Awareness

Awareness allows me to see the impermanence of my thoughts and above all the impermanence of these stages where my thoughts are stuck in a chaotic jumble.  

Right now for instance, I am committed to becoming more aware of the effort that I need to put into my environment to keep the normal standards of cleanliness.  I am defining them now as a  few forever loops; keep the dishes washed and put away: keeping the kitchen floor swept once a day; wiping down the kitchen table and counters once a day; wiping the bathroom sink, swishing toilet, keeping an eye out for clutter; doing a five-minute room rescue.

There is a mathematics to cleaning.  If I keep those loops going forever I will be able to maintain a normal standard of cleanliness without too much effort.  And then my efforts will go into the deeper cleaning, rather than the restarting after everything has descended into chaos. I hope.  So that’s the method. But no method will keep the house clean.  Only cleaning will keep the house clean.  Only activity, not theory, will maintain the feeling of being nurtured and cared for.

I have had an easier time doing this with writing. Why am I keeping this forever loop of brief daily writings happening?  Because I want to make sure that my thoughts do not become a chaotic, frozen jumble, and that I am cognitively flexible. This is how I connect to awareness.  This forever loop of writing is and has always been the way that I connect to the awareness that is stable and unending that will be there as long as life is here. That life may and probably won’t be human life. We may very well be exterminated, or exterminate ourselves.  I don’t know. These are some morbid thoughts.  But I enjoy this kind of contemplative energy, even when it’s dark. This is how I keep my writing going. Keep on writing.  Just keep on writing.   

I don’t seem to be able to maintain the same daily commitment into cleaning. Or exercise.  Or into wholesome, healthy eating of greens and fiber.  And frankly, those things are more important to my happiness. Writing is not the cause of happiness. Awareness is the cause of happiness, not writing. Writing every day and being successful at writing is a secondary activity. It is not and will never be a prime cause of happiness. That is energy and power that results in sustainable happiness.  But a life of mild happiness with occasional, typically human, disruptions will produce creative writing. For mild happiness, I need a clean home.  I need a healthy body and mind.  So the primary forever loops need to be cleaning, eating healthy food, exercising and meditating, nurturing a sense of family and community.  The same old same old My secondary forever loops are writing, making an adequate living and political and cultural commitments.

And then there's the random stuff in between, and then there's the awakening to the awareness that is forever without my efforts or participation. I supposed we could call that the Tao.

Surrender

Achieving this state of pure awareness is getting easier as the days where I begin with one hour of mediation accumulate.  But living, writing, being from this state is a different challenge all together.

How do I write from a place that is empty of thought? Who is doing the writing when I've let go of self narrative?

Running from this place makes sense.  I just move my body. Cleaning house from this place makes sense, I just do the basic tasks.  But writing?  Writing is complex.

But is it?  Maybe the problem is that writing from the place of self-generated suffering is complicated.  And so I expect writing to be complicated. I resist the possibility that wisdom has something brilliant to say and that all I need to do really is listen.

I resist the possibility that this is enough.

Words are tools, my brain is a tool, my consciousness is a tool. Natural intelligence and creativity come through me and my brain and vocabulary and reasonable facility with language are the tool that it uses.

Letting go of this writing self is a process of familiarity.  Feeling the tightness, the anxiety, the bad habit energy that sabotages my progress. It's all part of writing practice.

It's all part of living practice.

New Post

This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.

It started with what are now the basics.  A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone.  A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.

I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."

After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.

Suddenly I was angry.  But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.

I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience.  Not every moment had to be peace.  There could be authentic peace, even in anger.

And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.

The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.

I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.

I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt.  I was tired of this climb.

And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.

Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.

A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)

I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational.  So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.

But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

Going off track

When I first started this blog, the goal of the experiment was to see if Eckhart Tolle was right.  If simply being would put me closer to a purposeful life than the mere pursuit of success.

I believe it has.  I work with more purpose now than I did back then.  Even if I haven't written or published the book I set out to write, I've still used that experience to help me get a fellowship, and I've learned through it to focus my projects more towards my natural skills and experience.

And now I'm on a new path that feels exciting and purposeful as well.  And maybe the next book will come out of this.

However, the one thing that hasn't happened during this time, that I wanted to happen and that I needed to happen was to improve my financial situation.

Standing was not made me better off financially.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that standing has caused my difficult financial situation.  But it's not enough on its own.

Now that I'm focussed on money, I feel stress.  It's not necessarily a negative stress.  It's a transitional stress, I think, that I need to feel to change my financial situation for the better.

But it's a level of stress that is making it really difficult for me to stand, because it's painful to face this stress every morning.

My practice is at risk because of this.  Every morning I have a different excuse to avoid standing.  I want to check my e-mail, my blog.  I want to run.  I want to think about my plans.

I don't want to give up my practice. I has been my anchor through all of this creative growth.

So I'm thinking about just getting back to baby steps.  Five minutes every morning this week.  Ten minutes next week.  Do what I can to get my practice back. 

My new lifetime commitment

I'm a little flu ish this morning. Up early standing and then not sure if I really want to stand. Wrote for a bit, because my monkey mind thinks sometimes that's what I should be doing to make my writing better. Writing more. And there is truth to that. But I think it's a mistake to make writing the primary purpose. Being is the primary purpose. I think it's a more effective way to live, and to create.
That's my theory.
But the reality is that standing is hard. It is the hardest thing I've every done. To keep it up I have to believe that this really is the best thing for me to be doing. The best way to use my time. The best way to start my day.
The only way to start my day. The only way.

primary

I read something yesterday about Freud's theory of primary and secondary process in creativity. Primary is the raw images, material. Secondary is the abstract thinking, editing. I think that what meditation is doing for me is training my primary process, not just in creativity, but in life. We all get so caught up in secondary living, thinking.

Early in the morning like this, I am far more aware of how my mind drifts off to plans and dreams and conversations. Of course this happens whenever i'm meditating. But when I meditate at other times of the day, I'm going against the grain. I should kind of be planning and talking, so it's harder to have any real authority over my mind.

In the stillness of the morning, quiet is right. I have the authority of dawn working for me.