Lose control and flow

There is presently some time and space to notice what is being sent to the attention centre from the unconscious. ‘I’ have little control over the process. At the moment, and at the mundane level, there are many thoughts about house repairs and about dealing with trades people.

I notice that I spend most of my time in my head and tend not to notice the immediate external environment. I also procrastinate about worldly things eg the kitchen window has been single glazed and rotten for more than 20 years. My meechy mantra is, “If it aint broken, don’t fix it.” I try to avoid being got at by fleeting fads and frivolous fashions and by the hegemonic tricks of the “Hidden Persuaders” (ref Vance Packard)

Mindfulness and the mindbrain

Otherwise, at a supra mundane level, I have been working through the following E-Books that cover the practice of mindfulness and the science of the mindbrain. I am drawn to the emerging multi-disciplinary consilience of it all.

• Tricycle – the editors () Tricycle  Teachings – Mindfulness. A Tricycle E-Bo
• Barry Boyce and the editors of the Shambhala Sun (2011), THE MINDFULNESS REVOLUTION Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditation Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life
• Richard M Restak (2012) The Big Questions - Mind; eBook ISBN 978 1 78087 567   
• Moheb Costandi (2013) 50 ideas you really need to know - the human brain; Quercus. Kindle Edition.
• Scientific American Editors (2013) The Secrets of Consciousness. Scientific American. Kindle Edition
• Thich Nhat Hanh (2014). The Mindfulness Survival Kit: Five Essential Practices. Parallax Press. Kindle Edition.

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Never idle

I am only rarely ‘at a loose end’. This is because ‘the devil finds work for idle hands to do’. (ref John Knox and Max Weber on the Protestant work ethic.) Most of my waking hours are focused on what passes for ‘work’.

I engage in worldly affairs such as shopping and cooking, dusting and washing, and various other chores in the house and garden. These domestic tasks, along with official employment, are a form of work but, to me, they do not count as ‘real’ work. Real work involves engaging with mindfulness so as to build peace, wisdom and compassion.

Those who fill their waking hours with domestic tasks, employment, and fashionable fun can be thought of as embracing the existential cop-out and thus being inauthentic.

How to exist

In a 1960s Sunday newspaper I came across a phrase that has remained with me ever since – “neurotic nihilists living in existential vacuums”. I returned to it last year – see here  -  where I considered two possible reasons (one positive, one negative) for my having dropped out of the development business. This followed one of my earlier retreats which dealt with existentialism and its obscure bedfellow phenomenology

Existentialism is a philosophical attitude associated especially with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre. It is opposed to rationalism and empiricism. It stresses the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices.

Phenomenology is the movement founded by Edmund Husserl that is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness.

I approached these lines of thought as if they were scientific hypotheses but they were philosophical themes and, through approaching them as if they were ‘scientific’, I did my head in. My twin mantras eventually left the safe confines of my head and made their way to my guts and heart:

The only certainty is doubt
the only constant thing is change

Aargh!

Losing control

Following my third Portsoy retreat I lived and worked in Lesotho for three years. I played in a band where one of the female singers shared her feelings which inspired the following lyric:

“Another weekend morning and the sun is in the sky
Being more than Doing time, a space where I can try
I'd really like to know the peace in peace of mind,
the way to lose control and flow” (Clark) 

Also when in Lesotho I wrote a series of short articles about eastern religions for a local newspaper.   In researching for these I began to develop a more deep seated understanding and experience of mindfulness. The urge ‘to lose control and flow’ became a new mantra and I have been working with it ever since ie for about 15 years.

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And that is what is going on in the unconscious at the moment. The act of writing about it puts the focus on the supra mundane. Amongst other things it becomes apparent that thinking like a philosopher involves egoic doing, with sequence and control while during meditation the goal is to lose control and flow with non-egoic being. Where there is a philosopher’s self there is a problem; where there is no-self there is no problem.