A search for happiness in poverty. Happiness with personal loss, and a challenge to the wisdom of economic growth and environmental exploitation.
Wednesday, 26 July 2023
Monday, 10 July 2023
Self/Other, annoyance + My Muse
Things we notice are of two types. Thinks we like and are welcome, and things we don't like and are not welcome. Both can stress us as we try to get what we like and push away what we don't like. But when we are getting what we like or pushing away what we don't like it feels good. But when we don't get what we like or get what we don't like it feels bad. Now I think I notice something.
The personal side is irrelevant, but in terms of personal history the very first thing I wrote to My Muse was an experience on a river a few months previous. I had managed to get control of an inflatable mattress my friends and I were messing around with on the river and with an accomplice we just lay there in the Balkan sun and let the river take us where ever it was going. I rolled on my side to watch the water and the river bed sometimes shallow so I could see the rocks on the bottom and suddenly deep crystal turquoise green. Sometimes the river flowed fast and the banks and over hanging trees sped past, at other times we would get caught in a eddy and slowly rotate around a few times until being discharged back into the main current. It was an ever changing journey, unpredictable but not an adrenaline rush--with no white water or anything challenging--just a gentle and engaging conversation with the river, just letting it speak to me and reveal itself in all its unlimited depth and character. The result was being washed over by a sense of deep relaxation and a cooling spiritual connection with the world as if I had walking into the peace a cool of a deep forest within my soul. After the mattress grounded some time later and a few miles down the river we both realised it was probably time we rejoined the others. Let the air out and walked back to the party. But I remained in that inner forest for months afterwards. I wrote to My Muse about this because it was a sense/hope that she knew what I was talking about that originally attracted me to her. I have since learned other names for this and believe its a borderline Jhana, a teetering on the edge of pure mind. we tend to look for this type of thing in the wrong place and I realise thinking I could continue my river journey with her was the biggest and most damaging mistake I ever made.
So now I begin to continue that journey in the most ordinary of places. You do not need to be abroad in the Balkan sun to approach your pure mind. Recently have been enjoying the unpredictable current and eddies of train travel. As a train moves our bodies are subjected to all the jolts and sways of the wheels as they pass over the tracks. If we let ourselves go into this sensations of this journey that is being revealed to us we quickly begin to enter the peace that I found on that river.
BUT sometimes the opposite happens. If we are trying to sleep, or read, or write on a laptop the jolts and swaying can becoming annoying as it interrupts our own processes and wishes. When Isambard Kingdom Brunel decided to make his Western railway so smooth a journey that a champagne glass would not even be upset he had a particular type of customer in mind who expected a particular type of predictability and control. But we when we do not get this we can get quite irritated and upset. So how can something that can give us ultimate peace in one state of mind, give us annoyance and even anger in another?
It is to do with Self. If we analyse the river experience the key was "submitting" to the river. I imagine having a companion on that journey was important because it took away the worry of what might happen. What if we did enter rapids or choppy water? What if we did over turn in dangerous waters? These thoughts have never emerged until now more than 20 year later. There was submission to the river and whatever it wished to reveal, no thought of self. I was ready for whatever was coming, and was listening perfectly. Perhaps when religions talk about Submission to God this is the mind they are talking of. This is the real mind we need in life to be fully present and fully listening to life and existence.
But then we spoil it because we take the self view. This view is trying to sleep on a train that is jolting around. We wish for turning inside and being able to forget about the outside world so we can drift off to sleep. But once we are caught by some jolts breaking into our consciousness we begin to focus on them as hostile and opposing our inner wish. We are doing the exact opposite of submission and are trying to suppress. Trying to suppress closes our heart and traps us within our self and our wishes. You know when this is growing in strength because we begin to battle with the world and resist it on principle. The more the train jolts the more we try and sleep and push it away. I WILL SLEEP we begin to fight for. And if someone tapped us on the shoulder at this moment and said "just relax and give in to the train movement" we would probably attack them and tell them go get lost "Why should I? I am going to win this, stupid train. How dare it upset my wish to sleep" and so get more worked up and ironically as unlikely to sleep as is possible.
SO I speak from experience only yesterday. I had both experiences. I had both the pleasant Submission experience and the unpleasant irritated Wish to Submit experience. The difference is Other. When we self accepts and submits to The Other then we are peaceful. When we self rejects the other and wishes to fight it we are stressed and it is unpleasant. It's as simple as that.
So we are trying to sleep and the train jolting is invading our mind and stopping us. We are incredibly tired we wish to, even need to sleep. We start to get annoyed. Stupid train. Whole load of thoughts now "can't they fix the tracks with all the money I am being charged", "look at the state of the nation" anything to reinforce Myself and My wish, and attack the Other. But its all superficial wins; it feel bad but I won't accept that.
We take stock. Actually we may need to sleep, but we will survive. Its amazing how little sleep you can survive on, its just when you never get a chance to recover that it starts to damage you. You will get a chance to sleep sometime, so do you really need to Fight for a sleep now? So you begin to look at what is annoying you. The sways and jolts of the train. Are they so bad? You look deeper into them. What are they really like? What is so annoying about them? There is another one. My arm is compressed. Then my heads moves. Then we return back. It's not doing me any damage. I am okay. I don't actually need to do anything. I can watch what is going on quite peacefully. Now this is where the switch begins. Once we start to watch what is going on "as it is" and we establish that there is no real danger and we don't actually need to do anything then we can relax and we no longer relate to The Other as enemy. Now those jolts start to feel like caresses or perhaps the work of a masseur. People actually pay money for this type of manipulation. We now feel our body being compressed and manipulated by a friend, or someone we trust and the feeling now switch from stress and anger to warmth and pleasure. This is the feeling of Accepting the Other. I wonder how much of "Love" is a confusion with the feelings of accepting the Other and Submitting the Self to Another. When we trust someone and know they will not hurt us, when we believe they will be faithful and not put someone before us, when the door to them is open then we feel we can submit and that then is the same experience of accepting Other that you can find on a river or on a train.
Now its interesting as far as I can tell when Ajahn Brahm speaks so softly and kindly about absorbing for extended periods into the bamboos at a monastery I believe (tentatively) that this may be the same door into The Other. Resting the self and opening to the Other is the key to Pure Mind.
Now how crazy is that if we think about it discursively. The way to my heart is to go into the Other. It makes no sense! Surely the way to Me is to hold Me and push The Other away?
Well try it. Apparently it does not work like that. Indeed if they way to our soul is through the door of the Other, and we must step over Our-Self and submit to the Other instead it is really no surprise that we get so confused! and our lives are full of so much suffering. Look what I did. True I looked for Another and found My Muse but I did not succeed in fully submitting. What happened is that because there were other men around who were also interested and because from her perspective all this attention was very thrilling I was not able to maintain my submission. It was like submitting to the movement of train, but instead of the train massaging me it seemed to be massaging someone else (literally since physical relationship was the deal here). And that raises a whole new level here.
So on the train I explored this too. At each station people were getting on a filing past me. What started to annoy me were those people who joined the train in one carriage then walked through the train to other carriages. It meant that I was being disturbed not just at stations but between stations too. Like with the train jolting the thoughts begin "what is stopping them walking up the platform first and just getting on the train in the right place rather than getting on carriage 1 and walking through" ... any thought to justify what I want. So I tried the submission thing. But now this is much more complex because when you submit to a "person" you are engaging with an "agent" and someone who really could be hostile. The train is easy. No train actually wants to hurt you or not, it is just a sensation. But a person may actually be hostile. You are annoyed with them, they can be annoyed with you! So submission appears to be much more complex and hindered. Well actually this is as far as I got. Enough live meditation for one day and the train was starting to empty and my objects of observation were getting off.
So how do we deal with this added element of "agency." I don't like or agree with Sartre but he does analyse the experience of a stranger entering a room and how this completely distorts consciousness. But this is a very simple and naïve analysis. It does not need to be like this!
One issue that comes from this is the core question of how "other people" and "myself" occupy the same world. I believe I have some progress on this. To be clear there is ultimately only One World. It is a mistake to think of the world as a foam with loads of bubbles around people; each person seeing a different world. That said this is part true, but it is not the ultimate truth. The Foam is the ultimate truth and there is only One Foam. So then the question if we are all inside bubbles then can we know about The One Foam? Well of course we can because we are each looking at part of The Foam. we are inside a bubble that is part of The Foam. If we reach out and touch the walls of our bubble that is actually part of The One Truth. The problem is that our perspective is just one bubble, and we are not therefore able to see our bubble in relation to other.
Not at the common level anyway. But what is happening when we submit to The Other? When we let go of the The Self that is "inside" the bubble and we instead absorb into The Other then we are actually letting go for that perspective that is "within" the bubble. The world only feels like a "bubble" from the perspective of The Self. When we let go of that perspective and accept The Other then the world becomes less "single bubble like."
There are so many ways to write this. Hinduism is the strongest, but their way is also fraught with danger because the eternal temptation is to take the bubble perspective and hold The Self rather than The Other. Buddhism stamps this our completely by talk of Emptiness and Non-Self. But to other committed to Bubble Existence and Fighting The Other both ways of saying it fall on deaf ears. Scriptures like these just become wall paper for our bubble until we begin to be able to accept The Other in place of Our-Self.
Now saying that can put us into the classic opposition of Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism. We identify Self and Other and we try to submit The Self to The Other. We start "doing good deeds" we start trying to help people, we start sacrificing Our-Self in place of others at its extreme we are Jesus on the Cross dying for the sins of the World which for us is The Other. You have sinned and I will take your suffering.
But it most probably starts wrong because actually to start with this is all just Self. I AM HELPING YOU. I am not submitting at all, I am just directing My Self to take on You. I supress my wishes, I supress myself so I can absorb you. And, this ends up with resentment of The Other. I try to offer food. How often when I am hungry do I not think "why should you get this food, its mine, I want it, I need it." This is because "I" am offering "You" the food. I am not submitting to you, I am experiencing You through Me. At the core is still me and what I do.
And realising just how embedded we are within Our Bubble its easy to see just how badly the many doors to The Other are locked shut.
But the world is not Cruel. The moment we successfully submit we will feel the unlimited joy, happiness and release from being trapped in Our Bubble and this often encourages us to try it again.
But, but, there is a major trap even here. When we feel good about "giving"or "submitting" often its because of an unexpected and brief submission to The Other: we suddenly feel good. And when we analyse that and think "ooo that was nice how do I do it again" we are already on the wrong foot because it was not something "I" did but actually the opposite: it was a moment of submitting to The Other and not Myself for a moment. We are not Enlightened because in our Bubble State it would be the absolute worst thing: we would think we were Gods and untouchable from everything else both Suffering and Other People. What a monster!
So on a more positive note, the goal is simply to look into the Other, observe it and allow it To Be and Let it Be and submit and enjoy that.
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The intersection of sexuality and openness to The Other is quite interesting. Taking a vow of celibacy and rejecting all forms of pleasure could actually hamper access to The Other. Unsure about this, but if the caress of the breath on the nostril is a pleasant experience that opens the door to The Other than what is the difference between the caress of a lover? It seems that there is a sexual response that gets triggered in the latter which leads to a desire for gratification. In the former however "entering" The Other (from a male perspective) is simply the unwrapping of the layers of imposed Self to reveal ever deeper submission to The Other. The parallels between the two are actually quite uncanny. I have not ever resolved this, but perhaps what many people are really looking for in a sexual relationship is better achieved through meditation. And conversely the move to celibacy is actually just shifting from wanting crude external access to Another to the deeper letting go of oneself to enable deeper access and submission to The Other. They are actually not entirely different.
I have certainly heard it said that the Kundalini Energy starts in the basal chakra which is the source of sexual impulse, and through lifting that energy we can access ever more subtle and deeper modes of existence.
So perhaps it is not so surprising that spiritually so often derails into sexuality in its early stages.
Done it: proof that Jewish thinking is limited. Spent most of the day avoiding triggering ChatGPT but it got there.
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