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.

Transformation

I've figured some things out.

We change from state to state, from arousal to calm, from pleasant to unpleasant, from one combination of those states to another. The more we conceptualize these states with whatever cultural programming we've been given, the more varied and busy the change is.

It's a lot of work.

Mediation brings us back to the elemental states. The elemental change.  In time meditation becomes no more than the brain keeping everything in balance with the least amount of energy possible.

At that point, as we begin to liberate ourselves from all the programming and all the energy that following that programming takes, we move from change to transformation. 

True deep rest happens, and true deep repair takes root and makes absolute being possible.

Why I love hatred

In meditation yesterday I hit a vein of hatred in my heart that revealed just how attached to it I really am. All that punk rock energy, all that anger, all that jouissance that was the intense, but ultimately unfulfilling consolation prize of growing up with parents who despised themselves and each other.

All that cre-hate-ivity of the 90s. All that contempt for vulnerability. All that need to be cool. How I with I could go back and truly see how crippled I was by it.  And how vulnerable I was to people who were driven by hatred, not love.

The way out, however, is not to hate the love that I have for hatred.  The only way out is to accept it. and accept however long it will take for that hatred to dissolve, a day, a decade, a lifetime. Not nearly that long if I can learn how to rest in that sea of equanimity.

Why is gratitude hard?

I have not brought gratitude into my practice, my day, my routines as I intended to back in January.

Watched a cute video about new years eve resolutions that suggested that instead of annual goals we create annual themes.  So far I've lost that theme, but I could put that up on my mission spreadsheet as a way of re-directing myself.

But first if I am going to make gratitude a practice, I need to recognize that it's hard. That grievance is my habit loop, not gratitude. Grievance collecting is something I was raised on, with two parents who were union officers. In times of stress this is what wakes up in me, this pattern of collecting all the slights and injustices real and imagined.

Can I train my heart to recognize how it closes around my vulnerability and how it can open to a stronger energy?  And how do I keep to that training? 

I can commit to the algorithm of Padmasambhava's Natural Liberation.  First awareness of our disillusionment,  then awareness of the preciousness of life. Bring that 1-2 in every practice. 

New trauma

A few days ago my mother fractured her hip.  This is going to put some old traumas back into play.  She's in the hospital and I don't know what the next three months hold for her, or the next year. A good percentage of seniors never recover from this.  My father, who has been struggling with depression for the last few years is in deep distress.

Widening my window of stress around this might be a way of repairing old wounds, and going though some psychic rehabilitation myself. I feel the stress manifesting as cravings and a desire to escape into Netflix. I hope I spend that time instead developing a stronger sense of the preciousness of this life, and this awareness that we all have access to.

What would this rehabilitation look like? Maybe it is me make the intention to follow that bardo course.  To begin to prepare for my parents' death and to help them to prepare for death.  Hospitals are a profound place of disillusionment  and reminder of our transience.

May I be compassionate towards my parents. May they both live as long as they need to. May they both connect with the awareness that is their birthright.