Whose Side?

Probably the greatest aid is to chant “Whose fucking side are you on?” and to consult my own journal. Maybe I should add that chant to my morning and evening prayers:

Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?

I mean, really, that’s the meat of it. They’re trying to reduce me to wretchedness and slavery. Am I going to collaborate?

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Real time note: I wrote this thoroughly tongue in cheek, but I found myself chanting it on my daily walks, and it has entered my standard repertory of aspiration prayers. It is the prayer against gluttony, and the gist of it is: am I to be on my own side or not? Am I going to support myself or let myself down? The swearing is not just for novelty or piquancy, but to remind myself of the intensity of frustration that originally motivated the prayer. (Apologies to anyone of my father's generation who might be actually offended by the language: as far as I know that cultural moment has departed. My father is 96 and I don't think he's reading blogs these days.)

The Most Helpful Practice Text

So it turns out, shockingly enough – try to contain your astonishment – the the mere presence of “do one new thing” on my list has the power to frighten me into a decline. That is to say, the eating of large quantities of muffin and ice cream. No problem, really, you silly old man. If the hurdle’s too high, lower it a bit and start again. You don’t have to DO a new thing today. You just have to PLAN doing a new thing. If you’re going to go look at materials in a hardware store or a hobby shop, find out which one you’re going to. What its hours are. When you’re going, tomorrow. Then tomorrow you can actually do the thing. What you don’t do, lad, is grit your teeth and say “I WILL run at that hurdle! I WILL!” You’ve got all the time in the world, and none at all, and none of it matters in the slightest. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. Not really. Relax.

The very most helpful practice text for me is my own goddamn blog. I have been thinking the same goddamn thoughts for twenty years. Probably forty, but the blog doesn’t go back that far.

One New Thing

 Oh, dear, I am grieving: I am too old for this, and this is exactly where I have placed myself. Courage, little man. There are yet tendrils, or at least a recrudescence of fruiting bodies. You are not dead yet. And the movement may – probaby will – prove salutary, one way or another. You’ve lain dreaming in the cold sand long enough. So I am going to require of you that you do one new thing today, go one place you have not gone before. Because not filling in your little check boxes is a problem, but it’s not the problem. Right? You know this. The problem is that you’re a timid child hovering at the edge of the playground. And you’ve got to stop letting everyone else draw the lines around your life. For one thing, nobody really cares. For another, insofar as they do, modeling liberation is really more important than administering opiates. And Mr Death is not as far away as you think he is. Yes, the time is out of joint. So what? It has been for hundreds of years, and it’s not going to be put right in the year of our Lord 2025. Get real.

Sacred Time

So making and observing a sacred calendar is – yet another piece of, say, re-enchanting the world. Although the point of sacred time basically is that it’s NOT under one’s control and it is NOT dictated by secular concerns, so – as with so much of this re-enchantment project – it’s sort of self-defeating. Though I may be able to build something around solstice and equinox, as the Wiccans do.

Still, if I’m rolling my own, the benefits won’t even really start to accrue until the second or third round. Hmm. I still haver about whether I shouldn’t just go to a church and let somebody else run all this stuff. Even if I invent something useful for myself, it will just be because I’m so extraordinarily fortunate in actually having time to think and read and plan and do.

But – yeah, higher time. I do have strong associations with the Halloween season – which is considerably after the equinox, actually – being the time when the barrier between worlds thins and becomes less opaque. I don’t know how much of that is the dislocation of the time change. Hmm. I just dunno.

Anyway, I’m going to track for a few days and see if I can actually practice anywhere near solar noon. An obstacle there is that when I get close to that time I (rightly) think that getting my lunch before it gets too late is a higher priority. Eating early is indeed something that I need to do. I’m going to try doing it before practice – see if that works

[ written in early November, obviously ]

Doing Something Different

Here’s a question, then. I do “pray” for help against gluttony on my morning and evening walks, but I don’t really feel I’m engaging in it in any serious way. Does that mean it’s idle? Or that it needs souping up somehow? I mean, I am keeping to regimen, barring a few cough drops here and there, and it’s working, so do I even need to?

Well, yes, I actually do, because I’m not really addressing the disconnective part of it well, and if I don’t do that, then – as I know well from experience – the pressure will slowly build until I bust loose. That’s how it’s always happened, and that’s why, despite all my successes, I find myself, six or seven years down the road, twenty-some pounds overweight and still engaged in this weary internecine war. What I want is not to weigh 167.3 pounds: what I want is peace. 

So in that regard – no, I really am not doing very well. Given the stresses of the lead-up to Martha’s second knee surgery, I can maybe count just keeping in regimen as a win: but it’s important not to slip into a purely materialist mindset and mistake the finger for the moon. What I really want is peace, fullness, connection. And that means Doing Something Different.

Realize that this is intimately related to these boxes on our daily checklists that we can never check off. The endless, tedious search for titillation is also what occupies so much time that theres “no time” to do the liturgy work or the 2 pp of Trafalgar. There’s lots of time. I am never ever going to “have more time” than I have now. 

I think perhaps what I need is not more resolve – and anyway, where does one purchase more resolve? At WinCo? – but more brainstorming, and possibly more help from actual other living beings. Rather than praying distantly to a probably nonexistent God, come up with alternate activities. The music is one. Reading a Big Book is two. I’ve actually made good use of both of these. Another one might be watching some netflix series with Martha. Yet another making something with my hands. I mean, I might just go to hobby shops, hardware stores, TAP plastics, and see what synapses fire.

The Lord's Prayer

I say the Lord’s Prayer over breakfast, as discreetly as I can, so that I will not be one of those who pray standing in the synagogue, or on the street corner (or on the War Department YouTube channel) in order to be seen of men. The wording I use is as in the King James' Matthew, though I say “trespasses” rather than “debts,” as the Catholics do. The power and glory bit at the end, which seems to be a late addition to the scripture, I leave to Hegseth and his ilk: they have their reward.

I always remember Lama Michael’s response to someone asking about celebrating Christian holidays when one is not a Christian: after one of his characteristic, unsettling pauses, he said carefully, “it’s not obvious to me that I am not a Christian.”

In fact, in this twilight of my life, as I give rein to my intuitional mind to play with prayer as it sees fit, it is obvious to me that I am a Christian, in several important senses. There has never been a teaching I responded to more immediately and viscerally than the Sermon on the Mount.

The Dalai Lama once said that you should practice in the religious tradition you grew up in, if you can, which is good sense: it will be adapted to your sensibilities and your culture in ways that no alien tradition will be able to match. I used to mull that over, and conclude that I was someone who grew up in a Christian culture who could not practice in it, because of its insistence on endorsing propositions about God that seem to me to be inescapably self-contradictory, and clearly wrong. But of course I didn’t grow up Christian, or only Christian. I grew up atheist and aggressively, reductively materialist, as well. (My mother was some sort of faint Christian who didn’t choose to challenge my father’s atheism: I often wonder now what her interior religious life was like. I will never know.) My father’s morality is entirely Christian, though, like many atheists, he fondly believes that he thought it all up rationally.

And then Buddhism has been an equally deep influence: if it came later, it was also the context of almost all my structured spiritual practice, and my most influential teachers. I have fallen gradually back into praying, before meditation, with the full Buddhist prayers, together with their references to enlightenment and reincarnation: using my own tailored versions felt increasingly artificial and stupid – like correcting someone’s grammar when they’re making a passionate declaration of love. There are times when being correct is not being right.

So I have either become one of those woolly-headed vague spiritual types that I used to to view with such contempt: or else I’ve simply realized that I come from a thoroughly decayed and fragmented background, that I’m the pup of an old bitch gone in the teeth, and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending I’m anything else. I’m not going to obtain authenticity by picking some old tradition and pretending I don’t know anything about any other. There is no way to back up, and anyway I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go on.

Putting Off Taking a Shower

I like taking showers. Sometimes very hot showers. Sometimes cold showers, that make me gasp and blow and remind me forcibly that I am alive. Sometimes showers are luxurious and sometimes they're brisk; sometimes I sing and other times I laugh at my own terribly clever jokes; at dire times of my life, the privacy afforded by streaming water was the only privacy I had, and I've been grateful to it ever since.

So it is particularly ludicrous that one of the things I have to force myself to do is -- take a shower. It's an expenditure of oomph, and oomph is a commodity I've always been a little short on. But I will put off taking a shower for hours, or even days, as if I dreaded them.

What is that thing? That resistance? In Iain McGilchrist's terms -- which are the most meaningful I've encountered for understanding this sort of thing -- it's the usurpation of the left brain. I'm engaged in something the left brain has control of: scrolling in Facebook, or solving a Rubik's cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the left brain is stubbornly clinging to power, like an elderly blowhard senator, well into his dotage, who absolutely will not yield the floor. Embarrassing for all concerned, and no good to man or beast, but by God it's got motor control and it intends to keep it.

And that affliction, of the left brain refusing to yield, is what mindfulness meditation addresses, and which for me very little else ever does. Sitting shamatha is -- especially in the early phases of a sit, when meditation is, as a newbie would view it, "not working" -- a hissing and spitting cat fight. The left brain makes bid after bid at seizing motor control, and the right brain does nothing more complicated than saying "No. You have to wait." Tantrum after tantrum, wheedle after wheedle, ingenious excuse after ingenious excuse. You just practice saying, "No, You have to wait."

The right brain is, actually, and properly, the master. It is in every sense prior. But we are in a culture that has forgotten that: which cultivates, pampers, and indulges the left brain no matter what it's set its heart on. We've forgotten that solving problems is useless -- far worse than useless, positively ruinous -- if the problems are the wrong ones. The one thing the left brain cannot do is step back and say, "is this even the right problem?"