I will sit for hours in silence sometimes, doing nothing but staring outside my window, sometimes stretching, often smoking and drinking coffee. It is, I think, the only way to really get to know the flow of emotions within me, which lead to a flow of thoughts.
Or, as I have argued (I tend to use the word argue, assuming conflict, but of course nobody is arguing back, here; I am simply defensively oriented by nature) before, what really happens is sensations and images, as one dyad, lead to feelings and thoughts, as the second.
To my mind, if this is a valid claim, then the logical beginning of meditation is in sensation, and that trying to release thoughts is more or less getting it backwards. There is no reason you cannot start with the end result and work backwards, but it seems to me this has to be less efficient than starting with the source, which is the body, and I am not aware of a more complete system of somatic “rectification”–I will call it today, or righting, or to use the word Tarthang Tulku uses, balancing–than Kum Nye.
So a thought appears today that all truth already exists in silence. It is almost a bastardization and a reduction to consign truth to words. Words are already cooling, and solidifying, and losing their glow and connection with the primal source, whose vehicle, perhaps I can say, is silence.
I had considered making Saturday my day of “no keyboard” for this reason. But I am indulging myself, as I so often do. It may never stop fully, and of course my hope is that what I write is useful to someone, perhaps at least myself.
And then the thought appeared (none of us really know where thoughts come from, do we, even if we think brains are the beginning and end? I can say with some assurance, though, that waiting patiently makes them much more likely) that the past is a Present of sorts. If I imagine Proust–who I have never read, by the way–delving into an extended research into past times, then what he is doing in the PRESENT is look at information which is ALSO present that exists in what we call the Past. But we can learn, now, from what happened long ago, can’t we? It can still speak to us And we need to listen, for many reasons. And I am not just referencing Santayana, but our own psychodynamic histories.
There are times I get at the feelings I had as a baby. It’s interesting. I feel the terror, the helplessness, the continually upset stomach (I had colic, which was likely related to a very precocious understanding of the precariousness of my emotional/social environment), the inability to move, the fear of the darkness. No nurturing mother anywhere. I know she read to me, and held me, and did outwardly the things mothers do, but I cannot ever remember feeling safe.
And it occurs to me that in some ways we cannot avoid being present in the Now, but that for many reasons our Now is actually somewhere else. This is not intrinsically bad. I mean, I entered a Now which happened many years ago, but it is also a part of my now Now. It never left. The past is not the past for most of us.
And our sense of the future–our hopes and fears–is really on a continuum with our past, is it not? What we hope for was at some point possible for us, and what we fear has in most cases already happened in some way.
So what I would say is hold on loosely to the present, but don’t let go. Much of this consists, I think, in more or less sometimes setting up a deer blind, and taking conscious notice–let us say we are camera hunters–of what passes by.
And sometimes we can sneak down and follow whatever it is, and see where it leads, how long we can stay with it until it eludes us.
To me, the idea that doing the dishes can be done mindfully, that we can be fully present to the process, is not all that helpful. I can’t do it. What I CAN do, though, is remain silent, and allow what wants to come up to come up. All of these techniques of mindfulness are really tools for accessing the wisdom in silence. That is my view.
I tried Zen many years ago, and I never connected with it emotionally. It is too harsh for me, and I think this is mostly because they hold on too tight. They have rigid schedules, and there is not enough space, even in meditation, for what I will broadly call “more”. You need time to space out, to belly button gaze. The Tibetans, to take one obvious example, seemingly understood that. They held on to their practices, but they allowed space and gaps in them.
And I feel that “primitive”, or less wealthy, or less electrified and modernized peoples tend to naturally integrate what I would call meditation into every day. Working a rice paddy, or squatting and pounding rice into flour for hours and hours, perhaps with others, and perhaps alone, perhaps singing or sharing gossip, perhaps in complete silence: all of these must generate a sense of calm and flow which vastly exceed anything most industrialized, decadent, silly Europeans and Americans and others see in any month in any year of many of their lives, which are filled with noise, stress, and a constant hunger for more things, more recognition, more accomplishment.
We are addicted to noise, obviously. And the reason is that we don’t pay our debts as we go. Most of us don’t take the time to feel what we are feeling, and just push it down and move on. This accumulates, and calcifies–this calcification is Kun Zhi–and any time we try to release it large chunks of unpleasant experience tend to drop on us suddenly.
This is why we avoid it. We are pursued and harried by all we have left behind and abandoned. It’s not a good way to live.
And it is perhaps ironic, but eminently logical that the most powerful people, the most powerful families, tend to instill deep senses of shame in their children. They are pushed, because they are supposed to be elite, superior, excellence personified.
I look at that picture of young Hillary that much older Hillary posted, when she assumed, with many others, that only modest levels of cheating would be needed to get her into the White House, and that she might well win outright.
I see a girl with a fake smile she learned probably by the time she was 5, who had been harassed, and harried, and pushed, pushed, pushed. I don’t think Hillary ever really had a childhood worthy of the name.
Here is that picture. I find endless links tiring, even if they could be efficient:
Those seem to me sad eyes. I will often look at people’s pictures of their kids, and you can usually tell which ones are actually happy, and which ones are faking.
I wonder how well and how often her parents celebrated her birthday. I suspect they were the sorts of people–and I have read zero biography, so this is purely speculative–who would be quite capable of withholding ALL birthday presents if she got a B in something, or failed to become President of some club or other. She was taught early to be intensely competitive, and where needed to use any and all means necessary to achieve her ends. As I noted in 2015-2016, her dishonesty was already conspicuous when she helped in the Watergate hearings.
So much of “high birth” is a curse. And contented poverty is still contented poverty. It is hard to see what in life is truly worth valuing, other than to note most of us, in our country, are obviously not doing it right.
As a conservative I can easily point to the obvious financial/economic success of free markets, property rights, and enforceable contract law.
But as a human being, I can also equally say that this success has not made us happy. It has merely created the time and space in which something new COULD emerge, such that we banished poverty and want–let me say, involuntary poverty and want–but also embraced a better, higher culture which actually did work to fulfill human needs.
Many of the naive people supporting de facto Collectivism have been duped into thinking that anything has to be better. They see the loneliness, the people left behind, the huge disparities between the super rich and the rest of us, and conclude that those saying “we can do better” must actually INTEND to do better. They don’t. Their plan is to turn the world into a gulag in comparison to which they can feel special and superior.
It seems to me one glue holding evil people together is the necessity of reinforcing and protecting the shared delusion that they are living good lives, and that having more things, and special privileges and more power is intrinsically good, when they all know on some level that they are desperately lonely and on some level longing for death, even when that sense is very deeply buried, as for example it seems to have been with Fidel Castro, who was beyond doubt a full blown psychopath, as was Mao.
Is it not obvious that all Cubans not milking the Communist Party cow–which in turn steals all it wants from a people they impoverished– would gladly replace their current hellhole with an equivalent to what they had under Battista? That the Chinese would be better off with a Chiang Kai Shek, or even someone worse? The North Koreans with whatever despot was replaced by this set of Kims?
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And I will share one more thought before, I think, watching a John Wayne movie (the Searchers, which has been recommended to me by many people).
Pain and pleasure are harder to differentiate than many of us suppose. More specifically, the connection between physical body states and how our minds interpret them are more complex than most of us consciously acknowledge.
Physiologically, the feeling of being on a roller coaster, and walking alone through a dark alley at night are not that different. You get butterflies in your stomach, you tense up reflexively.
But people pay for the first experience, and they would pay to avoid the second. Is this necessary?
Many of the soldiers I have talked to have talked about how addictive and life affirming combat can be. I remember well talking with a couple West Point grads in a bar many years ago who kept going back to Afghanistan and Iraq because they LIKED it.
For them, war was a roller coaster ride. It engendered feelings they did not know how to get any other way. They ENJOYED the idea of walking down a dark alley, armed, alert, to see if they were the equal or better of whatever monster emerged.
And every time they were, it was a huge rush. As I have said, the feeling of tension followed by release is a big factor in much of human behavior. You need risk to get relief, and I would speculate that without risk, most people turn into banal slugs.
I may or may not have mentioned this, but it is apparently common for men to get erections–and women presumably the female equivalent–when in fire fights. A friend of mine had told me this many years ago. You get rock hard while under imminent threat of death in many cases. In one story I read, a guy actually came in his pants after barely shooting someone before he himself was shot.
And this is one rarely commented on reason why erectile dysfunction is common in combat veterans. Once the fog of war has cleared, once the images of dead bodies pile up in their minds, their dicks get confused, because the past becomes present, and sends them places they don’t want to go. And their women, mostly likely, have a hard time understanding this, particularly if they don’t want to talk about the details, which seems likely in many cases.
But living well means learning to love the ride no matter what comes down the path of life. I am of course not advocating war, but I am advocating the value of choosing difficult paths, and learning to love the grind, as Vince Lombardy talked about. And learning to love risk. Every athlete always runs the risk of failure. The fact that they can lose makes victory more sweet. There is no other way to get that feeling.
We tend to think of problems–which amount to a demand for work of various sorts, intellectual, physical, emotional–as distractions from life, as bad things. But it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that the texture of your life–what makes it INTERESTING, with interesting being what attracts curiosity, and curiosity being one of the best feelings in life–is created by the quantity and quality of your problems.
Bless your problems. Embrace your problems. Know that they are gifts, designed to increase your human stature, your knowing, your capacity for life.