meditation

WHO IS “YOU?”

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Don’t tell me about the person on your CV. Or the person you claim to be online in a search for love, or what passes for it. Try not to be selling some version of yourself when you answer. You’re alone in your house or apartment with no buyer in sight. So we’re talking about the real “you” here.

It’s a question that can easily arise during these days of solitary sequestration. What judgments are you making about what your “self” is doing, or not doing, during this time?  Where did those judgments come from? Are they really yours? How much are you still looking at whatever world is left to you within your four walls, including yourself, through someone else’s eyes?  Your goals, your ambitions, your needs, your guilts – were they, are they, really yours?

By telephone, I asked an old friend in Massachusetts — holed up with wife, two sons and a son’s girlfriend, in other words not someone in the ideally solitary situation for consideration of my inquiry.   “If you were an onion,” I said. “And we could peel away all the layers reflecting your reactions and defenses to life experiences, including experiences with other people – what would be at the core?” A bad metaphor to use with this particular friend. At the moment, he’s cooking all the meals for five full-grown people.  No surprise that he parried, “Not much to cook with! I’d need another onion!”

So forget onions.  I still think it’s a good question to ponder though, now that we have the time. Almost like a daily mini-psychotherapy session on your own couch. Or an hour at your desktop with “Clean My Mac X.” And if you arise from couch, or desk chair, somewhat liberated, or cleansed, of layers of self-judgment or other gunk that’s been weighing you down and/or slowing you up, then maybe this coronavirus lockdown thing will turn out to have been good for whoever “you” is, as well as for the rest of us.

 

 

 

SMALL PLEASURES

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Sasha in the sun.

You learn a lot cooped up with a cat.  Even when you think there’s nothing to do, she’ll find something for both of you. Like enjoying a shaft of sunlight in the apartment house hall. Or — if you can’t easily get down on the floor — enjoying the sight of her.

 

MEDITATION ON FLOWERS

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I bought myself some flowers...to cheer myself up..I was the one who bought them. It wasn’t an impulse purchase.  Last Sunday afternoon, I deliberately walked to the flower shop a few blocks away.  So how could this large arrangement of fresh flowers feel so wrong when unwrapped and on the coffee table?

I never used to buy myself fresh flowers. Before Bill, I was working in downtown Boston all the time, and nowhere near a florist. I certainly could have picked up reasonably priced bunches of multi-colored flowers at my suburban supermarket on weekends just before checking out with a cart of groceries. But they somehow always looked unreal to me, and cheap.  Besides, when would I have enjoyed them, or even have had time to change the water? I always seemed to be at the office.

 Afterwards, it was Bill who brought them home.  Always for birthdays and holidays,  more often for no reason at all.  In fact, it was unusual for there not to be a clear glass vase of fresh flowers on the coffee table in the family room where we spent most of our time when downstairs.  (The clear glass was my choice; I disliked opaque containers for fresh flowers.)  When they began to wilt, my frugal tendency would have been to nurse them along a little longer. He would insist on throwing them out. Then he would add “Buy flowers” to his daily list of things to do.

 He especially loved sunflowers.  If they were out of season, he chose lilies, preferably yellow or orange ones.  He never really spent a lot. Three stems, or even two, would do for him, with as much greenery as he could persuade the lady florist to throw in for free. (He had a way with ladies.)  When very occasionally persuaded to bring home roses because they were more romantic, they were yellow.

 My favorite color is red.  (You can see it in the chairs we bought together.  He chose the designs, I chose the reds.)  This made for a certain amount of mild dispute about flowers.  Once he did yield: a dozen red roses on my birthday.  I received them with great enthusiasm, hoping to encourage repeat performances.  No such luck, even though I generally expressed somewhat less warmth than he would have liked for all the yellow, or orange, or yellow and orange it fell to me to arrange in one of our two clear glass vases.

 As for the sunflowers, when we began life together they were my special bête noir.  I had never liked the ubiquitous Van Gogh that shows up in all surveys of French nineteenth century painting. And I particularly disliked the large brown centers and short little petals of the sunflowers themselves. They just didn’t look flowerlike to me.

 Unfortunately, at various times — either before he met me or surreptitiously afterwards — Bill had acquired about twenty stems of artificial sunflowers. They were to tide him over, I suppose, during those periods when there was a dearth of live ones.  Some were close replicas of the real thing, down to the big green leaves.  Others, more fanciful, were white and red, as well as yellow, with larger-than-real petals and colorful smallish centers.  He also had a secret cache of objets d’art in the depths of his large office closet, from which he produced three containers in which to put nine of the fake sunflowers. (Three, three, and three.)  These, after much discussion, found their way into our bedroom, to the top of the piano, and onto a sill in his office. Some of the others   appeared in the finished basement in still other containers I’d never known he had, although we’d been together for over eight years at that point.  The remainder of his sunflower stash I found thrust into the back of that capacious office closet when I was staging the condo to sell it; they were still waiting their chance to come into the light.

 It should come as no surprise I kept them all after he died.  Death changes the value of everything.  In retrospect, I was sorry I’d made a fuss about them.  It wasn’t such a big fuss, but still.  How much I would rather have had him back with all his nutsy sunflowers, actual and artificial, than live alone in a sunflower-free apartment!

 Bill’s fake sunflowers are therefore flourishing again at Windrows. Three sit in my office window:fullsizeoutput_c08 Three are on the bureau next to what I still think of as “his” side of the bed:Bill's sunflowers in the Windrows bedroomThree of the most fake adorn the all-purpose table in what the Windrows architect  designated as the “dining” area:fullsizeoutput_c0a The rest are stuffed into a red (yes!) vase that sits in the living-room window:fullsizeoutput_c0c But even with all the manmade sunflowers artfully placed here and there, up until last week my “new” apartment (not so “new” anymore) still had no fresh flowers in it, if you don’t count the two white orchids given to me on my most recent birthday by people I’ve met only in the last year. Yes, I put the orchids on my living-room windowsills away from direct sun, and yes, I keep them going, as recommended, with three ice cubes in each pot once a week. But to me they’re something else:fullsizeoutput_c0fArt objects maybe. fullsizeoutput_c0eNot what I think of as “fresh flowers” though.  And what’s a home without real flowers?

 About some things I’m quick.  About others not. A while ago, during a burst of sporadic early morning exercise, I passed Monday Morning, an upscale flower shop in Forrestal Village a few blocks from where I live. In the window sat a huge water bucket crammed with bunches of large-faced sunflowers, their big brown living centers turned avidly in the direction of the sun.  $7 a bunch. Instead of going right into the shop as Bill would have done, I walked on by, with a smile of course – thinking how he might have run amok inside and bought two or three bunches.  (One summer he gave my older son a dozen huge sunflowers in thanks for having invited us to visit in Southampton. It was hard to find a vase large enough to accommodate them all in the rented summer house.)

 It took me two weeks of staring at the empty surface of the black glass table in front of the sofa. That was two weeks too many. By then only a few bedraggled sunflowers with little faces remained drooping in a small bucket at the back of Monday Morning, far from sun. Poor sunflowers. (I know: pathetic fallacy.)  And now they were priced at $5 a stem, a deal breaker.

 But I had come out for flowers and I’m stubborn. So what did they have in the big window water bucket this week? There was a twenty dollar bill and a credit card in the back pocket of my jeans and I wasn’t going back with nothing.

 What they had, in more than one bucket, were bunches of red blooms that looked to me sort of like petunias but weren’t. That tells you how much I don’t know about flowers. Almost everything looks like petunias to me. Except sunflowers and lilies and orchids. (And pansies and daisies and carnations: I know what they look like too.) There were also bunches of carnations in all colors, including not only red, but yellow and white and red-rimmed cream.  And also many bunches of greenery, some in thick-leaved silvery green, others with dark green spikes and feathery fronds. $10 a bunch; 3 bunches for $20. All very fresh and perky.

“What color do you like?” asked the saleswoman, closing in for the kill.  “Her chairs are upholstered in red,” said a Windrows acquaintance helpfully; she had come out with me for the walk to Monday Morning and was now putting in her two cents.

I kept eyeing the yellow carnations. “Can I mix yellow with red?” Bill had always said you can mix anything with anything, and I always disagreed.  Except now death had intervened.  “Not really,” declared the saleswoman decisively, ending discussion.  “Try these.”  She pulled from the water a bunch of red-rimmed white carnations and pressed them against the bunch of dripping wanna-be red petunias she was already holding.

“Isn’t that nice?” she asked rhetorically.  “It will go perfect with your furniture.”  Really?  What did she know?  But it did make a third bunch of the spiky greenery free. And the greenery might help the flowers.  And the carnations were a kind of orange.  If you squinted.  I wielded the credit card, the acquaintance peeled off for a cup of coffee,  I walked back to Windrows alone with a tissue-wrapped armful.  Literally an armful.

 Which meant I now needed a very large glass vase. There was one, at the back of a high kitchen cabinet, which had come into my possession fifteen months before, when Bill died. It then contained an expensive condolence arrangement.  Bill wouldn’t have liked this vase, even if condolences on his death had nothing to do with it.  It was beyond large, and had a “fancy” shape.  As I trimmed each stem and placed it in the vase, trying to mix red-rimmed carnations with red mystery flowers, I knew the whole enterprise had been a mistake.  Why had I bought so many? Why had I listened to a saleswoman who didn’t know what was in my heart? Did I even know what was in my heart? What was it I really wanted? By the time I had forced the spiky greens in around the edges, and placed the completed arrangement in the center of the black glass table (see top of post), I was hating it.

 Maybe it would look better if I sat on the sofa?  Not really.  fullsizeoutput_bedHow could I make it look the way fresh flowers used to look on the family room coffee table before Bill died?   I moved the vase off center and considered:

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(Sophie had no aesthetic opinions to contribute here. However, as I had awakened her with all my fussing, she was plainly planning to taste the flowers when I finally went away and left her in peace. As there’s never any way I can stop her from doing most of what she wants to do, and since I was already disheartened by my purchase, I had no problem with her plans.)

The table was just too bare.  In the condo, there used to be a large shiny black ceramic bowl that looked like a giant ashtray on each of our two coffee tables, one of them next to the glass vase that held the fresh flowers of the week. The bowl in the family room had a bright yellow inside surface and the one in the living room a bright red inside surface. Occasionally Bill would switch them around — “temporarily,” he said — to see if they looked better that way. I didn’t really care which was in which room as I privately thought they were both extremely unattractive (although clearly some designer’s idea of decorative “art”) and hoped for a long time, without success, that they would fall out of favor when Bill acquired something new that needed table space.  It goes without saying I got rid of them both when downsizing.  Now my eye was missing them.  Why hadn’t I kept at least one?

What I had kept were two small black bowls of his — partly because they didn’t remind me of ashtrays but mostly because they didn’t take up much space. One was lime green inside, the other orange.  I put the orange one next to the oversize vase of red and red-rimmed flowers and pushed it around a bit until it seemed to settle itself on a diagonal to the vase.  It was much smaller than the shape in my memory, but it was all I had. Maybe with Bill's orange dish near it?To cover more table top, I added a third object — my black-bound Kindle, representing the piles of books that used to accumulate wherever Bill was sitting.

A little more mess? And the flowers pulled up higher?

Then I pulled the flowers out of the vase as far as I could — to give them air and free them up a bit.

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Bill would have said, “Enough already.  Leave it.  It’s fine.” And he’d have been right. This was as good as I could do. Let’s face it: I’m neater than Bill ever was.  I can’t leave messes of books and papers around, even to simulate the feeling that he’s still here.  My books are on shelves, my papers in files, magazines in magazine racks.  I was ying, he was yang.  Or vice versa.  That’s why our flowers looked the way they did. And why mine look like this now that he’s gone.

The bottom line here?  When these have lived out their natural life, I’m buying more. No one’s going to talk me into red ones next time. I’m going for yellow. Not necessarily sunflowers, although I’m not ruling that out. And definitely not too many, even if “many” is a bargain.  They’re going to have to fit into one of my own two much smaller rectangular glass vases.

Next time I’ll also know that buying flowers, even yellow ones, won’t be like bringing him back for a while, or making the place where I live like home.  It’s just as close as I can come to it. And that’s something.

 

 

THE RETURN OF NOW

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[If TGOB was ever read by more than a couple of isolated souls in Finland, it got by WordPress.  Finland is definitely not one of the non-Anglophone countries whose flag I ever expected to see more than once every three or four months, if that, on the stats page. France, Italy, Greece — yes. Even (rarely) Norway, Denmark and Azerbaijan. But Finland?

Until about ten days ago. Suddenly, a flurry of interest from one or more Finns!  Thirty-three Finnish views in an hour!  For me, drifting along in the quiet backwaters of the blogosphere, thirty-three views per hour from non-followers is a lot.  And from just one country? Mind you, this was not simply Finnish attention to the current post. “My” Finns (if I may call them that) were scouring the past, in some instances going back to the blog’s early months.  

Naturally I went back, too — to see what was so interesting back there in TGOB’s babyhood.  It wasn’t “Roger Angell On Life In His Nineties,” the all-time most viewed piece I ever posted.  Or “My First Bra(s),” ever-popular in hot countries where by religious or cultural edict women tend to be all covered up.  No, it was a brief bagatelle from sixteen months ago called “Now Is All There Is.”

I cannot explain the particular appeal of this post to Finnish sensibilities. Nor do I recall that it was such a big hit anywhere when it first appeared. It just came, and then it went. But it’s still all true, or mostly true.  The part about my being unable to meditate has been somewhat addressed this year by forming a meditation group. If you form a group, the group expects you to be there to lead it.  I can therefore truthfully say that as of May 29, 2015, I am sitting down with four other people to meditate for at least thirty minutes once a week. That’s a kind of progress, isn’t it?  Whether or not I’m able to remain in the now for the full thirty minutes before the gong sounds and we all open our eyes I leave to your imagination.  I might also add we’ve temporarily abandoned breakfast oatmeal for a smoothie made in the VitaMix, consisting of baby spinach, blueberries, and Mango-Banana Skyr  — the Skyr a sort of Iceland buttermilk, now replicated in the US. But who knows how long that will last?  Bill is already complaining it seems rather “thick.”

The Finns have now departed from my stats, having apparently read everything of interest to them.  Nonetheless, I still like “Now Is All There Is,” which is probably what matters most.  So with a tip of the hat to the good people of Finland, here it is again.  Better read it now (if you’re going to read it at all) before now becomes then.]

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NOW IS ALL THERE IS

Let’s look at another way of approaching “Now is now.” It’s my first principle for getting better at getting old, or getting better at getting older than you are today. [To see them all, revisit “My Twelve Principles for Getting Better at Getting Older,” posted on January 1, 2014.]

In reframing this concept less philosophically, I’ve somewhat paraphrased the Beatles, or at least their rhythm, in hopes that swiping the beat of their song about a four-letter word starting with “L” may help you remember what’s important here. Just hear them in your head when you say “now is all there is” aloud. Listen to the slowly fading sound of their blended voices singing together, and then dying away at the end: Now is all there is, now is all there is, nowisallthereis….

Now is all there is is worth remembering — whether or not you do think love is all you need — because now is all there is. All you and I ever have is now. By the time tomorrow gets here, it’s now. Now also becomes yesterday before you can say “Jack Robinson” if you’re not keeping a close eye on it.

Minimizing the amount of time I spend not keeping a close eye on now has always been a big problem for me. I don’t mean just that I fail to admire the sunset when it appears, or that I don’t pause long enough to enjoy the sight of little birds coming to the feeders filled with black-oil sunflower seed that hang off our kitchen porch. I mean I have a really hard time staying firmly in my own life — right now, this very day, this very minute. I am almost always off in a daydream, a reminiscence, a strategy, someone else’s story, fictional or not. Sometimes, I’m even away from now when driving, which is a very big no-no. I also occasionally waste now by wondering how it will be when I’m dead and there’s no more now for me (even though I know perfectly well that when I’m dead there won’t be anything at all for me, much less a now) — because being truly dead is something I cannot conceive of! How can I possibly not be? How can there be a time when I won’t know how it will be to not be?

When you don’t stay in the now, you can get really far out of it.

And don’t tell me about meditation. I have tried it in groups, and at Kripalu with a friend, and on my own with Bill and a timer to tell us when it’s time to stop. The meditating mind — at least mine, the only mind of which I can knowledgeably speak — is, as they say, an unruly horse. I don’t do well with a verbal mantra, but closing my eyes and following my breath as it moves in and out of the nostrils feels good and is calming, so I do that. Until I discover I’m not doing that anymore but thinking about something else entirely. Which is probably after about two minutes, but I can’t tell for sure because I’m not supposed to open my eyes to look at the timer. Then I try to rein in my unruly horse and start again.

I was never on a real horse but once in my life. [You see how my mind is wandering away from meditation towards mares and stallions here?] It was a small horse, a very brief experience, and on all counts — except falling off, which I did not do because the trail guide was holding me — a failure. Maybe that partially explains my poor results with meditation. But I don’t think so. It’s just me. Also my choice of partner. Bill is usually willing to meditate, but also usually falls asleep before the timer rings.

Now perhaps you understand why I say “now is now” is not a resolution, even though it’s a principle. For me to resolve compliance would be to fail. On the other hand, to keep it in mind (as best I can, haha) does move me along in the right direction.

But now I have to go make oatmeal. It’s almost noon and we haven’t had breakfast yet. I used up breakfast time writing this for tomorrow (which is now today) and now it’s time for (yesterday’s) lunch. Oatmeal for lunch? Why not?

I hope all this about now has been helpful. If not, don’t sweat it. Now it’s history. Go appreciate now somewhere else. And try to get that Beatles beat out of your mind. It’s so yesterday.

MEDITATION CONTROVERSY: PLEASE BUTT IN!

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[A little more than two weeks ago, I posted a piece about meditation which included a long quotation from Jack Kornfield, founder of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and a renowned leader of Vipassana meditation in the United States. The general response to such a long TGOB piece was quite gratifying.  However, it seems I remain Pandora after all these years. I could not leave well enough alone and sent the post through email to the most difficult (although rewarding) WordPress blogger of whom I am aware — William Eaton of Montaigbakhtinian. I’m not sure what I was expecting.  Perhaps no more than a “Thank you” by return email. 

It’s not entirely apt to say curiosity killed the cat, but my curiosity in this instance produced a lengthy comment on the blog post itself. Never one to let another have the last word if I can help it, I had to reply. Alas, the last word was not yet in sight.  A week later, my reply received a reply of its own, even lengthier than its author’s first comment. By the time I had a free moment to reply to the reply to my reply to William’s original comment, more than two weeks had elapsed since the original post, and between us we had produced a juicy intellectual to-do  — I call it “controversy,” he calls it “dialogue” — which no one other than the two of us will probably read because it’s slipped down too far below subsequent TGOB posts of a lighter, more accessible nature.

And so I present for your reading pleasure (or pain), the selection by Kornfield which many of you have already seen (and can therefore skip if you have), followed by the Eaton/Mishkin skirmish.  I’ve not included again the gracious comments on the original post from Gerard Oosterman, PreciousPen1955, Helena Sorensen, ShimonZ, Nancy and HilaryCustanceGreen, since they were all peaceable.

This will be somewhat heavier going than you’re used to on TGOB, but please slog on to the end if you can, and then speak up!  Participate! Help make it a free-for-all, fun-for-all posting experience, even though it’s already running 4194 words!]

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WHY MEDITATE?

by Jack Kornfield

Here is a story told about the Buddha shortly after he was enlightened. As he was walking down the dusty road he met a traveler who saw him as a handsome yogi exuding a remarkable energy. The traveler asked him, “You seem very special. What are you? Are you some kind of an angel? You seem inhuman.” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of god then?” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?” “No,” he replied. “Well, are you a man?” “No.” “Then what are you?” At this the Buddha answered, “I am awake.” In those three words — “I am awake” — he gave the whole of Buddhist teachings. The word “buddha” means one who is awake. To be a buddha is to be one who has awakened to the nature of life and death, and who has awakened and freed one’s compassion in the midst of this world.

The practice of meditation does not ask us to become a Buddhist or a meditator or a spiritual person. It invites us to fulfill the capacity we each have as humans to awaken. The skill of becoming more mindful, and more present, and more compassionate, and more awake is something we may learn sitting on a meditation cushion, but this capacity for awareness helps in computer programming, playing tennis, lovemaking, or walking by the ocean and listening to life around you. In fact, to awaken, to be really present, is the central art in all other arts.

What is that which we can awaken to? We awaken to what Buddhists call the dharma. Dharma is the Sanskrit and Pali word that refers to the universal truths: to the laws of the universe and the teachings that describe it. In this sense, finding the dharma is quite immediate. It is the wisdom that is always present to be discovered.

It is different than waiting for God to come down to us in a cloud of glory, or a big spiritual enlightenment, or a wonderful, otherworldly experience. The dharma of wisdom, what we can awaken to, is the truth that is right where we are when we let go of fantasies and memories and come into the reality of the present. When we do that and pay careful attention, we start to see the characteristics of the dharma in the very life in which we live.

One of the first characteristics of the dharma that shows itself in meditation is impermanence and uncertainty. “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world,” it says in one Buddhist sutra. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a rainbow, a phantom, and a dream.” The more quietly you sit, the more closely you observe, the more you realize that everything you can see is in a state of change. Ordinarily, everything we experience seems solid, including our personality, the world around us, our emotions, and the thoughts in our mind. It is like watching a movie; we can get so caught up in the story until it seems real, even though it is actually made of light flickering on a screen. And yet if you focus very carefully on what you are seeing, it is possible to see that the film is actually a series of still pictures, one frame after another. One appears, and then there is a slight gap, and then the next one appears.

The same thing is happening in our lives. Because that is so: nothing in our lives lasts or stays the same for very long. You do not have to be a very adept meditator to see that everything is changing all the time. Have you been able to get any mental states of any kind to last very long? Is there anything in your life that stays the same?

This brings us to dharma’s second law. If we want things that are always changing to stay the same to get attached to them, we get disappointed, we suffer. Not because we should suffer — this is not something created to punish us. It is the very way things are, as basic as gravity. If we get attached to something staying the way it is, it does not stop changing. Trying to hold onto “how it was” will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

So when we start to see the laws of nature — that things are impermanent, that attachment causes pain — we can also sense that there must be some other way. And there is. It is the way that can be called “the wisdom of insecurity.” This is the ability to flow with the changes, to see everything as a process of change, to relax with uncertainty. Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change. Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. We realize that gain and loss, praise and blame, pain and pleasure are part of the dance of life, given to each of us, born into our human body. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

When we ask, “What is the nature of the body?” we can see that it grows up, it grows old, it gets sick sometimes, and it eventually dies. When we sit to meditate, we can directly feel the state of our body, the tensions we carry, the level of tiredness or energy. Sometimes being in our body feels good, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it is quiet, and sometimes it is restless. In meditation we sense that we do not actually own our bodies but rather we just inhabit them for a short time, and during that time they will change by themselves, regardless of what we want to happen. The same is true for our mind and heart, with its hopes and fears, the grief and joy. As we continue to meditate, we learn to relate more wisely to what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.” Instead of fearing painful experiences and running away from them, or grasping after pleasant experiences hoping that somehow by holding onto them they will last, we come to realize our heart has the capacity to be present for it all, to live more fully and freely where we are. When we realize that everything passes away, not only the good things but the painful things as well, we find a composure in their midst.

….You can learn that you do not have to fear that which is painful and you do not have to grasp for that which is pleasant. We have often been conditioned to believe this way, but as we meditate, it quickly becomes apparent that grasping for what is pleasant or fearing things that cause us pain does not lead to peace, and it does not lead to happiness. The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

Instead, in meditation we discover a natural, open-hearted, and non-judgmental awareness of our bodies and our feelings. We can gradually bring this kind and open awareness to witness all that’s in our minds. We learn to see and trust the law of impermanence — this means we begin to see the world as it is really is. In the midst of it all, we begin to see how we can relate to all of it with compassion, kindness, and wisdom.

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[Now here are the four comments this post is about. Take courage in hand and speak up!]

WILLIAM EATON
Thanks for calling my attention to this, Nina. And best of luck with your group meditation!

That said, I must be my curmudgeonly self (and while noting that I have meditated off and on for going on 40 years now, and I’m now trying a new technique that I devised on my own). My curmudge is this: I was happy with the lines from Kornfeld and the Buddha when they were about being “awake.” And trying to be awake then might involve reading Marx or Freud (or working with a good psychotherapist), or many, many other, diverse actitivities.

But then I get to Kornfeld’s “Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change.” And all the stuff after that about letting go, being non-judgmental and accepting. This does not seem to have much to do with awake-ness, but rather with managing the many enraging aspects of life and managing them in a way that does not involve expressing one’s anger (something that is now taboo). Perhaps someone would say, in our rapidly changing, impersonal world, it is better to learn how to not get too bent out of shape by change than to be “awake.” That I can at least understand. But awakeness, in my book, involves recognizing that change (and mortality and consciousness and our inter-dependence) does indeed bend us out of shape!

I remember going to a yoga class on a Friday evening, and the young teacher proposed that we students begin by letting go of everything that had happened during the past week (i.e. all the “bad stuff,” the enraging stuff). That pretty much ended my yoga career (which had been offing and on-ing for 25 years or so). What did letting go of the bad stuff, the enraging stuff, have to do with being awake? It had more to do with being asleep, with not paying attention to the lives we are living, in which, of course, there is plenty of bad stuff and good (and unclassifiable).

I have also been, since adolescence, an off-and-on attender of Quaker meeting. Here’s another religion that, unfortunately, seeks to suppress anger and its expression, but, as a result, going to meeting can be an excellent way of becoming aware of one’s anger and of other people’s, and of the problems of consciousness and interdependence. An awakening form of group meditation?

This is not to say our anger and the human predicament are all we should be awake to, but rather that awakeness should be to all: to the good and the bad–the “real two,” I’ll call it, after this passage in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

Best, Wm. (Montaigbakhtinian.com)

April 14, 2015 at 3:02 p.m.

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NINA MISHKIN
Wow, William! You sure do like to stir the pot! I have indeed read Marx and Freud (although quite a long time ago), worked for twenty-four (discontinuous) years with two good therapists, and even attended several Quaker Sunday Assemblies here in Princeton, on the representation of a Jewish acquaintance of mine that Christ would not be mentioned, which proved to be both wrong and (for me) a deal breaker. But as it was I who invited you to read this post (curious perhaps as to your response), I’m reluctant to go mano a mano with you about it.

Nonetheless, may I suggest that the contradiction you identify between both being “awake” and “letting go” is only apparent? I can’t speak for your young yoga teacher — I was always terrible at yoga myself, even at Kripalu counting the minutes until it would be over. But what Kornfeld seems to mean by “awake” is “aware” — and what he wants us to “let go” of are the fantasies and memories in which too many of us spend our interior lives, so that we can then be truly aware of what is happening now. He is not a perfect guru by any means. But I do understand him to be speaking of meditation as able to affect for the better the state of our interiority, which then affects how we conduct ourselves in the world. And it has been my experience, even without meditation, that one can recognize and deal with the infuriating aspects of the life we are living more productively and with less harm to and suffering in ourselves without the heat of blinding passion which you seem to favor expressing.

It is very difficult to develop the “wisdom of insecurity” that Kornfield advocates as a goal. It is very difficult to be non-judgmental — that is, accepting — of our mortality and the impermanence of everything we love. You seem to be saying we shouldn’t even try. I feel we have to try. It’s too painful otherwise. That said, I would be extremely interested in hearing about the meditation technique you’ve devised on your own. Is it a secret? Or do you share?

April 14, 2015 at 6:00 p.m.

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WILLIAM EATON
Hi Nina. A value of writing and of conversation is that helps us continue to advance our thinking (which is not to say to make progress, nor to say that we ever reach an end. Rather, one interpretation gives way to another, as Bakhtin pointed out.) So my next reflection (which would have to take the place of any “secret” I might have) would be that meditation these days by and large (which does not mean exclusively) serves a medicinal purpose: helping to calm us down, take a break from the action. This can certainly be useful, but, like a lot of such medicines, in doing this work, it inevitably dulls our awareness. Yes, it is good to keep in touch with the fact that we are, in the cosmic scheme of things, next to nothing, and thus that our trials and tribulations are, on some level, without significance and our judgments absurd. But I would not have this keeping in touch involve losing touch with our lives in the world of appearances, let’s call it. In this world we do indeed have trials and tribulations. We do indeed make judgments, continuously, and we have to. You write of the too-painful. Yes, that, too, is part of human life, and to seek to escape from that is to seek to live one’s life less fully, (I often find myself in contentious dialogue with a line from Dag Hammarskold: “Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.” To include from the “too-painful” is what I am here proposing.)

I am also concerned that in our devotion to calming practices we are at times, and without pay, coping internally with anger that might otherwise be put to socially useful purposes: fighting the machine, we might call this. Or raging at the dying of the light, to borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas. The sociologist Norbert Elias wrote about how, with the development of the conscience and super-ego, human beings took on the work of self-control rather than this being done by external agents. (E.g.: We “beat up ourselves” more than we get beaten — or while we also get beaten.) My sense is that “the machine” now has a vast secondary machine attached to it — the machine of meditation teachers, yoga classes, spas, therapists, etc. The point is for us to work — NOT at our jobs, in our families, in our commercial dealings and political lives — but to work internally on getting rid of and not expressing our anger.

Suppose, for example, that I were working for a large bank or Internet company, and it was paying me $100,000 per year, and I was spending $10,000 per year on classes, therapy and retreats. And perhaps my employer was chipping in a little via health-insurance coverage. And much of this money was being spent so that I would be a good worker, so that I would not get angry at the angry things at my job, or would keep this anger inside. (And then go to a therapist to be treated for depression which is typically caused by repressed anger.) All this may be necessary to stay employed and keep the sushi on table, as we used to say. But I would have people be aware — yes, aware — of the system in which they were involved, the work they were being called upon to do, and were in fact doing.

Not to repeat my first comment, but it is from the above perspective that I liked your Kornfeld’s focus on awakeness/awareness, and I continue to like some of the message you report — the being truly aware of what is happening now. Though I would not have us let go of our memories, but rather explore them; nor would I renounce our fantasies, but rather have us recognize them for what they are and recognize our need for them — as a way of dealing with the “too-painful.”

My personal meditation technique is of minor interest, just a gimmick really, but I would close with this basic point. Americans are caught in a problem-solution view of life and of “ethics” (how to live). At one extreme this involves us in various approaches to death (and to medicine) that seem to have as their implicit goal immortality. But mortality is an aspect of the irresolvable human predicament. (Become immortal we would no longer be human.) There are other aspects of our predicament besides mortality. There are the challenges of being a social animal, dependent on others. There is consciousness, having to live with an overlarge brain. There are more transient “predicaments” such as capitalism or the multivarious weapons, military and otherwise, of modern technologies. For me awareness must include being aware of these things, and of the unanswerability of our most fundamental questions, the unrealizability of our most fervent dreams.

Perhaps someday I’ll post in Montaigbakhtinian an old essay, “There is No Solution.” For the moment I’ll close with these three bits from a favorite book, the British sociologist-psychotherapist Ian Craib’s “The Importance of Disappointment”:

(1) “This kind of illusion is often bound up with a kind of counselling or therapeutic evangelism: the not-quite truisms of ‘it’s good to get things off your chest’, ‘it’s important to have somebody to talk to’ and so on. Talking [AND BLOG POSTING & COMMENTING!!] can clarify, can replace impulsive and possibly destructive acting out, it can be a medium for making decisions, but it is not an alternative to conflict and suffering.”

(2) “There are, then, a number of aspects to integration that can make it a not-so-attractive prospect from the point of view of those who see psychotherapy as offering solutions, happiness and satisfaction. It means becoming aware of and suffering conflicts; becoming aware of and putting up with what I have described as authentically bad aspects of relationships, and of the self; and it means coming up against and recognising the limits of one’s abilities and the very real fear of disintegration that that can bring.”

(3) “The movement towards external and internal reality makes life both easier and harder; energy involved, in this example, in denial is released . . . and can be put to other, more productive purposes. The price is experiencing a real and appropriate fear; perhaps the best description of this dimension of psychotherapy is of learning how to suffer.”

Yrs. in dialogue, Wm.

April 20, 2015 at 1:48 p.m.

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NINA MISHKIN
Hi again, Wm. After some reflection, I’ve decided to respond once more, although I must confess I don’t believe we are still “in dialogue” — if we ever have been. You have now written an interesting short essay, at some remove from the original post, which takes as its springboard a few words in my reply to your first “comment” (about what may be too painful to bear) and then soars into a stratosphere of your own concerns, which seem to focus on preserving anger and misery at the human predicament. I would point out that Dylan Thomas, who you reference as urging us to rage, rage against the dying of the light (and as far as we know did not meditate) medicated his own pain with such an excess of alcohol that he was dead in his thirties. I might also observe, as I did in my earlier reply, that we engage more effectively with the “predicaments” of being — as you say — social animals or of capitalism and the dark side of modern technologies when we are calmer and less the victims of our own “monkey minds.” Which is what I take Vipassana meditation and Jack Kornfield to be about for rank beginners like myself.

I agree “there is no solution.” On the other hand, we have to live (as best we can) with what there is. I also agree that happiness is not the goal of psychotherapy, but neither is a steady diet of suffering (except perhaps for very strict Freudians). If I were making $100,000 a year doing work promoting ends of which I did not approve and were unable to find another way of earning an adequate living (that would support and educate my children, for instance), I would consider $10,000 a year well spent to keep me enjoying what there was to enjoy in those parts of my life left over from the wage-earning (such as sushi, and posting essays in Montaigbakhtinian).

In some ways, despite the impressive range of your reading and vocabulary, I find you to be rather an esprit simpliste in your responses; it has to be all either black or white. I too have been called that in my salad days but I’m trying to rectify this attitude towards what I’ve experienced and observed while there’s still time. Not to make bad jokes about the fifty shades of grey one can achieve by mixing black and white, but surely learning how to suffer is not the only thing life must be about.

Finally, I ought to point out that we are typing away here some two weeks after the original post, with the result that you and I are probably alone by now in reading what we have each been at such pains to write. Perhaps I should now open it up to those few followers of TGOB who may have the patience to put up with us and maybe even want to join in. If I re-post our friendly skirmishes, aka “dialogue,” It would be interesting to see what sort of comments we might get.

April 26, 2015 at 11:42 a.m.

AND NOW — IF YOU’RE STILL WITH US — IT’S YOUR TURN! DON’T BE SHY. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK.

WHY MEDITATE?

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I’m not a spiritual person.  Never have been.  I’m not calm, I don’t take life in stride.  I find it hard to start new things and hard to stop things I’m doing, or to say goodbye. Although I can love specific people fiercely, I can’t truly say my heart is full of loving kindness for all mankind.  While I tolerate a lot, when the worm finally turns, it turns.  And like an elephant I never forget.

That’s not to say I’m proud of these qualities.  I’ve always wished it weren’t so. Unfortunately, that’s the self I’ve got, despite the wishful thinking.  (Definitely Type A, and medicated for hypertension since the age of 43.)  But I have tried to change. I first signed up for eight sessions of meditation at the local Y at a time when I was much younger, living modestly in Manhattan with  two small children in grade school. I thought it might quiet me, make me nicer and better.  I even thought I was going great guns in that class.  (Probably an inappropriate metaphor for a would-be meditator, but you know what I mean.)  Then during comment period afterwards, I put up my hand and asked the leader if it was supposed to feel almost like an orgasm in the head because that’s how I had felt a couple of times — and everyone laughed.  There went any sense of progress. (Not to mention those kinds of feelings.)

Subsequently, I occasionally bought a small book on the subject and read it on the toilet (because small books lend themselves to short reading periods), but never found the time or inspiration to pursue the subject more deeply after leaving the bathroom. Until Bill came into my life.  Bill had spent several unhappy years between wives seeking peace and wisdom at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where he had sometimes fallen asleep during exceptionally long meditations but also did enough of the shorter ones to know he wasn’t very good at it although he admired those who were.  (He has, like me, a mind like an unruly horse.)

However, after the first flush of geriatric passion had somewhat ebbed for us, we did try meditating side by side in our living room for several weeks, an electric timer letting us know the moment of release. Then we discovered Netflix, a more meretricious method of passing the past-prandial hours, but much easier.  Also with Netflix we could hold hands.

Let me cut to the chase. Last spring we joined a neighborhood Community Without Walls, thinking we perhaps needed to connect with some real people other than each other. Half a year later, I was eventually invited to a session of dreaming up group activities that weren’t just eating together, sing-alongs, scrabble and going to movies.  Out of the vasty deeps within my aging self a question bubbled up:  How about meditation?

And thus it was that I am, at least for now, the facilitator of a group of, so far, four ladies plus a married couple who are willing to meditate together once a week in my living room. (Bill has promised to join us and not fall asleep, but didn’t want to come to the first meeting till he heard who was there. Is that frivolous, or what?). One of the guests has assured us there is more power when people meditate together.

What do I know about meditation that enables me to “facilitate” these sessions?  Enough to buy a very good app for my i-Phone of six twenty-minute meditations led by Jack Kornfield, one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge where Bill used to doze between bouts of would-be mindfulness. After preliminary who-are-you-and-what-are-you-hoping-for chat at the initial meeting, I played the first one — a mindfulness meditation for beginners — and it was a success!  Everyone wants to do it at least once more next time, before we move on to the second meditation on the app.

But next time, I’m going to begin by reading something aloud before I press “play” on the mindfulness meditation again. It’s an excerpt from one of Kornfield’s books included for reading on the same app, and it’s so good I’m going to copy out most of it it here.  It may be my age that makes me at last receptive to these words, because only when you’re getting old do you, perhaps reluctantly, recognize the truth in them.  However, everyone in my living room will be as old, or nearly as old as I am, so that won’t be a problem.  If you’re a relative youngster, you may want to go away until I post something more amusing.  On the other hand, the Kornfield excerpt is a great answer to the question at the top of this post. It also presents a great project to tackle before, ah, time runs out.  Are you up for it?

WHY MEDITATE?

by Jack Kornfield

Here is a story told about the Buddha shortly after he was enlightened. As he was walking down the dusty road he met a traveler who saw him as a handsome yogi exuding a remarkable energy. The traveler asked him, “You seem very special. What are you? Are you some kind of an angel?  You seem inhuman.” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of god then?” “No,” he said. “Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?” “No,” he replied. “Well, are you a man?” “No.” “Then what are you?” At this the Buddha answered, “I am awake.” In those three words — “I am awake” — he gave the whole of Buddhist teachings. The word “buddha” means one who is awake. To be a buddha is to be one who has awakened to the nature of life and death, and who has awakened and freed one’s compassion in the midst of this world.

The practice of meditation does not ask us to become a Buddhist or a meditator or a spiritual person. It invites us to fulfill the capacity we each have as humans to awaken. The skill of becoming more mindful, and more present, and more compassionate, and more awake is something we may learn sitting on a meditation cushion, but this capacity for awareness helps in computer programming, playing tennis, lovemaking, or walking by the ocean and listening to life around you. In fact, to awaken, to be really present, is the central art in all other arts.

What is that which we can awaken to? We awaken to what Buddhists call the dharma. Dharma is the Sanskrit and Pali word that refers to the universal truths: to the laws of the universe and the teachings that describe it. In this sense, finding the dharma is quite immediate. It is the wisdom that is always present to be discovered.

It is different than waiting for God to come down to us in a cloud of glory, or a big spiritual enlightenment, or a wonderful, otherworldly experience. The dharma of wisdom, what we can awaken to, is the truth that is right where we are when we let go of fantasies and memories and come into the reality of the present. When we do that and pay careful attention, we start to see the characteristics of the dharma in the very life in which we live.

One of the first characteristics of the dharma that shows itself in meditation is impermanence and uncertainty. “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world,” it says in one Buddhist sutra. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a rainbow, a phantom, and a dream.” The more quietly you sit, the more closely you observe, the more you realize that everything you can see is in a state of change.  Ordinarily, everything we experience seems solid, including our personality, the world around us, our emotions, and the thoughts in our mind. It is like watching a movie; we can get so caught up in the story until it seems real, even though it is actually made of light flickering on a screen. And yet if you focus very carefully on what you are seeing, it is possible to see that the film is actually a series of still pictures, one frame after another. One appears, and then there is a slight gap, and then the next one appears.

The same thing is happening in our lives. Because that is so: nothing in our lives lasts or stays the same for very long. You do not have to be a very adept meditator to see that everything is changing all the time. Have you been able to get any mental states of any kind to last very long? Is there anything in your life that stays the same?

This brings us to dharma’s second law. If we want things that are always changing to stay the same to get attached to them, we get disappointed, we suffer. Not because we should suffer — this is not something created to punish us. It is the very way things are, as basic as gravity. If we get attached to something staying the way it is, it does not stop changing. Trying to hold onto “how it was” will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

So when we start to see the laws of nature — that things are impermanent, that attachment causes pain — we can also sense that there must be some other way. And there is. It is the way that can be called “the wisdom of insecurity.” This is the ability to flow with the changes, to see everything as a process of change, to relax with uncertainty. Meditation teaches us how to let go, how to stay centered in the midst of change. Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. We realize that gain and loss, praise and blame, pain and pleasure are part of the dance of life, given to each of us, born into our human body. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

When we ask, “What is the nature of the body?” we can see that it grows up, it grows old, it gets sick sometimes, and it eventually dies. When we sit to meditate, we can directly feel the state of our body, the tensions we carry, the level of tiredness or energy. Sometimes being in our body feels good, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it is quiet, and sometimes it is restless. In meditation we sense that we do not actually own our bodies but rather we just inhabit them for a short time, and during that time they will change by themselves, regardless of what we want to happen. The same is true for our mind and heart, with its hopes and fears, the grief and joy. As we continue to meditate, we learn to relate more wisely to what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.” Instead of fearing painful experiences and running away from them, or grasping after pleasant experiences hoping that somehow by holding onto them they will last, we come to realize our heart has the capacity to be present for it all, to live more fully and freely where we are. When we realize that everything passes away, not only the good things but the painful things as well, we find a composure in their midst.

….You can learn that you do not have to fear that which is painful and you do not have to grasp for that which is pleasant. We have often been conditioned to believe this way, but as we meditate, it quickly becomes apparent that grasping for what is pleasant or fearing things that cause us pain does not lead to peace, and it does not lead to happiness. The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

Instead, in meditation we discover a natural, open-hearted, and non-judgmental awareness of our bodies and our feelings. We can gradually bring this kind and open awareness to witness all that’s in our minds. We learn to see and trust the law of impermanence — this means we begin to see the world as it is really is. In the midst of it all, we begin to see how we can relate to all of it with compassion, kindness, and wisdom.

NOW IS ALL THERE IS

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Let’s look at another way of approaching “Now is now.” It’s my first principle for getting better at getting old, or getting better at getting older than you are today.  [To see them all, revisit  My Twelve Principles for Getting Better at Getting Older, posted on January 1 of this year.]

In reframing this concept less philosophically, I’ve somewhat paraphrased the Beatles, or at least their rhythm, in hopes that swiping the beat of their song about a four-letter word starting with “L” may help you remember what’s important here. Just hear them in your head when you say “now is all there is” aloud.  Listen to the slowly fading sound of their blended voices singing together, and then dying away at the end: Now is all there is, now is all there is, nowisallthereis….

Now is all there is is worth remembering — whether or not you do  think love is all you need  — because now is all there is.  All you and I ever have is now.  By the time tomorrow gets here, it’s now.  Now also becomes yesterday before you can say “Jack Robinson” if you’re not keeping a close eye on it.

Minimizing the amount of time I spend not keeping a close eye on now has always been a big problem for me. I don’t mean just that I fail to admire the sunset when it appears, or that I don’t pause long enough to enjoy the sight of little birds coming to the feeders filled with black-oil sunflower seed that hang off our kitchen porch.  I mean I have a really hard time staying firmly in my own life — right now, this very day, this very minute.  I am almost always off in a daydream, a reminiscence, a strategy, someone else’s story, fictional or not.  Sometimes, I’m even away from now when driving, which is a very big no-no.  I also occasionally waste now by wondering how it will be when I’m dead and there’s no more now for me (even though I know perfectly well that when I’m dead there won’t be anything at all for me, much less a now) — because being truly dead is something I cannot conceive of!  How can I possibly not be? How can there be a time when I won’t know how it will be to not be?

When you don’t stay in the now, you can get really far out of it.

And don’t tell me about meditation.  I have tried it in groups, and at Kripalu with a friend, and on my own with Bill and a timer to tell us when it’s time to stop.  The meditating mind — at least mine, the only mind of which I can knowledgeably speak — is, as they say, an unruly horse.  I don’t do well with a verbal mantra, but closing my eyes and following my breath as it moves in and out of the nostrils feels good and is calming, so I do that.  Until I discover I’m not doing that anymore but thinking about something else entirely.  Which is probably after about two minutes, but I can’t tell for sure because I’m not supposed to open my eyes to look at the timer.  Then I try to rein in my unruly horse and start again.

I was never on a real horse but once in my life. [You see how my mind is wandering away from meditation towards mares and stallions here?]  It was a small horse, a very brief experience, and on all counts — except falling off, which I did not do because the trail guide was holding me — a failure.  Maybe that partially explains my poor results with meditation. But I don’t think so.  It’s just me.  Also my choice of partner.  Bill is usually willing to meditate, but also usually falls asleep before the timer rings.

Now perhaps you understand why I say “now is now” is not a resolution, even though it’s a principle.  For me to resolve compliance would be to fail.  On the other hand, to keep it in mind (as best I can, haha) does move me along in the right direction.

But now I have to go make oatmeal.  It’s almost noon and we haven’t had breakfast yet.  I used up breakfast time writing this for tomorrow (which is now today) and now it’s time for (yesterday’s) lunch.  Oatmeal for lunch?  Why not?

I hope all this about now has been helpful.  If not, don’t sweat it.  Now it’s history. Go appreciate now somewhere else.  And try to get that Beatles beat out of your mind.  It’s so yesterday.