Off on holiday at the weekend. First stop Stonehenge for the solstice and then cycling to Skye via Yorkshire to meet up with college mates. 1300 miles in total… will see how this bike fares (tho I still need to sort out a carrier rack for it which isn’t easy on a racer!)… the old wisdom does seem true: if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it; which becomes more generally – don’t try and change things, let them change themselves. Applied to the bike situation really the old bike would have done. Still I must live with other people and their decisions.
Now on the other point that I have been fighting most evidently recently that of marriage etc. Almost everyone I know who speaks of these things says one thing and then does another. There is no-one in history, that I know of, who has really “lived” what they say… or for that matter says how they lived. We look for justification from people like the Bird bloke who shot people in Cumbria a few weeks ago. If we ever found it wouldn’t that mean (1) under the right circumstances we are all Bird and (2) he had no choice but to do it. Both are absurd. There can be no justification or reason why he did it.
There was an article in the paper yesterday about the psychological make up of Darth Vader which argued that the character was mentally ill rather than bad. This is a distinction I don’t actually get. If someone is mentally ill then I presume they don’t see things the right way which makes them behave in good faith on wrong assumptions and so they commit a crime. Isn’t this everyone? Buddhism argues that we are all mentally ill because we try to perceive things in terms of fixed identities (you only need to look at metamorphosing insects to see that our mental apparatus don’t fit reality). The idea that someone is “bad” suggests that they actually want to cause harm without being mentally ill – this is impossible isn’t it? If we saw things clearly then we would care for other people. There is a vast rift in the law here as far as I can see – I will take the opportunity to speak to a criminal lawyer or psychologist about this when it arises.
Anyway the point is that do we ever understand why we do what we do? I have this force inside which drives me in many ways. One direction is toward “my muse” (even against all possible logic, reason and apparent facts). She was chosen by me (not by destiny I am fairly sure) but what was it in me in the first place that got me looking for her? That search began as far back as I can remember when all I knew was that girls were pretty and interesting. This type of force we accept because it is “normal” and harmonious with the society. But what of forces that are not. Homosexuals have fought with society on this. Then there are forces that could never be accepted in society like violence, hatred and the one that I have struggled with as long as I have like girls which is the awareness of sadistic pleasure. This is a force which apparently gravitates toward a situation of power over someone especially where that person is hurt. Call that a demon, but the question, like with all the others, is how does our rational Apolline self understand the forces that lie within. What are they – I have never seen anyone ever (in experience and in the books) even try and tackle this question. People who I think examine these things in depth then succumb to the forces of property, self-preservation, sex, etc without seeming to master them. How are our enquiring minds so weak? It is almost as though all the words in the world and history have been spoken just to drown out the silent un-reconcilable force of our own existence and being.
Now this way lies madness and I have struggled with this question all my life - but recently I see it coming out of the blog writing very clearly (probably because I have just been writing recently without too much of a clear plan). Lots of words but no real direction – a bore to read, I will edit one day when the point is clear
To dispel one direction of thought let me consider the idea that I have a genetic make up which leads me in a certain direction, a propensity say to heterosexual desire. Now in one sense this does provide some insight. If I was to destroy that part of my brain or endocrine system then I could change that desire. I believe castration weakens the strength of the effect. I would then not be so concerned about “my muse”. What this doesn’t explain however is how “I” have got involved in all this. Why does this chemical in this place affect “me”? Why does it impinge on my thoughts and my life? Put another way, why of all the things I could be, a woman for example, do I find myself in this particular circumstance in life? I will live my whole life as a man, this makes my life a very particular way – but why is this this way for “me”? Science can change one question for another which is maybe easier to answer, but it can’t ever answer anything itself. Who would have thought 300 years ago when they wondered how to speak to people far away that it would questions like how to amplify the signal from a transducer. (Just writing this it is clear that science works – like I’m realising all creativity works - by first discovering the pool of building blocks and then playing with various arrangements until the solution is found – this is how I worked out the speech. It is not so tidy as well formed question and answer.) But anyway science turns out to be like symbol manipulation in logic – it doesn’t actually solve anything by itself. We must do that. In a way doesn’t that get close to what I didn’t understand as a child that Life cannot be written down; there are no rules; it is not computable; it must be Lived.
Master Hsing Yun (Chinese Buddhist master) wrote very wisely and I’ll start here in answering the vague question posed in this post: perfect awareness is wisdom, perfect intention is compassion. Thus through training not only the Apolline awareness can be purified, but so also the mysterious force that drives us. The goal then is compassionate intention. However this isn’t an easy path. The road to perfection is made up of countless momentary corrections to our behaviour and thoughts. This then feeds back over a lifetime to become purified intention – the evil/demons that disrupt our motivations and force us toward bad actions become weaker. Thus what we experience as an un-reconcilable force to be angry or to sexual desire for someone are actually completely reconcilable except that the work was done over a very long period of time in the past. These impulses and intentions are the fruit of a tree planted a very long time ago. Pointless complaining that the fruit on this tree are apples when you wanted oranges if you planted apple seeds 5 years ago. OK this writing thread is going much better :-) So we want to know why Bird shot all those people: he planted the wrong seeds a long time ago. And why were they wrong? Because he didn’t understand much about gardening. So the Apolline could have had its say… but it didn’t do so in time.
So there is a totality within the Self… it is just that what we take to be Ourself right here, right now is just a snap shot of something that exists in time and we need to have controlled things in the past to have a good present. Now that doesn’t rest easy with the idea that there is no past and no future only a present moment. Well that doesn’t make sense on this level (I suspect it is the transcendent level). As a living being we have impulses and these are the result of past seeds we have planted. That much is clear. So by acting on them we simply plant more seeds an get more entangled. This is the policy I’m following. So no matter how strong the impulse to marriage or “my muse” it is something I do not what to strengthen. OK that is clear too.
For the record the True Self that governs all these little decisions and which is our moral compass, the thing which judges absolutely what is right and wrong, that is called (in Chinese Buddhism) our Buddha Nature and is the same for all beings. It is improving the brightness with which that shines through us which is the best goal. We do this by “Trying” to be good – that “Trying” is actually drawing upon the Buddha Nature within us, and as we draw on it we dust it off and it shines brighter. What is a surprise though is just how difficult all this is and what we think is the right thing to do, so often turns out to be the wrong because the dust is just so thick, and when things are that dusty, you can’t see at all. The builders here told me that the best plan is to sprinkle water on the floor before doing any dusting I wonder if that is meditation in the analogy. Funny how dustiness actually makes us want to stop meditating too.
So concluding this: we don’t have to be slave to our impulses, and we don’t have to suffer alien impulses like anger etc because our impulses are really ourselves but a part of ourself that takes time to mature. So like putting bags on to a carousel, the bag we have in front of us at each moment isn’t the one we put down… until our bag comes back. That is why impulses don’t seem to belong to us (I’ll call this experience of powerlessness in the face of alien impulses like Love: Invasion). Reacting to present impulses then leads us off into chaos, we need to see where that impulse came from and why we have it now… what reason did we put this bag that has turned up on the carousel in the first place. We probably can’t remember so best to treat with caution – the sense of “Invasion” arises simply because we have forgotten.
Abraham in the Bible discovers that his daughter-in-law-to-be has been unfaithful. He orders her stoning to death. But then she produces the staff which he left behind and he remembers it was he who deflowered her. She is forgiven because the sense of invasion upon himself has gone. I shouldn’t use Abraham as an example like this, but really he opens himself up to criticism rather! especially after trying to kill his second son earlier… and then sending his first son - which he had with the Egyptian maid - away from the encampment. Where was his faith then?… it is not a good track record. Don’t know why I chose now to pick on him but anyway.
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