The enemy of the present

The surest way to be distracted from right-here-now is to start thinking, particularly when those thoughts are about myself. Because I developed my sense of self from my thoughts (about me and my life) I ended up with an ego.


And my ego is the enemy of my being present. For one thing, if I indulge in any activity that stops me thinking, my ego is alerted, perhaps because it associated not thinking with loss of self

Inner light

William James wrote: "So long as we deal with the cosmic [...] we deal only with symbols of reality. But as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena, as such, we deal with realities in the complete sense of the term." This is what Carl Jung referred to as knowing in his famous answer to the question whether he believed in God. He replied that he didn't need to believe, he knew.


It seems highly likely to me that each of us carries within us an idea of God or of some power - belief or a willingness to believe. Some choose to reject the idea completely. Those of us who have gone on to contact this inner something have experience - not proof, mind, just experience. It is though an incredibly powerful experience and usually leads to full acceptance of God or God-ness that transcends the mere idea we used to carry - knowledge.


The closest anybody gets with an explanation that reflects my experience is the description of an  Inner Light. Divine light is a common factor in a majority of the world's leading religions and is significant in Christianity but Inner Light is more specific. It is at the very centre of the Quaker belief, holding that a certain element of God's own spirit or divine energy exists in every human soul. Friends often refer to this as "that of God in everyone," or sometimes as the "seed," or the "light."   


Quakers believe that no first hand knowledge of God is possible except through that which is experienced, or inwardly revealed to the individual human being through the working of God's quickening spirit. So George Fox, in his Journal, is repeatedly shown commending troubled questioners to the "teacher within." In his long, anxious search for eternal life and peace, he found no help until he learned to listen to the inner voice - as the hymn written by a Quaker has it,  the "still small voice of calm."


To get to the position Jung describes, I had to go past thought and accept that part of my human mind was not material and was therefore not measurable. I began to accept the realm of the spiritual and to watch rather than think about this part of me in which God-ness might reside.

More about meditation

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in
its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss,
clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence
of grasping. The diminishing of grasping in yourself is a sign
that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you
experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego
and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and
the closer you will come to the infinitely generous "wisdom
of egolessness." When you live in the wisdom home, you'll no
longer find a barrier between "I" and "you," "this" and "that,"
"inside" and "outside;" you'll have come, finally, to your true
home, the state of non-duality. 

        Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Heart-mind

I find heart-mind a useful image for a part of myself. From various spiritual sources we can take it that we have a physical heart, an emotional heart, which is the source of our loving, and a a spiritual heart (referred to as heart-mind by Ram Dass) the place from which our soul connects. Some sources would have it that the second and the third are the same. The Hindus  refer to the seat of consciousness for heart-mind, which is has a parallel with what Quakers describe as "that of God within us" - the place from which we can experience the still, small voice of God.


Ram Dass describes the heart-mind as awareness turned inward or " the spiritual awareness within." In spite of what our ego tells us, it has an important function in our sense of self. If I asked who you are, you might point to yourself as you answer. And you would almost certainly point to your chest. Maybe that's because this is where our awareness really is - not in our minds. My heart-mind is where "I" am, not my mind.


It follows then that awareness is a heart-mind process, not a thought process. The start of my growth in awareness came when my identification started to shift to me heart-mind. 


Through paying attention to myself, and looking hard at my mind and body, I became aware that my mind is in some way controlling the various organs in my body, causing my heart to beat, my lungs to contract and expand, and my liver and kidneys to function.


As I watched this, noticing that the processes were beyond "me" (in that I couldn't observe the processes or the mechanisms) I became aware of the fact that if "I" tried to control any of these different functions I would be likely to expire in minutes. I have no power, or ability, to consciously control my body. It reminds me of early efforts to use a short mantra as an aid to meditation; as I became more conscious of my breathing, the timing started to go awry and I got to the point where it felt as though I was struggling for breath. I do not understand how my body parts work in order to keep me alive - yet somehow I cause them to function.


It seems to me now that the same is true of the workings of my heart-mind. It functions and seems to work at a place beyond the reach of my conscious mind. Of course, there is something I can do to interfere with its working - I can exercise my will, going along with my ego. But, without doubt my heart-mind functions best when left alone, without me trying to run any aspect of myself though conscious thought or rationalisation.

Rilke's insight into fear

Drawn by sympathetic notes in one of his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young would-be poet, on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. This is one quote:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting for us to act just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence something helpless that needs our love.

 Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

Experience

If all we have is now, this moment. And all we have to experience this here and now are our senses. As we experience our lives in the present we often encounter things which don't please us. Then we start letting it bother us and we worry and start thinking about how we can change or improve - solve, maybe - this situation. And we are back to "suffering" which in time becomes unbearable.


The way out of this trap is acceptance - to grow to accept the world being exactly as it is at this moment. Now acceptance doesn't mean we have to agree with something in order to accept it; acceptance means that we face up to and acknowledge something - in a way, the opposite of denial where we try to banish something from our awareness. Nor does it imply a fatalistic endurance of the causes of what's causing us discomfort or pain.


As soon as we start to think about the situation we are in, we have made it worse. We're certain to face anxiety and dissatisfaction when we think what we see as difficulties. The epigram "Pain is unavoidable; misery is optional" talks directly to this - the more we think about our difficulties the sooner we become miserable. The thoughts distract us from actually experiencing our life, from being what we truly are.


If we are frightened, we have to experience the fear. If we're upset we have to experience being unhappy. When we think, we try to avoid the feelings which are bothering us and avoid the pain. By observing ourselves we increase our awareness of how we behave when we are discontented.


The more I am present in the now the more quickly I see my mistake. Uncomfortable feelings had the power to make me upset for weeks, if not months. As I practised living in the now, that time reduced. Sometimes - but only very occasionally - I can experience my upset as it happens without being distracted from the here and now. So that now it seems my difficulties are "carved" in the air rather than indelibly into rock.

Do you want to feel good forever?

Sorry, but it will never happen - trust me on this one. The first hurdle that will trip you up is your attachment, wanting to feel good. We constantly try to avoid pain by seeking pleasure, always trying to find something to add to our lives that will make us feel better; it's what the Buddhists call samsara - a lifetime of constant suffering. 


There's a problem at the other end of the spectrum too, in trying to find peace and quiet or freedom - or, my favourite, serenity. In pursuing this, we form another attachment to the ways we organise things to bring us the peace and quiet we seek. With an attachment, we find that every noise or intrusion disturbs us.


When I sit in stillness and silence, it is me that needs to be still and silent. It is impossible to arrange the world around me to be completely still when I want it to be. Noises will always intrude, life will continue to go on around us. My situation is complicated by the fact that my hearing appears to have improved significantly. I don't know whether this is a result of being still and silent so much but I now find that I can hear much more than other people - so there is the irony of there being more to intrude on my stillness.


The way forward is to avoid preferring things happening - including stillness and silence, including peace. Everything is as it should be so we need to accept the noises and disturbance around us. If I start my meditation in a quiet house I have to accept my family turning on a TV in another room; on occasions I can even find stillness and silence in  busy train carriages, concentrating on my breathing and accepting what is going on around me.

Emptiness

Keep this in mind: to be full of things is to empty of God, while to be empty of things is to be full of God.

Therefore, if a heart is to be ready for Him, it must be emptied out to nothingness. So too, a disinterested heart, reduced to nothingness, is the optimum, the condition of maximum sensitivity.

When he wrote this, Meister Eckhart went on to suggest that this is what Jesus meant when he said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

If this were a book ...

Then this would be the cover:

This is an artwork, I worked on a few years ago; it's made of archival photographs and montaged into a mandala attempting to integrate what Jung called the shadow-self, where much in my shadow is what my ego decided that it would have no use for. Jung wrote: 

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

The mandala contains a Higher- and lower-self and a huge mass of "general, all-over me" spread across the middle; it points to the awakened spirit being aware of all of his or constituent characteristics - both good and bad. It also reminds me that the essence of me doesn't change; I still have all my character defects but in becoming aware of them, and allowing them to be a part of me, I now have little use for them. 

Some who have seen this picture attempt an explanation of the child in the middle. There is no conscious choice in that although I like to think of a T-shirt I was once going to have printed that read "INNER-CHILD MOLESTER" in protest at a new-age psychology.

See for miles

There's a sacredness which is not of thought, nor of a feeling resuscitated by thought. It is not recognizable by thought nor can it be utilized by thought. Thought cannot formulate it. But there's a sacredness, untouched by any symbol or word. It is not communicable. It is a fact.

A fact is to be seen and the seeing is not through the word. When a fact is interpreted, it ceases to be a fact; it becomes something entirely different. The seeing is of the highest importance. The seeing is out of time-space; it is immediate, instantaneous. And what's seen is never the same again. 

 Whenever I read J. Krishnamurti (quoted here) I am always struck by his description of the place. He is so clearly in complete touch with wherever he happens to be and he sees so much.

There is no 'time' in the present

This is all there is. What you are aware of around you is all there is. Our life is this unfolding present. It is absolute and it is here and now. It isn't - nor was it ever - some other place or time.


Now is timeless. Time can be used to measure the past and the future but never the present. "What time is it now?" has only one answer: "It is now."


Mystics in each of the spiritual traditions point to this principle - it seems fair to call it an inescapable truth. In Zen Buddhism we have the great question, "If not now, when?" Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, explained a problem "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time." And in Sufism we find "Past and future veil God from our sight." (Rumi)

Living by the rules

Always a big fan of paradox, I was intrigued to hear the advice that "If you want complete freedom, live by the rules."


The analogy the speaker used was driving a car. If you choose to speed in your car, you create tension and put pressure on yourself. At the very least you are on the look-out for cameras or police patrols; plus, the people who won't drive as fast as you will keep getting in the way, slowing you down, making you more. But if you slow down, you can concentrate more on driving itself - come back to the moment and the task at hand - and join in with everybody else at a slower speed.


I like this most particularly because it highlights a major - and continuing - character defect, something that is guaranteed to dislodge me from the present. I look at the world and my instinctive thought is to spot an angle or a wheeze that will make things easier for me: Is there a short cut somewhere? Or something I can do to make things quicker and simpler?