Vulnerability

There is a new vulnerability within me. I think it's really a strength. Whatever the case, Rumi makes me laugh. Merton makes me cry.

"It took me time to find out: but I write down what I have found out at last, so that anyone who is now in the position that I was in then may read it and know what to do to save himself from great peril and unhappiness. And to such a one I would say: Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgment into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor."

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

a nine pound hammer or a woman like you

Point 1) I've been studying addiction. Really, I'm studying the symptoms. I know addiction occurs when I want something, seemingly out of the blue. My mind tells me that I just want it, as though I were fulfilling some random craving, as though anything were random. This is how my addictions play out. Suddenly I want coffee (out of the blue), and ignoring the craving, a headache arises. I ask myself where this headache came from, missing the causation.

When I took the five precepts, I was instantly filled with intense craving for these very things. I thought this was a strange sort of reaction, being that these intense desires were nonexistent a few days earlier. Then it started to become clear - I am addicted to these pleasures. As (most of) these five desires begin to die down, I notice similar reactions towards other things. Coffee, meat, sugar, self-loathing, fear, Taylor Swift... I have nothing to do but keep observing these symptoms. The strangeness of it all is that I'm no longer sure what isn't an addiction.

Point 2) When sitting, my mind wanders. There comes a certain point in every sitting where there is a strong "kick" from within. Something inside me wants to stop meditating. Like the addiction, however, I have no causal awareness. I have always attributed this to an outside cause. It's my legs hurting, the need to check the clock, the five bugs scouting my neck and ears, that dog seemingly barking at me. The list is as beautifully diverse as one would expect. Lately though, I noticed that it happens the same amount of time into the hour...

Oddly, as faith in mind dissolves, I feel relieved.

Spiritual children

Whenever two are linked this way, there comes another
from the unseen world. It may be through birth,
if nothing prevents conception,
but a third does come, when two unite in love,
or in hate. The intense qualities born
of such joining appear in the spiritual world.

You will recognize them when you go there.
Your associations bear progeny.
Be careful, therefore. Wait, and be conscious,
before you go to meet anyone.
Remember there are children to consider!

Children you must live with and tend to,
born of your emotions with another, entities
with a form, and speech, and a place to live.
They are crying to you even now.
You have forgotten us. Come back.
Be aware of this. A man and a woman together
always have a spiritual result.

-Rumi

This fear

What sort of thing is this fear? Someone told me I'm different after returning. I knew that already, but I didn't know if people noticed or not. As I've been searching for jobs and being busy, I let my meditation slide. I didn't even sit yesterday, and at first I can hardly tell the dIfference. But I'm fairly certain there is all the difference. When I go to yoga with my teacher, it is as though I shed many layers in his presence. This allows for such a different experience than when I used to push and push in other classes. The other day we did a long series of hip openers and by the end, I was ready to scream out and cry. The poses just touch a deeper part of me when those barriers drop away. Similarly, when I meditate, layers of rationalization, compromise, and excuses drop out of my thought processes. It's like I see a truer version of myself, and the funniest part of it all is that I don't know the man who is exposed. There seems to be a steep learning curve to life, when one has never done it well before. How do you interact with people? How do you deal with your emotions?

I seem to make make innumerable mistakes. I find how unruly my mind can be, and I wonder if it's really possible to do the things I'm aiming for. Maybe I'm just where I need to be - paralyzed but growing in my self-awareness.

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"Like the beginner the swordmaster is fearless, but, unlike him, he grows daily less and less accessible to fear. Years of unceasing meditation have taught him that life and death are at bottom the same and belong to the same stratum of fact. He no longer knows what fear of life and terror of death are. He lives - and this is thoroughly characteristic of Zen - happily enough in the world, but ready enough to quit it without being in the least disturbed by the thought of death. It is not for nothing that the Samurai have chosen for their truest symbol the fragile cherry blossom. Like a petal dropping in the morning sunlight and floating serenely to earth, so must the fearless detach himself from life, silently and inwardly unmoved.

To be free from the fear of death does not mean pretending to oneself, in one's good hours, that one will not tremble in the face of death, and that there is nothing to fear. Rather, he who masters both life and death is free from fear of any kind to the extent that he is incapable of experiencing what fear feels like. Those who do not know the power of rigorous and protracted meditation cannot judge of the self-conquests it makes possible. At any rate the perfected Master betrays his fearlessness at every turn, not in words, but in his whole demeanor: one has only to look at him to be profoundly affected by it."

-Eugen Herrigel

There's the art I'm seeking

"Spend ten years observing bamboos, become a bamboo yourself, then forget everything - and paint."

-Eugen Herrigel

fear

As I live my life, I find a deep existential fear within me. I call it existential, because I can't find a specific cause for it. I can't trace it back to its roots, but it reaches into my entire life. When I'm walking down the street, it creeps into my steps, whispering into my ear that I need to make sure my legs work right. I need to MAKE them move. And then I put unnecessary tension into my legs, becoming less efficient and putting the fear into my physical body. When I'm doing a yoga pose, it creeps in, saying that I shouldn't let myself go in that particular direction. When I'm dancing, the fear tells me that I'm about to miss the beat - it says to step now, before the music passes me by. The fear tells me I need to seek out a way to make a living, it tells me to worry about the amount in my bank account, it tells me to grab the closest thing and hold on for dear life.

And when I meditate, this fear abates, but a strange new feeling takes over. This is a certain aloofness from the world; it's a real sense that everything around me, including body and mind, is distinct from something inside me. It's as though I'm sitting on a bus, watching the world drift by, except that drifting is every sensible thing. In these moments, I intuitively sense that I am nothing but spirit, and this world truly is molded by the intent of that spirit. I feel that no action must be done, no heart won over, no dinner prepared, for all this is already finished as my spirit dictates. The world is something entirely new and strange, where I find that my actions ring hollow like the tantrums of a three-year-old. The fear sucks me away from this realization, and I am compelled to act. But these actions yield nothing. I end up dancing a dance of neuroticism, narcissism, nihilism. I end up denying everything I sense myself to be.

But I don't deny the existence of matter, and I don't mean to speak as though it doesn't matter. I think that once I can truly see from the perspective of spirit, I will understand the deep import of my actions. But without this understanding, believing that the true action is indeed the outer one, I feel that I doom myself to a wasted life. I really feel that I haven't done anything in my life - only meditation hints towards true action. I am reminded of the Marianne Williamson quote:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

eating meat

I stopped eating meat, but even as I write that, I ask myself whether it's true. I have been eating meat recently - I had some last night, just because I really wanted it. And I ate it at my father's house, because it was what was served. As I woke up this morning, I felt hung over. My body felt heavy and achey, my head was groggy and unclear. And I'm not sure why that would be. I got a lot of sleep; I wasn't up too late. But I did have some barbecued chicken fairly late in the night.

The reason I'm moving away from eating meat is because of the teaching to maintain a state of morality as a base for meditation. It's not that I particularly feel that killing animals is wrong, but simply that the teaching says not to kill. It seems like I should give it a full trial. I've left alcohol, lying, sexual misconduct, and stealing behind too. Of course, I try to. When I first made the vow to follow these five precepts, I was filled with a feeling that this is the first real action I've ever taken in my life. It felt deeply respectful of myself in a way that I've never felt before.

The more I consider this morality (or sila, as it's called in Pali), I understand it to form a wall around myself. It is this wall that protects our own individuality and values. It prevents us from hurting others, and prevents others from hurting us. So often, I've been living in the world like a mess. My interactions with others have no discipline - they resemble a shoddy dance connection, pushing, pulling, leaning, falling... barely making it through the dance on our feet and congratulating ourselves at the originality of it all.

i need the clay

As a young man, I was distraught by my inability to play sports. I was ok, but never very good. I have a horrible memory about playing in a basketball game, and they inbounded the ball to me after the other team scored. I got so nervous and excited that I just shot the ball. It was my only basket for the season - for the other team. I remember the awful shame - the silence of the entire gym, my inability to face anyone, the desire to evaporate. That was extreme, but I never excelled or felt very comfortable on a sports field. Looking back, I realize that this was very simply because I was not born with an athletic body. My posture was bad, I was gangly, lacking developed musculature. And this prevented me from feeling comfortable and in control on a sports field. I used to not understand.

So now I realize (and have accepted) that to walk the path of a dancer, I need some clay to mold. I need muscles and better posture. I need to work if I want to become something - this body must be shaped.


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On another note, here are some quotes from current reading:

"It must, however, be borne in mind that the pculiar spirit of [archery], far from having to be infused back into the use of bow and arrow in recent times, was always essentially bound up with them, and has emerged all the more forthrightly and convincingly now that it no longer has to prove itself in bloody contests. It is not true to say that the traditional technique of archery, since it is no longer of importance in fighting, has turned into a pleasant pastime and thereby been rendered innocuous. The "Great Doctrine" of archery tells us something very different. According to it, archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute, but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed - for instance with a bodily opponent. In this contest of the archer with himself is revealed the secret essence of this art, and instruction in it does not suppress anything essential by waiving the utilitarian ends to which the practice of knightly contests was put."
- Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery


"On the last day of January of 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers."

"When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of a leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.
And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.
Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives. And we refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation."
-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain


It seems that the true intention of our denial of love is to assert our own independence (and false sense of strength). This would seemingly allow us the abililty to exist in the world without the potential to be hurt by betrayal or loss of love, but it's not true. Because, as Merton says, this goes against our very nature of being. We are not ourselves in the sense we think ourselves to be. We are awash in a great societal, generational, planetary, psychological, aeon-long turmoil. This turmoil is the truth of our lives, not some puny (and imagined) sense of individuality. To understand this is to be as we are meant to be.

maybe not so dead

(Aug 3, 2011)

I think I've decided to start blogging again. It happened unexpectedly. I was sitting at a Nationals baseball game next to an old friend, and he mentioned something about my life that I was surprised to hear him know. And he referred to my blog. Another friend just a few weeks ago did something similar, and it occurred to me that people actually read it. And maybe people actually liked it. That vaguely crossed my mind before, but the reality didn't sink home.

Suddenly when I realized I was returning to Portland in what will be my second go at making a life there, I wanted to write again. Maybe I'm becoming an addict. The current question, as the scope of my life shifts, is what to rename the blog. What better place to find a name than Rumi's poetry?


The presence rolling through again
clears the shelves and shuts down shops.

Friend of the soul, enemy of the soul,
why do you want mine?

Bring tribute from the village.
But the village is gone in your flood.

The cleared site is what I want.
Live in the opening where there is no door
to hide behind. Be pure absence.
In that state everything is essential.

The rest of this must be said in silence
because of the enormous difference between light
and words that try to say light.


The new title is “A cleared site.” And this is what I will try to be. There's a long, joyous path in front of me, and simultaneously I am weighed down by a new understanding of my grief. I feel the wound dealt me when born – the one I've been picking at, not letting heal for 27 years. I see it now, and I see all the ways that I made it deeper. Now comes the process of recognition, of moving towards that vulnerability that I so long denied. Now comes the truth and the healing. And with it, just maybe, success.

My ambition is no smaller. In fact, the past year has made it larger, and the past months have honed it. I drop away all that is unnecessary, and what remains defines the path of my life. There is little I can do. I still feel like I got on an express train, and my faith alone keeps me from going mad thinking that the whole thing is headed nowhere. I could never be a nihilist. Long ago, in the recesses of my mind, I stumbled across solipsism, and in fact I may still be a believer, but nihilism reeks of untruth to me. How can one deny the deep lost connection, the wound of separation from something that I have no words for? I never could. And now I will consciously never do so again.

There is a deep need to acknowledge the truth of my existence. I hope that as I learn to do this, I turn myself into a cleared space. I hope that I take this knife and do my killing. I am not walking the path of consolations.