Posts filed under ‘Thoughts’
Web Site Frustration
I decided I needed to revise my website to change the focus from The Age of Anxiety (an audio I created) to my new book I Survived A Secret Nazi Extermination Camp. The book is being printed (soon) and so I wanted to be ready with a site to support the book’s launch (if there will be one). But my HTML skills are non-existent, so I’m finding it difficult to work on my WordPress site.
Maybe I need to really commit the time to learning these skills rather than just throw my hands up in despair. But I have always believed that if there is someone who knows how to do something well – whether a plumber, electrician or web designer – that amateurs like me should always pay for them to use their skills rather than do a hash of the job myself. In the past I always had the dosh to pay for this work, but at the moment cash is tight, which is why I am even considering doing this myself.
I’ve always assumed that Photoshop and other design tools were beyond my ability. I haven’t changed that opinion. So here I am needing to make a decision- learn the skills or pay for them. Any suggestions from the virtual world?
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Becoming One With The Tao
What does it mean to become one with the Tao? How can we join the Tao? Is this possible, or is just a psychological illusion?
To me there is a relationship between attaining oneness with Tao and letting go. Both involve a setting aside of reliance on ego and an acceptance that life, the universe, and everything is greater than our own small self. To really let go, to allow things to happen as they will, means to accept that our own plans, our own attempts to stay in control of events, is doomed to fail, and will in the end prove an unhealthy way of living. Instead of trying so hard to make things work out as we would like them to, we are better off – healthier and happier – to just rely on things turning out as they will. This requires trust, something which is in short supply in our day. To trust is to assume that ‘all will be well’ that there is an existing pattern in the universe that sorts things, events, and people in a way that is not inevitable or determined, but that will be somehow OK. To try to work against this flow of events puts us in opposition to this pattern, and since this pattern is also in us, it means that we are acting in opposition to ourself.
This can’t be good. Acting against ourselves is how we create imbalances in the flow of energy, of chi, and how blockages and stagnation occur in the body, leading to illness. If we want to stay healthy, then we need to make sure that our individual pattern is aligned with the universal pattern. The energy that flows in and through us should not be blocked, but should just continue the flow that is in the universe at large. This is, in its own way, attaining the Tao. Our individual pattern, our energy flow, is the power or essence of who we are. It is our signature. And this derives from the Tao, the universal pattern or energy flow.
The Tao te Ching (Chapter 16) says,
Attain complete emptiness
Hold fast to stillness.
The ten thousand things stir about;
I only watch for their going back.
One way of looking at this chapter is to see that it is about meditation. In deep meditation it is possible to attain emptiness and stillness. But this is only relative emptiness and relative stillness. Our heart is still beating, our digestive system still moving, our lungs still expanding; we still have awareness. Our body as an object in space is still, but our body as an energy system continues to function. However it is functioning at a slower and deeper level than when we are active. This means that our systems are able to slow down – our breathing, heart beat and digestion all slows – and this has a corresponding effect on our muscles, nerves and brain. No physical action is required, our involuntary systems provide all we need to stay alive, and so our nervous system (and mind) are able to take a well-needed rest.
One of ‘the ten thousand things’ in the world is our body, and in meditation it is very easy to view it ‘stirring about’. This stirring is not extreme, it is rather gentle and subdued, and so it is easy (in our relative state of emptiness, when so little outward activity is happening) , to watch for the body’s ‘going back’. Everything rises and falls, our chi rises and falls, our breath rises and falls. As we watch internally (the words used to describe this is something like ‘to turn your gaze around’) and become aware of how our energy circulates, rises and falls, then the places where we have obstuctions or blockages start to ‘light up’, show us where we have a problem.
It is this self-discovery in meditation of our subtle and not-so-subtle blockages, obstructions and pains that gives us the chance to self-heal, to start the journey to health that can break up these blockages, eliminate this pain, and increase the free flowing of our energy. I believe that this road or path to health is one of the ‘ways’ to the Tao.
Emotion, a book by Dylan Jones
I’ve recently been re-reading the book Emotion by Dylan Jones. The book is a survey of recent research into the emotions, and their evolutionary role. Jones lists the Basic emotions as being joy, distress, disgust, anger, fear and surprise. These are controlled by the amygdala, a sub-cortical part of the brain. The Higher Cognitive Emotions are love, guilt, shame, embarassment, pride, envy and jealousy, which engage the frontal cortex. Jones also discusses moods.
He touches on meditation as one of the Body Technologies of Mood. He considers meditation as a safe and effective ‘body technology’ to regulate emotions. Its calming effects work through feedback. In a meditative state, ‘the rythmic breathing and relaxed state of the muscles are interpreted by the brain as conducive to a calm state of mind.’
We usually think that the onset of a strong emotion causes body changes, but in meditation the reverse happens: the body changes come first and they induce the emotions. Since a feedback loop can be amplified, it stands to reason that improving meditative skills through practice can lead to more voluntary control over the body and the emotions. This has been demonstrated in advanced yogis, who can control their hearbeat and breathing to a great degree.
Jones makes an interesting comparison about breathing and the basic emotions, in that he considers them to be similar, ie, that they are biological -‘hard-wired,etched into our neural circuitry, by our genes rather than by our culture.’
An interesting and well written book.
Meditation Opens The Heart
There is a famous story in the Book of Chuang Tzu of Confucius’ advice to his disciple Yen Hui. Yen Hui planned to go to the Prince of Wei to try to reform this ruler’s wild and wicked ways by using Confucius’ teaching. After Confucius shoots down all of Yen Hui’s proposals, and tells him that the Prince will probably kill him for his intervention, he offers him some advice,
“You must fast. I’ll tell you why. Is it easy to work from pre-conceived ideas? Heaven frowns on those who think it is easy.”
Yen replies that his family is poor and he hasn’t eaten meat in ages, but Confucius explains that the fasting he is talking about is not fasting of the body but fasting of the mind. Yen asks him to explain what fasting of the mind is,
“Your will must be one. Do not listen with your ears but with your mind. Do not listen with your mind but with your chi. Ears can only hear, mind can only think, but chi is energy, receptive to all things. Tao abides in emptiness. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”
He goes on to say,
“It is in emptiness that light is born. There is happiness in stillness. Lack of stillness is called sitting while wandering. If you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you, even gods and spirits will come to you, not to speak of men. This is the transformation of ten thousand things, the secret of the wise kings. “
Yen Hui was going to Wei to apply the ‘pre-conceived ideas’ that he had learned from Confucius. But Confucius wanted to teach him how he could find new and spontaneous ideas, applicable in the moment, to use with the Prince. We see in this dichotomy between pre-conceived ideas and spontaneous ones, the difference between reaction and response. In reacting to events we use our conditioned mind, the pre-conceived ideas that experience and learning have taught us. But this isn’t fresh enough. We need to respond not only from experience, but also to be alive to emptiness, to the spirit of the event unfolding in front of us. This is why Confucius tells Yen that he must use his chi to listen to what is happening, and not just his eyes and ears.
This story is similar to the well known story of the Professor who comes to visit a Master to discuss Zen. The monk offers tea and when he starts to pour he continues until the cup overflows. The Professor asks him what he is doing, and the monk replies that the cup is just like the Professor’s mind, overflowing with pre-conceived ideas and knowledge. The fasting of the mind is to empty it of old and stale ideas so that it can respond with fresh insights to what is happening in the moment.
We assume that the Confucius story is about sitting meditation, since Confucius says that ‘lack of stillness is called sitting while wandering.’ When we enter into a deep meditative state we enter stillness, but if our mind fails to settle then although we are formally sitting in meditation our mind is actually wandering all over the place and it’s not really meditation, it’s agitation.
The Fasting of the Mind is a Taoist meditation practise called Zuowang- sitting and forgetting. We sit and forget, but what is it that we are forgetting? Shi Jing, in an article from Issue Number 1 of the 2006 Dragon’s Mouth, says about Zuowang,
A meditation retreat is not about acquiring and filling, but is a process of releasing and emptying. What we forget is the thing we hold most dearly: self, with all its opinions, beliefs and ideals. We can be so caught up in the concept of self that we only see the world as a place to fulfill personal ambition and desire.
To forget the self means to forget the mind and body, since our ideas of self come from our awareness of having a body and of being conscious. So when we sit in meditation we forget our self, our body and our mind – we empty out, but what is it that we are trying to empty? And what is this emptiness for?
In the West, the influence of Descartes has led us for 300 years to separate the body from the mind. The body was seen as low, crude and inert and the mind as the higher repository of thoughts and emotions. This dualistic view was never part of Eastern thought, so the Chinese view has always been to see the human organism as a unity, with body and mind working together. This is reflected in the old Chinese medical texts where the heart – hsin- was the seat of both thoughts and feelings, emotions and sensations, so that it was really the ‘heart-mind’, an inseparable compound of the body and the mind. The heart is the link between the body and the mind, and is the only organ with two meridians relating to it- the heart meridian and the heart protector.
In their books, Claude Larre and Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallee write about this view of the heart/mind. They say that Chinese classical literature sees the heart as the mind, the intelligence and the spirit. There are two aspects to the heart. It has a double meridian and a double presentation. It is both a void or place of quietness which allows the spirits to dwell within, as well as the activity which allows the spirits to circulate everywhere throughout the body via the blood and chi. It is the latter aspect which reflects the heart as the governor or master of the body. So the spirits reside in the heart and it is the heart’s function to send the spirits flowing and spreading out to the other organs of the body.
I recently attended a few Transformational Breathing (TM) workshops. Transformational Breathing uses a technique of sustained circular breathing through the mouth to attempt to open up your respiratory tract to the largest possible extent. In doing this it has to break through any blockages or obstructions that are stopping you from having a full open breath. These blockages are both physical and emotional. When I was going through this process, the facilitator asked me to try to open my heart.
After the session, I thought about the process of opening the heart, and how to go about it. Obviously it’s possible through breathing control to direct chi into the heart area, as well as to force breath into it to try to expand the heart and loosen or free it. But that’s purely on a physical level. What is it on a mental or emotional level?
I decided to ask the I Ching, ‘Will I be able to open my heart?’. Throwing the stalks I got the answer hexagram 35: Advance, but with no moving lines. The commentary of the 5th and 6th lines, in the Taoist I Ching reads,
Regret comes from the heart/mind not being open. If one knows how to empty and open the heart, one can thus seek from others, and so be able to fill the belly. Once one has filled the belly, fortune, misfortune and stopping at sufficiency are all in the palm of one’s hand. One can thereby be free from worry about loss or gain, and go straight ahead without doubt, going ahead in advancing the fire and working, with good results beneficial in every way. This is the illumination of becoming empty to bring fulfillment.
The sixth yang line says,
The work of overcoming oneself is to conquer the heart/mind. If one does not empty the heart/mind but relies on adament strength alone, strength must overcome strength – there is bound to be danger before getting good results and becoming blameless.
The Taoist I Ching is quoting the Tao Te Ching (Ch 3),
Thus the rule of the sage
empties the mind
but fills the belly
So to empty the heart/mind is to lose regret, make oneself open to others, cease having anxiety about loss and gain, as well as losing rational discrimination and intellectual knowledge. Instead we fill the belly with breath, lose self doubt, gain will power and strength, which enables us to live out our destiny.
I thought about the line,
Regret comes from the heart/mind not being open
Where does regret come from? To me regret is made up of frustrated desires, the things you wanted to accomplish but could not, or the things or people that you desired but could not hold on to. It is in a sense the past tense of desire. We know that desire is always a problem. Eastern religions ask us to reduce our desires in order to find contentment and tranquillity. But desire is always present, firstly because we have a primary desire to live, and this means that the desire for food and drink are basic desires necessary for survival. But even if we reduce or sublimate our desires we remain in the grip of desire. Any spiritual desire – to be one with the Tao, or to be enlightened, is still a desire.
We always think of desires as in the present tense, of the desires that we either have or are trying to control and reduce. When we think of desires it is usually the obvious ones, which the Taoists call the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and stupidity; And you can add to that list a couple of others: hatred and lust. But to see the reduction of desire as something negative, as a renunciation of the self, misses the mark. The Tao te Ching says (Ch 1),
Empty of desire, perceive mystery.
Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.
Lao Tzu says that if we can reduce desire we are able to perceive the subtle, whereas if we stay obsessed with desires we can only see the surface of things. We remain in the world of form and cannot break through to the world of emptiness and of essence. A life made up of endless desires is too shallow and can never get deep.
If my heart is not open enough, then it must be full of desires both old and new, and to open my heart means that I have to empty it. When you desire something or someone, you either feel fulfilled or unfulfilled. Either you accomplish that desire or fail to achieve it. The failure to achieve a desire leads to feelings of loss, lack, bitterness and regret. Even if we manage to accomplish our desires and have a feeling of joy these feelings do not last, do not remain for all time. Life is transient and impermanent. We lose even the things we have gained, so that loss is also part of success. All desires, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, lead to feelings of attachment and dependency, to a sense that we can only feel whole when we can bring outside or external things into our being, our heart.
So the heart is full of the corpses of desire. We harbour past feelings of hurt and betrayal, as well as the seeds of new desires that we want to pursue. In such a state our heart overflows like the cup the Zen monk poured. If we can empty the heart of these old feelings and reduce our present desires, then we make room in the heart. Through this fasting of the heart we create an emptiness that will allow other and better feelings, like compassion and love, to take up residence.
We need to transform our hsin, our heart-mind, and the way to do this is through Zuowang, sitting and forgetting. What we need to forget are old slights, pains, hurts and betrayals, so that the heart empties out of old attachments and can become a storehouse for new feelings. Unless we houseclean our heart, we are being dragged down by our past, and are not able to move forward in a unified way. We are victims of self-doubt and self-esteem, and can’t utilise our energy in a powerful way. This is what Confucius means when he says,
“Your will must be one.”
Mencius said (2a2),
When will is unified, it moves the breath.
When the breath is unified, it moves the will.
And Chuang Tzu tells us,
There is no weapon deadlier than the will.
So my aim in emptying my heart is to unify my will and breath, so that breath and mind act as one, and my spirit can become liberated. This is the job of overcoming myself by overcoming the heart/mind.
In The Heart Claude Larre and Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallée talk about the role of the spirits,
We exist in a way that develops. We have a future. As long as we are living, we are living for something, we are living for tomorrow, and for the years to come. However long, life is not without prospect. Is there any power to take care of this ‘becoming’ (our future, our development). Yes, there are leaders within us, and we call them spirits.
The role or function of the spirits is not to give us some spiritual high or a wonderful transcendant experience but to utterly infuse our waking and sleeping being, so they are able to give us specific guidance for every moment and activity in daily life. This is what Confucius was advising Yen Hui, not to rely on his learning and knowledge but to rely on his spirits. And the reason we sit in meditation, the reason we sit and forget, is that we want to empty the heart of all the old and outworn ideas and emotions that we have stored there, in what WB Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”. Once we have emptied it out we have created a home for the spirits to take up residence. This is the same idea as in ancient Greek religion. They created a beautiful temple, made an altar, devised rituals and sacrifices in the hope that the God would come down and make it his worldly home, to protect and guide their life. For the Chinese the hsin, the heart-mind, is a kind of fleshy temple. Keep it empty of desires, void of regrets and the spirits will have a suitable resting place.
So the advice Confucius gave to Yen Hui was: sit in meditation until you find stillness, and remain in stillness until you find happiness or joy; continue sitting until you find emptiness, and at some point light will emerge from emptiness, the light of awareness. At this point you will have transformed yourself, and you will be a sage, able to advise the Prince of Wei without having your head chopped off. This is ‘the secret of the wise kings’.
Copyright 2010 Mark Forstater
Meditation – The Stress Buster
When we are under stress it often seems impossible to get out from under it. Stress, anxiety and fear are often so overwhelming that we find ourselves at a loss to overthrow the trauma we face. In a stress response, our bodies are tense and jangled because of the rush of fight or flight hormones coursing through the body, which upset the nervous system. Our mind gets exhausted trying desperately to cope with the tangled and obsessive thoughts that swirl swiftly and endlessly around our brain, It’s no wonder that people in stressful situations try to temporarily obliterate themselves through drink or drugs, hoping to induce a state of oblivion. Anything to stop that mental tumble dryer that seems to leave us no peace of mind. Unfortunately, once that drug induced high has worn off, the situation is still there, but now the body and mind are more tired, with even less energy to cope. A dreadful downward spiral takes place.
Is it possible to find a non-medicinal way of transforming the stressed body and mind so that we can return to a state of relaxation? One way which has been effective for thousands of years in the East, and which has made significant inroads in the past 50 years in the West, is meditation. What is meditation and how can it help?
Meditation is a means of gaining control over the mind by quietening it and slowing it down. Since the mind and body are a unity, any change to the mind will have a corresponding change in the body. Meditation can lead to a relaxation response, the diametrical opposite to the stress response. Just as stress speeds up the nervous system, breath and heart beat, and consequently revs up the mind, so each change brought about through meditation leads to a slowing and calming of the body/mind: slowing the breath and heart beat, calming the nervous system, and relaxing the mind. It has been shown that meditators have a slower heart beat and less hypertension than the general population.
How can people in stress use meditation? Meditation is not solely a breathing technique, its aim is greater than that, but breathing is an essential component of meditation. The breath is the link between the body and the mind. When the breath is harmonious, the mind is calm. When the breath is agitated, the mind is upset. We can use this link, since breathing is the one physiological function that is both involuntary and voluntary. That is, we normally breathe unconsciously and automatically, but we can also consciously control the breath, It is this conscious control, used in meditation, that anyone can use as a tool for stress reduction. At its simplest, a person suffering stress can consciously use their breath to calm the body and mind, thereby inducing the relaxation response. Once this slowing down begins, a positive feedback takes place, leading to a general slowing of body and mind, and allowing a more normal functioning to take place. It does not take long to induce this state and there is no complicated technique in achieving it.
People often associate meditation with yogis sitting in the lotus posture, chanting ‘OM’, but meditation can be undertaken while walking, lying down or sitting. The aim of any cross-legged posture is to keep the back straight, but it is not difficult to keep the back upright while sitting in a kitchen or desk chair. Try it: Sit at the front of your chair, feet flat on the ground (about 12 inches apart), and keep your back straight. Now relax your arms and jaw, close your eyes and mouth, and begin to breathe normally through the nose. Do this for a number of breaths and try to ‘look inside’ to feel the breath entering and exiting your body through your nose. If thoughts arise, which they will, try not to respond to them, but just let them come and go. As you get into the rhythm of the incoming and outgoing breath, feel your body begin to relax. Your nervous system and heart will begin to slow down and your mind become calmer. The longer you sit the calmer you will get, but your mind will continue to bombard you with thoughts. Continue to allow them to just pass through. If you do not respond to them, then your mind and body will sooner or later find a state of peace.
Besides reducing stress, this technique gives the sufferer a tool which they can use at any time. It is quick to use and easy to do. Initial success in reducing stress can give the person the confidence that they have in themselves the ability to gain control over their situation. This sense of confidence and personal ability, once learned, is empowering: it is an extension of personal power. In that relaxed state, space can be created in the mind for new insights and perspectives which can lead to a new way of confronting and solving problems, including those that created the stress.
Meditation Opens The Heart
There is a famous story in the Taoist Book of Chuang Tzu of Confucius’ advice to his disciple Yen Hui. Yen Hui planned to go to the Prince of Wei to try to reform this ruler’s wild and wicked ways by using Confucius’ teaching. After Confucius shoots down all of Yen Hui’s intended strategies, he offers him some advice,
“You must fast. I’ll tell you why. Is it easy to work from pre-conceived ideas? Heaven frowns on those who think it is easy.”
Yen replies that his family is poor and he hasn’t eaten meat in ages, but Confucius explains that the fasting he is talking about is not fasting of the body but fasting of the mind. Yen asks him to explain what fasting of the mind is,
“Your will must be one. Do not listen with your ears but with your mind. Do not listen with your mind but with your chi. Ears can only hear, mind can only think, but chi is energy, receptive to all things. Tao abides in emptiness. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”
He goes on to say,
“It is in emptiness that light is born. There is happiness in stillness. Lack of stillness is called sitting while wandering. If you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you, even gods and spirits will come to you, not to speak of men. This is the transformation of ten thousand things, the secret of the wise kings.. “
Yen Hui was going to Wei to apply the ‘pre-conceived ideas’ that he had learned from Confucius. But Confucius wanted to teach him how he could find new and spontaneous ideas, applicable in the moment, to use with the Prince. We see in this the dichotomy between pre-conceived ideas and spontaneous ones, the difference between reaction and response. In reacting to events we use our conditioned mind, the pre-conceived ideas that experience and learning have taught us. But this isn’t fresh enough. We need to respond not only from experience, but also to be alive to emptiness, to the spirit of the event unfolding in front of us. This is why Confucius tells Yen that he must use his chi to listen to what is happening, and not just his eyes and ears.
This story is similar to the Zen story of the Professor who comes to visit a monk to discuss Zen. The monk offers him tea and when he starts to pour he continues until the cup overflows. The Professor is shocked and asks him what he is doing, and the monk replies that the cup is just like the Professor’s mind, overflowing with pre-conceived ideas and knowledge. The fasting of the mind is to empty it of old and stale ideas so that it can respond with fresh insights to what is happening in the moment.
We can assume that the Confucius story is about sitting meditation, since Confucius says that ‘lack of stillness is called sitting while wandering.’ When we enter into a deep meditative state we enter stillness, but if our mind fails to settle then although we are formally sitting in meditation our mind is actually wandering all over the place and it’s not really meditation, it’s agitation.
The Fasting of the Mind is a Taoist meditation practise also called Zuowang- sitting and forgetting. We sit and forget, but what is it that we are forgetting? In the old Chinese medical texts the heart – hsin- was the seat of both thoughts and feelings, so that it was really the ‘heart-mind’. When we sit in meditation we forget our body and mind, we empty out, but what is it that we are trying to empty?
I have recently attended some Transformational Breathing workshops. Transformational Breathing uses a technique of sustained circular breathing through the mouth to attempt to open up your respiratory tract to the largest possible extent. In doing this it has to break through any blockages or obstructions that are stopping you from having a full open breath. These blockages are both physical and emotional. When I was going through this process, the facilitator asked me to try to open my heart.
After the session, I thought about opening my heart. I wasn’t sure that my heart wasn’t open, although I don’t consider myself the most compassionate person. I certainly don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, so I suppose that this kind of emotional reserve does mean that my heart is not really open. So what would be the process of opening the heart, and how do I go about it. Obviously it’s possible through breathing control to direct chi into the heart area, as well as to force breath into it to try to expand the heart and loosen or free it. But that’s purely on a physical level. What is it on a mental or emotional level?
I decided to ask the Chinese oracle the I Ching, ‘Will I be able to open my heart?’. I got the answer Hexagram 35: Advance, which I consider a positive answer, but there were no moving lines. Here is the commentary on the 5th and 6th lines, in the Taoist I Ching,
Regret comes from the heart/mind not being open. If one knows how to empty and open the heart, one can thus seek from others, and so be able to fill the belly. . Once one has filled the belly, fortune, misfortune and stopping at sufficiency are all in the palm of one’s hand. One can thereby be free from worry about loss or gain, and go straight ahead without doubt, going ahead in advancing the fire and working, with good results beneficial in every way. This is the illumination of becoming empty to bring fulfillment.
The 6th yang line says,
The work of overcoming oneself is to conquer the heart/mind.
The Tao te Ching says something similar (Ch 3),
Thus the rule of the sage
empties the mind
but fills the belly
So to empty the heart/mind is to lose regret, make oneself open to others, cease having anxiety about loss and gain, as well as losing rational discrimination and intellectual knowledge. Instead we fill the belly with breath, lose self doubt, gain will power and strength, which enables us to live out our destiny.
I thought about the line,
Regret comes from the heart/mind not being open.
Where does regret come from? Obviously it is made up of frustrated desires, the things you wanted to accomplish but could not, or the things or people that you desired but could not hold on to. It is in a sense the past tense of desire. We know that desire is always a problem. Eastern religions ask us to reduce our desires in order to find contentment and tranquillity. But desire is always present, firstly because we have a desire to live, and this means that the desire for food and drink are basic desires necessary for survival. But even if we reduce or sublimate our desires we remain in the grip of desire. Any spiritual desire – to be one with the Tao, or to be enlightened, is still a desire.
We always think of desires as in the present tense, of the desires that we either have or are trying to control and reduce. When we think of desires it is usually the obvious ones, which the Taoists call the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and stupidity; And you can add to that list a couple of others: hatred and lust. But to see the reduction of desire as something negative, as a renunciation of the self, misses the mark The Tao te Ching says (Ch 1),
Empty of desire, perceive mystery.
Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.
This means that if we can reduce desire we are able to perceive the subtle, whereas if we stay obsessed with desires we can only see the surface of things. We remain in the world of form and cannot break through to the world of emptiness and of essence. A life made up of endless desires is too shallow and can never get deep.
But it is not just desires in the present moment that cause problems for me. It is also the shell or husk of old desires, those regrets that are clogging up my heart from years of mismanaged desire.
If my heart is not open enough, then it must be full of desires both old and new, and to open my heart means that I have to empty it. When you desire something or someone, you either feel fulfilled or unfulfilled. Either you accomplish that desire or fail to achieve it. The failure to achieve a desire leads to feelings of loss, lack, bitterness and regret. Even if we manage to accomplish our desires and have a feeling of joy these feelings do not last. Life is transient and impermanent. We lose even the things we have gained, so that loss is also part of success. All desires, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, lead to feelings of attachment and dependency, to a sense that we can only feel whole when we can bring outside or external things into our being.
So the heart is full of the corpses of desire. We harbour past feelings of hurt and betrayal, as well as the seeds of new desires that we want to pursue. In such a state our heart overflows like the tea cup that the Zen master poured. If we can empty the heart of these old feelings and reduce our present desires, then we make room in the heart. Through this fasting of the heart we create an emptiness that will allow other and better feelings, like compassion and love, to take up residence. This is what Confucius meant when he said,
This is the transformation of ten thousand things, the secret of the wise kings.
So I need to transform my hsin, my heart-mind, and the way to do this is through Zuowang, meditation, sitting and forgetting. What I need to forget are old slights, pains, hurts and betrayals, so that my heart empties out of old attachments and can become a storehouse for new feelings. Unless I houseclean my heart, what Yeats called that ‘foul rag and bone shop’ I face the danger of being dragged down by my past, and this means that I will not able to move forward. I may remain a victim of self-doubt and not be able to utilise my chi in a positive. What I need to achieve is what Confucius tells Yen Hui,
Your will must be one.
The Chinese philosopher Mencius said (2a2),
When will is unified, it moves the breath.
When the breath is unified, it moves the will.
And Chuang Tzu tells us,
There is no weapon deadlier than the will.
So my aim in emptying my heart is to unify my will and breath, so that breath and mind act as one, and my spirit can become liberated. This is the job of overcoming myself by overcoming the heart/mind.
What Is It To Be Enlightened?
In the beginning of his wonderful book on Buddhist practice, Working Towards Enlightenment, Master Nan Huai-Chin quotes a question from his old friend Mr. Xiao, a serious and long standing student of Buddhism. Mr. Xiao asked him, “Shakyamuni Buddha left home when we was 18, and finally- much later, after years of effort- lifted his head, saw a bright star, and was enlightened. What was it that he was enlightened to?”
This is a really good question, and one that I have been pondering for some time. The Buddha sat himself down under the Bodhi tree by the Ganges and said to himself, ‘I will not rise until I have achieved supreme perfect enlightenment.’ He then meditated for six days and nights and on the dawn of the seventh day he raised his head from meditation, opened his eyes, saw this bright star in the sky, and was awakened. Master Nan says that he answered Mr. Xiao by saying that the Buddha awoke to interdependent causation and inherent emptiness. Mr. Xiao was not impressed with this answer, and Master Nan admits this is just the dogma of Buddhism. Anyone reading a book on Buddhism will find these ‘truths’ of Buddhism written down, and so can learn them just like that. But the Buddha did not get these truths as ideas, did not read them in a book. He experienced something, after 12 years of practice, and that experience led him to think of the universe and all things in it as having been of interdependent causation and of being inherently empty. How much difference is there between having the experience which leads to the insight and just reading about it in a book.
The Buddha, the tree, the river and the star. What is the relationship between them? What is it that was going on in that dawn which zapped his mind and body with that insight? I used to think that enlightenment meant that you became aware that what happened to you in life was the same as what you did. That is, to lose the distinction between what you say and do, and what happens to you is to become enlightened to the situation you are really in. To only consider yourself as the sum of your thoughts and acts is to remain in an ego-driven world, whereas to widen it so that you are also what happens to you is to expand out of ego into a larger view of life.
But I don’t think this is what was happening to the Buddha. I think that he was entering into a wider experience still, one in which he could identify himself not just with the tree he sat under and the river that ran past him, but also with the stars twinkling in the lightening sky. This was an expanded view of himself as the universe, a view which showed him that although his existence as a human body was only temporary, which meant that it was empty of permanent existence and that this state also applied to the tree ,the river and the stars in the sky. Everything was in flux, change was the only constant, yet at that specific moment, like all the moments past and all of those to come, he was able to see that his life was as specific and real as could be, interwoven with all the other elements in the universe, and he had an existence that was expressed in each instant.
This is a feeling that we are all able to have, the idea of our destiny, in the sense that although I may not be sitting under a Bodhi tree meditating, but am sitting in my living room typing on a computer, still the moment that I am experiencing here, in this time and place, is the only existence that I have, and if I were to spend my time thinking about where else I would like to be, or what else I might like to be doing, or what parts of my life I would like to improve or change, then I am avoiding my destiny, my knowledge that I am in this place and this time, and all of the events in my life, all of my thoughts and actions, have brought me to this moment in time and place in space. If I fail to accept my situaqtion then I am truly unenlightened, whereas to accept that this is where I am is to live in and with my destiny and to flourish in each moment that arises. This is my take on enlightenment.
Unfrequently Asked Questions
There are a number of questions that we try not to ask. Why? Because we can’t answer them very easily, if at all. When we are young and questioning everything we tend to ask more searching questions, but as we mature and fit into the life that society sets out for us, we learn not to ask . When we get older and realise that our time is starting to run out, we once again take up some of these questions:
Who am I? (an old perennial)
What am I? (a variation)
Why am I alive? (The existential question)
What is my purpose in life? (this is a toughie)
Is there a meaning to my life? (and how do I find it?)
How should I live my life? (Socrates’ favourite question)
Maybe you have some of your own favourites? Let me know.
R Buckminster Fuller’s Experiment in Living
R. Buckminster Fuller was an free-thinking imagineer who helped to popularise the Geodesic Dome. A defining moment in his life was when illness killed his young daughter. At this time he had a revelation, and became determined to make his life “an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
Fuller decided to live his life as an ‘experiment’. That is, to take each day, and each moment in that day, as a singular and unique event, in which he would be able to respond spontaneously and freshly to everything that happened to him. He decided to record for himself and posterity all of these events, and his response to them, and he left behind a huge archive of his life and times.
He used as a metaphor for the potential power of a single individual the ‘trim tab.’ He said,
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trim Tab.”
At a time when the individual seems insignificant in the face of huge global states and corporations, when the history flows seems like an enormous mass that cannot be altered by a single person acting on their own, it’s good to be reminded that one person can make a difference.
Each one of us exists as our own universe, a constellation of consciousness in which our thoughts and feelings make up the world that we inhabit. If we could take the same attitude as Bucky Fuller, and live each moment that we are given as a fresh, newly created and completely open opportunity to which we can respond spontaneously and creatively, then our lives can become intensely alive, and we can awake from the dead habit of conditioned existence. We may not think that we can change the world and benefit humanity, but we can change and better our own universe and in doing so can indirectly benefit humanity.
Death Is What Happens To Someone Else
I have been reading Denial Of Death by Ernest Becker. Ironically, Becker was dying of cancer as the book came out in 1997. The matter of Life and Death as the Zen masters say, is the most important subject we can engage in. Without unflinchingly facing our own death, as Becker did, we are not able to engage fully with life. To deny death or seek oblivion from it, means that we cheat ourselves of the fullness of life.
Becker’s book is in part an examination of our fear of death, a fear that he claims is almost primal, one that we become aware of when we are still quite young. Freud thought that the unconscious had no sense of time or death, so that it is our conscious mind that becomes aware that one day we will die. Our unconscious continues to act as a carefree teenager, assuming that our existence will never come to an end. This is why soldiers going into battle assume that it will be the guy next to them who will be hurt and that they will emerge unscathed. Death is what happens to someone else.
Our conscious fear of death Becker calls a terror of death, and it is because of this terror that we try to hide from it, seeking oblivion and diversions of all kinds, from religion to drugs, to sex, to work, to TV. We try to put death out of our minds and to a large part we succeed, but the cost of doing this is high. We repress the idea of death and put it into our ‘shadow’, the dark side of existence that we don’t want to acknowledge.
But the things we relegate to our ‘Shadow’, the parts of ourselves that we don’t accept, need energy to keep them in their place, and this energy can only come from the total energy that we have available. Anyone who has had any dealings with batteries knows that a constant trickle of energy soon runs down a battery. We use some of our valuable life force, our chi or prana, to keep the Shadow secure, and this means we have less energy for the rest of our activities. This is why Becker says that denying death leads to a lessening of life. The total energy that we ccould apply to our life has been diminished by the Shadow’s call on our resources.
It’s often said that we use only 10% of our brain power. Clearly it would be good to access the 0ther 90% but how do we do that ? I think meditation can help to release some of this power. When we meditate we go into a state of deep relaxation. This relaxed state can be the ground from which new possibilities can open up, new awareness and perspectives can be discovered, and a wider more expanded consciousness can be created. This expansion of awareness can lead to insights about new ways of thinking and acting, so that people with problems or stress can find ways to accept or solve or survive the anxieties that life currently poses for them.
Fear, anxiety and stress all cause contraction of the body and the mind, leading to a kind of paralysis of will, a hopeless passsivity that creates a victim mentality. Meditation can help reverse this by expanding the mind, which really means expanding the universe, since each person’s mind is its own universe. This expansion can lead to movement and growth, creating a new positive situation where previously only negativity reigned. With more space created in the brain, there is the possibility of finding new ideas and solutions, and at worst there is the choice of accepting the dire situation you are in and trying to find the best way out of it.
To do nothing is not a solution.