I should be quiet as well.

Trigger finger pulled past pause.

Freeze frame of happy face.

Breeze.  Bamboos. Rustle of leaves.

Here’s the beauty of writing a blog.  I get to comment on my own thinking.  To second guess myself, as it were.  To unsimplify the over-simplification.  So this morning I’m commenting on my last blog entry. 

I found it an over simplification and rather preachy.  A near miss – kinda like Dick Cheney shooting at quail. 

Oh, I still find the basic premises accurate.  Fixation on a desired outcome does produce a rigidity in one’s thinking and actions.  And, people free of such rigid expectations are better able to respond confidently (read: effectively) to life’s experiences and events and better able to take action.

But where is the real messiness of life in that formulation?  I mean, life is not really like a large lobby in a public building with people voluntarily walking around with their eyes closed.  Most people use all of the senses they have available to get where they want to go. 

So take a different example.  Dick Cheney and friends out hunting quail.  One friend falls back to search for a quail he has shot.  He chooses to come back up to the group from behind.  Why?  I would guess he figured that no hunter would shoot backwards and that he was, therefore, safe to approach unannounced from behind.  Now the quail takes flight.  (What creature wouldn’t, seeing Dick Cheney sighting them down the barrel of a loaded weapon?)  Unfortunately, the bird flies around and behind Mr. Cheney.  He does what hunters do when fixed on the kill.  He tracks the bird, swivels, and fires before the bird gets out of range.  The rest of the story is legend. 

The point here is not Dick Cheney, who I feel sure was genuinely shocked by the terrible outcome of a hunting decision.  The point is that life situations are inherently messy when it comes to decision making.  So even if one knows that one may be biased toward a rigid response and a habitual decision, even if one tells oneself to be more open to the particulars of this immediate situation, one can still respond/decide in a way that produces a dreadful outcome.

I think that if some guru were charging me $1000 for his/her sage teaching, I would want more than just platitudes about rigid and habitual responses or about freedom from rigidly held expectations being a better frame of mind in which to make effective decisions.  Knowing that sort of truism is one thing.  Responding more effectively in the heat of the moment – say like while you are absorbed in flushing a quail into the air and swiveling to take a shot before the bird is gone that you recognize a friend has quietly slipped up behind you and is now in your line of fire – now that is a totally different thing.  Theory and real time experience.  Theory is clean and simplified, a pattern deduced out of multiple raw experiences.  Action in the moment is messy because no two situations are exactly alike.

I’m thinking that one of the things that makes action heroes in the movies so popular is the speed and accuracy of their decisions and responses.  I’ll take Obi Wan Kenobi as an example.  He really looks great on the screen.  On the other hand, how speedy and confidently accurate is his response to the dilemma he encounters?  Hmm, let’s see.  The script writer takes quite a while to develop the script for the action scene, and that is turned into story boards, reviewed, and rewritten.  The actor spends weeks and months training to learn the martial arts movements and to memorize the specific choreography needed for the scene.  The director and cast spend lots of time getting the scene right during the filming.  The director and editor cut and paste to get the final one minute of action plus another year to sequence all the segments into a finished movie.  On second thought, a movie hero isn’t all that quick even though he seems to be.

Let’s circle back to the original reason for writing this messy, Monday morning quarterback blog entry.  Because we are in a quandary between clean, overly simplified theories about confidence and decision making and the experience that real life situations produce decisions which are rushed and messy and which can sometimes result in really unpleasant outcomes.

Perhaps a way out of that quandary is to reconceptualize it.  What if we were to say that theory can be seen as a preferred set of response guidelines?  What if we said that real time experiences, no matter how rapidly they unfold, can be seen as a set of opportunities from which one chooses a response that one believes will result in a desired outcome?  Well, if we do look at it in this framework, then perhaps theory and experience are not so far apart.  They are related as a constant dialog.  Preferred response guidelines of action/response are mitigated by the particulars of the real time event, and decision of response to the particulars of the real time event is mitigated by preferred guidelines.

One way in practical terms that we actually experience this dialog between preferred guidelines and real time events is in “practice.”  Indulge me in re-phrasing an old adage: Practice makes for more effective decisions.  (Leave it to the movies for practice to make perfect.)  Life gives each of us a lot of chances to dialog with ourselves during decision making situations.  We get to assess the particulars of this real time event.  We get to compare response options both with the particulars of the event and with our deduced set of preferred response guidelines.  We get to modify both when we make a decision and see the results.  Take Mr. Cheney’s dilemma.  Guideline: shooting a quail is OK whereas shooting members of the hunting party is not.  Real life particulars:  the quail is not flying away from the hunter as expected.  Possible decisions: Track and shoot before the bird gets out of range.  Or, abort the shot because the bird’s flight path has taken it into territory with more unknowns. 

I’m no expert on Dick Cheney’s life, but I rather imagine that he has spent a lot of time hunting and learning to handle a loaded weapon with care and safety.  Even so one might suggest an addition to the guidelines for people hunting with Dick Cheney.  If you drop back to search for your quail, stay low when re-approaching Cheney from behind and let him know where you are.

Here are some questions this blog entry seems to raise but does not answer:

Is living -- action and reaction – really this complicated?  Isn’t this blog entry making a mountain out of a mole hill?

For time warp buffs: What does it say about George Lukas’ decision making process that he has the Alec Guiness version of Obi Wan voluntarily pass into the Force when fighting Darth Vader in Episode IV whereas years later when making Episode III he has the Ewan MacGregor version fight Anakin Skywalker to the death?

Is there not a terrible lack of taste in using a hunting tragedy as a key example in a week when a mass shooting actually did take place?  (And, I do apologize to anyone offended by this poor taste on my part.)

Is Babs correct when she tells me that this blog entry is overly convoluted and lacking in humor?

What do you think?  Please add your comments.

Tuesday, 20070417

Breeze. Bamboos. Flutter of leaves.

Eyes closed in her serene face.

Sunlight flickers on clasped hands.

I should be quiet as well.

Imagine a large room.  Say the lobby of a large building.  Lots of people going places.  All of them with eyes closed.  Moving with hope and fear in the direction each thinks he or she wants to go.  Some of them hold hands and work their way together trying not to bump into others and hoping not to be jolted by others.

Imagine someone with his or her eyes open in the same lobby.  Able to see the surroundings, the people wending their way, doors and windows, potted plants.  That person could easily help or hinder.  A whisper “A little to the left.”  A gentle clasp of an outstretched hand and a pull in a different direction.  A firm grasp on someone’s shoulders to redirect the whole body.  A kick in the shin for the guy who didn’t pay attention to the gently whispered direction.  A loud shout, “Hey, you Bozos!  Open your eyes, and look where you’re going!!”  Or maybe “Pay me a thousand dollars, and I’ll get you out of here.”

I was fortunate enough to be on a meditation course the last few days.  One of the topics that came up was confidence.  The speaker read some passages from a couple of books and gave examples from his own experience.  We all chimed in as we puzzled through the concepts of confidence, conditional confidence – you know, when you have done something enough times that you are pretty sure, pretty confident that you can get the desired outcome again – and over-confidence.  We gradually clarified that lack of confidence is based in an individual’s hope for a desired outcome and fear that the outcome will not occur.  It’s a spectrum that runs from no confidence – I suppose that would be complete fear that the desired outcome was unobtainable given this or that person’s lack of skill to produce any outcome.  It runs to conditional confidence. And it runs to full confidence.

Suppose, for example, that one gives up the fixation on a desired outcome.  Suppose that one recognizes that life is made up of choices but that the choices are neither right nor wrong.  The choice just leads to an outcome and another choice.  Sure one could choose a course of action that one thinks will lead predictably to a desired outcome.  But, it might not.  And even in the latter instance, so what?  It just means that one makes another choice, a course correction if you will.  And, if the flow of choice-and-outcome never produces the desired outcome, then one finds oneself in an adventure and a great opportunity to learn something new. 

It’s the fixation that leads to hope and fear.  It’s not the act of choosing.  It’s when I tell myself that the desired outcome – not having to eat dog food in my old, old age, for example – must occur that I get trapped in the emotion of hope or fear.  Ironically, it is the emotional stickiness of hope and fear that seem to keep one from the freedom to look at the whole range of opportunities in a given situation.  Fastening quickly on the hoped for outcome, one rushes into planning the series of actions necessary to obtain the outcome.

I think this realization that life is made up of choices and outcomes – not “right” choices and “right” outcomes – is what gives the enlightened, the gurus such a great advantage over the rest.  If one knows that any choice one makes will produce an outcome and the opportunity for another choice, then one can act with full confidence.  So a guru is always a step ahead of the crowd.  They are choosing their steps carefully; he or she has made a choice and is already awaiting an outcome.  One can almost imagine it.  The guru, he or she, can whisper in your ear, “A little to the left, Lovie.”  He or she can gently bump you off your cautious course across the lobby.  He or she can kick you in the shin and shout in your ear, “Open your eyes, Bozo!!”  He or she can tell that you are ripe to pay a thousand dollars for a bit of clear-sighted direction.  He or she knows that you could easily be just as clear sighted.  He or she acts with full confidence.

And that full confidence is so appealing to the rest of us.

Sunday 20070401

Our model describes it.  sigh

OK, extrapolate.  sigh

Wait!  So ego means mask?  sigh

Taste of tangerine on tongue.

Full moon again.  As I was watching it in the night sky, a cloud drifted across it.  I immediately imagined a woman drawing a fan across her face.

So why in a blog named the Plain Field Meditation is there nothing about meditation techniques?  Or, is this really just a series of meditations in the sense of philosophical essays?

Wetting the finger and leafing through the pages of the unabridged Wikipedia.com, we come to the definition of the word meditation: “The English word meditation comes from the Latin meditatio, which originally indicated every type of physical or intellectual exercise, then later evolved into the more specific meaning "contemplation." The use of the word meditation in the western Christian tradition has referred generally to a more active practice of reflection on some particular theme such as "meditation on the sufferings of Christ". Similarly in Western philosophy, one finds, for example, Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, a set of six mental exercises which systematically analyze the nature of reality.”

And then there is my home office altar.  It really means a lot to me.  I am attaching a photo of the altar to this blog.  Keep in mind that I am not a Buddhist – any more than I am a something else.  I put the Buddha statue in because it was given to me last year by a Chinese student as a going away present.  I doubt that Huang Jun knew what my spiritual leanings were/are, but he knew I had visited a lot of temples in China and tried to select something that would have meaning for me.  I treasure it.  The glass paperweight is an heirloom from the collection my father had.  I don’t collect paperweights although you will find a few scattered around my part of the home office.  But this one reminds me of my father.  And, I like the swirl of bubbles up through the center.  I have decided that it represents the known universe.  The plate on which the two objects rest is some sort of a plastic tray that has a reptilian scale pattern on it.  So that could be in honor of the fact I was born in the year of the dragon.  But no, it is actually a piece of the skin of the Worm Ouroboros, the mythical “great snake,” the dragon who eats its own tail and thereby forms a circle, the symbol of oneness and cycles.  I mean, it is my altar, and I get to set the meanings, catalyze the symbology, interpret the mysterious into dogma, and otherwise play with the things I want to remember.

Then a small segment of the moon became visible again before another larger cloud hid her lovely face again and she remained cloud hidden.  So like life.  One experience in full view only to become clouded over by other experiences and to end up only as a lovely memory.

Definition, part 2: "Meditation" in its modern sense, however, more generally refers to what in Christian monasticism is called contemplation. Here, awareness is brought to bear on the reality of the present moment without deliberately encouraging conceptual thought or imagination. A meditative state is the state of mind that someone is in during meditation. It is usually a state of relaxation. In the late nineteenth century, Theosophists adopted the word "meditation" to refer to various spiritual practices drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. Thus the English word "meditation" does not exclusively translate any single term or concept, and can be used to translate words such as the Sanskrit dhyana, samadhi and bhavana.

“Meditation is usually defined as one of the following:

·         a state of relaxed concentration on the reality of the present moment

·         a state that is experienced when the mind dissolves and is free of all thoughts

·         "concentration in which the attention has been liberated from restlessness and is focused on God."^[6]

·         focusing the mind on a single object (such as a religious statue, or one's breath, or a mantra)

·         a mental "opening up" to the divine, invoking the guidance of a higher power

·         reasoned analysis of religious teachings (such as impermanence, for Buddhists).”

For my money items 3 and 4 above are really the same thing, God being one of the many objects of concentration.  I make that point because it happens to be the definition of meditation that I favor.  So while I am guilty in this blog of writing essays that smack of “reasoned analysis” – well, I would like to think of them as having some logic – as listed last in the above citation, I really favor meditation as a practice and not meditation as a verbal contemplation.

During the practice of meditation one cycles between focus on a single object and other thoughts.  A key point in that cycle is the moment of awareness that one has lost mental focus.  That’s followed by a moment of choice to continue the train of other thoughts or to refocus on the original object of mental attention.  

So biting the tail of this verbal meditation, let’s refocus on the only real thing in it.  Full Moon this morning.  Some clouds.  Coffee.  Observation.