Don't Burn the Day Away

A favourite song of mine is "Pig" by Dave Matthews Band and a repetitive line throughout the song is "don't burn the day away". The graphic above seems to contain all of the words that appear in the song. The pig reference is about the greedy ego that is not content to simply enjoy life but always wants more. Part of the lyrics run as follows:

Is this not enough?
This blessed sip of life,
Is it not enough?
Staring down at the ground
Oh, then complain and pray for more from above,
You greedy little pig

Burning the day away of course means not living in the moment but instead allowing all of the ego's activities to be simply means to ends that never end. An activity as mundane as brushing my teeth is usually performed in a cloud of thoughts and with a clear end in sight, namely to finish cleaning my teeth so that I can get on with some other more important business. The action is mechanical and the grip on the toothbrush is far stronger than is needed. I am not present and so I clutch (rather than grasp) the toothbrush in case I lose my grip on it during my mental meanderings. This lack of conscious involvement in routine physical activities is partly what the Alexander Method, as developed by Fredrick Matthias Alexander, seeks to address. Lately I've been catching myself half-way through such mundane activities and concentrating fully on performing them without  attending to any thoughts that might intrude.

Maybe the reason life seems to pass by so quickly when we are older is because we are burning the days aways rather than relishing each one as it comes. It's easy to get caught up in this habit when you're teaching. The lessons become working days and then working weeks, terms, semesters and then finally years. Those years lead us ultimately to oblivion but the process can be slowed if we can "wash out this tired notion, that the best is yet to come" and learn that "there's much more than we see here" if we can only slow down enough to appreciate it.
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The Eight Verses of Training the Mind

I had reason today to be reminded of a quote that a Buddhist friend of mine always appended to his emails (I haven't heard from him in a while). It went like this:

I will learn to cherish ill-natured beings
And those oppressed by strong misdeeds and sufferings
As if I had found a precious
Treasure difficult to find.

It had always struck me as an exceedingly hard thing to do. Having not ventured out of the house for two days, Desy and I went to the local mall today. It was fairly crowded as expected for a Saturday and the coffee shop was almost full. There was only one place to sit and that was beside a guy who was smoking a cigarette. This is a common occurrence in Jakarta malls where smoking is supposedly banned but where patrons of restaurants and coffee lounges can light up uninhibitedly. It's difficult not to feel intense dislike toward the "ill-natured being" who is the source of the noxious smoke that is drifting into my nostrils.

However, rather than viewing the person as a source of irritation, the Buddhist verse sees the person as a "precious treasure" and an opportunity to practise compassion, understanding and non-reaction. It's possible to muster some compassion and understanding, after all the person is probably addicted to nicotine and he is steadily destroying his lungs. He can only relax in a coffee lounge if he is smoking. Non-reaction is more difficult because my tendency now is to stifle the negativity. I still see the person as rude and insensitive but I'll ignore it because I want to remain calm and unperturbed.

Indeed I have remained remarkably calm and unperturbed for two days but of course I never left the house and so it was rather easy. Outside, it's a different matter as I discovered in the coffee lounge. I can now see this Buddhist verse as a way of not suppressing the emotion that rises up when "oppressed by strong misdeeds". If the person or situation can be seen as an opportunity to cultivate equanimity, then that thought may be enough to stop the emotion arising in the first place.

A little investigation revealed that the verse my friend was quoting is part of a larger whole called "Eight Verses on Training the Mind". Here it is:

Here is a slightly different translation to the one that appears above (and that may be difficult to read easily because of the small print):

Eight Verses on Training the Mind                                               
by Geshe Lang-ri Tang-pa
translated by Jeffrey Hopkins
               
With the determination to accomplish
The highest welfare of all sentient beings,
Who surpass even a wish-granting jewel,
I will learn to hold them supremely dear.

Whenever I associate with others I will learn
To think of myself as the lowest amongst all
And respectfully hold others to be supreme
From the very depths of my heart.

In all actions I will learn to search into my mind
And as soon as a disturbing emotion arises
Endangering myself and others,
I will firmly face and avert it.

I will learn to cherish ill-natured beings
And those oppressed by strong misdeeds and sufferings
As if I had found a precious
Treasure difficult to find.

When others out of jealousy treat me badly
With abuse, slander, and so on,
I will learn to take all loss
And offer the victory to them.

When the one whom I had benefited with great hope
Unreasonably hurts me very badly,
I will learn to view that person
As an excellent spiritual guide.

In short, I will learn to offer to everyone without exception
All help and happiness directly and indirectly
And respectfully take upon myself
All harm and suffering of my mothers.

I will learn to keep all these practices
Undefiled by the stains of the eight worldly concerns,
And by understanding all phenomena as like illusions,
Be released from the bondage of attachment.

Well I can tell you, I'm a long way from that but I'll definitely try this approach in future difficult situations or when interacting with difficult people. Tolle explains emotion as the body's reaction to thought and that's a useful way of viewing things. If I think that the person smoking the cigarette in the coffee shop is annoying me personally then emotion is inevitable. Whether that emotion finds outer expression is another matter but it will certainly have inner expression in terms of increased blood pressure and pulse rate. If I realise that he's annoying everybody that is nearby and not just me, then the emotional response will be more subdued because there is less ego involved.

However, if I think of the person's behaviour as an opportunity rather than an insult or annoyance, the emotion doesn't arise in the first place. In this case, the ego doesn't instinctively leap to my defence. The ego is like a guard dog that protects its owner from perceived threats like smoke wafting from a cigarette. It's not that the ego sees the smoke as physically threatening (even though it probably is) but it views the inconsiderate behaviour as a threat because it feels diminished. "What right has this guy got to smoke a cigarette near me", it thinks? Of course, one thought leads to another. I may not like the way the person looks or the way that he's sitting. In fact, this rotund, middle-aged man was lounging back in his seat as if he were in his living room. The chain of thought quickly escalates the intensity of emotion generated. The ego thinks "who's this rotund, middle-aged guy anyway? I shouldn't just sit here and take this."

It all comes down to ego of course and even if, in future, I can sit down beside people who are smoking and "cherish" such "ill-natured beings", the ego may will be there to claim some credit. It may whisper in my ear "you really have come a long way from the quick-tempered son-of-a-gun that you used to be, old son. Well done." As Meher Baba says on page 170 of his "Discourses", "the ego is hydra-headed and expresses itself in numberless ways ... (it) is activated by the principle of self-perpetuation and has a tendency to live and grow by any and all means not closed to it. If the ego faces curtailment in one direction, it seeks compensating expansion in another."

The Pit and the Pendulum

I was given a copy of the above Arthur Rackham painting by Ali Reeves, over thirty years ago now.  The painting was created in 1919 to illustrate a short story by Edgar Alan Poe called "The Pit and the Pendulum". I still have the painting after all these years and I've long pondered its significance but it was only tonight that I decided to do some investigation into it on the Internet. It didn't take long to track down the painting and the associated story. Given my recent preoccupation with time, the title and content are interesting. Here is a description of the prisoner's first sight of the pendulum.

Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention . It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that in lieu of a scythe he held what at a casual glance I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks.

Prior to this, the prisoner, awakening in his unlit cell, describes the experience of "mere consciousness of existence, without thought, a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, THOUGHT". The final word is capitalized in the story, the gist of which is that the pendulum is actually a swinging, razor-shape blade that is slowly descending on his bound and supine body. A movie, starring Vincent Price, was made that seems to be rather loosely based on the Edgar Alan Poe story.

The content of the story is highly symbolic. We come into the world as "mere consciousness of existence, without thought" but then suddenly acquire it. As our thought processes become clearer, we begin to see and understand our situation. We are trapped in a very circumscribed world and we know full well that the Sword of Damocles is descending on us. If we remain bound by time, it will eventually kill us but in the story the prisoner breaks free of his bonds with the help of a horde of rats that are eating their way through a sort of straight jacket that is holding him down.

The rats are intent on eating him of course but they have to gnaw through his straight jacket before they can start on him. With the pendulum of death beginning to graze him, the prisoner breaks free and tosses off the devouring rats. He has evaded the pendulum and it then ascends again. However, the walls become red hot and devilish faces and forms on the wall leer at him as he is forced ever closer to the pit. The pit he has tested out earlier but dropping something into it. He knows it is very deep and what is at the bottom is unknown.

In the light of my current reading, I'd say that having attained stillness by escaping time, the prisoner needs to have his remaining ego attachments burnt away before he can enter the realm of pure Being. The pit is terrifying to the ego because it symbolizes its extinction. In the final scene, he is rescued as he teeters on the brink of the abyss: "I struggled no more, but the
agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and
final scream of despair". In letting go (of his ego), he finds himself although in the story the ending is quite mundane. He is rescued by General Lasalle of the French army that has entered Toledo and overthrown the agents of the Spanish Inquisition.

I'd been looking at the pit in the painting recently because I'd been having some experiences of my own regarding disappearing into bottomless pits. A couple of times now, as I've been meditating on my breathing and not attending to any thoughts that arose, a mild sense of panic has arisen due to a sense of nothingness. My instinct has been to cling on to a passing thought in order to get a handle on things. This is the ego panicking of course when it doesn't have anything to think about and fears that it is disappearing (which it is). I think this is a good sign but the panic pulls me out of the meditative state and I start thinking about what just happened. I have to go beyond that and sink into the panic. Over the years, I've been drawn to Rackham's painting and now I can use it as a source of spiritual inspiration.

Seeing Blindness

I came across a quote on a blog from an essay by David Duncan called "Bird Watching as a Blood Sport". It appeared as an article in Harper's Magazine on July 1997 but I've not been able to access it yet. Here is the quote anyhow:

"While writing the last paragraph, for instance, I swiveled my eyes from the page to grab a blue ceramic coffee cup from a shelf directly behind me. En route to and from this cup, my eyes moved across dozens of plainly lit objects. Yet I perceived none of them. By retracing, slowly, my eyes' route to the cup, I see that they swept across a brass banker's lamp, a Japanese painting of Ebisu playing a red carp on a cane pole, a photo of Meher Baba feeding a monkey, an old L.C. Smith Bros. typewriter, a bunny-ears cactus, an almost life-sized figurative sculpture, two jars full of pens and pencils, fifty or so books, and a large window. Yet I saw none of this. Something in me sought an object it knew to be blue, behind me, and full of hot caffeine--sought it so decisively that I turned 180 degrees, 'filming' all the way, yet made an essentially blind turn. This 'seeing blindness' is the great contradiction of human eyesight."

The reference to Baba is what caught my attention and the fact that he is feeding a monkey is ironic and suggests the so-called "monkey mind" that causes me so much trouble when I try to stay in the present moment. This is probably quite unfair to monkeys who are certainly far less occupied with the past and future than I am. Another walk with the dog tonight but I kept drifting off, not for long periods but very frequently. If I had any insights, it was simply that the mind will seize on the slightest thought in order to escape into the past or future.

I like this graphic of the mischievous monkey who has dominion over its hapless owner. At least now I know that the monkey is there, whereas before I was oblivious to its existence. In the past, I've often glibly used the phrase "monkey mind" without ever really understanding what I was talking about.

The Inner Dialogue

Tonight, while walking the dog, I succeeded for the first time in a long time to stop the inner dialogue that is normally playing in my head. I don't know how ... I just did. Two nights ago I had gone on the same walk and could feel, as I walked along , that my head was enveloped in a cloud of incessant mental activity. Tonight I was able to switch it off for reasonably lengthy periods. I would still drift off into the past and future but only for a few seconds and then I would snap back to the here and now. Previously, I had been using the inner dialogue paradoxically to try to achieve a state of presence. I'd say things to myself like "sink into your inner stillness" and in retrospect this was quite silly.

It says at http://www.puresilence.org/The%20Inner%20Dialogue.htm

Try this simple experiment. Listen for one second to the thoughts in your head. Turn your attention inward. What is it you hear? Perhaps you may see or hear that there is nothing there at all. You see by looking for the thoughts, for the noise, for the incessant spinning, it all seems to disappear. Of course, one second later it starts again and our attention is blindly attracted to the thoughts.

Perhaps, through your busy day, if you can take a second here and there to once again look inside and see this inner dialogue, you will again and again be amazed that by attending to it and simply being aware of it - it just disappears. Rest there in that point of disappearance. And resting there brings with it a great sigh of relief and peace. You have found your true identity: the pure silence, your true self and home.

I also like this approach to the problem as presented at http://bookfloozy.wordpress.com/

“When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”

The phrase "inner dialogue" or "inner dialog" returns a huge number of websites and images in Google, which is not surprising I guess. In turning my inner dialogue off, I felt a lot more in control and a lot more focused on what was happening around me. I felt more mentally alive, instead of feeling like my head was full of cotton wool.

The River of Time

Many years ago I read a novel by C.S.Forester called "Randall and the River of Time" (not related to the graphic above).It wasn't a great novel and an excoriating Time Magazine review from the 1950s had this say of the book:

On page 5 of Randall and the River of Time, the hero stands, in the year 1917, at the crossing of  two trenches in France, and wonders which way to go. At that point Hero Charles Randall and Author C. S. Forester make their big mistake: the hero turns left. Had he turned right, Randall would have been neatly dispatched in a German raid on a British strongpoint. Author Forester, whose Captain Horatio Hornblower is one of the best historical romances in the language, would thus have been spared the shame of scattering Hornblower's wake with a fictional mess for the gulls; and poor Randall would have been spared a life that is not much better than death, anyway.

Well I liked the book's title which is why I picked it up in the first place. The river of time imagery connects to my previous post in which I observed that my stream of thoughts and emotions had emptied into the ocean and that I was now bobbing about on its surface. I was of course getting a little big-headed and a dream that I had last night put things in perspective. In this dream, I was in a large, shallow, concrete swimming pool and I was holding a metallic wrist-watch. There was a channel flowing out of the pool and I allowed myself to be carried into it. I let go of the watch, thinking that it would not be lost but easily retrieved because the channel was shallow with a concrete base and the water was not flowing too swiftly. Quickly however, the current became stronger and the base turned to sand and pebbles. I suddenly realised that I had no hope of ever retrieving the watch.

The channel emptied into a small river and that's where I ended up. As I looked upstream I saw a huge wall of water bearing down on me and was momentarily alarmed. However, the place in the river where I was floating was quite calm, there was no strong current and I was close to some rocks that I could use to climb out if I needed to. The danger from the wall of water seemed to evaporate with that observation. That's the dream and I woke up at that point, making a mental note to remember it in the morning.

It would seem that I have come from the safe haven of a swimming pool and that I am in a little tributary of a river that probably flows into a larger river that may finally empty into the ocean. 'm clearly a long way from "the Limitless Ocean of love, bliss, knowledge and goodness" that Meher Baba describes. The swimming pool is a good metaphor for the limited and predictable, mental-emotional life that I've been living for quite some time now. My movement from this shalllow, concrete-based pool to a small river that has some depth to it seems positive, as does losing the watch. I never wear a wrist-watch but holding one, as I was doing in the dream, indicates an attachment to time and thus mind that can only exist in time. Letting go of the watch and accepting its loss suggests detachment from the mind's dominance.

In his book, "The Power of Now", Tolle talks of the mind's chronic attachment to memory (the past) and anticipation (the future). I thought that combining these two words together to form a neologism "memantic" is a good way to describe the sort of consciousness that dwells in the past or future and never in the present moment. I'm still largely absorbed in  this "memantic" consciousness but having moments of lucidity. I like the word because it rhymes with "semantic" and memantic consciousness is certainly obsessed with words. These words replace the real experience so that when I look at a tree, I'm not really seeing the tree. I have a mental label that I put on the tree but that label derives from the past and totally obscures the living reality of the tree. The final part of the word "antic" reminds us of the antics that the monkey mind gets up to its attempts to distract us from the stillness that it hates.