The Adventure of not knowing

If you don't expect to know what's going to happen, if you have no expectations, life can always feel like an adventure.

Like any adventure you need to have your supplies, otherwise it's an adventure in hell. You need to have maturity and skills and good instincts. You need the right attitudes, like patience, negotiation skills and you need compassion for yourself and the people you will meet.  And you need above all the ability to signal love, calmness, open heartedness.

To survive and thrive in adventure, above all, you need to know that place of refuge within you. There are things you can know and carry with you throughout all the places and events that you do not know.  You need to be able to access your refuge on call and know deep inside you that it is always there. 

#1 motivation blocker

I've been thinking this week about the difference between impulsivity and inspiration.

I believe that my impulsivity arises from a need to find stimulation to escape the dullness of a mind trapped by learned helplessness.  According to Mingyur Rinpoche, "faint heartendness" is the #1 blocker of our true, buddah nature.  He tells an interesting story in Joy of Living, about a woman who, early in his vocation as an international teacher, told him about her self-hatred.  He didn't know what that meant. This speaks to the new theory of neuroscience that I'm learning, that all our emotions are culturally constructed. My own self-hatred is a prison constructed from my experience and my circumstances.  When I sit with it I feel its core as a low arousal unpleasantness.

The "stims" that I've lived with all my life, my hand flapping, my grievance collecting, the jumping, the angry daydreams, these are all ways of trying to kickstart my muddy heart. 

But I'm experimenting right now with a different way.  I am following Rinpoche's instruction in seeing life as a dream, and thus feeling this faint heartedness and sense of powerlessness as that.  Seeing it the same way I would if I were in a lucid dream and then allowing the mind to open up to all kinds of possibilities of power.  I'm also spending more time in my meditation in that hypnagogic state, between dreams and wakefulness.

It certainly opened my mind up to changing one pattern.  I imagined that my room was miraculously tidy, and every time I finished my meditation, I felt an overwhelming urge to clean.

I am sitting in this moment in the cleanest room I've had in years.

Narayan Helen Libenson speaks of "don't know" mind, and how practicing this attitude of knowing that we don't know liberates us from all the patterns and habits that we delude ourselves into believing are our identity.

Being comfortable with the feeling of not knowing is what allows life to remain fresh and inspired. It's a natural stimulation that comes from the natural way that life changes, rather than the constant chasing after sensations that comes from a life that has calcified into dull routine.

Chocolate current

Apparently twenty per cent of the population is born happy.  They have a genetic pre-disposition that supplies more anandamide, a well-being transmitter, to the brain that the average human. A woman in Scotland had such an overload of anandamide that she couldn't feel anxiety, pain, fear,  had a tendency to get hurt, but her wounds healed much more quickly than most people.

Chocolate is apparently a trigger of anandamide. One study found that dark chocolate had potential as a natural anti-depressant. When I found this out I experimented with a meditation I was calling chocolate intravenous, imagining that I had just the right amount of chocolate in my veins, not so much that I felt sick but enough to sustain a stable feeling of enjoyment.

Knowing that enjoyment is something that can be sustained seems to be juicing my transformation. I've been thinking back to Echhart Tolle's assertion that on the New Earth we will live in three modes of being, acceptance, enjoyment and enthusiasm.  Enjoyment will replace want. I'm experimenting with this idea as I continue with the rest of the world in COVID 19 lockdown.

I don't think the economy will ever be the same again, because we will find it harder to accept the myth that ultimate happiness is found in stuff, intimate relationships, and careers. It's not that these things don't bring happiness, but none of them last.  The only thing that lasts is awareness. And even that only last for the duration of a life, which will never seem very long at the end.

Doing what we can to contribute to collective awareness, so that this truth will carry on after we are gone. That's all this is about.