The continuum

I'm reading Tim Parks' book Teach Us to Sit Still. He's in the middle of an intense meditation retreat and is considering giving up writing.  It's all so clear to him how language is the problem.  It's all so clear to him that books are not life.  That the writing life is not really the reality that one sees in meditation, a life.

I'm not ready to give up writing. I like my tools, I just don't want them to be in control of my mind and my soul.  I want to see beliefs as beliefs, thoughts as thoughts.  The goal of my life is not simplicity, it is the grace and skill to handle complexity.

I love Mingyur Rinpoche's story about the man who decided he was just going to stop saying "I".  As though somehow giving up language, or the concept was going to bring us closer to selflessness. No, says Rinpoche, that will just bring us closer to madness.  There will always be people who renounce technology in favour of maintaining the old skills. Artists who renounce the new techniques.  Portrait painters who would never paint from photographs.  And our society is richer for those people, because we need the old skills.  It's good to have some refuge from the stresses of constant change. But life's richness is also a function of change and complexity. We can't shy away from that.

A Walk In The Woods

I`m reading Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods in preparation for the book I'm going to write next year.  It's funny, but only about half way through did I realize, at a deep level, that it was about trees.  My mind this year has been so on technology that I've forgotten how important the natural processes of the world were to me.  But technology works best when we understand what it already wonderful and powerful in the world. It also works best when we realize what is vulnerable
  Consider the natural technology of the tree, from Bryson's book:
 
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.  All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue--the phloem, xylem and cambium--just beneath the bark, which together forma a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood.  However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.  These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do it is one of the wonders of life.  Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water--several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day--from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere.  Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter f machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water.

This has been without contest, the most difficult, uncertain and painful year of my life.  I have no doubt that there are many other uncertainties in my future.  But this year was just profoundly stressful at my core.  It is a really frightening thing to be poor, and I never want to be that bad again, and I would never want that for anybody.

But I survived and I have a year of writing ahead. For the next year I am doing the thing I have always wanted to do, the thing I have always dreamed of doing, writing a book.  Writing a book with no pressing responsibilities, other than to write that book.

To do this I need a lucid mind, a strong core, faith in myself and my abilities.  Faith in the value of my project.

To build these things, I will stand.

Is standing a technology?

I read something yesterday that hit me hard. Writing is after all just another technology.

uh oh...my son is up. Will have to stop writing for a bit.

Socrates was worried about the effects on memory that writing would have. Plato disregarded those fears by writing down his teachers conversations. Writing was to the Greeks in some way, what video games are to our era.

And in the same way that video changes the brain, so does writing. It can slow down our thought. It can help us remember. But it can also lie in a way that oral culture couldn't, or couldn't accomplish as successfully.

So, just for the sake playing with this idea. Is standing a technology? I mean I am cultivating energy and electricity, the same way any conductor does. Maybe it's an ancient technology that we've lost. It is a technology that brings power to our body and to our brain. It is a technology of consciousness.

We look to technology to bring us wellbeing. This is another way of bringing us that wellbeing. The question is also, perhaps, is it a better technology for bringing us what we really want? If what we really want is peace, well being, freedom, creativity, health, then this may very well be a more successful technology, than anything we've ever invented.