Have You Had a Taste Yet?

A thought-provoking passage from a story Yam Gruel by the early 20^th century Japanese writer Akutagawa:

“Yam gruel is a gruel made by boiling slices of yam in a soup of sweet arrow-root.  […]  It was regarded as the supreme delicacy. […]  Accordingly, such lower officials as Goi could taste it only once a year when they were invited as […] guests to the Regent’s Palace. […] On such occasion they could eat no more of it than barely enough to moisten their lips.  So it had been [Goi’s] long-cherished desire to satiate himself with yam gruel.  Of course, he himself did not confide his desire to anyone.  He himself might not have been clearly aware that it had been his life-long wish.  But as a matter of fact, it would hardly be too much to say that he lived for this purpose.  A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled.  Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.”

I have but one question for you this morning, but I’ll state it thrice:

Are you aware of what drives you and why? 

What yam gruel are you still chasing?

Have you had a taste of life yet?

Reference:  Rashomon & Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Read Spinoza

“Modernity dethrones humankind.  It reduces all our thoughts, purposes, and hopes to the object of scientific inquiry.  It makes laboratory rats of us all.  Spinoza actively embraces this collapse of the human into mere nature.  Leibniz abhors it.

[...] Leibniz intends to demonstrate that we are the most special of all beings in nature.  In the entire universe, [Leibniz] says, there is nothing more real or more permanent or more worthy of love than the individual human soul.  We belong to the innermost reality of things.  The human being is the new God, he announces:  Each of us is “a small divinity and eminently a universe.” (1)

Do we belong to the innermost reality of things, as Leibniz suggests?  Of course we do, but so do our pets and pet-rocks.  Nature is one even if we compartmentalize it into many.

Is each of us ”eminently a universe?”  Of course.  But there is nothing divine (i.e. transitive, i.e. created) about this divinity.  Nature is naturally, spontaneously, essentially divine, i.e. self-creating, i.e. uncreated, i.e. non-divine, if you wish to split dichotomous/dualistic hairs.

“The crucial difference between these two philosophers comes down to this: Spinoza finds happiness in loving God [which Spinoza equates with Nature/Reality]; Leibniz finds it in God loving us back.” (2)

If you are chasing ego and reassurance, read Leibniz.  If you are chasing the ordinary perfection of what presently is, read Spinoza.  If – however – you have no time to understand either, read Matthew Stewart’s “The Courtier and the Heretic.”  It’s a 300 pages long ping-pong of historico-philosophical intrigue.

Reference:

“The Courtier and the Heretic,” Matthew Stewart, 2006, W.W. Norton, (1) p. 241. (2) p. 253

United States of Body

There are days when
I am completely in my mind.
Those days are many.
And then there days when I am totally outdoors, totally out of my mind*
Like now:

*Mindfulness doesn’t mean more mind, it means less mind, more body.  There is this smell, this touch, this sight, i.e. this life as it is unfolding in this moment, and then mind cuts in, with its distracting interpretation, with its intellectualizing narrative.  Never mind your mind – and unite your states of body.

Take Your Time Being You

Ordinary perfection from Knut Hamsun:

“I have no mission, no places I must visit; I am just a wanderer setting out from a logger’s cabin and coming back to it again; it makes no difference where I am. <…>

It is starting to freeze as I wander back home to my logger’s cabin; soon the frost bites into moors and marshes, and makes the going easy.  I saunter onward, slowly and indifferently, with my hands in my pockets. Why should I hurry? It makes no difference where I am.”

“So I saunter and saunter in circles around myself, enjoying myself, tasting solitude.”

Take your time being you.  Enjoy.

Reference:

Knut Hamsun (A Wanderer Plays On Muted Strings)

Leaves of Perfection

When I say – in my writings – that the present is perfect, I am not being metaphorical.  I mean this in the most literal sense.  Each and every moment of life is all that it can be, i.e. the best that it can be.  That is perfection.  No, not that theoretical, unattainable, hypothetical, imaginary, abstract, naively-idealistic perfection that we have been all conditioned to chase, but an immediate, concrete, practical, realistically-inevitable, ordinary perfection of all that is. 

Perfection, as I see it, isn't a fantasy of what could be, but a reality of what is.  I am, of course, not alone in this worldview; I am not the first mind to have this sentiment.  This perspective dates way back.

Here's how it is phrased in Dzogchen Buddhism:

Everything is pure and spontaneously accomplished from the outset

Dzogchen (ancient teaching of "natural perfection"), according to Lama Surya Das, is "the summit" of all Buddhist teachings.  Here's another Dzogchen proclamation about the perfection of reality, attributed to 14th century Dzogchen master Longchenpa:

Since things are perfect and complete just as they are, beyond good and bad, without adopting and rejecting, one just bursts out laughing!

Monks are  poets.  And poets are monks.  Here’s Walt Whitman for you, in a Dzogchen moment of acceptance, in his Leaves of Grass:

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future…

Or here’s Whitman, echoing the same sentiment, in “Song of Myself:”

There… will never be any more perfection than there is now.

Seeing present as perfect is a baseline of awe.  I remember a not too distant time when I myself was a classic perfectionist, sometimes seeing faults, sometimes seeing areas for improvement, but always seeing the potential of what could be while being blind to the perfection of what is.  Now, this reality-rejectionist has been reborn as a reality-acceptionist, more interested in the obscure poetry of reality than in rhyming verses of imaginary potentials.

The usual approach to treating perfectionism is palliative symptom-management: a perfectionist is clinically persuaded that the consequences of the mistakes aren’t all that devastating; he/she is offered to let go of his/her perfectionistic expectations of self or others.  The bottom-line is that the therapist, just like the perfectionist, continues to subscribe to the notion that perfection is unattainable and therefore should not be so vigorously pursued.

My approach is entirely different.  My approach is that of Walt Whitman.  My clinical goal is to show “that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future…” and to show that “there… will never be any more perfection than there is now.”

In others words, my approach is to show that not only perfection is attainable, but to show that perfection is inevitable.

There are many different paths that I take to accomplish this (Western logic, Nondual logic, epistemology, Logotherapy-style meaning formulations, Gestalt-like experiential exercises), but there are, of course, verbal short-cuts.

Ask yourself: “Does Reality short-change?”

If your answer is “no,” if it is self-evident to you that the Reality – at any given point in time – is all that it can be, that is fully maxed out and cannot be otherwise, if it is self-evident to you that there is no other Reality at any given point in time, and therefore whichever Reality exists – at present -  is the “right” one…

Then ask yourself this:  “Am I a sub-set of this Reality?”

if your answer is a self-evident “of course,” then conclude that you too do not short-change, that you too are doing the best that you can, always have and always will, as long as you are alive.

Short-cuts – just like sudden opportunities – favor prepared minds.  If this line of thought is not necessarily self-evident to you, then you will have to go on a longer journey of self- and reality-acceptance.  Perhaps, a book-long journey.

Be well, life-walker.

ps:

Reality is sowing leaves of perfection not just in autumn.  Gather them all.  Perfection is mind's natural season.

References:

Natural Radiance: Awakening to Your Great Perfection (Lama Surya Das)

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

Present Perfect (P. Somov)

Experience It First and Only Then Describe "It"

The sun is love. The lover, a speck circling the sun.

These lines are from Rumi, in translation by Coleman Barks.

Whose lines are these lines? Rumi’s or Barks’?

When reading Rumi in translation by Barks, historically, I am reading Barks’ translation of Rumi’s translation of Rumi’s thoughts.

Whose thoughts are these thoughts that Rumi tried to translate into words that Barks later translated into words that I am now trying to decode into my own experience?

The experienceis the sun. The word, just another semantic Icarus burned up in its flight to describe it.

These lines are my attempt to translate the experience whose ownership is yet to be established.

Mind is a poem lost in translation.

Your mind, too, right now,is a poem the experience of which you are both beginning to write and read at the same time as I am finishing another one of my attempts to translate the untranslatable.

Bottomline: experience is beyond translation; whatever you are doing (eating, playing, working), whatever is the experience – experience it first, and only then (try to) describe it.

Notes:

I wrote this in 2009.  Here's what pops into my mind as I re-read this:

Experience It (i.e. reality) first and only then describe "It" (i.e. your interpreation of It).  Notice quotation marks.  Subjective is but a quotation of reality, a quantum of filtered mind.

Mind is a Detour

Dao De Jing: The grand thoroughfare [of Dao] is perfectly level and straight

Yet people have a great fondness for mountain trails.*

Somov: That's right: mind is a detour, take the short-cut.

*Dao De Jing, Philosophical Translation, Roger Ames and David Hall

Satisfy Your Craving for Existence with a Fix of Ordinary Perfection

Words are for communication. When you are alone, there is no need for words. A wordless mind is a different mind. Try it. Take a language fast:isolate yourself for a day, kill the TV, keep mum, and avoid reading or writing.

Without words, the mind is without its usual tools of distinction. Each word, after all, means something; each word defines, delineates, denotes, describes, divides and edits the Suchness of what is.

Live a day in this spacious wordlessness. See what emerges. Notice how all these comparative notions of perfection and excellence phase out. In a state of wordless awareness, there is nothing to prove or disprove.

Instead of craving existence we begin noticing that we already exist. Instead of chasing ideals, we notice the reality. Speechless, we begin to feel in awe.

Un-speak
the domino effect of your words
back to the Original Silence -
To a moment
before your Mind
created the word “mind.”

From a Sense of "I" to a Sense of Awe!

An 11th century Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer wrote: I passed into the potter’s house of clay, and saw the craftsman busy at his wheel, turning out pots and jars fashioned from the heads of kings, and the feet of beggars. (1)

A 21st century blogger echoes: You are made of this Earth, so, be.

An 11th century Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer wrote:

How long wilt thou expend thy existence on vain self-love, or in searching for the source of being and of not being? (2)

A 21st century blogger echoes: Ground your quest in what is.

An 11th century Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer wrote: I am racked with thirst, and yet a fresh cool stream flows before me. (3)

A 21st century blogger echoes: Have a sip of now.

An 11th century Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer wrote: Come, seat thyself upon the grass, for in a little while grass will spring from this dust of mine and thine. (4)

A 21st century blogger echoes: Appreciate the ordinary perfection of your non-stop growth.

An 11th century Persian poet/mathematician/astronomer wrote: Life was given unto me without my consent, therefore my own existence, filled me with astonishment. (5)

A 21st century blogger echoes: Shift from a sense of “I” to a sense of awe!


References:

1-5: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A Pass of Self-Acceptance

Lady Nijo, a once imperial concubine turned Buddhist, named, as the court ladies would be in the 14^th century Japan, after a street (2^nd Avenue), shares the following travel note:

“I had given up my home completely, yet my thoughts quite naturally lingered on the possibility of return…  These thoughts occupied my mind all the way to Osaka Pass…    As I paused to rest, my glance was caught by a cherry tree so heavy with blossoms that I could hardly take my eyes from it. 

Its blossoms detaining travelers

The cherry tree guards the pass

On Osaka Mountain.

I composed this poem as I continued <…>  at dusk I saw prostitutes seeking companions for the night and realized that this too formed a part of life.”

The irony of ordinary perfection:  an ex-concubine 2^nd Ave. beauty, now a wandering Buddhist, is arrested by a sight of beauty of Osaka Pass, and gets a pass into self-acceptance.

References:

The Confessions of Lady Nijo, 1973, p. 182-183).