Shamanic Journey Workshop in June

The workshop surpassed my expectations. Michael Harner is indeed old and slow, often forgetting what he's saying, apologizing, reporting that he's just found himself in Ecuador. He laughs, a lot, and for a long time. He makes frequent stabs at organized religion and oppressive regimes (including ours). His presence is penetrative, in the gentlest of ways. Power is attracted to him and it clings to him; it drips and oozes off him, like a number of the animistic spirit world is cloaking him so densely that little critters are falling off everywhere. During one journeywork session, I was laying with my eyes open while my partner was journeying on my behalf, and Michael walked by. As he passed near me, I got a strong sense of him being an old, old oak tree, moving slowly for the depth of his roots.

August Post to Zen Discussion Group

To me, the more interesting questions raised by the film “What The Bleep Do We Know” concerns our interest in using scientific language to prove our consciousness and validate our physical and metaphysical experiences (think "intelligent design"!!). With intersubjectivity looming as the great epistemological frontier of the 21st Century, and the dawn of the Enlightenment a dim memory, what fabulous questions are in store for monkey minds!?!?!

We have lived an eon of "reason", what if we're headed for an eon of "faith"? What of the language of Buddhism? It is looked to as a wise Master here, since it's language covers breaches of empirical evidence with elegant dispassion. The Four Noble Truths are basically an ancient Rx, are they not?!

This article covers some ground work of "quantum mysticism":
http://www.wie.org/j27/what-the-bleep.asp

Excerpt: "So maybe the widespread popularity of quantum mysticism, and its latest offspring, *What the Bleep*, is pointing not just to our cultural propensity to be enamored by the amazing insights and innovations of science but to our innate fear of scientific materialism, which seeks, by definition, to squelch soul or spirit wherever it finds it."

June Post to Zen Discussion Group

Here's a question about knowledge.

:-)

How do you study the dharmas with non-attachment? How do you decide what knowledge to hold dear, and which to consider with equanimity?

On what basis do you decide whether it's more important to know who the 6th Patriarch is or what the 6th Ground is? To read a sutra, or to avoid texts?

If we vow to master the dharmas, we're putting a lot of investment in them. How would we find equanimity to release them as easily as hold them?

Can we just sit, as it's been suggested, and find all our knowledge, there, inside? Can we do this with no training or guidance? One of the central aspects of Zen practice is having a teacher. What is their function, if not to pass on knowledge?

The best I can make of it, today, is to consider Right Effort, arising skillful qualities. The moral and philosophical tenets of zen (Buddhism, the Tao) are objects that provide pivot points for our attention, and hold little value outside of that function. (Yes, it logically follows that Playboy Magazine is just as useful a text as the Diamond Sutra.) Zen, zazen, is practicing awareness, of dancing such pivot points. To me a fruitful sitting isn't the one in which I've had an easy and tranquil mind, it's the one in which I've struggled on my pivot points. When I exercise my capacity for equanimity through observing my thoughts, it works much as repetitions in the gym, which build a muscle by first tearing it: dancing my pivot points breaks my habits and I get to build new, more aware mental formations to dance with another day. :-)

I've also read the analogy that it's like fine tuning an instrument, which is why we're always practicing and never performing.

So, what do you know?

Excerpt from a Letter, May 2006

Allowing, letting, letting go, surrendering. I couldn't agree with you more. Our layers of stories, habits, desires, defenses, fears ... aka thoughts, can be pulled away to reveal the ever-present happiness which eludes no one, yet is habited by few. Awakening, awareness, enlightenment are acts of surrender not force, of shedding not accumulating, of vulnerability not defense.

"Vulnerable and protected" ... I look forward to finding synergy, simplicity there. Masks are fascinating, intellectual, creative catalysts for storytelling, perhaps for teaching and translating. I wonder how mask is involved in the arts of warriors. Is mushya shugyo a process of honing mask, or discarding it? What do warriors chose to be open and vulnerable to? I've found models in yoga (strengthful surrender), zazen (disciplined mindlessness), and other .... ummm .... more obscure practices, but failures to produce that balance can leave one feeling like a tin duck, at the mercy of the shooter's quality of aim. ... Hmm, it just occurred to me that shifting my thinking from defense to protection opens up possibilities :-) .

Your sailing/woman metaphors triggered some questions and thinking for me and I find I actually have a lot to say regarding that and feminine and masculine energy in sea imagery (and in general) ... but then I'd be rambling. Suffice it to say I'd been wondering at the caricature of the lone woman in sea imagery (lighthouse, siren, widow on the shore...), and what you wrote opened up a new image of the porousness of the feminine, so pervasive that language can only approach it in metaphor ... hmmm. I've been building a boat in my mind for some months, but I think it's actually a metaphor for a man (or maybe masculinity), and, notably, I'd never pictured its sails!

Karma study, March 2006

Me:
Say, here's a karma story an old woman from Vietnam remembered from her childhood. Wonder what you have to say about it:

“A woman was being beaten by her husband. She went to the Buddhist abbot to get his blessing to leave him. The abbot told her that leaving him would not solve her problem, that in a previous life the husband had been the beaten wife and the wife had been the abuser. He told her that she must suffer her fate to pay her karmic debt, or she would just be reborn into again and again. He instructed her to place slim bundles of hollow reeds around the house, so that when her husband wanted to beat her he would grab one of them. In this way, he could enact his need, and she could receive it without harm. She did this and very quickly he stopped beating her ... her acceptance repayed the karmic dept.”

He:
I believe the Woman is at a place in her life where she is deciding, whether she knows it or not, when enough is going to be enough. I believe we, as Human Beings, have the ability to see in the mirror what our short-comings are and then be able to do something about it. I for one no longer enjoy hanging around people who remind me of what I once was at what I believe was my worst. I believe that each and every one of us has the choice to stand up and say "Enough".

So as far as the Abbots' advice...Shakespeare may have said it this way..."The Metaphors The Thing". Basically, the Abbott is saying, "When you are tired of the way things are, you will do something about it". At least that's what I think...and you did ask me what I thought. Thanks. ; )

Me:
I don't know much about karma. I took up very loose and casual dharma studies a few months ago, and started at the beginning: the four noble truths. Caroline Myss' notion of sacred contracts interest me, but then I'm also just getting into reading a little Ouspensky and Gurdjeff (heh), and have become most interested in framing the great psycho/emotional/mystical cosmic goo dance (aka existence) as a direct channel from sensing to knowing to believing to behaving to producing outcome, as often as possible ... without losing touch of wonderousness and awe. From that perspective, the tale seemed more useful as a koan than a morality play, and interestingly you are the first person I've shared it with who has done the same! The way you framed the significance of the behaviors resonates with me the most: awareness, leading to questioning, leading to behavior, leading to outcome.

I'm most interested in the experiences of regular and expanded consciousness that are grounded in my body in some way. Through yoga, sex, zen meditation, and alter-sensory experiences like Reiki, hallucinogenics, and shamanic meditation, I've been developing a sensitivity to different energies, or impulses in my self (and more limitedly in others), specifically manifested in bodily sensations. I think it's not much different from "gut feeling" or adrenaline rushes that make one's neck hair stand on end ... but are more varied than the usual menu of fear, sex, hunger, empathy, ... . I'm interested in chi, kundalini, etc. ... but am equally as happy with blood sugar levels, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

The thing I like about our karma story, is that outcome changes through action (doing/not doing) rather than language (negotiation). Rather than giving power to a law of judicious logic, she chooses vulnerability and self-responsibility. The question I don't have an answer to, is whether either of their awareness is necessary for resolution. Unless, of course, either of them wants to have that information available for future choices they might make. I prefer to think awareness is necessary, but then I know people who consistently come from a place of right action, with out much meta thought around it. My observer self witnesses my action self, and when I'm all in tune I function with the depth of primal matter, and a rightness of spirit. That's a resolved experience that's hard to beat for the good outcome and wonderousness I mentioned above. I wonder if without the observer self, life would be fluid, but without the gratitude that awareness produces.

Questions about self awareness and choice, as well as one's influence in the world fascinate, mesmerize and confound me. I've become more comfortable with states of confusion, recognizing they house the act of shedding a skin. Cognitive dissonance as weekend get away ... . My turn-around times are becoming shorter, too. But, I will fess up to being messy sometimes. I tend to feel too intense for most people, which I think is mostly projection, since there are so few people I actually share that stuff with, in a real way, beyond the conversationally interesting.

He:
You make a wonderful point regarding whether awareness is necessary from either the Husband or the Wife from our Karmic Tale to bring about resolution. The point in question being, ' would Life without the observer self, although fluid in it's anarchistic way, be as wondrous without the gratitude that awareness produces?'. I think not. Experience indicates, without fail, gratitude produces happiness. Without the observer self, life would be just that...life. I guess the miracle still exists, maybe just at a level that has become comfortable. As for myself, I have found that gratitude for what I have in my life, for taking responsibility for my actions, for the simple realization of my part in any future "now"...

Quoted to me in a letter

"...a little softness can feel dangerous but is life affirming in the quietest of ways. So quiet in fact it seems a miracle to be heard." Kahty Chen--March, 2006

it's lonely out in front

"This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists," declared Martin Luther King, Jr., "not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority."

diet is a four letter word

Some eating philosophy and experience I shared with a friend, who just started a diet:

I aim to choose the most efficient foods to feed my body machine, and have food be about health and energy, not desire, lack, punishment, and comfort. I do insist on enjoying my food, though! Why would I overeat? Because I learned to crave food. In response to that, I learned to make choices to reduce cravings. When I want to treat myself I choose massage over pound cake.

Tricks that work for me:
First thing that goes in stomach in the morning: glass of water with lemon, seems to decrease my appetite especially for sweets and starches

Eating less salt, sugar, bread, pasta, alcohol, and caffiene, reduces food cravings (mine were sweets and salty starches)

eating 3 small meals with protein snacks in between (eat every 3-4 hours) keeps my mood and energy stable, I don't crave larger portions or un-nutritious foods. (Protein snacks: yogurt, smoked salmon, mozzarella, milk, tuna, chicken tender - SMALL portion!)

Eating less salt, caffeine, and sugar, reduces food cravings

Trader Joe's

• Almond butter (mix with soy sauce for peanut sauce for steamed veggies)
  
• canned protein shakes to keep in car for quick snacks, makes me burger-proof
• Smoked salmon in the fridge section (or the canned stuff is good on pasta, with peas)
• cheese: fresh mozzarella in liquid (rich and satisfying)
  
• Bread: the moist european style bread that is about 1/2 the size of a regular loaf. Great fiber content - don't eat more than one slice per day! Lovely toasted, and is filling.
• sparkling water (with lemon, or a little juice, is great soda substitute)
• soy milk (doesn't need to be fridgerated till opened)
• Guilty pleasure: tuna in olive oil
• lowfat greek yogurt - heaven if you love to eat sour cream with a spoon
• long european cucumber, eat the skin - free food!
• turkey/chicken sausages
• frozen chicken tenders or breasts (bake with lemon and onion, stir fry in peanut sauce)
  
• frozen fish and big fat sea scallops
• frozen fruit: mango slices, blueberries
• Almonds and macadamia nuts: good fat (peanuts=bad fat)
  
• olive oil
  

Health Food stores

• Dr. Braggs Amino Acids (use on salads)
• Miso (a soy soup base, good with bok choy (cabbage), green onions and tofu or shrimp)
• vitamins (I can give you info about good ones, if you like, for example, centrum makes the best one-a-day multivitamin)

Regular market:

• Berries and cantaloupe over bananas, apple and oranges (less sugar, more vitamins)
• Kale, cabbage and broccoli over squash, zucchini, eggplant or potatoes (more fiber and vitamins)
• Black, pinto, garbanzo beans over sauced beans
• Steam a whole trout with ginger, green onions and garlic
• No canned food, no frozen food, no premade salad dressings or sauces (tend to have too many additives)
• No crackers, ever!
• Kashi Go Lean cereal, or no cereal is even better
• Real Ice cream or none at all (eat a smaller portion: the point is for the body to feel good, not to get to eat more - lowfat foods excuse us to eat more, which reinforces craving cycles)
  

on Peak Experiences

An excerpt from "The Places that Scare You: A Guide to fearlessness in Difficult Times" by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun:

The lord of mind* comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind. We can use drugs this way. We can use sports. We can use falling in love. We can use spiritual practices. There are many ways to obtain altered states of mind. These special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more. For example, new meditators often expect that with training they can transcend the pain of ordinary life. It's disappointing, to say the least, to be told to touch down into the thick of things, to remain open and receptive to boredom as well as bliss.

Sometimes, out of the blue, people have amazing experiences. Recently a lawyer told me that while standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change an extraordinary thing occurred. Suddenly her body expanded until it felt as big as the entire universe. She felt instinctively that she and the universe were one. She had no doubt that this was actually true. She knew that she was not, as she'd previously assumed, separate from everything else.

Needless to say, her experience shook up her beliefs and made her question what we do with our lives, spending so much time trying to protect the illusion of our personal territory. She understood how this predicament leads to the wars and violence that are escalating all over the globe. The problem arose when she started hanging on to her experience, when she wanted it back. Ordinary perception was no longer satisfying: it left her feeling troubled and out of touch. She felt that if she couldn't stay in that altered state she'd just as soon be dead.

In the sixties I knew people who took LSD every day with the belief that they could maintain that high. Instead they fried their brains. I still know men and women who are addicted to falling in love. Like Don Juan, they can't bear it when that initial glow begins to wear off; they're always seeking someone new.

Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can't integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn to get along with our neighbors. Then, even the most remarkable insights can begin to permeate our lives. As the twelfth-century Tibetan yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, "They are neither good nor bad. Keep mediating." It isn't the special states themselves that are the problem, it's their addictive quality. Since it is inevitable that what goes up must come down, when we take refuge in the lord of the mind we are doomed to disappointment.

Each of us has a variety of habitual tactics for avoiding life as it is.

* lord of mind being one of three strategies of ego we use to keep our selves shielded from the fluid un-pin-downable world, and to provide ourselves with the illusion of security.

Power, from pig sex to post-apocalyptic culture :-)

The Avatar talk this past Wednesday was really good. Thorn, who publishes "Instigator Magazine" was a refreshing voice in terms of why culture is important for individuals. He's quite inspiring, with hillarious stories of the Old Guardsters, and really solid and radical ideas about the reality of erotic deviance and the ways it is nurtured or corseted by "community." He pointed out that if "community" doesn't support the young, new perverts because their ideas seem too radical, then that younger generation may find itself weak and scattered in face of terrors like disease epidemics or political crusades, with no "community" to hold it together. He made a case for Old Farts to embrace the new generation, in order to preserve a culture of erotic freedoms, even if they are practiced in new and unrecognizable ways.

Guy Baldwin was, as I always think he is, dead on with some analysis of cultural dynamics, but then, he is one of my heroes :-) . For me, Guy tends to normalize stuff, as in looking at how a thing operates, rather than giving it energy as drama. He is gifted in illuminating problems as opportunities, must be the buddhist in him. He not only spoke of acknowledging the "new guard" but pointed out that there's something to be learned from the inhabitants of today's culture - as in: the youth of a culture are talented in regards to their own time, and older folks have stuff to learn from them about how our world works NOW.

An interesting thing that I reflected on was the notion that "Old Guard" was a top down (aka Top oriented) society in which bottoms had no influence (just like the military, aristocracies, patriarchy). The so called "new guard" sounds more bottom oriented, as in teach bottoms what they want to know, which is not shoving protocol down their throats (just like anarchy?). Analytically, the notion of a bottom oriented culture (in BDSM) fascinates me from a feminist perspective. I've been researching harems, veiling, and have made a commitment to my Zen practice because of my interest in something akin to "bottom", or feminine, power, or a life of influence that is wielded in a dispersed or indirect manner. All this and post-colonialism, too, is enriched fodder for ideas about where a global society might be headed. I like to picture it as large monoliths teetering, and collapsing on their own massive heards, clearing the way for the quietly thoughtful and scattered to emerge upon the rubble, tilling it under for a NEW AND BETTER society. Which is not a utopia, but actually more of an antitopia, or nontopia, because unity is no longer an ideal.

This weeks incredibly on point horoscope from Rob brezsny:

Most people hate to feel lost. It can be scary not to know where you are, to wander aimlessly with no sense of direction. But I'd like to propose that in a few rare situations, being lost is a good thing. Such is the case right now, Scorpio. You don't know your destination, you've lost your map, and you're not even sure where you came from--all of which sets you up perfectly to stumble upon a rich discovery you would have never found otherwise. I suggest that you relax completely into the unmoored, floating feeling. The paradoxical truth is that the best strategy for finding your way out of the fog is to enjoy the fog.

A long time ago
I went on a journey
Right to the corner
Of the eastern ocean.
The road there
Was long and winding,
And stormy waves
Barred my path.
What made me
Go this way?

T'ao Chi'ien (372-427 AD)

Meta Girl

Not much of a journaler, consistency being a base requirement, my musings have most often found form in my visual art work or internal conversations within my lively mind. Both platforms offer plenty of space to indulge my everythingness, welcoming every attractive tangential curiosity, every enriching and divergent alternative point of view, and basically every shiney, sparkling pulse that fires a wave in this noggin.

I do however, crave a written discipline that will provide a fluid vehicle for expression that my mental masturbation and visual art practice can't quite satisfy. Being the meta-girl that I am, of course my first post isn't so much an entry as it is a rumination on the potential for making entries. But first a little history :-)

My mom actually introduced me to the world of cut and paste, teaching me to cut up my report drafts in high school and tape them together before final the final typing. I will have cut and pasted phrases in this little post perhaps 30 times before I publish it. Cut and paste offers endless opportunities for variation - lucky me!! And even though I have to peek at the keys a bit, typing has always been a more fluid conduit for my thinking than hand writing. The energy expelled in typing is rhythmic and light, it's like skipping across a flat surface, whereas writing is heavy and slow, contained more in the 3 dimensional space of the hand, pen and paper, it's more like making love or cooking.

Internet and computer platforms offer a cornucopia of expressive vehicles: word processing, graphic layout, calendars, powerpoint presentations, email, discussion lists and forums, personal ads, chat, instant messaging (IM), personal and professional webpages, LiveJournal, blogging, etc. Each vehicle offers fertile grounds for exploring expressive form.

When I first acquired an online life, my emails were dispatches to distant friends, of the ebb and flow of my passing interests and critical concerns. Postal letters and cards only interested me for spurts, but email was immediate. I am too selfish to simply "give" away correspondence, I crave responses immediately!

The forms that provided the most immediate response are the one I really became addicted to. When I post on a discussion list, I am always happily surprised by the high quality of writing I submit. When I read what I've had to say, I think "What an interesting and intelligent girl!" Oftentimes, the more intelligent my writing, the fewer responses I provoke, but at least I can go back and reread my own fascinating thinking. Instant messaging (IM) and chat environments provided a dysfunctional number of hours of exploration for the hybrid form of speech/writing it embodied. Speech has proven to be the most sludgy form of expression of all for me. Hearing myself talk, really does bore me, but the written ephemerality of IM and chat made my speech more exciting to me. Finally, I could converse, in near-realtime, at the level of my written intellect. Needless to say, I am smart enough to have found the end of those rainbows quickly enough.

Finally, while social speech has proven a dreary vehicle for me, academic speech (in the form of lectures, seminar discussion and critical dialogue) has been a rich and rewarding field of play. The interactivity and high energy level embedded within these forms is stimulating enough to enliven brain tissue in realtime, literally expanding my intellectual capacity as I go. It feels really neat! But it requires a live audience, one that I don't have 24/7 access to. (Hmmm, there's an idea for consensual slavery - a harem of intellectual exercise partners.)

Now, let's return to the topic of a consistent writing practice. Having tried LiveJournal for sometime, I became bored with my voice, again. What makes memoirs, personal musings, diaries, and autobiographies interesting? Having an interesting life certainly helps, but some of my most beloved tales are of nobodies, who don't really do much - their non-stories delight me for the air and breath contained within them. For me, the best writing has the capacity to listen; it contains enough space to accommodate the life that the reader brings to it. But a busy, flashy story has filled up so much space that there's no room for me, the reader, to muster up responses and images in a counter-offering. And even if I could, a busy and flashy story wouldn't be capable of hearing me when I read it.

This leads me to the crux of this meta post, which is to focus on a form for personal expression, using the written word, that is immediate enough to satisfy my selfishness, and challenging enough to focus my aesthetic and intellectual pretensions. The style of "journaling" I practiced in LiveJournal felt small and insular, like the writing of a schoolgirl whose world is only as big as her playhouse. I look to blogging to be a time-based and expansive vehicle that can help me tie together some aspects of my voice into a cohesive frame for varied content and attitude. I ain't no David Foster Wallace, but I'm sure I have at least as much to say.