Am I doing it, or is it doing me?

Another summer, and after a few summers have come and gone I have finally decided to get back into circuits training – a physically intense group exercise. I had been going to the gym all along, but only to “train” at my own pace, not pushing myself at all very hard. Participating in the circuits’ class doesn't only demand that you try your best to keep up the pace, whether in press-ups or sprints, along with everyone else; it encourages you to throw yourself totally into the activity, holding nothing back.

In the days following this I felt rejuvenated in mind and body. After about three days I went for a swim and found myself effortlessly swimming length after length after length! Usually to swim more than a few lengths in one go I would have had to make quite an effort. Not this time. But where did all this energy, this effortlessness, come from?!

O my poor raggedy self,

What do you really desire? Your meditation has become a fetid nest for your laziness; once again you have found yourself asleep, out on that artificial limb of self-deception; again you have forsaken the organic branch of self-realisation.

Ego is again dragging you along, as it continues denying both death and life.

Awake! And be aware: you are egoistic, always the doer, your so-called living is constant effort. Just this awareness is a great step; don’t despair. Then…at least don’t be half-hearted about it! Don’t be a reluctant doer – be total; make a supreme effort! People only think about their life being so much effort; they complain and invite the sympathy of others – which is exactly how they want it. Yes, how you are depends not on some crass burden society has forced you to bear, but entirely on you.

Watch again how your mind attempts to escape reality by rationalising it: separating pleasure from pain, gratification from “annihilation.” Watch how each man wraps himself up in cotton wool, in cafes and cars.

See how social conditioning has taught you to cling, to be miserly; with your money, with your love, with your energy. Your “life” has become dead. You have been deceived and mocked.

Cling no longer; throw open all your doors, and all your windows – make way for the incoming of fresh energy. Do you really desire more of the divine? Or do you love your little life so much?

Become empty; be an instrument, a flute through which God, existence, life can again play its tune. Then you are not a doer but a happening.

Meditation is the way of paradox; it does not follow the path of your logical, consistent, miserly mind. Life itself is a great dance, and if you can face up to your reality – yes your reality, that which you have created for yourself – you can just turn around and join in the celebration!

Forget about yourself, and become again like a small child. Picture him. So caught up in the energetic play of life that he cannot even recognise his own face in the mirror.

Security of thought

I just want to note a special thing that happened with me the other day.

For 9 months now I have been working in the non-occupation they call security. I chose this job for the time being as a experiment in meditation. Of course, you can make an occupation out of anything, but security is one job where this becomes rather silly in the end, because, as I have found out, the task of "securing" a place is most effective when you are simply a presence there, aware and alert. Otherwise a "security presence" can never really achieve peace and even creates an underlying feeling of insecurity. The mind is restless and always needs an insecure world, with which it can then occupy itself, trying to make it secure. I began to see how futile this was. In this attitude, the only thing my mind was securing was itself ...Ah-hah! so security is a game...then why not play it?

So instead of working, I'm watching. With my eyes, of course - but also with my awareness or consciousness. Instead of constantly calculating with my mind and thinking what to do? I am simply observing, inside and out (and I have found that they are both the same thing; while I am calculating and thinking of what to do next, I am not seeing what is really going on on the outside, with people, because I am only concerned with securing my mind or ego - "me" as a separate individual. And this is what security has come to mean: 'guarding people's separateness.' But because people are not separate in reality, security really means guarding people's illusions or sleep. Ultimately, of course, it is about securing life against death. But life no longer means life, and death has come to mean only what is in reality a natural part of life. In the terms of our society, life has come to mean the ego, the separate "thing" we value the most.


So, that experience... For months my mind was reacting to not having enough occupation. After work, and sometimes during it, I would find myself becoming overly occupied with something completely trivial. Strange as it may seem - with all the relaxation - I was finding myself tired and fatigued at the end of my work shift. Shouldn't I be feeling refreshed? For months, instead of giving in to this tiredness and going with it, for some reason I would find myself fighting it. Deep down perhaps I was afraid of letting go, so my mind told me not to. Get a grip!! But no, I wanted to see what happens when I relax - but I was purposefully postponing something from happening. It took me a while to realise this fully, and to become tired of the same routine gripping me over and over. But finally I did become tired of it. And I let go.

It wasn't any special effort, and I didn't think much about it. I just did it out of mere frustration. I got in from work one evening at about 8pm and went to bed and slept!! It was just the body's natural way of taking me, once I gave into it! I woke up at 12.30am and didn't get back to sleep until about 7am!! I woke up again about 3.30 in the afternoon - just in time to get myself ready and go to work again! But this time, work was feeling so much different. There was none of the usual drag. I was feeling immensely blissful, rejuvenated. I was breathing. I am breath...Breathing is me? I am not. Only breathing is. Shut up, mind!

But mind is shut up. Secure.

I have to let it go. Free.

meditating in india

So let me try to give you some more insight into my India experience.

One of the main reasons I went there was to explore meditation. I was brought up with conservative Christianity, and in this tradition meditation means thinking and reflecting upon words. But this can get a bit frustrating because of the simple fact that we are not just an airy balloon head floating around; we are bodily, and also spirit.

In the East the traditions of Zen, Tao and so on, have recognised that meditation is needed in order to counteract the dominance of this "airy-fairy balloon head" that we call our mind. If we identify with it, the mind restricts our reality to narrow concepts such as time and space. So, for example, we can spend all day stressing about not having enough "time" to get our work done. This is the absurdity of our “meaningful” lives. Of course such a person is right; they don't have time—time has them! But in mediation we neither have time, nor does time have us; because time (and even space) are relative. Although this can be demonstrated scientifically, it is a truth that can only be experienced; i.e. you have to meditate, or "be" in meditation to really know it.

In the Osho resort in India the first daily meditation is called Dynamic Meditation. This is no silent sitting. You have to really use your body, and then "become" your body.

Okay! are you ready for it? The first stage, lasting for 10 minutes, is doing a rapid and chaotic breathing through your nose. The second stage, also 10 minutes, is going crazy; yes, holding nothing back, you simply explode (screaming, crying, spinning). The third stage (10 mins) is jumping up and down and shouting "hoo! hoo! hoo!" (don't ask!). The fourth stage is silent and still witnessing, just watching and being aware of what is now happening on the inside (15 mins). The last stage is to celebrate, through dance, this "whole" you have melted into.

Do you think you could do this in a room with a few hundred other people? But this is exactly the point of meditation. Meditation is a great death. As in love, you melt, you are no more. It takes courage to begin, but you have your eyes closed and everyone else is going crazy too. For some reason I didn't really get into this meditation (having to get up for it at 5:30 am didn't help!), though I have heard some others say that, because it releases social conditionings, it made them feel "clean."

I benefited mostly from the breathing mediations. After doing the Chakra breathing meditation I felt very complete in myself, with freely flowing energy from my feet to my head. The Gourishankar mediation was also extremely beneficial for me; it involves holding and releasing your breath while gazing softly at a flickering light. As I mentioned before, we are spirit, and spirit means breath (as in Genesis 2:7). When I allow myself to "become" my breath, through giving a simple attention to it, I realise I am one with this immense eternal existence, and not, in fact, the little "me" that is nothing but a unit of society.

My whole struggle is, of course, this "dying to self" that Christians sometimes talk about. But how can I die to myself unless I first become myself? Or, put another way, how can I die to something that I know nothing of? My trip to India has instilled something in me that I can perhaps describe as “dying to the struggle."

There and back again

I awoke at 10 am on Wednesday 28th March, all ready to travel to India in just a few hours time. Strangely, I wasn't at all excited. And I wasn't sad either. Just a single voice floated within my sleep-charged mind. It said, "There is nowhere to go."

Great!

I did, however, go to India. And I was, of course, confronted with lots of interesting scenes, things and people. But they all appeared to me as a mirror; ultimately I was confronted with myself. As the Little Prince has said, in the book by the same name, "straight ahead of oneself, one cannot go very far." My journey was not to "India," but to myself. And yet, ironically, this inward searching is the true heritage and spiritual meaning of India.

India, and in indeed the whole of the East, has a rich treasure of what we in the West might best understand as no-mind. West is mind: technology, science, mathematics, insurance, and lots of words. Such a mind has of course been extremely helpful and has made many Westerners materially comfortable and feeling somewhat fulfilled. But the cost has been that, for many Westerners, their world has become contingent, like a thin shell that needs constant patching up with consolations and reassurances. Mind is an impressive, even beautiful, structure, but on its own it is a very poor, even poisonous, form of life. So in the West, mind has been both our blessing and our curse. The East, on the other hand, has more reality on the inside: I was aware of a deep and solid peace and well-being in many Indians I encountered. However, as with some others, I found that this could be rather exposed and poorly equipped to deal with outer, material realities. Subsequently, the Eastern society, to our Western mind, looks crazy; everything is chaotic, nothing is organised. The roads, for example, are crazy; if you drive in India, you have to be totally involved and engaged in the activity in order to stay alive. But they are alive! I know that here, in Northern Ireland, you need not be engaged while driving; you can choose to be anywhere else, because, to drive on our roads, all that is required is a machine-like conformity to the highway code - then just keeping your eyes open is enough. You need not be that alive; just a little consciousness is needed. But really we are all sleeping. When 7 months ago I changed from driving a car to driving a scooter, I realised how that all along I was fast asleep, dreaming in my cosy little car, detached from the world.

Just like being on my scooter, India was a little trip out of my normal, sleepy life. A reality check!

About half of the time in India I was in a meditation resort, Osho Commune International (see osho.com). It is a great place to relax, rediscover yourself, and to meet lots of interesting people from around the world. At least that’s how it was for me. Maybe I will write about some of the meditation techniques they do there in a later blog.

About half way through my trip, while in the resort, due to some high-voltage joking with a friend, I was in a rare moment of no-mind (i.e. not being serious). The very next moment I caught the eye of a beautiful girl, whom, without a moment's hesitation, I suddenly engaged with the most random question, so random, in fact, that I can’t even remember what the question was. After trying to compose herself from this sudden intrusion of her personal space, gradually she began to warm to me. We connected, or at least our energies did. But deep down, down below my warm outward display of charm, I was cold. And coldly calculating... But after trying to calculate whether she was as calculating as me, slowly I realised I was trusting her, and that it wasn't so bad, even though she still felt slightly dangerous.

Oh, and I got a new name: Yoko. It's Japaneese and aparently means "child of light"

India!

Not a lot has changed since my last bloggings - though I have started a security job, which is great for getting my reading done, watching DVDs...that sort of thing! don't be too jealous, it's bad for you.

Anyhow, I am going to India this week. For three weeks. On my own. Why? Hmmm, I don't know. I suppose I could say its for reseach and insearch, though I might fit some rest in somewhere. Well that's the bare facts. I will probably tell you something else when I get back. You won't miss me, will you?

ME=√U (roughly)

Awakened ones have always reported seeing the rest of us sleeping, dreaming, or basically operating like a machine—today we might say a bio-computer or calculator. Yet at some level we are all aware of this. For example, I know that only on very rare occasions am I open and real with people I meet. Usually I am coldly "calculating", at a psychic distance, the "right" things to say and do to ensure a safe yet successful outcome for myself. To my calculator, you are just a significant number.

But I've been getting a little bored with this ego-game. So I've been making a few experiments toward actually encountering others... On the first few tries, others just appeared to be a different brand of calculator. But, alas! just by observing this, reality catches me off guard. I have set my own calculator down (though not out of sight) and I'm observing the other person doing his or her calculations. However, my own calculator jumps suddenly back to me and quickly informs me this is risky to do, not least because I'm supposed to be efficiently engaging with someone! But my shadow silently draws me back and I feel reality urging me to allow it be brought into the light...indeed, why should I carry the burden of being "nice" and "putting up a front"?

Obviously I am afraid to take off my mask, because what it's covering will not be accepted. Behind the mask I am self-centred. Shouldn't I just keep the mask off?! Damn no. It would get too messy, too uncomfortable, I calculate. Much safer just to stick to this game of You and Me, this game where there's a definite point at which you stop and I start, where I'm me and you are you (it's still an interesting game, of course). So I keep the distance. Right there.

Up until now this game has been good for me. It has helped me develop and become familiar with myself. But for now I think I have learnt enough from being independent. And yet I don't want to become dependent on others, because that would make me a puppet, and I'd much prefer to be a calculator, for now.

Too busy searching. Too often finding. Out

For as much as I can think, I have always been a solitary, independent individual, and an introvert. But I'm coming to the realisation that I can't always avoid the outside world by pretending to myself that it isn't here.

After all, as one of my favourite authors, Alan Watts, liked to emphasise, what happens on the inner always happens on the outer, and vice versa. In other words, reality often appears to us like a mirror does in the morning... And yet we still just have to go and look in that mirror, don't we?

Recently I have been noticing how everyday, through every moment, I'm looking for my reflection - and not only in the mirror. Especially at those times when I feel somewhat small, powerless, vulnerable, I feel an urge to affirm myself, my existence, my aliveness. So I try to make an echo, an effect, something (anything!) that assures me that I am, in fact, alive (phew!).

Why else did I create this blog? I need to be alive. Or do I? But how can I not be alive? Isn't it already obvious that I'm...me?

Yes.

And no.

Recently I have sought the "echo" in such impulsions as the dynamic art of surfing the Internet, trying to make someone grasp an idea of mine, or simply devouring a taste-provoking substance such as cereal. I figure that such inclinations (in their intensity) are just my attempts to prove to myself that what is on the inside (of me) is also on the outside, in "reality". Perhaps this is because I feel separate and apart from the world, from existence, and I want to feel like I am a part of it.