The Dark Mountain Blog
How societal collapse begins with a broken heart
posted by Darren Allen
8th May, 2012
Many people intellectually understand that the world is within; that the objects and relationships perceived ’out there’ are in fact, first of all, ‘in here’ – that everything you do, love, see, want and fear exists, first of all, in the mental-emotional self. But this intellectual understanding usually remains intellectual, abstract – of little practical value: If your money is running out, or your wife, or your world, you usually do not consider protracted reflection on existential credentials to be first priority. Even though you may intellectually appreciate that an external loss is really happening within you, and even though you may feel it gripping your skull, pressing down on your chest or sinking into your guts – your instincts are usually to solve the problem by changing the world. Or talk.
In the last few years the idea of the end of the world (meaning this human world-civilisation) has entered the edges of the mainstream, and people are starting to talk about it without fear of being labelled loons. Nobody, however, is applying what they know (or even what they don’t know) from their own actual lives to their relationship with a collapsing world. It sometimes seems, when reading all the anti-civ, society-collapse literature on the web, that nobody has ever had a broken heart, that nobody has ever faced total loss, that nobody has had to give everything in broken surrender, that nobody has ever had their personal world totally fall apart before. If they have nobody seems willing or capable of applying this actual experience to what we all will be facing sooner or later as the wider world falls apart.
This isn’t to deny the importance of discussing peak oil, new organisational paradigms, political blindness, the nature of institutional relationships in post-crash societies and all the other topics which occupy writers today who are looking at social collapse; but to make the point that these are all intellectual concerns. None of these things will be at the forefront of anyone’s awareness when society really starts to break down. What people will be aware of is intense fear and intense desire, and unless the nature of fear and desire are addressed now we will find ourselves – as individuals – completely unprepared for the enormous change, profound loss and horrorful uncertainty that is on its way.
It is not society that we need to be looking at, it is ourselves. On the face of it this is a bland truism – many people seem to be saying the same thing. And yet – where, in all the collapse literature, can you read about sex and making love? Where can you read confessions of the tiny crimes the self commits in moments of day-to-day crisis? Where can you read of practical ways to enhance stupendous creativity and decrease hyper-subtle existential anxiety? Where can you read about class – how how middle-class thinking corrupts generosity or abandonment – or about how freedom from the self also means freedom from work? Where can you find the connection between love and death and the earliest or strangest experiences of the divine? Where can you read about the nature of consciousness, how it changes in states of uncertainty, how it contracts and opens to subtle puffs of vibe-threat or suffering-facing – where, in a word, can you read about self?
It is not the world that is passing away, that is facing death – it is the self, and the end of self is, evidently, not something that self can prepare for; that will or will not happen ‘one day’ – it is continually present.
The world is ending now.
How To Deal With the End of the World or What Happens Today When Self Faces Unself
When the internet shuts down, and mobile phones stop working, and streetlights go out, and jobs cease to exist, and money becomes valueless, and you are constantly surrounded by people that, for once in your life, you have to have a direct relationship with, you will find that it is not scarcity that you need to learn to deal with, or violence, or the collapse of ‘democracy’, or the end of an oil-based economy. It is your self. The following short guide is a means to prepare yourself for a time when large chunks of who you are – your habits, reflexive desires, fantasies and repetitive thought patterns – are, through having no ‘external’ object to work on – annihilated, and you are forced to plunge into the ocean of unself that surrounds you right now.
UNTHOUGHT Fear and desire feed off brain chatter and associative thought trash. Unless you can master your thinking and the restless mechanical movement of your attention, you will be paralysed by thought-fear at the annihilating fact of total loss rising before you and unable to hold back from agonies of craving, anger, guilt or panic brought on by thinking during loss.
Use the city to practice thought and attention mastery. Walk through the metro enjoying your breathing more than the adverts, refuse to participate in gossip. See how pornographic news-violence has power over your attention – and in seeing this, take the power back. Allow the urge to rubber-neck disaster slip through your system.
DARKNESS Are you afraid of the dark? This doesn’t mean can you sleep in an unlit house full of people, it means can you walk through a forest alone at 2am? The darkness is more than just a physical threat, its an existential reminder of the unknown. Learn to face it as soon as possible. Find the nearest graveyard and walk through it at midnight alone, facing down any demons that might appear with the shield of unthinking abandon.
SEX Unless you are in contact with the delighted love-feeling that contact with the opposite sex naturally bubbles up, you’ll be a slave to murderous sex thoughts. This will be the same as now – unable to tell the gentlemen from the beast, prey to maulers, restless, cold or violent – but, when civilisation crashes, without social checks to keep these insanities suppressed or locked up, they’ll make a howling nightmare of life.
Use the city to practice the awareness that precedes automatic glances towards stimulus-response tits and arses. Practice scriptlessly, wantlessly facing the opposite sex in spontaneous ungrasping unknowing. Practice loving when you most don’t feel like it. Practice getting out of your fuckbrain when you kiss and entering the wide unbelieving body of sense-surrender.
VIOLENCE is built on sexual frustration (in that the connected warmth of love-making is without violence), and depends on restlessness and expectation. In civilisation violence is mostly anger and irritation, and leads to shame and vibe corruption; but when the bubble pops its going to get grotesque.
Learn how to deal with your own anger – by feeling your restlessness, and looking for the tiny expectations which lead to frustration and fury. You must learn to remind yourself, when angry (or afraid or depressed), that no situation is so bad that you cannot laugh at it, or find it interesting.
Facing other people’s violence is a different question, and requires a different kind of selfless courage. For this you need to learn to acquire instant discernment. Some violent situations require the subtle art of calm, watchful prisoner’s defiance, some require self-mastered presence – to sniff out a murderer before he even appears and not open the doors of your eyes a crack to allow him in – and some violent situations require the killer instinct – the death-fearless chucking of all chips to the wind in order to defend someone else. You can practice most of these in the arenas of cruelty that civilisation currently offers; the dinner-party, the office, the factory and the family.
FEAR stands before every nightmare you’ll face as the mask is ripped off the face of the world. Fear, first of all, of losing things you think or feel you have – your money or your dignity, your possessions or your qualifications, your power or your status. To practice overcoming these seek out situations in which you cannot use or rely on these things, situations that you fear or really ‘don’t like’ – aloneness, poverty, unscripted spontaneous theatre, nature, the company of the dying, mad people, children and extreme boredom are the classics, but everyone has their own private hell which, sooner or later, must be faced. Better to do it in your own way, now, than to be propelled into it by civ-pop.
Underneath fear of losing what you have, is the atomic fear of losing who you feel you are. This aversion to the emptiedness of unbeing is a constant background anxiety or tension which lies at the root of all fears, even the tiniest eruptions of anxiety or violence. To face it is partly a question of self-mastery – learning to let your self slip into inner feeling and full sensory awareness of the present-moment – partly a question of love – exposing yourself completely to another and allowing that gaze to raise your game – and partly a question of honestly – not mere confession, but the unjudging turning-towards of self-awareness, watching the self as it thinks and feels.
The super-intimate skills of self-mastery are not acquired by learning, psychology or magic but by actively seeking out criticism, uncertainty and the experience of unself, and by practicing, again and again, letting go, allowing and courageously, selflessly acting before the manifold opportunities normal life offers to lose your presence, break down, throw a wobbler or behave like a dick.
Posted by Darren Allen on 8 May, 12
Comments: 75 comments - Read them and respond
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Thank you. This makes such good sense. Powerful ideas.
It’s a powerful piece, however I do find a few bits rather jarring, which didn’t allow me to get the full gist of it. It’s true, however, we are very reliant on “distraction”: telly, phone apps, even the internet. When that goes and you’re just on your own in a house for weeks at a time during a blizzard, could you manage without going mad? Many people didn’t. There’s a reason the winter months were so dreaded by our ancestry – and also a reason that festive seasons and the festivals to honour the sun’s return were done with such heartfelt relief.
But even so, I have some issue with the piece: firstly insistence on the “opposite sex” a little bit out of touch with current times, and may therefore distance some readers. It’s a quibble which many people who might otherwise engage will be sure to point out as excluding them. Or, people like myself who haven’t a chance of hell in engaging in anything with same, opposite, or otherwise I thought “Well that leaves me out then.” Where does this leave the single – high and dry again, I suppose. Same as ever. Thankfully I can feel love in other ways for my environment, for my work, although I am still working on loving the self.
Anger is not something I think needs analysis or to be “laughed off”. Anger is an emotion much maligned, just like fear, sadness, and other so called “negative” emotions. But I don’t believe there’s anything negative about them UNLESS they perpetuate violence – and this can be violence toward the self as well as violence to others. A tantric teacher one told us at a convention that the idea of living a non-violent life and harming no one was ridiculous, and impossible. The message god misinterpreted and loss. The point of “doing no violence” wasn’t to start a vegan agenda, but to teach people to do know violence to the self with negative, hurtful thoughts, to not batter oneself down. Mental-self-flagellation masquerades under the moniker of “Humility” but often seems to do more harm than good. It’s difficult for many people to work on, but it’s worth a shot.
However even with the above observations, it’s a very important issue to discuss.
I love this post, but would take issue with: “Unless you are in contact with the delighted love-feeling that contact with the opposite sex naturally bubbles up . . . .” For some people, it’s not the opposite sex that causes that feeling to bubble up.
Thanks Darren — this reminder is very perceptive and important. But while your assessment that collapse is about personal and emotional loss and the loss of the self is dead on, my experience (and listening to and reading stories of how people coped during the Great Depression) suggests to me that how we learn to cope with that loss will vary hugely from person to person. So parts of your ‘advice’ ring true for me while parts are just inapplicable (or incomprehensible).
Better advice, I think, would be to get to know oneself well — something that civ society discourages (since it is easier to sell to and control people who are and aspire to be like everybody else). For many, caught up with the needs of the moment (theirs and loved-ones’) that self-knowledge practice will be very difficult to find time and energy and presence to do before it’s too late. Those people are in for a difficult time.
I’d love to read a follow-up post that suggests ways in which we can practice learning to know ourselves better, and in particular practice developing the lost capacities, for example, of getting along with people we don’t like, of facilitation of self-organized groups, of community-building, and of psychological resilience (as opposed to inurement, the current popular strategy for dealing with suffering).
I don’t think there is a prescription for this, since we are all so different, but there may be a common process of self-discovery that will let us each find how we can best (re-)learn these important capacities.
We’re going to need them.
Thanks for the comments.
My point about sex and the opposite sex is that they are the cause of epic quantities of fear, violence, frustration and nightmare confusions – whether you are alone, in a partnership, homosexual or whatever.
As for anger, I would draw a distinction here between free-anger and frustrated-anger. The former is able to see clearly – a tool if you will, alert to the present and and able to be put aside. The latter is a kind of psychic possession, defensive, corrosive, always bubbling under and based on self.
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Religion and spirituality have discussed and provided guidance on how to live through the uncertainty of social collapse, the abandonment or loss of things you love and your ‘self’ have been around for years. That’s why they are one of the first things people turn to
Wow – this is a beautiful and powerful post Darren. Thank you for sharing it.
I’m not so sure that “nobody” is applying what we know/sense about our actual lives to our relationship with a collapsing world. There are plenty of people mixing and sharing our personal experiences with our engagement in the world.
A few years ago a friend asked me: how can we hospice an old world and midwife a new world being born? We need to do both.
And it isn’t “the self” that I see dying. It’s the *stories* that we tell about ourself that are dying. It’s the collapse of old ways of thinking and perceiving ourself. Many of us are searching in this darkness to feel the deeper life within our stories.
The fear that we feel comes with losing who our mind thinks we are. And we don’t need to go through self-mortification (e.g. by criticism and “selflessly” acting) to be transformed. We can also be transformed by seeking fulfillment – following our hearts, being kinder than we think we should be to ourself… and laughing at ourselves when we inevitably do sometimes behave like a dick.
Sorry, I’m going to be provocative here. What a lot of dross filled, self-centred nonsense. All you have talked about is ‘self’. At no point of any significance did you really mention ‘others’ (family, kids, friends, neighbours, community).
Fundamentally we don’t need to look after our ‘selves’. That’s actually what is wrong with the sick society we live in today. We have lots and lots of people thinking the most important thing is self-preservation, self satisfaction, self awareness, etc. However if the overiding concern of society was to look after each other, then the ‘self’ would by definition get more help and support than it knew what to do with.
To give you a little insight which you may not have, based on my own personal experience, the first thing you think about when faced with a ‘freefall’ in your life is the people around you. When you sit in front of a consultant that tells you, you have cancer I can promise you you don’t immediately think about ‘self’. What the body (or at least mine) does is reach for others,those close to you that will need your support and vice versa. You also enter a slightly strange parrallel world where what your body tells you to do a couple of things.
The first is ‘don’t look down’. This is the opposite of what you talk about with regard to addressing issues such as ‘losing things you think or feel you have’. You don’t look at what you’ve lost, or risk losing, you look at what you’ve still got and how to make the best of that. What you have written, from my experience is trite crap.
The second unconscious action is ‘to get on the conveyor’. This takes you to places you can’t predict but it is a way of dealing with the myriad twists and turns of what you are faced with, as and when you have to face them. But above all else, this part of the experience, is about reacting. In a ‘freefall’ much of what you do is react and, I’m sorry, nothing prepares you for that.
About the only part of your post I actually agree with is your comment about finding ‘that no situation is so bad that you cannot find it interesting’. I would agree with that. It’s also an extremely useful way of coming to terms with what you are facing. A kind of ‘know your enemy’. But again it’s not about ‘self’, it’s about ‘other’.
But as for ‘laughing’, you’d be a dick to do that and may I suggest the crying would come before the desire to laugh ever surfaced.
I don’t know. The literature of letting go is vast, although perhaps it does not call on us to face our own doom. I wonder is all this supposed to help us at the end? Isn’t this all just about facing death? Isn’t the violence of others and our own violence, the worst we have to fear? (We face that now but of course a definition of collapse is ubiquitous violence.) So we should practice achieving the states of mind that will….do what? Help us face death – our own and the death of those we love – with equanimity? Better to put all of our energy into trying salvage or create something between people that will work in the darkest of circumstances? But perhaps that is what you are saying.
Hello again. Happy to respond…
Evokit
Yes, my ‘where can you read about…’ paragraph is perhaps a touch hyperbolic. There is, of course, much good stuff about the nature of self. But high quality penetrating self-reality-observation, with the unmistakable tang of salt-in-the-eye originality, is very hard to find in any artistic or literary sphere, and – my point – there seems to be a rather critical dearth in the new field of ‘post-crash’ literature. If you have any recommendations though, please pass them on.
Dark mountain?
Dave Pollard…
Thank you. Don’t agree with your first point though. Although the details of the problem change from person to person, the essence is the same – as you seem to suggest at the end of your comment (‘common process’). Self-knowledge, for example – or knowing how one acts, reacts and the qualities of one’s mind and emotions – not only arises from the more fundamental, and challenging art of self observation – pulling away from the mental-emotional complex, from vibe-blind over-concentration and letting the self blend into unself – but stands alongside self-mastery.
And yes – letting go of self going to be a ‘skill’ everyone will have to learn, or unlearn.
Nick.
Thank you for the complement. I don’t agree about the stories comment though. Stories either come from the mental-emotional self alone (what I call self-in-charge – or the dominator consciousness) – or from reality (the big room, kamichan, yinyin, the silent void of the absolute present, call it what you will) – which is then shaped by the tool of the self.
If the tool is operating the master, as is so often the case, then the stories will be turkeys.
Also don’t agree about fear coming from losing what mind thinks we are. Firstly mind will very swiftly pick up a new story if the one it is attached to is shown to be nonsense – in other words the problem is attachment to any story, not to any particular story. Secondly that problem itself is an effect which arises from the vibe-blind autonomous emotional self-in-charge – the quivering ball of hurt that possesses your mind, makes you think it is you, and causes all the horror of your life.
Finally don’t completely agree about transformation through fulfilment. Of course joy and liberation do transform – but to get there, and, more’s the point stay there, under all circumstances – when your twat boss criticises you for no reason, when your girlfriend or boyfriend wakes up with a moody, when the doctor lays his hand on your shoulder, when you’re irritable, uncreative, frustrated, desperate and hanging on to yourself – nearly always, in my experience, requires suffering and mortification. I don’t mean ascetic self-destruction, but the letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go and turning towards the pain that gives liberation and opens the door to fulfilment even wider.
Andy Brewin
A good relationship with others is impossible without self-mastery. If you cannot put your self aside all you are going to see in others is what you want, like, approve of, agree with, don’t want, don’t like, disapprove of or disagree with. Miracle a distant ninth.
You cannot see the mystery of the other while the highly unmysterious, extremely clever and unbelievably swift mental-emotional self lives, moronically autonomously within, ready at any second to pull a virtual world over your eyes and corrupt your perception with emotional possession.
I did not say we need to look after ourselves. I did not mention self-preservation or self-satisfaction: almost the reverse.
I disagree about nothing preparing you for death. The purpose of life, for me, is not just preparation for death, but an ongoing, open invitation to actually die, to let self slip away into the superb, strange and ridiculously intelligent uber-moment.
Peter Stroud
Yes, the literature of letting go is pretty big – although, as I say above, hard to find wyrd fine practical power in any medium – but I also wonder why it is not applied to the coming catastrophe, or how to connect our daily lives today with life under the most extreme circumstances. I wouldn’t call this facing death – which is not, for me, the worst we have to fear – but the actual experience of death, what it means for the self to pass away and for the enormity, the shattering monstrous hugeness and mania and delight and horror and sweet simplicity and ever so particular character of what is, to flood in.
I do not agree that it is better ‘to put all our energy into trying to salvage or create something between people that will work in the darkest of circumstances’. Unless you know who you are, unless you have mastered yourself and able to see beyond the warping filter of secret pain it puts between you and others, you’ll never create anything worth loving and effort and stress and dread loss will ghost ya.
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I actually quite liked the post, I think it was a bit like what we were saying through the comments after the recent posts…. How to hold yourself, the way of it, the calm simplicity…But I get Andy’s reply too because as I was reading I was thinking, hmmm I wonder if Darren has children. That thing of being so tied by every thread of your being to a small, vulnerable and incredibly precious person that you care about more than yourself. Personally and as Andy has said, I couldn’t care less about what happens to myself in the future unknowness, I could laugh fearlessly at it and stride through however many .2 am forests I needed to with a singing heart. But the children…..so thanks Darren and thanks Andy. The talk is just talk and I am laughing at the thought people seem to believe that they can be told or taught to practice this way, that someone else can work it out for them and pass it on over a blog etc ! evolution 101 anyone?
For anyone interested in what I mean by self and unself – because my use of these terms is a little unusual, and my post here is very brief – please check my Brisk Guide to Your Self
http://www.gentleapocalypse.com/2009/02/brisk-guide-to-your-self.html
And, an important follow up – Are You Insane?
http://www.gentleapocalypse.com/2010/01/virtual-prison.html
Ta very much.
Rosie
Thanks. Can’t say I agree about ‘just talk’. I’ve benefitted from talk in my life, even abstract internet talk wafted across the hive-mind by an unknown ghost, and ideas on how to deal with personal crises too – even being told what to do.
I’ve done my best to suggest – ridiculously briefly alas – practical measures of self-transcendence – not mere insouciance – in the thick of work-flat-shop-bus ‘normal’ life. If it comes across as more guffing on about what is the problem and what is to be done and how things are, then I’ve one hundred percent failed here. Hopefully the context it is lifted from – my wider work – will redress that imbalance.
Having or not having children has nothing to do with what I’m saying. Overcoming your moodies and irritations and anxieties and daily dullnesses of heart that vibe-torture babies and corrupt flow between you and young children is also a 2am graveyard.
Very refreshing to hear someone shift things to the visceral, personal reality of unsought change and loss. That is in fact a good part of what drew me to DMP in the first place…as Paul recently put it (sort of), we simply don’t live in abstractions, however hard we might try to.
I found the real strength of what you say in the beginning. If we step outside the media and class bubbles that cocoon us, seduce us, distract us, there is nothing at hand that is not already present in our (plural) broken and hurting lives. And in the various forms of dying that beset those lives.
What I missed here was the sense in which the life-skills you discuss may grow in community. Or conversely, how few of us ever do, of our own volition, take the processes you advocate from experiment to something we carry with us moment-to-moment, something we know in our bones. (You may have chosen to leave any suggestion of the long history of just such disciplines of ‘self-mastery’ implicit, so as not to be pigeon-holed?)
The vulnerability and need that we all carry in the face os loss is the very stuff of religion, if we divest that term – just for a moment – from the ossified institutions, the abusive and privileging power structures, and the seductive false certainties that all arise parasitically to feed on that visceral need.
Talk of self-mastery means alot less to me than befriending the fallibility and vulnerability that such changes return us to. But these are simply differences of emphasis, perhaps, also writ large in the traditions that have for millennia – at least – enshrined and passed on just what you discuss here.
CG Jung said on his deathbed (so I am told): “In my life I have had to climb down a thousand ladders, to make friends with this little clod of dirt that I am.” That’s what self-mastery means to me.
And sex…I agree with the above comments, and also feel you buy in, here, to our cultural obsession with the idea that if we don’t keep getting it, we’re stifling something essential, that will then grow poisonous. Yes, the heart blooms and knows itself in sexual love. But sexual love comes in its own seasons, and sometimes not at all, and the heart may bloom in many other ways.
Thanks for a provocative reflection.
Mat
On the one hand, I’ve become so weary of the over-intellectual middle class semi-sophisticated self-indulgent handwringing, sort of pretentious poetic self-flagellation and self-pity, associated with DM, that I found this a quite refreshing read. Yeah. Spiritual training. Toughen up. Ready for the Apocalypse.
I think I already did all that, didn’t I ?. Trouble is, it’s not really much of an accomplishment, is it ? …when you think about it…..
I know that it’s possible to train oneself to step on and over the rotting corpses of women and children without flinching or being troubled in the least. The forensic archaeologists who investigate mass graves learn how to do it. Samurai trained themselves to perform bloody slaughter and remain emotionally unperturbed.
On the other end of the scale it’s possible to be so hypersensitive that one bursts into tears at seeing a dead mouse.
There’s sixty million of us sitting on this thing called UK. It’d be good if a lot more got themselves together, but it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it ?
I suppose it depends whether one begins from a ‘personal survival at all costs’ perspective, or a ‘how to build a viable alternative community’ perspective or a ‘what’s in the best interests of everything that is not human’ perspective.
I live with death. I don’t mind leaving. Loss of self isn’t really a big problem. I don’t relish having to watch what happens when this civilisation thing goes down. I imagine it’ll resemble contemporary accounts of famine and plague and civil war in mediaeval history books, that I’m rather glad I didn’t have to witness at first hand.
Mat
Thank you.
Community is a superb testing ground for self-mastery of course. All your insanities and stupidities will out if you have a direct relationship with your fellows. Few of us do have such a large direct-relationship group though – but nearly all of us have romantic relationships – the community of two – and so I tend to confine what I have to say about self and others to that.
As I say though, dinner parties, office meetings, shop-transactions – they’re all much better than ashrams for dancing with the devil and diving in the deep blue sea.
You say… ’Talk of self-mastery means alot less to me than befriending the fallibility and vulnerability that such changes return us to. But these are simply differences of emphasis, perhaps…’
And I agree. Although I’d add the word mystery to fallibility and vulnerability. The more mystery you can actually experience, thoughout the actual day, the more impossible and vivid and slicing to the bone it all is, the more self is necessarily in its place.
As for sex, I disagree – although I am making a huge distinction between sex and love-making. What you say makes sense in theory. In practice just about everyone yearns for romantic love, has or has had chronic relationship problems are absolutely cripped with obsession or encoldened by boredom and the experience of ’normality‘. Solving all this is clearly a vital part of life. I don’t mean to suggest that if you’re not in partnership you cannot be happy, or know love though. Gosh no.
Wolfbird,
I’m not so much talking about being able to walk through the apocalypse without losing your cool, as being able to walk through your relationship with your mother and father, your daily interactions with the opposite sex, your journeys on the london underground, the blank canvas you’re staring at, your dreams and nightmares without falling into your same same same same self.
Naturally your own private apocalypse is yours in particular. You might find it easy, for example to walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield, but play clunkily with children, cannot step onto an improvised stage, have secret sexual shames and talk down to your mother. Who knows – but whatever it is, that is the training ground I am pointing towards.
Rosie,
Thanks. You read my mind :)
Andy
Darren,
In reponse to your comment to Rosie you say ‘having or not having children has nothing to do with what I’m saying’. Clearly, on the basis of that trite response, I’ll also work on the assumption you don’t have children. Sorry, it has everything to do with having children. By dismissing the very important context that children provide to any discussions of loss or collapse, I’m afraid all you’ve written sounds like a lot of self absorbed, self satisfied, self indulged tosh.
You can’t possibly leave out, or ignore, or disregard the most important element of many people’s lives and call this a guide. It’s not.
Andy
Well, I have children, and I also think that what Darren says here is interesting and important. I don’t agree with it all, but I think the central point is well made. But – of course – each to their own.
Hi Andy,
Whether or not you have children is irrelevant to self-mastery, although self-mastery is not irrelevant if you have children: because its your self-in-charge – meaning your subconscious anxieties, expectations, addictions and the cold cutting off or moody instability they result in – that will cause suffering your children will spend most of their lives dealing with.
Looks like you don’t agree though.
Nevermind. Warmth to you,
Darren
Paul, Darren,
If the central point is self-mastery…….so what ? What’s this blog telling anyone? Is self-mastery any different to our general development as human beings? I don’t think so. Not in the context Darren has written this. Everyone ‘self masters’ to a lesser or greater extent everyday in their work, home and family life, and dealings with friends and foes alike. Standing in a graveyard at 2am is surely no different to walking through a group of yobs in any high street. We do this sort of thing all the time. To assume we need some sort of ‘how to’ guide is patronising to say the least. That’s why I’m getting ‘huffy’ about this. As a slight aside, one of the main reasons I think why the environmental movement has failed to gain any level of general buy-in to its ideas is because of the patronising and high-handed way it has presented its arguments. Sorry but this, to me, comes out of the same mould. But as you say Paul, each to their own.
I enjoy DM very much. There is much to be gained from the lively debate we have in these comments boxes. But as one of the central themes of DM is (I think) to create a new narrative then if a blog looks a bit rough round the edges then it needs bashing about a bit surely :)Unlike Wolfbird I’m not slagging the idea of DM, or its participants, off just one particular blog.
Cheers
Andy
Why you being so rude pal?
I’m certainly up for the rough-and-tumble of debate, Andy (though I hope we can do it respectfully) and ‘how to lists’ are certainly a good way of getting an argument going! Nothing wrong with that.
I suppose people will have different ideas about what the ‘central point’ here is. For me, the central observation of this post is that ‘the political is personal.’ I do think it’s the case that we all ought to understand what we are bringing to the table when we talk about collapse, crisis and the like. There’s a lot of projection in political discussions. We all do this, and it’s worth being aware of our selves in that sense.
I think you’ve raised a lot of interesting points, Darren.
Self-control, self-mastery, that sort of area, implies one portion of one’s being taking charge, dominating, the rest. So, I’d like to ask, how do you know you’ve got hold of the right bit ?
If you take the analogy of riding a horse, does the horse have to show total obedience, deference, submission, to the human on its’ back, to demonstrate the sort of mastery you have in mind ?
Btw, I have actually sat in graveyards all night, as a buddhist practice. It’s not the sort of thing I usually mention in ‘polite’ company, because of the strange looks I receive.
If I can add to what Andy has brought up, I don’t think “self-mastery” can be really practiced without some sort of external framework. Otherwise, as Wolfbird said, how do you know you have the right bit? In this context, the “why” of self-mastery becomes more important, or at least a pre-requisite, to the “how”. As a father to two sons, a husband to my wife, a member of my church, and a small landowner, the path to the type of self-mastery that will be consistent with my ideals, my community, and my environment, will be very different and might persue very different ends.
Modern society has offered us the chance to define ourselves according to our own tastes (and then, how easy it becomes to attain self-mastery, when you are the one defining your goals!). It is much more difficult to learn to submit ourselves in humility to the judgement of our loved ones, our community, and the environment around us. So in a way the road to self-mastery begins by looking outside ourselves, for some sort of orientation. It is the difference between navigating a boat by dead reckoning and being guided my the moon and stars.
Hi Darren,
I think the value of your perspective comes across more clearly in some of your answers than in the how-to suggestions of the original piece.
I liked what you say above about the ubiquity and reach of our crippling yearning for personal love.
I’d say, though, that love in that sense is one of those areas of experience whose power to reshape our lives for good lies precisely in its ability to trash any illusion of self-mastery, or independence. To return us to our fumbling and blundering longing to live – which surely means, at a fundamental level, to relate – to be in relationship?
Truth is, I just distrust the term ‘self-mastery’. I feel that some of the flack arising here comes from the whiff of smugness a self-mastered-independence-of-conditioning rhetoric carries with it – although I don’t feel that at all in many of your comments.
The East has rehearsed this for millenia, hasn’t it? “Whats the use of any self-mastered emancipation from the current of suffering as you watch the rest of the world being carried away in it?’
I prefer ‘self-surrender’ to self-mastery, but even then I’d any say such discipline is at most a relative good, helpful in not adding to the mess, but not any kind of ‘answer’ in the face of pain – others’, your own – beyond allowing you to be more available to it, and thus more able to respond.
The real nub of what you’re saying comes across in this, for me, which I loved:
‘You might find it easy, for example to walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield, but play clunkily with children, cannot step onto an improvised stage, have secret sexual shames and talk down to your mother.’
All the best,
Mat
Wolfbird,
Self-control and self-mastery are not the same, I’d say. The former is, as you say, one part of the self – an idea or emotion – controlling the rest. Self mastery is the whole context in charge, or unself. The difference between the two, in my experience, is both phenomenally subtle and unbelievably vast (see the links I posted above, particularly the second one).
And yes, in the self-mastery sense, the horse must be dominated completely – but not by ‘you’. If ‘you’ get involved frustration and pain will not be far away.
Andy,
Hard to respond to someone who is, by their own admission, slagging me off. I’ve responded to your points above. If you think normal life in the normal world is enough to help you overcome your anxieties, frustrations, belief-clinging, inability to daily love-delight your wife or play outrageously with your children or expose your heart to the piano or live for a week with your parents or escape from wage-slavery or whatever your particular nightmare is, then that’s great. I’d ask you how you go about it – becaue I have found it difficult and enjoy swapping tips – but I fear you’ll pour scorn on the suggestion.
Rade,
I have given a hint of ‘the how’, and (at least in the comments) pointed out that each self is insane in its own way. The ends are the same, for me though: fearlessness, gaiety, creative-delight, enough love for those around you, every day, freedom from moodies and compulsions.
And yes, loved-ones and community and nature are a much sterner and more intelligent test than life in the world-world, but, although the art of listening to nature and what the more innocent of your fellows feel about you is fundamental, I believe it is also a red-herring to suggest that one first look externally to solve the problems of self – as it is not about where you look, but who, at any particular moment, is doing the looking – and not even finally look – because when your wife turns her face to the wall and you feel the whole dread universe between you, or when a writhing monster has taken possession of your children and is pushing all your buttoms, or when you are walking through a forest and are not mad overwhelmed by the weird vibrating god-beauty of it, or when you just cannot stop yibber-yabbering inside about something someone said about you – the solution, even before action, is an inward release. Is it not?
Thank you Mat. I agree the original piece is sketchy and perhaps slightly skewed in emphasis. Its a big topic though!
Can’t say I agree about love. When the knives are out I can literally feel my emotional self raging inside, wanting to blame or blub in self-pity. You might not call the art of containment (not suppression) and release and surrender ‘self-mastery’ and in fact, although its been the focus of these comments, its not a term I use too often myself, but whatever you call it, it needs to be done.
Thanks for delicately drawing my attention to the ‘smug’ baggage of ‘a self-mastered-independence-of-conditioning rhetoric’. Avoiding (or at least being aware) of such baggage when talking about life, love, death, god, truth and madness is a life’s task, so its good to be aware of further associational traps, even if one disregards them.
I think you’re right about the east ‘rehearsing’ enlightenment.
Terminology quibbles aside, I can’t agree about there being no use to ‘emancipation from the current of suffering’ or that it is a ‘relative good’ or that it is not an ‘answer in the face of pain’. Self is your only problem and overcoming it is your only challenge. We all know this in those moments when the absolute fills the room.
Wow. Brave and intelligent post and lots of thoughtful and heartfelt responses. I’m with you, Darren, mostly, tho I also have sympathy with the views of Dave, Nick, Andy.
Much to say. What you’re speaking of of course is the imperative towards consciousness, and the urgent need for that to be unitive consciousness. We live in a culture where the ego is deified – in fact for many people in a materialistic culture that’s all there is, egocentrism, philosophically speaking. Never mind anthropcentrism, let alone ecocentrism: we make the mistake of thinking we are all separate units. When we wake up and realise that what we do to others we also do to ourselves, and v v, things might change.
I feel that this dialogue IS actually happening ‘out there’, and the internet helps create forums for this. I feel stronger in my attempts to change self/views/conditioned behaviour/world as a result of knowing via the internet as well as through flesh and blood people that so many of us recognise this urgency and are doing what they can.
Of course the significant changes need to happen ‘in here’.
But Darren I’d take issue with that statement that all violence is frustrated sexuality. Sometimes it’s territorial, often it’s plain greed, or anger, and mostly it’s fear-driven – that this ‘I’ is not being given enough respect/value/admiration/love/money – whatever one’s own buzz is.
I don’t personally believe that more good sex is the answer! (I don’t want to bring gender issues in here really but I can’t help feeling you’re writing as a man!, and no doubt more good sex would be good per se), though no doubt it’s a good symbol for the kind of unity we’re talking about, and on occasion might give us a glimpse of that – but lovemaking can also be a refuge for the self, the egoic self, and can massage the emotional body more than it might lead to spiritual evolution or genuinely unitive consciousness. It’s more likley to be the other way round: an increased sense of unitive consciousness leads to both thess anger out there and better lovemaking!
But talking, honestly, openly, from the heart – yes.
What we actually need is a quantum shift in definition of the ‘self’ beyond the individual human ego to the transpersonal all-inclusive – which you do kind of point at but don’t actually say…
But all power to you for this sensitive and challenging post.
Roselle
Correcting typos in post above, dammit: ‘athropocentrism’; and this sentence should read: ‘It’s more likely to be the other way round: an increased sense of unitive consciousness leads to both less anger out there and better lovemaking!’
Darren, apology. In your response to Mat above you DID say what I said you didn’t (in the article): ‘Self is your only problem and overcoming it is your only challenge.’
Roselle,
Thank you. Yes, the post only scratches the surface and there is much to misunderstand through my ommissions and [sometimes accidental] emphases. Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the essence of it though.
I didn’t quite say that all violence is frustrated sexuality; rather that violence (and business) is impossible if you’re in love and making love – although, of course, there are other ways to deal with your violence.
I should emphasise that I am making a fundamental distinction between sex (good or bad) and love-making. Allow me to make the distinction clearer:
Sex is a restless, reality-excluding mental-emotional tight-grip focus on a self-created image: no different to masturbation and porn – there just happens to be someone else there.
Bestial sex-want is never satisfied and only creates problems. It is violent, desperate, quickly bored but never satisfied and can only be controlled by cold brain-clamp. Sex with another (and constant sex-fantasy) creates distance between you, spike, irritation, annoyance and all sexual problems.
Making love is an experience of total sensory floodout – the 99.9% of the sense data normally excluded by the mental-emotional self is perfectly allowed in a state of self-annihilating devotion and near hideous strange-delight. This is no different from the full-scale wide-attention life of über-woo which surrounds it.
Transdimensional animal love-making (and constant woo) creates liquid ease, lack of cling and creative amazement all day – but to reach the garden you have to be able to know how to give up your self – and you have to want to – which is impossible while men and women are addicted to their silly plans and schemes.
Love-making, in this sense, is never a refuge for the self – and it lasts all day. Sex always is.
(I’ve made the distinction clearer here than it sometimes is in practice though. The restless sex-brain can interpose itself into love-making and present lovers can bring each other out of the virtual world.)
But of course there are other ways to overcome self than making-love or really being with the opposite sex – there’s the whole of your life, for a start! – but sex and love-making are a huge part of men and women’s lives, and must be addressed if self is to be mastered (or allowed to slip sweetly away).
Once other point Roselle, about definitions of self. If you check my links in one of my comments above you’ll see how I define that very slippery word. I am using self in these comments when, most of the time, I mean self-in-charge (or the dominator consciousness) – the mental-emotional system usurping consciousness.
I would say the ‘transpersonal self’ you suggest is, despite blending with ever-wider matrices and networks, ultimately unnameable – I use the words ‘unself’, ‘the context’, ‘kamichan’ and ‘the big room’, but there are a billion other (easily corrupted) alternatives.
Agree with your main point but don’t get it why you use terms unknown for most readers when it’s basically Buddhism 101. That theory/practice is almost impossible to digest in itself. Good thing is we have a million shelf-miles of introduction for the interested reader.
To understand your point fully one must be familiar with the Buddhist view on the illusory Self vs the true Self. If not then your piece is prey to false objections.
But good to bring it up. I do daily zen meditation to blow out my self Image and replace it with actual self (which of course is totally dependent on my relation to others/outside).
I’m positive that this will better my ability to collapse in style and to be the compassionate warrior of solidarity that I wanna be. The one our Unciv will need many of.
No whining, no regrets but love, laughter and emotional bravery.
Darren,
Thanks. I was thinking about this last night and so I do want to respond in a slightly less confrontational manner. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘normal world’. The world to me is whatever I encounter, whether it be yobs in the street, the mundanity of washing up or this more taxing intelligent (I hope) debate. We make of our lives what we will. I firmly believe there is much to be gained from learning and so try to expose myself as much as possible to new information and different points of view. I’m not sure about this word ‘mastery’ though. What the heck is it and actually why do we need it? It seems too narrow to me and therefore, as a number of respondents have said, could lead you to ‘mastering’ completely the wrong thing. This kind of comes back to the point I made at the start about when your world goes into ‘freefall’. This takes all sorts of twists and turns (it certainly did when i was very ill) and I’m not sure any amount of ‘mastery’ ever prepares you for it. Flexibility of mind, pragmatic thinking, a healthy perspective on things and the love of people around you does help however. But that’s not mastery of anything in particular. If it’s not ‘mastery’ I’m sure you are going to ask me then what is it? The only answer I can give is opening yourself up to all sorts of experience and learning but NOT getting too hung up about trying to master every situation that you think might arise in some circumstance such as a ‘collpase’.
If you reckon you find it hard to overcome your anxieties I can fully agree with you. Not the least because I think we live in a society where angst is a natural (and growing) part of its make-up (look at the level of mental illness we now see). I have no claim to have mastered my anxieties (as you seem to suggest I’ve implied). Quite the contrary, I think when you get involved with issues such as environmentalism you are throwing yourself open toa whole lot of potential angst. I do believe that putting yourself in a position where you believe you have to ‘master’ yourself simply adds to your burden. For example if you believe you have ‘self-mastered’ something what happens when it all goes wrong. I’d suggest that approach is more a recipe for suicide than success.
Anyway, I hope that hasn’t put me in a position where I sound high handed and patronising.
Good debate though. Worth having.
Cheers
Andy
Hi again Darren – thanks for your articulate response (and I enjoyed yours too Andy).
Of course I knew what you meant by distinguishing sex from love-making! ;-) I’m completely with you. You expressed that very well.
I was simply pointing out that it’s often, still, (lovemaking I mean) mostly a sensory/emotional experience that may lead to dropping of ego-barriers and a tripped-out sense of bliss and calm; I was saying that it in itself doesn’t necessarily lead to a transpersonal perspective that connects us to THE WHOLE (though it may give us glimpses). Actually maybe it does. It depends on your metaphysics I guess.
I like ‘unself’, yes. That’s neat. I agree with what you are saying about the transpersonal being unnameable, and the self as you define it I’d still call the egoic self, the little self that looks out for number one.
I know what Andy means about the word ‘mastery’ – it does have ‘power over’ connotations unfortunately; and even ‘power over oneself’ if we use the word ‘mastery’ has an implicit tone of coercion, maybe? I prefer the word ‘empowerment’, which implies of course ‘power to’ (‘effect changes’) rather than power OVER. But of course I understand what you are saying; and agree with it.
I practise Zen mindfulness, and much of what you’re saying resonates with that as I’m sure you know. Remembering to bring my attention continuously back not only to the quality of where I am and who I’m with (human and non-) in my inner and outer worlds but also to the choices I have in every moment, kindly and with responsibility, helps me continue to feel empowered and open to others and to how things are as well as how they might be in the face of eg two big bereavements in the last few months.
Here’s to love and the ineffable ;-)
Andy,
Thank you. I need mastery – and again, I do not mean suppression, effort or one part of the self controlling another part – because without it my self-in-charge will want, worry, yibber-yabber away in the background taking me out of my unbelievably pleasurable senses, corrupt my creativity and sponteneity and cut me off from miraculous empathy-blending with so called ‘objective realty’.
For me it is the self that is narrow – a useful narrowing, to be sure, one that can really get things done. But it is not the master of my system. Unself is in charge here, and it not only knows what it is doing, but it is blended with experience that the self literally cannot imagine – including death.
I am not talking about mastering ‘every situation’ – or anything external at all – just the self. The mental-emotional entity that calls itself ‘I’ all day. The thinker, the chatterer and, underneath that, the restless wanter and the anxious not-wanter. To a great extent ‘I’ have mastered that or I wouldn’t presume to offer advice on how to do it. Not completely though – - and am quite happy with the noble ‘burden’ of continuing to endeavour to as it has brought me more ridiculous freedom, love and delight than I can possibly express here – but it still has a habit of biting me just when I think its obedient to the good thing. I am offering tips, advice and – on my blog – the chin-dribbly fruits of my findings – not any smug or superior commands to lower mortals.
We’re all in this together, right?
Thanks Roselle,
Glad we accord. Not fond of the word ‘empowerment’, but that’s not important.
Low bows,
Darren
Self mastery sounds like approaching a new door with an old key.
Self mastery,Self control, Self surrender. The ambiguity certainly arises in the ‘sense of self’ rather than in the qualifying quality.
By ‘you’ i expect you mean the ‘self’ as a lens focusing an expanded frame of reference somewhere beyond the familiar.
It is notoriously hard to talk about the ‘self’ in those terms.
Looking outside oneself implies stimulating a sense of ‘wakefulness in the face of the unfamiliar’, a powerful concept that is entirely unambiguous.
Rade mentioned ‘orientation’ a very practical element in any process that is attempting to use the familiar as an approach to the unfamiliar.
Jim.
I mean what is not self – the empty witnessing full-body, full-sense, wide-attention me-flavoured totality – experiencing self under all circumstances, particularly those in which the autonomy of self is under threat – in creativity at the highest stakes, in right relationship with one’s parents, in the space in the room right now, in the everything-more-vivid impossible forest alone, in continual love-making and the constant presence of your partner and so on – and particularly particularly in those times and ways in which you personally have most anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, moodiness, discontent, boredom and wotnot – your own personal hell – which, when experienced in this way, and perhaps instantly acted upon – heaven is.
I guess that i am getting what you are defining… It is the un-self that perceives beauty whilst the thinker, as you called it, finds the need to define the experience in ways that are inadequate and unreliable.
For me the un-self is what is actually doing all the looking and providing all the energy while the censor of the egoic self, as Roselle called it, limits potential with its compulsive fuss and chatter.
There is the trick of staying with the looking so that when the definitions and judgements flood in, instead of jumping on the bandwagon and joining the dialogue you keep looking and just, well, keep looking. Its tricky to look without analysis but relaxation helps. its do-able and the reward is that unreliable voices lose strength and the thinker gets a little clearer and more reliable in distilling meaning from experience.
In terms of how to go about meeting the unknown maybe i would vote for self composure.
Thanks for the thoughts and wish you wakefulness…..jim
Jim.
Thank you. Yes, unself is the experience and mindfulness and detachment from the ego are what I am talking about. However, it is also – and more fundamentally – emotions that need to be continually experienced in this way, and contained by the surrounding body-presence, and, most crucially of all, the point I am making, is that it must be done in the ways and times that you personally find most difficult.
I list a few common areas of challenge in my original post – sex, violence, mind-chatter, darkness and fear of exposure, a few more in the comments – brilliant and spontaneous creativity, playing well with children, living with your parents. A few other classics might include hanging onto (unconsciously falling back on) your class-status, your money, your time, your youth, your vocabulary and knowledge, your sad story, your excuse, your techniques for dealing with novel social situations, your gender or your spirituality. Like I say, the trick is finding your particular twinge, the tip of your particular nightmare. Its not easy, which is why I suggest asking for good criticism from the perceptive.
Off topic, but very brief. I’d like to ask why you all don’t discuss this on http://uncivilisation.ning.com/forum ? It’s such a huge and engaging and important subject.
I was told that my presence was inhibiting people there, so I’m taking a low profile for the time being. The new decor is refreshing, lighter, less doom laden. I wish some of you folks would contribute. Nobody has said anything for days. I’ve had an acrimonious row with Paul over certain misunderstandings. That’s resolved. We’re the best of friends again now. :-) I’ve got my own blog where I can scream at the Moon without disturbing civil discourse on Uncivilisation, so please don’t be intimidated, speak your minds, let’s get some worthwhile threads over there.
I am reading you Darren and you certainly seem to have a passion for penetration.
Simply being in a state of at least relative non-denial does tend to open up the area of personal challenge and the character of the challenge seems to be determined by individual vulnerabilities. Some people thrive on violence some are prey to apathy and boredom, insecurity comes in all shapes and sizes and as you suggest, it breaks down into an infinite web of subtler and more personal tests until you could say the shape of the individual throws its own particular unique shadow.
Denial literally removes the challenge, drains the senses and blocks energy, whilst cranking up a climate of self honesty makes for vulnerability in relationship and can mean fast track inner change.
As much as a preparation for shock and the ‘unexpected’ in dealing with broadscale breakdown this attitude is a very good handle on how one would approach living and working day to day with people who have not shared a long term history of ego crystalizing familiarity.
That has got to be a deal more complicated than sharing a blogsworth of ideas.
Jim,
Fully agreed. There is much to discover at this point – where the extreme meets the ordinary, and where the individual self meets its – as you say – its particular shadow. And much by way of pearls to bring back. Not just clunky blog-posts like this, but electric weird straight line hit to the good thing michaelangelo-standard comics, timeless melodies with neptunian beats, dandelion-mimicing architraves, vigilante plumbing and truly miraculous trousers.
See you on the beach colleague!
Nice attempt Darren, and well handled on the comments/replies.
When I think of self-mastery and the like, I am always drawn to Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, and that crowd.
I get what you’re saying, but this stuff has been round for millennia. Cheers.
Eremush.
Thank you. Beans have been around for ages too – still need fresh ones. Not a big fan of those you mention though. Bit thinky-thinky for my palate.
I’m glad I picked this one up late. The reason for this is that I have been involved in life (mum’s got Alzheimer’s, daughter’s having a baby, and I’m renovating a barn, trying to write a book, make a living, sustain a marriage, make a difference); the kind of life that Darren wrote about in his response to Wolfbird:
“I’m not so much talking about being able to walk through the apocalypse without losing your cool, as being able to walk through your relationship with your mother and father, your daily interactions with the opposite sex, your journeys on the london underground, the blank canvas you’re staring at, your dreams and nightmares without falling into your same same same same self”.
The very avoidances and habits that we take for granted in THIS civilisation, are the ones that contribute to our blindness, and to our probable inability to deal with what might come if the lights go out. We are, for the most part (as Paul said at UC2), luddites with iPhones, and often not prepared to face our partners honestly, let alone the apocalypse!
I think a core point I take from Darren’s original piece and his sensitive reposes is that this can’t be just about debating. At the very centre of DM is a manifesto which claims that we have to find new ways of telling stories – and find new stories to tell. What might be best about this thread is the diversity of stories being told!
And was I the only person who thought that Darren’s piece was actually brilliant, dark, satirical comedy – or am I really missing the point?
Steve,
Thank you. Kind words and a widescreen life, it sounds.
I’m not completely comfortable with DM’s insistance on ’finding new ways to tell new stories‘. Seems to put the cart before the horse. But it has been good to hear from good people.
As for comedy, the great Michael Shurtleff, when asked what – if he could choose the one thing – makes a great actor, said ‘humour.’
Its why I mentioned finding something funny in the worst of situations. Of course I don’t mean ridiculing other people’s tragedy, or laughing away the horror, rather release from mechanical insanity: when the feeling of pain and despair and loss is nearly overwhelming, for example, there is something inside, some letting go, some fond indulgence, that sounds like laughter.
Humour is vital, yes I agree. In my story it also goes hand in hand with re-viewing Self. If we take our Selves too seriously, we’ll never get out of this alive. If we can learn to experience our Selves in all their smoke and mirror-ness, then we can have a good laugh at ‘em/us. Then we can start to really listen to both each other and the environment around us.
That would be a fresh start for the re-civ to come.
As for arguments the old monk said: MU
That’s zen humour by the way
We’re all freaks of nature folks so relax and do as little as possible. Soulutions so often lead to bigger problems. In-action is the most subversive action.
I’ll be walking alongside Paul. Enough of the running around.
Feels good, looks good, makes good.
Wowsers this one’s gone on and on hasn’t it? Well done Darren… I think your writing is impish and lovely especially on vigilante plumbing and truly miraculous trousers!…you have been most courteous, patient and receptive in your replies to the heavy load of comments. I do agree with your central idea,to me it is basically about a practice of awareness. There are many of these practices, old and well worn pathways of gentle wisdom, roselle has mentioned zen already…this idea of a practise is what I was getting and with ‘just talk’. We can blather on about this all we like with all our clever ways and wrangling over definitions but the place you are talking about can only be arrived at through a sustained humble and attentive practice (as I’m sure you are aware).talk and ideas will never get you there. But yes, of course they can point the way among the undergrowth to those that haven’t seen the opening and I thank you for shining your kindly light to try to point the way down the path. I could argue more about the children thing because I know from experience how much they challenge one’s practice in a way different to anything else but I will tip my hat to you and sound the gong, with thanks and warm smiles, Rosie
Rosie,
Thank you. Glad we are coming from the same place, more or less.
I too dig those ‘old pathways of gentle wisdom’. I found it hard, as a youngster, to apply their lack of specific guidance on dealing with pointless jobs, ‘causeless’ emotion, sexual problems, raising children and wotnot to my modern chaotic not living in a hindu-field lifestyle. But that’s not a problem with the teachings of course, as they (at least the ones I love) still get so finely to the point, but a great deal of dressing up and being special surrounds spiritual tradition and the wily western mind is, if nothing else, a genius at subtly missing the point. And as I mentioned above, nothing quite hits the sweet spot like the truth fresh.
And I agree about talk, for sure, although I think that talk can still be much more powerful than ‘pointing the way among the undergrowth’ – splendid as that is. Words can be phenomenally powerful can they not? They can, delivered at the right time, in the right way, crack self-shells wide open, plug pipes of awe in batphones to the lord and inflate bellyminds far away, in love.
Finally, children. Again I say they are no barrier to self-mastery. In fact if, as you say, they ‘challenge practice differently’, (or more than anything else, which is not true, but anyrate,) if they did, then this would make them less of a barrier to self-mastery. The more anxiety, stress, hurt and annoyance something or someone causes you, the greater the opportunity to face down your self – which is all to the good, as mastering your moods, irritations, selfish fears (meaning the smothering controlling ones some mothers have and mask as ‘care’) or blithe hardnessnes of heart is essential if you are to raise a child that doesn’t spend its whole life trying to even perceive the vibe-conditioning your self warped it with as a bairn.
Hope that chimes in you. If not, no problem. Let it slip into your tea, detune, cloud-swirly. Thanks again and good talking with you. I bow low with much twirling of moustache and cheer of flourish,
Darren
I thought this thread had petered out but it seems people are still around…
Brilliant, dark satirical comedy?
Darens response to my last comment mentioned ” timeless melodies with neptunian beats, dandelion-mimicing architraves, vigilante plumbing and truly miraculous trousers.” and signs off “see you on the beach colleague”. This is clearly divine nonsense issuing forth from the babble depths of his ‘unself’ and it certainly raised a chuckle. It also piqued my curiosity as we had spent the day laying 50 metres of pex piping for a very ambitious solar fueled earthen floor and were just talking about a taking a trip to the beach.
I don’t know if ‘unself’ is the best term for the concept of a more right brain involvement in the way of things but it is certainly a place to get to know better.
Jim,
I knew you were thinking of going to the beach.
I am absolutely not talking about ‘a more right brain involvement in the way of things’ – which, self informed, is just an emotional-flavoured delusion – but agree that unself is not always the best term – I also like the context, the big room, kamichan, yinyin, maasauu, pepo, wakan-tanka, tirawa, fufaka, imunu, kwoth, shango and magwang hooosh fe-tarp.
Ta-ta
‘a great deal of dressing up and being special surrounds spiritual tradition and the wily western mind is, if nothing else, a genius at subtly missing the point.’
Loved this Darren – and it names much of the agenda behind my pickiness over self-mastery above. An agenda born in a background in (what I came to see as) an endless project of self mastery, so often assumed within a spiritual context, that collapsed, quite suddenly, as being an endless, narcissistic distraction from living in the world. (It was a cross-current within the same domain that brought about this liberating failure of resolve, but thats another story.)
So much to run on with here, many thanks for a valuable discussion. I like the shift towards laughter greatly…I had been dwelling on your distinctions between sex and love, which I applaud, but which also left me laughing for some reason. I wasn’t sure why at first, but I think I felt my own experience was somehow missing from this epiphanic, mystical picture of love…which seemed to lack something more ordinary, unflattering, absurd even – a middle ground, maybe, born in living together, over time: affection, acceptance, relationship…the ordinary stuff. And running through that, comedy, all the way.
I’m not saying you’ve missed that – I find your approach here nothing if not accepting.
All the best,
Mat
Hey Darren
Maybe you misunderstood my question mark.
I was agreeing with Steve who asked the question and saying yes i love good honest humour. Nothing cuts through negativity like good humour.
I work with abstract imagery as a sculptor, communicating through the forms i make that although open to criticism on various levels can’t be argued with, much as you can’t argue with ‘miraculous trousers’.
Perhaps we are in the same boat with language as we are with agriculture. Both systems that need a bit of tweaking to get right. But anyway i am not a wordsmith and i have always found them to be tricky things. Terms are just terms and get beaten out of recognition.
When i said ‘right brain’ i meant the term that is quite commonly used for what stays ticking when ‘you’ sign off and go to sleep. A holistic wonderland of imagery that ticks all the time but that the lateral ‘self’ can’t easily navigate asleep or awake.
Mindfulness, wakefulness, mastery, whatever, a quibble here, a quibble there. I sensed most people here on the same wave length in a subject of some considerable depth. Practice is essential. Good stuff, very heartening
Thanks for the ride.
Mat,
Thanks manyfold and replicating. Pickiness understood, but you can’t blame pine trees for Ikea.
And I tend, love-making-wise, to emphasise whum-whum silent waves of galaxy-wide god-power coursing through your two astonished bodies over bed-pranks, electric-eels and sweet quotidian oddnesses; for the same reason I’d send this up to space, as an example of what humanity is capable of.
Over and out, for now,
Darren
Jim,
And thanks to you. As I say, I’m not talking about the right brain – imagination, emotion, or anything else that ticks – which, as I mention above, like mindfulness and spirituality (and abstract art), can be a wanky hiding place as much as a cave of delights.
And yes, of course, terms, like ploughs, get beaten out of recognition. It is our job to sharpen them up again, so they can whittle a spindle.
Good talking with you Jim.
Darren
Or ‘galaxy’ of delights…..or just straight galaxy.
Hiding places are easy to find. Slip into a shadow, dress it it up and call it what you will, jack yourself up some justification for being there and talk up some enthusiasm. Yeah, a major waste of energy. Delusion as you said, emotionaly enhanced or otherwise.
Thankfully it’s not my job to rescue people from their hiding places and self styled traps. I stick with the practical and keep an eye to the collateral. Building, growing, dispersing. Making, gathering, dispersing. Refining processes. Defining needs. Working with the willing and looking for new stories, or at least fresh ones.
I couldn’t resist to come back with this one.
Young Jake, a sociology graduate, here to get his hands dirty, is using his spare time to mess around with the woodworking tools and following a couple of decent spoons, in the last few days he has moved on to chopsticks. I am hearing a good deal of josh and banter about the speculative uses for such; knitting needles, hair pin, in one ear and out the other and so on, and along with digesting your last response, i find i am watching him whittle a spindle.
I am not saying, “far out, cool, man”. I am not looking for something exciting to decorate the cave walls. I am just looking, and i like it.
I might though, be tempted to say “wowsers”, which i picked up from Rosie and sounds well worth saying, maybe because it ryhymes with trousers but not only.
All power to the word mill, maestro!
Fantastic. Love it all.
Darren you’re a star in stardust trousers.
Steve good to meet you (again), on here. Yep my experience is the same, with similar challenges (ooops I mean ‘opportunities’).
Rosie, loved this: ‘We can blather on about this all we like with all our clever ways and wrangling over definitions but the place you are talking about can only be arrived at through a sustained humble and attentive practice.’
Jim: ‘Building, growing, dispersing. Making, gathering, dispersing. Refining processes.’ YES!
Darren, Zen isn’t ‘Hindu’ :-) (and I know you were speaking loosely) and is about cutting through the crap, the thinking, and short-circuiting the conceptualisations. Takes lifetimes, of course. And more. For me it’s not a religion but a signpost that brings me back over and over to your great word ‘unself’.
I bow to you, bod(hisattva) on the Crazy Wisdom Master path.
Laughter – yes laughter… and yes making love with the universe.
“Darren, Zen isn’t ‘Hindu’”
I suppose it depends upon what the word ‘zen’ means to you, but I think you’ll find that zen is most definitely Hindu, in that the word comes from Chinese ch’an, which in turn comes from Indian dhyana ( sanscrit ) or jhana ( pali ), and although both words were used by buddhists, the Buddha was a hindu, in the same sense that Jesus was jew…. and the techniques described re dhyana/jhana very likely predate anything that could be considered a ‘religion’ in the Western sense of the word, going right back to unknowable palaeolithic shamanic times….
I suppose you may argue that zen is Japanese… but I’d say that is a serious misunderstanding…
Hi wolfbird
Yes, of course the Buddha was born in India, and of course the names (Chan, Zemn, Dyhana etc) have an etymology in common (but then even our own tongue has Sanskrit roots too) but Buddhism was brought to China and then Japan where it was merged with indigenous spiritualities (eg Confucianism, Shintoism, Daoism).
In Japan, the very particular form of Buddhist practice was deeply influenced by Taoism, and only then did it become ‘Zen’. The ‘flavour’ and emphases of Zen are quite distinct from Indian Buddhism, and even further distinct from Hindu practices.
Of course these all lead up the same mountain, but there is a quality in Zen that is unique to its Chinese Chan and then even more Japanese Zen origins… that’s all I meant.
It’s like the difference between say the Quaker faith and Judaism – roots in common; beliefs and practices distinct.
I don’t know how much any of this matters, really; the Sacred Mountain is right here, right now, no matter what path you use to get up it; but someone taking the Zen path (it’s my own practice) still takes a different route from eg a Hindu practitioner.
Oh and btw neither Zen nor Buddhism as it manifests in the West is strictly speaking a religion – no belief or faith is required. It’s a psychospiritual path of self-knowing that leads you beyond the self (in theory!)…
Okay. I’m glad you’ve cleared that up, roselle. :-)
I would say that zen is beyond any sort of definition.
When I have to try and explain, I often say it’s an anti-ideology, or an anti-religion, or an anti-philosophy, in the sense that it’s an ideology, religion, or philosophy designed to take one beyond any of those things… beyond names, concepts, words, ideas, thoughts of any sort… so, yes, psycho-spiritual is not bad…. but physical, too, no ? Or can it be done without a body ? :-)
Anyway, zen is a prettier word, IMO, and does the job well enough, whatever it amy mean to anyone :-)
If being is really being, there need be no argument about how it is different from non being. Forget time; forget distinction. Enjoy the infinite; rest in it.
Chuang Tzu.
If the word fits, then wear it.
If the word begins to stretch, or your head shrinks and the word slips down over your eyes, then chuck it.
Hu Man Tzu
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