Today I hit my 400 session running streak with Headspace! I’m so glad for the Headspace app and I think it has helped me out quite a lot over the days and days of me using it. It certainly has hammered in the notion that we can let go of the past, live in the present, and not fret about the future.
Here’s for another 400 days!
As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.
The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.
The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.
The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.
The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.
While talking with a friend about meditation and the buddhist idea that the world is occupied with a force called maya, that wants you to stop seeking awareness, and perhaps making an effort towards enlightenment by plying you with distractions. Maya could be summed up as all the things that disturb your meditative awareness. Everything from a ringing phone, a neighbor kid ringing the doorbell, or an itch on your nose that is driving you to distraction. It’s all maya.
Then as part of the conversation, an image from a beloved movie appeared in my head, of the Junk Lady from the movie “The Labyrinth”. She is all hunched over, surrounded by Junk in the Junk Fields where she makes a home, and spends all her time trying to dissuade the purpose of the main character with objects that she once loved. Handing them to the main character one after another, in a rapid succession to confuse and derail the greater effort of the plot in the movie.
The more I think about the Junk Lady, and that whole scene, the more it resonates. That maya is like that. An itch here, a ringing phone there, a screaming cat downstairs, a plane making the house rattle because its too low, or whatever else happens that tries to interrupt your focus on whatever it is you have selected. A word, an emotion, or your breathing. This force is also within as well, the little mind some call it, when you are trying to focus and all of a sudden, because you aren’t doing anything and that is strange and wrong for the little mind, it starts to run around like an agitated monkey, rummaging around and throwing out memories, stray thoughts, whatever it can get its clever little fingers around and bring to the big mind to get it to stop being quiet. Trying to count breaths and before you know it, you’re thinking about pulled pork and BBQ sauce as your stomach gurgles. That is maya, in a nutshell.
Today I’ve meditated 100 times in an unbroken streak!
Hooray!
The smallest things can make the biggest difference. Put aside a few minutes for your mind today.https://hdsp.co/e/6Bi8xjvcvL
I’ve attended a few church services in my days, I go mostly at others requests or because it’s important to go to be kind to others – like funerals and such. Every time I go, it always appears to be a catholic service that I end up attending. As a pagan in a candy-flavored protestant shell the catholic services are hilarious. Mostly I equate catholics with aerobics. Get up, sit down, back up, back down, now kneel! kneel! kneel! Back up! Back down! Quick quick! It’s good for my joints.
I do pay attention to the sermons and to a lot of the crufty stuffings that surround these rituals. The church has a kind of fantastic structure – it’s like ossification. What at one point was very flexible has over time accumulated the calcium of dogma and habit and hardened into an almost mindless progression. It’s structured so durably to argue that if you go frequently, you probably have a church-going reflex established in your nervous system. You hear a certain turn of phrasing and bam, you’re standing upright. That sort of thing.
The sermons however still give a hint of that old flexibility. But even still, much of the sermons I hear orbit the same dull white dwarf star. They seem stuck, constantly beating on a dead horse – the dead horse of sin. It’s something that’s remarkable and fills me with uncomfortable awkward feelings. It’s a preoccupation that has been hashed so much that it’s way beyond cliché. What if the sermon wasn’t about sin but about everything else. Everything but being evil and bad and worthy of only gods punishment. How about a sermon on grace. On tolerance. On feeding a starving person because being a good person feels good. How about if we give satan, hell, sin, and judgement a vacation?
I’ve noticed this and it concerns me, but I keep my mouth shut because the last thing anyone wants when soaking in their dogma is some chatterbox asking awkward questions. There is a problem here though, and it touches on such bombastically goofy concepts like original sin. We are born corrupt and evil, sinful, right from the get-go. Infant sinners. How can anyone win? There is no win condition! There is just this dreadful plodding through life. There is no chance to lose anything because you’re doomed from the start. The catholics and the christians in general would now reflexively vomit up Jesus Christ as their big-red-mystery-button. He died to deliver us all from evil and sin and blah blah blah. I doubt the entire crucifixion story as a inaccurate batch of hokum. Yeah, he got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if we all just got along, but then he died – then they put him away and then he was resurrected and went off in a blaze of glory. That seems too convenient and tidy to me. It’s too neat, too tied up and packaged with the delightful brown-paper wrapper of hope. Dead as a doornail, laid out, prayed over by a handful of believers and then poof! Back to life!
Even medically that seems silly. What’s more accurate? How about if he was in shock from blood loss, maybe in a coma? To someone 2000 years ago, with the medical skills of a sea sponge someone who didn’t move and looked all pale and tragic was obviously dead. He popped back to life, it was his miracle. His last miracle in fact. So, worship this fellow who utterly failed to stay dead. Or, he recovered from shock, recovered from his coma, got up in the middle of the night, and wandered off. I bet he wandered off, claimed he was someone else, and led an entire full life and died of old age with someone he loved, and here’s something that really will freak out christians – he might just as well have had kids. Daddy Christ. Why not? What’s more plausible? That a man dies and then pops back to life and is God on Earth or rather recovers from shock and a coma, wakes up, wanders off, has more of his life story play out and dies of old age?
Now now, don’t upset the christians. They don’t like this sort of talk. What do they like? They like pain. They like doom. They like agony. Talk talk talk all about sin and death and doom and hate and God being disgusted with us and how we should be ashamed for our sentience. What a head trip. And yes, Adam eating the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. If that isn’t a thinly veiled allegory for developing enough awareness to become sentient I don’t know what is. So what’s the point? Stay stupid. Stay asleep. Be ashamed of your sentience. Really, do your level best to bury the fact that you are a vital thinking knowing being and remain in your half-asleep permanent walking slumber. Eat, breed, worship, die. In the end, feel like a wretch for living your life and being told that you won’t ever be worthy – except that if you accept some stranger (yay for Jesus!) into your life, you’ve got that Golden Ticket to Willy Wonkas great chocolate factory in the sky. Talk about endless constant reinforcement. Your only hope is the fellow selling hope by the seashore, he’s Jesus, and he’s everywhere. Except you know, when you are living your life, you act like a beast because that’s what is expected of you. Be mean, brutish, hateful and spiteful. You might as well since you’re a sinner. If there is no talk about being good, no talk about maybe being honestly worthy of God’s love, no freedom from the endless oppression of original sin which is dumped on you at Chruch every Sunday, and the really warped part? You feel guilty for not going! What a knotted pair of knickers this is. You go to be reminded just how awful you truly are, and if you don’t go, you feel guilty for not going – to hear what an awful person you were born as!
Imagine what Church could be like without all this heavy baggage. No hocus pocus, no fairy tales, just a weekly reminder that we are born good, born pure, born innocent. That we should celebrate our sentience and that we should champion enlightenment and seek ascension. That we have an innate ability to transcend wretchedness and awfulness – we can be good people, we can be good to each other, we. can. be. good.
Then before you know it, if you aren’t paying too close attention to how things are unfolding you look up and see that you’ve become a buddhist, or even worse, a jain.
I think the world could use less christianity, less Jesus, less of this oppressive spiritual baggage and more of what comes naturally from within each of us. We don’t have to be awful.
We can be good.
I have reinforced certain habits using the gadgets that I am so fond of using. Specifically the Reminders app that is linked to my Apple ID and my iCloud account. Enter items one place and they are present on all the other devices I use – ta dah! So I have a structure of repeating reminders that I use to structure my workdays – actually my entire life – but lets just go with workdays to make it seem less sad and dependent. I schedule snacks, lunches, even the end of work because when I’m concentrating deeply on something time just flows right on past me. Without alarms and reminders I would be late for everything and I might even forget to attend something important. So my reminder went off today, for my mid-morning snack, which is a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom greek yogurt and so I went into the mailroom here at work where the community fridge is located and as I was walking to get my snack I noticed the mail. Oh! The mail! So I got sidetracked. I got my mail and brought it back to my office. Mostly it was junk, just more meaningless wastes of paper as most mail is these days and I sat back down and got back to work. Then I had this nagging feeling like I had forgotten something and I looked at my reminder list and my snack wasn’t checked off.
I would love to attribute this to anything but what it is. Technology has softened my wits. I’m easily distracted and waylaid and that in itself is just another problem. It’s not age, although I would love to blame it on something like that, but what it comes down to is that technology is a double-edged sword. Sure it enhances life and makes it easier on us, but by doing so, it eliminates the rigor we once had to not forget when we move from room to room. The only real saving grace is that doorways represent really fundamentally important context changes in the human brain that can demonstrably damage items in short-term memory. You can get up, walk out of the office with a fully fleshed out plan and each time you pass a doorway that plan gets hit by a mental tempest. Coworkers stopping you to talk, mail in your mailbox, something going on with the machines in that room that need attention, anything at all can swiftly kill even strongly made plans.
This got me thinking about an imaginary environment, a building made up of doorways, in a long linear arrangement, say 15 rooms. Each room loaded with things designed to distract and confuse. Bright lights, blaring sounds, overstuffed mailboxes, a copier machine spraying paper, a ball-pit filled with brightly colored balls being gently agitated with mystery sounds coming from underneath it, perhaps even animals and clowns, like a circus. People walk in the entrance and as they slowly make their way through the doorways and the distractions erode even the most intensely established mental frameworks. When people reach the exit, they walk away refreshed and emptied. The worries, the concerns, the issues they carried in with them at the entrance are utterly blown away by the simple act of slowly walking through this environment. At the end you could have a nice big lounge filled with soothing music and overstuffed chairs with a really long wall of excellent books that you can pick out and read for as long as you like. Perhaps another room where you can nap. You could bill such a building as a “Mind Wash” and I bet people would pay to be able to enjoy it. All your worries, all your troubles, at least temporarily blown away by all the doorways and all the distractions and then the mood music and lighting and books and napping pads on the floor. 🙂
I was midway through “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book” by Daniel Ingram and decided that I really couldn’t finish reading that book. It wasn’t because the author or what he wrote was difficult to understand or really any concrete reason honestly, however as I was reading there was a mounting feeling that continuing to read the text would somehow damage my recent spiritual explorations. This isn’t the first book that I’ve cracked open on the subject of Buddhism, and it isn’t the last book that I have either slogged through out of some sense that if I start something I really ought to finish it or in the rarest cases, stop reading half-way through.
I’ve also run my toes through other books, most notably some core Zen books that I found free online. I didn’t really get along with Zen either as I didn’t have the chops for it. As I read along with the Zen teachings I discovered that a large part of the foundation of Zen is wound up with cults of personality and pretty hardcore physical abuse. Teachers are pseudo-deities and they are fond of beating their students to a pulp. Uh, no thanks.
So it brought me back to this book by Mr. Ingram. The writing style of the book was very conversational, very colloquial, and around page 140 or so it became exceptionally particular and rather obnoxiously dismissive. What struck me in the earlier chapters was this feeling of threat from this particular book. Not the general threat in the sense that the words were in themselves threatening, but threatening to my own spiritual development. I started to feel a kind of chafing as I was reading about how there were all these steps, and these stages and how everything was so meticulously laid out. It started to upset me, in a very deeply spiritual sense. That any random persons spiritual journey can be laid out with such rigor, such structure really repels me. That people are just machines playing back music and that the music never ever changes from person to person. I suppose I was chafing against dogma, and that dogma was of the core teachings of Buddhism which I don’t necessarily ascribe to. I’m all for the cessation of suffering and a lot of what the Buddha had to teach makes sense, but it’s one thing to see the morality as waymarkers versus seeing the morality as a pair of manacles tied to a chain and led through a machine.
It comes down to reading a buddhism book and not believing in buddhism. I suppose any book and faith could switch places. I have no interest in the Koran because I have no interest in Islam. I have no interest in the Torah because I have no interest in Judaism. And really, why exclude the 800 pound gorilla in the corner? I have no interest in the Bible because I have no interest in Christianity. The big three are stultifying. So rigid, so structured, so planned out. There is no soul in these faiths. Nothing to explore, nothing to discover. Everything is safe, paved, prepared and many of them have little rest areas in which you can get off the road and have a snack. Even as it appears Buddhism is very much like this as it turns out. Everyone reads the texts and then goes about mindlessly following because, really, what else is there? So you learn all these new words and vocabulary and you notice names that ring dim bells in the other texts you have read and over time you come to the stark realization that the author is beating around the bush and in a way, brought on a crisis of faith in a religion that I don’t believe in. For Buddhists it’s all about being and not-being, ultimately the realization of Nirvana by becoming enlightened. It’s all very important sounding but my problem is I know too much about the structure of the Universe. I have more than a passing idea about QM, Brane Theory, M-theory, String Theory, GUT, TOE, the list goes on and on. Ontology and Cosmology and, well, lets face it, I’m too smart for my own good. I’ve dabbled too much. I’ve in a way, seen too much and imagined too much. When I read about the cessation of dualities I can’t help but think of Bohm’s Implicate Order, and when I think of that I think about the potential of living in a holographic universe, which then brings up threads connected to the Everett Interpretation for QM, that each observation causes a split so that every potential possibility is realized. The raging undercurrent of all of it is, that as I read about the experiences this man, Mr. Ingram has with meditation I think about his brain. About how it processes information, so up along with this goes what I know of behaviorism, Jungian analysis, and the real thorn-patch of quantum neurodynamics. So I see all these learned sages going on and on about attaining this and that and getting teachers to teach you this and that and I find myself wondering "Don’t these people know that what they are seeking is actually extending their consciousness into the quantum foam that exists between their synaptic clefts?" And then I imagine David Bohm looking all sternly at me and giving me a ‘tsk tsk tsk’ gesture. If it wasn’t for anything else, I have Tielhard de Chardin on my shoulder like a little angel whispering in my ears about the noosphere. Perhaps Eckhard Tolle is a little devil on the other side, I haven’t made up my mind. But this is what gets me. How can anyone know what another persons spiritual path is going to be? Just because 2500 years of people all referring to each other and repeating each other lends some small credence that there is something worth exploring, there is a part of me that blanches when told that this is how it really is and that in a way I could obtain a map of what is to come and follow it.
I suppose in this sense, following a map is what dogma is all about. If you reject the map, or you don’t follow it, then you should feel bad or foolish because you aren’t doing it right. You aren’t doing it the way 2500 years of much wiser people have done it in the past. And how dare anyone buck a 2500 year tradition? Uh, well, hate to break it to you, but I’m kind of a pain in the ass if you haven’t noticed yet. I’ll ignore 2500 years of learned thinking if it means I get to explore on my own.
And so we get back to faith in a central pillar of spirituality. I knew when I lost my faith in Christianity, when I was 8 in the library of my grandmothers Presbyterian church, that my faith, that my entire spirituality would have to be formed not from things I could find to follow but made up of the experiences of my life. That the only really honest faith, the only true spiritual path I could ever know and feel any amount of strength in would have to spring up from deep within myself. I can’t hear God from without, I have to hear him (or more entertainingly, her) from within. And when I mean God, I don’t mean some objective father(mother) figure in the sky, somehow judging me as I lead my life, but really God as a handle for really what can only be regarded as my own soul. In that way I am a proud secular humanist. Secular in that I reject all faiths, humanist in that the only faith left is whatever I find when I turn my sentience inward. So in a way, coming back to this book, I had to stop reading it because it was pushing me too hard, offering a map, dogma, too strongly.
So I have questions, and the answers I seek seem at least on first glance to shimmer on the horizon like a mirage in front of the Buddhism banner, but then as I approach the mirage falls apart and I find myself wandering around again. Funny how much real human spirituality includes the notion of wandering around in a desert for a very long time. For that we can blame Moses, who apparently needed a map! Getting back to it, the best way for anyone to find, well, actually, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they should do. I know what I should do, and for me, more specifically and clearly, it’s exploration that has to continue forward without structure, without a map, without dogma. So I can’t read that book any longer.
Does that mean I will stop meditation? Absolutely not. There are answers in meditation, I just know it. I can feel it. But like everything in life, nothing comes free and easy. This pursuit will take me probably the rest of my life, but in the end I can sit back and laugh and notice that it was right all along because it was mine. True, it’s a frankensteins monster made up of things I’ve picked up from wiser men than I, but at least it’s my monster. This monster not only sings “Putting on the Ritz” very well, but also dances. I couldn’t very well leave out that reference, now could I?
This also pretty much concludes any other readings or pursuit in the direction of the banner of Buddhism for me. It’s not for me. While I respect Buddhists more than the other faiths, they all are hamstrung in the very same way. Too much structure, too much plan, too much dogma. In a way, when I ask myself “Am I doing it right?” the only honest answer is “Absolutely, because it can’t be any other way.” Now when I say I won’t follow the Buddha it doesn’t mean I won’t raid his tent for neat ideas and shiny bits. I rifled through Jesus Christ’s footlocker, I have no compunction with dashing the Buddhas tent and sorting out his goodies. It’s just, I’m drawing my own map, and I’m drawing it as I walk along, french curves, spirals and mad meandering squiggles all.
Faith is like a fingerprint. No two are alike. Dogma is meaningless because of this one central idea. How can you share what can’t be standardized? What you need is 30 kiloqualms over there. What is a kiloqualm? That’s a silly question! It’s obvious! (to me) 😉
This post was submitted by Mr. David Haas with the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance, he requested that I share it on my blog and I think it’s worth a read.
Yoga- A Good Fitness Choice for Cancer Patients
Most people regard yoga as a form of healthy physical activity. However, yoga is more than mere exercise; it is both a practice and a philosophy. Originating in ancient India, yoga requires physical, mental and spiritual discipline. It is usually associated with the meditative rituals of Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions.
Commonly practiced around the world for centuries, yoga is growing in popularity across the United States. It has numerous health benefits, not only for healthy individuals but for those battling cancer. Some doctors and fitness trainers consider yoga ideal for people going through aggressive cancer treatments or entering cancer recovery programs.
A Good Cancer Fitness Choice
Yoga is an excellent low-impact activity for patients in all stages of cancer. It is gentle on the body and beneficial for the mind. In fact, yoga is at the cutting-edge of mental health. It relieves emotional and physical stress, provides mental clarity and promotes general well-being. All of these things work together to help patients win their battle with cancer.
Patients going through conventional treatments can use yoga to increase energy and combat fatigue and other treatment side effects. For those battling difficult cancers like mesothelioma or pancreatic cancer, yoga is a wonderful palliative treatment.
Many patients find it hard to endure treatments for mesothelioma and other advanced illnesses, and vigorous exercise is usually out of the question. Gentle stretches in bed may be all they can handle at first. When they are ready to move beyond stretching or short walks down the hall, yoga is a good fitness choice.
What is Yoga?
Many cancer treatment programs integrate yoga regimens with traditional therapies like surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy. Yoga is a form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, a holistic practice.
According to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, numerous findings suggest that yoga improves life quality issues for survivors of breast cancer and other diseases. While it cannot cure cancer, yoga is beneficial for those enduring pain or discomfort. Less pain means a better life, with more time for loved ones, things and experiences.
Yoga emphasizes certain physical postures and positions. As a result, people often regard the practice as exercise. However, the term “yoga” literally means “union.” Both the practice and philosophy of yoga seek to create oneness by uniting the body, mind and spirit.
Yoga’s Value for Cancer Patients
Due to yoga emphasizes fitness as well as self-reflection, it can be quite valuable for patients who face treatments for mesothelioma, breast cancer, skin malignancies and other tumors. Physical and mental health is essential for fighting cancer, and yoga helps patients maintain a healthy body and mind.
Like other alternative therapies, the type and intensity of yoga vary from person to person. Patients who choose to incorporate yoga into their cancer fitness programs should talk to their doctor first. Yoga requires fairly good physical health to begin with, so patients should verify their health status with their doctor. Upon approval, patients should search for a qualified yoga instructor in their area. Instructors can show patients the proper techniques for the most benefits.
While actively pursuing the design I’ve had to make meditation a part of my daily routine I’ve been looking online to see what is out on the Internet when it comes to meditation. What I half-heartedly wished I’d see is clear resources on how to get started and free information, perhaps even courses that people could sign up for if they wanted. There are lots of resources online, including Wikipedia, which I quite enjoy. Much of the basic information is useful but many of the links on the first page of Google seem to orbit this semantic space that I like to characterize as ‘freaky eastern shazam’. It’s very reminiscent of the sites you run into when investigating anything that isn’t mainstream in the west. Reading about Tea leads you to bombastic hyperbole about all the health benefits of tea. Reading about Reiki leads you to similar bombast, Feng Shui, Buddhism, and really what this particular blog post is about, Meditation. All these topics have collected the flotsam and jetsam of bombastic hyperbole around them. A lot of ooohing and aaahing and almost always there is some old crusty personality featured that is an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ that is supposed to lend the topic seriousness. It’s as if western thought is a nightclub and the only way to get beyond the bouncer is to have some sort of elderly expert you can name-drop which will unhook the red velvet ropes and let you in.
Specifically what I ran across that kind of upset me is the site for Transcendental Meditation. Now I have nothing against them at all, no real complaints or critiques to speak of, as they seem to be pleasant and upstanding people. What I do find rather irksome is once you click beyond all the chrome shiny you get to the brass beneath it all. I’ve noticed this quite a lot, this sense of having to pay to be taught, that ‘tuition’ costs some rather pricey sum that somehow justifies a buying-sight-unseen product which may or may not be for you. I’ve hashed this very thing out with the people who follow Reiki, and here we see it again, except for meditation. The cost is $1500! But because Oprah and her cult-of-personality is “underwriting” a portion of the wares that tm.org sell, they’re willing to lower the price to $975!
Selling what should be a basic part of human living strikes me as wrong. It’s upsetting. Everyone should be encouraged to explore their consciousness. They should be willing to explore the many porticos and hallways to their awareness and realize that it’s more than just being on and off, being awake and asleep, being active and maybe-I-dream-but-I-don’t-remember. I’ve gone exploring and there is more here that people should be curious about and explore along with me. So I see these sites and I note the cost and it strikes me with an almost angry emotional sense that something that is an inborn and fundamental part of living should be for sale. Everyone experiences meditative states at least briefly every single day of their lives. I maintain (alas have no empirical proof) that everyone passes through the state that I feel when I meditate right after they leave REM sleep and right before their first conscious thought which is almost always some sort of planned movement, to get up off the bed. If you bring on this particular state with your full awareness intact during the day and stay in that place for a time, it changes you for the better. There is something here that is good for people and I can feel it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it to be right.
There is a counter-argument that is usually made, especially by Reiki professionals who state that the cost is high so that people take it seriously. That in a way, the only way to impress upon a western mind that something is worthy of pursuit you must first make them pay for it, which in a way compels them to make it feel serious because otherwise it’s just a waste of money and wasting money is taboo. The mental garden path runs, “Well, I paid $1500 for this, so I should get my monies worth…” and I find this entire notion to be embarrassing. Shouldn’t you want to do something that may be good for you from your own values, for your own good? Why should money enter into it? Then again, I did pay over $15,000 for a “college education” so upon reflection, I’m as much of a guppy as these yokels paying $1500 for someone to teach them meditation. In many ways I think about the time I spent in college and what I got out of that experience. Was it about the “higher education” that stayed with me, or is it something else? It would be crass to basically state that I paid $15,000 for a beautiful piece of paper which I’ve never shown another living soul, but entitles me to letters that I get to tack on to my name, which nobody ever does because the letters B.A. are so common as to be meaningless. Perhaps what I got out of college wasn’t what I went there for, but for all the other things that happened to me while I was there. All the other things I did, the growing up, the learning, and none of it was done in a classroom. I try to remember anything I learned in a classroom for my college education and I can’t recall anything beyond a vague impression of stadium-style seating.
But what I can do now is explore without having to pay someone to teach me. At least in this I can do this on my own. I don’t need someone to hand me any paperwork I won’t ever really use. Because meditation is an inherent skill, and a ‘college education’ isn’t, then that may be the justification I use to both criticize tm.org for selling out and why I sold out to the SUNY college system in New York. The basis is flimsy, but it is something at least.
So what does it take to meditate? It seems straightforward to me, and I strip away the religious claptrap that surrounds the act, if you want to take meditation and clothe it in a religious context that’s fine and up to you. The basics as far as I consider them is to exercise your will and carry your full awareness into a state of consciousness without thoughts. The parts of the brain can be resistant to this because while we are conscious we pretty much are just an endless stream of thoughts and this is the problem. You are more than a stream of thoughts and meditation helps you explore what existence is without this constant stream of thinking. I find that concentrating on breathing is perfect. It’s something you absolutely must do at all times or you will die, so you might as well use it as a tool to manipulate your consciousness. I’ve found that concentrating and centering all my will and awareness on my breathing, the feeling of breathing is all that I need. I notice that my mind wanders off of breathing and the further I go the more unusual ‘junk’ gets thrown up and occurs to me. It’s just as if the thinking parts of me know I’m trying to quiet them and they don’t want to ever shut up, so they try to sabotage me. While I sit calmly trying to meditate my thinking mind, in a panic to keep me from leaving, digs up the scent of WD–40 and the embrace of my maternal grandfather. I’m sure if I were to anthropomorphize my thinking parts it would run something like this: “WHAT!?! You cannot leave me! I’ll fix you! Here, here’s a memory of your grandfather! See! You can’t live without me!” Throughout the entire experience I have discovered that trying to suppress these intrusive thoughts only encourages them to pop up, just like raising the heat on a pan of popcorn kernels. The more heat, the faster they pop. Instead of actively suppressing them, the key I’ve found is to apply my will to let go of whatever it is and calmly return to breathing. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. In the end however, if I have enough time and willpower I can cross a barrier and as I’ve written about before, it feels like a different region of consciousness. The popcorn thoughts no longer appear and everything is serene, calm, and quiet in the most important place of all, inside my own mind.
So, why spend $1500, or even $975 if something like this can be explored and developed by sitting someplace comfortable, closing your eyes, and breathing? I think more people would enjoy it if they tried it. As I’ve characterized it before, it’s ineffable. There really aren’t words to convey what the feeling is, wonderful and magnificent and delightful don’t really touch the nature of what this space in your consciousness is. The only thing that really upsets me is that I’ve been carrying this around with me for 36 years and only now have taken it seriously. Instead of bemoaning the lost time I am going to make it a part of the life that remains to me because this is really really good.