Wounded ancestors

Today I chatted with two of my younger sister’s children. They are both in their thirties and both have children of their own. I can see something of the parent in the offspring at the various levels.

I share parents and ancestors with my sisters. I was reminded of this by the book that arrived in the post this morning - Thich Nhat Hahn (2010) “Reconciliation – healing the inner child”. Quirks of parenting reproduce themselves through the ancestral lines.

My elder sister has been working on the family tree. The bare bones of the female line in the last 154 eventful years are:

Kenneth Fraser Miller (1859 – 1920) – 61 years – Farmer, Inn Keeper

Married: 26 jul 1888

Margaret Jane Miller (nee Williamson) (1860 – 1926) – 66 years – Inn Keeper

Five children:

Margaret Lesley Gordon (nee Miller) (1889 - 1946) – 57years – shop keeper and hotelier

Married: 13 sep 1911

R Douglas Gordon - grocer

Four children:

Margaret Lesley Clark (nee Gordon) (1915 – 2002) – 87 years – bus conductress, Nurse

Married: 21 nov 1942

George (Dod) Clark (1913 – 1994) 81 years

Three children:

Margaret Lesley Cottee (nee Clark) (1947 – xxxx)
George Gordon Clark (1949 – xxxx)
Isobel Anne Gauld (nee Clark) (1951 xxxx)

Ancestral home

How did Kenneth and Margaret get on running an Inn after having moved around farming? Were they progressive entrepreneurs? How well did they cope with having children in an Inn? Did they carry baggage from their own experience of parenting? Three of the offspring spent time in Malaya and China. The youngest in the family died as a POW.

Not much is known about R Douglas Gordon. Margaret Lesley was already pregnant when they married. After the fourth child he ‘disappeared’ leaving my granny to support her four children by herself. She ran a Temperance Hotel. The two sons graduated from Aberdeen University and moved south to work. 

My mother believed in temperance. She was a bus conductress until she became a housewife and mother. She was pregnant when she got married and her first born son was stillborn. When my Dad’s butcher’s business faced problems in Buckie my mother became an auxiliary nurse in the hospital back in Portsoy where she mostly worked nights. In 1961 the family moved to Portsoy except for my elder sister who stayed in Buckie with Dad’s sisters. Dad eventually became a ward orderly in the hospital.

AHA – I feel embarrassed to share ideas about my ‘wounded child’ - especially on a public blog. It seems to dis-respect the ancestors - and that is taboo. If you cannot say something nice don’t say anything (?). Feelings might change after reading Thay.

No problem

The Dharma (truth) involves un-common sense and counter-intuition. Dis-ease ends when you (?) realize the no-self. There are many hyphenated words when the topic is re-programming your mind and brain. Norm-cracking, paradigm-shifting and turning your head around – changing minds.

Before language evolved our ancestors lived consciously in the present moment; they were like the rest of the animals and the plants; and the galactic minerals; and the patterns in those minerals. We are the churn of stardust.

The hard wiring of our body and mind is fleshed out by our culture, subculture and parenting. There is an interplay of nature, nurture and serendipity in our conscious and unconscious patterns of thoughts, feelings, words and actions.

We evolved over millions of years to survive in relatively unchanging hunting and gathering groups in the plains of Africa. Thus we have Stone Age brains.

Self-consciousness is fairly new. It can be seen as co-terminous with language and thus perhaps only 50,000 to 100,000 years old.

Language has made exponential, cultural growth and development possible in the last few thousand years. Our Computer Age nurture is now well out of step with our Stone Age nature. We now ask much more of our minds and brains than they are capable of achieving in a stable and balanced way. In short, most ‘civilized’ people are screwed up and suffering because of individualized cravings.

Fortunately there is a cure. There is neuro-plasticity – even in the hard wired parts of the brain. Those who choose a simple and good life are able to be mindful of what goes on in their heads and thus to change it. Frugality, renunciation and enlightenment result - along with wisdom and compassion.

It is easy to say but hard to do – there is an end to suffering and dis-ease. No-self, no problems.

sharing trust

original caravan

There were 20 people in yesterday’s sangha meeting. The dharma reading was from Thay about reconciliation and the wounded child. The root message that I took from it was that you have to sort yourself out so that you can be of more support to others. I have ordered the book – it will be here in a few days. The technology is amazing – interbeing.

Several ‘sharings’ caught my attention. Amongst these was that, although the details vary, we are all basically wired up the same way. This is a good thing to know. We are not alone and unique and weird. It would be a good thing to promote this understanding by encouraging people to tell their personal stories about practice. There is the option of doing this via the internet where the audience is potentially enormous.

watering seeds

Thay has the image of seeds – both good and not so good – in the store consciousness. When these are watered (ie given space in the attention centre) they grow. By taking thought and being mindful we can water the good seeds and withhold water from the not so good ones. Thus, in time, the balance of what appears in the attention centre changes. I wondered about the origins of these seeds. Some will be genetic (nature) whiles others will be the result of learning (nurture). To what extent can we change the genetic hard wiring? Neural plasticity – yoh!

Then a big question? Can mindfulness help those suffering from Dementia and Alzheimer’s? Logic suggests that it might help in the early stages but that in time the brain and its mind will be beyond help. Some work is seemingly being done by medical people involved with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

A Tibetan Buddhist nun was in the sangha circle with her robes and cropped hair. But the ‘uniform’ did not dissolve the person inside. She came across as a good humored and non-toxic human being who has given her life to, and enjoys, promoting the dharma. A full time institutionalized practitioner. Refreshing. Inspiring.

Note: In what I have written above I have tried to avoid issues of betraying ‘trust’. I have not linked individuals to thoughts and feelings – other than to myself. This might be viewed as a cyber extension of the sharing process. Individual practitioners could be encouraged to put their personal stories online (possibly on a blog) OR – perhaps as part of the ‘buddy’ system – an author could be given permission to tell the story of a practitioner.

Hanson's brain

I am now re-reading Rick Hanson (2009) ‘Buddha’s Brain; the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom'. A lot of his ideas stuck with me since the last reading although I did not realize their source. For details see www.wisebrain.org . 

“Modern times often cause us to go on automatic pilot, continually multitasking and busying our lives with digital stimulation, information overload, and schedules that stress our brains and overwhelm our lives. Finding time to pause amidst this chaos has become an urgent need few of us take the time to satisfy.”

Premises of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is founded on several core premises:

1. The brain is an information processing device, and it produces behavior in response to external and internal inputs.
2. The brain's adaptive mechanisms were shaped by natural and sexual selection.
3. Different neural mechanisms are specialized for solving problems in humanity's evolutionary past.
4. The brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms that were designed for solving problems that recurred over deep evolutionary time, giving modern humans stone-age minds.
5. Most contents and processes of the brain are unconscious; and most mental problems that seem easy to solve are actually extremely difficult problems that are solved unconsciously by complicated neural mechanisms,
6. Human psychology consists of many specialized mechanisms, each sensitive to different classes of information or inputs. These mechanisms combine to produce manifest behavior.

[SOURCE = Wikipedia]

Unhiding the wounded child

The Dharma talk at yesterday’s sangha included some of Thay’s thoughts about the wounded child. As I understand the concept, we each carry a wounded child because of malfunctions in the systems by which we were parented and encultured. The wounded child is usually hidden from conscious attention but it has a powerful influence on our feelings and emotions.

We are hard wired in a general way to fit in with the particular social and cultural norms of our birth community. A good example is with language: we are hard wired to learn a language but the particular language that we learn depends on when and where we are brought up.

Our minds are primed to pick up behavioral clues about how to form relationships and to function in a particular culture and group. For millions of years we evolved to operate in hunting gathering groups of limited size. There were ways of dealing with ‘us’ (the in-group) that were different from how to deal with ‘them’ (the out-group).

But ‘culture’ has changed very rapidly since the evolution of settled agriculture. Our genes have not kept up. In many ways we live with a Stone Age brain in a computer age world. This is (a) why contemporary patterns of parenting and enculturation tend to malfunction and (b) why there are so many wounded children.

I can use that line of thinking to throw light on my hang ups and on my spiritual journey. In my early twenties I committed to ‘finding better ways to be human’ and to ‘zero population growth’. I can now see a back story to those commitments.

John Knox (1514 - 1572)

I sought better ways to be human because I was not satisfied with the existing ways – or at least those that I knew about.

I was born into a village level Scottish Presbyterian subculture and was aware of the hypocrisy that surrounded the ‘rules’ espoused by the elders and betters who were the good and great. The idols had feet of clay.

Parochialism and xenophobia were also rife – beware of Catholics and the English! The stern thinking patterns of John Calvin (1509 – 1564) and John Knox (1514 – 1572) were still live and active.

BUT the mass media told of the swinging sixties in other parts of the planet. At thirteen I experienced field archaeology; at eighteen I escaped the village and became a university student in Aberdeen, and at twenty two I became a school teacher in Edinburgh.

There were indeed different ways of being human. But better? The next thirty five years took me to various parts of the planet on the ongoing quest.

I eventually became a cosmopolitan, international, education advisor of the restless, reliable, workaholic variety. Was this because of a wounded child within? When I made time to notice what was going on it was apparent that the early ‘rules’ were still active. Such things as:

• a fair days work for a fair days pay
• a fool and his money are soon parted
• don’t just sit there, do something
• little children should be seen but not heard
• look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves
• neither a borrower nor a lender be
• no pain, no gain
• respect your elders and betters
• spare the rod and spoil the child
• the child is father to the man
• the devil finds work for idle hands to do
• the Lord helps those that help themselves

It might be argued that it is an error to think of a ‘wounded’ child. Those in authority might prefer to think of a ‘well-disciplined’ child. Selfishness must be expunged. The child must be obedient and respectful – the child is father to the man.

An Africa story. I was teaching science in a laboratory in Sesheke, Zambia. Many of the students were from the Lozi tribe. In Lozi culture if a child wishes to address an adult he must kneel at their feet and wait to be acknowledged. I was teaching a first year class where a girl wanted the toilet. I was facing the blackboard when she came and knelt in front of the bench where I could not see her and therefore did not address her. None of the other students felt that they could tell me about her. She peed herself.

My other early commitment was to ‘zero population growth’. At the time I thought that this was due to idealistic concern for the environment and the planet. I was the last male Clark in our family line - it could die with me. The working definition of celibacy reckoned that copulation was OK so long as there was no fertilization!

BUT it could also be seen as selfishness on two counts – (a) there would be no need to sacrifice time and expense to childrearing and (b) I would be free to promisciously sample a wider range of women.

BUT it could also be seen as fear on two counts - (a) no woman would be willing to share a lifetime with inconsequential little me and (b) I would mess up the childrearing process and thus spawn seriously wounded children.

SO I might have a group of wounded children buried in the unconscious and they might be susceptible to exploration and kind treatment. It is said that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. And this includes parents and the wider community of family and friends.

And beyond that there are:

• the blood and spiritual ancestors reaching back to at least the 16th century
• the hunting gathering forebears
• the pre-linguistic hominids.

My mind/brain has a long history and potentially a long future.

It bears thinking about!

When I became a grown up I put away childish things. Or did I?

Staring for peace

George Clark 19 February 2006

 When you make time to stand and stare[1] you will come to grips with your flow of consciousness – with that never ending stream of thoughts and feelings that occupy your attention centre. There are two ways to come to grips with the flow. You can either side-step it or go with it.

You side step the flow by engaging in one-pointed concentration. The classic meditative focus for this is your breath which has many desirable qualities[2]. This is dealt with in great depth in most introductory books on meditation[3] so will we not bother with it here.

A more ‘active’ approach is to focus on ‘tasks’ and there are two ways of doing this. You can be  mindful of every day practical tasks like walking or washing the dishes. The idea is to prevent your mind from running into the past or future by paying close attention to the details of the present moment.

Another, even more practical, option is to concentrate on your ‘work’ tasks whether these be artisanal or intellectual. 

The idea is to lose ego-consciousness so that you are running on auto-pilot[4]. This mind state is more common than most people suppose. The more famous cases are when (a) a poet is inspired by the ‘muse’, (b) an athlete or novelist is operating ‘in flow’, and (c) a Christian is happy to ‘Let Thy will be done!’

You go with the flow when, instead of sidestepping it, you make a positive effort to witness the comings and goings of thoughts and emotions. The witnessing can be passive or active. 

As a passive witness you notice when a thought or feeling arrives but you do not pay it too much attention. Soon it will disappear to be replaced by another. When you first begin this practice you will be amazed at (a) how much is going on, (b) how little control you have over the process  and (c) the flimsy and evanescent nature of mind stuff. 

As an active witness you interact with what you notice. By categorising and labelling you gain insight into what is going on. There are two main types of insight – rational/ intellectual and emotional/ spiritual. When you begin to have these insights you appreciate why Socrates reckoned that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.

The two techniques complement rather than contradict each other[5]. If, when you make time to stand and stare, your mind is a stormy ocean, then you can use side stepping techniques  to calm the waters. Once things have quietened down you can go with the flow and gain insight. 

The busy mind can be thought of as muddy water. Keep it still long enough and the mud settles. Then you will know the brilliant clarity which is, always has been and always will be your mind’s natural state. You will see through the illusion which is ego and know unity consciousness (the Oneness). This mind state is the peace that passes all understanding.

Make the time to stand and stare
 and
know the peace that passes all understanding

 

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[1] “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare” Wm Henry Davies – the vagabond poet. http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Leisure.htm

[2] eg it is ever present, follows your every mood,  and you can voluntarily interfere with it if you want to!

[3] eg Ven. Henepola Gunaratana (1992) Mindfulness in Plain English http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_english.php

[4] Like riding a bicycle of driving a car

[5] In the Buddhist tradition the techniques are called Shamatha (Chih)  (stilling and stopping) and Vipassana (Kuan) (taming and training)

The vagabond mind

George Clark, Oct 2004

The vagabond poet Wm. Henry Davies penned the famous lines “What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare”[1].

Time to stand and stare has been thought desirable since Biblical times. The fourth of the ten commandments goes as follows:

Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But (on) the seventh day thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. (Exodus Chapter 20)

Such periods of rest allow you to cease striving and to be still and know. Know what? “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (Psalm 46:10)

From another spiritual tradition Dogen Zenji’s main recommendation[2] was to ‘Just sit’. Everything else will follow. In reflecting on everyday Zen Tim Burnett[3] notes –

“Dogen says "have no designs on becoming a Buddha" and he also says we are "already actualized Buddhas who go on actualizing Buddhas." So we do need to practice to express our Buddhahood. But true practice is beyond the realm of desire. It happens daily in our lives whether we like it or dislike that particular day. But it's not something we do to get anywhere or get anything, either. When you sit. Just sit. Really. That's all there is”.

So you make time to stand and stare, you just sit and become still – then you will know. Know what? You will know how to be true to your Self ie to the God within. And so? Shakespeare[4] caught the essential long term moral point:

"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man” [5].

But there is a short term more psychological point which Swami Krishnananda[6] recognises. He identifies the need “to search for one's True Self through an acute analysis of the variety of psychological involvements in which the essential Selfhood of Being seems to be enmeshed.” His suggested means to this end are hard line and very practical:

“Stay for a while, for a month at least, in a place where you are unknown to people and you have no connection with anybody. You have plenty of time for yourself; nobody will disturb you. When you have your little breakfast or lunch, etc., sit and cogitate about what is happening with your mind. The first thought will be that you have lost something. You may have pain in the body or feel that you are not fit for this, that your desires are not being satisfied, something looks odd, not quite all right ...”

So it is not an easy process. An anonymous writer in nineteenth century rural Russia[7] had a clear view of the situation:

“The trouble is that we live far from ourselves and have but little wish to get any nearer to ourselves. Indeed we are running away all the time to avoid coming face to face with our real selves, and we barter the truth for trifles.”

So can we, should we, be otherwise. Hear from three English speaking quotables:

"He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts." (Samuel Johnson)  

" When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal " (Bob Dylan)

“No time to stand beneath the boughs, And stare as long as sheep or cows”. (W H Davies)

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[1] Full poem online at http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Leisure.htm

[2] Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman outlines Dogen’s thinking with enthusiasm and compassion http://www.stanford.edu/group/scbs/Dogen/Dogen_Zen_papers/Hartman.html

[3] Tim Burnet – everyday Zen - warts and all - http://www.everydayzen.org/teachings/tim_homepractice.asp

[4] For the context of the quote see  http://www.allshakespeare.com/hamlet/713 

[5] (Hamlet II 78-80) William Shakespeare  (English playwright and poet. 1564-1616)

[6] “To Thine Own Self Be True” an online book by  Swami Krishnananda http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/true/true_pre.html

[7] The quote was taken from an Owen O'Sullivan article which gives an interesting modern perspective on our present theme http://www.carlow-nationalist.ie/news/story.asp?j=21351