3 Demons

On holiday I became very aware of my 3 main demons. Two actually are very similar.


Demon 1 called Stupid.

This demon likes to call people stupid and find faults in them. It does this when I feel superior to them. Interesting my karma that I should have had a boss who had this pathologically. This demon breaks out (like the others) when I am tired. The first time I noticed something was up I thought stupid about some one and then fell off my bike. Then I saw this man, slightly overweight walking up the mountain track where I was at 4.30am. I wondered why he eas there and labelled him stupid. Later I found out that rather than fighting that demon I could have been watching the otter at the base of the cliff. He turned out the anything but stupid being from the museum and being exactly the best person to meet. I came in inviting demon stupid to an imaginary tea party like a naughter child who refuses to play - much as Pauline would have done in Zola's 'Zest for Life'.


Demon 2 called Critical. Critical is almost the same as Stupid but has been around a lot longer. Critical was there in my head for a large section of the Land's End John oGroats walk being critical especially about "cars". When i am exghausted the arguments begin about why on earth people drive such short distances and carry 1ton of metal around with them when they travel etc. Critical is now invited to the tea party.


Then came Demon 3 called OCD. He is actually a mental illness and quite a lot bigger than the others. This is the one I have struggled with for over 20 years - actually all my life in one incarnation or the other. He decided to join the party (as expected) when I slept on mountains by large cliffs during my cycling holiday. This demon has two heads. The first head is actually OCD for real, the second head is the fear of OCD which is just as bad if not worse. His greatest show was on the Storr at 11.30pm. Faced with fading light, a weak torch, and no map or compass it was important I remembered the way off the summit because I didn't want to get caught in a white out if the clouds came in. A tricky path up through sheer cliffs I expected to lead to the summit but instead came to this Shangri-La like emerald plateau of lush grass with lazy sheep scattered across its quilt. They were here for the night and I was very suprised that the environment was so hospitable. The trig point was some distance and I forgot completely the way back. Faced with sheer cliffs around the demon popped up and I started to fear what it would be like if I got OCD (exactly like vertigo) and came to obsess about throwing myself off a cliff. With no escape route I was trapped with this demon. I got a bit panicy and started a frantic search for the way down. It seemed to be no where. I ascertained that far off I could get to a section that looked green, which calmed me enough to begin a systematic search along the cliff edges until I found the way down now in almost darkness. All the while I was watching and analysing the demon. On getting clear of the cliffs it faded away and I was simply left a bit shaken. The battle continued as I bedded down on the edge of the next level of cliffs - but this way down was well assigned to memory in case of a white out with even a few stones laid on the way up as memory aids.

I began to wonder what would happen if my mind collapsed up here and so far from "home". But what home do I have I thought, where am I seeking to return to? This calmed me down and brought me back into the present peacefully. How much harder it must be if we have created a secure warren somewhere not to feel insecure when we are away from it. I was reminded of the girl I used to share with at uni who had had a nervous breakdown on a mountain in Israel. She had to be helped down and back "home". What a terrible experience, at least she was with friends. So my thoughts got to examining this "void" that we fear enveloping our knowing consciousness - the oblivion that is both fascinating to drug users and sexual adventurers but also terrifying as we risk never returning. My conclusion was that there was no evidence for it. All things that happen including mental melt down will pass into something else - there is no final extinction; it is a myth. On that final conclusion I fell asleep and awoke complete refreshed. Demon OCD asleep. However I need to wake him up and have him to tea more often so I can get to know him, that was my main conclusion. This demon has in many ways dictated a large part of my life especially the last 20 years where I have been afraid of being trapped anywhere in case he pops up and I cannot escape. Indeed being trapped is the main fear now, he rarely actually pop up.

Individual production and consumption. Progress?

Think I made this point before but in the 21st Century after several hundred years of explosive scientific and technological "progress" we still live in a world where people are concerned about where their food comes from.

The reason for this statement is the realisation that my mother and my sister are very concerned about where the money to support myself will come from. I don't have this fear because I know that the real problem is human population and it is true that a large percentage of the human population will have to die when oil runs out. But while oil is cheap then food is cheap and there is a plentiful supply. My worry then is not whether I have the money to buy food, but rather whether the human race can manufacture enough food in the future.

I guess this cuts deep into the issue of employment which I am not interested in. For my mother and my sister it is enough to get a job to get food. Yet I see my mother weeding the garden and throwing away plants that I have learned are excellent to eat - nettles, fat hen, jack-by-the-road to name my favouries. Food doesn't actually come from employment. The problem is that oil has lead to machines and plentiful food and so high population. This I now suspect is the real reason for human population growth - nothing to do with the medical advances. The sun is impossible to own so the energy and food from it is free. Oil however is every capitalists dream because it is easy to own and the population whose energy comes from oil has thus been bought by the capitalists who own oil. We thus have to "work" for the capitalists to get at that energy.

This it seems to me is the underpinning of the current world order. Once it was land rents on farm land. The sun (and energy) couldn't be owned but the land required to grow plants could so the capitalists/land-owners managed to get the others to work for them. Now it is much easier: the cost of land is higher and the value of human labour is lower since people have to compete with mass produced agriculture, we have therefore to work even harder to get at our energy.

This picture is far away from the naive 1950s image of progress leading to more free time and leisure. At the bottom line despite the enormous progress it seems oddly that things have not changed at all. People still worry about where their next meal will come from. This point has been analysed at length (in terms of social structure) but remaking to point from the other side that it is social structure only that maintains a system where we need to work for our food.

The more I look at things the more I see either one of two possibilities. The human race has been pregnant with a massive paradigm shift in the concept of life and living for many centuries but is either lacking imagination in making to move OR the ruling elites are afraid to offer up their comforts and embrace the change.

Basically as has been said for decades, and been obvious for millenia there is enough food to go around and feed the world multiply. That the energy to make this food is currently plentiful and cheap. That the number of jobs available is falling every year (from efficiency and mechanisation) yet we insist on a system where distribution of productivity is to those who work... i.e. those eligible for payouts from the system are fewer in number each year and the payouts are greater each year! Where private ownership is preferred to public owenership with the obvious benefits. As an example I use public toilets just as Rome had. Consider the efficiency in everyone using a local toilet rather than having to manage a single one each. That the human race is trapped within a paradigm of individual productivity and consumption.

Social Self is entirely constructed

Waiting at a friends house yesterday I was wondering why they are my friend and not other people. I discovered the day before that someone I don't even know is not my friend now because I think I stood them up - but can't even remember we were supposed to meet: so fickle is friendship.

I realised instantly where the problem in those thoughts lay. It presumes that "I" am a single thing which if a friend of one person then presumably "I" who is the same "I" is a friend of everyone.

My relationship with people depends on both me AND them - the experience of being "with" someone is then not the result of "I" + "Them" in which "I" and "them" are distinct elements with known properties but rather than "I" is actually a product of being "with" them. I am a friend to one person and not a friend to another because I am different in each relationship. To one person I am good, to that person I stood up I am bad. Which am I?

We are involved in relationships to the bottom and below of our very self. There is no part of our social self (ego) which escapes the influence of relationships.

These thoughts showed me as best as I have been shown what Buddha meant by anatta. It was a destabalising thought because I came to wonder what am I? Am I good or bad? Am I really this person's friend? But this is me grasping for the "ego" that I have believed in.

We usually think of ourselves as good. It is interesting for me to consider all the many people who think I am bad tho. My dad thought i was bad. My mum thinks I am bad - tho she had some difficulty marrying that with the "good" work I did at the w/e. My ex-boss thinks I am bad. In fact i think to generalise: everyone who has ever been in a position of authority over me thinks I am bad - I actually relish this. I remember my ex land-lord a few years ago saying to his wife 'see I told you he was no good' after some dispute. In my mind they bring this upon themselves tho because of their expectations of people who they believe they have control over. A landlord because of the paper which proves ownership expects certain privilages that I don't automatically accept etc so there is always going to be conflict. But it is interesting for me to reflect on the fact that in each of these cases I am actually "bad" because the relationship has soured.

Shall consider more.

Should add that on holiday i tried a new approach. I was not so disciplined and spent a lot of time talking to people and being "sociable". This has had an effect on my mind which I am exporing for better or worse.

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Karma has a funny quality of being coincidental, or maybe fruiting all at once. Heard yesterday that the mother of someone I knew years ago real quite hates me. I suspected I knew why immediately, gave it some thought and can't think of anything else. Problem was I fell in love with her daughter, call her X. She was the best friend of someone else who I was in love with, call her Y, but who couldn't make a decision over her then boyfriend. I didn't want to be the one to break it up - that is against the Buddha's direct rules. So I left it. 10 years later that relationship has ended anyway. It is the same as "my muse" and I realised this morning thinking about it that in actual fact it is the man's responsibility to break up the relationship! In olden times we had a fight and the victor won the girl. This makes it easy for the girl. That girl said to me a few years later "why didn't I try harder to get her", well it hurts the boy she's with and its immoral. Of course it can also be a technique to use someone to make your partner jealous. Strategies are complex and shady. Now I realise that to live the "worldly" life we have to break Buddha's rules and be immoral. This reinforces my decision to abstain and avoid all such entanglements! You can't be Truthful and play the Game of the World. This seems to be what is emerging in these recent posts.

Returning to the most recent situation. After failing with that girl I did my usual and displaced with another - a disaster and she got seriously hurt (happily married now). On the eve of getting things together with her however (tomorrow 8years ago as it happens) I was seated by chance next to the girl in question now, X. She was only 16 but being best friends with Y we already had a rapport and got on very well. It was looking at the pictures from that wedding that I suddenly realised that I had an inexplicable sexual attraction to her. Ouch. Then to cap it she sends an xmas card signed "love x". I'm in trouble. Clearly its all a mistake I'm 15 years older than her and do everything to escape the attraction. I happened to write a short melody (unbeknown to her inspired by her) which I gave to her and stupidly warned her off me on MSN saying that being single I was easily influenced, deliberately double edged cos i wanted to disclose my feelings but couldn't. I realised last night that my decision to leave the temple and also hook up with another girl (disasterously) actually came from this struggle to escape. Anyway 5 years after running she is still single according to Facebook and this has worried me for a while. She was saying a few years ago that she really likes the simple life of non-possessions and monasticism and more recently hardly goes to the temple anymore. I have reconsidered my decision to leave now that she is older, but still think the whole thing a mistake, more particularly because I am trying to escape in general now. Stupidly I pretend texted "i love you" to her to see how it felt - it actually sent and I was faced with the reality. It filled me with horror, the prison door closing, my whole life mapped out in concrete in a single move. I made out it was a text for someone else accidently sent to her... weak excuse and painful... she texted back who's the lucky girl. So I did the right thing avoiding starting a relationship I felt I could not complete. But i wonder whether that influence that I had on her has upset her mother. She is still not in a relationship but the clock is beginning to tick fast for her now - is this my fault? However had I done the honourable thing and married her then I think it would have been equally frowned upon because of the age difference. This is a no-win situation. Another shady side of the worldly world that is best avoided.
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Considering further: "My muse" did get engaged but her sister had a sudden angry outburst one day where she said "oh that relationship! it wasn't going anywhere". "My muse" was a commitment phobe. X and Y are weak. It all works out great for me because I can still taste freedom while exploring into commitment. How often do people in this stream speak of non-attachment and yet secretly seek relationships?

Well unfortunately it seems I can't do non-freedom, it feels like death to me. Like a fish on the beach, or oil sinking in water this just isn't what makes me live. Whatever was with "my muse" or with X or Y has become rather old and stale now. I considered many times getting back in contact but it never works a second time around (even with male friends I have escaped from) - there is always that distrust. The song sheet from which all this was sung from has become too worn and crumpled, it really is not a song I can take interest in anymore. I truly am getting too old for all this. Yet the timing is odd because returning from my holiday last week with my less disciplined "social" self I actually found myself looking at couples playing with their kids and for the first time felt that I could do that. I would be a great dad. But enough to have felt that; that was last week; this week I am returning to the other path - I realised at the same time strict self-discipline and having carefree fun with the family truly cannot mix.

Returning to the blog title: I think that while the self is constructed socially we must transcend even the social to gain liberation. A brief foray into the social shows it up to be pleasant, envigorating and stimulating - but sadly fruitless. For the wedding I had to examine humour and found that actually it is quite easy. I already can talk for England - a gene from my mother's side ;-) - and armed with these being social is easy. I imagine if I entered the dating game again that too would be easy to the point of boredom. The thing is all this doesn't go anywhere - there is no great wisdom to be found at the end of the tunnel of love just the same old questions as the children flee the nest and my partner grows old and dies of why I was born and what it was all about.
I realised as I started Vipassana meditation for the first time yesterday that sensuality was a serious casualty of the relationship with "my muse". Because we never worked out physically I switched that all off. Yet that is essential to experiencing ones own body, regardless of someone elses. My great tantric experiment may have worked with her, but now it is plain old Vipassana and thank God the pains and blockages of that failed path have all but cleared now. The door here is wide open and I close the others.
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Shall blog the next bit as 4 prayers for 4 directions