Going back to the reasoning of the type I-need-him-because-I-love-him. Just watched the video of Dan Dennett’s presentation on TED called “Cute, sexy, sweet, funny“. Nothing new for those in the field of science but for the rest of us might sound somewhat surprising (that’s one of the reasons I love it!).
I always thought I liked sweet stuff because it was sweet. It appears I got the causality backwards! I don’t like honey because it is sweet but honey is sweet so that I like it. Sugar is high energy which was what we needed when we were had a more active lifestyle. Nature wired our brain so that we preferred sugar. There is actullay nothing intransically sweet in honey; it is our brain that makes it experience as sweet.
A friend of mine who has no kids and doesn’t want to have any of his own was telling me the other day how his little niece manipulated him into giving her his undivided attention. She was so unbelievably cute that he simply could not resist. We think we like babies because they are cute. Backwards reasoning again. Babies are dependent on us as they need to be cared for and protected. Being cute is their way of making us like them.
So where does it leave us with the original argument? One thing’s for sure: nothing’s certain. Just because we perceive the connection going one way doesn’t mean we’ve figured the direction right (besides there can be more than two dimensions to that plane) and we have to be careful making assumptions. I choose “Curiosity over assumptions” as a motto any time.
In his book ‘Touching Enlightenment’, the Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray makes the point that many western meditation students spend a lot of time in their heads and very little in their body. Meditation practice is all too often seen as a mind practice with very little to do with somatic sensations. He goes on to say that unless we fully embody our practice, and allow it to include our physical nature as well as our mind, we will end up as a set of disembodied heads, further away from enlightenment than when we started. I tend to agree.
To me it seems strange that we have come such a long way from an embodied practice since it seems to have been part of the intention of the Buddha to learn mindfulness of the body as a base before adding anything else. However, I guess now there are far more sensory distractions and intellectual pursuits to be had than there were in India two and half thousand years ago and perhaps we need to emphasise the physicality of practice more now than ever before. Continue Reading »
For Saturday’s webinar we were asked to reflect on the question, “Is the body great or small?”. I noticed the frustration I felt with the way the question was formulated and my internal resistance toward setting a label, defining the body in terms of it’s size. As soon as I said something about the size, it became reduced to that – size, something relative, a concept. The body itself did not seem to matter that much any more. It held no mystery.
Still, in our lives we do have to measure, to compare. “Is the practice great or small?”. If I don’t measure it, how do I even know if I’ve moved at all or am still stuck on the same spot? How could I measure my practice? Not in hours spent on the cushion, or the number of Dharma books I read or retreats I attended. I guess ultimately it was about the question, What is it that I want from my practice?
I received a few comments to my previous post, some of them not on this page. What they had in common was the idea that we need others because we love them and needing people was in fact not so bad. In short: we need to need people. I believe that the idea that some degree of dependency in a relationship is OK aside from the cultural underpinning is also backed up by another strong belief: if we don’t need others we will end up being cold-hearted and detached people and that is not an attractive picture. Likewise, if others don’t need us, we will end up lonely and unappreciated.
Really?
What about the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela or other individuals who have shown enormous compassion to their fellow humans and do not strike me as cold, detached and non-caring? Nor do they appear(ed) to be lonley and unappreciated. It is easy to think that once we take away our dependency on others, there will be nothing left.
Let me say from the start: when it comes to romantic love, I was cultured into the whole you-complete-me belief through films, books and some ideas that basically made it impossible to have a healthy relationship. I grew up in a culture where jealousy was (and still is) taken as a sign of loving someone and even encouraged (especially in men). The idea that loving someone involves an emotional attachment pervades many cultures but what does it actually imply? It means I depend on another human being for happiness. I depend on you for my happiness. How does this sound for responsibility?
How much is this moment worth to me? To get a sense of worth of something I need to compare it to something else, something on the same scale.I would probably value the moment I take a step into the emptiness of the open sky with a parachute on my back more than a quiet morning in the kitchen when I am waiting for my espresso to be ready. At least today when I feel I could use more action .
Most of our awake time I spend comparing stuff, assigning value to things, events and experiences based on how I feel about them at a particular time. It is easy to forget that all of those also have absolute value, outside myself and my story. Every single experience, event or thing is unique and therefore comparing it to the next one does not make sense.
If we remembered about the absolute value of everything, lots of anxiety in our lives would dissipate because at its root lies comparison, preferences and discrimination of one thing over another. When we take relative value of things for their absolute value, we end up chasing those things or experiences we value higher than others. This is not bad in itself, it just doesn’t work in the end.
I thought this month I would focus on exploring the notion of compassion: how do I define it, why bother with it, my own hang ups around it, the techniques for cultivating compassion (what works for me). This seems like a good place to start:
Returning to the earlier post on reactivity and pants. For starters, I believe it is never really about them pantsor whatever becomes a trigger for our reactivity, although in the situation when it actually occurs it can be very hard to see it. We so much want to believe that the root of our discomfort lies outside ourselves that we start believing it and acting on it. For me the question is not whether to pick up the pants or not but rather what I can learn from my reactivity around it: why and how matter more than what. This is not to give myself yet another reason to beat myself up over something but to see what underlying beliefs run the weather of my emotional and mental landscape.
It was one of the tough days that call for a treat. On that particular evening it was the bar of rather expensive dark chocolate with cherry and chilli pepper that had the task of saving my evening. I had a gnawing headache that was so subtle it was hard to notice. When it was my turn to pay at the grocery store, I realised I didn’t have enough money on my bank account and Swiss chocolate had to go. (I have to explain here that I do not owe or use a credit card.) It was not such a big deal: I needed to get home to my PC and transfer some money from the electronic saving account to the one that was connected to my Visa card.
Can we see reality as it is? Beau Lotto’s optical illusions point us in the direction that the brain did not evolve to see the world as it is but the way it was useful to see it in the past and the brain is constantly learning. There is no inherent meaning in information we receive from the world. Our brains create meanings based on the patterns they detect, comparing the new information to something we learned before and this is what matters in the end.
If anything, this can give some of us who are a bit too certain something to become uncertain about.
The brain does all this enormous work and I haven’t even asked for it! It’s like I move forward by relating to the past all the time. How do I learn anything new? Introducing some uncertainty, something that was not part of the past experience. Another question: how can I experience the world differently even when I see what appears to be the same thing or the same person? How do I not get stuck in the old interpretations of the world?
Welcome to AR-blog! The question I try to answer on the moment-to-moment base is: what is the appropriate response here?
Appropriate response is when we clearly see what the situation requires, not what conditioning determines, or what external expectations and internal demands precipitate.
Want to write a guest post and share about your practice? Send me an email: understandingcat[at]
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