The Quotation That Begins My Day

Stocism offered wisdom broad enough to appeal to both a philosopher-emperor (Marcus Aurelius) and the philosopher-slave (Epictetus).

 

Where Your Wings Are

The seagull by Norah McGuinness 

Tara Lemieux: “As the story is told, one day there was a seagull playing out in the yard at San Quentin. It had been raining, and the young bird was deriving much pleasure from paddling about in the puddle. The inmates watched as he stretched his wings gleefully, turning his face towards the sun and shook off the remnants of the fallen rain.

“Just then, an inmate picked up a stone and took aim at the bird. Jarvis immediately blocked the man, which escalated the man’s aggression and caused an argument to ensue.

“I mean, who the heck did Jarvis think he was? And why did he care so much about some blankety-blank bird?

“The others circled around the two men, just waiting for a fight.”

“’Why’d you do that?’ the inmate challenged.

“To which Jarvis so eloquently replied, ‘I did that because that bird’s got my wings.’”

Dharana and Flow: Getting into 'the Zone'

Consider the similarities between Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow and the ancient yogic concept of Dharana, which is the meditative practice of constraining conscious thought to one object.

“This concentration is not forced, like when an analyst concentrates on working out a difficult problem in a computer program,” wrote Nancy Wasserman. 

“The concentration experienced in Dharana is more passive and occurs in a state of relaxed awareness… The meditator creates a deeper compartment that allows the mind to flow more rapidly in that one particular direction.”

Intense, effective focus through relaxed awareness is also, of course, the definition of flow. 

Wasserman quoted a relevant remark by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended, “…the stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.”

Rechanneling that sap could be akin to flow, which Csikszentmihalyi described as “…a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Csikszentmihalyi said this comes easiest to those who possess what he called the “autotelic personality” — the internally driven people who have a tendency to engage in an activity for its own sake.

Those who have an autotelic personality are said to experience less stress during their complete absorption in flow. 

For me, writing and art can slip easily and almost imperceptibly into a flow state. The feeling is unselfconscious and immensely gratifying. 

But any number of activities can be translated into flow.

Vladimir Drkulec said, “I have experienced flow when playing chess, dancing, at a party, in karate class, in aikido class, in a fight when attacked by two people, in tense situations where a fight seemed imminent, while out in nature, when walking. The compression or expansion of time seemed to happen so that you perceived yourself to be moving slow as molasses while the other people around you were moving even slower. 

“In one case, I played a chess game that lasted almost 13 hours and was barely conscious of the passage of time. Only when the game was over did I realize that I had skipped lunch and was well past the dinner hour.”

Mike Oppland observed, “It’s important to note that one can’t experience flow if distractions disrupt the experience. Thus, to experience this state, one has to stay away from the attention-robbers common in a modern fast-paced life. A first step would be to turn off your smartphone when seeking flow.

“Also, the balance of perceived challenges and skills are important factors in flow. On the one hand, when a challenge is bigger than one’s level of skills, one becomes anxious and stressed. On the other hand, when the level of skill exceeds the size of the challenge, one becomes bored and distracted.

“Since the experience of this state is just in the middle, the balance is essential.”

He Forgot the Moon

The thief left it behind:

the moon

at my window

— written by the Buddhist monk after he came home to find that a burglar had taken the few possessions he had.

When Things Go Wrong, Let It RAIN

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — Marcus Aurelius

 

Christopher Isherwood: The One Who Was

'Lost Youth' by Deng Chengwen

“And now, before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man ‘I,’ let me consider him as a separate being, a stranger almost, setting out on this adventure in a taxi to the docks. For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearned or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. We still share the same skeleton, but its outer covering has altered so much I doubt if he would recognize me on the street. We have in common the label of our name, and a continuity of consciousness that I am I. But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. And that awareness belongs to everybody; it isn’t a particular person.

“The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can’t revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I’m tempted to sneer at him, but I will try not to. I’ll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son.”

— Christopher Isherwood, whose close observation of the man in the mirror evokes for me a Buddhist sense of the ephemerality of self.

Does Meditation Make You Immune?

Are people highly advanced in meditation serenely immune to anxiety, cravings, depression, fear and irritation? No — but they gain an edge on existence.

In their 1995 report on yogis in the advanced stages of meditative practice, The Stages of Mindfulness Meditation: A Validation Study, Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown found: “What changes is not so much the nature of conflict, but awareness of and reactivity to it … (With practice) there is greater awareness of and openness to conflict, but paradoxically less reaction at the same time in an impulsive, identificatory and therefore painful way … (The practitioner) may note the intense desire until it passes, like every other transient mental state, or he/she may act on it, but with full awareness … Mindfulness is said to automatically intervene between impulse or thought and action in such cases. This mechanism of reality, combined with clear and impartial observation, allows a new freedom from drive and a new freedom for well-considered and appropriate action.”

A meme made for me by my lifelong friend Jim Hampton. Thanks, Jim! The point is not to let our reactions to our failures to achieve emotional equanimity push us still further away from it.

Why Your Brain Lies to You

A conceptual sculpture installed at Rong Khun Temple in Chiang Rai, northern Thailand

“So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?’ the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t ‘The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.’ No, at the MOST basic level, the answer is ‘The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.’ 

Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.”

— Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

Stoic Virtues Still Stand

• The ability to discern the best course of action to take in any given situation.
• The emotional strength to follow that course despite obstacles.
• The insight and understanding to balance the needs of others with your own.
• And, finally, the power of self control.
Those are the four Stoic virtues: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. And between them, they still pretty much cover the waterfront.

Unbind Yourself

Keeping an Untroubled Spirit

The single phrase I have found most useful in life is from Marcus Aurelius: “The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”

But my favorite quotation contains an inherent contradiction. If you cast a cold eye on things and see them for what they are, how on earth are you supposed to maintain an untroubled spirit?

It’s tricky balancing act, and you have to be careful you don’t tip off into worrisome musing on one side or seemingly sociopathic indifference on the other.

Just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in a television interview, former first lady Barbara Bush noted that she was untroubled by it all.

“But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this and what do you suppose?” she told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. “Or, I mean, it’s, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

In one way, Barbara Bush was absolutely right — we must not permit negative thoughts to overwhelm us, particularly if they are about events largely out of our control. But the person who was determined to invade and occupy Iraq — justified, as we now know, entirely by lies — was her own son, and Barbara Bush’s ability to shrug off her own responsibility for the subsequent horror of that war is breathtaking in its amorality.

So how to remain untroubled by suffering, without being indifferent to it?

“One way is to recognize that we do have a choice in where we focus our attention,” wrote psychologist Jessica Grogan. “While it may be incredibly difficult to shift away from the negative, it may be less difficult to consciously choose to emphasize the positive.

“An adjunct to this attention shift is the technique, applied most notably by Hans Vaihinger and Alfred Adler, of ‘acting as if.’ This means, essentially, ‘acting as if’ the good things were bigger deals and the bad things were smaller deals.”

But while shifting focus to maintain calm, how to do we keep unpleasant realities in our awareness? Perhaps by consciously practicing empathy.

“Through empathy, you will see how our egos help to keep us separated as individuals instead of a collective consciousness,” wrote Gregg Prescott. “For example, many people are too detached from worldwide atrocities, such as famine and starvation in third world countries.  They may think to themselves, ‘If it doesn’t affect me, then it doesn’t exist.’ What if it was YOU who was starving?  Would you want others to know or care or would you prefer to have people say to themselves, ‘If it doesn’t affect me, then it doesn’t exist.’  The truth is that we are all in this together and if one person is suffering, then we all suffer.”

The image I kept coming back to is the surgeon, whose mission it is to relieve suffering and save lives. But to do that job effectively, he must be dispassionate, calm and controlled.

Untroubled by trouble, in other words.

Thoughts on a Long Walk

Thoughts on a long walk: It occurs to me that a tree is aware without being conscious. Without thinking, it reaches for the light. Without uncertainty, it’s grounded and solid. As such, it’s a metaphor for mindfulness meditation.

From My Friend Jim Hampton

The Guide to the Good Should Be Within

Developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.

“In the esoteric traditions, codes of morality are less important for the simple reason that the ultimate purpose of the spiritual effort if to attain a level of personal development at which morality is natural,” Walt Anderson wrote in Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism. 

“It is discovered within oneself, and external authority is no longer necessary or meaningful. This principle is not foreign to western psychology. Lawrence Kohlberg theorized that the most highly developed human beings operate out of inner moral principle. The same point is made by Abraham Maslow in his studies of healthy, ‘self-actualizing’ people who, he says, have relatively little respect for the formal rules and regulations of the society but at the same time a strong sense of concern for others.”

Homosexuality and Enlightenment

Eckhart Tolle has put his finger on something here that I’ve wondered about for a long time.

“As you approach adulthood, uncertainty about your sexuality followed by the realization that you are ‘different’ from others may force you to disidentify from socially conditioned patterns of thought and behavior,” Tolle wrote in his book The Power of Now. “This will automatically raise your level of consciousness above that of the unconscious majority, whose members unquestioningly take on board all inherited patterns. In that respect, being gay can be a help. Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not ‘fit in’ with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of your consciousness by force.”

I presume this is also one reason so many gay people turn to the arts, where an outsider’s perspective can be a source of inspiration and insight. 

The Lightness That Makes Being Bearable

You May Control a Mad Elephant

Given my lifelong fascination with super powers, this quote strikes me forcefully. By the way, we just happen to have a mad elephant on hand that needs taming right now.

The Quest Began on a Coffee Shop Place Mat...

“(A)s we would come to understand much later, our crises each contained the seed of a magnificent gift. We were both forced, by pain, to look under the surface of things. To investigate deeper into the nature of our human-beingness — its impermanence, its lack of continuity, its disappointment…”

“Paula and I sat one evening after class in the coffee shop beneath the yoga studio, discussing our lives. We discovered we both secretly felt our breakdowns were a kind of spiritual crisis. … As we identified, together, the aspects of this search that we shared, I scribbled them down on the paper place mat in front of me with a big red crayon:

“ — A search for ‘the quiet’ in which the small inner voice could be heard.

“ — A longing for the authentic and the real.

“ — A visceral need for self-expression.

“ — A sense of rebellion against the ‘captivity’ of our old lives.

“ — An inchoate sense of something unimaginable about to be born out of the disorganization of our lives.”

—  Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

Steve Hagen on the Dilemma of Desire

“Our senses numb when we overload them,” wrote Steve Hagen in his book Buddhism: Plain and Simple. “But once they’re numb, it’s tempting to overload them even more until we’re too numb to feel much at all. This is precisely the vicious cycle of an addictive drug. The overall effect we experience is the opposite of what we desired.”

“(I)t’s not merely drugs that are addictive and have the power to take us over the edge. For example … we’ve become jaded about great art and music simply because, with our technology, we’ve made it all too commonplace. When we can see reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers regularly, we no longer see their incredible, screaming vitality. And how much power is left in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony after the hundredth hearing? (It might help to remember that for the people of Beethoven’s day, just hearing it all would be a rare event).

“How can we deal with this situation? Should we attempt to snuff out our desires? Should we think of our desires as nasty, or wrong, or evil? Of course not. Those approaches simply add more fuel to the same fire.

“So what can we do? First we see. Then we turn around and go back.

“There’s no pressure we need to put on ourselves. Simply by seeing how things actually are — what leads to confusion and what leads to clarity — we begin to turn around.”