My mental circus, inside and out.

meditation

Emma had a really good meditation today, but at the beginning, when her mind was chatty Cathy, she thought, "Who in the hell am I talking to?" There are several audiences, it seems, for all of this mental blather.  Sometimes it's people she used to know.  Sometimes it's people she knows.  Sometimes it's people she's never met. Sometimes she's chattering away to herself. Chattering chattering chattering as if someone could hear and as if it mattered.  Scolding, berating, reminding, begging, wondering, analyzing, grieving, worrying, fantasizing,  planning, creating metaphors, all in an uncontrolled way like a crazy old aunt or a radio set between stations.  So click, it goes off and then there's something really good, something big and calm and peaceful, and in the vastness of it, thoughts are small and wispy.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 31, 2006 02:42 | link | comments

self-analysis

Once upon a time, Emma traveled to Africa to see a boyfriend, but although they spent six weeks together in a tent, in this incredible world of giraffe and elephants and iron mountains that attract lightning, he refused to have sex with her.  Finally, after she had begged him for days for some kind of explanation, he said, "I don't analyze myself." 

For her next real relationship, Emma chose someone who obsessively and loudly analyzed himself.   He also liked it if Emma, too, went along with analyzing him, but only if she exactly echoed his self-analysis.  He did not appreciate independent thought in a girflfriend.  An independent thought was considered a breach of trust. Granted, there was a lot to analyze, since he was completely neurotic,  but the analysis was accompanied by extreme self-love at one minute and extreme self-loathing the next, both states tied to the monstrous self.  When they broke up, this man told Emma, "I'm  just too complex."

Well, yes, and aren't we all.

As Emma writes these descriptions, she has to give a hearty laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. But what she had meant to do was examine self-analysis, to give a kind of meta-analysis of self-analysis through these two examples, which are common states of being.  It seems that neither of these models are especially good ones because in both, the self is a kind of affliction whether analyzed or not.  It obviously doesn't go away when not analyzed, as in the case of Bachelor Number One, but can rise to gigantic buffoonish proportion as in the case of Bachelor Number Two.  In neither case is there an openness to another person, even if one is talking one's head off.

To analyze or not to analyze   Emma has found it very restful to give up analyzing in some ways that seem extremely unhelpful.  What is really helpful is standing above thoughts, to stand outside the self and to observe it as an impermanent research object.   That's why Emma's blog is written in the third person, so this is not just a literary conceit.  And who knows whether anyone she describes here is the same person that she once knew.

The very fact that we can stand outside the self is an enormously consequential thing, and brings up the time-honored question, Who or what is it that observes the self? And why would this be the place or state or scene where we find true compassion and intimate connection to other beings?  Standing outside also makes lying possible, since lying requires the projection of a false self and predictions about the outcomes for this false self.  That is how primatologists know that apes have consciousness, because females and juvenile males, through various deflecting behaviors, fool the silverback into thinking he has control while they sneak off and have sex behind his back.

Of course, the ultimate answer to any project of analysis is: Does it make you and others around you happy? Is it increasing the sum total of happiness in the world or just making everyone more miserable?  It's a delightful thing to commit to happiness as life's goal, and happiness is actually the higher, more refined, and more sophisticated state of consciousness.  It takes work to achieve and sustain happiness. The greatest lie of all:  Ignorance is bliss.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 30, 2006 20:51 | link | comments (1)

crow, mountains, and elephants

Wandering around the blogs, Emma begins to think about thought.  She has a really helpful metaphor for dark thoughts that settle on the mind, especially in meditation.  They are like crows on a blanket, and if you pick up the blanket and give it a shake, they all fly off.   Crows are smart and opportunistic scavengers, and they feed on death, and while they may be perfectly fine in their place, it is best if they don't settle on the blanket.

However, Emma is also feeling somewhat restless since she has several days of no grandparenting and no traveling and no parties, and she's wondering what to do with herself.  So out of this restlessness she began to cruise travel pages, dreaming of going on a pilgrimage to Mount Kawagebo in China or a trek in Bhutan.  But somehow, the travel advertising seemed so offputting, as if the trip would make her into something she did not want to be, the tourist who alights, consumes, and leaves.

And as she is having these thoughts, she hears a poem by Lama Gendun Rinpoche, "Don't go into the inextricable jungle looking for the elephant who is already quietly at home."

Still, a mountain would be very fine.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 29, 2006 22:15 | link | comments (1)

r&r

Emma was so exhausted from all of the cleaning, cooking, and entertaining of the holiday that she collapsed in a heap and watched the entire first season of Six Feet Under on HBO.  Now this is a very good TV show with humane, wonderfully drawn, complex characters, as good as a novel.  Emma was hooked from the first episode, which begins with the death of the father, an undertaker, who continues to appear as a ghost.  His death frees everyone in his family from a cloud of repression, as they slowly discover.  The show is a long witty meditation on death and its effects on the living, and just absolutely wonderful.  Highly recommended.

On the other hand, avoid the film What the Bleep at all cost.  It appears to be a discussion of the spiritual dimensions of quantum physics, but, WARNING, it features the charlatan JZ Knight who channels the Atlantean Ramtha.  Gimme a break!  It's just amazing how these types construct "evidence"--This is really a kind of back-formation, since they go out and find bits of knowledge to prove whatever wacky theory they already believe.  Thus, they never discover anything at all, but are, in fact, quite rigid personalities.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 29, 2006 07:37 | link | comments

Windows

Last night, Emma took some of the remains of the xmas feast over to Flora and her elderly mother, who are housebound.  Flora is suffering from a bleaker depression than usual, though she is always depressed to some degree. Her mother is around ninety, and has macular degeneration and severe hearing loss, but seems in somewhat better spirits than Flora.  Flora put her head down on the table and said of her own depression, "The drugs don't work if nothing good ever happens."  Now they happened to be sitting in the living room of Flora's beautiful new house, which has large picture windows overlooking a park with three ponds.  And Emma just wanted to say, "Look out your window, my dear!"

Emma thinks of depressives as being at the first stage of the journey, the one where you realize that life is unsatisfactory and that things are not going to go the way you (or anyone else) want them to.  That's inevitable.  Depressives know this fact inside and out.  They have done an intense study of it.  They know the First Noble Truth up and down and sideways.  But they are stuck at this stage and can't be reasoned on to the next ones, where you realize that 2) the root of suffering is craving and attachment, including to your own self 3) you can get out of it, 4) there is a way that really works.   It's remarkably simple, yet so very very difficult sometimes to take those steps because the greatest attachment is to ego ego ego, even a monstrously depressive ego.

So Emma plans to have Flora and her mother over to be around baby Max.  Emma has a belief, possibly quite false, that anyone can be cheered up by baby Max.  He is so open, in the moment, and just so gosh darn cute. (He has just gotten up and is loudly and joyfully singing "Jingle Bells" in his own unique way, since he doesn't know what the words are.) We all need real love--not passion, but compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, and the equanimity that accepts us as we are.  They all work together, and one doesn't work without the others. Those things release us from our constriction, which is a real physical feeling that tells us that all is not right.  Then maybe we can see out our windows.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 27, 2006 21:47 | link | comments (2)