Trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a pint beer mug.  You can only take it one mug at a time. – Alan Watts

I got turned on to Alan Watts just yesterday, if you can believe that.  Mike left a comment on the post yesterday and I followed the trail to his latest post where I listened to Alan Watts.  What a cool guy!  Anyway, this quote came from one of the links I listened to whilst perusing.  He was saying that thoughts occur one at a time, and I think what he was getting at was the same damned thing all the nondual folks are always trying to shove down my throat, which is that I’ll never understand it with the mind.  The mind can’t get it!  Alan Watts died in 1973.  See, even dead people piss me off!

Mike also left a link to a quote, which I’ll just go ahead an replicate so’s ya don’t have to keep flippin’ around the damned web.

Even the intellectual understanding of the inexistence of our ’selves’ is a rare and bitter attainment which few even attempt. And that is only the elimination round which qualifies us for access to Reality… Intellectual understanding should be not indispensable to a ’simple’ mind, but, with our conditioning, it would seem to be an almost inevitable preliminary. - Why Lazurus Laughed by Wei Wu Wei

Apparently, according to Wei Wu Wei (another fascinating character), an intellectual understanding is possible, although not likely.  I’d like to think that I have such an intellectual understanding of the “inexistence of our ’selves’”, as I’ve mulled this junk over so many, many times.  Then he says “…it would seem to be an almost inevitable preliminary.”  To what?  Preliminary to the experience of the inexistence of our ’selves’?  He says the intellectual understanding is a rare and bitter attainment.  I can understand bitter.  I think I’m there, actually.  It’s bitter not being able to find or locate your self.  But here  it is, in no particular location, always here, always watching, never moved or touched, just…. here.  What the hell is it?

What the HELL is IT!!!!!

And how is that me?  I am that blank nothing-screen that it’s all plastered on?  Like I’m some kind of dry erase board or something.  All this shit just “happens”, and I am some humongous infinite NOTHING that this Mike thingy happens in?  What about the Mike thingy?  What’s that?  Me?  Isn’t that me too?  Why hell no, hadn’t I negated that bizarre little friggin’ anomaly away already?  Mike isn’t me…. awww c’mon!  Oh, for frick’s sake already!  Sling ‘is head against the damned wall!  Hack it off with a rusted sword!  It’s just Mike… it’s nothing…. not who I really am… what the hell’s the difference?

OK, that was a bit twisted, but I felt it, so there ya go.  I’ve got to take off and find some meat thermometers for smoking a 14 lb turkey tomorrow, so I’m gonna need that damned head to see where the hell I’m driving.

I watched a fascinating BBC documentary, and I’d posted it in the comments section of yesterdays post, but I think I’ll put it here as well.  It’s long, but sure does getcha thinkin’.  You clowns have a magnificent Thanksgiving weekend, unless your not American of course, in which case have a magnificent non-Thanksgiving weekend.

There are six parts to this, so pay attention.

…The whole spirituality thing is just, like, the most pointless merry-go-round.  God! I can’t stop thinking about this!  My mind has been trying to get a handle on all this since I saw you on Saturday.  I’m only really beginning to understand it all myself and I can’t believe anyone can even think about anything else!  I keep thinking “This is it!  This is the only game in town.  The only dance there is.  What else could possibly matter?  I look at other people going about their normal lives and I want to scream!  To shake them and wake them up!  How can anyone watch a movie or go to work or eat a sandwich with this huge freakin’ thing staring them right in the face?  I mean, am I going insane?  I know I’m not, but am I?  Is this normal?  Really, you can tell me.  Am I being, like, the most total whack-job?  - Julie from Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing.

Well that about sums it up for me, how I’m feeling right now.  Talking with Randall was immensely helpful, yet very upsetting also.  I have been keeping it an internal wrestling match since going to bed early Saturday morning.  Up to this past Friday night, Randall and I have been emailing back and forth, both of us, by necessity, using way more words than would be required if we were to  just talk.  So, finally, we did just that.  I wondered how I’d start the conversation, and even thought at one point I’d write an outline of points I wanted clarification on – you know, be all organized.  Well, that’s just not me.  I hardly plan anything, just opting for the go-with-the-flow side of life.  Hell, it’s worked for 40 years, why buck it?  I decided not to sweat it and let it happen how it would.

Talking with someone who has no doubts about something, anything really, is very engaging.  Randall happens to know what the hell he’s talking about.  He never got tripped up one single time, not that I was trying.  The great thing about talking with somebody versus emailing is that all the questions and hesitations are met immediately and dealt with.  We talked for two and a half hours, and at the end I was empty.  I had no more questions.  I would see one come up in my mind, and there was the answer right on its tail.  No need to even form the first letter of the first word in my mouth.  Pointless.

It’s all centered on my belief that I am something that I am not.  To have 40 years experience as a human being, then to be told that that is not who you are is not a pill that’s easily swallowed.  The proof, however, is everywhere I look, and Randall was very adept at pointing that out to me.

Viv made a comment recently:

And it seems to me that there’s a problem with separating the animator from the animated, since it’s life that created the body in the first place – the body grew out of nothing, but it’s strange that it remains when the life that animates it ceases. It still exists – it just isn’t … animated anymore – but it still lives in a way – the cells start to break down and decompose… so there’s still energy there – it’s just an opposite kind of energy – turned in instead of out – the breathing in as opposed to the breathing out.

That sat down cross-legged in my gut, and hasn’t stood up to leave yet.  We had been talking about death; her losing her dog, and I losing my brother, and how strange it is to see a body that’s dead, and having the feeling that what was this body, what made the dog her dog, or what made James “James”, was not there.  Everything was there same as it was when something animated the flesh and bones, but now it’s all limp and starting to return back to the Earth.  That “life” is gone.  What is that life?  That singularly separate life started out with the union of a sperm and an egg inside the womb of a mother.  That life, taking what it needed from the mother to create itself and grow and move and have the hiccups.  When does this life identify itself as the body it so obviously isn’t?  And the body stops, the life is there no more.  Did that life itself stop?  If I’m not the body, then James wasn’t the body either, he just thought he was.  His suffering was too much to bear.  Now he’s rid of this burden, and I wonder if that was enlightening.  I brought up this point about how life created itself, or how maybe it was a recreation of itself.  I don’t know but Randall had been saying that I, this body, is nothing more than life experiencing itself.  I wondered if life didn’t create itself specifically for the purpose of knowing itself.  The totality of existence wouldn’t necessarily know itself other than through a life which was capable of knowing itself.

Randall was very patient with me, gently bringing me back to myself every time.  There’s always this presence that is aware of whatever it is you see.  You can’t turn that off.  You can’t deny that it exists and is always there.  That is what I am, he told me over and over and over again, not once losing patience.  He came at me from ten thousand different angles, and he knew it wasn’t sinking in, but he didn’t seem to be concerned about it.  Honestly, all he can do is point, right?  I have to see it for myself, and he has nothing to do with it.  I guess he knew it was all happening as it should have because he never forced the issue… just kept pointing it out to me.  It was annoying because I knew what he was going to say.  He’d made a statement about it being like a hammer to the head again and again when he talked with Bob.  Yeah, like that… hammer on the head.  I know it’s coming, and boy does it piss me off to hear it again.

So now I’m dealing with this constant buzz.  This craziness.  I do literally feel sometimes like I’m gonna crack up.  My head feels squeezed tight.  I can’t think straight or concentrate long enough to try to make sense of it (maybe that’s a good thing).  The suggestion of what I really am is too mind-boggling to admit, but I no longer can honestly cling to what I’ve always taken myself to be either.  The Matrix keeps coming to mind.  Sorry, but that movie has so many analogies to this crap.  After touching the source, Neo’s mind separates from his body and he finds himself in an in-between world (the train station).  He can’t leave… he’s stuck!  It’s like that right now.  The foundation of me as this body/mind has been questioned and found to be inadequate as a fundamental reality.  I am not this.  Yet at the other end of that spectrum, the fact of me being the ultimate awareness in which, and of which the entirety of the universe exists, is not very believable either.  I’m stuck like Neo.  I have no home.  It’s a very uncomfortable place to be, and it’s driving me nuts!

Quick post.  Just wanted to give you all a bit of access to that clump of grey mung that sits in darkness and ponders what is happening and where it all comes from.  Ladies and gentlemen (and all forms in between), I present, via a moment in the life of Mike, the innermost workings of a befuddled mind.

Pondering

I’ll be back…

It’s the weekend, and nobody’s reading this anyway, so here’s a fun commercial that had me rolling for a long time when it first came out.  I love the last line… “Oowaaaaaaahhh.”

This is my “junk post”.  I don’t know if it happens this way with the rest of you regular bloggers, but starting Fridays, the views, or the number of visits jumps off a cliff.  Since hardly anyone’s gonna read this… oh what the hell?  I don’t write as if I have a huge audience anyway.  As a matter of fact, up until November 26th, 2007 all my writing had been to myself in the form of journaling.

I don’t know if I still have it or not, but the first journal I ever kept was inspired by my 7th grade English teacher.  Inspired may not be the right word because it was a mandatory assignment.  Anyway, Ms. Parker (who, oddly enough, became my wife’s English teacher about 10 years later on the complete opposite side of town) made us keep a journal in those composition notebooks (which, oddly enough, are manufactured at the company I’ve worked for since July).  I don’t remember what we were to journal about, but after her class was finished I kept it up.

Journaling (notice I’m not calling it a diary – sissy stuff) was something I found to be very therapeutic.  I joined the Navy right after high school, and I was thrust into an environment where I knew nobody and the only ones who were talking weren’t really talking.  They were our drill sergeants (Navy calls them company commanders, or CC’s, but you guys wouldn’t have a clue what I meant unless you’d been in the Naval boot camp), and they were LOUD and very, very MEAN!  We had two of them.  One, a Chief, was on his way out of boot camp duty.  This was his last company.  The other, a Boatswain’s Mate 1st class, was just starting.  We were his first go-round.  Can you imagine how that went?  Simply?  The guy on the way out (Chief) was training the guy on the way in (Boats).  So Chief had to really show Boats the ropes, and we paid severely for it.  They had this thing called mashing, where, as punishment for some vile crimes such as starting a march off on the wrong foot, or looking down at your feet at attention, the CC would say, “DROP”, and we’d all hit the deck in the push-up position.  What happened next was called getting mashed.

These guys invented all sorts of cruel calisthenics with which to violently, and inhumanely painfully punish our bodies.  ”Down an inch” was one of my favorites.  In the push-up position, back straight and level with the deck, up on your toes, elbows locked so the arms are forcing your shoulders into the air, and our dog tags hanging outside our shirts, the CC would say gently, “Down an inch!”  That’s what we did… went down one inch.  About oh, I don’t know, a minute or so later came the next command, “Down an inch!”  We’d do this until our dog tags touched the ground, then laid flat on their sides.  Once that happened, the commands changed a bit; “Up and inch!”  Sounds easy, huh?  This went on forever!

Another one they liked was called “watching TV”.  Similar position to the push up, but instead of supporting your upper body with outstretched arms, you put your elbows on the tile floor and cup your head in your hands.  See why it’s called “watching TV”?  The only thing touching the ground was our toes and elbows.  Then, that little pain in the ass Boatswains’ Mate would say, “I don’t like what’s on.  Let’s change the channel.”  Whatcha think happened next?  We leaned on to one elbow, then reached our now free hand out in space in front of us and pretended to change the channels on an imaginary TV.  If Boats didn’t like the channel we selected, we had to keep changing it.  It SUCKED!

There are probably dozens more of these wicked exercises I could tell you about.  I won’t.  It was NOT fun at all, and I wondered why I didn’t just go ahead and sign up for Seal training instead.  Anyway, the point is that the Navy was sometimes isolating and very cruel.  I’d developed some fast and close friends, brothers even, during those times, but none ever as close as my real brother who was thousands of miles away.  Nobody to really talk to.  So I wrote.  Writing let me get it off my chest, so to speak, and I didn’t have to justify what I was writing, or edit it for political correctness.  I’d written some fairly harsh stuff about my experiences.  One rant in particular found its way to my boss’s boss, who decided to interrogate me about it.  The rant was about HIM too!  That was uncomfortable, and I didn’t write much after that until the divorce.

I wrote a damned book during that 3 plus year ordeal.  We had a 2-year-old daughter at the beginning of it, which made things incredibly painful for me.  ”Incredibly painful” does not even begin to describe it either.  I had nobody to talk to, and writing was unbelievably therapeutic for me.  That period of my life was really the most extended and ungodly painful – up to and since.  I did a lot of my spiritual searching during those 3 years and was able to discard a lot of my religion as a result.  So, from that perspective it was worth it.  As painful as it was, it was necessary, and it was exactly what I needed.  Sooooo glad I went through it because it’s because of that crap that I am now who I am.  I have a beautiful life now, a life that would not have happened otherwise.  I’m very thankful for the pain.

After the divorce was final I stopped writing for the most part.  I wrote in that divorce journal every once in a while, but just out of a feeling of needing to bring things up to date.  I haven’t written in it since before I met my amazing wife Kelly.  I never felt the need.

A discussion with my good friend BJ about what we were going to do after we finally got laid off led to me starting this blog on November 26th, 2007.  I’m glad I did.  I’m glad I have that good friend.  I’m glad I have this life, its ups and downs, the pain, the pleasure… all of it.  I love it!

A rational mind, based on the impressions that it receives from its limited perspective, forms structures which thereafter determine what it further will and will not accept freely.  From that point on, regardless of how the real world actually operates, this rational mind, following its self-imposed rules, tries to superimpose on the real world its own version of what must be.

This continues until at long last a beginner’s mind cries out, “This is not right.  What ‘must be’ is not happening.  I have tried and tried to discover why this is so.  I have stretched my imagination to the limit to preserve my belief in what ‘must be.’  The breaking point has come.  Now I have no choice but to admit that the ‘must’ I have believed in does not come from the real world, but from my own head.”

What kind of book do you think that came from?  Spirituality?  Buddhism?  Advaita?  Nonduality?  Close, but not quite.  I’m re-reading Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics and this is part of the opening chapter of a section titled General Nonsense, which discusses Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  But isn’t what it’s saying completely applicable to our daily experiences of reality?  Usually, life goes on as it does, no surprises, nothing out of the ordinary.  But every once in a while you get snapped out of your reality, your comfort zone, and all the rules you thought you knew and understood no longer hold water.  Doesn’t happen often, but when it does, boy does it shake you up.  Know what I mean?

It’s true.  Everything we have believed (and in some cases, like mine, continue to believe) is not based on reality.  What we believe is based on our thoughts about the interpretation of reality; a reality that we will never, ever know first-hand.  Everything we know and sense is nothing but here say.  Think about that.  You live in your mind after all, don’t you?

(Our 4 year anniversary is today.  4 years ago, around 4 o’clock pm, I pledged my love and devotion for as long as I live to my beautiful wife, Kelly. I’m as happy a man as you will ever meet in your life because of that pledge.  Everyone should be so lucky as to find a companion to share this incredible journey with, and to share in the everlasting creation of this beautiful life.)

There’s been a gentle tugging throughout my life.  Many of you that have been with me (reading da blog) for a while should already know that this tugging is there.  It never tugs more than a little, but my mind takes a hold of it, latches on to the tugging sensation, and just goes ape shit sometimes.  The tug?  Plainly put, it’s a constant pull towards a “knowing”, for lack of a better description.

I was a Christian for a very long time.  I’d heard it forever – “Let Jesus into your heart.  Just ask Him to enter your heart.  You can have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.”  I believed it, too.  I really wanted to feel God in a very powerful way.  I wanted to know God!  And, as it turned out, God came in the form of Jesus in the religion I was raised under.  Fine with me… God, Jesus, Holy Spirit; however that whole triumvirate of God was supposed to work, I figured if they’re all the same guy, then one would do just as well as the other.  Why not Jesus?  So I prayed, asked forgiveness for the sins I’d committed, then asked Him to come into my heart.  I felt much better afterward, like my whole outlook on life had changed.  I was a child of God.

After a while it started waning.  I loved going to Church because that’s where all my friends were.  Girlfriends, too!  We were there practically every time the doors opened, and it was cool with me.  We sang, had a Boy Scout troop, did the youth camp thing, which was wonderful, and just had a great time.  At some point, though, the tugging started.  The relationships and fun and games at Church were not enough.  There was some kind of a void that needed to be filled.  I knew what it was… God!  I wanted to know God.  Like shake-his-hand-and-have-a-long-conversation-with-Him knowing.  It never happened, and it became frustrating.  These preachers would say things in Church like, “God said to me…”, or “I was walking, when I heard the voice of God.”  That was cool!  That’s what I wanted.  If God talks to these guys, I figured I could get some of that too.  It wasn’t happening though.  I decided to talk to some of these preachers about it, and all I ever got out of those conversations was that it wasn’t a literal conversation, but that “still, small voice inside your head.”  Oh, I’d been fed a line of bologna (say baloney).

So what did I do?  Ignore them!  OK, so maybe God doesn’t really talk to them, but He’s out there somewhere.  Maybe I won’t be able to talk to Him either, but surely I can experience Him.  That’s been the pull ever since.  The desire to experience God.  Now, admittedly, my views about God have changed drastically, to say the least, since the early days, but the essence of what I’m going for is still there.  Call it God, the Truth, Ultimate Reality, Self, Oneness, Nonduality, Moksha, Satori, whatever, there apparently are some of us who have experienced that, so it means that I can too.  The problem is that getting one of these Clowns to come back down to your level to ’splain how it works is a bit difficult.  There are some who give it a good go, but it seems as if their perspectives have shifted to a point where it’s silly to explain what was never not there to begin with.  And how do I know these Clowns “got it” anyway?  I don’t.  I just have to take their word for it, and stay away from those who are trying to sell me something.

Reading Sri Ramakrishna yesterday (never heard of him before yesterday either), I came across a couple quotes that I thought were worth writing down.  Here are a few (and these are for me, ya know?):

“One should not reason too much.  Too much reasoning throws the mind into confusion.”

“If there are no desires, the mind naturally looks up toward God.”

“He who from the depth of his soul seeks to know God will certainly realize him.  He must.  He alone who is restless for God and seeks nothing but Him will certainly realize Him.”

“God cannot be known by reasoning.  By faith alone does one attain everything – knowledge and super-knowledge.  By faith alone can one see God and become intimate with Him.”

There ya go!  In my face, huh?

This oneness thing must be a perspective-specific anomaly. If you can back up enough, you can start to see how it makes some sense.

Take the intestines for example.  In the intestines reside many bacteria (lactobacilla, eubacteria, clostridium, bacteroides and the spifida bacteria for example) – I don’t know this because I’m a gastroenterologist… I just looked it up.  These bacteria do us a huge favor, you know.  Without them we wouldn’t be able to process certain starches and complex carbohydrates and so on.  ”We” wouldn’t live very long without them, and if they get out of balance the other way (too many), it causes other problems that threaten our survival.  Yet we do them a huge favor too.  We eat, they eat, they live, we live.  Mutually beneficial operation goin’ on down there.  Can we say that these bacteria are not “us”?  If we take ourselves to be our bodies, then we must include them in that definition, right?  Remember, without them our bodies don’t really work too well.

What about from the bacteria’s perspective?  One little bacterium, sitting in a pitch-black, zero oxygen environment, making methane (you know… that smell) as it devours the leftovers from lunch.  Does it know it exists?  Is it conscious?  Can it think about its predicament?  Does it ponder the nature of reality?  Who knows?  But we, up here in the macrocosm of the body, don’t even know they’re there.  If someone were to rip the intestines from your body, you would die.  So would our little friends!  I think we could safely argue that these little bacteria must be included in our definition of “me” if we still assume we are our bodies.

Back up to another perspective.  Earth.  Is it conscious?  To us it seems like a ridiculous question.  If the bacteria are conscious, do you think they ask each other if they think the world they live in is conscious?  I guess for argument’s sake it doesn’t matter if the Earth is conscious or not.  The point is we are like these little bacteria in our own intestines.  The Earth’s job is not to support human beings, although it does that as well.  The Earth, just like our intestines are to the bacteria, is a very comfortable environment in which we humans can thrive.  We eat from it, and our waste ultimately leads to the production of more stuff to eat.  We breathe oxygen from the plants and trees, remove this toxic waste from them, and they, in turn, remove our toxic waste (CO2).  Again, like the bacterial-human relationship, it’s mutually beneficial.  How perfect!

So from the Earthly perspective, we could say that there is one Earth.  It is one, and we are part of it.  We are Earth.  Right?  It doesn’t take much of a mental leap to back all the way out to a universal perspective then.  It gets really dizzy looking and thinking about oneness from this perspective.  To a point, it’s not very helpful to do either.

I get stuck trying to understand the claims of nonduality when I can sense that I am an individual.  That individuality cannot be shaken.  Like I’d said in a previous post, I want to believe, but I’m also very pragmatic about it all.  It has to make sense to me and be something I can experience directly.  That pragmatism and need to know the truth is what’s pulled me out of many of my old beliefs.  I find I have very little use for beliefs anymore, but do recognize there are still some I haven’t been able to negate.  I live to fight another day.

Don’t feel much like writing about deep things right now.  I’m not thinking deeply here lately, not since the meme thing.  I saw this video this morning before I came to work, and thought it would be cool to put here.  Kind of fits.  Imagine how you would react to somebody on the metro, tube, subway that behaved like this.  I think I’d get off on the next stop!

Inspired by an inspired post at http://blogwithoutaname.com/a-silent-post/.  Please check out what the others have “said” as well.