Sunday, September 16, 2007

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Let the water be water

I have mentioned before that we all tend to carry our past around like a stone. It often becomes a burden that weighs us down, and a reason to fault ourselves. Speaking as a recovering alcoholic, I know this aspect of existence more intimately than I'd like to.

This weekend I described it to Neal thus: we receive the water of our lives--the flowing, constantly mutable series of events and impressions that arrive on our perceptual doorstep-and the first thing we do is take the dry, dusty lime and sand of our previous impressions and associations and mix them into it.

What we end up with is cement.

We like to do this, because by making cement out of life as it arrives, we think we are getting something--if you'll excuse the pun--more concrete that way. Something lasting, something that will serve us in the future, because we own it.

As if we could own anything--the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we tread on.

We don't see that by making concrete, we are actually just creating more weight to carry. If we just let the water be water, we're better off. If we have to carry anything, better we carry water than concrete. At least water can quench our thirst. All concrete can do is wear us out.

Don't get me wrong. We all need a foundation upon which to build, but the foundation should not be a set of static concrete blocks laid down in a rigid square. The foundation of practice is in the body. In other words, the establishment of the beginning of where we come from within the present state of sensation is where we build foundation. If there is a rock on which we build our church, this would be it. Not rocks made of previous experiences, good or bad, which we want to cling to.

The body is our continent, the place where our inner civilization arises. Conversely, our emotions are the continental weather: wind and rain, drought, tornadoes, heat, and ice. The weather is force: motive, exciting, compelling. Every emotional event seems utterly convincing and exciting.

Unfortunately, we constantly mistake the weather for the continent. We want what we consider to be the "good" weather in our lives to be permanent. And because we generally lack any intelligent discrimination, even destructive elements of our emotional life such as resentment and jealousy easily become "good” in our eyes.

So we desperately cling to our likes and dislikes, our loves, our hatreds, a thousand other emotional reactions. Unfortunately, by attempting to turn them into something solid, we twist them out of shape. When you try to tie something down that by its very nature needs to be in movement, it will eventually wither and die, no matter how hard you try to nourish it.

The movement needs to be constant, it needs to be accepted, but we cannot allow ourselves to become the weather. Unless the feet of our mind are firmly rooted in the soil of the continent, this emotive force drags us in every direction willy-nilly. Gurdjieff describes a man fallen prey to the vicissitudes of his emotional weather both in the last chapter of Beelzebub and in Views From the Real World.

It would be helpful for us to begin to really discriminate between the continent of body and the weather of emotion by applying our intelligence as third force. It's this three-centered balance within ordinary life that can help us discover what Trungpa called "The Open Way:" a way defined by warmth and compassion, intelligence and engagement, and perhaps above all, a right self-valuation that affirms our essential worth, even under the most adverse of changing circumstances.

Ultimately, if we don't tinker with the water of our life--mix in the sterile dryness of our attitudes and harden it--the water of life becomes a medium of support. We float on the water of our entire life--all the impressions we have ever had--and let them buoy us up in this present moment.

There's a true joyfulness in this, even in the midst of the trials we are all required to face.

So: let the water be water.

And may your trees bear fruit.

Monday, September 17, 2007

We don't know what's possible

Can't say enough good things about this book, which is an exciting investigation of the flaws, errors and outright wrong assumptions rampant in mankind's ordinary mode of "thinking." Go buy it and read it. The prologue alone is worth the price of admission.

The book serves to remind us that we don't know what is possible. Our intellectual, emotional and physical lives are built on an endless series of assumptions that bear little relationship to what actually happens. Gurdjieff himself pointed this out when he mentioned to Ouspensky that men spend an absolutely enormous amount of their energy worrying about things that they think will happen, but almost never spend any time worrying about the things that can, will, and do happen.

Perhaps the whole point is that we can't think of what will happen. And, in fact, Taleb points out--much like Gurdjieff and Dogen--that our experts aren't expert, and that what we think is thinking isn't actually thinking.

The man who swims through the water will always get further than the one who mixes cement into it and then tries to swim.

In the same way that it is nearly impossible to comprehend what might lie in front of us next in the unpredictable conditions we inhabit, it's equally impossible to predict what could happen to us in an inner sense. This means that, as some Zen schools believe, enlightenment could take place at any moment. We just don't know. Making any presumptions--positive or negative-- whatsoever about our possibilities is a mistake.

"We don't know what's possible!"

Way to go, Mr. George. Bravo.

Since we don't know what's possible, if we have to make assumptions, to paraphrase Martin Luther, "Since we must assume , let us assume boldly." (He said sin instead of assume, which may mean much the same thing, come to think of it.)

While we are assuming boldly, let us boldly assume. Let us assume that many impossible things are possible. Let us assume that impossible things come true every day.

So anything is possible. And we might as well assume good things are possible for us in our inner life!

One more slightly tangential note that I think deserves a mention.

On Saturday night, at the dinner table, the family and guests were discussing if free will exists.

My stepson Michael brought up the idea that if it were possible (as in some perverse and gnomish theories perhaps it could be) to determine the exact location of every atom, molecule and quanta in the universe at a given moment and calculate the exact sum of all their effects on each other, one could predict exactly what would happen next.

This idea assumes an absolutely deterministic universe. In a universe of this nature no free will would be possible.

We don't live in such a universe. All the reductionist analysis in the world cannot change the fact that at the quantum level, the location and momentum of any given particle exists only as a probability. Ergo, quantum physics offers us free will in a truly scientific form: at the root of physical reality lies an "instability of choice" that allows for an infinite number of possibilities to be manifest--all of them, in their unique individuality, ultimately unpredictable.

We could go further and mention mathematical models which predict that, if the universe is truly infinite--as it rather appears to be at present--then at a relatively low number (low relative to infinity, that is) the probability of seemingly "impossible" events--such as there being exact duplicates of our solar systems, planets, and ourselves, right down to the exact details of our lives--becomes very nearly 100%.

Kinda scary, I think, so we better not mention that stuff.

May your own improbabilities become manifest in joyous ways!