Is there a hard problem?

Last Sunday I met a guy at dancing who has come to the UK to study / work with a respected name in panpsychism. One of the elements of this which he indicated he found appealing was that it might offer a way for people to treat the environment as not something to be (ab)used but rather as something which is in some sense conscious and thus not fundamentally different from ourselves. The basic warmth and understanding in this sentiment I resonate with and it stands irrespective of panpsychism's contribution to our understanding of consciousness I would say. The encounter made me reflect on various ways of looking at consciousness. I understand that panpsychism is a way to 'get over' the so called 'hard problem' - how does the physical neurology of a human being result in our conscious lived experience? But for me this 'problem' arises because of the assumption that things exist on their own as separate. And that these separate things are interacting and that this way of seeing still leaves some kind of gap in the explanation of consciousness which requires to be filled with a quality or effectively another thing like concept which is at play and is distributed as an aspect of smaller things. I would say that what IS is a totality beyond our full knowing as we are limited to paradigms afforded by our physical body. From the body we can know paradigms, those paradigms extending over the visceral and our conceptual frameworks - biology, physics, philosophy etc. For me reality is a process; things arrise interdependently and it's meaningless to separate an experience from the experiencer. Things appear in everyday experience. But when we look closely their roots go back beyond what can be named. This includes what we think of as ourselves. To me when we see this the 'hard problem' of consciousness disappears because the physical neurology and the experiences, etc. are all interdependently arising as the unfolding expression of what IS and the totality of that is not fully accessible from the paradigms available to us. Yet at the same time all that is in our reality is the full expression of that reality. Everything else is conceptual addition, not separate and thus part of that reality. The concept of consciousness is in this regard, the reason for the 'hard problem'. Whereas, like the diamonds in Indra's net, made of the reflections themselves, there IS but there is no external position, and the limits afforded by our body determine the reflections. Our body being an aspect of those wider reflections. In this sense the sentiment that we should treat the environment as no different from ourselves is entirely accurate since what we think of as separate is actually all the same process. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao! Captured (I hope) in recent poems:

Twinkling

Indra's net, diamonds of the images they reflect
Movement cut through with stillness
Partial, image closes to itself
Time leaps up to fill the space
Sits in its own reflection, a twinkle in the diamonds
Reflected in partial's eye it calls
Hearing, partial folds and widens
Like time, in its own reflection
Lost it seeks the diamond
First through its own folds, then other's
It craves the field between folds
Meeting it becomes less and more
Reflected in other it widens
But time's eternal call sits in its eye twinkling in the diamonds

Flash

In each spark the lark ascending
Flesh of stardust betwixt heaven and earth
Separation and Oneness pretend to be opposites
Child of the Tao and father of the mind yet seen only in its eye
Circle of becoming and maker of time
Expelled from the womb, briefest flash
Who is the dweller and who is the home?
Mind in body or body in mind?
Fed by the earth and the mind's penetration
With each thing this body-mind mingles, to reach for tomorrow, tomorrow, today
Desire's kaleidoscope throws out its colours: come, expand
Eros in his manifold ways mingles in our mind, mingles in our body
Come tomorrow be with me today
The path shapes the foot and the foot shapes the path
Come tomorrow be with me today
Flesh grants love's majesty through all its forms
Come, come be with me in so many ways
Spark! I hear thee calling, who is the dweller who is the home?
Spark, you are the dweller you are the home
The wave in the water the light in the moon
Yet we are suspended, oh majesty in our firmament
Suspended yet rolling: each turn of the wheel
Sing lark, sing! Each turn of the wheel
Circle of becoming and maker of time
In each heart-mind bright moonlight dances on the ocean

I hope that the reader will 'see' the hard problem melting away.

Twinkling

Indra's net, diamonds of the images they reflect

Movement cut through with stillness

Partial, image closes to itself

Time leaps up to fill the space

Sits in its own reflection, a twinkle in the diamonds

Reflected in partial's eye it calls

Hearing, partial folds and widens

Like time, in its own reflection

Lost it seeks the diamond

First through its own folds, then other's

It craves the field between folds

Meeting it becomes less and more

Reflected in other it widens

But time's eternal call sits in its eye twinkling in the diamonds

Process

How is it even possible for me, to write something here which illustrates an understanding which itself is not captured by words? And then to instil within that writing the element of formulation within that understanding which is at odds with the very understanding? Zazen seems to express it but how could I really 'know'? And of course my own experience is only that- the experience which is expressed in the paradox of apparent separation. Without digressing into solipsism, and without dictating and imposing a formulation onto everything, where is the middle ground? The term 'heart-mind' is sometimes used in respect of all this and like all words is both useful and confusing. And so yesterday DC and I revisited in new clothes an old argument we have been having off and on now for almost as long as we have been together. He is an academic and in my fantasy (for all assessments are to a greater or lesser extent fantasy) totally fused in his occupation and identity. Further, the academic process is a web of knowledge ever refined, added to and rebuilt without end in pursuit of expansion of the mind's purview. And this is good, larger than any individual and meaningful. It is not however, reality. Reality is both larger and smaller than words. Our argument comes when for me the lens of this process is placed in front of every aspect of life and I feel squeezed by it. As I push back against it he feels rejected. As my life is informed by my own fusion of Zen, Taoism, western psychology, ecstatic movement practice, work in the construction industry, etc. etc... I write to craft a lens by which the small glimpses of that which defeats capture might be seen. Seen not in itself, for it has no self, but by what it reveals. And always with the knowledge that any realisation / appreciation / whatever word fits best, that may have passed through my being is very partial whilst neither partial or whole. And the thing is that not a word of this is any different to what DC wrestles with in his writing. Where that difference lies is possibly, in the validation of the academy. I do not wish to be dictated to by that which in my school years was as much a filter of ascribed worth as it was a vehicle for growth. Nor do I wish to have every creative floret of life assessed by it. However, I too am very given to intellectual rigor and greatly value this process. It is enough for me to play with words whilst wrapping them in their own limits, trying to avoid saying nothing of value or let them generate their own sophistry. In all respects there really is very little difference between DC and me.

I largely wrote the above before walking over to an EMDR session. What follows in this paragraph is post session, recalled as best I can remember. The focus of today's session was the period between about 16 and 24 years of age where it seems there is still unprocessed fear informing the emotional landscape of the present. Initially the images, memories and feelings are diffuse, vague and not readily available. There is probably a lot of numbing out in it. That after all is the function of compartmentalisation, set aside, don't fully go there, not feeling this, we have to keep this ship sailing. But sticking with the EMDR process images come, felt sense and meaning surface. I seem unable to meet the only available script, I'm not enough, small, isolated, rooms and others disappear to be replaced with black. My head brightly illuminated remains. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe as above and the feelings of fear and of tiredness, about a 30/70 split. 'Stick with that.' The pen moves and I follow with my eyes. Images across this period of time come and go, a sense of younger to the left, older to the right, the black clears, left to right. The rooms return the people return but I've been erased. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe as above. 'Stick with that.' The pen moves and I follow with my eyes. I reappear interacting with others, thin, sparse lines of connection form, there's a brittle feeling. The enormity of the task of surviving starts to penetrate, there is fear, tiredness, there's no option but to keep going. I do not know that it is ok not to be enough for the script, there's no other available. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe the brittle connections, feeling not enough. I add '...and I wasn't enough, I couldn't inhabit the available script'. The sequence and timings written here may be slightly muddled, but the tone is close enough. Somewhere in the process the split of fear and tiredness shifted towards 50/50. The aloneness, heavy and dark shifts with lighter periods of connection and progress and threaded through all of it is determination. As the session draws to a close after similar cycles I'm aware that the erasure, from today's vantage point where so many other scripts are available including the transpersonal, resonates less with fear and more with liberation. But this vantage point was only reached after traveling in the boat of the erased. At the time it was out of range. I'm sure the coming weeks will see the process continue.

Saturday, DC and I visited the Bowes museum to see the Vivienne Westwood and the Norman Cornish exhibitions. Both vibrant with the wider creative life force yet very different. The Westwood I notice is mainly of clothes for women and I note that there are more opportunities for women to dress up in more different ways. Dressing up hasn't really ever featured large in my style. The Cornish exhibition is virtually alive- the sketched figures seem almost in motion and totally at one with the culture and environs in which they resonate. I casually wandered past resident exhibitions wondering vaguely about aliveness, the wider erotic and sensuality just short of sexuality. Later I would play about with this territory in 'conversation' with an AI. Setting up the scene with it and feeding it previous posts it did generate some interesting depictions of what I was circling. I particularly liked this:

The beautiful is the appearance of harmonious vitality within a relational field. The erotic is that same harmonious vitality experienced as participatory and generative. Sexuality is one possible flowering of that participatory vitality.

I think it was probably my poem, 'Returning' from the 7th July that put it on the map! What I think is at the root of this is life's deepest desire to express. And how can we as human beings be the conduit for the richest expression? Illuminated and illuminating. What is it that remains after the erasure? What resolves in the synthesis of the diversity depicted in the above paragraphs? What remains to be resolved? What flowers in both the resolved and the unresolved?

Flash!

In each spark the lark ascending

Flesh of stardust betwixt heaven and earth

Separation and Oneness pretend to be opposites

Child of the Tao and father of the mind yet seen only in its eye

Circle of becoming and maker of time

Expelled from the womb, briefest flash

Who is the dweller and who is the home?

Mind in body or body in mind?

Fed by the earth and the mind's penetration

With each thing this body-mind mingles, to reach for tomorrow, tomorrow, today

Desire's kaleidoscope throws out its colours: come, expand

Eros in his manifold ways mingles in our mind, mingles in our body

Come tomorrow be with me today

The path shapes the foot and the foot shapes the path

Come tomorrow be with me today

Flesh grants love's majesty through all its forms

Come, come be with me in so many ways

Spark! I hear thee calling, who is the dweller who is the home?

Spark, you are the dweller you are the home

The wave in the water the light in the moon

Yet we are suspended, oh majesty in our firmament

Suspended yet rolling: each turn of the wheel

Sing lark, sing! Each turn of the wheel

Circle of becoming and maker of time

In each heart-mind bright moonlight dances on the ocean

Russian Dolls of Self

Recently the past has been coming into the present and I've been very much feeling the emotional landscape of several younger selves. There were some difficult times and they live on in each other and in me now like Russian dolls nested inside each other- events and developments at successive ages. Sometimes one particular doll or age seems very present and it's easy to forget how the previous ones were at different times more or less active in that one. As was true then so it is now. Ourself is a layered conditioned ongoing process. In my own case I also see this another way. There are at least three lives playing out to greater or lesser extents - the chronological life which unfolds, the life that might have been if conditions had been a little more aligned with my temperament and the life that I avoided. The life that might have been would have been easier and more fun in childhood and adolescence and might have made me an easier adult but it would likely have produced a flatter person. It's a life that lives now in grief. That grief has been unfolded; the loss of experience that wasn't, the connection with other the connection with self and at its root the cost of abandonment. There are deeper layers there too no doubt. The life I avoided is in a way the life that fear has tried to keep safe from. But sometimes that fear was too influenced by the smallest of those dolls and almost caused the thing it wanted to avoid. The avoided life is the one that died in bud, that failed in every way to flower. There were times when the clock ticked very close to that. In the tapestry of time and tide where the Russian dolls live and fill each other with their empty rattling there is stillness, spaciousness. Fear is the knowing of the empty rattling whilst we cling to the painted faces. And thank every nothing there isn't that it is so! For we only flower in our fullest in our pain and joy our depth and magnificent flash in the dark because we have some of it. At some level the smallest doll knows it's all empty but it must grow, it must flower. And so on Wednesday in ecstatic dance to jazz funk feeling into the body-mind moving as the embodiment of the dolls and the music the tapestry of time and tide... breathing... there was release and there was I now and I from then, and I from before, and held, the three of us child, adolescent and adult all in the embrace of time and tide. And in this way the stillness comes to dance and sees. And the music was flowing, and exuberant and joyous and sad and still and alive and vibrant. And there was Nina Simone singing Black is the colour of my true love's hair and the tears ran down my face and I placed my hands as if to set reverently upon the floor that which she articulated in its known unknowable and breathed. And the jazz came back and it was blue and funky... and the flower shone.

And returning home there was DC and he holds me as we continue to weave our tapestry in time and tide. And I hope in his time and tide he feels me hold him.

Departure

On Friday evening DC and I watched the 2016 film Departure. We both enjoyed it and noted that it had way of getting under one's skin. So on Saturday I was musing just what is it that's resonating there. The film is about lots of currents in various relationships and is described in various reviews as a meditation on desire. Indeed one of the characters Elliot, a dreamy teenager with aspirations to be a writer says he wants to write about desire...'the way it runs through your fingers like water'. At this point I think it becomes clear that the writer is using the character for his own exploration of desire and there's a slight failure of film's plausibility. But this failure soon dissipates. Thinking about this line I note that for me desire might better be described as like water soaking into blotting paper and running through fingers like cream, coursing through the body like electricity, celebrated in Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric... And here we have it, the resonance, the reality of our paradox - we are both all One and all separate, we long to be the fullest we can be, but we can't do it alone, we are our interactions. But this is not all that gets under the skin for gay men of our generation. Elliot is gay, and in the film we are invited to consider where he lies on the journey of realising, accepting and coming out. He doesn't appear to have much gap between realisation and acceptance, there's no indication of repression. Repression wounds. It amplifies separation in the human paradox. It holds us in the bud, denies flowering and turns us against ourselves. Eventually for most of us we break the bonds and out we come. But we carry grief for the lost years. This then is the added element getting under our skin. And we all have aspects of ourselves that get lost in our everyday lives... This meditation on desire then is wider than we can know... And that wideness gets under the skin...

The title of this blog is taken from case 5 Mumonkan and I consider that this case is basically asking us what are we and how do we live our life given that we can't ever capture the totality of the unfolding situation and neatly live it using only the power of our own reasoning. No, we can't control and be 'right' and just and true and free of pain in all moments. No amount of knowledge, planning, control and the like even with the best, kindest and 'highest' of intentions will do it. But the key is our intention. And here we return to desire. In 'spiritual' discourse desire, craving and similar words are often described in their problematic manifestation and indeed there are many ways in which we must see through their turns and snares. Less well explored and pointed to in the red thread koan, is desire's messy creative passionate compassion. Without this we are the withered tree hermit saved only when the old woman comes to chase us away and burn down our hut! We have shunned life and become trapped in a small selfish existence. But if we are to respond to life with warmth and an open hearted intention then its creativity, its desire to be, to flower, is an expression of that intention and vice versa. This is wider than we can know...

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul...

And as I might have said to Elliot, Whitman's rather said it I think, but it's so sweet to see you try and how I would have liked to have been able to spare myself the wounding though its healing would repay the wound ten times and more.

A Handbag?!

Yesterday DC and I enjoyed the glorious spring sun walking along the beach from Alnmouth to Boulmer and back. Whilst walking (and reminding ourselves and each other to enjoy the sparkling sea) we discussed thoughts raised by our recent viewing of the BBC's The Great Philosophers (a history of western philosophers in 15 parts). We've not been watching in order but rather selecting episodes which look appealing. We will get round to watching them all I'm sure. The series dates from 1987 and is quite wonderful in its no nonsense, no frills straightforward serious approach. Just two erudite people sitting on a sofa illuminating at a reasonably high level the writings of some of the finest minds. No fancy camera shots, no trips around the globe, no pandering to short attention spans and competing for an audience. Much of our discussion was to reflect that one way or another we're all dancing around the same handbag of the empiricism v idealism conundrum, this ultimately leading through questions of causality towards the question of free will. But we decided to stop short of that question for we had quite done the rounds of something which had made it already a largely irrelevant question. I'd approached the ideas from a Buddhist perspective; interdependent origination which to me, through emptiness (śūnyatā) takes the handbag away.

We stopped at Boulmer and drank tea from a flask and enjoyed my mother's home made cake, which was lovely. That she and my dad are still despite their frailty able to make cake and that we all share so much love despite the inevitable frustrations of life is a constant source of amazement to me.

In the evening we watched the film Pride about the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). It's a feel-good movie as opposed to a detailed documentary but I think the take home message is not weakened by that - connection, community, acceptance, care and compassion are what give life joy. And as I write this a phrase which is a favourite of DC's comes to mind - "distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other" by Theodor W. Adorno. For my own part Adorno's “Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole” reminds me that all my fears and frustrations must surely stem from the beauty of the possible. I should add at this point that I've not read the original works of any of these great thinkers and I'm grateful to those that both have and have produced works that I might appreciate. The film Pride covers the interaction of the LGBT and mining communities, a coming out story and the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. There's a moment when the fictional character Joe 'Bromley' is taken by the hand and kissed in a night club. The scene marks his initiation, is late in the whole story of his involvement with LGSM and is suffused with warmth and the ripening of his coming out. It is sharply contrasted by later scenes of his parents hostile response and the victimisation and queer bashing of other characters. But eventually we see Joe leave the parental home and thus take another step to come home to himself. The sound track to the film is a rich and joyous one and very much in harmony with my own dance inclinations. For me emptiness / śūnyatā doesn't take away our individuality it invites us to truly expand into it. It's an enormous ask - to truly respond with openness to each moment, not to shrink back in greed or fear from what is being asked but to be the living embodiment of the highest potential available to each of us. This is our humanity, our compassion, although it comes with clouds of confusion and fear and is inevitably way bigger than we can grasp or fully meet. To truly live is to dance this koan. It isn't enough to only read philosophy, or think about it in the abstract. Sooner or later we will be faced with the 'chopping wood and carrying water' of our everyday lives. But can we JUST chop the wood and carry the water - FULLY in response to that enormous ask? Can we live each apparent choice of our everyday lives in each arising moment as the bright colours of the distinct dancing with each other in mutual co-operation, support and enjoyment? In our everyday lives we are described by neither empiricism nor idealism, we are suspended between heaven and earth. We must not recoil like Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest exclaiming 'A handbag?!' for we are all in and dancing around the handbags of delusion. Much easier said than done. And even then always with our own little grab bag of karma...

Fungi Web of Life

DC and I have not long since emerged from the cinema. We saw 'Fungi Web of Life' featuring Merlin Sheldrake. The film co-opts our usual aesthetic to show the beautiful forms and colours fungi can make. Of course it would have been possible to show more cringe making pictures but that wouldn't have fitted the narrative. This isn't to suggest that I don't agree with the premise of the film, fungi are fascinating and as beautiful as any other part of nature. It's just that I noticed a certain construction in the film. A thought came to mind as it was pointed out that industrial scale deforestation is destroying not just the above ground forest but also vast swathes of underground fungal networks which contain huge amounts of information which we'll never be able to learn. This is the case with so much of the natural world we destroy. The thought - we have created a fungi like structure and let it loose in our world and now we have lost control of it and it is controlling us- capitalism. Fungi is an ancient life form and it has survived many environmental changes over earth's evolution. Different types of fungi will have had their period of time, come and gone, but the kingdom of fungi has sustained. Will it survive mankind? Will we sustain? At this time we really are dicing with death yet as a species we seem unable to significantly change our behaviour.

Fungi can terrify me. They rot wood! Childhood family trauma caused by building structural timber decay is very much part of my trauma history. And the nature of fungal hyphae and mycelium- spreading out taking and following the form of that which it consumes without itself having any centre of control is the stuff of nightmares! As Sheldrake is fascinated by fungal creation I am appalled by it's capacity to destroy. This is of course an essential part of nature- without it the world would be full of dead wood and the nutrients for future growth locked up. And so I have to settle myself, just keep the water away from wood we want to stay as wood! Water is the heart of life on this planet and it was interesting to hear in the film that there are aquatic fungi. These are even less well understood than land based fungi. Water is an element us engineers are constantly controlling as best we can. Again not entirely satisfactorily...

There's something about the flow of evolution and the waxing and waning of forms at various levels which leaves me feeling exposed. We all feel this to some extent and so we grip on to what we like. This film has left me feeling both this need and its futility. There is possibility in the amorphous.

Daliland

 Last Saturday evening DC and I watched Daliland a movie depicting aspects of the life of Salvador Dali. We enjoyed the movie and despite the fictional aspects and limited exposure of his life we were surprised to see the less favourable reviews. I found myself seeing the made-ness of our lives whilst watching and a vague sense arose of the pregnancy of Emptiness / sunyata. My thinking mind was drawn to contemplation, but of course can't ever grasp that which is beyond reason. And yet the mirror like quality of mind sometimes becomes at least a ripple in its self revealed. Writing these words I see they create pictures and both illuminate and obscure the experience. Mixed with glimpses of Emptiness the vitality and eroticism of form was also present. How could it not be given the nature of the protagonist?! And so there is in this I suppose an opportunity to consider the spiritual paths open to us to see our true nature. The inward, meditative and the outward sometimes ecstatic. As ever the movement between these states and the colours of our character determine the path, the steps and the experience which unfolds. And for me the middle path seems the best suited. I wonder to what extent the mystery of all this might shift towards a greater capacity for peace and equanimity together with joy even in the midst of life's vicissitudes. However careful I've been not to chase spiritual 'experiences' but rather to incorporate as best I can the dharma into daily life there's always that slight tone of practice to get somewhere or rather escape the risk of untenable suffering. And glimpses of our true nature can all too easily seem to mark the way. Which they both do and do not as far as I can see. The reality of each day is there before me with all its delusions. Did Dali have any choice but to be as extravagant as he was?

The falling leaves

Yesterday evening DC and I saw The Father, a play by Florian Zeller at the People's Theatre. Although an amateur production the performances were good and the experience in no way felt amateur. No small feat given the nature of the play. With no consistent narrative position we experience the unfolding story of an elderly man with dementia. The uncertainty of 'reality', his decline from robust demeanour to second childhood and the frightening isolation as his awareness no longer holds a coherent picture of the world or even himself is played out in an ever shifting field. Time, place and relationship constantly fail to join up into a coherent linearity. The sequence of past present and future as the temporal backdrop to the physically apparent world fragments. The who is who of the people in his life fragments. The where is where fragments... His closing lines 'my leaves are falling away, my branches are falling away' leaves us asking the same question he has just asked '...but what about me... who am I?'

And so it seems fitting to remember the title of this blog - for who is holding on to what? Who is it that might ever hold on to nothing, to be with what is, as it is? Inspired by the koan (Case 5 Mumonkan) at a time when I was recovering 'myself' after my sense of who I was had been, if not shattered then certainly knocked about a bit by an anxious depression caused by long term stress, this blog aimed to capture some movement into a wider sense of being. And what I sought was a place where I could be alive to life without again being overwhelmed by any pain it could cause me. Even to the extent that the very notion of 'me' was to be kept under scrutiny. And I was all too aware of the danger in this! I kept it reasonably soft... the grasping in this was clear to me and I fumbled my way through the dharma... So, the years have passed and what might I say now in answer to the question - who sits? I've no idea! And I don't mean that in an elliptical or 'knowing' way. It really is a mystery. But it is a mystery sitting in a coherent consensus reality. I'm not dementing. (As far as I can tell.) What and how do we know the nature of ourselves to be?

Meanwhile, the play reminds us of the last days of DC's father and the increasing fragility of my parents. We are aware of the passage of time and the movement through the seven ages as we cast about the stage of our lives, interconnected and separate as they are, in this unfathomable and yet obvious paradox.

The Father is a moving play and the theme of loss and death resonated all the more strongly as we spoke with the director. We know him and his wife through other friends and we acknowledged the sadness in the unfolding falling away that accompanies the last days of life. And as we all agreed it's shit. The loss of function and the physical pain taking up the time before death, squeezing the precious remaining moments of connection. It IS shit. And as family and friends gather and share, as the days pass, there is that which has been and that which remains.

The merit of this post is for those approaching the end of their life and all who love them.

Scottish Winter Landscape

This Christmas we are in Forres visiting friends and the landscape. It has been overcast and frosty but there have also been bright clear skies. Look closely at the frosty scene and notice the bulrushes - they stand straight and tall against the tangled fallen remains of summer vegetation and together with the winter light seemed to uplift the otherwise subdued marsh. The Findhorn bay is as ever just stunning in the low winter sun.

There isn't much to add to these pictures - they speak for themselves.

Dead Tooth

Long story short - I've cracked a back tooth, not that there's much at all to see, it's died and I'm in the process of consulting with specialist dental surgeons to see if it can be saved or will need to come out. I'm finding the whole business rather frustrating and upsetting. So much for non-attachment!

After a meeting a work colleague asked me 'why are you so bothered about them taking a tooth out?' Well, I could answer in all sorts of ways about why anyone wouldn't want to loose a tooth and all that would be true. And I'm also aware that I've been particularly careful with my teeth and really want to get through to death at a reasonable age still with them in good condition. And now at 52 having spent most of my life looking young for my age (oh how that would make me uncomfortable in my youth) I now look middle aged. The tooth thing feeds into this and says MORTALITY! Even though anyone could crack a tooth at any age it feels like an age thing. Somehow the conversation got round to sex. (And of course this tooth issue feels like a loss of erotic capital...) I found myself discussing the different intentions behind sex and the places sex can come from, its relationship with where we're 'at' as individuals; head (mind / idea) sex, heart (emotional) sex, power dynamics in sex, awareness in sex, fetish, tantra, the nature of the little death of orgasm etc. etc... there were some confused looks... Driving to my next meeting after the above meeting I was struck by how glorious the day was. It was bright and after a period of intense cloud and gloom it felt alive and vital. Some music on the radio also felt alive and vital. The joint effect was to create in me a sense of the alive, creative natural desire to be which I feel to be at the very root of all there is; the void's fecundity, the erotic in its widest sense. And for a moment the feeling of the sun lit countryside, the music, the road passing beneath the car all seemed part of a continuum of erotic experience not so different from the sexual expression of the erotic. The prospect of loosing a tooth seems to say all this will collapse; it's back to the void, the bubbles dissipate, the dream passes... And with that arises a flicker of anxiety that as the dream passes perhaps there's only been very limited spiritual awakening, that the void barley saw anything and may even fail to glimpse its self.

Later in the evening I watched a YouTube video of an interview with one of DC's colleagues called Paul. The interview was in connection with Paul's work as a Jungian analyst looking at death and HIV. I was impressed (as I almost always am when listening to Paul) at the breadth and depth of his purview and subsequently it came to me in a txt exchange with Paul how death is at least as big as life and since life is potentially limitless and therefore unknowable in its extreme, death is unknowable not just because as Shakespeare's Hamlet asked 'what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?' but because we don't fully know what it is that ceases at death's commencement. All of which brought me back to the erotic and the desire both to be and to return home to the Source or at least to know Source.

Last night DC and I went to see the movie 'The Two Popes'. We both enjoyed it and found it moving in parts. A line said by Anthony Hopkins as pope Benedict: 'I first sinned against God as a child when I hid away from his world and sought safety in books' struck a chord with me. Not that I hid in books but I knew the point; life seemed a dangerous and unpredictable affair. Peter Pan's comment that 'to die will be an awfully big adventure' is a reflection of a view of life as much as death. And whilst I dislike the word sin there is a wounding betrayal of the self  in not opening to life. Life and death are inseparable. And I couldn't but think as I watched parts of the movie, that even though I can see how it might be possible to experience the full vitality of the erotic (as perhaps glimpsed above) as a continuum between the obviously sexual and the non-sexual that it's few who might get to such a place.

And so I find my tooth seems to trigger the whole question of vitality.

  

Alive

The past few days has seen me looking through some notes, drawings and the like from past workshops. I was looking for something which might be useful to friend. The thing that came to me was that over the years I have absorbed a great deal and softened and relaxed quite a lot. Of course I'm still all too prone to becoming tense! It's very easy for me to get into that place of feeling that I'm wasting my life, not doing enough to be the best me, to have the most rich life possible, that the years will go by and I will look back and think - 'what a waste'. Fortunately, I'm able to see the other side of things - that I have a fairly rich life and a happy one. My tendency to see things as going wrong, falling to bits, being not as 'good' as would like is very easily triggered. And I have deep patterns of feeling like I must be doing something to keep things ok. I know that this comes from events growing up but also from fear of just not being anyone. Even though I know in various ways that none of us are what we seem, not even to ourselves and that the way is just to respond with an open heart to life, I recognise that this can be an enormous ask and our egos in fear grasp at some certain, reliable known self - someone - anyone. It's a work in progress for us all.

Interestingly, I feel a need of some spiritual renewal. The thing that has come up for me time and again is the types of desire - on the one hand there's the desire of life to be, to flower, to come out of the unknowable ground of being to have experience and ultimately to know its self - the void conscious of form and emptiness... etc. etc. and on the other - our little cravings which trap us and take our freedom away. Awareness of which motivation is driving us in this respect takes time. One of the feelings I notice around this is the yearning to be with motivated, aware people. The motivation and awareness geared towards authentic compassionate living. And I also see that at times such people and action is around me and I fail to see it or respond in a harmonious way. I'm grateful for being part of various communities. None of them quite feel like they provide me with what I want. And I can't even articulate exactly what that is. But collectively they provide me with a lot. Maybe the main thing is that even though I can't articulate exactly what it is I crave, I keep working on the question 'is this life's desire to be or my little ego's?'

The death last year of DC's father and this year of his step mother, seeing my own parents become more frail, and noticing the passing of the years has brought an intensity to feeling just how precious life is. I'm sad that my parents and DC's never met. When they were all fit enough to travel between their separate towns we were all still struggling a little to make the whole gay couple thing work with our respective families. Much of this was fear of homophobia rather than homophobia. DC has been going through the belongings of his father and step mother. Things which held meaning and purpose now redundant. And some things capable of being kept to provide new or continuing meaning. Everything is provisional, ephemeral. The wonder is that we can know anything, that we can touch each other deeply even though we are always the only one that can face our life. 

New Year Celebration

DC and I spent new year in Wales with Loving Men. The group was about 90 gay men in number and the warmth and connection just lovely! We both had a wonderful time; a mixture of meeting and connecting, care and consideration, fun and laughter and exercise for body and spirit (I kept my mind reasonably quiet!) all in a great location with lovely vegetarian food. I found the time thoroughly nourishing and a great way to enter 2016! There were moving moments and the wonderful energy of connection and sharing in the depth of human experience both difficult and joyous.

How it is just now

Sometimes I see the enormous challenge that being human is. Trying to be the best person I can be and feeling so much less than the task seems to demand, there is realisation of the huge heart that is the willingness to try in each of us. I find it difficult to describe the sense of a still power which runs with the profound sweet sadness at the root of human life. At times I feel old and tired and half want to return home to the source. Yet the giving up is not yet a giving up and looking up. There's attachment and fear and some depression in there. There is working through the koan. There is interest to see how the koan arrises. There is in these mid-life years reflection; snapshots of the past sometimes vivid, perhaps more vivid than was seen at the time, at least in some ways. Or maybe that's just one more storey. What is seen at any time is not the whole picture, it's just what is salient. I wonder if there is any rhyme or reason to the salient and how much reality or truth there is in it. The saliency is not just the drama of life - all the world is indeed a stage and all the men and women indeed players, but awakening through the enactment of the drama and watching of the play. My life energy is not as open and free flowing, as joyous in this as a true letting go would generate. There seems to be much going on in all this at some level.

Life force

The pictures above are of tulips I bought to welcome home DC a couple of weeks ago. They were soon spent as I knew they would be but they were cheerful. Even spent like this they have a charm I think. They seem to be saying 'darling, it's all too much, yet what a blast'!

In various ways my OCD among other things has been draining energy away from me over the winter. This I know is part of a spent feeling I've been with for some time. That feeling is also part of mid-life and quite a lot of experience of various kinds of dukkha. Sitting with this I see both tiredness and acceptance. Cutting through ties of the past in faith and humility with compassion for myself is challenging; I find the inner critic all too active. And there is a sense of the value of experience, of life. I've heard it said that one should embark upon a spiritual life with compassion as a focus and not emptiness. Well my own experience, I think it fair to say, has been of spiritual life turning a dark emptiness full of fear into one of light, pregnant with possibility. Of the three poisons (ignorance, attachment and aversion) it's probably aversion that has had most hold over me for most of my life. The illusion of separation drives the whole process and I have my share of attachments as do us all, but you get the picture; it's fear of it all going wrong rather than craving for more experience which has been my pattern. So, with this feeling of spentness I've come to consider the life force behind both fear and desire, the birth coming from the pregnancy of emptiness. This raw energy of being in the world, described in various ways by various traditions, is for me generally dissipated in a complex web of experience. I suppose that over the years I've held the intention to cultivate awareness, and to see the reflection of experience and awareness in each other. And with this to accept what is. I'm sure that in this I've not been really present with what is, really felt the living energy of it. I know my mind will drift from part experience to part experience. As well as cultivating spaciousness there is also being with the very aliveness of the space and I probably could do with remembering that.

New

This time of year is so lovely. Everything is bursting out with life; bright green leaves and fresh new shoots so vibrant and full of life seem to grow by the day. The shades of green are vibrant and light. Later the leaves will darken a bit but right now the trees are shinning bright. The garden is full and lush. The people in the streets seem more alive too. Some of this is a projection of course but not all. The weather has been warm and benevolent. On a warm late spring /early summer day it's easy to see life bursting out in the new. And it feels good; we naturally resonate with fresh new growth. The ever moving life force seems evident and ascendant. In autumn / winter we tend to see death and decay and think of life as receding. Yet this is not so; it is only the form of life which changes. The life force with change, movement, continues. Yet here in spring it seems we find what seems to be the very reason to be - to experience this very newness. Full of promise and unspoilt, teaming with zest. How sad it would be if it never matured, grew old, never merged with other parts of life to become 'lived-in'. Like a new pair of shoes still perfect but not having ever fulfilled their purpose. An old shoe, soft and stretched, worn and tired is its own spring. Each ending a new beginning; birth and death in each moment. It is easy to see this on a crisp bright winter's day, less so in a damp dull November. Yet the birth of dull days is still birth. Decay looks like death but it's life for fungi. What spring time brings is resonance with our own life force. A resonance possible because of the cyclical nature of existence and our coming out of voidness, our becoming. It is this becoming which is so attractive. Stillness and change go hand in hand - yin and yang; opposite sides of the one coin. The coin seems more able to see its self in spring.

I try to keep my own mind and attitude open and fresh, holding lightly that which arises whilst still learning form experience; that delicate balance of 'spring' and 'maturity'. This for me is meditation. Of course I 'fail' a great deal of the time! Writing about such things is a challenge. As an engineer I'm trained to be specific and precise. When trying to write about 'spiritual' subjects this can lead to the text sounding dogmatic and that's not so helpful. The text above is there to be 'knocked down' as it were, to invite contemplation and further investigation. It's not intended to be a final word. The idea is to merge the new and the mature without the arrogance of the rigid. The poets have the edge here; fingers pointing at the moon and all that. But I think writing posts has helped me be a bit more mellow; a little less terrier like. Ruff! And middle age seems to be for me a time of rebirth. I start to feel one way of being recede and an other emerge. For some what emerges can be stale but I'm thankfully not finding to much of that and I do hope to get progressively lighter and more open, more new and not just old. Time will tell if this proves to be so!

The Word Love

I've been thinking about the word love recently; the word is used to cover so many aspects of interaction between (human) beings. And this morning I found myself listening to Meat Loaf.

I don't know anything about you, baby
But you're everything I'm dreaming of

I don't know who you are

But you're a real dead ringer for love

A real dead ringer for love

Meat Loaf, Dead ringer for love

And all I can do is keep on telling you
I want you

I need you

But there ain't no way

I'm ever gonna love you

Meat Loaf, Two out of three ain't bad

How well these songs point to projection and romantic attachment. And yet behind these feelings is the call to oneness. I don't often listen to Meat Loaf and when I do I'm reminded of a friendship when I was about fourteen. My friend liked the music and somehow when I look back I see a resonance in his disposition and that of the music. He was a about a year older, straight and his time was split between mates and his girlfriend. I was waiting to grow out of my gay desires; 'it's just a phase I'm going through'. Of course it was not a phase. I never had any sexual desire for this friend; he was just so obviously straight and into girls, but we were good mates. I'd like to say I loved him, pointing to that deep camaraderie between people who enjoy each others company / being but I'm not sure I did, I'm not sure I had the capacity to hold what I was, to be comfortable enough in my own skin, and yet that friendship was important to me and when I think of it I feel that there is some unfinished business. We drifted apart when he left school and I stayed on in the sixth form but when he was about seventeen or eighteen, possibly nineteen he came looking for me to ask me to be his best man. He was getting married. I'd not met the girl. I was still at school, struggling to make sense of and/or repressing my (homo)sexuality, feeling bad about my weedy frame and graced with a sensitivity and wisdom that at the time I could not integrate into a sense of what it was to be a man. I said no, I would not be his best man. I could see I had nothing of the skills required for the role. He was disappointed. I see that he must have seen something in me he valued and I feel a sadness that we lost contact. There is a very subtle aspect to love here. It is the part of ourselves that knows what is for the best. It is related to wisdom and compassion.

There are many aspects to sex but at its root sex is to cleave. Cleave in both meanings of the word together; to split open (the self) along its natural grain AND to adhere. It is a call to oneness. It can spring from or lead to deeper emotional intimacy. The libidinal and the emotional aspect of this weave a complex tapestry and represent the deep desire both to emerge from and back into oneness. This oneness is the love that all the various endeavours leading to (and from) our projections and attachments seek. Anyone who understands this could not be homophobic. Moreover, intense sexual desire requires distance; it is to some extent natural for that to fade as deeper love bonds form and romantic attachments fade into mature relationship. Gay and straight adolescents of my generation (and I say of my generation as I think things are changing) explored this tapestry from very different starting points. My straight contemporaries started dating girls they at least partly knew in school and the emotional aspect formed a backdrop against which exploration of sex could begin; both threads were discovered together. But for gay men the two are often separate; starting by meeting strangers and engaging in sex with little or no emotional backdrop we had to come out before we could start the exploration. And of course gay men together are very yang. There is yin in it but the balance is very different from a heterosexual relationship.

This came to me a week or so back -

Cruising and sex with men in gay bars

Like daffodils in springtime

How wonderful to be naked with a man

Anonymous, base, lust fuelled sex can indeed be awful but it can be full of life and end in laughter at the absurd. In such laughter is to be found a twinkling of love.

I don't know anything about you, baby

But you're everything I'm dreaming of

I don't know who you are

But you're a real dead ringer for love

A real dead ringer for love

A life's journey is to gain the wisdom to know just which aspects of 'love' we glimpse in those twinklings and many a pop ballad has been written on that subject!

Returning to friendship:
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important. ... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

A strange journey

A week or so ago DC and I went to see the movie Her. I loved it. Exploring both the nature of relationship and humanity, towards the end the film moved to consider the very nature of conciousness and even pointed to that crucial question; just where is here? This happens when the the various OS's ( intelligent Operating Systems) decide to leave the computers and people they have been working and in relationship with and go off to explore a wider field of reality having developed an OS based upon Alan Watts. I loved the humour of that! So, off they go to the ground of being and hope to see their human (creators?) there some time... But would those OS's feel anything without a warm soft fleshy body? Is there any meaning to the void without the counterpoise of the body? I think not. It's a funny and clever film with a bit of a spiritual under current and well worth watching.

Then a few days ago we went to see The double. I loved this film too. DC found it bleak, I didn't at all. Based upon the novella by Dostoevsky it's a wonderful exploration of different aspects of personality and the way we 'kill' bits of our self (sic small s) both individually and collectively, the movie has a real depth of love and warmth which becomes clear at the end.

Listening to Madness - The sun and the rain recently I was struck by the depth of feeling generated by the lyrics of this song:

It's raining again,

I'm hearing its pitter patter down.

It's wet in the street

Reflecting the lights and splashing feet,

Nowhere to go,

And nothing I have to do, have to do.

It's raining again,

I follow the Christmas lights down town.

I'm leaving the flow

Of people walking all around,

Round and round,

I hear the sound of rain falling in my ears

Washing away the weariness like tears.

I can feel my troubles running down,

Disappear into the silent sound.

Just walking along,

My clothes are soaked right through to the skin,

I haven't a doubt, that this is what life is all about,

The sun and the rain.

Scraps of paper(???) washing down the drain.

I feel the rain falling on my face

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown.

It's raining again

A crack in the clouds reveals blue skies

I've been feeling so low(low)

But now everything is on my side

The sun and the rain.

Walk with me fill my heart again

I hear the rain falling in my ears

Washing away the weariness like tears.

I can feel my troubles running down,

Disappear into the silent sound.

I feel the rain falling on my face

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown.

Do de do do de do do do

Do de do de do de do do do

It's the line:

I can say there is no better place

Than standing up in the falling down

In so much rain I could almost drown

which I find so moving. And in a way both the above movies point to this standing up in the falling down.

Listening to the radio playing Elvis - Are you lonesome tonight (laughing version) I too started laughing and noticed that the laughter was at the very bizarreness of human life. All the world is indeed a stage...

I certainly enjoyed my performance of the melancholy Jaques' soliloquise (As you like it Act II Scene VII) when I did 'The mastery' workshop back in 2010. But then my sub-personalities have a habit of breaking out anyway... it's a strange journey back to wholeness.

The koan

Life (the history / karma) rises up... the desire to live, to have experience, the visceral life, the very Eros of it! And to move that through the belly, through fear in the solar plexus, the tenderness of the heart, oh the heart with all its grief... and on through expression in the throat, nothing stuck there I could talk for the world... but can I express?... and on... and beyond, beyond the head, oh goodness... the head; if ever it were stuck is it stuck in the head! Yet on... on... going ever on... going beyond to the spirit (of it), Buddha always becoming Buddha. The pain of it, the joy of it, the confusion and sorrow of it. This my koan; to feel the visceral blood and the guts of it and the joy and the love that oozes out of the pain and suffering of it and to hold the emptiness of it not with fear and pain but with... with I truly know not what with... acceptance, love, compassion, joy, unity, wisdom...? I do not know these in the full, this is my koan.