Three Things

1. Replacing mindless scrolling with reading. I think this has been… about halfway successful. I have to remember how little reading I was doing before the current push. I was reading, say, two pages of “hard” stuff, maybe five pages of Spanish; I think I’ve doubled that, and added in much “middle” reading, things such as Atkinson’s history, Jules Evan’s ecstatic experience book, Marshall Sahlins’ swan song. I am reading much more, and it is very rich and fertile reading. Really I think the main thing that remains to be done is not so much to increase the hard reading or the middle reading, but to swap out the scrolling (YouTube and Facebook “shorts” are particularly noxious) for music. The solutions to the other discontents, perplexities, and problems are not to be found in reading more intensely, or reading more widely. You’re doing that. It’s not going to give you people to pray with or sing with, and it’s not going to expose you to ecstatic experience. It’s just not. That’s not something it can do.

2. So there, you’ve just delineated it. You want people to sing with, people to pray with, people to dance with, and

3. You want to be inviting ecstatic experience in a responsible way (but not in a guarded way: the distinction is crucial. You can’t invited the Goddess only if she promises not to make anyone uncomfortable. I mean, you can; you do: but wondering why she doesn’t come, under those conditions, is idiotic.You know why she’s not coming. Get real.)

 

Affliction

With Christmas, as with so many afflictions, I have taken it too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously: it is not a grave injury that is done me by a brutal world. Not seriously enough: my distress is a thing I have to thoroughly understand and intelligently address.

Yes, yes, it is distressing in that it’s a last gasp of a dying Christianity that doesn’t understand itself. It’s being celebrated by people who don’t believe in it for reasons they themselves do not understand and do not process properly. Yada yada yada miserable people trying to fill a spiritual hole with mountains of crappy stuff yada yada they won’t even sing a damn Christmas carol together yada yada yeah all that. Take it as read.

But my distress has much more to do with an autistic person’s distress at interrupted routines, and in particular what feels like an intentional subversion of everything I try to build in the course of the year, every bulwark against anxiety and overeating systematically stripped away. Like the damned time-change twice a year: everything I work so hard to create is violently jolted. And the timing of the winter assault, with Thanksgiving leaving just time to semi-recover, and then Christmas (with New Year’s for a coup de grace!) wrecking everything again. It is as demoralizing as it could well be: it’s as if designed to ruin me.

It is not designed to ruin me. It is people clinging desperately to one of the last scraps of sacred time left to them. Mauled as they are by modernity, shell-shocked and stupefied by diabolically clever marketers, they’re still trying to salvage something. Wish them God speed. But I still have my own problem. I lose myself, I lose my nest, I lose all my supports, I’m naked in the wind.
First of all: remember: no one gives a fuck. No one is paying attention. You do this season however makes sense to you. They are actually looking after each other, in their fashion. You just figure out your own stance, and your own ritual. So you don’t have your breakfast cafe for two days! What that means is that you can do extended sits, both mornings. Like maybe two thirty minute and one twenty minute sit, with your little walking meditations in between. Then make your breakfast and have your coffee and face the day. Whatever else happens then, you will have done something that will feel like it’s of value, and like it’s not participating in ruination. And say a prayer, while you’re at it, for the exiled Christ-child. This can’t be fun for him either.

Fetch

30 mins sit, brief walking meditation, then 20 more mins sitting. Felt like it had some traction. I drove to Tom’s at sunrise by way of 82nd Ave: the sky was all orange fire, huge and stippled like textured plaster, and when I turned west on Division street I swear to God there was a faint rainbow in front of me. I don’t know what more of a sign I could ask for, unless I’m holding out for angels with blazing swords and loquatious shrubbery. I’m really not at all sure what the enterprise of meditation is, for a lapsed Buddhist and not-really-Christian and pilferer of hozho; but it appears to be the correct one.

Not that I imagine the show was put on for my benefit. I don’t require a monogrammed universe. I think a lot these days about how to save the enchantment while rejecting the falsehood. Maybe it is to be done by methodically inverting the Aristotelian hierarchy, and making things subordinate to -- less real than -- actions and relationships. The sunrise was not an object created by God for my edification: that's an absurdly grandiose idea. The sunrise was a movement in which She and I participated; and the sunrise as object -- as a thing that could have been photographed by third party --  is simply an artifact, a by-product of the multitude of relationships in motion between the person of the Sun and various persons here on earth. Who are ourselves by-products of multitudes of interactions among and within themselves. It becomes ponderous and absurd to try to make my language reflect that sense of what is most real, for any amount of time, but it's quite easy to see it that way. I see it that way all the time, and always have. The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That's not some advanced meditative state: it's the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it's true, but it's also normal, ordinary, regular. I don't have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

It Makes A Neater Job

Instead of sitting 50 minutes this morning, I prepped a 30 minute and a 15 minute timer on my phone. When the thirty-minute bell came I kicked off the 15 minute timer, lay back over my cushion to stretch my spine and legs a little, stood up and walked, very slowly, attending to the sensations of the floor under my feet, and dangled briefly from my chin-up bar, then walked slowly back to the cushion and resumed the sit, till the second bell. It is challenging to keep any kind of meditative attention while moving, but no more challenging than constantly bringing my awareness back from the fact that my knee hurts and my shin is going numb. I think this is how I’m going to do my longer sits from now on. There’s a not-very-clever machismo involved in white-knuckling through some kinds of physical discomfort, marching under the banner of a mind-body dualism that is no more convincing in eastern metaphysics than it is in western. Being still for a long time is obviously necessary for training the attention, but sitting so long that I can’t easily stand up afterward doesn’t demonstrate my superior spiritual craftsmanship so much as it demonstrates abusing my spiritual tools. At the end of the second sit I could stand up like a hale human being. With variations of these breaks for my legs I could do a whole morning sit, or possibly even a day-long sit: whereas sitting down again soon after a straight fifty minute sit is clearly not going to happen.

Pre- and Post-Thanksgiving

Seriously, morning and evening I should chant “Nobody fucking cares!” and “Whose fucking side are you on?” at least four times: those being the things I most need to remember and hold close. Nobody cares what I do, more than in passing (and if they do, let them inform me of it! I don’t have to guess); and I must not help media-suffused capitalism despoil my body and soul. They are not the most dignified of aspiration prayers, but they’re the ones I need.

No binge yesterday, finally. It was a struggle. But remember this is not about vanity, nor even about health: It’s about being on my own side. It’s about not betraying myself, not letting myself be suborned. It’s about not doing things that will – quite immediately, nowadays – make me feel icky.

We’ll track the weight, and we should certainly add more food if we’re dropping more than a pound per week. Two pounds is way too much. (I’m speaking not of this week, of course, which will be anomalous, even apart from being the week of Thanksgiving, but from next week on.)

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Heya. We seem to have incurred only pound or so of damage on Thanksgiving, which we should be able to make back inside of a week. So good. Notice, señores, that eating off-regimen is NOT a binge on Thanksgiving; it’s simply observing the festival. It would be a waste of good willpower to try to white-knuckle my way through these holiday celebrations. By good fortune Martha’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving, so there’s only two of them this year. So. I am halfway through the holiday rapids. Shoot Christmas successfully, my lord, and we arrive in the calm water of January.

Tried a timer of 8 minutes for my short meditation. Not obviously right, not obviously wrong. It’s not clear to me that it’s doing less than the 25 minute sit – so far that kind of time (15 to 30 minutes) seems to me maybe a bad compromise. The bell is coming too soon to really step into another place. If I’m just saying my prayers and checking in then maybe even shorter than 8 minutes might work. Let’s just experiment. In any case it’s not a stationary target :-)

I am also wondering whether an even longer sit, but with a short interval of walking meditation in the middle, might serve. Around forty minutes the physical discomfort becomes insistent, and since I don’t intend to ignore physical discomfort entirely – imprudent at my age, certainly, and maybe imprudent at any age – 60 minutes with 5 minutes of walking in the middle might be more beneficial. Some of the benefit of course comes precisely from coping with discomfort, but some also comes from that wonderful sense of having crossed over into a radically different kind of time and space. There’s a limit to how valuable impassivity in the face of discomfort is, but I don’t think there’s a limit to the joy of crossing over.

Whose Side?

Probably the greatest aid is to chant “Whose fucking side are you on?” and to consult my own journal. Maybe I should add that chant to my morning and evening prayers:

Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?
Whose fucking side are you on?

I mean, really, that’s the meat of it. They’re trying to reduce me to wretchedness and slavery. Am I going to collaborate?

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Real time note: I wrote this thoroughly tongue in cheek, but I found myself chanting it on my daily walks, and it has entered my standard repertory of aspiration prayers. It is the prayer against gluttony, and the gist of it is: am I to be on my own side or not? Am I going to support myself or let myself down? The swearing is not just for novelty or piquancy, but to remind myself of the intensity of frustration that originally motivated the prayer. (Apologies to anyone of my father's generation who might be actually offended by the language: as far as I know that cultural moment has departed. My father is 96 and I don't think he's reading blogs these days.)

The Most Helpful Practice Text

So it turns out, shockingly enough – try to contain your astonishment – the the mere presence of “do one new thing” on my list has the power to frighten me into a decline. That is to say, the eating of large quantities of muffin and ice cream. No problem, really, you silly old man. If the hurdle’s too high, lower it a bit and start again. You don’t have to DO a new thing today. You just have to PLAN doing a new thing. If you’re going to go look at materials in a hardware store or a hobby shop, find out which one you’re going to. What its hours are. When you’re going, tomorrow. Then tomorrow you can actually do the thing. What you don’t do, lad, is grit your teeth and say “I WILL run at that hurdle! I WILL!” You’ve got all the time in the world, and none at all, and none of it matters in the slightest. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. Not really. Relax.

The very most helpful practice text for me is my own goddamn blog. I have been thinking the same goddamn thoughts for twenty years. Probably forty, but the blog doesn’t go back that far.