Q and A with seekers of absolue truth
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 21, 2011
This past weekend I watched the opera “Don Giovanni” at the Cleveland Opera house, with my mother. It was a lovely opera, and it managed to evoke very vivid emotions in me, despite the language barrier (it’s in Italian, but there is a translation screen above the stage). What I found most fascinating the main character, Don Giovanni, whom Mozart (the writer of the opera) modeled on Don Juan, the famous womanizer. Throughout the acts of the opera, Don Giovanni is revealed as a vile, lustful man, whose only god in life is the pursuit of pleasure. In fact, he is so determined to get what he wants, that he even kills for it, and gives his life for it at the end. He is the epitomy of sexual desire, and human willfulness, and he is a daredevil. As evil as he is, he is also the most determined of all the characters in the opera, the other characters (his servant, the women he scorned, the women wanting revenge), all fluctuate in their desires and motivations.
Even the woman whose father he kills in the first act, is torn between feelings of desire and love for him, and her revenge. Giovanni is so bad, in fact, he is almost inhuman in the way he follows his debased desires, almost an abstract representation of human willfulness. The thing I found myself wondering was this: I could easily identify with all the characters on stage, but when it came to him I found difficulty. Not because he was so vilified and immoral, but because he was so very definite in his desires. Unlike him, his servant Leporello is torn between the desire to follow his master and share in a life of plenty, and his desire to leave this immoral affair before it gets too bad. His former mistress Elvira is torn between her desire to destroy him and reveal him as a monster for abandoning her, and her feelings of admiration and love for a man that will not yield to any woman.
Anyway, I thought hard about this after the opera: even though Don Giovanni is a monster more than a human being, and kills and seduces freely throughout the acts, is he not the character that is most honest to his desire, obeying it to the very end into his death? And is that not one of our main complaints as humans, in our daily lives, that our desires fluctuate so much that we cannot stay faithful to one for a long time and follow it to its completion? On a spiritual path, I hope that I will be more like Don Giovanni than any other of the fluctuating characters I saw onstage: willing to follow my desire for truth no matter what, even if it leads to my death. And yet at this point in my life I doubt at times its attractiveness, since there are other things attractive to me, that I follow at times more intently than a spiritual resolution. And then I go back to it again. I cannot boast the singularity of purpose in desire that Giovanni has, and that saddens me.
The other characters represent what I hate so much about my nature, and human nature in general: inconstancy. While Don Giovanni is very abstract to me in his ability to follow his desire, one thing is clear to me: if what you desire is very attractive to you, above all else, you will follow it without wavering, even into death. Because when you are so consumed with following something attractive to you, that process itself rewards you beyond the loss that death may represent for you.
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).
December 27, 2010
The realization that I was all alone was what put me in the state of paralyzing depression. There’s a belief behind it that I was unloved. For four years I haven’t been able to do the work of seriously finding my way Home. The feeling of love itself is what finally freed me enough from this paralysis. Ever since I felt love, I witnessed changes in me. I don’t recognize myself in these, and for the first time maybe, I can say that something else is working through me. Determination was set, and I did not create it.
Love towards whom? Maybe it doesn’t matter. My experience convinced me that people are disappointing. Anything conceivable is disappointing, if not soon then later. But it turned out, love feels the same regardless of whom or what it is directed. What do you do when love comes? “Follow him, yield to him,” Khalil Gibran says.
In my early teens I prayed hard so that God didn’t let me love him too much. Love was too overwhelming, and I felt I was on the verge of giving up everything, my self, for God (my notion at the time, based on my upbringing, was by becoming a nun). Now in my braver times, I long to love too much.
October 13, 2010
If this were you, where would you be now?
Where would you have begun, and would you have ended?
Where and what are the boundaries of you in space, and in time?
September 29, 2010
Question (in rhyme)
Is it best to have your way,
Even at the end of the day?
As dawn approaches and darkness encroaches
And my soul cries out to say Hey!
This wasn’t so different, anyway,
From the way things were yesterday
Would I have it my way or would I let
Life have its day?
I was eagerly hoping for a roll in the hay
But all that I seem to get nowaday
Is something else rather, seemingly more
Like an endless galore
Of wishes and ways that look nothing
At all
Like the ones I would have
If I were in control.
So I tell me again ‘let them go!
Let them stray!’
I will gather my sheep and go forth from
The bay
To the inner way
To the inner way
And let life have its day.
September 22, 2010
Do we have to view life as bleak and serious in order for us to survive? Somewhere along the way to adulthood I picked up this belief. Somewhere Rose said that “life doesn’t take you seriously. So why take it so seriously?” I miss the period when I could allow relaxation and enjoyment to be a part of my daily life, and I didn’t see that they would conflict with my survival. Back then I didn’t see myself racing with time and competing against the whole world.
Ignoramuses Anonymous 