People throw this slogan around, much of the time – I think – not really understanding what they are saying.
In a period of five years, my stepbrother Dennis (just in his 40’s) was required to make the decision to take off life-supports, his youngest brother, Jim (complications from a kidney transplant) and his wife, Barbara (hit by a car). During this same five years, he was present at the hospital bed of his older bother, Pat (also complications from a kidney transplant – kidney problems run in the family), as Pat’s wife, Pam, had to make the same awful decision.
When, a couple of years later, I heard him say, “It is what it is”, it took my breath away. Here was someone who has faced the worst of “what it is” can be. If he has found within himself the courage and spiritual depth to hold this stance, then what of me? Can I find within me that level of spiritual surrender to the difficult realities of my life? Thinking of Dennis often helps me to get there.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Dualism
WRONG (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
How do you know when something is going wrong?
How do you know anything?
One can only “know” things that are real.
“Going wrong” is made up.
Dualism refers to breaking life into two’s – good and evil, God and the devil, right and wrong, better and worse, going right and going wrong, good guys and bad guys, you and me, me and God.
Our sensory apparatus is hopelessly, permanently hooked on seeing things as separate. Especially seeing. Sometimes sound can feel like an ocean washing over us. But even there our minds will construct what’s going on as something out there washing over us, here.
There we refer to the real culprit – our minds. Our analytical mind just doesn’t know how to function without dropping things into different buckets, categories.
Even calling the mind the culprit is dualistic. It comes from the belief that some things, e.g. categorizing, are better than other things. We may believe that a unitary view of things is more accurate, but categorizing (“dualizing”) is simply part of the evolution towards seeing the essential oneness of things.
So what exactly is non-dualism? Our language is never going to do a great job of capturing it, because our very language is, in its very structure, dualistic. Subject-verb-object. “I do x to you”.
But let’s hack away at it, knowing that we will inevitably fall short. Non-dualism is recognizing that, under the skin of life, under the appearance of separation, all truly is one. Lots of spiritual, maybe especially New Age folks, like to say that “All is one”, but they don’t really mean it, don’t actually get it.
They may in the next breath, refer to the “Hero’s Journey.” With all due respect to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, looking at the world in terms of heroes and non-heroes may be helpful for some people at certain points in their lives – but not for others at others.
First, if each person’s path is totally unique, then there is no basis for comparison. Perhaps everyone is always being heroic in his or her own way. If we are all different, then no one has a roadmap. We are all making it up all the time.
It may also not be true that we, ourselves, are more heroic at some times than others. If we could really walk not just a mile but a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, we would understand that what they are doing right now is exactly the only thing they could possibly do. If we trace back the roots of what we consider our most individual, creative, “heroic” acts, we may find that there are many factors in our past that directly explain our current actions.
There’s lots more to be said about non-dualism. A.H. Almaas wrote a series of four very dense, very brilliant books on the topic – and only scratched the surface. I could write here about non-dualism and depression, and God, and lots of things – and probably will in future posts. I’m likely to start from scratch another time and come at non-dualism from a different angle, with completely different and equally inadequate words.
PREFERENCES (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
When my preferences no longer matter
When my biases are all exposed
In their wild and glorious inaccuracy
When, beaten down,I lose the will to pick and choose
Ah, then, then I can begin
How do you know when something is going wrong?
How do you know anything?
One can only “know” things that are real.
“Going wrong” is made up.
Dualism refers to breaking life into two’s – good and evil, God and the devil, right and wrong, better and worse, going right and going wrong, good guys and bad guys, you and me, me and God.
Our sensory apparatus is hopelessly, permanently hooked on seeing things as separate. Especially seeing. Sometimes sound can feel like an ocean washing over us. But even there our minds will construct what’s going on as something out there washing over us, here.
There we refer to the real culprit – our minds. Our analytical mind just doesn’t know how to function without dropping things into different buckets, categories.
Even calling the mind the culprit is dualistic. It comes from the belief that some things, e.g. categorizing, are better than other things. We may believe that a unitary view of things is more accurate, but categorizing (“dualizing”) is simply part of the evolution towards seeing the essential oneness of things.
So what exactly is non-dualism? Our language is never going to do a great job of capturing it, because our very language is, in its very structure, dualistic. Subject-verb-object. “I do x to you”.
But let’s hack away at it, knowing that we will inevitably fall short. Non-dualism is recognizing that, under the skin of life, under the appearance of separation, all truly is one. Lots of spiritual, maybe especially New Age folks, like to say that “All is one”, but they don’t really mean it, don’t actually get it.
They may in the next breath, refer to the “Hero’s Journey.” With all due respect to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, looking at the world in terms of heroes and non-heroes may be helpful for some people at certain points in their lives – but not for others at others.
First, if each person’s path is totally unique, then there is no basis for comparison. Perhaps everyone is always being heroic in his or her own way. If we are all different, then no one has a roadmap. We are all making it up all the time.
It may also not be true that we, ourselves, are more heroic at some times than others. If we could really walk not just a mile but a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, we would understand that what they are doing right now is exactly the only thing they could possibly do. If we trace back the roots of what we consider our most individual, creative, “heroic” acts, we may find that there are many factors in our past that directly explain our current actions.
There’s lots more to be said about non-dualism. A.H. Almaas wrote a series of four very dense, very brilliant books on the topic – and only scratched the surface. I could write here about non-dualism and depression, and God, and lots of things – and probably will in future posts. I’m likely to start from scratch another time and come at non-dualism from a different angle, with completely different and equally inadequate words.
PREFERENCES (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
When my preferences no longer matter
When my biases are all exposed
In their wild and glorious inaccuracy
When, beaten down,I lose the will to pick and choose
Ah, then, then I can begin
Friday, February 23, 2007
Apologies
Apologies can be useful to let the other person know that you care about them and do not wish to hurt them or cause them difficulty. When you are lucky, you or the other person will remember that you aren’t the doer - that life is dancing its endless perfect dance though you. When you’re really lucky, you will both be hip to this truth. Then, when one of you apologizes to the other, you will just wink at each other and maybe smile a foxy little smile.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Under the Hood
Living in this physical universe, we see the world as separate objects. That car, this dog, me, you, her, him.
- Separation is imbedded in the structure of our language: subject-verb-object. You do X to me, I do x to you.
- Our five senses perceive things as separate objects – especially our visual sense, which, for most of us, is our most dominant link to the world around us.
- And our physics (aside from the quantum mavericks of the last couple of decades) has been solidly mechanistic – billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other, cause and effect.
Let’s, for the moment, leave out quantum physics – about which I am, for the most part, unable to intelligently comment. What else in our experience can point our attention towards connection under the appearance of separation? What’s going on under the hood?
In his novel V, Thomas Pynchon laid out a fabulous metaphor for these invisible linkages. In the book, we encounter a mysterious underground mail system. This unexplained postal web would leave you messages when and where you least expect them: under a rock that you happen to kick over, on the back of a door, inside your McDonald’s burger wrapper. These messages could be an exact answer to a question you have had on your mind or a decision you need to make. Or they may simply point you in a direction, without further explanation: proceed east or go to x location – and await further instruction. Or the message might be completely indecipherable to you, with the information or awareness you currently have available to you. Like a Zen koan, this message inserts itself inside your conscious and/or unconscious mind, there to work its whammy in ways you may never understand or even be aware of.
- Separation is imbedded in the structure of our language: subject-verb-object. You do X to me, I do x to you.
- Our five senses perceive things as separate objects – especially our visual sense, which, for most of us, is our most dominant link to the world around us.
- And our physics (aside from the quantum mavericks of the last couple of decades) has been solidly mechanistic – billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other, cause and effect.
Let’s, for the moment, leave out quantum physics – about which I am, for the most part, unable to intelligently comment. What else in our experience can point our attention towards connection under the appearance of separation? What’s going on under the hood?
In his novel V, Thomas Pynchon laid out a fabulous metaphor for these invisible linkages. In the book, we encounter a mysterious underground mail system. This unexplained postal web would leave you messages when and where you least expect them: under a rock that you happen to kick over, on the back of a door, inside your McDonald’s burger wrapper. These messages could be an exact answer to a question you have had on your mind or a decision you need to make. Or they may simply point you in a direction, without further explanation: proceed east or go to x location – and await further instruction. Or the message might be completely indecipherable to you, with the information or awareness you currently have available to you. Like a Zen koan, this message inserts itself inside your conscious and/or unconscious mind, there to work its whammy in ways you may never understand or even be aware of.
Birds – Under the Hood 2
I haven’t always paid a lot of attention to birds. One of my clinical placements in grad school was at a strictly inpatient VA hospital out in the country. My clinical supervisor there, Dick – a very sweet, introverted man – was an avid birdwatcher. I don’t think that I was totally sucking up when I bought a pair of binoculars and started, after work, to stalk the wild avians with him. I think his passion for these little creatures genuinely infected me, almost immediately
Since then, birds have been, for me, a source of endless fascination, wonder – and mystery. Inhabiting, as they do, the space between earth and heaven, they have more and more seemed to point towards connections between those realms. (Bear with me here. I know this is starting to sound pretty flaky, but it is an awareness that has gradually grown over many years.)
At the very least, birds draw our attention to an aspect of physical reality that is less static or stationary. They are in constant movement – hopping around, looking around. We don’t see them stay put anywhere for long – and we never see them sleep. They sing. (I love our mockingbirds.) And they fly!
Sometimes the aspect of reality towards which they point us is not visible. At this bucolic VA hospital, when we would sit in the large dayroom of our psychiatric unit, my supervisor liked to identify – by the sound of their calls – the various birds in the big field outside.
(This made for one of the most confused moments of my tour of duty there. When new patients were being processed into the unit, part of this process was for them to be interviewed, in this same room, by the unit’s psychiatrist – with all the rest of the staff watching this obsolete, humiliating ritual. Dick would amuse himself by trying to guess what diagnosis the psychiatrist would give the patient. One day, as a new patient was being interviewed, Dick leaned over to me and whispered, “Yellow breasted sapsucker”. I spent a moment of complete disorientation before I realized that he was diagnosing a bird, not the patient.)
Before meeting Dick, I would probably not even have “heard” these birdcalls from the field behind us. But especially when I knew what the identified bird looked like – and even more when I had seen them live through my binoculars – the sound of these birds filled my ears with wonderful, interesting, sometimes beautiful sounds. And my mind’s eye with movement, form, and color – including the beautiful meadow, which would not otherwise have brought itself indoors for me. The otherwise solid separation of outdoors and indoors, man-made and natural, mostly logical/conceptual and organic/esthetic – all these separations got mixed up and mooshed together.
Another incidence of the kind of invisible seam that birds were for me weaving into the seeming empty spaces around me, occurred during this same period - when the world of birds was so much coming alive for me. My classmate Harold and I were walking across campus, when I heard the unmistakable chirp of a cardinal from the dense bush by the building in front of us.
“There’s a cardinal in there”, I said.
Harold, the good New York City boy that he was, asked, challengingly, “How do you know?”
“Well, they like to hang out in bushes like that, and that’s the chirp they make. When they’re up in the treetops, especially in the springtime, they just sing their little hearts out – but down in bushes like this, they chirp.”
Harold eyed me suspiciously, abandoned his premise that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and dropped back to his real bottom line. “So what?”
In New York, where Harold had grown up, you were bombarded by so many stimuli that there was no way you could keep up with them all – you had to filter them or be overwhelmed. So the primary filters became, “Is this dangerous to me?” or “Has this got something that I want?” If that stimulus did not meet either of those criteria, why would I want to bother focusing on it? So what?
The “so what” for me was that this sound suddenly populated my world with beautiful stimulation, not over-stimulation. Something that I could not even see made me feel instantly connected with the natural world around me. It filled some of the “space” that is necessary to feel separate.
Since then, birds have been, for me, a source of endless fascination, wonder – and mystery. Inhabiting, as they do, the space between earth and heaven, they have more and more seemed to point towards connections between those realms. (Bear with me here. I know this is starting to sound pretty flaky, but it is an awareness that has gradually grown over many years.)
At the very least, birds draw our attention to an aspect of physical reality that is less static or stationary. They are in constant movement – hopping around, looking around. We don’t see them stay put anywhere for long – and we never see them sleep. They sing. (I love our mockingbirds.) And they fly!
Sometimes the aspect of reality towards which they point us is not visible. At this bucolic VA hospital, when we would sit in the large dayroom of our psychiatric unit, my supervisor liked to identify – by the sound of their calls – the various birds in the big field outside.
(This made for one of the most confused moments of my tour of duty there. When new patients were being processed into the unit, part of this process was for them to be interviewed, in this same room, by the unit’s psychiatrist – with all the rest of the staff watching this obsolete, humiliating ritual. Dick would amuse himself by trying to guess what diagnosis the psychiatrist would give the patient. One day, as a new patient was being interviewed, Dick leaned over to me and whispered, “Yellow breasted sapsucker”. I spent a moment of complete disorientation before I realized that he was diagnosing a bird, not the patient.)
Before meeting Dick, I would probably not even have “heard” these birdcalls from the field behind us. But especially when I knew what the identified bird looked like – and even more when I had seen them live through my binoculars – the sound of these birds filled my ears with wonderful, interesting, sometimes beautiful sounds. And my mind’s eye with movement, form, and color – including the beautiful meadow, which would not otherwise have brought itself indoors for me. The otherwise solid separation of outdoors and indoors, man-made and natural, mostly logical/conceptual and organic/esthetic – all these separations got mixed up and mooshed together.
Another incidence of the kind of invisible seam that birds were for me weaving into the seeming empty spaces around me, occurred during this same period - when the world of birds was so much coming alive for me. My classmate Harold and I were walking across campus, when I heard the unmistakable chirp of a cardinal from the dense bush by the building in front of us.
“There’s a cardinal in there”, I said.
Harold, the good New York City boy that he was, asked, challengingly, “How do you know?”
“Well, they like to hang out in bushes like that, and that’s the chirp they make. When they’re up in the treetops, especially in the springtime, they just sing their little hearts out – but down in bushes like this, they chirp.”
Harold eyed me suspiciously, abandoned his premise that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and dropped back to his real bottom line. “So what?”
In New York, where Harold had grown up, you were bombarded by so many stimuli that there was no way you could keep up with them all – you had to filter them or be overwhelmed. So the primary filters became, “Is this dangerous to me?” or “Has this got something that I want?” If that stimulus did not meet either of those criteria, why would I want to bother focusing on it? So what?
The “so what” for me was that this sound suddenly populated my world with beautiful stimulation, not over-stimulation. Something that I could not even see made me feel instantly connected with the natural world around me. It filled some of the “space” that is necessary to feel separate.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
"Outdoors Forgives Indoors", Majo
I was in the camp bathhouse and - even in this magnificent Northern Wisconsin retreat - I was ruminating. I just couldn't seem to shut that old mental computer off. I was running over and over a set of thoughts that really had been pretty well milked dry several minutes ago - yet I couldn't put them to rest.
Then I swung open the screen door and morning sunlight evaporated the thoughts like burning off the morning mist. I was once again part of the trees, part of the dazzling light, part of the wonderful, pure, mostly undisturbed eco-system. That turbulent, disturbed, restless mental process went suddenly silent, vacant - and my attention shifted totally outward. This felt lots better.
When I was absorbed in my own mental process, i was removed from my environment. When the richness of the natural world pulled me back out, I was integrated into my surroundings. Paul Reps, a Zen teacher, wrote a haiku (one-line poem) that goes "Outdoors forgives indoors." I find this true again and again. The natural world has a capacity to straighten out the kinks that we create in our minds - to help us establish balance again.
This principle is as true on a figurative level as the literal one. Locked up in our own personality, our own mental process, we easily become out of balance - preoccupied with our neurotic worries. But when we balance ourselves out with strong, open contact with other humans, we have the chance to heal. Any mental pre-occupation which we fully share with another is bound to change.
I like to ask myself, "What is it that I am most needing to share with another human at this point in time?" Or, "What would be the most creative way to air out my own process right now - open it up to more contact, more response, more support?"
Other people, the intelligence of other human minds, are part of our natural eco-system. When we hold our thoughts and feelings too long separate, too shut away from our species-mates, they start to turn sour and out of balance. We need periods of privacy and introversion, in the same way that I occasionally needed the seclusion of the bathhouse at camp. But I knew better than to spend all my time in there.
Outdoors forgives indoors.
(From Radical Integrity, 2007)
Then I swung open the screen door and morning sunlight evaporated the thoughts like burning off the morning mist. I was once again part of the trees, part of the dazzling light, part of the wonderful, pure, mostly undisturbed eco-system. That turbulent, disturbed, restless mental process went suddenly silent, vacant - and my attention shifted totally outward. This felt lots better.
When I was absorbed in my own mental process, i was removed from my environment. When the richness of the natural world pulled me back out, I was integrated into my surroundings. Paul Reps, a Zen teacher, wrote a haiku (one-line poem) that goes "Outdoors forgives indoors." I find this true again and again. The natural world has a capacity to straighten out the kinks that we create in our minds - to help us establish balance again.
This principle is as true on a figurative level as the literal one. Locked up in our own personality, our own mental process, we easily become out of balance - preoccupied with our neurotic worries. But when we balance ourselves out with strong, open contact with other humans, we have the chance to heal. Any mental pre-occupation which we fully share with another is bound to change.
I like to ask myself, "What is it that I am most needing to share with another human at this point in time?" Or, "What would be the most creative way to air out my own process right now - open it up to more contact, more response, more support?"
Other people, the intelligence of other human minds, are part of our natural eco-system. When we hold our thoughts and feelings too long separate, too shut away from our species-mates, they start to turn sour and out of balance. We need periods of privacy and introversion, in the same way that I occasionally needed the seclusion of the bathhouse at camp. But I knew better than to spend all my time in there.
Outdoors forgives indoors.
(From Radical Integrity, 2007)
Friday, February 16, 2007
"Uncontested", Majo
Is this moment OK?
A voice in me says perhaps I should be in another
Should be somewhere else, doing something else
With someone else, as someone else.
Perhaps I should be further ahead than I am.
Perhaps I started at the wrong place
And will never have a chance.
Perhaps I have not done enough or well enough
Perhaps I took a wrong turn
Somewhere back along the road.
More than ever I rememberI am hearing and observing this “perhaps” voice.
It is a funny voice, I think
Where does it get its information?
Its accusations have become monotonous to me
I see that it truly does not come from me
In fact, it truly is not alive at all
It is a tape recording, a mindless machine voice.
It is caught in an endless litany of “not enough”.
There is no life in it and no life in listening.
It is a relic, an echo
A memory that has not caught up – and never can
With here and now.
It is a here-and-now would-be destroyer
Except that here-and-now is
So much bigger, so much stronger.
This moment is nothing but alive
It vibrates, pulsates, sings, reverberates.
The present moment does not see or hear
The “perhaps” voice at all. There is no contest.
When I step from “perhaps” to this moment, I am uncontested.
(From Call Me Crazy, 2005)
A voice in me says perhaps I should be in another
Should be somewhere else, doing something else
With someone else, as someone else.
Perhaps I should be further ahead than I am.
Perhaps I started at the wrong place
And will never have a chance.
Perhaps I have not done enough or well enough
Perhaps I took a wrong turn
Somewhere back along the road.
More than ever I rememberI am hearing and observing this “perhaps” voice.
It is a funny voice, I think
Where does it get its information?
Its accusations have become monotonous to me
I see that it truly does not come from me
In fact, it truly is not alive at all
It is a tape recording, a mindless machine voice.
It is caught in an endless litany of “not enough”.
There is no life in it and no life in listening.
It is a relic, an echo
A memory that has not caught up – and never can
With here and now.
It is a here-and-now would-be destroyer
Except that here-and-now is
So much bigger, so much stronger.
This moment is nothing but alive
It vibrates, pulsates, sings, reverberates.
The present moment does not see or hear
The “perhaps” voice at all. There is no contest.
When I step from “perhaps” to this moment, I am uncontested.
(From Call Me Crazy, 2005)
"Synchronicity", Majo
I ride the back of a massive whale
Called luck
Or chance
Or the convergence of the spheres
Or “Just coincidence, you dreamer, you”.
When my son was 12,
I told him that God winked at us
When things converged
He thought me more foolish then
Than even I was wont to be.
Today he says it back to me.
I work as a cashier
I play with numbers all day long
They wink at me many times a day.
My boss and I talk of what life was like
In the 70’s in the good old USA
As we talk, this woman writes her check
For her gas and cigarettes combined
It comes to 19 dollars and 70 cents -
Why?
This girl says it’s her birthday –
She’s 29 today
Her several purchases add up
To twenty-nine dollars cash American
Cool.
This is the first or second grade of the
“All things in synch” school
But fun and helps me pass the time
And, in their so-light ways,
These convergences
Dare me to still believe
This world is chaos - just
The senseless bouncing
Of the billiard balls of life.
Why did that old song
Play on the radio at just that perfect time?
Or, coming around that corner
Why did this perfect person appear?
Is there a guiding hand?
Do my five senses only
Know how to perceive
The seeming separateness of things?
This sixth sense – dormant most the time
Sees the web, the one tapestry of life
Can see what’s next
Because it’s all there at once
All the time.
Could it be
No matter what I think of you
Or my gripes that you
Are even here at all
That you were always meant to be here
Right this moment, now?
If I go deeper
Engage with you more full
It might get clear
The wink you have for me
And I for you
Or I will simply be surprised
How completely inadequate – or wrong
Is how I see you now?
And how perfect, now
That you are here in front of me.
If certain things connect like this
How can I make them happen more
Here in Asheville, where these things go on
Faster and much more than in the normal world?
What if the beauty is that
I don’t do it at all?
That maybe I don’t
Do anything at all?
This flash-frame
Where all seems one
May mean that all is one
There are no actors
Or those they act upon.
There is just life
Dancing its dance
Dancing us
Even when we just sit and watch.
(From Don't Take It Personal, 2007)
Called luck
Or chance
Or the convergence of the spheres
Or “Just coincidence, you dreamer, you”.
When my son was 12,
I told him that God winked at us
When things converged
He thought me more foolish then
Than even I was wont to be.
Today he says it back to me.
I work as a cashier
I play with numbers all day long
They wink at me many times a day.
My boss and I talk of what life was like
In the 70’s in the good old USA
As we talk, this woman writes her check
For her gas and cigarettes combined
It comes to 19 dollars and 70 cents -
Why?
This girl says it’s her birthday –
She’s 29 today
Her several purchases add up
To twenty-nine dollars cash American
Cool.
This is the first or second grade of the
“All things in synch” school
But fun and helps me pass the time
And, in their so-light ways,
These convergences
Dare me to still believe
This world is chaos - just
The senseless bouncing
Of the billiard balls of life.
Why did that old song
Play on the radio at just that perfect time?
Or, coming around that corner
Why did this perfect person appear?
Is there a guiding hand?
Do my five senses only
Know how to perceive
The seeming separateness of things?
This sixth sense – dormant most the time
Sees the web, the one tapestry of life
Can see what’s next
Because it’s all there at once
All the time.
Could it be
No matter what I think of you
Or my gripes that you
Are even here at all
That you were always meant to be here
Right this moment, now?
If I go deeper
Engage with you more full
It might get clear
The wink you have for me
And I for you
Or I will simply be surprised
How completely inadequate – or wrong
Is how I see you now?
And how perfect, now
That you are here in front of me.
If certain things connect like this
How can I make them happen more
Here in Asheville, where these things go on
Faster and much more than in the normal world?
What if the beauty is that
I don’t do it at all?
That maybe I don’t
Do anything at all?
This flash-frame
Where all seems one
May mean that all is one
There are no actors
Or those they act upon.
There is just life
Dancing its dance
Dancing us
Even when we just sit and watch.
(From Don't Take It Personal, 2007)
The Joy of Blogging On "Life Lived More Deeply"
The LLMD website (www.home.earthlink.net/~llmd/) is, by its nature, relatively more static than a blog – and so suffers more from how genuinely difficult it is to put all this into words. (Even while we will continually edit and even reorganize the site to do a better job of this.) In this blog, I – and you, if you choose to comment – can more free-associate about this somewhat nebulous concept and experience. We can come at it from many different angles and lay no trips on ourselves that what we write has to conceptually make sense. Lots of material on the web site may also not make a lot of logical sense, but I aspire to reasonability there more than I intend to here.
So you may also want to not hold on to the requirement that these words need to fit into a nice neat package. In fact, sometime you may want to deconstruct the words – not attempt to decode them – as in the sound meditation described below.
Sound Meditation
Sometimes, especially when I am either doing monotonous work that doesn’t require a lot of attention – or walking down the street or just sitting somewhere, I will just let all the sounds in my environment wash over me. Sometimes it will be obvious what caused the sound, other times not. As much as possible, I let go of naming them. If the sounds include human voices, I will let go of listening to words or meaning, but just allow the sounds to have their own auditory qualities. When I’m doing this, I also am sometimes able to not attach value judgments to the sounds, e.g. “car sounds” – noise, bad; or “bird sounds” – pretty, good. No preferences, all just sounds. (As with any meditation or awareness practice, my attention naturally wanders from this focus on the sounds in my environment. The practice then is to not judge this wandering, but to just lightly bring the attention back to the sounds.)
This kind of sound meditation will be a little trickier to do with the written words on this blog. I’ll explore the possibility of putting sound clips on here, but may not be able to do this. If you want, though, it could be an interesting experiment to tape record a passage and then listen to it in the floating, non-meaningful way described above. The effect will certainly be different listening to your own voice. Otherwise, you can read out loud or hear the sounds of the words in your mind, or simply pay less attention to the voice in your mind that continually wants to know “what does it mean”.
So you may also want to not hold on to the requirement that these words need to fit into a nice neat package. In fact, sometime you may want to deconstruct the words – not attempt to decode them – as in the sound meditation described below.
Sound Meditation
Sometimes, especially when I am either doing monotonous work that doesn’t require a lot of attention – or walking down the street or just sitting somewhere, I will just let all the sounds in my environment wash over me. Sometimes it will be obvious what caused the sound, other times not. As much as possible, I let go of naming them. If the sounds include human voices, I will let go of listening to words or meaning, but just allow the sounds to have their own auditory qualities. When I’m doing this, I also am sometimes able to not attach value judgments to the sounds, e.g. “car sounds” – noise, bad; or “bird sounds” – pretty, good. No preferences, all just sounds. (As with any meditation or awareness practice, my attention naturally wanders from this focus on the sounds in my environment. The practice then is to not judge this wandering, but to just lightly bring the attention back to the sounds.)
This kind of sound meditation will be a little trickier to do with the written words on this blog. I’ll explore the possibility of putting sound clips on here, but may not be able to do this. If you want, though, it could be an interesting experiment to tape record a passage and then listen to it in the floating, non-meaningful way described above. The effect will certainly be different listening to your own voice. Otherwise, you can read out loud or hear the sounds of the words in your mind, or simply pay less attention to the voice in your mind that continually wants to know “what does it mean”.
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