Musings

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Carl Rogers was a person who had a profound and life-changing impact on me. I never met him, but I did read a couple of books by him, listened to some recordings and watched some old video and was absorbed by his ideas. Here was a guy who was really onto something.

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Cars driving in the night
I am safe tucked up in bed
Headlamps cast shadows

I try and I try
And I can never grasp it
— Miracle of life

I need nothing more
Than a little food, shelter
And a little health

No problem persists
Sitting still and releasing
To the infinite

Love is my compass
The universe is my guide
My eyes wide open
I'm fully alive

Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all

Everything I now have will one day be taken from me. My money, possessions, friends, family and health. One day I will disappear and all my memories of everything I've ever felt, thought, or experienced will be gone. There will be nobody to experience any of it anymore.

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I've been running an experiment in my life to see what impact meditating for at least 20 minutes every day has. I started the experiment at the beginning of this year and wanted to jot down my preliminary findings.

Observations

I enjoy meditation

In keeping with how we should not force ourselves to do things we don't like this is good news for the experiment.

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Let's set ourselves a new goal

One day you wake up and decide you're finally going to learn to play guitar. You go to the shop, buy a guitar, start watching tutorials, learning scales and take a few lessons. At first things are enjoyable, novel and exciting, but over time you realize you aren't practicing as much as you were in the beginning, this is harder than you thought and actually quite frustrating. You start to feel overwhelmed by the size of the task ahead of you and feel frustrated that you aren't improving at the rate you'd like. Why can't you play like Jimi Hendrix yet? More time passes and you realize it's been days since you last played the guitar. Thinking about it no longer excites you, in fact it fills you with dread and guilt. Maybe eventually you sell the guitar.

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Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.

Whenever I suffer I remind myself to be grateful because I understand I am going through a natural process and no matter how dismal it may seem and no matter how long it may last I will eventually grow from it.

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Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

There are no moments just as there are no things. All of life is but a single timeless moment. You can never escape it and you can never get outside of it. You can think of the past and remember things, but those memories only exist in as much as they are phenomena occurring right now. Likewise the future only exists as a thought experience in the now. We can never reach the future because the moment we do we find it is actually the present. This is all there is. That is what makes it holy. That and the fact that this is everything that is.

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Take, for example, your own visual field. As your eye scans the territory of nature, does it ever see a single thing, a solitary thing, a separate thing? Has it ever seen a tree? a wave? a bird? Or does it instead see a kaleidoscopic flux of all sorts of interwoven patterns and textures, of tree plus sky plus grass plus ground, and waves plus sand plus rocks plus sky and clouds...

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Aversion means shying away from what you fear. Courage means facing it head on.

Aversion feeds fear. Nine tenths of your suffering is just anticipation of what may or may not come.

Courage feeds growth. Each time you face your fears head on and move through them your fears diminish and you grow.

Remember that aversion and cowardice are never easier or more preferable than facing what you fear - not now when they feed anxiety and not in the long run where they limit your growth and potential.

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The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see ... Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people.

This is my attempt to summarize my learnings (or perhaps unlearnings) from On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas E. Harding.

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The tetrapharmakos

Don’t fear the gods,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.

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Back in suffering and pain I talked about how we could separate the passive sensation of pain from the active sensation of suffering. The idea was that you could define suffering as a mental activity that came in response to the primary pain sensation. The nice thing about dividing it up that way is that it gives you the ability to change your response to pain and train new habits and new ways of coping with and possibly even embracing pain. Looking back I feel like the words "suffering" and "pain" don't really mean what I was trying to define them to mean, but hopefully it helped to get the point across.

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