Immediate Joy

Meditation has changed my sense of self.  I wouldn't say yet that it has stabilized it, but I'm not as prone to accept this tiny self that seems to live in a prison somewhere in my frontal cortex.  There's this bigger, more fluid, more magnetic and powerful self that lives and travels throughout my entire nervous system. Pure awareness, not just a glimmer, but an increasingly present energy.

This week started out with a greater consciousness of the self-hatred that is beginning to break up in my heart, like that piece of ice from the Snow Queen. Now I find my self wanting to know what this more powerful self wants. What is this consciousness feeling in and through my heart?

One thing is wants is to run more. To feel that pure joy that comes after a long run.  I've put the picture of myself and Ben that I took at the end of the 10K, to remind myself throughout the day how important that vitality is to my life. It's spring, so the nice fresh weather helps.

My higher self, if that's what we want to call it, wants to feel healthy joy. The healthy joy that comes from creativity, exercise, and useful, meaningful work. The healthy joy that comes from having a lot of love in my life and in my home.

Not overexcitement or grandiosity.  Just that mild sustainable joy that comes from a life well lived.

Absolute Love

A few years back I wrote a post about a pivotal moment in my practice, the night my depression died. This morning I write about another such moment. The morning my self-hatred healed.

The process started last night, in much the same way, with insomnia. To try to nudge myself asleep I listend to a Tergar meditation on essence love, a meditation where we forget about lovingkindness and compassion, and practice being, without concept, without cognition with whatever suffering we're feeling in its rawest, most present energy. Only there is transformation possible.

I followed that up with a Rob Bell podcast on grace and peace. Grace is that energy that allows us to receive the gifts of life, and its abundant rewards that are always available to us, whether we deserve them or not. I usually fall asleep half way through a Robcast, but not this night.

Finally, tired of every virtuous option available to me,  I watched the last episode of Downton Abbey on Netflix, until eventually I drifted off.

This morning I was too dull in my brain to read or think much, so I meditated during the hour that I've been trying to devote to tidying. During this meditation, the completion of the triad I started two weeks ago with Absolute Joy and Absolute Self emerged.  Absolute Love, the love that is always there, whether we see it or not, regardless of what we have done in our lives.

Then it came to me that before I assimilate this sense of Absolute Love, I need to deal with the deep block, such a strong part of me, so persistent a presence, I'm not even aware it's there.  Self hatred.  My legacy of years of rage, frustration, unkindness. That self hatred is like this lump of carbon in my heart.  But it  is also  in its way the gem like flame that Walter Pater writes about in his famous essay on the Renaissance. It is love gone hard. But it is love.

My parents successfully maintained their hatred for over 50 years. And I wonder if this has been a great gift to me in a way, because al I need to do is turn it into love.  I have the maintenance part down, I just need the antidote.

That night my depression died, did not mean the end of depression, but it did mean the end of depression having a death grip on me.  It still visits from time to time, but it's never been as strong in me again.  This has happened now with my hatred.  I don't expect it to leave me, but it will never rule me in the way it once did. And for that I am deeply grateful.

Absolute Self

This week I move from cultivating my sense of absolute joy, that joy that is at the core of my awareness, undiluted and undiminished by all the cultural and family programming, to cultivating absolute self. This is the self that can pull back from all the monkey energy that I love even while it distracts me from the better life Ben and I could be having.

  I'm going to try and experiment this spring break. I'm going to treat Ben as though he is operating from absolute self, even though his monkey mind is strong. I'm going to continue bringing this absolute self into tasks, writing, work, even T.V. watching.  I'm definitely going to bring it into the dinner I'm having tonight with my parents. But I'm also going to look for and connect with the absolute self in others.

  I'm going to watch out for irritation, judgement, defensiveness. I'm going to use tonglen as a way of loosening the grip of my monkey energy.

  Above all, I'm going to keep watch on my monkey mind and monkey energy. Just keep watch. See it as my companion, my old friend, my child even.  But not myself. I am not monkey mind.  I am this strong, lucid, wise presence that gets stronger with every meditation.

absolute joy

This week I read an article in the New York Times about what the rich can learn from the poor about money management.  It sparked an important insight about joy.

The article looked at a mistake people often make when calculating whether or not saving money is worth the effort needed to take advantage of the savings. People were asked if they would travel half an hour to save 30% on a 45$ purchase. Then asked if they would travel the same distance to to save 5% on a 400$ purchase.  More people would make the trip to save 30% (10$) than they would to save 5%(20$), even though the 5% is actually more dollars saved. It's a wrong choice because more money has more spending power than less money. The actual dollar amount that you save is the absolute value, not the relative value.

This got me thinking about the goals of meditation. What is the point really, this constant work towards parsing absolute reality from relative reality? Absolute reality is like negative space. It's the background, it's the indivisible is-ness of things, it's the emptiness, it's the 0 on a time line.  It's not something that exists in comparison to something else. Relative reality is all that arises from this background.

In absolute reality there is more "absence" of self-created suffering, because suffering needs things, sensations, thoughts, images to compare to to other sensations, thoughts, images, to stay alive.

Absolute joy, in this conceptual map, is the joy that we feel when we are conscious, and able to sustain our consciousness of absolute reality. But it's not an abstract concept because it's where we make the leap, psychically, to that place. Or perhaps as close to that place as we are able to be in this feeling, thinking, imagining mind of ours.

To dwell, to make a real home, in this absolute reality is to have easy access to absolute joy. And that is, of course, the most precious resource that we can have.  People want money because they want joy.  But money is only a tool, it is not joy in itself. It is not absolute. Were the economy to explode in your country all those absolute dollars in your bank account would be cold comfort.

The economy can't do much about absolute reality.  And so it can't do much about absolute joy.

To achieve enlightenment it to not only see that, but to feel it, to feel it at the core of your being, to make it the ground up which your entire life is built.

It's to know that  happiness is the only absolute value that really counts. And it's to strive to have as much of it for yourself, and for others, as you can.

Fear of Power

Over the last week I've been noticing how I feel when I choose to shift my sense of self from the powerless feeling of ordinary consciousness, to the more powerful feeling of pure consciousness. If I see myself as driven and created by this powerful psychic force, and I see the drives that diminish my energy--my ordinary sense of self, as puny in its face, it's inevitable that my life will change. And change for the better.

So what is this fear about? Well, change for the better means more work. It means greater risk of failure, or perhaps bigger more noticeable failures. It means risking criticism, envy, contempt. Having a dream, where I grew up, meant contempt if it wasn't the dream that was the dominant dream.

It means living up to your potential, and paying back the gifts of life.

It means the solid realization that the strongest most powerful part of me, the part I share with all beings, whether they realize it or not,  wants to communicate what I've learned and what I'm learning to others.

It's an entire shift of my locus of control, and that makes me feel a little unbalanced.  In the past it has made me feel extremely unbalanced, but slowly that shift to a different centre becomes more intuitive.

It's an interesting optical illusion because the "self" that I'm afraid of letting go of sees the locus of control outside myself.  Whereas the "self" I'm trying to give more control of feels like it's outside of me, but is really the self that has the most inner control.

Patience.

Half-Empty

This week, I'm going to spend some time with my heartbreak. The grief, the lost dreams, failed relationships, projects, deep disappointments, and harsh reckonings that have resulted from circumstances beyond my control, but more often from my delusions, ignorance, wishful thinking and naivete.

I do this because I've decided to let it go, and to change this pattern to the best of my abilities. But first I have to feel it, feel where it comes from, feel who is feeling it. My suffering is going to be transformed into peace. That decision has been made.

I'm doing this in large part because decisions about my book are coming in.  I've received my first pass, and I'm steeling myself for others. Very few people even make it to the level where they have an agent shopping their book around, so whatever happens, I've still made progress. But I still have this sick feeling in my gut. The feeling that tells me that I'm only allowed to go so far in life. The feeling that tells me that success is just not in my cards.

But is that feeling really in my gut?  Why would I have worked this long if it really wasn't probable?

This week I'm going to pay attention to exactly where this feeling is coming from. Is it coming from a place of wisdom?  Or is it coming from a place of fear? Is it coming from a place that is going to help me stop wasting energy on things that won't impact my life, or anyone else's?  Or is it coming from a place that is creating low expectations that are undermining my progresss?

The challenge this week is to feel this feeling out and sense just how reliable it really is. Is heartbreak inevitable in my life? Or will I find that path towards connection?

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.