a noisy meditation

We've often observed, in our meditation group, that there is no point in regarding extraneous sounds as intrustions, as disturbance to our peaceful meditative atmosphere. Note and be with the sounds, make them part of the present in which you are meditating, might be the advice - perhaps from an unusually self-righteous teacher! Still, good advice. Easier advice to follow with the sound of birds' feet on the roof, or a strong wind. But industrial noise levels?

Next door are having their cobbled outside area pressure-washed today, and the guys are using the noisiest compressor in the history of the world. For a moment, I thought it was an angle-grinder. Perhaps a bass one. We decided to go out in order to escape it, but first I wanted a short meditation.

 So I setled me down to meditate, thinking "wonder if this is hopeless?" It really was a loud and monotonous noise.

No problem, to my surprise. Didn't even have to work at concentrating on it or ignoring it. It was simply - there. 

Maybe regular meditation can actually make us better at accepting what is happening now, rather than wanting it to be different, wanting to move on to the next thing. If so, it worked this morning.

So I stayed with the noise. Only difficulty was, when it stopped. The sudden quiet came crashing in.

But it was, of course, nice when it stopped.

"We must admit there will be music despite everything."

Excerpts from "A Brief for the Defence" by WS Merwin

(thanks, Annee.)
 

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants....

                                                     The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
                                           From REFUSING HEAVEN (Knopf, 2005

Some things don't resonate for me - "what God wants..." when the only God I can relate to is nonhuman, so doesn't "want" - though I follow the poet into the idea of praising the Devil (as a symbol for evil in the world) if we make injustice the only measure of our attention. That's an important insight.

None of this stops us trying to do something about sorrow, slaughter and malnourished babies - but if our attention to the wrongs and evils of the world takes us over, we are in deep trouble, and those who suffer get nothing from our despair. From our delight, from our enjoyment, comes the sense of values and contrasts that enables us to take useful action in the social sphere. 

And so, of course, the poem reminds us to seek to live in the present moment and to act from it.

"We must admit there will be music despite everything."

There was music in Terezin transit camp - not, as in Auschwitz, to keep time as the slaves were marched to work, or to deceive inmates about the true nature of the place, but for its own sake. Despite everything. Despite the fact that what they were in transit to, from Terezin, meant that most of them eventually died. But before then - there was music.

Olivier Messaien wrote his "Quartet for the End of Time" in a prisoner-of-war camp. The quartet was premiered at the camp, on a bitterly cold night 15 January 1941, in an unheated space. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. The cello was bought with donations from camp members. Messiaen later recalled: 'Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.'

flat on my back, not really meditating, when...

 In a meditation session, our minds rest with the breath, or areas of the body, or ..whatever it is we are using to centre ourselves. But our minds move away into linked chains of memories, or anticipations and fantasies, or - well, if you meditate you'll know the stuff. So we are taught to bring our consciousness gently back to the breath, or whatever we're using...

It's been frequently observed  that one difficulty with discrete meditation sessions can be that we try too hard - "how can I get back to that wonderful feeling of being here and now and only here and now?" (Not that we ever can, in any real sense, "get back" to anything - time's arrow moves in only one direction.) "How can I stop my mind wandering away from the breath?" And the harder you try, the harder it gets.

And meditators can often feel self-critical because they feel they were "drifting off,"  "not concentrating," "letting my thoughts run away with themselves." The "I'm useless at meditating, must try harder " treadwheel.

 Perhaps these feelings are endemic in discrete sessions "on the cushion" (chair, stool etc) exactly because sesssions can seem special, apart, to one side of daily life. 

I should try to remember two things; it was John Peacock who first made it clear to me that having the mind wander off, and gently returning it to the present moment, is all part of meditating, it is not some shameful failure of mind! And secondly, that it's not helpful to feel that being mindful is only a product of discrete meditation sessions.

This morning, I was doing the few simple Pilates-based exercises I use each morning. These are to stop my back throwing in the towel too far in advance of the rest of me. 

 it's probably needless to say that this lissome young fellow is not me, and I was on the carpet at home, not on the grass surrounded by flowers.

Lying on my back, I finished with a big stretch, then relaxed - and with no bidding or effort felt -  It. Being entirely and only present. No effort preceeded it, no thought in particular led to it. 

Maybe it was having being bodily aware of the various quite small and focused movements needed for the Pilates, letting my mind stay with them. Maybe it was the contrast between the effort required, followed by the abrupt release of effort and muscular tension.

It didn't last long, It never does, but It'll be back, perhaps when I'm on my back, perhaps when I'm walking along the top lane, perhaps when I'm in session.

 Doesn't really do to analyse It too much, I'm just grateful for It's arrival, and will try to arrange myself, in whatever posture and location seem propitious, to encourage Its arrival.

"Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time..." 

                                  (TS Eliot, Burnt Norton)

"I still haven't found what I'm looking for," not quite...

I want to feel in touch with, part of, something so vast we might as well call it omnipotent, all powerful. It seems likely to me that all of us need this or something like it, but I don't want this is to read like a sermon or a bossy directive so I will simply write in terms of what I need.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;”
            (Wordsworth)

I take the poet to be saying that we don’t much feel part of Nature, in the sense that it is ours and we are its.

There are powerful polarising forces in our culture, and I'm not just talking about politics. For example, we tend to feels that someone who is troubled, as Wordsworth was, by the materialistic excesses of our choice-driven culture necessarily wants to turn away from the material world, maybe to live on top of a mountain in China. 

Well that's not me; our technological culture is rich in benefits for nearly all of us - let's take that as read. But I do believe too often we lay waste our powers with endless fussing about insignificant differences between one consumer good or one experience, and another. We haven't got much of a frame against which to set the glittering lure of everything the marketing industry has created to draw us towards products and experiences. 

It’s too easy to think that expressing our individual selves through choice and consumption is all we need to do for a happy life. In any case, as long as 1% of the world’s population owns - what is it Oxfam said? 80%? - of the world’s wealth, and we know that fact, how can pure materialism feel like a satisfying way to live? (We really do need to do something about that 1%, but that’s not my brief here.)

You might justifiably object that there are still very many people in the West who follow a religious teaching, and those teachings are frequently critical of materialism as an end in itself. So there are and so they do. 

Some of those teachings seem to me socially benevolent and supportive of individual calm and well-being. Others, by their self-righteous exclusion of everything they disagree with, are the reverse of calm and benevolent, as far as most of us are concerned. 

And they are occasionally socially toxic and physically dangerous; but let's not get into the wearisome argument between pro and anti-Dawkins - are religious people or atheists more likely to be wicked? Crusaders and jihadists vs Mao and Stalin. Since almost all of us are neither, let’s take something else as read: it’s what individuals do with their beliefs that ultimately matters, much more than the beliefs themselves.

It would be so much simpler to be a devout Christian or a gentle Muslim, but that may not really do for those of us who can't accept the demands of faith in supernatural beings. 

Although I think we do in the west exaggerate the importance of belief over practice, and although I can see the potentially  supportive nature of regular religious observance, this whole area of life is too important to me for any faking or wishful thinking, and that’s what I’d be doing if I started saying a "Hail Mary, Full of Grace." We can't unknow what we think we know - unless it is shaken to bits by something else.

Gradually, bit by bit, that shaking has been an uncomfortable but rewarding part of my living. It is leading me away from either total belief in a major religion, or a purely rationalist, materialist understanding of our world.

One thing remains firm and clear, for me at least: omnipotence cannot be anthropomorphic. God cannot have a human face or any human attributes. So I need to keep looking.

Someone once wrote that people who are happy with a religious faith and regular observance can expect a calmer and happier time of it than those who are working things out for themselves in what is called "A spiritual path.” (Sorry about that clumping great modern cliche!) The path-seekers will have a lonely, restless time of it.

So be it.

The Meaning of Christmas?

One answer would be that it means whatever we want it to mean, but that's a little too easy, for something so powerful, even when it is not acknowledged to be so.

For a declining but still substantial number of us, it is simply the story of the start of the Incarnation, Word made Flesh. The story, to be found in Matthew and Luke, is literally true, for such people. (Mark and John don't mention it.) Angels from the realms of glory, a virgin birth, shepherds and Herod, the whole thing. It happened, just as the Battle of Actium or the Act of Union happened.

At the other end of the scale, there's the entirely commercial and secular view; a chance to  buy and sell, to eat and drink stuff we don't usually eat and drink, and to get presents (OK, to give them, too.) 

My feeling is that a lot of us are in the middle. It's a tremendously powerful myth, a midwinter (almost) celebration that brings family and friends together. But there's more. There is something strong and special about this - the serenity, the idea of light and hope at the darkest time of the year. "In The Bleak Midwinter..."

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPpy3XSk6c0

And for many of us, these powerful feelings seem to survive horrible journeys in horrible weather,  gruesome presents from irritating relatives, and all the other usual seasonal grumbles with which people like to shield themselves from the idea of giving in to a little joy.

But one casualty of the modern Christmas, other than the New Year's Eve drunks being wiped down and sewn up in A&Es across the land, is the idea of the Twelve Days of Christmas, of Christmas as a season, not just a weekend. It vanishes into sales, measurements of how well The High Street did, trade figures and news of dreadful but relatively small-scale events here and elsewhere - events that happen all the time, but they are usually covered over by The News. Well, The News must go on being reported, even when there isn't much News, so: how about an unusually vile murder?

So: hooray for Twelfth Night, for Epiphany and the Kings. Next Christmas, let's try to keep that special feeling running until at least the day after Twelfth Night! 

In this spirit, then, Threnody will be learning "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and singing it in parts.

The paradox of the present

I've done a bit of head-scratching lately about the present, after reading a post on the  Secular Buddhist Association website. I'll pass on my confusions to you and see if they are at all useful. Which I doubt...

 For a good few years now I've done what I understand most meditators do, those who've come to it via the 8-week mindulfness course, anyway.

I let my awareness stay with my breath, or other bits of the body if I'm doing a body scan, and when my thoughts drift off into narratives, worries, memories etc, I gently bring my awareness back to the breath, or my left foot, or whatever. This I do to stay right where I am - in the present moment.

But. Does the present moment exist? I certainly don't seem to be able to stay in it for long, though after even a succession of brief visits to what I could call "presentmomentness", I feel...better? Calmer? Broader? Freer from conditioned responses, compulsive thinking.

If we imagine the present as moving forward perpetually, leaving the past behind  and not fussing about the future until the present reaches the future and turns into it, as it were, then what is it, this present moment? How big is a moment? 

Is it like a straight line - the shortest distance between two points, we remember from school, not the mark you make with a ruler and a pencil on paper - simply, the thing itself, the conceptual entity. 

.                                              . 

The shortest distance between those two full stops is a straight line. How wide is it? It doesn't have width.  It need have no dimension, thickness, physical presence itself.

Like the present, it's entirely a concept. A pencil mark simply represent it.

 (are they doing what they think they're doing? Where and when are they?)

Next: the neuroscientists tell us that we are always about 1/10th of a second behind the actual occurence of any event, due to the time our senses take, however keen they are, to process the information and respond to it. The fastest sprinter in the world (Mr. Bolt himself) cannot be less than 1/10th of a second off the blocks when he hears the gun. (False starts excepted, of course!)

 Does this insubantiality of the present moment matter? Well, it might, to meditators. 

One trap for meditators is striving to stay in the present, berating ourselves for drifting off, feeling we've had an unsatisfactory meditation. No matter how often we may be told that drifting off and coming back to the breath (or body scan, whatever) is part of meditating, it's hard not to evaluate a meditation as you go along, or afterwards. Hard not to grumble at yourself for not staying in the present.

Which is an impossibility.

But if the present doesn't exist, in other than an unreachable, theoretical sense, then where do I live?

Not in the past, clearly, however nostalgic I may be, because the memory reconstructs and changes the past, and that can only happen in the present. 

Nor in the future, obviously, because whatever plans or fantasies that may be runing through my mind, they are not happening at the moment, and they or may not happen in the future.

So where do I live? The present is only a theoretical point in time, the past and the present no longer exist or don't yet exist.

Where I live isn't a fixed point in time that is succeeded by the next fixed point in time - the present like frames of an old-fashioned film, a succession of fixed points in the movie of my perceptions -  is it 8mm, 16mm, 32mm? The present has no dimensions. 

Where I live, what I am, is continuous, a collection of processes, part of the collection of processes we call this planet, this universe.

I'm not a fixed point. I don't exist at all. I am a socially neccessary construct. But in the freedom that comes from meditation/cultivation, I more and more understand this.

I am flow, change, processes, nothing else.

As freedom often is, that realisation - I don't exist - is pretty frightening, until  that fear, that striving, is simply let go of.

 Let go. That's an invitation, not an imperative. We can't nag ourselves or each other into liberations.

getting old(er..)

Adjusted to fit UK contexts, here is a poem from David Rynick, a wise and compassionate man:

  65^th birthday manifesto, by David Rynick

NHS, Atorvastatin,
baby aspirin please.
Don’t forget: zipper up,
phone, wallet, keys.

Sixty-five, still alive;
running now on fumes.
Yet to come, worrisome;
the piper plays the tune.

Still I’ll dance with tattered pants,
shameless far and near.
Too old to care when others stare,
I’ll find new freedom here.

 More of David on: http://davidrynick.com/blog/

and in his wonderful book "This Truth Never Fails."

I wish him plenty of fumes. Maybe growing old has new freedoms in it, as well as deteriorations. Yeats wrote:

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress

Interpret and relate to "soul" as you wish.  Let's sing and dance onwards.