Present moment – Page 388

The myth of normality

January 7, 2011January 4, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

A quote from my favourite book of last year on a similar theme to Monday’s post on loneliness.Wisdom begins with clearly seeing the dynamics which operate in the ways that society portrays happiness.

The common myth that is perpetuated in society is that the normal person is happy, balanced and integrated – otherwise there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re mentally unstable. We’re even alarmed by unhappy people. Everyone in the media is smiling and cheerful. The politicians are all smiling, cheerful. confident; funeral homes even make the corpses up to look smiling, cheerful and confident.

Meanwhile however, perhaps you’re not smiling and you don’t feel cheerful and confident. You know you can’t live up to any of the images of the model person. You don’t have the right appearance or status symbols, your performance doesn’t cut it, you’re out of touch with the latest trends, or maybe you are just poor – someone whom society doesn’t want to acknowledge. Unhappiness in Western culture is often treated as a sign of failure. Others think, “They’re not happy, maybe they didn’t do enough. And maybe they’ll want something from me so I’d better steer away from them”

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

How life is full of mysteries

January 5, 2011January 11, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Went walking this morning early in the forest around the Sources of the Allendon. It was particularly beautiful in the early morning light. The freshness of nature, the trees covered in moss, the noise of the river and the familiarity of the place relaxed and softened my heart. Nature is often like that: It creates those moments when we connect and feel spacious. It is not so easy in our everyday life with people: we have learnt to contract and pull away. The beauty of the walk brought to mind this poem by Mary Oliver:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity, while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

Good days and bad days

January 4, 2011January 4, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Níl aon suáilce gan a duáilce féin. Irish Proverb

(lit. There is no virtue that does not have its own vice = There are no unmixed blessings in life)

Acceptance of life’s up and down’s may be a wiser way to start the New Year and may reflect the wisdom worked out over the centuries in some of the religious and wisdom traditions. However, it does not mean that it is easy to do. The fact that we are continually surprised and upset by changes in our life is testimony to the resilience of our belief in – and wish for – something unchanging and permanent. We want things to last, to stay as they are, as indeed sometimes they should. Therefore, every time we have an experience that brings us face to face with the reality of impermanence, such as when someone moves away, a friendship ends or we lose something we care about, we suffer, sometimes deeply. It is a reminder that it is in the nature of the human heart to form attachments, and of the flip side of being fully involved in life. However, when we come to really understand that things are not guaranteed to remain the same, or that people are not always consistent , it frees us from always reading what happened as a story about us. It also saves us from defaulting to the usual pattern of interpretation that we use, such as that we are to blame or that we did not try hard enough.

It would seem that some awareness of the impossibility of holding onto things exactly as we would like to has been around since time began. Different cultures have tried to understand it in different ways. We can see this in the Irish proverb quoted at the start of the post. The Ancient Greeks tried to understand it by blaming the gods. As we can see in this extract from the Iliad, they believed that humans received either a mixture of up’s and down’s, good and evil, or received suffering, but never received pure good times that lasted forever: On the floor of Jove’s palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Jove the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Jove sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men.

Wherever

January 3, 2011January 3, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Wherever we are

we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine,

the presence of each other

and the wonder of our breathing.

Thich Nhat Hahn

A New Year: Time moves on, or does it?

December 31, 2010December 31, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. St Augustine

We cannot be separated from time…we ourselves are time. Dozen

New Year’s Eve is one of the days when we can put ourselves under pressure by our understanding of time, which leads to judgmental thoughts.

Mindfulness practice emphasizes awareness of the present moment, without judgment, as being the only moment that we have to work with to produce happiness. This is based on a frequent teaching in the Buddhist tradition, such as in The Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone, where the Buddha advised his listeners not to dwell on the past and the future, but to live mindfully in the present. However, we can find a similar understanding in the Christian tradition from St Augustine, who argued that the past has no actual existence now, and that the future has yet to come. We are subjectively alive and conscious only now, however much we like to run away from that.

A lot of stress this day comes from how we allow ourselves to see time as an external thing, which happens to us. Modern society likes to see time as something that has to be productive, provided we simply take better charge of it. Once we understand it this way we can easily fall into the fears associated with thoughts of it “being wasted”, “not being used well enough” or “going too fast”. These thoughts become judgmental on days like New Year’s Eve, as we evaluate the past year and feel we have not used time well enough, or push ourselves with resolutions to “use” it better in the future. We even compare how we are using the minutes and hours just before midnight as some sort of measure as to how popular or successful we are. This creates mental time zones in our head – a future imagining of something better and a current dissatisfaction with aspects of our life now – which serves to make us feel misplaced in the present. We mentally want to relocate into the future and this creates a tension which can be felt in our body and in our emotions.

However, time is not something that exists independent to us. We create time and the sense of its passing in our minds. Therefore, it is linked to our inner contentment and gratitude more than to any outside, objective standard. The future exists mainly in our thoughts, and is largely a projection of the fears and desires which exist in us now. Seeing this, we realize that the only place we can work on our happiness is not tomorrow or next week, but now. Most of the talk about future resolutions are rooted in some understanding of effort and pushing, which only ultimately increase the tension they are designed to relieve.

On a similar level, the past can also cause us suffering today. One of the main ways is by replaying the events of the past year and repeating stories to ourselves about them . We seem to hang onto painful events just as much as happy memories; indeed we get some of our present identity from them and are almost afrauid to let them go. Thus we lose the present moment by letting memories or events of the past year impact on us, turning into a fear, which we mask as judgment or contempt, thus creating discontent, striving, and comparing. The best way to ease this suffering is to develop a compassionate understanding of oneself and others, softening the heart rather than hardening it.

Mindfulness practice is slowly accepting ourselves, without judgment, in the present, as it actually is. Suffering comes from demanding more choices than what the present reality is actually offering. The present moment then becomes problematic for us and we deal with this by wishing or dreaming, pushing or blaming. Accepting the present moment means allowing whatever emotions that arise on this day to arise, without seeing them as pointing elsewhere, or implicating anyone. In that way this day is like any other day: we have the choice to work with our reality with compassion or with fear. With compassion the fear of the future or the blaming of the past can dissolve; we are left with the ongoing unfolding of life itself, not our thoughts about it.