spirituality
Suffering is Caused by Attachment
Suffering arises because everything changes, everything is impermanent. Everything is in process, all the time. Whenever we hope to find any lasting happiness by means of something that is changing, suffering results. This means that nothing in the realm of ordinary human experience can provide lasting happiness, and trying to force things to stand still and make us happy is itself the main source of misery.
“Attachment” in Buddhism extends far beyond the sense of “greed” or “clinging” to something closer to what the Christian tradition would call “pride”–a self-centered isolation, the separate selfhood, “ego” in the worst sense.
This selfhood acts upon others and the world as if they were forever separate from oneself, generating what author Charlene Spretnak described as “the continuous chain reaction of craving, jealousy, ill will, indifference, fear, and anxiety that fills the mind.” This is a deep, pervasive, but normal kind of alienation–one seemingly built into the nature of the human nervous system.
The most pervasive form of self-centered suffering takes place as we project upon everyday experience a huge burden of extraneous interpretations, associations, fantasies, emotions, painful memories, and diversions. We act then with the Buddhist big three problems: greed, aversion, and delusion. Greed sucks things in to our purposes, violating their natures as necessary. Aversion shoves things away, denies, distorts, destroys them–again violating their natures. In the state of delusion, we float, confused, not seeing, not knowing, insulated from the pain and salvation of deep experience.
Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each moment from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In this way a special form of mental torment is created that consists of seemingly endless layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt and self-justification–known in Buddhism as “samsara,” the illusory world we think of as real. It is what, in honest moments, many people might call “normality.”
I think of it this way: Instead of experiencing life directly, we create a worldview and experience it. That worldview serves to protect us through a system of explanations; but it also makes each of us into an isolated self, separated from nature, from real experience, from spirituality, and from one another–causing all experience to be distorted and “out of joint,” and ourselves to suffer from living at one remove from life. We are nearly always, in some degree, outsiders to the world and even to our own experience.
Buddhists have given deep attention to the ways human beings are at once empowered and entrapped by the categories we create for thought and language. Racial prejudice is a straightforward example of what Buddhists mean by suffering that is created by the mind; it is based on mental categories that distort perception and project our expectations onto others. The fundamental Buddhist act is to accept responsibility for one’s projections, and to learn to know, first hand, how the mind creates illusion and amplifies suffering.
My Descent into Madness…
… can be described thusly:
As you can see, as time has gone by, my appreciation of language-based humor has become stronger and stronger… and inevitably, more “granular.” A friend recently told me “I don’t know anybody that appreciates typos as much as you.” And it is true. My recent dissection and adoption of “HAW” (link) illustrates this perfectly.
So if you refer to the chart, you can see how appreciation and usage rise pretty steadily together, until the “point of no return”, which i am well beyond now. After this point, my appreciation hits some sort of critical mass and i begin telling jokes based on other jokes… layer upon layer… so as the appreciation continues to rise steadily, my usage rises exponentially.
And as my usage goes through the roof, the jokes become more “inside” (requiring more and more explanation for those who haven’t been following along the whole time)… and accessibility falls off… What i find funny becomes so exclusive that it appears to be complete gibberish to the underprivileged masses.
The vertical line on the left with the +/- signs should probably say “level of gibberish.” The “point of no return” is really the point where the level of gibberish builds too quickly for the general public. But after thinking about this a while, it got me thinking about humor in general… are ALL jokes “gibberish” to some extent? What makes something “funny?”… Remember that scene in Short Circuit where Steve Guttenberg tests the robot for sentience by seeing if it could understand jokes? Getting a computer to understand the humor in “why did the chicken cross the road” is not a simple task. It must be more than the level or irony that makes something “funny”… It’s fascinating that a good sense of humor appears to be proof of free-thought or something… It’s all gibberish to a machine. So is gibberish evidence of free thought? Is the soul rooted in madness?
It’s like they say… there is no right or wrong… just popular opinion. Everybody is insane. You hear of those creative genius types whose art is argued over as being either “pointless” or “genius”… Are these people simply somewhere slightly above that “point of no return?”… and the crazy cat lady who stands on the corner laughing at passing traffic… is she just so high up on the gibberish level that she’s totally left us all behind? Maybe she’s not lost in there. Maybe she’s simply sight-seeing in higher realms of human experience.
So yeah… to all you janky people who continually crack me up with all the engrish and all the “wat?” and “feh” and all the numbers embedded in your exclamation points… keep it up. And to you i dedicate a hearty HAW. Carry on.
Back Door Bragging
from an episode of 30 Rock i saw the other day:
Kenneth: The personal essay is way harder than I thought, cause it’s not in my nature to brag on myself.
Jenna: Not even a back door brag?
Kenneth: What’s a back door brag?
Jenna: Backdoor bragging is sneaking something wonderful about yourself in everyday conversation. Like when I tell people it’s hard for me to watch American Idol cause I have perfect pitch. You try it!
Back door bragging… now that they’ve brought it to my attention, it’s all i hear. It seems like just about everybody does a little back door bragging from time to time… Others do it almost continuously and never even realize it.
In my ongoing quest to be a better person, often i am stopped dead in my tracks by the realization that somehow i have fallen off my path… and i am humbled all over again… which is frustrating because, just when you think you are on the path to enlightenment, you realize how far away from the goal you really are. This 30 Rock episode brought me to yet another one of these epiphanies… this back door bragging thing is a new hurdle, previously camouflaged by my own ego. How often have i done it? Have i ever been looked down upon at my job because of it? It’s like suddenly i’ve taken a microscope to all the minutia of my behavior.
The other night i rewrote an email 4 times before sending it, taking great care to remove every instance of back door bragging… and i was constantly amazed at how it would rear it’s ugly head in a new form, every time i tried to remove it. I finally got it right… but man, i cut the length of my email nearly in half. I was worried that all i’d have left to say is “lol” or something… but as luck would have it, i really do have real things to say… it just takes a while to undress them sometimes.
It depends on the audience too… you are probably not at risk of back door bragging in the company of certain friends… but just wait until you run into your ex one morning on your way to work… before you’ve had your coffee… on the one day you dressed like a total ass-clown… yeah chances are your insecurities are going to kick in, and some bragging is gonna slip out your back door… another good reason to invest in adult diapers now.
They say that within a demon’s name lies it’s power. And now i get what that means. Now that THIS demon has a name, i have conscious control over it. It’s important that i don’t back door brag, considering how enlightened i am to begin with… more than most people, actually. People often compare me to ghandi and it wouldn’t be very becoming of me to start back door bragging now. I probably only did it a FEW times anyway… which was probably due to the enormous stress that comes with being such a positive role model. It’s hard for someone like me to rest, you understand, because when you’re everyone’s favorite, people just constantly need your attention. Why just the other day i was blessing this baby while saving a cat from a burning tree… ah nevermind.
Dolly Zoom and Time Dialation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y48R6-iIYHs
http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/dolly-zoom.html
So i’ve noticed this technique used in many many movies… i figured it had a name but i didn’t think to look it up until today… You dolly the camera away from the subject while zooming in at the same time. The object of focus (usually a person who you want to portray experiencing something of impact) stays centered and around the same size while the background appears to stretch behind them. It’s usually accompanied by a sweeping sound effect or creepy violin strings…
I thought of it this morning on the way in to work because i was thinking of the concept of time dialation and 2012. Is time speeding up? And if so, why don’t we notice it? It seems like old people are always talking about how life goes by so quickly but high school felt like fucking forever. Maybe think of it like the dolly zoom effect… Time is dollying away from us while our brains are zooming in to balance it all out in our minds. And just like the creepy background-stretching effect is evidence of this motion, so is the feeling of the days slipping through our fingers… even though the clock seems to tick away at the same measured rate.
When i was a kid it used to feel like my meals were SO far apart… far enough, at least, for me to get hungry in the in-between time. These days, the clock hits 9:30pm and i feel like i JUST had lunch.
Makes you wonder….
Anyone else have a weird day yesterday?
i’m serious. Starting Sunday night, shit has been off the hook.
Sunday night i’m walking down the stairs in the middle of the night and i smell a sulfer kind of aroma… which caused me to pause mid-step or something and i slipped down like 3 stairs or something. “god damn ghosts tryin’ ta kill me!” i muttered.
But the next day, (yesterday) things continued to suck. I felt upset most of the day after i got jammed up by somebody, then on the drive home i nearly ran into a mercedes who braked hard in front of me. Only 2 blocks from the apartment, my heart was still racing when i pulled up to find emily sitting in her car with the door open and a frown on her face. Turns out SHE got in an accident on the way home too… in the same way. Then while i’m re-attaching her bumper, my phone rings. it’s my mom calling to tell me that SHE got in an accident too!
“Fuck” i thought. “Darkness descends and shit.”
So i talked to one of her neighbors who was able to go pick her up… she’s fine… emily’s fine… i’m trippin… how are you? I’ve asked several people this morning and a good number of them experienced a deluge of shitty luck and weirdness yesterday as well. One friend even said “I fel like somebody put a hex on me sunday afternoon.”
So just curious if you’ve noticed any weirdness too. it doesn’t have to be BAD luck necessarily… just excessively DIFFERENT situations that you’re expecting to walk into. Synchronicity. In fact that first thing that set me off yesterday morning was actually part of an intense 3-way synchronicity too.
I wonder if more and more days like this will occur, the closer we get to 2012… if novelty increases as it’s supposed to, things are only going to get weirder. I for one am looking forward to it (and welcome our new ant-overlords… lol). Like Hunter Thompson said “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Imagining the 10th Dimension
This is a really killer video presentation that helps you understand higher physical dimensions… kind of like the book “Flatland” but this one goes up to the 10th dimension wheras Flatland focused on 4, and only gave you a taste of 5 and 6 at the end.
Thanks to Djeeno for telling me about this one…
It seems kind of clear to me that when we dream, we are experiencing a broader range of dimensional reality than we do while awake… I also tend to think that we only shut this stuff out because we don’t need it to survive in this collective social creation that we inhabit.
Everyone has had moments where they’ve fallen asleep for only a few minutes but dreamed seemingly hours of dreams… Everybody has had bizarre other-worldly dreams that seemed almost like alternate realities… a lot of times these dreams come with whole new sets of memories for this other life you just jumped into.
Once i fell asleep and found myself in the middle of a prehistoric foot-race of some kind… i was stuck in a pit and all these people in tribal clothes were running and jumping over the thing… and suddenly all this memory came flooding in… i remembered the reasons why i was involved in this race… i knew that i had hit my head when i fell in this pit and had been knocked out for a minute. I remember all the drama between family and peers that I had experienced during the week leading up to this race.
What if i was dead? Would i enter a dreamlike state and never wake up from it? Would i enter some reality and inherit all the memories of that life and simply pick up from there?
I believe that, when you dream, you are meandering through higher dimensions and exploring cross-sections of infite possibilities… i think that sometimes you can gain a little control and you can focus on one reality for a lot longer… hence vivid and profound other-world experiences… And I think that this 10-dimensional model that the physics world has come to embrace explains this… i think this video illustrates this very clearly.
How can we experience lifetimes of memory in the blink of an eye? Because in higher dimensions, infinite realities can be experienced as a single point.
We know that if we are not allowed to dream, we go crazy or die… I think this is because we HAVE to return to our higher dimensional selves… there is a natural rhythm here… we zoom in on the multiverse and focus on one point of perspective… on consciousness…. like learning to focus on a stereogram… then at night our soul “exhales” and pulls back from focus, allowing us to stretch our spiritual legs and “recharge”… then we take a deep breath and dive right back in when we wake up.
Breathe in… Breathe out… Breathe in… Breathe out… just like everything else in our universe.
2012 – super-symmetry
Have you felt a strange quality in your day-to-day, over the past 2-3 weeks? Have you been noticing an elevated level of synchronicity lately? Have things materialized in your reality that you were just talking about the night before?
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for weeks… it started out as me wanting to write about all the crazy synchronicities of late… but then i realized that this subject, as most enlightend output tends to be, seemed connected to a lot of other aspects of my reality… from feelings of “life-out-of-balance” to recently reported black hole activity…
At some points along your journey, there are places where you can take a step back and observe how everything is connected with such breathtaking symmetry… for just a few moments everything seems to be in perfect balance… You want to tell people about what you’re seeing but you get so wrapped up in watching it all transpire that you get stuck on stupid… and you’re afraid to talk about it for fear of becoming distracted from that moment and losing sight of it altogether.
That’s what happened here. i’ve been sitting back watching this perfect universe rotate and undulate and change and evolve and crack it’s jokes and teach it’s lessons for a few weeks now… so enamored by it all that i don’t even know where to begin in documenting or sharing it.
I feel like 2012 is closer and more real and more positive than ever before… i feel like it’s beginning to rear it’s unprecendented unimaginable head and, before long, this crystalline moment of snowflake-like perfection will be upon all of us… and we will all take our hats off and look up to the sky as the change we’ve all been waiting for washes over everything…
…Or not. but I, personally, am rooting for transformation.
Contrast
Coming back from vacation is like coming down off of a really mind-altering trip.
You feel like you’ve been given a new lease on life, but you know it’s only a matter of time before every-day-life comes to piss on your picnic…
Every time it becomes a question of “How long can i keep up this positive frame of reference? How long before i get kicked down off my cloud and forget the simple joys of life again?”
Contrast is necessary though… i dare say it’s fundamental to our very reality.. light and darkness need each other in order to exist… so in the end it’s all about seeing your glass as half-full, right?
So why is there such a tendency for us to see the glass as half-empty? What is it about negativity that creeps in, relentlessly? Is it just me or does it seem like there are more people struggling to find peace in their lives than people who are habitually happy?
Wedding Plans
Some of you already know that I am an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church. Yeah I know what you’re thinking… big deal right? Anybody can get ordained in a matter of minutes this way right? True and yes the site can be quite silly but I did this after being impressed with a close friend who did the same. It was merely the officiation of the spiritual work that he had been doing for years… I say now, as he used to, “I take my title very seriously.”
So in taking my work seriously I try to be there for everybody in my life in whatever way I can. (this usually means listening… probably the greatest gift you can give someone) This is not always easy because there are only so many hours in the day and there are so many people I wish to spend time with… so many people whose lives i wish i could touch in some way… So i elected to bare the title “Missionary of Music” in hopes that I could do my work through music and affect a wider range of people.
The problem is you end up “hermitizing” and writing music into the long hours of the night… see less people… and then wonder if you’ve somehow fallen off track. Sometimes I forget that my presence is what some of the closest people in my life need from me… not techno.
When authentic swamis earn their titles they give up their material things.. their homes… their former lives… and the local government declares them as “dead”… However if it is discovered that they abandoned their families back home to do this they are forced to go home and take care of them first. This is what I worry might happen to me if I focus too singularly on my medicine (ie: musical medicine for the masses)
So I was deeply pleased when my friends Jason and Ruthie asked if I would officiate their wedding later this year. My legal status as a minister is finally getting called into use… and here i have been handed, arguably, one of the most pristine tasks a minister can perform… for two of my closest friends. So that rocks balls. Now I just have to plan my script… get a quality certificate printed, stamped and framed… and figure out what the fuck I’m going to wear… =)
What’s best is that it’s going to be held at the ranch and the reception is going to be an all-night party! And I get to play! So that means I’m doing DOUBLE the ministry in ONE night! BAM BITCHES! WHO’S YOUR SWAMI!?!?!
Oh yeah.. last night I was asked to join The Ambient Mafia’s ranks… so we’re talking Minister and Mafia Member at the same time! OK so it might not be a REAL mafia…. but we DID eat pasta so I think that counts for something.
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