Month: April 2017

I use to think of my getting older as a time to learn new things.   I’m finding out that it is also a time to unlearn many of the lessons of my past life.

For starters, the way I have learned to see the world has been horribly inadequate, even wrong.    Reality is not what I have been taught.   Newtonian physics doesn’t quite explain what my eyes see and what my hands touch.   I have learned to live in an illusion, and it is so freeing to begin to shatter that learned illusion.

The new experience of unlearning illusion goes further into my cultural and religious mythology.   So much of what I have considered the natural order of things has been a fabrication created by humans who are around me or lived in my past.

I find it interesting that I have spent so much time and energy sorting through the mythology of religion, trying to understand better how religion made sense.   I might as well have been playing a game of Skyrim or Civilization on my computer.    It has had about as much relationship to reality.    I am happy to at last uncloak the myths of religion and see them for what they are.

Cultural myths have been no less illusory.    The roles of men and women.    The nature of marriage.   The restrictions on loving one another.  The role of economics and ownership.   I have pushed back against all of these as I have come to see how they are constructs of society, and have very limited basis in reality.    They certainly are not going to be a large part of my future.

So many of the habits of nutrition, my learned likes and dislikes about food, are all lessons out of my past.    Putting these illusory principles aside is not easy, and they seem to be a daily challenge.    I know I am unlearning, as I must, my old way of eating.

Above all, I am unlearning what I have been taught to expect about getting older.   Old age is a time of improved mental awareness as I learn the new ways of mindfulness.   It is a time of mental sky-diving.    This is a time to learn more about gardening and geology.   It is a time to look deeply into what others can tell me about the nature of reality.   It is a time to free up my interest in writing.

The list could go on, but I know that old age is not the myth told to me by my society.   Old age is a good time to unlearn and shovel out all the junk teachings of my past.

 

 

The past is a terrible place to get stuck.  I sometimes like to look back at experiences of my past, but I only like to make short visits.    It is not a place I want to spend much time.

I am aware of how the traces of nostalgia provide content to my dreams. There is hardly a dream that  does not have fragments of my past.   Nostalgia flavors my dreaming, whether I am awake or asleep.   Rather than adding zesty savor to my time awake or asleep, memories seem to dampen my current experience.   Nostalgia shapes and limits my alertness, memories stir up anxiety.

When I seem to be clinging to memories of my past, I shy away from an unknown and unexplored future.   I retreat to the past, and shrink back from the present.

It is tempting to dwell on the known and fear what is yet to come.   Nostalgia urges me to cling to the worn and familiar.   Memory becomes a measure by which I can judge the present.   It seems like a chilling sense of loss that falls on many who enter old age.

For me, it is a new experience even if any one of my days enters into twilight.   When my day slowly leaves brightness behind and slips into darkness.    I want to avoid looking back at the clear daylight with either longing or regret.    I prefer to embrace  the unknown mystery of darkness.

I could easily take refuge in the shuttered realm of rest when faced with the bright invitation of a new, wakened morning.   Each new day calls me forward into a new day of adventure, delight and discovery.  Why would I choose a future that is only a reassemble of what I have known, a reconstruction of past experience?   Nostalgia urges me to reach back, when I would rather lunge forward.

Life, for me, is not a merry-go-round showing me the same again and again.     I would rather it be a roller-coaster, hurling me into an uncharted, unknown future.   I know it will plunge me into terrifying depths and frightening heights.  I know that most of that ride may leave me exhausted with delight.

To do any of it again would not be the same.  Nostalgia is too numbing.   It is time to turn the page and find what awaits with bright, searching eyes.

 

I have to admit that I am a bit uneasy when I tell friends that I “meditate.”   The word is something of a put-off and I’m not even sure that it describes my experience.   At least for me, it instantly conjures images from my past that sound New Age, look strange and smell like incense.   My brief encounter with Transcendental Meditation may have ruined the word for me for life.

I’m ready to admit that I engage in contemplation.   “Mindfulness” and “awareness” both give some idea to people who are more scientifically minded.   “Contemplation” plunges me into the deep and mysterious realm, and I think that is what I do.

Contemplation is an action, a willful leap, a wild adventurous embrace of whatever.   It begins with my body relaxing and, apart from aiming into an empty void, it is an unplanned and uncharted plunge.   For me it is choosing to enter a dark and empty labyrinth.   On a good day, I encounter nothing.

I am not so much lost in the labyrinth as I am absorbed.    I have entered the castle with many rooms, all of which defy description.   My movement is unguided, I take nothing with me.   I walk out of time.

I am beginning to realize how much of my life I have lived in a world of myth when reality is as close to me as my skin.   Like many of my fellow humans, I have relied on myth to make sense of something I could just as well have observed.    Stories, imagination and fantasy are such a weak mythological substitution for observation and awareness, but it is a substitution I so readily have made.

I agree with Joseph Campbell that Myth has great and amazing power.   It is often an entry point to make sense of a world that would otherwise be difficult to figure out.   It is a lesson our ancestors learned and taught.   It is a practice that is woven into the fabric of our culture and experience.

At Easter, I received an email that started with the declaration “He is Risen,” a slogan that has for ages attempted to summarize and underscore a supposed reality of a christian teaching.   It is a story told for centuries to point to a reality experienced by my ancestors.   As much as I love a story, the myth can also obscure, make the reality distant from my awareness.  Rather than rise to the understanding of the reality, I get lost in the story and never get beyond.   I choose to be a dreamer, not an observer.

Some of the Greeks figured this out over 2500 years ago when they put the world of Gods aside and celebrated the power of observation.   Fortunately, some people in India picked up this realization while the western world pushed it aside and went back to the mythological world of human-like Gods for many centuries.

I am now learning that as a human, I am an intellectual creature.   I can rely on my perception and observation to live in a meaningful way.  What I once considered an act of intellect was actually my imagination doing its best imitation of intellect.    I know I can be free of imagination and mythology to observe things as they actually are, not as I imagine them to be.  I do this every day.

Stories, even stories from my own experience, can shape my imagination and how I see the world.    However, I now know that I can go beyond, deeper than my imagination.   I do it but it is often not easy.

I think that, as a species, we are struggling to evolve out of the realm of myth.   None of us can ever do it unless we recognize that we actually are living in a world shaped by myth.    As a member of the human species, I am trying to move into a world of observation, out of imagination, something my species has been slowly doing for about 2500 years.    In evolutionary terms this is but a blink in time.

Perhaps I have to remain partially in the realm of myth, like my ancestors, until I am ready and able to see things as they actually are.  But I don’t intend to stay there very long.   I still want to be able to merge with the intelligence of the Universe, which I can only do with observation, not imagination.   Before I can do that, I have to shed my mythological culture and all its wiles.   I must strip down to my own skin, shed all the appurtenances of my imagination if I am to enter the world that exists inside, behind and beyond appearances.

First I want  to learn to observe with an open and unimpeded mind.   I want to learn to perceive without any preconceptions of what I am seeing.   Some of the Greeks tried to explain how to do it.   Some of the great thinkers of India tried.    They all said something like “Pay attention” “Be awake” “open your mind and senses to what is around you”.

I am trying to put aside the stories I have been told of the past and the ones I am told in my daily media encounters.   It is better for me if I allow my imagination to rest and relax.

 

 

A simple gesture was all it took for Judith to unlock a new awareness for me.    In an instant, she unknowingly revealed to me why, for so much of my life, ritual has had such an attraction for me, why it has been so important.   As she prepared to strike the bell, she did it with such deliberation that I became intently aware of her action and I was drawn into her movement.   Her movement was an invitation for me to join her, and I did.   Now I understand ritual in a deeper way.

I think that ritual raises my awareness because it is so deliberate and intentional.   It is something I have done before, perhaps many times, and because of that familiarity, there is an ease in becoming very aware of what I am doing.  Since I’ve done it before, I can instantly remember what it feels like to be aware.   I go to that awareness smoothly because I am familiar with the way.

The irony of this is almost laughable.   In my culture ,”ritual” has almost taken on an opposite meaning.    Ritual has often come to mean something I do out of habit.   It is something I can do without thinking, particularly without thinking of what I am actually doing.   Rituals have become things people do because they have always done it this way.   In a twisted way, ritual often means something I might do to remind me of something else.

For a long time, I have insisted that a ritual action must be real.   What is done is what has meaning.    If someone has to explain a ritual, that is a distraction, a fake veneer that often hides the real meaning of the action.   I suppose it can be useful if a ritual is used to remind someone of something else, but the inherent meaning of a ritual is what is actually happening.

I know that it helps me to assume a certain posture when I want to raise my awareness.    If I turn my palms up, or if I turn them outward, my awareness instantly rises in the palms of my hands.   It is a practiced ritual, and always has the same effect.    My attention can be focused on my palms almost effortlessly because I am very familiar with the pathway to that place.   Once I have my attention under control, it is so much easier to direct it wherever I want.

This is what Judith taught me.   Her gesture is what was happening, it was the only real thing I saw at that moment.   It was the focus of my awareness.   The ritual exists for its own sake.   It doesn’t have to have a hidden meaning.   Its true meaning is easy to see because I have seen it before and I can more easily enter into in.    I joined Judith in her movement with ease, but only because she adroitly invited me to become aware of what she was doing.

 

Today I discovered that my garden does not belong to me.    I belong to my garden.

I like to imagine that time when there was nothing alive on this planet.   The whole earth was a place where the only interactions were between rocks and wind, water and shores.    The only chemistry present was in its simple form with  electrons moving from atom to atom or being shared.   The energy in matter had not yet pushed for anything I now call organic.

Forces and particles from distance galaxies buffeted the stuff of this small blue planet.   Chunks from other worlds sometimes rained down from the sky.   Perhaps there was some level of awareness in this young world, a kind of intelligence.    But there was more to come.

If I could go to this ancient, lifeless place, if I  could go back 4 billion years, I would be entering a sterile environment.    There would be a total absence of life as I an encased in it now.   Every thing I would touch, every breath I took (if I could breathe) would leave a living signature behind.   I would be trailing a cascade of life in an otherwise lifeless world.

Cells from my  body, organisms that live in and on me would be invaders in this world previously untouched by life.   A living cloud of thousands of kinds of organisms would travel around with me and descend on everything in my wake.

Of course, I could not survive in this setting without the presence of the oxygen made so abundantly by plants.   I could not continue to live, nor could the organisms that accompany me live, without nourishment from our fellow creatures.    We have all evolved together and rely on one another to stay alive.

We have come jointly from the same lifeless past.    Where once there was nothing at all alive, I now cannot move without bumping into my fellow creatures.    Every where inside me and around me, I am immersed in  and flooded with living creatures.   My world is wholly alive.

What a waste of a day when I haven’t been dazzled at least a dozen times. True, there are those days when the soft touch of the carpet fails to excite the bottom of my feet.   There are also the mornings when my ears  barely react to the chirping of birds on the other side of my bedroom shade.

I am so grateful that there are many other days when the cold granite in the bathroom leaps at my touch and grips me in the memory of its ancient excitement at being on fire.   Water rushes against me from a shower head and in an instant pelts me with the tale of a lifetime adventure involving now-dead stars and treks across limitless fabric of space and time.

I walk through my garden, and step into a small part of the world teeming with life.    Plants strain to reach the energy of the sun, roots pull water from the ground, the soil vibrates with the silent movement of millions of small organisms.    Subtle changes in the posture of plants discretely reveal themselves, new blooms shout their presence, fish drift about searching for something to eat.   Everyone is prepared to engage me, to absorb me, to fill me with wonder.

And so it goes through many days.    It would seem that I would be exhausted from all the excitement and interaction.   Instead, I am energized by a day that has connected me to the whole cosmos, immersed me in a space where time does not matter.    I have the joy of being joined with the seemingly endless energy of all things.

By the end of the day, I am tired but I also am filled with a peace that rises through all things to meet me.   I want to do it again, and again, and again.   With every step, with every glance of my eyes, with every movement of my hands, I want to feel the joy that comes from unending chances to be dazzled.

Today, my garden has all the early appearance of a spring garden.    Some blooms are already disappearing, like Scilla, but they are being replaced by an abundance of new blooms.    I love the excitement of my spring garden, the sudden flash of color, the awakening of a new growing season.

I am reminded that it is one thing to bloom and be beautiful.    It is quite another to ripen.    I often think of new aspects of myself now beginning to bloom, after all these years.   Actually, I think that for me it is also a time of ripening, and that may be more significant.

Ripening comes to me only after facing and accepting the pain, the darkness, the uncertainty.    To ripen, I have had to face the possibility of pain, the uncertainty of a future.    I have needed to become a friend of the night.

Ripening may be revealed in the bright light of day, but it occurs only through the acceptance of the dark time.

For a while, it was becoming slightly alarming that I had become less connected to reality.    Today I seem to be more connected than I have been for nearly a week.   Actually, becoming “less connected” with reality has meant that I seemed to be slipping back into my old way of seeing reality.    Most people would probably consider my old way as being more in touch.   What I have become more aware of in the past two years is that  my “other” reality only appears when I am more truly aware.

For me it is like looking at the screen on the dash of my car that shows me what is behind me when I am backing up.     I can choose to turn around and see directly what is actually behind me.    Or I can look at the screen in front of me and watch the imaginary world as seen through a wide-angle lens.   Sometimes the imaginary, distorted image is useful because it gives me an image I want to see and can benefit from.    Sometimes, I just turn around and look at what is actually there.

I have been learning to look at what is actually there as I have practiced my mindfulness skills, as I have become more aware. It has meant that I have had to put my imagination to rest.    I am less inclined to interpret what I sense, what I see, in light of my past, remembered experience.    I am also less likely to interpret what I sense through my imagined reality of what might, or even likely will happen.

Basically, it has meant staying in the present, paying attention to what is going on right now.   It has meant seeing reality without the interpretative lens of my remembered experience or my prediction of what is going to happen.

So often, what I have reacted to in the past has been a reality that wasn’t there.   I’ve mis-interpreted what is going on because I am caught up in my memory of what happened in the past.     Or I am focused on what is likely to happen rather than what is before me right now.

Being able to use my memory to interpret or my imagination to predict are useful skills.    I think that I find them so useful that I tend to use them constantly, habitually.   As a result, I am not connected intimately with what is actually happening right now.

I am convinced that what is actually happening right now is the only reality.  The future and the past are distorted, fabricated illusions that can disturb me and distract me from reality.   I’m happy to be slipping back into my new way of seeing reality.    I don’t what lured me out of it, but I definitely prefer my alternate reality.