mental chatter

"Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you just never noticed. You also are no crazier than anybody else around you. The real difference is that you have confronted the situation; they have not. So they still feel relatively comfortable. That does not mean that they are better off. Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to Liberation. So don't let this realization unsettle you. It is a milestone actually, a sign of real progress. The very fact that you have looked at the problem straight in the eye means that you are on your way up and out of it."
(Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English)

Shambhala Sun - Looking into Laziness

Shambhala Sun - Looking into Laziness with Pema Chodron

BrainTypes.com - The 16 Types

BrainTypes.com - The 16 Types: "16 personality types"

The urge to write

George Clark, 18 June 2008

Most days I write at least 400 words. On the shelf above me is almost 2 metres of A4 folders of notes  from 1965 through to 2000 when I went environmentally friendly and stopped printing them out.

No fiction or poetry or travelogues or journalistic essays. It is nearly all about facts and ideas with an early predisposition towards intellectual cleverness and a later one to intuitive wisdom: with some recent merging as post-modern modes of thought  link to traditional and mystical ones.

Subject matter ranges across 12 major disciplines in my personal quest for understanding and for better ways to be human. There are as yet no solid conclusions but the journey has spawned the occasional output that others might find helpful in their own questing. My vocation seems to be to facilitate learning – both of myself and others.

The urge to write might be an offshoot of the human urge to speak which involves communicating and being social. As it is I now live alone and work from home so I am something of a hermit. While this can lead to stewing unnecessarily in my own juices it has the advantage of not having to stew too much in the juices of other people. The jury is still out on whether I am pulled by the vision of mystical peace or pushed by the demons of burn out and world weariness. But either way there is ample solitude in which to practice mindfulness and renunciation.

I write both professionally and for pleasure. Professional work is both paid and voluntary. These days the paid writing is mainly to do with plain language – mostly rewrites of government policy documents but also some original stuff aimed at popularising key development concepts. Voluntary writing is wider in scope and includes basic copy writing for the local Boat Festival and Salmon Bothy and more original pieces related generally to social development and channelled through the CCSD, Hakikazi Catalyst and earlier for the BPL.

But the bulk of the writing is done for pleasure. This includes handwritten prose, lists, mindmaps and doodles: although there are not so many of those these days because my handwriting is getting very poor. So most input is through the keyboard where there is a mix of structured and spontaneous writing.

Most of the structured writing takes the form of one-pagers although there is the occasional essay and dialogue. These are often based on handwritten drafts. Some are reports of what other authors have said that is clever or wise, but increasingly they are home grown. Most of these end up on my various web sites and blogs.

But spontaneous writing makes up the bulk of what I produce these days. There are the 20 minute flows of consciousness which follow the instructions of Dorothea Brande and there are the less rushed daily diaries. I open one of these first thing every morning and add to it throughout the day with time stamps along with way. These are mainly prose although there are some lists, continua, matrixes and the occasional illustration. They are a mix of the banal and the brilliant. Some of the brilliant bits are extracted and built into one-pagers or essays.

It is said that if you want to be a writer then you must write. I took a couple of correspondence courses on writing a few years back – they were on creative writing and on journalism so they did not truly suit my needs but they offered a lot of good ideas. I have also (a) acquired a fair collection of 'how to write' books which have been useful and (b)  set up a blog where I put links to useful places on the internet.

In November of 2007 I systematically estimated how many 'spontaneous' words I had produced. It comes to slightly over 7 million[1]. That indicates a fairly strong (possibly abnormal) urge to write.

 

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[1] 400 words per day for 48 years

Artikelen van Erik Weijers - The origin of consciousness

The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind - summary of Julian Jaynes classic book

Buddhist Masters and Their Organisations

Buddhist Masters and Their Organisations

Neuroscientist experiences the 'spiritual' during a stroke

See video from TED at youtube

Being in the world.

26 July 2006

 

You can radically change your 'sense of being in the world'. You can recondition your mind. You may presently sense yourself as an individual ego suffering in limited time and space - an insignificant and petty agent in this world of dust. This can change to a sense of being in a non egoic state with horizons in the infinite and the eternal where there is the fearless peace that passes all understanding; where 'you' are a manifestation of the cosmic agent (in an angelic rather than devilish way!)

 

Note:

• Only 'you' can change your mind at this level (although a role model, well established guidelines, and like minded company can provide support and encouragement)
• Your mind has to become mindful of its nature and procedures ('be still and know' - guidelines are available from the wisdom traditions)
  Mindfulness leads to awareness of, and freedom from, the causes and conditions that create the petty agent.
• All minds are already cosmic agents but the petty agent acts as a veil. The task is simply to remove the veil.
• All that is needed is vision and effort.
• Some people are more ready to change than others - but it is an open possibility for us all.

 

Shambhala Sun - Mindfulness, Compassion, & Wisdom, Three Means To Peace

Shambhala Sun - Mindfulness, Compassion, & Wisdom, Three Means To Peace

Joseph Goldstein - If our aspiration is peace in the world, is there anyone we would exclude from this wish, whether they are terrorists, suicide bombers, soldiers lost in violence or government policy-makers? "May everyone be free of hatred, free of emnity." These are the mind states that drive harmful acts. If our own response is emnity or hatred or ill will, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are part of the problem...
It is not a question of whether unwholesome mind states will arise in us—or in the world around us. Feelings of hatred, emnity, fear, self-righteousness, greed, envy and jealousy all do arise at different times. Our challenge is to see them all with mindfulness, understanding that these states themselves are the cause of suffering and that no action we take based on them will lead to our desired result—peace in ourselves and peace in the world.

bigger existential supermarkets

"but usually if I'm sitting there without reading, I am a divided person"

 

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading John Blofeld. He held my attention in Taoist mode and my body and mind were thus calm. Later I did some web design work and that gave some more easy, non-egoic time.

So: cute ways of being non-egoic; noble (?) distractions. Watering the good seeds or at least not watering the bad ones. Keeping the mind free of those negative thought patterns that have become habit energies and which pull me down.

But: the negatives are not to be totally avoided. The idea is to get into a calm and positive frame of mind and then to look into the negative habit energies to see their causes and conditions and thus what lessons might be learned.

There is an enormous existential gulf between 'thinking' and 'noticing what is being thought ': especially when the thought is attached to feelings and thus to body reactions:  and they always are.

Aha: I notice the mind toying with various thought trains but not having decided to fully hop on board any of them. Seemingly spoiled for choice. But it is a limited choice relative to what is truly available. There is the phenomenal v the numinous. More choice of phenomena (bigger supermarkets) - so what? More numinous moments - neat.