Posts Tagged ‘Meditation’

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Thoughts Are Not Thinking


10 Jan

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I’ve been meditating regularly for a while now and, just like everyone who has ever tried meditation I have discovered the enormous amount of thoughts running around in my head.  It’s like a 24/7 thought making factory is on double-overdrive with nothing but super caffeinated workers on duty.  They never stop cranking them out!

That’s how it seems at first anyways.

When I started meditation I had what I think is a common idea that at some point my thoughts would permanently stop.  I would be left with a placid mind like the boundless sky, never touched by an errant concern.

That may happen at some point, but it sure ain’t the case yet!

What has happened though is my relationship with my thoughts has radically shifted.  First of all they are not mine.  Not exactly.  They spring from my particular history and environmental factors, but I don’t make them happen.  They just show up.  Unbidden and unannounced.  Secondly I see that they are not thinking.  Thinking is an active action.  Thoughts just passively arrive.

It’s like a red car speeding across your field of vision.  You recognize “red car”, but not the make and model unless you pay some attention.  It’s only when you actively look that it becomes a “cherry red model-T with chrome detail and white-walls.”  Seeing something is passive, looking at it directly is active.

This calls into question the accuracy of one of my frequent self-blame internal accusations, “What were you thinking?!?!”  Or, another favorite, “How could you think such a thing?”  The answer now comes as a relief, “I didn’t.  That thought just showed up.  What I do with it is my responsibility. Whether I choose to fuel that thought by actively thinking on it is up to me.”

That is a much better and easier relationship to those thoughts that keep-on-coming!

“Your” thoughts are just random guests, as Rumi would say, that show up when they do by their own cause.  You did not cause them to show up.  What you decide to think about them is up to you.

On a bright note I do have periods of time now without thought, and not just while I am asleep!  Sometimes I drop into a space devoid of the motion of thoughts while active alertness shines brightly.  That usually happens while I am meditating, but more and more often it is the case while I am going about my day.  Luckily no one has started accusing me of zoning out yet. ;)

When You are No Longer You


09 Jan

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The Law of Identity, that is, cannot hold in  process-world ‘where,’ as the mathematical physicist says, ‘every electron has a date and is not identical to itself from one second to another.’ – RAW

I’ve been reading Email to the Universe, the last book Robert Anton Wilson wrote before he concluded his time as a living human being.  He is one of my favorite sources for exploring the inner workings of Taoist thought.  RAW uses the word Process as a translation of the word Tao, which he picked up from Ezra Pound.

One of the distinctions RAW works on in the book is the self-concept (and by extension other-self-concept) held by two basic camps of thought. There are the Western paradigm folks who nail things down into discrete packets of stuff in space. These we can call Spacers.  Spacers are also fond of pointing as the current location a thing holds.  Then there are the more Easter style paradigm peeps who note that a thing changes over time in a continuous process of existence.  This crowd we can call Timers.

Spacers hold that a thing is a self-contained component discrete from other things and stands on it’s own even while being part of larger organizations of things, and conversely composed of smaller discrete things.  A table is a specific thing that is composed of parts like legs, top, joints, etc.

Timers see that a particular thing, say a table, changes over time and is simply the state of the thing as it is now.  A table used to be a tree and will one day be termite food.

The funny and obvious thing is that both camps are right, just from a different view.  We are all nested and nesting in an infinitely complex web of interconnected things.  We also are subject to change over time.

For me this call into question the idea of names.  In the Spacer view it is sufficient for a person to have a specific label to track there place in the configuration of stuff that makes up reality.  This is not really sufficient for the Timers though as the Travis that is writing this is vastly different to the Travis who was watching TV while living at home twenty years ago having never even thought of being a writer.  So, it makes sense to attache a time stamp to the name-label to keep track of just who we are speaking to, or about, on any given occasion. Since the function of a thing is also affected by where in an arrangement of things it happens to be a locational stamp would be useful too.

This would allow for a much fuller conception of a person to deal with.

That’s what went through my head anyways.  What do you think?

Signed,

Travis-(s)San Francisco, CA 94110, (t)1/9/2011 ~ 00:32

Stop For a Second


08 Jan

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I’ve been reading the book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
by Tara Brach, Ph. D., and deeply enjoying it.  The last section dealt with the concept of the sacred pause.  This is a practice I try to work into my life, and it was great to get a reminder.

The idea is to take a moment to stop striving, or goal-seeking, or activity to try and get somewhere, something or someone and just be with what is real for you in the present moment.  It’s a sort of energetic reset.  Just taking a moment to see what is so, without judgment or plan.  It is a state of welcoming whatever is present, just as it is, and checking in with the core of ourselves.

Tara suggests the idea of picking a specific activity for practicing the pause.  Something you do on a regular daily basis.  This could be before you brush your teeth, before you leave the car, as you finish ting your shoes, as you sit down for lunch, or any activity that you do regularly where you can take a moment for yourself to pause.

I find a pause in my day to take a moment, or three, to just experience what I am experiencing consciously is incredibly invigorating and greatly sharpens mental focus.

You could try one right now before you read the rest of this post.  Take a few moments to close your eyes, relax your body and breathe easily.  Let your awareness scan through your current experience.  How does your chest feel? Your jaw? Is there any tightness there or elsewhere? Are there a stream of thoughts going through your mind? How does gravity feel on your flesh?  After a few breaths slowly open your eyes and go back to reading.  See how that feels.

In OA (and other 12-Step Programs) they have a version of this sacred stop that you can reach for (as a tool) when you are in the grip of negative emotions or energy.  It comes with the handy acronym – H.A.L.T.  That stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.  When you catch yourself lashing out in anger, fuming, stomping off, or telling take a moment and do an honest assessment.  Are you acting out for any of those reasons, and if so what can you do to actually address the issue?  It’s a wonderful way to get real with why you are acting the way you are.  You can then make an informed decision as to whether your current course of action will deal with the issue, or if a different course is called for.  Often in life we get driven to unskilled actions by misunderstood or unexamined feelings when we could actually address them and move on.

If the idea of the sacred pause appeals to you I highly recommend you carry it around in your back pocket for a few days, get some use out of it and see if it works for you.  Let me know how it goes!

Cheers!

Grateful for it All


31 Dec

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You ever sit and watch the rain?  I do.  When I was  a kid growing up here in San Francisco we would have weeks of downpour in the fall and winter months.  I used to walk home from school getting soaked and looking forward to sitting in the living room with the curtains wide open, watching the rain stream down in thick splashes.  The street in front of our house would turn into a river, ripples blowing uphill in the wind.  I would sit there poking away at homework and watch the rain for hours, thinking about where it had come from and how it worked.

These days I am a little more in the know about what goes into making rain.  I have been on a Buddhism study kick lately and one of the concepts central to Buddhist thought is the idea of interdependent conditions which come together to form any, and every thing we encounter.  In order for rain to happen several conditions need to be present.  There has to be water, clouds, differing temperature pockets, the right amount of wind, and more.  If any of these factors is missing then there is no rain.  So, when you are looking at rain, what you are seeing is the culmination of causes and conditions.  If any one was not present then the phenomenon of rain would not be either.

The same is true of a chocolate cake.  Take away flour, eggs, milk, salt, chocolate, heat, or the person baking it and there will be no chocolate cake to be found.

This is also true of the experience I call my life.  In order for there to be this life right now there had to come together an staggeringly complex set of conditions and formations.  If any one of them was not present then neither would I be. From the countless breaths I have taken, to the food that has been provided by the labor of others, to the bed I sleep on, to the guy who cut me off in traffic, to the bank teller who was rude to me when I was twenty-two.  If any part was missing, so would I be.  The person that would be here would be someone else.

Seeing this the other day as I was walking home from work I was filled with a profound gratitude, for everything, everyone, and every situation I am with or have ever been with.  All of it is the sum total of causes and conditions that make up the man I call Travis.

Looking at things that way puts a very nice spin on them indeed.

As this year closes, with a grateful heart I offer a deep bow to all the conditions that have come together to form me.  Thank you all, each and everyone. (Yes, that gal who said I was cute “like a hippo” when I was 7 too.)

Peace and Love for the New Year!

A Brave Meditation Manifesto


18 Dec

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Great post by Farnoosh over at the Prolific Living blog, A Manifesto for Meditation.  Give it a read!

It falls very much in line with something I was pondering after my meditation practice this morning.  My own frustration when thoughts come up to distract me during meditation.  My own relationship with random thoughts showing up has softened a great deal over the time of my own daily meditation (today was day 1284.)  For the most part I just watch them float by.  When I do get caught up in them, and subsequently notice that I have been caught up, I note that and then watch it float by.  This is easiest to do when the thoughts aren’t particularly troublesome.  But, occasionally very negative images and impulses do come up.  I used to have the habit of strongly denying them.  Now, however, I have come to see that such creatures popping up are not invasions, but are rather the monsters of disowned shadow elements of my own existence being found by the growing allowance for the light of awareness to travel where it may.

I am in strong agreement with Ken Wilber and the other teachers of the the spiritual wing of the Integral Institute that meditation is not a proper therapeutic model for nearly all psychological troubles.  It is wonderful though for bringing those troubles into the light of awareness so that they are not so easy to deny.  In meditation when these beasts get seen and make a show, we would do well to be grateful for their appearance and the chance to consciously seek an effective means of integrating and adjusting them.

The sweeping beam of attention that meditation trains us to use consciously will not always show pretty things, but it will show us what is.  It can give us the opportunity to face what is honestly rather than hiding from it to be ambushed at unpleasant times.  We can re-meet these aspects of ourselves and find a way to transform their negativity into constructive and skillful means.  Meditation will not do that for us, but it will reveal the issues so that we can use therapies tailor made for them.

I am grateful for finding the discarded pieces of my particular manifestation, even if I don’t always wish that they existed.

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Travis Eneix

Dedicated to looking at the self.