Category: Mind

365 days later

Jon9 Comments

It was a year ago that I had that “glimpse” that I posted about as “the suck.” I remember it as one of the most significant spiritual experiences of my life—up there with my “born again” experience in my youth, and a powerful experience of Christ that I had six-and-a-half years ago.

Unlike those, this glimpse was largely just that… I glimpsed the Void, almost like I was alone on an empty holodeck as in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yet I only felt it for a few seconds… It was as if I had “bounced” out of it almost immediately. Nevertheless, it was enough to leave me a bit shaken for several days afterwards.

What stayed after that? What changed in me? Why do I consider it that important, when my experience of the world is practically the same as before the experience?

For one thing, it seems to have cured me of my pursuit of enlightenment through study. Since then, it’s as if I know exactly what ideas, beliefs, and so forth really are… nothing but arrangements of thoughts. And I know that thoughts are nothing… just little bubbles in consciousness. Some thoughts seem attracted to some people more than others, but you can’t make yourself have a thought. (Kind of puts “intellectual property” in a whole different light, eh?)

Wanting to “figure out” the Universe is probably a stage that most intellectual mystics have to go through, but if it is, it’s certainly one they also have to give up. Thoughts are not reality.

Also, because I don’t “believe” in beliefs anymore, I think I’ve grown more tolerant of others. I still have a problem with “kind intolerance”—anger at those who don’t seem “kind enough” or “nice enough”… but it’s less now. It has to be, since I know that everyone, definitely including myself, has a head full of junk made out of nothing describing a world that isn’t there. It makes fighting over “who’s right” pretty silly, huh?

That’s the most of it. Yeah, the Void was scary for a second. Now, I’d like to fall into it.

No one is better than me!

Jon4 Comments

OK, this is a thought that’s been with me recently, and boy, I guess I need to explain!

The mere fact that that statement sounds arrogant shows that we really have problems with the things we claim to believe, from Christianity (we’re all the same before God) to democracy: (we all have the same rights). Most of us, I think, will fall onto one side or the other of the statement “there is no one better than me.”

Perhaps most of us, whether we want to admit it or not, (and a few weeks ago, I would’ve denied it), simply don’t believe it. there’s a core belief that others (maybe most others: are better than me. Although we have all the ego defenses to cover it up, there’s the fear of not-okness in the root of our “self.” From womb to tomb, others tell us what to do, what’s cool, what’s hot, what’s good, what’s not. Others have more, make more, do more, (or have more and do less—even more enviable). The ego’s quick gloating when it sees someone it feels superior to, comes from a motive that is impossible to hide.

There are those, however, for who the statement above is not sufficient. No one is better than me means I am better than most others. Their awareness of power and freedom to act in this world is enjoyed, without a thought for those affected by their actions, unless the thought is “sucks to be you” or a less bald paraphrase of the same.

I wonder how many people simply feel confident in being in their skin, day in and day out, not feeling superior or inferior to any other? I can’t say I feel it, but it’s like I’m starting to see it;

No one is better than me.
Some are more talented or capable in different ways, but none are better.
Just as every blade of grass is rooted in the same ground
and draws its life from it,
Every person is a walking windsock filled and given shape
by the same Life that blows everywhere and fills everything.
No one is better than me. And none less.
I am free. Why do I make so many concessions during a single day–tasks, assignments, social convention, law? Because the benefits of doing so outweigh the consequences of not doing so. Or because it suits me. Or because of love.

But nothing defines me or limits me, save the skin I wear, and that is most definitely temporary.

How will I live today? I don’t know. How will I live tomorrow? Who cares? No one is better than me. There is no power but that which flows to all things and all persons.

Are you even here? Am I?

Yes or no doesn’t change the fact: no one is better than you. Enjoy it.

I resolve…

Jon13 Comments

Not to assume I know who I am.

Yes, there’s other things, too, relating to exercise, meditation, etc. All the usual stuff. And, I made the “guilt resolutions” very, very light… There’s a reasonable chance I can keep them.

But I realized that I want to go a bit deeper than that this year. If the reason we make resolutions is to change ourselves, maybe the fault lies not in needing to change this “person” we’ve come to think we are, but in assuming we’re that person in the first place.

Yeah, I’ll take a silly Internet personality quiz in a heartbeat… but I really want to see what happens if I scratch off some of my major assumptions about Jon. For instance:

I’m an introvert.
Am I this year? How will I know?
I don’t go out much.
That was true… what’s true now?
I start lots of things that I don’t finish.
Really? Who says?
I live more in my head than my heart or my body.
Interesting. We’ll see.

In other news:
I’m getting ready to restart the WisdomReading group as a separate blog. If you’re interested in reading The Gospel of Thomas, The Dhammapada, The Tao Te Ching, or The Upanishads, drop me a line, and I’ll email you the URL and other details when it’s ready. If you participated in the WisdomReading group last year, the format will be different. There will be posts once a week for each of those Scriptures, so if you don’t like the Upanishads, for example, but can’t get enough of Thomas, no problem. just read the weekly Thomas post and comment on it.

My language study is coming along quite well. I started studying Spanish in October, and I guess I’m at an intermediate level now. I grew up on the Mexican border, but had a strange resistance to learning Spanish… really, I could say “please,” “thank you,” “Where’s the bathroom,” and little else. Now I’ve got a better-than-beginner vocabulary, pretty good knowledge of the simple tenses (except the damn subjunctive), and I can read fairly decently, such as El Pais and Yahoo! Spain. Now, I’m working on more complex grammar issues, listening, and speaking.

I plan to continue working hard on Spanish for the next two months, and to start studying Catalan in March. I’ve been brushing up on Esperanto along the way. I wonder if I could really be quadrilingual by the end of the year? By then, I’d like to be able to translate the “Spirituality” pages of my site into Spanish, Catalan, and Esperanto, and to be able to correspond in those languages.

I’ll soon be doing a series of posts on love.

Everyone, Happy New Year! Bonan Novjaron! Feliz año nuevo! Bon any nou!

Ice Cream Truth

Jon5 Comments

Millions of voices of the world clamor for belief. You are asked to believe that 123 is a better cable channel than 234, that Sandscrape is a better toilet paper than Scratchroll, that M.T. Promisiz is a better leader than I. B. Lyin.

Then you’re asked to believe “in” pure abstractions, for instance that the area called Rolling Hillarity is a different “country” than the area called Dulland Flatlandia. And whether you are Rolling Hilarious or Dulland Flat, you need to believe that your country is the best one!

But the belief-net isn’t finished entangling you. To be “really” complete, you must have a “belief system,” too. In other words, you need to cram an elaborate mental superstructure into your head comprised of numerous associated concretized thoughts—that is “beliefs” about things you can neither see or touch. And you need to believe that it’s right, and preferably believe that all others are wrong. If that sounds like hard work, it is.

But fortunately, some have tried to make it easier for you. The most popular belief systems have come in ready-to-use packages, and luckily for you, a mere a half-dozen or so brands have satisfied fully 90% of the people of the world. Some have strong incentives if you buy this brand, you will enjoy bliss forever, and if you don’t, you’ll be in agony forever. (If that’s not incentive, what is?)

Occasionally, though, people come to the point of wondering what is true, what is real. Is it the belief system, or is it something else, maybe something the belief system is trying to describe, no matter how awkwardly. I propose a simple test:

Does it help you enjoy your ice cream more?

It’s amazing how irrelevant beliefs are when eating ice cream (or calamari, for that matter). An evangelist whose name I forget, despaired of trying to get ministers of different denominations to associate together through “ecumenical events.” He found that it worked quite well though when the occasion was getting ice cream. Belief systems don’t eat ice cream, but people do!

And for God’s sake, don’t believe a word of my beliefs here. Just see what makes your ice cream taste best. That just might be real. Taste and see (Psalm 34:8). If it does, it’s probably more real than a belief.

Fingernails and Fast Food

Jon1 Comment

I bit my fingernails from as early as I can remember, until early September 2001. I usually wasn’t conscious of it… only when I looked at my ragged nails, or spat out a “trimming,” was I aware of it at all. I tried many, many times to stop, and never could.

In 2001, just after the Labor Day weekend, I went to a Vipassana Meditation Center for a ten-day-long “intensive” (Intensive is the word for it. It was ten hours of meditation a day, for ten days, and all but part of the last day in silence.) I didn’t really enjoy the experience that much, but midway through, perhaps it was five years ago this very day, I looked at my hands, and realized that I hadn’t bit my nails since the intensive began. I also realized that I was now free forever from my nail-biting habit.

Two nights ago, while I was sitting at my computer, reading some blogs, I suddenly felt a strong rush of energy to my head, and it came with a distinct message, that I should sit zazen immediately. I obeyed, and after a period of sitting, felt I had been given a gift: specifically, that I was now free from my addiction to bad foods.

Some of you know me well enough to know what my diet is like. I’ve struggled with eating decent, healthy food (versus fried food and sweets) for more than two decades. Occasionally, I had some success that soon proved to be all too fleeting. But when I woke up yesterday, the certainty of the gift held: I was free. And my meals showed it. So did my meals today. I find I simply don’t want things that are bad for me anymore.

My teacher told me there actually is a Sanskrit word for this phenomenon (I don’t remember what it is) but it refers to the liberation of a person from negative attachments. It comes not from self-effort, though; it’s an effect of the spirit becoming more aligned with the One.

You can soon expect a leaner Frimster!

Steve Pavlina on Nonduality

Jon7 Comments

Although its over an hour, this is worth listening to. Steve Pavlina uses the freedom of the podcast format to explain his idea of the “Law of Attraction” at length, and in the course of doing so, nonduality as well, which he calls “subjective reality.”

It’s fascinating (for me, at least) to hear nonduality being discussed in a completely non-religious, even non-spiritual format. For instance, enlightenment teachers and religions have developed a vocabulary to distinguish between the higher, universal Self that’s in all beings e.g. (Atman, Christ, Universal Mind, etc.) with the illusory “self” that thinks one particular body-mind sensor unit is its self (the soul, flesh, ego, etc.). The lack of such a vocabulary makes it a particular challenge to elucidate such concepts to an audience completely unfamiliar with the subject.

Yet Pavlina does a masterful job, and has some great answers for why the most apparently obvious things in the Universe (e.g. separate beings, separate consciousnesses) are not as they seem. His idea of the Law of Attraction (particularly in the engaged, active mode) also parallels what my teacher has taught me about how to change aspects of my life.

Non-duality breaks out of the “spiritual” closet. Who’d’ve thunk it?

The Magic of Permission

Jon3 Comments

I am who I am, and have the life I have, because I was given permission to.

This fact has been high in my awareness for the last couple of weeks. We are bundles of permissions and restraints, mostly received from others. I’ve written that I sometimes burst into song. I’m able to do that unself-consciously, because I was given permission to. But most people have had that freedom taken away from them. Where there could be a song, there’s silence, instead. Not too long ago, having music at all depended on families, friends, or individuals singing or playing instruments. (Now 99% of our musical intake is recorded and commerical… and with iPods, increasingly isolated.)

I was given permission in my youth to think for myself and research information. Many people have been given restraints in those areas instead, and were given permission only to think the same thoughts, about the same things, that their parents did.

Of course, my youth wasn’t entirely rosy (far from it). Instead of normal permission, I was given tight restraints in the area of doing, such that the doing side of my life is still under-developed. I need to consciously give myself permission to do and experience more.

Sometimes I had to fight for permission. I can see much of how I became a spiritual questor came from fighting in my youth for the right to worship outside of the permitted channel of my parents’ denomination. (It was a long and grueling fight, BTW.)

Gaining permission is not something that ends with childhood, and neither is the grace that it blesses the soul with. And just as restraints and inhibitions are often unconscious, the giving and receiving of permission is often unconscious, too. Also, understand that I’m not writing about permission in its negative view as something bestowed by a “superior” to an “inferior.” I’m talking about blessing, encouragement, affirmation, or just letting another be as they are. The psychological effect is the same: OK-ness. Permission. The lowering of a psychological barrier.

I recently thanked a close friend of mine for the gentle permission he gave me a few years ago to proceed with the next step on my spiritual journey. He was very surprised. He had no idea that much of my spiritual growth over the last several years had its root in a single kind sentence he said to me.

He’s not alone. There are many others. And those are only the ones I’m aware of. When I posted my concerns about blogging a few weeks back, several of you gave me permission to take it farther. Thank you.

To some degree, all of our words are all either contributing to this extending of blessing, or its opposite. C.S. Lewis said that in everything we say or do is helping other become like demons or angels. Another Anglican, John Donne, simply said, no man is an island.

Alan Watts wrote a book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. For what it’s worth, you’ve got my permission to break it.

Meditation on “Imagine,” conclusion

Jon1 Comment

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

No possessions. This is easier for me. For several years, I considered joining a Catholic religious order. I looked forward to the prospect of making lifelong vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. (Well, poverty and chastity, at least! Obedience? Say what?) The modern life of monks and nuns in religious orders isn’t completely free of possessions, but it comes close. It’s definitely a refutation of consumerism and greed. The Paulist Fathers more accurately call it a promise of Gospel simplicity rather than “poverty.”
After much “discernment” (the work that both the inquirer and the order do to find God’s will in the matter), it became clear to me that my mission is to live in the world, with all of its challenges, not in a monastery or friary designed to help me cultivate my interior spiritual life.

Well, the fact is I’m not a monk, and I no longer seek to have no possessions. In fact, I’m looking forward to upgrading the RAM in my PC and probably replacing my ailing DVD player. But I try to live relatively simply. I am very conscious of greed in our society, and its effect upon the soul and upon the world. “Freedom from want” is nigh impossible when nearly every marketing dollar goes is spent to increase wanting. And meanwhile, often because the very definition of the consumer society is that it can never have enough, the other kind of wanting—lack, deprivation, hunger ensues.

Idealistic top-down efforts have tried and failed to change this. Communism was a spectacular failure of idealism, which created horrific suffering for the world. What I can do, is work on the bottom-up approach. I can control my wanting. If I destroy the wanting engine within myself, someone else can have more. Imagine if more of us did the same, we would be doing the one of most revolutionary things possible.

Imagine!

Posts in this series: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, interlude, conclusion.

Drag

Jon4 Comments

Aerodynamic forces
Isaiah recently commented about how persistent the illusion is. It’s a constant. Except for those who live in a state of enlightenment or theosis, the instant you take your eyes off of the goal, off of the divine reality, the world returns.

Or another way of putting it is that the moment you stop pressing forward with your simple, unconditional, loving awareness, you experience something pushing you back, whether you notice it or not. I remember when I was taught about aerodynamics in junior high, that there are four “forces” acting on a airplane: weight, lift, thrust and drag.

What I’m talking about is spiritual drag. The very experience (or environment or phrase or thought) that helps us to see God better at one point, often hinders us from going on to the next. The instant I stop “letting the mind of Christ” be in me, “my” own mind fills me, with conflict, egoic fears, and all the rest. Jesus called the Path “the narrow Way.” The Katha Upanishad amplifies that narrowness, and calls it “walking the razor’s edge.”

So what keeps the illusion in place? Why am I always “me?” The language we were taught about “The enemy” seems so apropos. Mara, Maya, Tempter, Satan, Devil, Demiurge. Drag. In every moment, Drag seems to be an invisible force, pushing us back, in every place, ready to thwart, diminish, skew or cover up our awareness of God’s reality. Everywhere we are, the enemy seems to be, too. Yin matches Yang.

Or so it seems. The fact is, physicists laugh at the “four forces” of aerodynamics. With their higher level of understanding, where others see weight, thrust, lift and drag, they only see one: Inertia, the tendency of an object to resist change?whether being put into motion, or to change its motion.

Drag is just one more part of the illusion. And the source is simply our little selves.

And they aren’t even here, either.

At peace in a world of conflict

Jon7 Comments

So much drama in the world! The strange thing is that, other than a very strong wish for peace, I’m very unmoved by it. I feel in a way, almost like Ashtavakra: The world and all its swirling storms are illusion, there is only peace. It’s like the posts that I’ve written against “belief” in countries, and “identification” with religions and other distinctions, are starting to take hold here.

Not to long ago, I would’ve rejected a peace like this on principle (interesting how our principles destroy peace, __nicht wahr?__): How dare I not get worked up! The world’s aflame from Israel and Lebanon to Afghanistan, “my” country’s in the thick of it, and Syria and Iran add major fuel to the fire. With that state of affairs, surely I’ve got a _responsibility_ to be disturbed, don’t I?

What about the other side of the coin? Should I dance and sing because a major terrorist plot was foiled? (Yes, I _am_ very glad that more massive suffering was apparently prevented. But I’m not fooled into forgetting where the _real_ battle is.)

So mostly I’m unmoved. I see the dramas that the ego’s identifications, defenses, aggressions, resentments and so forth make on the grand scale, and I can recognize them for what they are. And now, instead of feeling guilty about refusing the invitations to lose focus, I feel more certain that this _detachment_ from the blame game, the “me” game, the “us” game, the “them” game, and all the mess, is a significant key to peace.

Detachment isn’t a lack of love. It’s non-reactive love, or rather, the environment that allows natural love to flourish. Ego-based love falls easily into the karmic traps. (The bastards killed my sister on 9/11 ? I’m going to Afghanistan to pay them back!)? As natural as such a reaction is, it is a reaction. And at least one result is that al-Qaeda has gotten a lot more battle experience as the drama of action and reaction continues.

How to stop the drama? Shall I organize massive protests and marches for peace? Sometimes, and in some places, that seems to work. More often than not, I suspect, it creates more conflict, and hardens people into defending the positions they’ve already taken.

In ??A New World??, Eckhart Tolle discusses how personal awakening contributes to global awakening. One person is at peace, he can dampen the reactivity of others. Presence ? deliberate, calm, presence, extends outward, and not just through natural means, either. The butterfly effect can happen. “(ext)Kitabu Roshi”:http://soulsword.org writes in his new book, ??Soul to Soul?? that while you enjoy a cup of coffee, you can influence a vote in Congress between your first sip and your last.

Nonduality seems madness to those who haven’t had a glimpse yet. Who is dying in Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq? Me, just me. But even more than that, no one. Nothing has happened. Things are not as they appear. There is no world to disturb my peace. And there is no “my” peace, anyway. Hell, I’m not even here!

Want a non-mystical explanation? Chris Dierkes is back and blogging, and has written an insightful essay on the Integral World website: Dr. Persianlove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb.