Meditation - If you've ever tried to meditate and given it up as a bad job because your brain will simply not shut up and...well... meditate, Headspace's 10-day free trial might help. I tried it a few weeks ago, during the time my blood-pressure became unruly after a change of meds. I found the trial period helpful, though haven't felt the need, as yet, to carry on into the "paid-for" sessions, my BP having been reined in, natural calmness, for the most part, is restored.
As an alternative to meditation proper, I've often found that 10 minutes just watching Bear Cam, live video from Alaska, can be beneficial, especially when the temperature is nearing 100 degrees outside, and humid with it. The videos resumed for a new season in the past few days. Bears should now be awake after their annual hibernation. There isn't a lot of beary action going on so far, but I still visit two or three times a day - just because I enjoy the sights and sounds.
I occasionally suffer the unpleasant feeling of having been left behind, like the kid (superannuated kid it has to be said!) who didn't quite get with the group following a Pied Piper - into smartphone-land. Should I, at last, get with the trend and treat myself to a smartphone? I've usually been quite late in catching up with any 21st century gimmick du jour. I didn't own a home computer until 2001, didn't start a blog until 2006, have not yet migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and haven't used a mobile phone since leaving England in 2004. Back then I owned one of those early clunky jobs with a wire antenna to pull out. Husband currently has an out-of-date cellphone with a slider keyboard for texting, and uses it hardly at all unless we're away from home. At home we have an olde worlde land-line.
My left-behind feelings, smartphone-wise, eventually led me to investigate Blackberry's newest offering, the Key-One. Not sure why I chose to investigate Blackberry from the many smartphone choices available, except that I remembered that Hillary Clinton, a legendary doofus when it comes to technology, used to swear by her Blackberry. If she could do it, then I'll certainly be able to wrangle one into submission! In a wild moment of abandon I clicked "confirm" and found I'd ordered a Blackberry Key-One. 24 hours later, after much mental argument, I attempted to cancel the order, as the phone had not yet been marked as shipped. Cancellation should've been a possibility. "No-can-do", said the customer service person - "it has now shipped." Ah well - it'll offer yet another learning curve for me to scramble up! Phone arrived on Thursday.
The new learning curve I've set for myself could prove to be awkward at times, and steep in places. Android is the land in which I shall stumble, trying to learn its language. You never know, my efforts might even provide fodder for the odd blog post or two...or if frustration ensues, there's always meditation and bear-watching.
Finally: this is fun, for anyone interested in the vagaries of UK politics, Brexit, Theresa May, and for old Python fans:
A recent piece by Ian Welsh, Character as Personal Destiny, had me scratching my head and wondering. I don't fully agree with his ideas, which reminded me somewhat of remarks I read long ago on an astrology forum, stating that "it's possible, once enlightened, to transcend one's astrology". I recall that I did question that proposal at the time. A post of mine from last year touches on similar thoughts -Musings on Meditation. My response to commenter and blog-buddy "mike" there included this thought:
We're here to untangle from the puzzle of life what we can, I suppose. If meditation helps in the untangling process, it can't be bad. But I've always had the uncomfortable feeling that, if taken to extremes, it could simply provide an excuse for not taking note of what's going on outside of one's own inner-ness. These days, I'd hesitate to blame anyone for that attitude, things being as they are - but somehow it doesn't feel right.
Anyway, back to Ian Welsh's recent piece - SNIPS:
The idea of karma is related to this. You’re born at a particular time, with a particular personality, to particular parents, in a particular place. Your nurture and your nature (the personality that even babies have) is predetermined, therefore your life is predetermined, because how you will react to events is a matter of your character, which is your original personality plus the circumstances you grow up in.
The fully enlightened are said to be largely immune to karma. This is because, often, as you meditate, it becomes clear that personality is a choice. You don’t have to act in accordance with your personality if it’s not in your self interest. This is true of everyone, but it’s one of those abilities most people don’t use. As you meditate you become detached from your own character, it doesn’t seem important to you, and as a result it loses much of its power. As it loses its power you become free to act as you please, and in that sense you break your karma. (And by act, I also mean think. The sort of terrible thoughts that plague many people lose much of their power.)...............................Meditation, then, can make you free and rob you of much of the juice required to make use of that freedom. The less you care, the happier you are (I know many people won’t believe that, I’ll just say that in my experience it’s true, and many other people attest to the same). .........................Still, I think it’s worth remembering that your personality isn’t anything super-precious, and that it can be your chains. Acting in ways that aren’t beneficial to you (or, often to anyone else) because of your personality serves no one. Personality is often chains, and yet we treasure it. If you want to be happier, be less attached to who you are.
"You don't care"....that's the scary part to me. A population of "don't carers" sharing a planet with equal or greater numbers of "I want power,
control and...everything and will have its".
Oh - what the heck! I shall stay unenlightened and care!
'cause you've got personality,
Walk, personality
Talk, Personality
Smile, Personality
Charm, personality
Love, personality
And of Cause you've got
A great big heart.....
Music must be a helpful aid to meditation. My own restless mind will not stay still enough to meditate for more than 30 seconds, so I cannot claim a credible opinion on this, but when has that ever stopped me? I tottered around YouTube looking for inspiration. There are lots of videos promising "music for meditation", long videos of an hour or more. What would suit one person's taste could be anathema to another, what follows is simply my own opinion.
I sampled a few minutes of a couple of special meditation music vids, found them a tad synthetic sounding; experienced a similar reaction to some other New Agey offerings. What would I find soothing ? Gregorian chants sprang to mind - the wonderful echoey mystical musicality of it. Dang ! Gregorians Do the Beatles now?? What the.......? Granted there are still some traditional Gregorian chant albums around, but those I sampled didn't give me the right amount of echo - probably due to combined limited acoustics of YouTube and my computer's sound system.
How about Enya? A possibility, but from that thought my mind leaped immediately to pan pipes. Yes! Simple, natural, honest, organic (in every sense of the word - pipe organs were an evolution of the ancient pan pipes.)
Pan pipes: their history spans the continents of Earth. They appeared in various different cultures, perhaps not at exactly the same time in man-made time, but probably around the same stage of development of each culture. In the Americas, China, Europe, Africa evidence of this, one of man's earliest musical instruments has been found, stretching back for at least 6000 years. The instruments were constructed from reeds, bamboo cane, wood, clay, bone.....whatever was to hand in a particular location.
The instrument's name - or that given to it in the West, honours Greek mythological god Pan. The story goes that Pan, god of pastoral folk and their flocks, fell in love with a beautiful nymph, Syrinx. Syrinx didn't find Pan, with his cloven hooves and shaggy countenance in the least fanciable. She fled, with Pan in pursuit. When they reached a river bank with nowhere for Syrinx to escape, she became desperate. She called to the river god for aid and in response was turned into a reed. Pan, reaching out to embrace the nymph found only a bunch of reeds in his grasp. His sighs produced a strange melodic sound to echo through the reeds. To demonstrate his undying love Pan broke off some reeds and made them into a flute-like instrument, played sad melodies to his lost love, who he imagined to be embodied in the instrument he always carried.
A modern master of the Pan pipes is Romanian musician Gheorghe Zamfir. Here he plays Chopin's Etude no. 3 in E major
Opus 10 no. 3 "Tristesse".
Edgar Muenala plays "Chess"
This piece is titled only Tibetan Flute - Deep Tibetan music (1) - it's lovely, but politically slanted comments below have to be ignored!.
There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? Where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
....weeklong visit to Drepung Monastery in southern India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had invited the U.S.-based Mind and Life Institute to familiarize the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community living in exile in India with modern science. About a dozen of us—physicists, psychologists, brain scientists and clinicians, leavened by a French philosopher—introduced quantum mechanics, neuroscience, consciousness and various clinical aspects of meditative practices to a few thousand Buddhist monks and nuns.................What passed between these representatives of two distinct intellectual modes of thinking about the world were facts, data—knowledge. That is, knowledge about the more than two-millennia-old Eastern tradition of investigating the mind from the inside, from an interior, subjective point of view, and the much more recent insights provided by empirical Western ways to probe the brain and its behavior using a third-person, reductionist framework................... More important, even when the monks were not meditating, but simply quietly resting, their baseline brain activity was distinct from that of the students. That is, these techniques, practiced by Buddhists for millennia to quiet, focus and expand the mind—the interior aspect of the brain—had changed the brain that is the exterior aspect of the mind. And the more training they had, the bigger the effect.
The old post my memory was searching for turned out to be this, from 2011: An Astrological Challenge: Candy Barr and H.H. Dalai Lama. In a nutshell: I'd noticed that the stripper/exotic dancer and the spiritual leader of Tibet shared a birthdate; I set out to see how astrology could explain such a wide discrepancy in outcomes.
Having re-read the post, I'm happy with the conclusion I reached. I particularly enjoyed re-reading the exchange of comment there with my old blog buddy Gian Paul in Brazil. Here's the exchange that caught my eye. It arose as a result of the final paragraph of my post: "Candy Barr found her way from a childhood of abuse by trading on sensuality. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with his position abused, though in a different way, continues to walk the path of spirituality. Are these two qualities, sensuality and spirituality so very different? Are they not two notes of the same chord?"
Gian Paul:
Agreed that sensuality and spirituality may be very akin to each other. There are stories (suppressed of course) about many saints (including J(esus)C(hrist)) having had some intense if not pleasure at least struggle "with the flesh".
One of the stories I found of interest is that of two Hindus, who after seeing a pretty girl, continued on their way. Some considerable time later, the younger Hindu asked if it would have been right to have had an affair with that woman. The elder's response was that this type of question can go on for ages. For his part he had "so totally enjoyed the girl's appearance and looks, that thinking about it again could never match the quality of the original moment of encounter."
Me:
Sensuality and spirituality - yes I pondered a while on that and couldn't come up with exactly what I wanted to write about it, even though I "sensed" a connection.
Sensuality relates to all our senses, not only those of a sexual or lusty nature which are usually brought to mind by the term. To be spiritual I suppose one would need to have all senses firing at full blast, so sensuality is a requirement of spirituality. But spirituality need not be a requirement of sensuality......does that make sense?
Gian Paul:
You are asking difficult questions, Twilight. Here my humble thought: Sensuality (including the more noble, evolved aspects of it) belongs to the "incarnate, material" part of humans.
Spirituality, for who wants to believe in that existing, probably will not mix easily with the "lower nature". Hence the religious kind of aspiration which wishes to overcome, exit the lower nature.
But is that not possibly a construction of the mind? The story of the two Hindus offers a better approach, I find.
Me:
Difficult Questions Are Us! - I should change the name of this blog! :-) Yes, it's a question that everybody would answer, and perceive, in a different way. I've never really understood "spirituality", but had best not get into that discussion.
The Hindu story you quoted does indicate that the ability to appreciate sensually is present in us all - but how we choose to proceed after that appreciation is important.
I'm sure the Dalai Lama appreciates beauty - in female form as well as other forms - it's part of life, part of what we are. But that would be his boundary - the appreciation.Sensuality and spirituality are both emotionally driven, though, and therefore link to that Grand Trine in their charts. Two ways of manifesting.
Sensuality and spirituality - that comparison came to mind again as I read the article linked at the top of this post, and these lines in particular:
More important, even when the monks were not meditating, but simply quietly resting, their baseline brain activity was distinct from that of the students. That is, these techniques, practiced by Buddhists for millennia to quiet, focus and expand the mind—the interior aspect of the brain—had changed the brain that is the exterior aspect of the mind. And the more training they had, the bigger the effect.
In effect, then, does regular meditation kind of shift the wavelength of sensuality for the meditator, possibly permanently away from fleshly lust? In which case, it's a good thing we all don't practice meditation or the species would have died out aeons ago. Sorry if I'm sounding flippant, as I stated in a comment above, "I've never really understood spirituality". Suffice to say that the term spirituality can cover a lot of ground and a lot of mushy New Age fuzziness. But, ignoring that side of it, there is an aspect of this that's troubling. Meditation, and the serenity it can bring about for an individual has to be a good thing as a temporary occasional aid. If it were to be practiced as a permanent way of life it would have to be practiced universally. If not practiced universally - the rest of 'em would trample roughshod over those experiencing their serenity. There's a living example in Tibet, now.
