Nostrils flare scenting time and

probabilities; mouth

waters anticipating

the fun of the right moment.

I went to have brunch with my son’s family this morning.  Not far after I merged onto the interstate highway I saw a huge blinking yellow arrow pointing to the right.  Roadwork ahead.  As I got to the work site, the Illinois Department of Transportation had helpfully placed a sign to explain the narrowing of traffic lanes: WEEKEND LANE CLOSURES – speed limit 45 MPH strictly enforced; $345 fine.  As I passed the barricaded worksite, no work was taking place.  How kind of IDOT, I thought, to provide practice in proper work zone driving etiquette at the very beginning of the peak road repair season.

But then it also seemed to me to be perfectly fitting for my weekend so far.

I have applied for a job, and I am waiting to see if I get a call for a job interview.  I’m led to believe that the company looked over applicant resumes last week.  So as we got to the weekend with no expectation of a phone call, I have found myself putting much, but not all, of my anticipation aside until Monday.  Oddly enough the part of the anticipation that I was not able to put aside so easily was the “What if they don’t call?” anxiety.  You know.  “What if they don’t call on Monday?!!!”  As though somehow Monday was the last day when Human Resources could be making job interview appointments for such a vital new position.  It is the loss aversion element of seeking something that one considers really, really important.

Jonah Lehrer has an excellent summary of the interaction between the emotional gut mind and the rational mind.  In my current case, given too much time between the point when one begins a decision making process and the point when one can finally make and implement a decision, both my gut mind and my rational mind go a bit berserk.   Here is Lehrer’s sage advice: “Why is thinking about thinking so important?  First, it helps us steer clear of stupid errors.  You can’t avoid loss aversion unless you know that the mind treats losses differently than gains.  And you’ll probably think too much about buying a house unless you know that such a strategy will lead you to buy the wrong property.  The mind is full of flaws, but they can be outsmarted.”  [Lehrer, Jonah.  How We Decide.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  2009.  Page 250.]

Which brings me to two good refresher lessons life has given me with this job opportunity experience.  How kind of life to provide two good practice experiences in the proper handling of job hunting expectations.  Both refreshers relate to meditation.

One of these is that no matter how entrained the mind gets, how attached to an expectation, there will come a point when the nonattached observer self recognizes that the mind has been hijacked by that attachment.  And right after that, one again has a point of choice.  I can continue to wallow in this attachment, or I can step back from it.  I think this is one practical application of what Lehrer is saying about why it is important to know about the thinking process and the ability to outsmart the flaws inherent in human thinking. 

Now I must admit I have wondered today why my own personal observer self took so long to  pull me up short and to whisper “Get a grip” into my ear.  Maybe it was his annual vacation week.  Well, at least life is always happy to provide new learning opportunities for people like me.

The second refresher lesson is that if one is going to blast off all gung ho – “Warp nine, Mr. Data.  Make it so!” – on gripping adventures such as applying for the ideal job, then one had better be prepared to enjoy all aspects of the adventure.  That includes the entrancing emotional ride while surfing the probability waves of the adventure.  “What if HR doesn’t call on Tuesday either?!!!  How kind of HR to prolong the waiting.  Good practice for next weekend.”

And as for my nonattached observer self, I’m deducting at least two days from his annual vacation allotment.  

On my computer screen Chen

Rong’s dragon pearl of wisdom

in claw drifting live daring

come and get it Chumster.

This Christmas I took two of our grandchildren to see the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.  I had seen the 1951 original when I was a kid and loved it.  To this day I remember part of the phrase that the human mother had to say to stop Gort from exterminating an entire American army battalion, “Klaatu barada nikto.”  Every time my grade school had an atomic bomb drill, and I crawled under my desk and dutifully hid my face to avoid the glass that would shatter inward and not to be blinded by the sudden light from the bomb detonation, I remembered the message of the movie: Atomic weapons were dangerous.  (I was glad helpful space aliens had come to explain that to Washington, DC.) 

I did like the giant robot, Gort, in the remake better than the old Gort.  This time Gort fragments into millions of tiny, self replicating, locust-like destructors that simply devour all humans and human-made objects.  Much tougher for any one human being to shut down the entire ravaging swarm with a simple cease and desist order.

Which brings me to talk about President Obama and the stock market crash.  I suppose maybe first I should mention that all of the NINA ARM’s (no income, no assets adjustable rate mortgages) and the CDS’s (credit default swaps) reminded me of the ravaging Gort hoards the way that they destroyed the stock market and were chewing away at the value of my retirement savings.  When Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter began declaring Obama to be the Messiah, I really hoped that a god-like alien (i.e. anyone with more smarts than the Bush administration and greater personal ethics than the Wall Street bankers) had in fact given the incoming president some magic words, words that would instantly cause the stock markets to cease and desist from their free fall.  I think it would have been great to see President Obama step to the podium a few weeks ago – you know, just after it was made public that AIG Financial Products executives would be receiving retention bonuses despite the fact that they had created the voracious little CDS critters.  I hoped he would hold up his hands and in loud clear voice would speak into the roiling stock market destruction saying, “Klaatu barada nikto.”  Instead my sister sat me down and told me to pull my vanishing money out of stock funds and put it into CD’s.

It turned out for me that the 21^st century translation of Klaatu barada nikto is in fact “Get out of the market now.” 

I think there must be some sort of space alien sentence that the 1951 heroine did not tell us movie goers.  It would have told us to get back into the market when the global economy begins to reestablish itself.  I’m pretty sure about that because in both the original and the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu, the wise space alien, does come back to life and earth does continue happily to pursue a wiser course of action.

Blago speaks expounds his side

of the show slides his semblance

dissembles his perceptions

The ayes have this story’s end

I have a growing passion for a particular Chinese, hand scroll painting, Chen Rong’s Nine Dragons. It was painted over a period of years around 1244 AD.  It is 50 feet long.  Here’s an interesting thing about really old Chinese paintings, no one can be sure if the painting is authentic.  In China copying old master works is not a matter of forgery, it is the sincerest form of flattery.  And a good way to improve the artist’s brush work.  But for the person, me, who would love to get his hands on a copy of the Nine Dragons scroll, there is the cloudy question of whether I would get a good copy of the real nine dragons or a good copy of some other artist’s flattery. 

My guru used to talk about surfing the waves of life’s ocean.  I could see in his eyes a certain joy in the prospect of a storm tossed sea.  In that day he might encounter one of his meditators who was blissfully grateful for a lesson learned from the day before.  But another might have been shocked by something he said or really angry at being called out of a sound sleep at 2 AM because the guru wanted to give another important lecture.  Among his meditators stories abounded of times when the guru had embarrassed them in front of their friends or work colleagues.  This usually took place after the meditator had spent a lot of time trying to convince his/her work mates that this guru, this enlightened being, was someone they had to meet.  Gururaj was a capricious dragon of a guru.

I bring up Gururaj and his joy of surfing because the print I downloaded of one of Chen Rong’s nine dragons reminded me of surfing.  In the print a dragon looks to be swimming or surfing through turbulent seas.  I would guess that for Chen Rong the dragon represented the Daoist concept of the natural power inherent in the universe.  Maybe for Chen Rong this dragon is not so much surfing the turbulence as a creaturely embodiment of the turbulent waves themselves, waves that roll into themselves as well as reach outward to grasp what is ahead.

But when I printed out the picture and looked closely, I noticed that this dragon is looking out of the picture plane at the viewer.  I laughed.  I couldn’t decide whether the dragon was having a sly dialog with the viewer or betraying a certain emotion due to the turbulence.  Is it about to say, “Watch me slide through the next set of waves!!!”  Or is it saying, “Holy smoke!! What have I gotten myself into?!!”

You see?  This is why it is important to know whether the copy I downloaded is a faithful rendering of Chen Rong’s masterpiece or if it is a flawed flattery of the original.  I want to know this dragon’s thoughts.

Of course when you read this blog entry, you are reading only my flattery of Gururaj and his thoughts.  Who knows how close to the original that is?

She sits a bit back shadowed

hands tightly together no

smile giving her self away

Twilight too bright for headlights

Does it seem this way to you too?  In a new or mostly unpredictable situation, the first response is a kind of fearful emotion?  Maybe just a bit of anxiety or apprehension, not full blown terror. I have often wondered about this especially because I seem to be more blessed with this reaction than Babs is.

Actually it makes sense to me.  Emotional responses are the first responses.  And, if one is confronted with a new situation, then the emotional mind, often called the gut mind, attempts rapidly to assess whether this is going to hurt a lot , a little, or not at all.  That’s a working description of anxiety as a first response to things new.

It could also be argued – probably by Babs – that being anxious is just my basic nature.  I can’t really disagree too strongly.  I grew up in a household where being anxious wasn’t just a matter of happenstance; it was the preferred mentality.  My mother and I have long agreed that when confronting a situation, one should envisage the worst possible scenario and figure with some confidence that it won’t be that bad in reality.  This is a more dire approach to facing things than pessimism.  Pessimism is just the possibility that the glass is only half full.  I think preparing for the worst and hoping it won’t be that bad trumps mere pessimism.

Modern psychology has recognized that human beings respond first from their emotional, gut mind, and then a bit later the rational mind kicks in to process the situation at hand as well.  It’s a well documented fact that perceptions from the five senses get cycled to the amygdala, the seat of the gut mind, before they get all the way upstairs to the newer brain parts.  So before the rational mind can begin to figure out from all the clues that a piece of left-over rope lying next to the twilight path is just a piece of left-over rope, the gut mind has already jumped ahead to the “be afraid; be very afraid” response.  So despite Babs’ protestations, my mother and I aren’t completely nuts.  I’d just like the record clear on that point.

Interestingly, my guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi, didn’t split out the gut and rational minds so separately as modern psychology does.  This I have found unusual because Gururaj was a pretty with it guy when it came to science.  He was perfectly happy to use the Big Bang theory in talking about the origins of the universe.  In some comments, one can almost read in a conceptualization of the Absolute Divinity that would not be far out of line with multiverse “brane” cosmologists.  But, curiously he lumped the gut mind in with the rational mind, one big lump, the “conscious mind” in his terminology.  So the way to handle the quick emotional reaction of the gut mind was to “do your meditation and spiritual practices” because that simple maxim applied to all things involving the conscious and the subconscious minds.

Still I know many meditators who struggle with their emotional responses.  I certainly have and do.  Somehow it is a contest.  Just as one should always be nonattached from the ego’s attempt to grab the steering wheel of one’s life, my friends sometimes seem to want to blot out strong emotional responses.  “I know I shouldn’t feel that way.  Gururaj used to say that a mountain could fall behind him and he wouldn’t notice it.  So why am I so easily upset after all these years of meditating?!!!”

Now it makes sense!  The gut mind reacts more quickly than all those years of meditation and nonattachment.  It reacts on some very oversimplified reaction patters.  “Have we experienced the same sensory input recently?  Then this must be the same thing as last time.”  So if you are in the habit of eating a lot of banana cream pie, and the gut mind gets sensory input regarding a triangular shape of yellow with white on top, it is likely to be sending out a strong “Grab it” message before the rational, conscious mind has much chance to react by remembering that the piece of pie in the refrigerator is the piece of lemon pie that Babs saved for her dessert and that touching it will only bring a great deal of pain into one’s greedy life. 

See, it is at this point that the nonattachment gained in meditation really does pay off.  One needs to be nonattached to the immediate gut reaction in order to give the conscious mind time to fine tune the mind’s perception of what the sensory input is really all about.  In short, react, assimilate, then choose.

At the very least one can use all one’s faculties to make up a good story why you ate the piece of lemon pie before Babs gets back to the refrigerator.

Blue their old gray hound whimpers

hearing passersby wanting

action fresh air a place to piss

I have no key to their door

I’m writing this morning from the home of my son-in-law, a well know UK artist.  Last weekend we saw a five-second slice of a Microsoft commercial that used one of his civic sculptures as an iconic background in a TV commercial.  I was thinking this morning about what an average life I have had.  I know one shouldn’t admit to an average life.  There are no merit badges for average.  Still I have had a wonderfully average life so far.

My grandfather was a farmer.  As a kid I remember it was always interesting to look in the toolbox mounted to the fender of his tractor.  I usually could find an arrow head or two; sometimes just a fragment and sometimes a nearly perfect point.  One my grandfather’s fields had been the site of an Indian encampment, a site close to an outcropping of flint.  Of course, when I saw the field, there were no signs of the camp.  There were no post holes for woodland hogans, no fire pits, no rotted remains of a village.  My grandfather only had the flint points that he found every spring when plowing.  I have often wondered if the field had ever been a real village or just a site where Indians had chipped the flint to make tools and weapons.

The flint points are the only bits left of the lives on that Indian tribe – at least for me.  In a way then, the Indians lived invisible lives.  That, I think, is what average is all about, invisibility.  On the face of it being invisible would seem like a rather miserable fate.  Not leaving a mark in history to show for having been alive, now that’s pretty awful, isn’t it?

I’m not so sure.  Here’s the thing.  Just being alive seems like quite a gift. 

I remember as a child seeing people in all stages of life – a bit like watching a film.  As an adult classroom teacher it was interesting to watch the students and meet the parents – each with their own individual life dramas.  In short, I am always fascinated watching all those lives playing through.

And, here’s the other thing.  I also get to live through my own individual existence and interact with life.  I have my own drama, quite absorbing for me of course, and it fits in perfectly to create harmony or strife or both in the individual lives of those around me.  I know from experience what it feels and tastes and moves like to be meeting a girl for the first time.  So when I see my grandsons discovering another dimension to girls I can enjoy their discovery.  I know what it means to have a business strategy in progress.  When I get emails from former Chinese students about their first jobs, I know the welter of hopes and anxieties that go with entry-level jobs.  Increasingly I know the slow melting of ache one feels when one stands up after sitting in one position too long.  And, as I observe my mother, I know that I will feel those minor aches and pains grow longer and deeper in duration.  It happens to most people as another part of the average life progress.

Still in a way I am leaving small chips along my path in time.  I post these blog entries.  I wonder if in fifty or hundred years time, some electronic harvester will find a way to plow through all the different blog assemblages and toss them into the electronic version of a toolbox.  I wonder if some small child or AI will come along and read through them and will in turn wonder about the people who left all those shards littering the electronic past.  Probably.

wind ridden snow slides smoothly

breasts the white crested hill side

slithers exhausted to rest

my hand in warm glove shivers

“Every Man Is Guilty Of The Good He Did Not Do.”  It’s the topic for this Sunday’s sermon at a church I passed on the way to get my car serviced.  I was really happy when I realized that all the women in that congregation were free of guilt.  Then I wondered if, given the fact that all the men were already guilty, there was much incentive for them to do good.  It could be that the men in the congregation are actually more free to do less good.  I mean I have certainly given up trying to continue a post-holiday diet once I step on the scales on Monday morning of week two and find that I regained the three pounds I lost during week one of my new diet.  (Ok, I admit I am just giving myself permission in advance of the holiday binge not to get too excited, too expectant about the forthcoming 2009 post-holiday diet.)

Let’s stop that line of reasoning.  It seems rather arcane and convoluted.

I bet the church pastor will really advocate trying harder to do good.  If I were he, I would use the parable of the Good Samaritan as the Bible reading for the service.  I imagine that the pastor will point out, quite accurately, that we go through our daily lives and are often oblivious of good that we could do.  So we should try harder to be more aware of opportunities to do good.  And of course, we should do the good we become aware of.  Or else we men will become even more guilt ridden.  Perhaps to give the women in the congregation something to think about because they are not guilt ridden nor doing-good conflicted, the pastor might encourage them to teach their sons to be more aware of do-good opportunities.  That way they could help the next generation of men postpone their inevitable guilt for at least a little while longer – say into their mid-teen years.

Let’s stop that line of reasoning.  It’s rather arcane and convoluted.

The message here is pretty simple.  It’s about being guilty.  Guilt is to religion as Velcro is to clothing manufacturers.  Velcro binds your shoe sides together and has the added benefit that you never have to learn to tie a bow knot.  Guilt binds the devout to sin.  If one is not being good, then one gets stuck with sin.  Of course the danger underlying it all is that the sin-ridden guilty will not be pure enough to enter heaven and will spend eternity in hell.  If one skips the do-gooding attempts and simply does evil, then one is bound to suffer in hell anyway.    In Christianity – maybe just to make the game of life more challenging – all humans are born guilty of original sin.  So we men have to work like the devil to clean up our lives and become worthy of heaven.  And that brings us full circle back to the topic of the next Sunday’s sermon, being guilty of the good we men haven’t done.  This definitely seems pretty convoluted to me.

Personally, I don’t see the need for sin and guilt.  Original sin is just unnecessary overkill.  Getting through the day is challenging enough.  Where is it written that we cannot make choices unless they are based on fear of sinning? 

Suppose, for example, that I am driving behind a school bus and see the yellow warning lights begin to flash on the bus.  I know that means the bus is going to stop soon.  Kids will get out of the bus to go to their homes.  So I will have to stop and wait for the children to get safely out of the street before I drive onward.  I also know that I could perhaps get around the bus before it slows to a complete stop and switches on the red lights as it disgorges the school children.  However, I might not make it the around bus before an exiting child steps right in front of my speeding automobile.  Which is the wiser decision?

I think that is a big enough problem and a weighty enough outcome.  I can handle that OK.  (By the way, in this multiple-choice scenario, I am going for solution A: to stop the car and wait until the kids are off the bus safely and the bus turns off its lights.  Rationale?  My car does not have very good pick up so the likelihood that I could get around the bus before the kids can race in front of my car is minimal.  And, well, they are kids.  They know without any doubt that they are invulnerable.  It will be many years before they fully understand human frailty.)

But do I also need to worry about committing a sin – let’s be accurate here, adding another sin onto the rapidly growing load of original and acquired sin I am already carrying?  Can’t I just make a simple wise decision?  I really don’t feel the need of guilt in this decision making process.  I don’t need to spend extra time puzzling through whether it would be a big or small sin if I made an unwise decision.  I just need to hit the brakes, let the kids get on with their lives, and get on to wherever I was driving.

That’s simple and direct enough.  Not too arcane; not too convoluted.

Slow trek to teahouse rocks raked

Row upon flow around steps

Passing one perfect blossom

Geese oblivious above

It is Indian Summer here.  The early morning sun yesterday was unimpeded and as brilliant as a spotlight on the fall foliage.  We have had fall color now for almost a month.  That’s the way it was forecast to go.  The summer was cool and wet, and bushes and trees especially did not suffer from drought.   They have turned from green to color in wave upon wave this October.  It is a fall that photographers hope for every year. 

But, it isn’t perfect.

In my mind all the foliage should be in color.  In reality not even on the same tree are the leaves fully in color.  As I walk along the sidewalk no tree and no bush is perfectly turned.

That’s just my mentality.  Sometime in my life, I came to believe the fantasy that things could be picture perfect.  I suppose that comes from a childhood of calendar photographs in which entire Vermont forests were riotously in color from October 1 to 31 followed by a month in which a wild turkey, tail fully spread, paused in contemplation of Thanksgiving.  I think my fantasy is also fed by driving at speed.  When I drive, my attention is seldom on individual trees or bushes.  My short term memory  blends the trees just passed into red trees or yellow ones or still green ones.

In reality as I was walking this morning I just stopped in front of one imperfect bush.  Had I just walked past it, I would have remembered it as a neon red vision.  But, no.  The leaves were in an infinite variety of shades from green to neon red.  I wanted to see the red, but the bush was really a Christmas tree of different colors.

No wonder Japanese tea masters took the simple expedient of decapitating an entire garden of flowers in order to leave the one perfect blossom so that their guests could enjoy the beauty of nature in the master’s garden.  Those guys figured out a long time ago that reality was never picture perfect.  And, you can’t have that in a proper tea ceremony during which the smallest details are to be savored.

I thought about that standing in front of the bush that was so messily turning red.  Maybe I could just pick off all but the single perfectly neon leaf.

Unfortunately I got caught up in observing all the different colors on that one bush.  It did not take a lot of imagination to see the whole annual life cycle of the bush happening leaf by leaf all at the same time.  Much more interesting to see and a lot less work than trying to get rid of all the not-quite-neon-enough leaves.  Much more enjoyable and complicated than my stripped down picture of perfection.

Sunlight low slanting.

Green, red, gold, brown leaves.

Dew glinting on grass.

Just reading the news.

I started to write a couple of weeks ago.  Topic: economic meltdown.  I just couldn’t find spiritual inspiration nor much connection to the topic of meditation.  I had a great title: May You Live in Interesting Times.  I guess the times weren’t interesting enough then.

I did get inspired Friday afternoon.  I downloaded the Friday evening closing stock market quotes into my Quicken account.  I like to see how my retirement accounts are doing.  After the download, I felt oddly calm.  The thought that crossed my mind was that we, the collective we that actually includes all peoples, we had turned a corner.  Life as we knew it for the last couple of decades had ended.

I was reminded of a similar change experience I had several years ago.  The memory was a body-mind, gut memory, a physical, emotional response.  It happened at the end of a year when my first wife and I were in the process of breaking up our marriage.  We attended a week-long meditation retreat.  (See.  I got in a connection to the topic of meditation right there.)  At some point in the week I came out of a meditation with a clear realization that I was ready to make the change.  I wasn’t sure what the change would be, but I was physically, emotionally, and consciously ready for all the stress and strain that would come next.  Sure enough, almost as soon as my wife and I got into the car to drive home, we fell right back into our usual bickering.  That was interrupted when we discovered that the breaks weren’t working properly.  We had to suspend the arguing in order to deal with the emergency of finding a repair shop.  Still, emergency resolved and car brakes repaired, we resumed our bickering and argued so vehemently that we decided to resolve our difficulties by getting a divorce. 

The synchronicity of driving toward a divorce in a car with bad brakes turned out to be a good occasion from which to draw all kinds of unwarranted parables.  I remember mentally writing all kinds of spiritual lessons about that interesting timing.  Many of those great lessons were written indelibly in my thoughts while I sat in the negotiations with the lawyer as we deliberated the most equitable dissolution of the marriage.  They were a waste of time.  The real lesson was that all that thinking about synchronicity kept me tightly bound up in the misery of getting a divorce and wishing that things weren’t so miserable.

Looking at the download data in my Quicken account and watching the evening news Friday, I got that same gut feeling.

I admit I am politically liberal.  I say that so that you can understand why I was really pretty pleased to see the end of Reaganomics, the repudiation of Republican neo-conservative policies, and proof of the complete incompetence of the Bush administration.  It was a rather dramatic and to my mind unnecessary validation of the old adage: “Give a man enough rope, and he will hang himself.” 

Still I am reminded that there is little need to bind myself with feelings of vindication.  It’s time to trust the gut assessment that life as I know it has just turned a corner.  There is new work to be done.  My piece of it is to cast votes in the coming election for the people whom I assess to be the best to handle the new opportunities.  And to wait for the first good historical analysis of this past and really entertaining period in American history.

Wand waves, wafts magic on me.

Hook’s sword slices air.  I’m too swift.

Ship’s net ensnares me now.

GET UP! GOOD MORNING! WAKE UP!

It has been so long since I last wrote a blog entry.  Long enough to sink into a slothful state of un-spiration.  “Un-“ what?  OK, I do not have a word that means the opposite of “inspiration.”  It certainly isn’t ex-spiration.  Maybe comatosity would fit.  Comatosity: noun, the label for the mental/emotional state of being comatose, being zombie-like. (definition from Tom’s Dictionary of Invented Words)

Rather than just continue to avoid writing, I have carefully drawn the following story out of my bag of fruitful memories.  Here it is.

I wake up the other morning with a bad case of the wishes.  You know.  I wish I had something fun lined up to do that day.  I wish I had written the blurb to invite other would-be writers to get together for coffee and discussion, the blurb that would go in our local community newsletter, the same blurb I have put off writing for the last three months.  I wish I didn’t feel depressed this morning.  The wishes.

I can sit and think about my wishes a bit more, I guess.  I have the feeling that there are a lot of sources for those wishes, sources that I just haven’t taken the time to ferret out. 

Frequently when I feel depressed or get caught up in feeling bored and wishful, I philosophize it away.  I put the feelings and thoughts into a broader context.  Like, for example, I might think that this was really the first week in many months when I was not fairly busy.  I might say to myself that I have been   teaching classes in a foreign country.  I have been travelling too much to worry about anything other than packing clean clothes for the next destination.  I could think that I have been working on a consulting project with a looming due date.  I could even use the rather far out rationalization that I have been caught up in pre-presidential campaign nuances.  And then comes the good part of philosophizing.  Finally, I can say to myself, it is really quite understandable that I would feel a bit at loose ends after all these other preoccupations.  I can say it is understandable that I would feel a bit down.  Ergo, it is understandable that I would wish for something more stimulating to grab my attention and to divert my thoughts.

Such philosophizing stretches the feelings out enough so that they do not pinch and ouch so badly.  Still no matter where I look in that stretched out philosophized landscape, the feelings are the same and Iam still preoccupied by them.

Next part of the story.  Instead I go for a walk.  It is a chill morning here in the Chicago region.  The remnants of Hurricane Gustav that gave our parched lawn a good soaking the last two days have passed eastward.  A white egret glides in toward the pond near my pathway even though I am passing close beneath the bird’s flight path.

Maybe you have had this experience too.  The walk gave my body and mind the chance to become aware.  The walk gave me a chance to own the emotional/psychological state I was in.  It gave me the chance to see that I was fully engaged in feeling sorry for myself and wishing things were different.  And, such a moment leads to the possibility of a choice. One can choose to continue on with the current train of thoughts and emotional reactions, or one can choose to step back into a quieter space and to refocus on a different flow of experience.

I am grateful to meditation.  Over time while meditating I have come to recognize that there is a cycle in meditation.  The mental attention is focused on something – could be just observing what is passing through my mind; could be a mantra.  Then at some point my mental attention gets hijacked by a different train of thought.  But, there is that moment of awareness at which I do become consciously aware that my attention has been hijacked. That moment of awareness leads directly to the empowerment to choose where I want to focus my mental attention – the mantra and beginning a new cycle in the meditation or continuing on with the interesting train of thought that has hijacked my attention.

The story I am relating here runs in the same kind of cycle.  There is the part of my everyday life – like waking up with a case of the wishes -- in which I am really caught up in the emotional confusion and psychological consternation of trying to figure out what some new event in my life is all about.  I am hijacked by coping with life.  Fortunately, a moment of conscious awareness does occur.  I become aware that I have immersed myself completely in the nitty gritty of manipulating reality to get what I want out of the situation.  With that awareness comes the choice to step back from the grip of my emotions, step back from manipulating life to meet my desires, and the choice to become quieter and more balanced. 

There now, I have broken the long silence.  There are some electronic ink marks on the screen of your computer monitor.  Maybe we can just lie back, light up a cigarette, and ask each other, “Was it good for you?”

Bosch, Heironymous. c. 1510 

Triptych: Paradise, Judgment, and Hell.

(Me) “Lunch?”  (She) “Beans and chilies.”

(Me) “Chilies?  You mean toast, right?”

(She) “You are just playing dense!”

Pouring petrol onto oil.

My mother turns 90 years old in one month.  Don’t tell her you know this.  She has strictly forbidden any of us to celebrate such an awful thing.

Mom is someone who grew up in the Great Depression.  Like my father, she has an unassailable belief that one can only count on oneself.  It is up to each person to conduct his/her own affairs.  One should never be beholden to anyone else.  I refer to that set of values and attitudes as John Wayne stoicism. 

Mom recently broke her leg very badly.  We weren’t sure she would survive the required surgery.  She did.  We weren’t sure she would ever be able to walk again.  She needs a walker all the time now, but she gets around.  We weren’t sure she would be able to go back to her assisted living apartment and be on her own again.  Although she has had a month of round-the-clock care givers, she can manage on her own and is doing so now.

Still like every other human being I know, mom has her inconsistencies.  She is emotionally quite vulnerable, and she really doesn’t like to be the center of attention.  That’s why you shouldn’t let on that you know she will be 90 or that the whole family will celebrate her birthday whether she likes it or not.

Here is a vignette of my mother.  My sister, my mother and I were talking over whether mom was ready to let go of the care givers and be on her own with the normal amount of assistance furnished by the assisted living facility.  She could only think of one problem, getting the storm door to her apartment open to go out for a cigarette when she wants to.  My sister suggested that she could go out the back door, out the side door to the sidewalk, come around to her porch, and smoke there.  “Oh, no!” said mom in horror.  “People would see that I was smoking!”  Mentally I was doubled over in laughter, but I think I pulled off the attempted straight face.  As if anyone at the assisted care facility who would be interested doesn’t already know that she smokes.  In point of fact, all the facility staff who do smoke already congregate on mom’s porch to smoke on their break.  Still, mom lives in the belief that one lady who eats at the same table as mom does not know mom is a secret smoker.

The other morning mom and Babs were sitting out on the porch for mom’s first cigarette.  It was before the staff came by to give her her pain, tranquilizer, and anti-depression medications.  Mom was wishing that she had not survived the broken leg.  Babs asked her if she was frightened of dying.  “Oh, yes.  I’m going to Hell.” She replied.

When Babs relayed that bit of conversation to me, I was instantly angry.  Hit someone in the face angry.  Someone in the pulpit at some time had sold my mother on the idea that Hell was the inevitable destination for those who deviated in any way from the path of righteousness.  In her mind my mother has stepped off that designated path.  Once?  How many times?  As an orphaned child?  As a young wife?  As a mother?  Did she get caught smoking by her mother-in-law?

Mom isn’t going to tell me why she will go to Hell.  She knows beyond doubt that sooner than later she will die.  She will end up in Hell.  Well intentioned people like me might try to talk her out of that conviction, but in those moments of pain in the early morning sitting out on the porch with her first cigarette, mom feels trapped.  Living is no longer pleasant nor easy.  Death leads to an eternity of suffering.

I am so angry at that guy in the pulpit. 

Scholar at her easel

opens paint pot coral pink,

paints within number nine lines.

Sun rises, briefly seen red.

I’d like to know.  Everyone I’ve ever met seems to want to as well.  But it takes a lot of work, mostly a lot of guess work, to get to know.  So there is all this uncertainty about life, about how life works, about how to know.  What to do?

Trust me.  It’s easy.  Just trust those who do know.  Of course, finding someone who knows how life, the universe and everything works is rather tricky in itself.  Still, it can save a lot of work for you.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

Luckily many of those who do know have written it down in books.  Some explained it all really well.  Or perhaps they only explained it verbally to the few hundred or few thousand who came to listen to them, but some of the listeners wrote it all down and left it recorded in books.  Some of them, like my guru, had it video and audio taped for posterity.

Politically speaking, some of them become pundits on CNN or Fox News or in newspapers.  Some of them on TV are so well known they only need to go by their first names – like Oprah or Dr. Phil.  Or Rush. 

Knowing how it works is a necessity that cannot be avoided.  Aye, there’s the rub.  One either has to figure it out for oneself, or one has to take someone else’s word for how it works.  Neither alternative is without its faults.  If one truly does try to figure it all out on one’s own, then one does literally have to invent the wheel.  If one accepts someone else’s word, then one finds oneself in blind faith obeying a set of operating procedures.  Turn crank A, depress the valve, and press button B in that order.  Remember always, thou shalt eat no pork in months that end with the letter “R”.

And where is the joy in that?  Where is the moment of watching the sun set and just enjoying the shifting of color and light.  Where is the fun of making up a shared story with your four year old grand daughter or inventing new rules while playing a game of crazy eights?

This business of inventing the wheel again or blindly following someone else’s prescription for the good life gets to be a heavy and numbing necessity.  It lacks spontaneity.  It lacks fun.  It lacks quickness.

It lacks the confidence that life is enjoyable.  Wanting to know – when it becomes an obsession – is the very root of the problem.  If I want to know so badly, then I buy into the idea that there is a correct or perfect way to exist in life.  I buy into the assumption that a particular way of getting up in the morning, of eating or avoiding certain kinds of food, of living by certain values is somehow going to shape my life so that I do not waste it.

This is interesting.  There is a moth trying to get through the glass window in the door.  It probably flew in last night when we were all coming in from watching the 4^th of July fireworks.  This morning it is trying valiantly to get outside.  It is getting rather worn out from all the effort of bumping up against the clear glass window.  I wonder if I can gently open the door and get it back into its more usual surroundings.

OK, I’m back.  I used a piece of note paper, the one on which I had made some notes for this blog entry, and the moth – probably panic stricken at sight of such an enormous white expanse moving toward it – summoned up the energy needed to flutter back outside.  I hope it can get some rest in the morning sunlight and go find a good breakfast.

The comfort of home.

Joy of conjoined love.

Interdependence.

Time to hit the road.

The memory of water.  I have been fascinated by this phrase for the last several days.

The phrase has nothing doing with me remembering water.  It has to do with water as the repository of memories.  The concept is a bit of a Zen koan for me at the moment.  You know?  Like the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  What is the memory of water?

Like any koan worth its salt, the question is totally non-rational.  One can not puzzle it through logically to some sort of A=B; B=C; therefore A=C conclusion.  Koan “answers” are more like my mother’s answer to the question, “What is love?”  “You’ll know it when it happens, Sweetheart.”  So I am sitting in open affirmation waiting for the memory of water to appear to me.  I am standing in open affirmation.  I am walking, teaching my Spoken English classes, going out for going-away suppers with friends and students, drinking coffee in the morning, trudging up to class, stopping by the garden pond to watch the gold fish, conferring with foreign teachers, having lunch in the canteen on campus, giving final exams – doing all the everyday stuff in open affirmation waiting for the memory of water to surface.

I have been reading an interesting book by Lynn McTaggart called The Field.  She writes about a number of different areas of science which all seem to point toward a human mind’s ability to perceive and to influence what she refers to as the Zero Point Field, a subatomic sea of quantum level energy forces.  I haven’t finished the book so I haven’t read the magic formula yet by which we can all create in the physical universe exactly what we see in our mental universes.  But I digress into cynicism, doubt, and ambiguity.

I think one of the reasons I am enjoying the book so much is that it successfully (at least for me) combines the vocabulary of scientific investigation and a science-based conceptualization of the nature of the universe with tantalizing hints at a different way to describe the spiritual or mystical side of existence.  Those have always been fascinating facets of life to me.

My guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi, used to talk some of his higher level meditation experiences.  Sometimes he let slip that he saw us as balls of light, a comment that I found interesting as it was such a conundrum – the English version of a koan.  With Gururaj one always had to wonder if he was speaking in metaphors or literally.  Since I was born very near the state of Missouri and firmly believed that such airy-fairy comments should have a provable scientific basis, I found such comments by my very own guru hard to dismiss and hard to accept at face value.  Still he was a “guru”, and in those days of my awe-struck innocence, that meant that he was able to see or had already seen things that I was too earth bound to perceive.

On the other hand, I did once have a very interesting meditation experience.  Coming back up a level of conscious awareness, I had the very peculiar experience of being an electron in an atom.  I don’t mean that it was a metaphor.  It “felt” very real.  I remember a clear knowledge that I could easily slip back into a state of energy.  But, I was really enjoying the experience of having form, of having stability instead of flux for the time being.  I felt perfectly balanced and stabile in form because of my proximity to the nucleus of the atom.  We perfectly balanced each other and that balance allowed me to retain form for as long as I wanted to.  Becoming more conscious during my meditation, I began to think and process this very strange “experience” of being an electron.  For all the world it reminded me of sitting comfortably in front of a warm fire in the fireplace on a cold winter’s evening.

After a while contemplating the feel of being an electron and slowly becoming ever more consciously aware that I was in meditation, the Missouri side of my life reasserted itself.  I began to file the curious experience away in an appropriate mental box, Meditation Experiences Interpreted by the Subconscious in Dream-Like Images so as to Make Them Understandable to the Poor Boob Conscious Mind Inhabiting the Body of Thomas.  It’s a big box full of unexplained – maybe not necessary of explanation – kinds of spiritual and mystical experiences.

Still….  It felt very real at the time.

So about the memory of water.  Patience.  That’s the action in resolving the koan today.  I’ll know it when it happens.

I know that the last time I wrote in this blog, I wrote about taking a writing break until summer.  Still, the mind changes.

Sunlit at midnight my plane lifts.

Journey of 8000 miles

slides beneath stepless feet.

Short sojourn turning homeward.

I reset my watch sitting in the plane at OHare Airport.  It was 12:30 PM in Chicago, but I set the watch to 1:30 AM the next day.  That was the time in China at the moment.  It is the time my body clock needs to readjust to.

In just three weeks I will be doing the reverse; setting my watch to Chicago time while sitting in the plane in Shanghai.  And my body clock will again groan loudly as it begins the next time/space shift.

 On the plane coming back to Chongqing, I again was reminded of those Taoist dragons that have become the root metaphor for my life this semester in China.  I find the Chinese dragon to be an excellent descriptor for the powerful, erratic, and unpredictable flow of life.

As I sat on the plane and thought more about the dragon-as-symbol, I began to experience the presence of the dragon.  Letting my reverie unfold I could imagine myself in a dark, foggy space.  I could hear the slow breathing of something near me.  Could feel the occasional touch of something dry and scaly brushing a leg or my back.  Could sense the rise within my body of the fight or flight emotions.

It was a great chance to get in touch with what I conceive of as my gut-mind, my emotional mind.  That mind sometimes communicates with me through dream-like images, and when I puzzle through those images I find they are good, visual metaphors for the situation I am in.  For example, returning to Chongqing.

Chongqing is not in the zone of earthquake devastation centered in the Sichuan Province, but it is near enough to experience many of the powerful aftershocks.  Returning to Chongqing is quite a bit like walking into the misty lair of a powerful dragon.  One cannot be completely confident in the hand-made concrete and steel buildings of Chongqing that a powerful aftershock would not bring the whole edifice down.

It is also impressive to me how well my gut-mind could animate the metaphorical image.  It is a lifelike experience of walking cautiously through a dark space inhabited by a powerful, wild animal.  Great fun! 

I am reminded of my old guru’s description of riding the waves of life like a surf boarder, not just enduring the vicissitudes of life but really enjoying the ride.

Beyond Mao’s peasantry

three ladies, hands laced behind backs,

gray hair tied back in a bun,

stand dappled in spring sunshine.

I woke up Tuesday morning with stage fright.  I had been expecting it.  We’re talking self fulfilling prophecy here.  So I made myself a strong cup of coffee, dug out the lesson plans for my Tuesday morning classes, and made sure that I had the right materials and handouts packed.

“The journey of a thousand li (miles, kilometers) begins beneath one’s feet.”  Lao Tzu.  We took a bus down into the primary shopping area in Chongqing this past Saturday.  We wanted to see how much had changed in the 19 months since we had last paid homage.  One of our favorite stops was/is the Xinhua Bookstore, sort of the Barnes & Nobles of China.  Floor 4 always has the foreign language section.  A great hidden resource in that section is the shelf of Chinese classics in English translation.  A new one caught my eye, The Book of Tao and Teh translated by Gu Zhengkun.  How fortunate that the translation benefits from the discovery of several bamboo slips on which a very early version of the verses making up the Book were transcribed.  These are the Guodian Chu slips. One might compare this find to the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Thus, in addition to getting a highly readable, English version of the book, one gets the latest edition.  If nothing else, I have corrected one of my favorite phrases, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with but one step.”

I should probably have been reading Gu’s translation rather than an essay on stage fright Monday evening.  Sometimes avoidance is the wiser policy.  But, despite some futile, subtle warnings floating through the back of mind Monday night while I read before I fell asleep, I was determined to read the last of the essay, Petrified, and with that to finish the book of American Essays.  The author, John Lahr, did too good a job in evoking the gut tightening feeling that sweeps over the body and drives rational thought off to the wings.  It brought back a ferocious memory.

I remembered a time when I was a young high school teacher teaching a summer school class in Western Civilization, a course required for graduation in my high school district.  Any teachers among you can imagine the strange mix of students one has in a summer school class.  Students from the honors track of classes who are too busy during the regular school year to fit in the required Western Civ. class because they need the foreign language and the band class.  Or they are the students who have taken the class before and failed it; sometimes failed it several times.  The disparity between the two is stunning.  You have eight weeks to cover a book of thirty-two chapters; four 55-minute periods each day.

In my second summer teaching the class I had covered almost all of the material I had prepared for the first day, and I still had a whole hour to go.  I remember sitting at my desk while I had the students writing one of the exercise question sets.  The desk was an old metal army surplus desk that the school district had picked up on sale some time in the 1950’s.  I remember looking out the window to my right and seeing my car sitting in the parking lot.  It struck me that I could escape if I just got up, took my briefcase, got in the car and took off.  That thought escalated in seconds to an overwhelming crescendo of fear my hands gripping the desk like steel claws.  I was simply panic stricken at the full hour left on that first day and the dearth of teaching/learning activities left to fill that endless time.

I think one of the things that I like about Taoism is the sense of a flowing, shifting unpredictability as one condition of life.  There is a wonderful Chinese hand scroll titled The Nine Dragons.  As one unrolls the scroll one is confronted with roiling clouds through which the nine dragons twine and swim out toward the viewer.  As I have been reading Gu’s introduction to the Book of Tao and Teh, I have often thought of the photos of the Nine Dragons I’ve seen.  The Tao that can not be described in words is reminiscent of the glimpses of dragon bodies, flexed claws, and spiky spines in the painting.

I was saved by the bell – as I remember now.  The bell for the five-minute break between the last two hours sounded.  The students filed out to use the washroom and talk with their friends.  I grabbed a last cup of stale coffee, took several deep breaths, and let the emotional overload subside.  When it came time that my materials were finished – indeed rather quickly – in the last hour, I asked the students how many of them subscribed to the belief that the pyramids were created by aliens from UFO’s.  Two-thirds raised their hands.  That led to an interesting discussion.

That was thirty years ago.  This Tuesday morning turned out to have its surprises but no stage fright.  Roll up the scroll, and put away the dragons.  Look at the feet.  Take a step forward.

Lion pillar guards no gate –

sentinal of the Great Leap.

Sapplings delicately screen

passers by from its power.

Walking to class this morning I saw an older Chinese gentleman jogging lightly ahead of me.  Ahead of him was his dog.  I watched the dog.  The dog owner moved to the street curb and out into the street.  With a quick glance, the dog also started across the street.  No words were spoken.  Several cars were coming up the grade at a good speed.  The old gentleman called his dog and brought him to heel out of the on-coming traffic.  As soon as the cars passed, the man and his dog continued on to the other side of the street and were soon weaving their way up the block.  I watched the dog keep in contact with the man.  No matter where the dog was, he frequently paused and checked what the old man was doing.  He took his cue from the man and stayed loosely on track with the old gentleman.

I was watching the dog because I recently read an excellent essay, What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell.  It’s about a “dog whisperer.”  For those of you like me who never thought to whisper in a dog’s ear, a dog whisperer is a man who understands dog psychology so well that he is able to work with the most aggressive animals so that they do not have to be killed.  He is also able to help dog owners gentle alpha male/female dogs so that they can regain control of their dogs.

Gladwell tells of some interesting research studies done on animals.  Turns out that dogs actually do better than chimpanzees at solving some decision making experiments.  It is obviously not the size of the brain nor how smart the dogs are compared to the chimps.  It seems that dogs being pack animals have learned to read humans extremely well.  The dogs check to see where the researcher is looking during the experiment and go try where the researcher is looking.  Chimps try to puzzle the problem out on their own.  So we could say that the chimps are more “lone wolf” types than the dogs.  [Audience feedback: “Groan.”]

Keeping that in mind, I have been using the dogs’ well proven path to getting along in China.  I pause frequently.  I check to see what the Chinese folks around me are doing.  I try to do the same.

This is a very interesting experience for me.  One of my longest held character traits is the strong desire – an almost chimp-like, lone-wolf bent of my nature – to reinvent the wheel every day.  I have probably never used anyone’s lesson plan for a class just the way I found it.  I never even use my own lesson plans the second time around in just the same way.  The lesson plan I teach to my Thursday morning class is not exactly the same one I taught to the Monday morning class.  I think that is not a bad character trait.  It has kept me actively engaged in life.  It has made me fairly creative in many problem-solving moments in my life. 

On the other hand it has led to wasting a lot of time on elaborate plans that when put into practice were just too complex to be useful.  It has led me not to confer well with key players.  Babs would be glad to give many instances to bolster that confession.

So yesterday we had a delightful lunch with two young couples at a duck soup restaurant.  Both couples are recent graduates from our university and former students of our Spoken English class.  I do not know much about Chinese restaurant etiquette, especially not about how one eats a roast duck swimming in a hearty broth in a large bowl in the middle of the table.  Remembering the good common sense of the dogs, I frequently checked to see what the two young women did in eating the soup.  If they took bone and meat from the duck carcass into their mouth and later spit out the bones, I did too.  If they dipped every bite in a spicy Chongqing sauce, I did too.  And when they slowed down and began eating less and less, I did too.

I had a great time.  I found that I wasn’t too concerned about whether my eating was too strange by Chinese standards.  Instead I enjoyed the conversation and catching up on what our former students were doing now.  As we got back to our apartment, Babs commented she had never seen me so relaxed with those two couples before.

A blue thread rides my slipper.

It’s lost from home, and, dark blue

on light blue cloth, seems happy.

Now I know right foot from left.

I had an email conversation with a young man.  We are worlds apart as the moment would have it.  He wrote lyrically of the deep peace and silence he experienced in his meditations.  I wrote about being absorbed in the mundane bits of life.  He wrote about walking in the deep forest.  I wrote about traveling in a foreign country where people speak a language I don’t.

We are worlds apart as the moment would have it.

Mine is a kind of walking meditation I am doing.  Maybe one could say it’s a tantric sort of practice.

I remember reading a book by Chogyam Trungpa called Crazy Wisdom.  It’s about the philosophy of tantric Buddhism.  There are comparable schools in yoga and other Indian schools of spirituality.  I think of it as the spiritual version of reverse psychology; what’s supposed to be bad for you can be good if handled properly.  So drinking alcohol, normally against the religious code for most serious monks, becomes a tool in tantrism.  Sex works too.  Lightning flung by wrathful and vengeful Gods does not strike the devout monk who skillfully and appropriately partakes in these otherwise flagrant sins.   Maybe we should say it’s like the old Viking maxim: “If it doesn’t kill you outright, then it will only make you stronger.”

I bring up Crazy Wisdom and the lyrical young meditator because I am in China these days.  Teaching Spoken English for this semester.  So peace and tranquil meditations have taken a backseat to surviving and getting my classes started.  Mind you, having said that, Babs and I both sat down for a quiet meditation this afternoon.

My point here is not that one kind of meditation practice – sitting quietly in meditation or some reverse psychology, tantric version of meditation – is the best or better one.  Any form of meditation can be done skillfully and appropriately; any form can be performed so badly that little comes of the meditation practice.

Maybe one could say I am reminding myself that it is the deliberate attention placed on the action that creates a meditation practice.  By that I mean one can cope with living in a foreign culture.  If one does so with a meditational mindset, then one can benefit from it as much as the person who sits lyrically tranquil in the deep forest, eyes closed, attention focused mindfully on a mantra or on the breath.

This isn’t a new concept.  Trungpa got a whole book out of the concept.  It can be seen as a form of Zen walking meditation, e.g. having the same mind while in action that one has while in inaction.

One of my classes this semester is at a satellite campus about one kilometer away from the main campus.  I teach an 8 AM class on the main campus, and I am supposed to catch a shuttle bus over to the new campus for my 10:10 class.  I went to the square in the main campus where I had been told the bus would stop to pick up faculty.  I stood in the rain near a group of faculty who seemed to be waiting for the bus.  Wrong.  They were just good friends who had stopped to talk to each other before wending their way to their next class.  I found myself standing alone just as the bell for the next class chimed out over the campus.  Nothing for it but to walk the kilometer to the new campus and find the right classroom.  I had lots of adrenalin coursing through my blood as I tramped over to the new campus.  I had lots of worry about finding the right classroom in a building where I could not expect anyone to speak any English.  And at the same time there was a certain humorous quality to the moment.  Sort of like the fun one gets of seeing how many balls one can juggle in the air at one time – and adding one more.

As I arrived in class – amazingly a classroom with students still waiting patiently – and introduced myself, my cell phone rang.  It was the Bert, from the foreign teacher office wondering where I was.  “In the right classroom beginning my class.” I said.  He seemed happy and relieved.  I went on with the class. 

I admit, however, that I saw the crazy part of the situation first – long before I was able to see the crazy wisdom part.

Slather on butter.  Nibble.

Semi-sweet orange and

walnuts on the tongue.  Smile.

Boy again even today.

I ate the last piece of my mother’s orange bread this week.  The last piece forever.  Mom doesn’t bake any more, and while my sister has taken up the baking of orange bread, it is not the same.  This last loaf of mom’s bread came from her freezer when we got her house ready for sale.  Over the last many months Babs and I had savored the last few slices.

Orange bread isn’t just the taste for me.  It also comes with stories.  After I had graduated from college, my wife asked me to get mom’s orange bread recipe.  When I asked, mom handed me a note card from her recipe file.  I dutifully copied both of the sides with the ingredients and preparation directions, and came to a small “etc.” squeezed into the last corner on side two.  I asked mom what else the etc. included.  It turned out to be another two pages of preparation and baking instructions.  So much like my life these days.

I woke up from a bad night’s sleep this morning.  I had awakened at the end of every dream during the night, every time I rolled over on my back or my side.  My last dream was the first few minutes on the first day of teaching a new high school class.  The dream was filled with student disrespect and the need – that is to say, my professional teacherly assessment of the need – to establish a proper classroom discipline atmosphere.  When I roused out of sleep after that dream I looked at the clock and realized further sleep was out of the question.

So I can say that I have begun the trip to China.  The body and the conscious mind do not board the plane at OHare until Tuesday morning, but the subconscious mind and the emotions have already begun the adventure.  Thankfully a cup of coffee and a quick look at the newspaper online allowed me to get things back to normal.

As I recount the night and dreams here, I can detect a quiet chuckle from the spiritual corner.  There is a lot about all these anxious preparations, these consciously written task lists, these increasingly minor details that is amusing.  I am glad that part of me does still pause and chuckle while so much is going on at other levels within myself.

Gururaj used to sum up this kind of experience in a wonderful little yogic aphorism:  “Action in inaction, and inaction in action.”  But since we are on our way to China, I should point to the little white and black dots in the yin-yang circle.  Same thing.  In the midst of the hubbub there is always the possibility of tranquility, and in the midst of boredom there is always the possibility of lively gestation.

So back to that last piece of orange bread.  I stole it.  I got down to the refrigerator before Babs knew where I was.  I unwrapped the slice.  I slathered on the butter because as a kid growing up in middle Illinois you always slathered butter on high cholesterol foods.  I savored each bite while remembering the kitchen in which as a kid I used to eat mom’s orange bread before going off to school.  So much for my life in those days. 

The last nibble.  The last crumbs eaten.  The last ever.  Amazing.

Fog afield Beebelbrox

opens his eyes.  Reality

catalyzes from probability.

White mice scurry other where.

So this thing about a good habit becoming a bad habit, how does that work? Ah, Snipperwhapper, it’s the old story of attachment.  You know.  "Familiarity breeds contempt."

A long time ago I received a mantra to use while meditating.  That’s a good thing.  Over the course of time I found myself using it not just while sitting in meditation.  Hey, I remember reading Ram Dass, who wrote about using his mantra while driving his car.  I thought that was a bit scary, but it was Ram Dass after all.  He was an advanced being as far as I was concerned and could set his own rules I figured. 

Anyway, I did find my little mantra was pretty handy in those odd moments in life when I was waiting for the next thing to happen.  That’s a good thing.  I found the mantra was handy when I was standing in line waiting for my turn.  That wasn’t so pleasant, but using the mantra was a good thing I decided.  I found the mantra began to come spontaneously when I was experiencing moments of minor stress.  That was a good thing.

Then one day when I was on my way to a new high school to give some classroom presentations and I was late and I was not sure if I had picked the right road to get to the school and I was focused on figuring out if I would make it on time, it happened.  I wasn’t aware of feeling stressed.  I mean if you had asked me and I had turned my attention away from looking for familiar landmarks along the road, I might have owned up to a mild feeling of stress.  Maybe sublimated panic.  Maybe even hysteria.  But, you weren’t there, and you didn’t break my concentration on the drive by asking me that question.

Nope, I myself noticed my little mantra screaming for attention.  It was so engaged in trying to get me calmed down that it made me even more anxious.  That was not a good thing.  I said to myself, hands gripping the steering wheel, “It must mean something significant.  It must be significant if some part of my subconscious mind has recognized that I am in need of calming and has turned on the faithful little mantra.  Has just gone ahead without any CONSCIOUS request on my part.  Has just taken the NECESSARY step of revving up the ultra-calming, LITTLE GIANT MANTRA due to my ANXIETY level.  THEN it must mean that I am truly stressed out.  It must mean that I am near the state of irrational PANIC!”  Now that was a really, really not good thing! 

It wasn’t too long after that initial experience that I noticed my subconscious was using the Little Giant Mantra Calming Elixir quite often.  I began to notice that my subconscious was a pretty fidgety, pretty nervous character.  He, my subconscious, was becoming obsessed with whispering that calming mantra while I was trying to get serious and meaningful work done.  He was, in fact, using it so often, I got worried.  I – the conscious, wide awake, rational person – began  to wonder if maybe I was living a much crazier life at some subconscious level of my mind than it seemed to my conscious mind so busy dealing with stuff out there in the real world.  If it weren’t so crazy, I wondered, then why was my subconscious trying to get me to slug down another round of Mantra Calming Elixir.  Overriding love of the Little Giant Mantra Calming Elixir is a bad thing.

Eventually and to this day, I have had to be cautious in using that little mantra.  Now when I notice it running in the background beneath my interactions and trysts with Mother Life, I do pause long enough to do a sort of quick internal scan.  I check to see if my fidgety friend, the subconscious, is on to something I should be paying more attention to or if he is just over reacting again.

I’m not sure I can say that I’m truly a recovered Little Giant Mantra Calming Elixir addict.  But, I can say that I do not become frantic when I become aware that the mantra is singing its siren song somewhere off in the distant rocks.  I see it like the proverbial canary in the coal mine.  As long as the little mantra is warbling, then some degree of anxiety must be going on somewhere in my mind.  But, it isn’t cause to go to red alert and raise the shields against attack.

I simply apply the counter-mantra, the admonition stamped on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.  “Don’t panic!”