Just a note: I’ve shifted the “rules” for post­ing com­ments on this blog. You will now see your com­ment appear directly, with­out a delay for approval. I really want to hear from all of you, so click on the post title, above, and leave a comment!

I need to get out of my head!

How can we ever leave where we are? But we do it all the time. In fact, most of us are sunk so deeply into our own men­tal images that we can barely even rec­og­nize where we are any­more. We need to learn to come back to a place we have never left. It’s absurd. But that’s the way it is.
— Brad Warner -
“Sit Down and Shut Up,” p 26

In other words, why, oh why, do we keep insist­ing that we live in some other real­ity far removed from the one we encounter all the time? ibid., p. 64

For the record, I really like Brad Warner.

He’s a 40-something Zen guy who has in his back­ground stints with punk rock bands and also worked in Japan for a mon­ster movie com­pany. His books are both hon­est and irrev­er­ent. As such, he takes heat from some in the Zen world, who like their teach­ers to be gilded over with perfection.

When you come right down to it, Brad and I are doing the only thing we can do—we’re extolling the virtue of being present, while liv­ing in the non-imaginary world. One of the best ways of doing this is to be present in your body, while being aware (yet non-attached) to your thoughts.

I just recon­nected on Face­book with three peo­ple I knew at good old Elmhurst College

—we all grad­u­ated in 73, and all of us still look pretty good, if I do say so myself. The two guys lived in the same dorm as me, and the woman was the edi­tor of the school paper (I wrote… imag­ine… a rather rude col­umn for same, until I finally insulted the pow­ers that were and was “fired,” but Joan let me get the final word in…)

The guys were part of a group that was really into jazz and the blues, and also enjoyed the use of recre­ational sub­stances, so they were my kind of peo­ple. They imparted their love of the music (I didn’t “get” jazz before their inter­ven­tion) and for that I’m eter­nally grateful.

I men­tion this because Dar­bella and I spent the week­end at the Kitch­ener Blues Fes­ti­val. Among oth­ers, we lis­tened to Canned Heat (“Going Up the Coun­try”) and David Clayton-Thomas (from Blood, Sweat and Tears.) The music was excel­lent, only a lit­tle rain, good food, good company.

My mind, as usual, accom­pa­nied me.

So, I lis­tened to myself. Crit­i­cize, gripe, and com­plain (no doubt a famous law firm.) Mostly, I was doing judge­ments about people’s appear­ance, closely fol­lowed by “Why the hell don’t ‘they’ shut up and lis­ten to the music?”

Now, be clear here. Doing this is not “wrong,” nor stop­pable. Our lit­tle minds take us away from (let’s call it) real­ity all the time. I pleased myself (another mind trip) that, in the main, I didn’t fix­ate on any of it for more than a sec­ond or so at a time. But I rue­fully admit that those sep­a­rate sec­onds of judge­ment were quite sequential.

Now, the down­side to such inter­nal dis­trac­tions is that I couldn’t really lis­ten to the music at the same time. And the music, you see, was real­ity. Or bet­ter put, my cho­sen real­ity for that time.

Now, don’t you find it inter­est­ing that we pick a real­ity to be present in, and then leave it to go to Fan­tasy Land?

In a sense, it’s like my men­tion of jazz. The thing, for me, about jazz is that it is unpre­dictable, and weird stuff hap­pens. Jazz solos are impromptu, and I still find it unbe­liev­able that some­one can riff on a theme, be so seem­ingly some­where else, and then end up pre­cisely on track with the rest of the band (who do not seem to be exert­ing them­selves to stay in the groove.) Amazing.

As soon as I try to ana­lyze or com­pare what’s going on, I lose the music.

It is so that there is what is going on (real­ity) and what I think about it (fan­tasy.) This dove­tails with last week’s arti­cle, which posed the ques­tion of “me” vs “them.” This arti­fi­cial con­struct is a prod­uct of mind. Things come into exis­tence as I think about them. As do sep­a­ra­tions, and distinctions.

Where this gets odd is under­stand­ing that noth­ing around us, includ­ing us, is real, as in sub­stan­tial and lasting.

Another music exam­ple. Canned Heat played at Mon­ter­rey and Wood­stock. Their big hits came early, and “Going Up the Coun­try” became the theme song for Woodstock.

Now, the two main guys from the band died decades ago, and I sup­pose the Canned Heat Dar and I just lis­tened to are vaguely related to the orig­i­nal band. What I can tell you is that the music, 40 years later, sounded dif­fer­ent. Even the flute play­ing was different.

Dif­fer­ent, not wrong.

If my expec­ta­tion was that things were going to be like they were 40 years ago (same thing with David Clayton-Thomas…) I was going to be dis­ap­pointed. I was not disappointed.

I was struck (a good thing!) by the dif­fer­ences, noted them, and stayed with the music.

If you watched the video, above, you got a snap­shot of the late 60s, and the cul­ture of the time. (I love the nuns, 2/3 of the way through.) But, you see, none of those peo­ple exist, either back then, or now!

Me, in 73. (Or is it? Hmm…)
Susan! Stop staring!

It’s sort of like if you were to look at the actual film. Each frame of each per­son is a mil­lisec­ond of time. You can cut a frame out and look at it, and say, for exam­ple, “Here’s Wayne in 1973!” What ridicu­lous statement.

A frag­ment of Wayne-ness exists in that pic­ture. But it’s a chimera. There is never even a moment when I am the same as I was the moment before. I am not my sto­ries of me, a real­ity proven again and again.

I wrote to one of the guys from Elmhurst Col­lege, and men­tioned the music thing — how I remem­bered him teach­ing me about jazz and the blues. He wrote back, and remem­bered that I’d taught him how to use a dark­room, about exis­ten­tial­ism, and (the part I liked best) “[you] just made me want go Europe and put my eyes & hands on things.” I was quite struck — after he men­tioned those things, I remem­bered them.

Our his­tory is always and ever noth­ing more than the sto­ries we choose to remem­ber and focus on. We are not who we say we are! We are all of it, and none of it, and decid­edly that parts we choose to forget.

This is Brad Werner’s point, and mine too.

We are end­lessly com­mit­ted to our sto­ries, to the exclu­sion of what’s really hap­pen­ing. Which must be per­ceived and expe­ri­enced, as opposed to clung to or rejected. It is what it is, and then it isn’t. Just like us.

In Body­work, the hard­est part is get­ting peo­ple to stay in their bod­ies, and totally present, in order to have a (excuse the pun) full-bodied expe­ri­ence. Body­work the­ory is that trauma and delight are equally trapped in the body, and are not expe­ri­enced. Rather they are (over) ana­lyzed. This head trip­ping is encour­aged in the West.

So, you go to a ther­a­pist, and hope to have your sto­ries changed.

OK. That’s OK. That’s what this blog is sort of about — get­ting you to shift your story. But this is not enough.

The only path that is effec­tive is to let go of depend­ing on sto­ries altogether.

The requires a will­ing­ness to be awake, while hav­ing the full expe­ri­ence of the present moment. In Body­work, that means allow­ing the plea­sure and pain to flow in and through your body, while observ­ing and eval­u­at­ing with­out judg­ing. Or stop­ping it.

A pop­u­lar pose for most people.

Because the world is decid­edly off bal­ance, and has been for sev­eral years, the legs, pelvis and belly hold all kinds of dra­matic stuff. Plea­sure and pain, charge, sex­u­al­ity, self-awareness, and rela­tion­ships tend to be the “off kil­ter” key points.

And most peo­ple suck up the dis­com­fort, telling them­selves end­less sto­ries, and hop­ing that shift­ing the story alone will shift the feel­ing, sen­sa­tions, and phys­i­cal­ity of the unbalance.

Doesn’t work that way.

It’s like, in Zen, the key is not a shift in think­ing, although there is a com­po­nent of this. The shift is to “I don’t know,” com­bined with zazen, or just sit­ting. The key to the prac­tice is the sit­ting. The phys­i­cal act trumps end­less rumination.

In a sense, it’s lis­ten­ing to the music now, and now, and now.

More on this next week!