Where is the snow?

It’s the end of the year. Some years, the mountains are covered in feet of snow accommodating happy skiers and snowboarders sliding down their glossy slopes. This year, the flatlands are bare and the mountains are thin. Today on the next to the penultimate day of the year, it was seasonably cold – low 20s. Yet it felt biting cold. We are out of shape for winter in northern Vermont and it is easy to complain of the cold, the lack of the snow, and anything else you might care to complain about at the end of another calendar year. We like to complain. There are industries devoted to our complaints. Name a complaint and there is a product available to assuage your feelings of inadequacy. Could your life be complete without any of this? That question is an invitation. Try to live life without feeling that some product will complete you. Try to live your life separating your well-being from everything that you do.

At the end of the day, what happened today is what happened today. Some of the things that happened today we had a hand in, shaped its course and path. Other things, occurred outside of our sphere of influence. Whatever occurred it is in the past. Done. Fini. Yet, we act as if it is not the case. Reliving the past, projecting ourselves into the future, endless commentary about what is supposedly happening now (supposedly because we relate more to the idea of what is happening now than what is actually happening now). We tend to hold on to the past try to rework it as if the artist’s hand could revise time. Fat chance. Time, according to some quirk of physics only moves in one direction. Go figure. Our minds, however, can move in three directions – past, present and future. As we look towards the future of the New Year, see if the mind can notice this present.

Featured exquisite mind webpage: mental factors

Meditation practice requires work, effort, and persistence. This work can be joyful or arduous depending on the attitudes we bring to practice. Traditionally, there are five mental factors that tip the scale towards more joyous practice. These are faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration. These factors will be explored in this section. These mental factors contribute to the psychological seat we bring to practice. Exquisite Self-Care can also help to provide a solid foundation in which to realize these mental factors. Humans have the unique capacity to consider their own minds. To practice mindfulness meditation is to consider the mind in a deliberate and pointed way. This way, however, is not what we are typically involved with. It is not problem solving, creativity, worrying, regretting, planning, rehearsing, or any of the other possible facets of cognitive activity that we might typically be engaged with. As such, it takes some getting used to, and it takes some time to reorient our brains to be comfortable with what is essentially doing nothing – nothing other than experiencing our experience in the moment. Doing nothing? “That’s downright un-American!” And so, our minds may thusly protest. Faith, wisdom, energy, insight, and concentration will help us to retrain our minds to this unusual and rare activity of considering our own minds as objects of our own minds. Read more ...

Dies Irae

I am returning to D. H. Lawrence today, with an excerpt from his pansie “Dies Irae”

and we know not how to live wordless
we live an a vast house
full of activities,
and the noise, and the stench, and the dreariness,
  and lack of meaning
madden us, but we don’t know what to do.”

Lawrence might have enjoyed an MBSR course or a vipassana retreat. In 1929, these were scarcely available in the West. He would have needed to travel to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, or Ceylon to find such teachings. In fact, Lawrence did travel to Ceylon and spent six weeks there in 1922. Curiously this trip to one of the repositories of Theravadan Buddhism turned him off to Buddhism. He eschewed the opportunity to study and go within himself while there, deciding that it was a bogus inwardness. The Buddha frustrated him and he was known to say upon seeing a seated Buddha statue “Oh I wish he would stand up!” While Buddhism was not his cup of tea, the tantric practices of Hinduism apparently were. I think Lawrence might have enjoyed and connected with vipassana, if he had gotten past his biases. Of course, this is a presumption on my part. Reading the Path to Mindfulness, by Bhante Gunaratana (or Bhante G), reveals the day-to-day monastic life of Buddhists in Ceylon. As is the case currently in Japan with Zen, institutional Buddhism looks very different from the contemplative practice of vipassana. Buddhists in Ceylon go to temple to ask for blessings and to perform rituals. The monks were often engaged in small-mindedness, harsh treatments, and petty power struggles. They do not go to meditate. In fact, Bhante G. had very little meditation practice early in his monastic training. So, the Buddhism D. H. Lawrence was exposed to, was likely this exterior form, which bears little resemblance to what the Buddha actually did himself.

All That We Have is Life

All that we have , while we live is life;
and if you don’t live during your life, you are a piece of
dung.
And work is life, and life is lived in work
unless you’re a wage slave.
While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside
and stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work.
Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung.
Men should refuse to work at all. As wage-slaves.
Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves,
and put their life in it.
For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap
of dung.

Writing in 1929, D. H. Lawrence speaks blatantly to the notion that we must embody ourselves through our life, including our life at work. Lawrence issues a strident call of caution – be awake or be dung! He also makes a political statement in this poem about the working conditions of wage-slaves. This sentiment is echoed in the work of the poet David Whyte, who reminds us that most of our waking day is spent in the service of work, so it behooves us to be fully present to that experience and to make sure our soul is included. Even with work that is mechanical or repetitive, such as factory assembly work, we have the opportunity to embody our experience. In today’s world of union negotiated workplaces, wage-slaves are a thing of the past, except perhaps for the conditions of unfortunate workers in sweat shops.

“And in the dark unscientific, I feel the drum-winds of his wings”

So said, D. H. Lawrence in on of his Pansies, “Give Us Gods.” I think Lawrence is speaking to an experience of the nonconceptual, the sense that can arise when we move out of thought and into the expanse of our experience. Such states can arise during meditation and these states may, in part, be explained by changes in specific regions of the brain – activating of some and inhibition of others. This line of poetry seems to speak to the sense of depersonalization that can occur in meditation. This is not a pathological form of depersonalization, but rather a momentary deactivation of the storytelling mind and the incessant self-talk we usually engage in. We become less self-preoccupied and when that happens, spacious feelings arise, and we become closer to the sense of the divine as we move away from the sense of our own storyline. Such considerations raise the question of whether the experience of god is anything more than a brain state. I have an abiding interest in this question. There is much scientific research being conducted on this question. One set of findings suggests that spirituality and religiosity may be genetically endowed (The God Gene). Other findings suggest that stimulation of particular brain regions can evoke spiritual feelings. The fact that spirituality may have a genetic and brain basis does not, however, rule out there is more to the spiritual than one or another brain state. Meditation can provide a taste of this experience in a reliable fashion.

Coming to Our Senses

I am 100 pages through Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 600 page magnum opus, Coming to Our Senses. I am reading it in advance of the Psychology of Mindfulness Course that I will be teaching at the University of Vermont later this year (end of May through June). I am reviewing it as a potential text for this course. As always, Jon writes lucidly and convincingly. The words flow in a poetic, even flowering, prose. He is no longer teaching mindfulness for better coping, as he did in Full Catastrophe Living. Rather he is aiming for the whole enchilada – enlightenment itself. He has not used this word yet, but he is talking about nothing short of the radical transformation of experience that mindfulness and mindfulness meditation can effect. There are some caveats, however. If we pick up the mantle of mindfulness meditation with the goal of transforming ourselves, the self that wants to be transformed will get in the way of that transformation. He is laying down a lot of foundation to get people to calibrate and orient their expectations in a way that won’t lead to a furthering of attachment. And he is not just talking about personal transformation, but transformation of the entire world, and he articulates how these are not actual separate ventures. Given the short summer session that I will be teaching the mindfulness course, there may not be time for students to consume such a weighty volume. It is likely that I will offer this as a suggested reading.

Emptiness according to D. H. Lawrence

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,
and it would be thick black dark forever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
nor death, which quivers with birth,
but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

At first glance this verse from the poem “And Oh – That The Man I Am Might Cease To Be –“ sounds like sinking into depression. Yet, the title gives a clue that Lawrence is speaking more about emptiness – not the emptiness of psychiatry, but the emptiness of dharma, which is the emptiness of desire and attachment. It is not sleep, nor is it death. It is a place where each moment carries gravity and a solid meaning without referring to any particular experience or stories. Being in such a place is a positive experience, and is made available when we stop telling ourselves the same stories over and over again – especially the one that tells us who we are. This sentiment is reflected again in his poem Nonentity:

The stars that open and shut
Fall on my shallow breast
Like stars on a pool.
The soft wind, blowing cool,
Laps little crest after crest
Of ripples across my breast.
And dark grass under my feet
Seems to dabble in me
Like grass in a brook.
Oh, and it is sweet
To be all these things, not to be
Any more myself.
For look,
I am weary of myself!

This seems a fitting image for the start of the new year. One of the teachings of mindfulness is the uniqueness and opportunity in every moment. Such an approach to life makes the designation of one day, such as New Year’s Day, as special. I think this approach to life with holidays takes something away from the spectacular ordinary. Of course, it would be easy to disagree with my approach, as almost everyone I meet does! Of course, there is no harm in celebrating a holiday and enjoying what it has to offer. The New Year can be a time of fruitful reflection of where we have been and where we are going.