love?
My fears run away from You
And my desires overlook You,
Yet where are You not?
Make me to know Your ever-presence,
And allow me to rest in the Eternal arms of Your Love.
Call me to You, oh my Source.
Swallow me whole, and dissolve me in Completion.

Thin Red Line, by James Jones

(Following Private First Class Doll as he goes about trying to steal a loose pistol before his company, C-for-Charlie, is dropped at Guadalcanal):

Doll had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was. And everybody believed him, or at least accepted his fiction story. Doll did not know if everybody learned this about life when they reached a certain age, but he suspected that they did. They just didn’t tell it to anybody. And rightly so. Obviously, if they told anybody, then their own fiction story about themselves wouldn’t be true either. So everybody had to learn it for himself. And then, of course, pretend he hadn’t learned it.

Doll’s own first experience of this phenomenon had come from, or at least begun with, a fist fight he had had six months ago with one of the biggest, toughest men in C-for-Charlie: Corporal Jenks. They had fought each other to a standstill, because neither would give up, until finally it was called a sort of draw-by-exhaustion. But it wasn’t this so much as it was the sudden realization that Corporal Jenks was just as nervous about having the fight as he was, and did not really want to fight any more than he did, which had suddenly opened Doll’s eyes. Once he’d seen it here, in Jenks, he began to see it everywhere, in everybody.

When Doll was younger, he had believed everything everybody told him about themselves. And not only told him – because more often than not they didn’t tell you, they just showed you. Just sort of let you see it by their actions. They acted what they wanted you to think they were, just as if it was really what they really were. When Doll had used to see someone who was brave and a sort of hero, he, Doll, had really believed he was that. And of course this made him, Doll, feel cheap because he knew he himself could never be like that. Christ, no wonder he had taken a back seat all his life!

It was strange, but it was as if when you were honest and admitted you didn’t know what you really were, or even if you were anything at all, then nobody liked you and you made everybody uncomfortable and they didn’t want to be around you. But when you made up your fiction story about yourself and what a great guy you were, and then pretended that that was really you, everybody accepted it and believed you.

When he finally did get his pistol – if he did get it – Doll was not going to admit that he had been scared, or unsure of himself, or indecisive. He would pretend it had been easy, pretend it had happened the way he had imagined it was going to happen, before he started out.

Endless Aquisition

I went ice-skating this past weekend at Schenley Park.  There were little kids bravely face-planting, couples trying to hold each other up, hoards of  10-year-olds celebrating a birthday, and a scattering of cocky teenage hockey players who could probably skate better than walk.

I imagined how it would feel to be able to fly so effortlessly on the ice.  Man, wouldn’t that just be so cool?  The steps to get there were clear, probably very similar to how it felt to learn guitar.  First, you flail about trying to simply survive in unfamiliar waters without too much embarrassment.  Your footing stabilizes somewhat as you get a feel for what you’re doing, and eventually you’re holding your own pretty well.  Nothing fancy, sure, but you don’t face-plant nearly as often.  In your braver moments you try something new, perhaps failing several times, but eventually getting the hang of it with enough practice and effort.  The idea of how cool it would be to look like a pro keeps you going.  With hours and hours of practice, you become more adept until you can hardly remember what it felt like to not know how to do this.  Motions are effortless and automatic.  And now you finally have reached your goal.  You have a new way to feel superior to others in order to paint over the underlying ache of vulnerability.  You can fly around others in circles, throwing in some “look-what-I-can-do”s every now and then in case they don’t immediately notice your awesomeness.  They wish they were you.

Despite how painfully ridiculous this feels, it seems to be what happens when learning any skill.  I still find myself throwing in show-off moves in guitar lessons with my students.  Aside from having a means of making a living, however, this particular skill I have doesn’t really make me any better off than before.  I’m no less vulnerable.  I’m no more likable.  How could adding more of these skills ever end the longing for Home?

What is confrontation?

What is self-inquiry confrontation?

Imagine that you’ve lost your glasses (and also for some of you, that you have glasses to lose).  There’s no one else around to help you look for them, and you’re having trouble looking on your own since you can’t see too well without them.  So, you call a friend for help.  Since your friend is not with you in your house to look, he tries to be helpful by asking useful questions as you feel your way around.

“Where was the last place you remember wearing them?”

“Where do you tend to keep your glasses when you aren’t using them?”

“Are they on your forehead?”

Some questions may hurt your pride or feel insulting if you already have strong ideas about where your glasses should or should not be.  For example, “Are they on your forehead?” might feel insulting if your feeling is, “Does he think I’m stupid?  Of course my glasses aren’t on my forehead!”

Yet, sure enough, sometimes you find what you’ve lost right where you were sure it wouldn’t be.  If you honestly don’t know where your glasses are, it might do you some good to swallow your pride and question your beliefs about where they might be, by checking your forehead.  This would be much more helpful to you than trying to convince yourself that you know where they are but just can’t find them for some reason, or that you can see fine without your glasses.

Self-inquiry confrontation is meant to give the same kind of support as your friend on the phone trying to help you find your glasses.  In this case, however, what has been lost is of much greater importance: Peace, Love, Security, Identity, God, Self, or some unidentified source of longing.  Beliefs, world-views, values, ethics, and self-concepts are questioned in order to help the person being confronted to see through the untruths blocking his way to that which he is seeking.

People may be drawn to the meetings not knowing exactly what it is they are looking for, but having a strong feeling that something is missing.  Confrontation is not about telling a person what he is supposed to want or be looking for.  It is about helping that person look within for himself.  To return to the metaphor of your friend on the phone, it’s as if you’ve forgotten what you’ve lost in the first place, but you know you’ve lost something.  Your friend can only try to help jog your memory by asking you questions.  Each person who attends the confrontation meetings has to decide for himself whether the meetings are in fact helpful to him.

To give an idea of the ballpark, these meetings are often most useful to those interested in such teachers as Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Douglas Harding, Richard Rose, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Bernadette Roberts, Huang Po, and Hui Neng, though familiarity with such teachers is not necessary in order to attend.

For clarity’s sake, here are some things which confrontation is not:

-A philosophical debate

-A chance to flex one’s own intellectual muscle or knowledge

-An opportunity to convert others to one’s own beliefs

-A group discussion aimed at consensus, agreement, and acceptance

To put it another way, self-inquiry confrontation is not for those who are concerned with what others’ beliefs should be, or for those concerned with what their beliefs should be according to someone else.  It is for those who are interested in looking honestly and earnestly within themselves.

What Is Man?

This was quoted in the last chapter of Daniel Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will.  It’s from Mark Twain’s What Is Man?

“Young Man:  You have arrived at man, now?
Old Man:  Yes.  Man the machine – man the impersonal engine.  Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations.  He is moved, directed, commanded, by exterior influences – solely.  He originates nothing, not even a thought.
Young Man:  Oh, come!  Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?
Old Man:  It is a quite natural opinion – indeed an inevitable opinion – but you did not create the materials out of which it is formed.  They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors.  Personally you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of putting the borrowed materials together.  That was done automatically – by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery’s construction.  And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have not even any command over it.
Young Man:  This is too much.  You think I could have formed no opinion but that one?
Old Man:  Spontaneously?  No.  And you did not form that one; your machinery did it for you – automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it…
…Young Man:  You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.
Old Man:  I do.  Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine the things perceived.  That is all.”

Wegner makes the point that this is not to say that the feeling of free will doesn’t exist.  But, he argues, this feeling doesn’t have anything to do with causes for actions.  In his opinion, the feeling of free will is simply an evolved way for the human organism to identify it’s own actions.  It does this identifying by relying on a heuristic based on three factors: priority of thought to action, consistency of thought with action, and exclusivity of causal possibilities.  When a situation meets these criteria, the mind infers that it is responsible for the action, and there is a feeling of ownership of that action, of having willed it.

Decider

This poem was quoted at the beginning of Daniel Wegner’s book The Illusion of Conscious Will:

A leaf was riven from a tree,
“I mean to fall to earth,” said he.
The west wind, rising, made him veer.
“Eastward,” said he, “I now shall steer.”
The east wind rose with greater force.
Said he: “‘Twere wise to change my course.”
With equal power they contend.
He said: “My judgment I suspend.”
Down died the winds; the leaf, elate,
Cried: “I’ve decided to fall straight.”
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

I’ve noticed what feels like a voice following the action-producing mechanism.  For example, if I feel an itch on my nose and my hand rises to scratch it, this action begins to happen before I really notice it.  But then following it as quickly as it is noticed is a voice saying something like, “I’d like to scratch my nose now.”

An image came to mind related to this.  It’s like a quiet person going about his business silently, with an obnoxious person following him around saying everything that they’re doing.  The silent person makes his way to the store.  The obnoxious person tags along, and as soon as he realizes where they’re going yells, “I’m going to the store now!”

Very uninspired week but not painfully so. Missed almost all my meditations, played a video game in all of my free time, totally ignored my to-do list and had a celibacy accident when I thought I was done with those. I finally finished the game I’ve been playing since the retreat a month ago and have been watching a conflict what to do next: find another or turn away. I have voices that want both.

Despite lower energy levels from not being celibate for long, both PSI meetings have seemed great. Perhaps it is contrast to not thinking about finding truth, perhaps it is simplicity I was hoping for out of playing games. Perhaps it is something Art’s doing. That I can see I’ve never been anything other than awareness is a problem.

An exercise to challenge assuming I make decisions is a highlight this week. Trying it three times has left me feeling some doubt about this beloved assumption. It was: dedicate 2 hours to not making a single decision then report one’s findings. After a few days of procrastination I was quickly surprised by what was happening once finally starting.