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Stephen Pickering

Category: Philosophy

  • How to Meditate – Post #3

    “Yoga [meditation] is the (intentional) stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff.” – Yogasutras 1.2

    “Throw open the gates, put self aside, bide in silence, and the radiance of the spirit shall come in and make its home.” – Kuan Tzu, P’ien 36

    “When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,
    When you relax your [qi ?] vital breath and expand it,
    When your body is calm and unmoving:
    And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances.
    You will see profit and not be enticed by it,
    You will see harm and not be frightened by it.
    Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,
    In solitude you delight in your own person.
    This is called “revolving the vital breath”:
    Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.” Kuan Tzu (24, tr. Roth 1999:92)

    To me it feels like every thought we have is blocking out our true nature. It’s also blocking out what would be a true life experience: both because the inner self can’t get out, and the outer life is blocked from showing forth its true nature and transcendence. “The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, yet men do not see it.” Thus every thought we have is distracting us from the ‘real show’ or ‘real adventure’ of our lives, which is our destiny. It’s like the Polynesian saying, “We spend our time fishing for minnows, all the while standing on a whale.” The “minnows” are thoughts, distractions, making us ignorant of the “whale” of our true nature, our true destiny, which is something much bigger than we ever imagined, and much more interesting than the sideshow of the mind trying to catch “little minnows.”

    The sublimity of our essence is trying to make itself known both from within and from without. Thoughts are blocking that “knowingness.”  This is the reason for the practice of yoga, or what we call meditation. To re “yoke” this awareness which would initiate a marriage of the eternal with the imminent.

    “There’s something that wants to make itself known, a presence.”

    “No one has yet lifted my veil.”

  • How to Meditate 1

    My own insight happened while I was meditating last week: It was the insight that you’re not trying to get rid of your thoughts, or stop thinking, but rather stop the attachment to the thought. Don’t let it move you emotionally. That way the thought can come and go without you emotionally reacting to it. Think of the mythology of the Buddha: His victory came not from directly getting rid of thoughts, but by not being moved by them. Remember the story? First he was tempted by desire in the form of Lord Kama’s (a metaphor for Ego, Super-Ego, or even thought itself) beautiful, naked daughters (I believe there were three, which is an important mythological number) and he didn’t allow himself to be moved. So then, Lord Kama tried to use fear: He sent armies and weapons hurling at him. Again, the Buddha wasn’t moved, so the arrows dissolved into flowers.

    Ah, but I almost forgot, there were three temptations, right? What was the third? It was the temptation of “Dharma” or in our lingo, what you should be doing out in the world. You might call it a “Political” temptation or a “Career” temptation. In the Buddha’s case, he was a King’s son. So, the temptation was political. The Lord Kama said, in effect, “What are you doing just sitting here? Can’t you see the world’s going to hell in a hand basket? You’re a prince. You should be leading your people!”

    And still the Buddha did not allow himself to be moved. And that’s the moment he attained complete victory.

    I just bought a book on Kindle called “Why Meditate?” and while I’ve just read the first 10 or so pages, he already confirmed my first insight: That you’re not trying to stop or get rid of your thoughts. At least not directly. Anymore than the Buddha tried to directly get rid of The Lord Kama. Instead, he wasn’t moved emotionally by the temptations of desire, fear, or duty. And that’s a good metaphor for what you’re trying to do in meditation: as the thoughts arise, you don’t try to fight them, but instead, lose your emotional attachment to them. Practice not letting them emotionally move you. So in that sense you really need thoughts during meditation, just like a marksman needs a target. You need them, so that you can practice not letting them control you psychologically or emotionally.

    Here’s another good example. If you go to the 2:48 mark of this video, you’ll hear Deepak address this very issue:

    “See, trying to silence a thought, is a thought. Ok? So, don’t try to silence the thought. But, you see, if you leave them alone, they start to say to themselves, ‘Nobody’s noticing me.’ Ok, so you don’t try to get out of the thought, because that is a thought by itself…The awareness of a thought is not a thought. It cannot be, right? So, just be aware of it. That’s all. Don’t try to [silence it].” – Deepak Chopra

    I might rephrase it like this: “Trying to silence a thought, is an emotion. If you leave them alone, emotionally, they’ll leave the ‘party’ on their own volition. So, don’t try to get out of the thought, because, that, in itself, is an emotion. Instead, try to lose your emotional attachment to the thought.”

    Play and practice with this idea. As the thoughts arise, practice not being emotionally moved by them.

  • On Ego: The Labyrinth Metaphor

    The labyrinth in which the hero soul has become lost. That’s the place from which we are all starting. Did the ego build this labyrinth? Or is the labyrinth a metaphor for the ego itself? Those are interesting questions, but they aren’t nearly as interesting, practically speaking, as what the Wax String of Theseus stands for. The wax string is a metaphor for the thing that got the hero, Theseus, out of the labyrinth. Some qualities strike me about it:

    • It’s very smallness, thinness, almost invisible quality represents the fact that it is something representative of the spirit, soul, the psychology. It’s easily lost, like a feeling, but if held onto can lead you out.
    • That same narrowness represents single-mindedness of purpose, and an unbending intent. It also represents a psychological commitment. So that nothing distracts from it. It’s very narrow but very long, meaning that, commitment, ironically, leads to freedom, adventure, and, in short, the way out of misery.

    Update: 03/11/15:

    I’ve been reading a lot of Grimm’s Fairy-Tales in the last few weeks. This kind of material really feeds my soul, makes me happy. But I’ve only been “allowing” myself one or two stories a day. It strikes me that when you find something that really awakens your passion, why compartmentalize or limit yourself to it for one hour a day? My sense of this and similar experiences, is that, like the Wax String, you should hold on to them, not let them go, stay with them, all day and all night, at least until they lead you “out” of the Labyrinth. That’s my sense of “The Hero’s Adventure” and more specifically the metaphorical, or one possible metaphortical meaning of this element in this particular story. 

  • On Ego, What it Is, What it Does, and How to Cure It

    “Because the conscious mind has to be in control, even though it doesn’t know anything.” – Dolores Cannon [Youtube Link]

    I’ve heard Dolores say in other interviews that the Conscious Mind is the Ego. That makes the definition pretty simple. If that is the case then the cure would seem to be spending more time with the sub/unconscious parts of our psyches, paying it more respect, i.e., meditation, having the intent to remember and write down your dreams, and respecting the images and messages coming from that deep well. – Stephen

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. This post is definitely under construction. It may be so indefinitely. The main reason is: I have a strong sense that Ego is our main problem in life. Ego has hijacked our Consciousness, and it won’t let us be happy. It doesn’t want us to be happy.

    But here’s the rub and the reason I created this post: I don’t know why, nor do I know exactly what it is, or how to get rid of it.

    The few times in my life that I’ve really meditated, and carried on a sustained practice, it does seem like that exercise had a positive effect on reducing it, much like working out at the gym burns fat.

    But somehow the Ego itself, being still in control, seems to stop me in my tracks from doing such things as meditating, anything that would threaten it’s existence. Since it has hijacked and controls the brain it accomplishes this behaviourial control by releasing negative feelings around anything it doesn’t want you to do. Anything that would help you escape from it.

    Still, I don’t know what it, Ego, is, exactly. I’m hoping that writing itself, you know how writing is a way of learning, will help me arrive at an answer. If you have any thoughts on this subject, then I would love to hear them in comments.

    It occurred to me today that we weren’t born with Ego. It feels like Society somehow injects us with “Ego” little by little, as we grow older, and we don’t notice it, much like we don’t notice our day to day aging, until one day we wake up and our consciousness has changed. The wonderous feeling we had about life as children has disentegrated.

    The myths and fairytales, in their picture language, seem to be saying, in an over arching theme that the cosmic or natural energies can’t get through to our consciousness, that they’re being blocked by something. And that if we were to remove the obstruction, those energies would automatically carry us to our destiny. It certainly feels like the Ego is that blockage. So the question becomes, how do we in our modern lives remove that blockage? Certainly the picture language of Myth and Fairy-Tales seem to have a metaphorical answer. As time goes on and things come to me, either through my meditation practice, or reading Myths and Fairytales, themselves, or people like Joseph Campbell and Deepak Chopra, among others, I’ll add to this post. This post may get really long! So what? I do think the answer to this question is the central realization of our lives: To Be or Not to Be? It seems to almost come down to this binary, “Quantum” type answer: Either you’re living your destiny or you’re not.

    Ok, since this post is just about writing down the ideas that come to me, that feel true, I’ll start with this:

    • Ego is the sense, the feeling, the belief, that you are separate from the World, the Universe, Nature, everyone and everything around you.

    That statement came out of me a few months ago, seemed to come from my “archetypal” self. It felt true when it came out, and although I’m not “feeling” it now, I do remember it, and I want to write it down, so I can refer back to it. That’s good. That’s a start. But it still doesn’t tell me what to ‘do’ about it, how to cure myself from it. Well, I’m gonna ponder this, and hopefully I’ll come back to this post with some more ideas, if not answers.

    Update: June 1, 2013.

    • “It’s a mode of existing, it’s a way of existing that sets God apart from anything else”

    I just saw this in a lecture about Infinity that the World Science Festival produced last night. It’s talking about ‘Qualitative’ infinity as opposed to ‘Quantitative’ Infinity, an idea that apparently came from Aquinas. This idea of ‘Qualitative’ Infinity as a ‘Way’ of existing produces images in my brain of Purity which strikes me as the opposite or even the ‘Antidote’ to the problem mentioned above of some kind of blockage. A “Pure” connection is unblocked. So how does it relate to this article? It almost seems in this sense that ‘God’ is anyone or anything who is existing in ‘pure being.’ Ego is a psychological ‘impurity.’ So it could be that ‘God’ is simply any ‘being’ that is existing without Ego or any other kind of impurity. That’s a fascinating concept.

    http://new.livestream.com/WorldScienceFestival/InfinityEvent/videos/20260843 – (That quote and the talk of the Theologian where I heard it starts at about the 13:22 mark of the video on the page of this link.)

  • Why Aren’t We Being Visited by Time Travelers from the Future?

    This was Stephen Hawking’s famous question and or reasoning for why time travel must not be possible: For if it were, and since Einstein’s equations say that the Future already exists, then we should be flooded with ‘tourists’ all around us from some point in the future, when surely the technology will have been developed.

    Most of the time, I feel like Movies in general, are the worst types of ‘didactic pornography,’ but you just have to appreciate how, say, a movie like ‘Loopers’ at least tries to creatively address such issues. It’s agains the law. Presumably because of the chaos it would create through an endless cybernetic feedback loop would end up giving off more energy than the Universe could handle. The energy from this feedback loop, that just kept multiplying exponentially, would rapidly become greater than the Big Bang itself and just rip Space apart as well as breaking down the laws of physics.

    Whenever I’ve thought about this question, most of the time I end up thinking the darkest of all thoughts, but one that’s all too obvious: That we destroy ourselves before we’ve developed the technology. It’s a terrible thought. God, I hope it’s not true. But look at the facts. This was a real fear in peoples’ live in the 50’s and especially the 60’s at the height of the Cold War, then even into the 70’s and when I was growing up in the 80’s.

    Then when the Cold War ended we thought a real “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” had begun, and that threat was over. Hope it is. But look out over the next thousand to 10 thousand years, which feels like about the amount of time needed for something like time travel to be invented. With so much technological power growing exponentially every year available to the individual, God, such dark thoughts almost seem inevitable, unless, hopefully, we evolve every aspect of our humanity for one, also develop the technology that would stop the ‘lone rogue’ without hampering the benefits of increasing technology for increasing the standards of living, enjoyment, and prosperity for the majority. As much as I hate thinking about this topic in this way, I’m really surprised that no one responded to Hawking with this answer.

    But anyway, moving on, having just read “The Way of Zen” and currently reading such things as “Creative Mythology” as well as “Spiritual” things by Deepak Chopra and Ram Dass, another answer occurred to me in the shower: What if the reason is more metaphysical? Such as: The Reason we haven’t been visited by tourists from the future is because we are asking the question. 

    That’s the same answer that a Buddha master gave when his student asked, “Am I a Buddha?”

    “No,” said the master, “You are not a buddha.”

    “But,” protested the student, “You said all things are ‘buddha’ things.”

    “Yes,” the master responded, “All things are Buddha things. But you are not.”

    “Why not?” implored the student.

    “Because you are asking the question.”

    Most physicists, even the cutting edge ones like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, would immediately dismiss and leave any conversation if Metaphysics were brought up. But I can’t help but feel that Quantum Theory itself, as well as many aspects of Relativity, is a “Meta” Physical Philosophy. If that’s the case, then surely a metaphysical answer to the question, and metaphysics in general, must have a place at the modern day “Philosophical” Dinner table.

     

  • The Essence of Zen

    I just got through reading Alan Watts’ “The Way of Zen” which is just awesome, by the way. I didn’t really know who he was, other than, I heard Joseph Campbell mention him a couple times, and in the back of my mind I thought, “Oh, he was just some sort of 60’s new age guy who was sort of in Joseph’s ‘Entourage’.”

    Wrong! This guy was the real deal. He was so “in it” so “grounded” that hearing him speak, which may be even better than his great books, you know you are listening to someone who was “transparent to transcendence.”

    That’s what draws you to someone who is or has really followed their bliss, is that the ground is so speaking through them, that you can just feel there’s no Ego agenda that’s going to try to fool you, no editing out of anything, even competitive forces, because it’s like the ground of being speaking ‘through’ this person. That’s a paradox in itself, and as you get more into this world, you know you’re headed in the right direction as more of these paradoxes, oxymorons, anamorphuses, start popping up, and not only do you not mind, but they have a delicious quality to them.

    Anyway, back to my main point. One thing that strikes me that may be the essence of Zen, especially when it comes to some sort of skill is that the practice isn’t what is making you better. The practice, which is of course required, is rather putting you in tune to receive the genius. The practice, the honest practice, sort of makes you worthy, like an initiation, to receive the message from the Gods. And then it becomes almost effortless, like the craft is working through you. You become a conduit for this genius. So the practice puts you “in tune” to be a conduit for manifesting the eternal.