“In this global pandemic, we’re in an era of isolation, retreat. We’re also in an era of heightened uncertainty. This can be a terrible thing, and drive us to loneliness and distraction … or it can be a time of practice, reflection, and deepening.”
Imagine having a couple of buttons on your desk. Let’s say, red and green. And everytime you walked by you could press the red button for a negative/angry/fearful thought… or the green one for a positive/peaceful/uplifting thought. Wouldn’t last long, just a few seconds or a minute or two.
Why would you ever push the red button? You wouldn’t, not if you thought about it for a spit second. You’d wear that fucking green button out. But we find ourselves soaking in negative thoughts and — if we’re lucky — have a moment of awareness.
“Whoa. I must have hit the red button. A couple of times.”
All of which goes to explain why people report constantly hearing me muttering, “Green button, green button, green button.”
My friend Kent reminds us the red button state is most people’s default. (Always going for green.) Buddha says “life is the red button state’. Awareness would be the inbetween.
“The playfulness and joy of a dog, its unconditional love and readiness to celebrate life at any moment, often contrast sharply with the inner state of the dog’s owner — depressed, anxious, burdened by problems, lost in thought, not present in the only place and only time there is: Here and Now. One wonders: living with this person, how does the dog manage to remain so sane, so joyous?”
— Eckhart Tolle
“In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.”
— Eckhart Tolle
The word/concept “light” comes up frequently in my reading and contemplation. So I asked Google Drive to search my notes for any document containing the word. It pleases me that I can do this. It seems that each time I stumble across one of these excerpts, it’s fresh and newly relevant for where/what I am.
As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.#
There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas
Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination.
In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.
The light of consciousness passes through the film of memory and throws pictures on your brain. Because of the deficient and disordered state of your brain, what you perceive is distorted and coloured by feelings of like and dislike.
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”
— The God Theory (Bernard Haisch)
“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)
“(Your mind) is like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking. And this happens every day of your life.”
— Sam Harris
To paraphrase SNL character Chico Escuela, “Life has been berry, berry good to me!” When I look back — something I’m trying to do less — I can’t help noticing the nodes. Those forks in the road where I had to chose which path to take. From my current vantage point, it’s tempting too say I wouldn’t be where I am today (a good place) had I chosen the other path at any point along the way. Yes, I might be in a “better” place, but it would be a different place. I’ve mapped out some of those nodes below. (Click the image for larger map)
For reason’s I can’t recall, I tried out for the high school musical and got the lead part. In college I switched my major from business to theater when it looked like falling grades my cost me my draft deferment. When Nixon froze the lottery — and I was no longer in danger of getting drafted — I dropped out of law school and got a job with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. I hated it and quit after a year and wound up working at a small town radio station.
On one of the nights I went to Tommy’s North End Cafe, I met my future wife (40+ years). She says it was the only time she had ever been there.
I burned out after ten years at the radio station and we moved to Albuquerque where I couldn’t get arrested. I went back to the radio station where Clyde Lear found me and brought me to work for his new company where I stayed for 29 years.
Like Harry Bosch, I don’t believe in coincidences. My life experience suggests there is a pattern to our individual realities. A process, intelligent beyond human understanding. As for those forks in the road, this from Random Walk by Lawrence Block:
“You did what you would have done, in a minute or in all eternity.”
The word comes up with some frequency when reading about meditation. We try to sit still… and allow the mind to become still. Applying the definition above, sound is pretty simple. We try to find a quiet place to meditate to avoid distracting sounds but some — I’ve read — can tune out the sounds around them. It’s the movement of our thoughts (non-stop) that seems to get in the way of stillness when meditating. And the only way to stop that movement is to silently observe thoughts as they come and go. Such awareness somehow… dissolves or dissipates thoughts.
What, I wonder, would be the experience of such internal stillness? What would that be like? With which of our senses would we notice stillness? Not sure what stillness would look like. Assuming there were little or no sound to hear, what would mental stillness sound like? I’m tempted to say it’s more of a feeling than a sensation but “feeling” is a pretty slippery word. We all have feelings but we don’t know where they come from and we have no more control over them than we do thoughts. I think we need that sixth sense to experience Stillness: consciousness or, better still, awareness.
But stillness is a fragile state. Even the thought, “So, this is stillness” breaks the… spell? Like so much in meditation, “trying” gets in the way. “Alright everybody, BE STILL!” Doesn’t work. We don’t find stillness, stillness finds us.
