“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, April 16, 2015

It's Not a Sport

"The basic point of mindfulness is to be completely, totally in touch with what happens in your body and the environment around you. You are not reduced to an inanimate clod of earth while you are meditating. You may feel your pulse or your heartbeat. You feel your breathing. You hear sounds and see sights. You feel vividly that you are alive." --Trungpa Rinpoche

That's it. I'm afraid, with full respect to David Lynch, I never could get behind transcendental meditation, which when you get over the fanciness of using a mantra, is basically replacing one thought with another. No wonder it's so soothing.

The TM approach implies there's something wrong with (that one) thought. That feeling of wrong just is samsara, precisely.

What's wrong with a thought--any thought? Just let it be naked. That's what I'm talkin about.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lots of resonance here. More and more, as I get into this Dark Object-Oriented Ecology and compare it to what has been the usual way of thinking (about pretty much anything) up till now, I get the sense that about 70% of our problems and misery are generated by the choice to avoid uncomfortable things. The rest just go along with existence, but I reckon we could probably reduce human misery by 70% if we just stopped loathing the...well, the loathsome, I guess...by means of some sort of reverse social engineering.

Great quote from the first "Weeping Angels" Doctor Who episode (the one with Sally Sparrow): "Sad IS happy, for deep people."

Hold the anti-hippie missiles, but also try listening deeply to a song called "Mountains of the Moon" by the Grateful Dead. The live versions are generally better than the album one, and you can hear it for free on archive.org (they only played it in 1969...the year of my birth, and of the moon walk). It's soft, dark, beautiful folk that evokes a sort of "evening of existence" melancholic joy.

Anonymous said...

Lots of resonance here. More and more, as I get into this Dark Object-Oriented Ecology and compare it to what has been the usual way of thinking (about pretty much anything) up till now, I get the sense that about 70% of our problems and misery are generated by the choice to avoid uncomfortable things. The rest just go along with existence, but I reckon we could probably reduce human misery by 70% if we just stopped loathing the...well, the loathsome, I guess...by means of some sort of reverse social engineering.

Great quote from the first "Weeping Angels" Doctor Who episode (the one with Sally Sparrow): "Sad IS happy, for deep people."

Hold the anti-hippie missiles, but also try listening deeply to a song called "Mountains of the Moon" by the Grateful Dead. The live versions are generally better than the album one, and you can hear it for free on archive.org (they only played it in 1969...the year of my birth, and of the moon walk). It's soft, dark, beautiful folk that evokes a sort of "evening of existence" melancholic joy.