Another seeker shares her experiences

The following is an email I received from a friend, Shree Iyer, discussing the various posts on this blog. It was so interesting and helpful that I have got Shree’s permission to reproduce it here. Thanks Shree!

“I was reading about your blog on meditation with great interest. I used to meditate quite regularly before I had my son. But I struggled a lot with keeping my mind quiet.  I would accomplish 10 seconds of silence only to start drifting off into my usual mental chatter. Funnily it would primarily revolve around people I disliked strongly!
I tried some Kundalini yoga exercises which I learnt from a book.  I found them more interesting.  Of course I have never done these long enough to reap any real benefits.
Some 9 years back I practised visualisation consistently over a long period and did see some real results. I visualised living in a beautiful house(I hated the flat I was sharing) every single day and ended up living as a paying guest in a grand mansion!
You mentioned about Ken Wilber surviving an illness because of Vipassana.  I don't think I would have that level of perseverance.  But I have always found solace (and some miracles) in simple prayers and reading holy scriptures. Just as Christians sing choirs, Hindus do similar kind of singing called bhajans.  There have been many great Hindu saints who have spent their lives singing the name of the Lord which was their way of meditating on the Divine (Not sure if you have heard the ISKCON devotees singing on Oxford Street). Some of them chant the Lord's name a thousand and odd times (Again ISKCON devotees do that, they carry a bag with beads) or write the Lord's name on paper.

As I mentioned last time I enjoyed your blog 'sense of being stared at'.  I was very intrigued by your experience.  I had a similar experience 7 years ago, although I don't know if I should call it trans- rational- (i'm not good at Physics!)  I was in UK at that time and my mum in India had been diagnosed with cancer and was to undergo surgery. She had not mentioned this to me. Just a couple of days before her surgery I had an unusual dream where I was at a social gathering with my dad and my mum was missing.  I generally don't give much importance to dreams. But that dream really upset me and I cried incessantly. I for no reason felt she was going to die. It's only later did I find out that she was diagnosed with 4th stage oral cancer and she died 6 months later.

In one of your blogs you had mentioned about observing the breath to check for the nostril you were breathing through dominantly.  I read about that somewhere.  If you breathed strongly through the right nostril then you get out of bed putting you right foot down first. The same was to be followed when getting out of the door. I religiously followed the practice for maybe 2 weeks before forgetting about it completely. Going back to your point about paying full attention to your body, I read a book written by my spiritual guru wherein she talks about consecrating every task that you do to the Divine.  She meant not just major projects but even simple tasks like brushing your teeth. I haven't tried consecrating my brushing but I did try it with getting my son to brush. (My son hates brushing and will scream and put up a fight as though he's having a tooth extraction every morning) And the few times when I did consecrate my efforts in getting him to brush, the whole process did seem less onerous.

I also liked your blogs psychic phenomena and hungry ghosts. I had read a book by Bruce Goldberg about spirits and the other world. I was quite fascinated. It’s really great that you have had the chance to experience it first hand.

In your other blog you had mentioned about Providence and about who it works for.  In my personal experience I feel that it's all about Karma.  Because I see some really insensitive, materialistic people who never get touched by even an iota of grief.  And I've seen good hearted, well-meaning people go through immense calamities.

I'm sorry, this has turned out to be a rather long discussion! I tend to get overly enthusiastic when it comes to topics on spirituality and occultism.” 

"Maybe so, maybe so..."

You may be familiar with the following story:

Once upon a time a farmer eked out a living from the land with the aid of his son and their big strong horse. One day the horse ran away. ‘Oh dear’ said friends and neighbours ‘What a disaster!’ ‘Maybe so, maybe so,’ said the farmer. The horse returned, bringing with him a mate, which the farmer also set to work on the land. ‘What good luck!’ exclaimed the neighbours. ‘Maybe so, maybe so’, said the farmer. Then the son, trying to ride the new horse, fell off and broke his arm. ‘Oh dear’ said friends and neighbours ‘What a disaster!’ ‘Maybe so, maybe so’ said the farmer. The army came by, press ganging new recruits, but wouldn’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken arm….. and so on and so forth.

I tell this story now, because here in the Davis - Birkett household we’ve been having a similar set of up-down-up experiences, and this story reminds me not to get too down about anything, because you never know what’s around the corner. However, the story suggests that you should never get too ‘up’ about anything either, for the same reason. 

Rudyard Kipling suggested that you’re mature only when you can look disaster and triumph in the face and ‘treat those two imposters just the same’ and Buddhists would talk about the supreme importance of non- attachment. Attachment is what keeps us re-incarnating in this painful world.

But do I really have to give up feeling joyful about certain occurrences, in order not to get down about others? True, if I were less attached to my husband or son I probably wouldn’t get as upset as I would now if anything were to happen to either of them, but people who won’t commit to relationships or allow their children close for that reason are usually considered damaged!

Perhaps I need to practise feeling joyful without getting to attached to that feeling...

I would like to know what others think. As this site seems to have trouble accepting and publishing people’s comments, you can always email me at helenjdavis1955@gmail.com, and I’ll put it on this blog.

Goodbye Meditation; Hello Spontaneity

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I have had quite a revelation.

Those of you who, like me, have tried to introduce some spiritual discipline into their lives, such as meditation, prayer, contemplation of spiritual matters, and ‘right action’ will probably know that there is a lot of confusion around the whole concept of meditation. Far from there just being the main two types of meditation, ‘concentrative’ and‘mindful’, such as the likes of Wikipedia maintain, there are all sorts of other practices going under the broad heading of meditation.

For example, there are ‘guided meditations’ which use visualisation, (this is used a lot in Kabbalah and also in transpersonal psychotherapies.) I have also seen ‘kenosis’ – self-forgetting – referred to as meditation, which always struck me as being the opposite, at least in day to day practice, of ‘mindfulness’, though it does sometimes involve intense concentration.

As you might know, I set up a daily routine of prayer,meditation etc. when I left work last July, - I outlined it in my blog post ‘Daily Practice’. I used an online tool for meditation which made it about as easy as it could be. This is not the first time I have tried to meditate regularly and even before Christmas I was finding myself dreading this daily 20 minute meditation (again), and finding all sorts of reasons for not doing it (again).

The problem has been that, even when I have managed to meditate regularly, for over a year, I have never found the process beneficial, either in the doing, or the outcomes. I had been trying to resign myself to the fact that, tedious as meditation was, it was just something that had to be done.

 At the same time I was discovering that singing in a choir, which I started to do in November, was resulting in a ‘kenosis’ that was immediately giving me all the benefits that meditation is supposed to;- nourishment of the soul, positive emotions, and physical relaxation which I hadn’t experienced since an hour’s silversmithing as a teenager.

When I mentioned to one of my Kabbalah teachers that I intensely disliked meditation he said “So do something else” but that was just before term ended, and hasn’t resumed yet, and I haven’t had a chance to ask him if self-forgetting would be a good ‘something else’.

So today I put the question out on the London Integral Circle’s list and got the following enlightening and uplifting reply from HelenTitchen-Beeth, to whom I am profoundly grateful. I reproduce it here, and hope that others find it as liberating:

“Sufi teacher Llewelyn Vaughn-Lee distinguishes between masculine and feminine spiritual practices, and classifies meditation among the masculine, ascending approaches. He suggests that the masculine needs disciplining, whereas the feminine needs to be allowed to love what it loves and go with her appetites and inclinations of the moment. This could be one reason why meditation doesn't work for you and immersion in embodied practices - like silversmithing or singing - does.

I must admit that I have moved away from any specific spiritual paths, and towards the practice of direct, unintermediated immersion in the kosmos - which is tantamount to saying that I do what I feel like, when I feel like doing it, and I no longer bother to 'should' on myself about things - either spiritual or mundane. Whatever relieves your anxiety and brings you joy brings you closer to your natural state of being - as you were born to be in order to fill your unique function in creation. It also increases the likelihood of your inspiring joy and elation in others. And what else is spiritual practice for, ultimately, if not for our individual and collective flourishing?”

Many thanks to Helen Titchen-Beeth for this insight.

I would be interested in the views of others on this topic.

"Who is this God person anyway?"

‘God’ – as in ‘Do you believe in God?’-  is a hard worked little word, and can be taken to mean many different things.

I mostly use it in this blog to refer to an unseen sacred numinous principle, an ultimate reality; not a being, and certainly not possessed of any qualities that we could imagine. But I’m aware that I do also use the word to refer to the aspect of this numinous principle to which I pray. (For more on this see the post 'Full Circle - Thou, It, I, Thou')

Karen Armstrong, (whose book ‘The Case for God’ should be given free by the Government to everybody attaining the age of 35, and anybody younger who asks for it,) maintains that in earliest times many humans were well aware that no ‘being’ could be responsible for all they experienced, but worshipped and respected ‘Being’:  “a fundamental energy that supports and animates everything that exists…. You could not see, touch or hear it but could only watch it at work in the people, objects and natural forces around you.” Whatever this was, it was impersonal and transcendent.

Perhaps this is why the natural forces thus animated were themselves anthropomorphised as gods and goddesses in many societies, for example: Agni, the god of fire, Apollo the sun god. I used the term ‘gods’ in this way in my post ‘Honouring the Gods‘, and modern psychotherapy makes much use of these as a way of identifying the unconscious driving and pulling forces within human nature. Buddhism, which is unconcerned as to whether there is or isn’t an unseen sacred numinous principle – Buddhism is an agnostic religion- nevertheless makes reference to the ‘realm of the gods’. These gods are powerful superhumans, enjoying a life of luxury, rather like most the Greek gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. Like them, they can interfere in the life of ordinary people but, also like the Greek gods and many other pantheons of gods, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

When I was taught Christianity, I was taught that those who worshipped pantheons of gods, or one in particular of a pantheon of gods (Zeus, for example) had got it wrong, and that only monotheism was right. However, one couldn’t help noticing, as one made further investigations into this, just how like Zeus or any other ‘sky god’ or ‘high god’ the Christian God seemed to be. 

Unlike ours, many societies did not (and do not) have a problem worshipping a pantheon of gods, while being absolutely clear that these gods do not represent ultimate reality. To quote Karen Armstrong again “There was no ontological gulf separating these gods from the rest of the cosmos; everything had emerged from the same sacred stuff.” 

I should say here that I do think that Christianity in this country, the UK, tends towards fundamentalism (inclined towards a literal reading of the bible). I remember the outcry when an Archbishop expressed the view that it really didn't matter whether Jesus was born to a virgin or not. However, I consider myself a Christian, because I use Christian symbolism and myths in my meditations and prayers, and I'm completely happy to pay my dues to any number of  'archangels' representing various principles such as 'truth', 'compassion', 'courage' and 'serenity' without ever getting these confused with the sacred unseen numinous principle; the ultimate reality. I think that fundamentalists have completely failed to grasp the actual point of religion.

Millenia ago it seems the "Upanishadic sages [in India] were among the first to articulate another of the universal principles of religion....The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are engrained in our thoughts and behaviour but are also the source of so much pain." (Armstrong.)

I would be very interested to know to what others reading this are referring when they use the word ‘God’.

Antifragility

Soon after I wrote my last post, Dr. Edward Kelly posted a précis and critique of Nassim Taleb’s latest book ‘Antifragility’ on the London Integral Circle’s list. With Ed’s permission I have reproduced this below, because it describes an attitude well suited to an understanding of life as an adventure and a chance to learn and understand more, rather than as a search for predictability, stability and comfort, (or fame, power and/or wealth).  I think Taleb himself might be surprised to see I've linked his concept with certain aspects of kabbalistic thinking. However, having accepted that Providence and our individual souls can be quite ruthless in what they will put us through to achieve God's purpose, Ed's raising and considering this concept seemed quite timely.

Ed writes:

“I have reviewed and briefly summarised Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ from three different perspectives; ‘what is antifragility, what can we learn from it and what do I think about it’? I have made these distinctions in order to not confuse ‘what is antifragile’ as he describes it with ‘what I think it is’ as well as providing space for ‘us’ to consider what we can learn about it.

            What is it? Antifragile is a state of mind that prepares us to deal with randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks, the volatility asymmetry and non-linearity of life. This is the central argument in the book. Someone is antifragile when there is more upside than downside in a situation where volatility, randomness, errors, uncertainty, stressors and time arise. Time is here considered the same as disorder. Taleb says however that antifragile is more than just the opposite of being fragile, i.e., being able to withstand the shock of uncertainty, disorder and ‘black swan’ events, rather antifragile is about being able to thrive in a world of randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks and the volatility of life.

 Being in an antifragile state however will not help improve your ability to predict uncertainty but it will help prepare you for when uncertainty happens. The challenge becomes then, ‘can we just accept that there are things that we can’t understand and therefore can’t predict’? Most of us fail in this because we reduce what we don’t know to what we do know which in turn makes us fragile when things go wrong. He adds that probability is primarily a qualitative rather than quantitative construct. Our tendency however is to quantify the unquantifiable which he equates with naïve rationalism, i.e., the modernist scientific tendency to believe that everything is knowable. His recommendation for thriving in a world of uncertainty is not however to become ‘more robust or resilient’ but to become more antifragile. [I asked Ed what the difference was. He confirmed that whereas a person's robustness or resilience is important when reacting to something,  antifragility seems to be more about preparing for things which haven't happened yet and cannot be seen coming. To be antifragile is to be strengthened by life's knocks]

            What can we learn from antifragile? Another way of asking this question is what are the consequences of Taleb’s insights that might be relevant to the rest of us? Perhaps the principle thing we are reminded of is the limits of linearity and how much of our experience of life is ‘non-linear’ and unpredictable, i.e., there is much more chaos, disorder, uncertainty and change in our world than our scientific rational mindset might have us believe. For instance a good example of non-linear effects exists, “when you double the dose of say a medication or when you double the number of employees in a factory, you don’t get twice the initial effect, but rather a lot more or a lot less”.

In our desire to be more rational, itself a noble objective, we may forget what Pascal said, ‘that the end goal of rationality was to show the limits of rationality’. We moderns suffer from the illusion of control, which Taleb says is making us more fragile and susceptible to unpredictable black swan events. Taleb goes on to talk about responsibility and the skin in the game/captain of the ship rule. One of the big problems he mentions is that our bureaucrats and bankers (and indeed our academics which he reserves some choice comments for) tend to share in the upside from their words and actions but none of the downside. This should be addressed with a, “no opinion without risk” approach, particularly when dealing with the public.

He also mentions how doing something is often not better than doing nothing. We are very familiar with this concept where in the build up to the recent financial crisis the bankers took all the risks and where now after the crisis the public have taken all the responsibility. Taleb call this a tendency to Iatrogenics, the harm done by the healer as when the doctor’s interventions do more harm than good. Stopping to think about the potential harm from an intervention helps us to think in reverse, to reason backwards or as Charlie Munger encourages us to do with all arguments; to invert, always invert.

There are a number of other interesting terms that Taleb introduces such as Neomania, a love of change for its own sake which can result in forecasting the future by adding, not subtracting. He says that predicting the future by removing what is fragile from it is better than naïvely adding to it. He also speaks about Opacity and how things remain opaque to us, leading us to suffer form illusions of understanding. Technically he speaks about looking for convexity effects rather than concave effects; convex is good [J], concave is bad  [L]. Convexity affects emerge from nonlinearity and are generally considered good. The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something (p.298). More generally, he also makes interesting references to the lack of correlation between educational spending and GDP growth. Money spent on education may be good for society but is not correlated with GDP growth.

            What did I think about it? I liked the book and while I found parts of it difficult to read and understand and therefore need to return too, I nonetheless found it stimulating, thought provoking and informative. Perhaps most of all though, I thought it was courageous. Taleb pokes his stick at many of the sacred cows of modern economic and social thought and reminds us (drawing from the ancients such as Seneca whom he greatly admires) of some common sense ‘home truths’ of human behaviour that we have perhaps forgotten.

He particularly mentions the Robert Rubin violation, the Alan Blinder problem, and the Joseph Stiglitz problem, as examples of people who had options for the upside with no exposure to the downside – i.e. they had no skin in the game and no consequences to their actions.

There are however some things I think that he misses. For instance, the attachment to order management and linear thinking and it’s corresponding lack of preparation for randomness and non-linearity, is addressed in Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary; the divided brain and the making of the Western World which Taleb doesn’t refer too. As McGilchrist outlines, the left-hemisphere has a narrow focus and seeks order and certainty. It lives in the world of the known and in ‘how things work’. The right-hemisphere’ on the other hand has a much broader focus. It is more comfortable with uncertainty and the world of the unknown. It wants to understand ‘what things mean’ in context. While both are needed, the naïve rationalist and scientific worldview is associated with the former whereas the broader more embodied worldview is associated with the latter. The naïve rationalist is perhaps the ‘half-knowledge’ that Taleb talks about (p.257) which itself can be integrated through development which is something else he doesn’t talk about. As outlined in Kegan’s The Evolving Self and In Over our Heads or in Torbert’s Development Action Inquiry, as individuals break through the conventional ceiling of naïve rationalism and begin to see the ‘subjectivity behind objectivity’ and the constructed nature of reality, including their own, they can also see that it is not a case of either or but ‘both and’. Both hemispheres working together are required to function in a complex, changing and uncertain world. Taleb doesn’t necessarily express it like this, but giving him the last word that he perhaps deserves, this maybe the kind of integration he is hoping we can achieve in becoming more antifragile.

Finally, this book has caused me to reflect on how antifragile I am and how in following the ‘barbell’ strategy he recommends  I may become better prepared for the kind of second-order effects that inevitably arise from randomness, uncertainty and change.”

One more thing to add. This post and the last has dealt with the 'severity' pole of existence. The other pole is 'mercy', and running between them, holding the balance, we have 'grace' and 'compassion'. I shall return to mercy, grace and compassion in my next post.