Winter solstice

Christmas should be on the 26th this year. Tomorrow the day length finally increases here in UK from 7hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 51 minutes. The last time the day length was that long was the 17th December, and the shortest day was actually the 21st and 23rd, with the sun at its lowest (celestial point) on 22nd December. The sliding of sunrise and sunset days I don't understand but it shows there are many cycles involved in making day length.

Its quite amazing then that the ancients placed Christmas where they did - how in the world did they know that the 25/26 was the day the sun returned. I don't think it's a diss to the Christians to remind them that this festival is of great importants outside their calendar. Its a fact that the year which is governed by the cycle of the sun, which is also the most important thing which determines our weather and welfare - even today! - has certain high and low points and these have always been celebrated. Meanings have changed, but facts are facts.

Of course the return of the sun, and its birth in the heavens is exactly what we still celebrate. It is just an abstract spiritual son we look to now rather than just the physical sun. Just as at Easter we look at the coming again of the crops against the foe of winter, and now Christian countries look to the coming again of Jesus against the foe of sin and death - the resurrection.

=== 27th Jan 2010

This is wrong! I checked this up again this year (2009) and it doesn't work!! Don't know what was up with that data but day length should sinusoidally reduce to the solstice and then increase again.

Life, sex and death

I'm a little more philosophcal about the recent news. When things go wrong that's when we learn the most. She is a soldier to me now, forging ahead into territories that we all must walk one day, brave and fearless like she was in life, into that boundless unknown void. There is much to add to this story, but at the right time... i've still a lot to learn myself.

This has all woken me up to. Without a sense of death really how can we know what life is? and that was supposed to be the enquiry of this blog.

Cosi Fan Tutti was on TV today - saw the beginning, rest is recorded for later. Can "real" women be faithful, or are we destined to chose pleasures over virtue? This girl was a goddess to me, a heavenly being, but not because of sexual faithfulness - we were never physical with each other - but because of spiritual intimacy (or the belief of that). That I begin to remember - after the 9 years of this "relationship" - was the whole point.

If we chose physical pleasures over virtue, we chose the mortal flesh, we are bonded by what is temporary and soon to be extinct. But if we chose the spiritual and forgo the temptations of the body - what then? This was the whole point. Is it eternal if it aims for bondage between what is immortal? I never imagined that this would all be tested so literally. Is she immortal in some spiritual way? did I only love a mortal thing? Why did I feel I had been waiting for her my whole life when I met her? Why did we talk endlessly of eternal friendship and forever - is this all just irony knowing the truth is inescapable?

There are bonds that go beyond the physical. I knew something was wrong when she had a car accident 3 years ago. I knew something was going wrong last year and I had this dread feeling around the time she died. I knew nothing of these events for another 7 months - but after her death there was a release in my life and I had begun to explore old territories of interest. Maybe her loss did free me from some mortal attachment? When I got the email I already knew why it was sent, but didn't want to and couldn't accept that so I invented other reasons. My intellectual mind is terrible at intercepting deeper awareness, it has done this on many occasions. Maybe it is afraid of the new horizons that take power away from that rational creature. I remember she said she could see spirits. I didn't know what to make of that, we never really talked about it. Maybe she was already of a deeper level in life.

We were supposed to have a "natural" relationship. There was to be no overt desire, no manipulation, no compromise, no argument, no coersion, no seduction - if we were bonded naturally then what need for "making a relationship" or love. The paper knows what to do when the match is there - if we were truely connected then it seemed to me that it would happen by itself - and if it didn't it was not supposed to be. Well did it happen or not? Without direct communication and with only hundreds of thousands of poetic and alegorical words did we ever communicate anything. How can I ever know now? A councellor friend said just a few days ago that communication is the key to a relationship. I feel like I'm in a structural philosophy class again - do words mediate everything? I knew when she was in danger without words - altho I grant that it was words that I took to confirm these facts.

If relationships have to be made based upon human desires then all relationships are fearful of death. I am not fearful of death. I have a story to post sometime on that - one I sent her for valentines day - one that I wonder whether it might have been useful to her on her journey.

Buddha beat death and Jesus especially we know beat death. Holding onto the world in place of heavenly riches is like holding onto a sinking anchor for security. Knowing the difference between that which sinks and that which rises, and letting go of all these things that sink around us, must be the wisdom that survives death.

When I first prayed and chanted for her I was trying to see her face and where she had gone. My father was at first not so good, but now resides in a warm and cordial heaven and I'm so happy he has the smile that he only ever tried to get in life. This girl I was stunned to find in a world of brilliantly jewelled columns holding up a roof too far above to see, blinding white light shining all about and throughout the space, gold and silver jewelled thrones at all levels. It was utterly spectacular - I have never even dreamed or thought of such a wonderful place. I wonder if this is just my own respect for her expressed in imagination, or another connection beyond the physical? I so hope she is at peace, and in a happy place - and her mortal family and friends at ease and peaceful too.

I begin to have entertain faith that maybe there are worlds beyond this, and that peace is really a possibility for all man. Happy Christmas.

My muse is gone.

I found out 2 days ago why this girl's sister contacted me, it is as bad as the deep feelings I have been ignoring for a long time. This girl has passed away. In her memory let me say that she was the most wonderful, beautiful and inspiring person I have ever met. She was as free as a bird, as joyful and energetic as the swallows playing in the summer sky, it was as peaceful in her company as arriving in that deep forest glade and her voice was captivating, rising in short bubbles of excitement, just as the meadow stream flushes buoyant from its spring. There are no words worth anything. I had a letter read to me last night, I cannot believe she is gone, her words sounding from beyond the grave. She was only just 26, it makes no sense. I always thought she was a being from heaven, so freely she has returned to that happy place. I want to follow, but I know my days are here. I don't want to write more, there can be no turning back now.

Thank you to commenters

I just noticed that there are some comments on these posts - I am honoured but also my god things are no longer private. I'll pretend they are tho cos that might cause me to edit. Many thanks for the comments I will read and ponder them soon.

More on Nothing & dependent origination

I always thought that "relationship" mentioned before would enlighten me somehow - it seems to have been through awareness of the process of grasping and needing. To have needed something more than ones own life is ridiculous on closer examination - because we must have valued our own grasping more than the thing in order to need it that much.

On Saturday I woke up with a closer approximation to nothing and emptiness. It is the space before and after my life that is nothing. It is neither an absense nor a presence, but the peaceful irrelevance of myself. Neither positive, nor negative. I then examined a passage from the Diamond Sutra I never understood before - the bit of things being nothing more than their parts.


Building a Chair.
So I want to build a chair and I do some quantity surveying and write a list. Say 10m of wood, a flat panel, a saw, 10 screws, 5 hours of labour and 3 cups of tea (6 items). I get to work and finally have my chair. I sit back in it and relax enjoying the fruit of my labour.

The question is: have I made a new thing. Obvious answer yes else how am I sitting down now, where before I was on the floor. However if there is a new things where did it come from? If it is really a new thing different from the 6 items in the quantity survey then doesn't it need to be added to the survey to make 7 items. In which case what is the need for the other 6 items? We know however that it was created from the other 6 items. So on one hand it is new because we are sitting in it, but on the other hand it is just a composition of 6 other things and not new itself.

Simple but profound. We tend to think of a chair as a unique thing, something distinct and special, something which unlike many other things cannot be sat in. To comfortable solution to a special part of life, sitting down. Imagine a world without chairs. However at the same time a chair is not any different from it component parts - it is the plain sum of things which in themselves are no use for sitting down. The chair then is a different type of thing from its components, it is just an "apparent form" which emerges from its components, but which has no real substance - i.e. something we need add to the ingredients.

Just the really confuse matters, when this is understood we need consider that the starting ingredients themselves are just "apparent forms" of other components and so on.

The conclusion then is that form (the way things seem) is actually an "apparent form", it is like an illusion which is not really there. In reality it is just the sum of component parts which are quite different from the "apperant form", and if we wish to understand the origin of the "apparent form" it comes from nowhere - it itself is made from nothing.

This "nothing", i.e. the striking emergence of distinct unique forms from component parts, is the real emptiness of the "apparent world". The world is still apparent it is true, nothing there changes, but we realise that the apparentness is only that, it has no realness.

Thus in connection with the previous post: what "I" was before the component parts came together to make me 35years ago was nothing, and to nothing this "apparent form" of myself will return. And underlying that "apparent form" is emptiness, which is the same emptiness which enables me to grasp and take in all the apparent forms of the universe into myself as my life and existence.

The Grasping Hand & Nothing

Forget the last blog entry am making progress elsewhere...

Take a look at the hand.

With the hand we grasp for things that we want. Maybe a pen, maybe some food, maybe a lover. In each case we feel better off for what we have gained, and if we fail to gain then our hand feels empty and we feel worse. Normally then we view "empty" as a bad thing.

If we are already holding something then we are unable to grasp something new. It is because our empty hand is empty that we are able to grasp for new things. Thus in this sense emptiness is critical for the acquiring of new things and the satisfaction of our desires. Indeed it is precisely because our hand has nothing in it that it can be used to hold things. Thus in the act of having something we are relying upon our hands own emptiness! In this sense emptiness is critical in the act of having and is a good thing.

One thing we cannot grasp however is the hand itself. Try and grasp your hand now! It is impossible. The inability to grasp ourselves reinforces our insecure. If we ever doubt ourselves what can be grasp to reinforce ourselves? Nothing!

In this sense also the hand is intrinsically empty, because it cannot hold itself - there is nothing there to grasp. This is because it is just the possibility of grasping, not a thing which can be grasped. Thus in grasping relationships we fit together like shaking hands, each grasping the others grasping and empty nature. My emptiness fits into your emptiness, and vice verse and there is a bond.

There is a great analogy here between the hand and the self. The "true self" is our grasping nature: our ability to go-for-things, acquire things and own things. It is not however the things themselves. But often we examine that power through the things themselves, we add up the things we own and the things we have done. Or at least we measure our potential to own things through what we have actually done and owned. However our existence itself is actually just the space into which all these things come. And that is obviously there whether it is a filled room or an empty room. If we think the filled room (the ostensibly successful life) is any different from the empty room (the life of monastic non-ownership and attachment) then we are viewing the rooms space in terms of its contents not its emptiness. We are told the human mind is actually an infinite space with room enough for the whole universe and more!

To Have or the Have not?

I have a story to tell which is teaching me a great deal.

9 years ago this month i fell in love. Nothing extraordinary about that, but for me profound. I remember the day preceeding that clearly: a girl walked into the shop where I worked. I remember she stood out because she seemed to glide rather than walk; in all the time I knew her I never remember her feet touching the ground. The shop as I remember it was always radiated in golden light whenever she was present that day and those afterwards. I watched her enter the training room and some hours later leave and thought I'd never see her again. A few days later I turned around one afternoon and to my shock she was there on the till next to me. An opportunity I had to take. I spoke to her and in those first few seconds I fell in love.

This was the girl I had always wanted to meet. The person of my childhood dreams. It seemed the very reason I had been born. She was the key to my heart and with her it just opened. I pondered so much then and since as to whether I really was waiting all my life for "her" or for someone like her. I write this as an edit to the original post because that has become of critical importants. Either way the door of my heart was finally open and I was seeing the beautiful world inside for the first time. How I had known it was there, and how I had known that this girl would walk into my life and open it were a mystery that led me to hold onto the idea of rebirth and karma - things I had been very skeptical about. There was at least a sense I had known her in the past, there were unfinished things from behind the veil of my past before I was born. That is the mythology that makes all this so difficult, and the protection of an open heart the most precious part.

I think there may have been some mutuality, I remember seeing her dazing dreamily at me some weeks later. Speaking to her I was amazed that we had anything in common. There was just one bad bit of news she was 17. But that turned out to be only part of the problem she had a 33 year old boyfriend and there lay the rub.

She may not have know what she was doing, but I was sure it was not the way I wanted it to be, to have to take her from him. If it was going to be like that, afterall, why shouldn't someone else take her from me!

If it was going to be, it was going to be. A match and a candle don't need much to get them started. If you end up having to work at it, there is something wrong.

I was also worried that we had another huge difference. In life I have never wanted anything. I for that reason have nothing. I had no job, no significant qualifications, no car, no house, not even any good clothes. Yet she was hanging out with a millionaire. I made the decision that unless she chose me, I would not bring her into my "fools paradise".

You believe you are invinsible. That is the foundation of much morality. Trying to fulfill my love on the meagre scraps that were offered me, being the very best friend I could be, exploring the beautiful world I had been revealed as purely and without "taking" as I could was to prove my own hell on Earth. After a few years what was good began to turn bad. Anger and jealousy began to take over and the stress I was experiencing between what I wanted and what I had began to consume me. I had no choice but the walk away - literally out of the pub and her life into a desert. It felt I left my very soul right there sitting in that London pub.

Since then I have had very little to give the world. It is hard to live when you are not living. But never to give up, and certainly never to dwell on the past I have moved on - still believing myself invicible. I guess I had some kind of nervous breakdown - altho apart from some panic attacks and a few years of agoraphobia I like to think I shook it off alright. Tried out a few relationships but was always haunted by the emptiness inside.

I practiced Buddhism in those years. I still disagree with the mainstream Mahayana because what I wanted was liberation from this life. And I thought I was succeeding. There was some joy in my life and I thought I was growing new sprouts and living again.

This week I found an email from this girls sister trying to get in touch. In an instant I realised I have been living a lie. I still love her, she still means the world to me. Now I have a problem, a real problem. If I can't get rid of this wrteched love what can I do. I turn to theory next to work out exactly how all this works and what it means about life and love...

but first a tea break (we are in England afterall)

Loss of Baiji

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/12/14/ancient_species_of_dolphins_believed_extinct/

I read today that the Baiji river dolphin has been declared effectively extinct. Despite still holding a ruthless genetic attitude to "species" one feels that something real has been lost, and the question I always ask here is what have we gained in its place.

Certainty

it just occurred to me as I scanned my bulk mail folder looking for important emails about how do I know that I am concentrating enough to pick them out. We know that were I daydreaming I could easily scan over a name, and actually its amazing that I can just look over the list - without any particular expectation and wow magically I can notice a name of interest - how do I know that I am in the right frame of mind to do that?

Maybe its a feeling I have which proves this fact. A feeling of "paying attention". How about "I just know".

Then I played devils advocate with an imaginery "scientist" who would want phenomenal proof. How I would argue does he know that he is paying attention to his experiments? He would say that he has the phenomenal knowledge of the experiment itself to assure him that he is not sleeping or not paying attention.

But I would argue further, how do you know that you are paying attention to the "evidence" that you are paying attention?

At the end of the day we just "know" directly whether we are paying attention and what the state of our mind is. Being a mind is the same as knowing a mind!

It is not a case of viewer and "the viewed", but rather viewer is "the viewed".

Its strange in a world of proof and ecvidence to speak of self-evident truths, things we know in themselves directly, but these things must be possible else we would never be able to reach across the divide from ourselves and the world we wish to know.

Of course once the divide is bridged once it is no longer so great. What is the difference between viewer and viewed anyway? that has not been imagined itself.

- Another bit of writing in the long list that begins on the home-page and spills out in all directions to some sense that the world is self evident and existence and truth are already here. That working, building and constructing truth is at root a myth.

Matthew 6:22-23

22 The light of the body is the eye. Therefore if your eye is sound, your whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if your eye is evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

found it... this is the bit from the Bible which summarises Jesus' similar statements to Hinduism and Buddhism - that to know ourselves look at what we see, that what is outside is what is inside, that our self does not hide behind the appearances of the world like a computer or viewer, but rather IS "the quality" of what we are seeing and experiencing and thinking - the goodness or badness of our existence.

This is remarkable to me that in its core Jesus, Buddha and the Hindu sages are on this point at least speaking exactly the same language.

Does this concordance between such traditions suggest that there is a common core to human life? that there is a single path of goodness for those who will know it.

Ever since orientating myself to these points on Thursday last week things have gone bad. I argued with my mother all weekend like I used to when I was a kid, and today am in the endgame with my girlfriend of 2 years - altho that was a forgone conclusion 2 years ago!

Sometimes it looks like the closer you get the harder it gets. So maybe this is the core to progress in life and the facing that core is why the going has gotten tough.

What is a Good Self?

Following on from the last post it is apparent that this puts the knife further into the "self thing".

What is the self I keep asking myself, both unsure what it is and also amazed that I seem to be sure, but can't see why.

After the previous post I see that I have been still believeing in a "ghost" behind the scenes pulling the strings of my world. When I think, speak, have emotions, dream or whatever I have imaged that there is a secret self, unseen by the "outer" world who does all this like a tank commander running operations in his safe tank. Yet I have never seen this "ghost", nor do I have any reason to believe in it, I just feel as though it is there - that is after all what makes me "me".

In the last post I realise that all those things I thought where caused by my secret myself are actually myself. I am nothing more than my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, my actions.

The very same things which other people judge me by, my thoughts, words, and actions are actually "myself". There is no hidden self in its "inner" world creating impulses which have effect in the "outer" world, because there is no "inner" world. Recaping the last post: the "inner" world is actually the outer-world-as-I-see-it, and if there is an "outer" world it is an imagination about a world free from "interpretation", free from subjective involvement, an objective world - which is a fantasy since we can't know that directly (without personal involvement). There is only 1 world - tat tvam asi (thou that is art).

So the "self" is plain to see for everyone. And this has a big implication on our behaviour and attitudes. I have lived very much hiding from reality, believing that inside there was a self which was misunderstood, which has bad/good things happen to it, which was free from the world around it. Yet now I see that this is an illusion.

You cannot be a good person and hide behind bad things - saying for example that you were forced to do them, or that you were justified in doing them. Bad things - be they thoughts, words or deeds are only bad things, and if you do them then you are bad - there is no escape to your "inner" world. Bad things only result in bad things, so you have no choice but to avoid bad things immediately, there is never reason to do them.

A good self on the other hand is one who has good thoughts, words and deeds. Most importantly it is a self who strives to be positive in its thoughts, words and deeds and to ignore negative thoughts, words and deeds. There is no good self hiding behind the scenes of a person, they are good only in their positive approach, emotions and attitudes.

So the search ends for me for an "inner" self, and the discover, liberation and revelation of such a self is believed to be a myth. There is only one process and that is to chose positive as often as possible, and to learn to ignore negative. The more we learn to avoid negative and replace it with psoitive the weaker negative becomes and the stronger our self becomes.

Thus faced with situations which make us angry, hateful, destructive, bitter, sad, unhappy, lonely, sarcastic, vindictive, revengeful, shy, frightened, greedy, selfish, unkind, cruel, thoughtless etc, i.e. whenever we are negative we have a job to do - to find ways of being positive to shake off the darkness, see things in a good way and see a path through to the light.

Such positive ways always exists because the "negativity" we see, the unpleasantness of such existence, is just our self being bad. And if our self can be "bad" and make our world unpleasant then it can also be "good" and we need to find that way through. Its the job of a knight, or soldier as the Protestant Christians imagine.

This is a powerful way of starting to turn against negative: when things turn bad we take it as a challenge and adventure to find the positive - remember all those movie adventures where heros head off into darkness to bring back light. Of course it is hard and perseverence is the key, not to give up.

There is no hidden self, damaged or bad pulling the strings - we exist only in the moment in what we think, say and do and so we can make instantaneous changes if only we can let go of belief in a solid "self" and identity holding us back.