How to be alone

Well shipmates, you are in for a little treat. You know the music vid, now know the poem vid. A beautiful, refreshing little video called ‘How to be Alone’ by Tanya Davis. My blog has a contractual obligation to post anything called ‘How to be Alone’.

I will not spoil the surprise for you by making any other comments, but you can trust me, its great.

Love, no risk free trial

If you have been following my posts on love, you will know that love and non-desire are not contradictions in terms. Love, as opposed to attachment, is a free, independent choice or it is nothing. Don’t take my word for it. You will find this theme in all philosophies and all religions.

In Taoism for example:

There is no greater mistake than wishing to satisfy one’s desires;
there is no greater unhappiness than not being self-sufficient.
There is no greater calamity than the desire to possess.
Tao Te Ching 46 (my translation from Tao Te King)

In Zen:

One major obstacle in living a life of love is the tendency to hold on. We grasp and cling to each other, preventing the freedom of love from rising on its own. Zen asks us to let go.
When someone comes into your life, let him come. Welcome the person, whoever he is. Enjoy what it is he brings, even if it's only for a short time.
When it is time for a person to go away, let him go. Do not turn the person's leaving into an experience of rejection, loss or abandonment. Realize that his leaving has nothing to do with you. It is simply time for him to go.
Do this with yourself as well. Let yourself come and go freely in life, and don't get caught in unnecessary chains. The more you free yourself and others, the more easily you fall in love.
From an article by Brenda Shoshana, author of Zen and the Art of Falling in Love

In the Bhagavad Gita:

The liberated man receives what the Divine Will brings him, he does not long for anything, is jealous of no one: what comes to him, he accepts without repulsion nor attachment; what goes away, he lets go, to rejoin the whirlpool of existence, without regret, nor affliction, nor feeling of loss.
Sri Aurobindo, The Bhagavad Gita and its message (my translation from Tao Te King)

In the Christian tradition:

Nothing renders man more like God than this implacable detachment. For what makes God God is his implacable detachment: from this springs forth his purity, his simplicity and his immutability… This resemblance must be achieved by the grace that elevates man above the temporal and purifies him of everything that is impermanent.
Master Eckhart (my translation from Tao Te King)

Love from a position of detachment allows us to enjoy and appreciate what comes into our life and saves us from the pain and feeling of loss for what goes out of our life. Not only that, but good things and people are more likely to come into our life if they are free to come and go as they please. And, once here, they will likely stick around longer.

The Samurai of Love

By the Way of the warrior is meant death. The Way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

There comes a time in a budding love relationship when our partner will test us. A careless remark. A certain lack of response. Or something more blatant. I’m not even sure if they do it consciously or not. But what it boils down to is seeing what you will put up with. If you go along then it will eventually get worse as they realise you are hopelessly in love and they can pretty much get away with anything and you will still be around. From there it is not far to their losing interest in you and finally they leave you.
Of course I am talking about my own experience but perhaps you can relate to it.
So there comes a time when you have to be able to stand the test by standing your ground, walking away, saying no or whatever it is that your love does not think you will have the guts to do. You have to be able to ‘kill your love’ or ‘die the death of love’ like a samurai.
We have seen in my posts on love that ‘you can’t love someone you can’t live without’. That is merely attachment, infatuation. Real love can only come from a position of strength and independence. You have to be able to choose to love. This means you have to be able to walk away.
Ironically, it is your ability to walk away which gives you the better chance to win your love.

Those who cling to life, die; those who defy death, live. Uyesugi Kenshin

You have surely been in the situation where someone is in love with you and trying too hard. Or at least you have known people who try too hard to be loved, to be liked, to impress. And it always backfires on them. Trying too hard is unattractive. Clinging is unattractive. We just want to run away.
So when our love turns cooler on us, the answer is not to cling more but to cling less, and, like a samurai of love, prepare our soul to face ‘death’. And defying the death of love, perhaps we may see it live.

Photo from Wikimedia: Yamana Tokoyuni

Sit on top of the world

Touch my skin and tell me what you’re thinking,
take my hand and show me where we’re going.
Lie down next to me, look into my eyes
and tell me, oh tell me what you’re seeing.
So sit on top of the world and tell me how you’re feeling,
what you feel is what I feel for you.
Take my hand and if I’m lying to you,
I’ll always be alone if I’m lying to you.

These words are the lyrics of a song that for me most completely embodies the feeling of a person in love (who is uncertain of the feelings of the beloved). They come from the song ‘Take my hand’ from Dido’s album ‘No Angel’. I will not try to comment on the beautiful musical score or the flawless voice and execution of Dido. But the words… listen to the words.
Here you have the attention, the complete attention of the person in love. The need for information, the need to know the heart of the beloved. Here you have sincerity and the grace and poetry born of sincerity. Sit on top of the world, she says – that’s how I feel about you. If only she could make you understand how she feels. She is not exaggerating - here you have the solemn invocation and vow of truth – she’ll always be alone if she’s lying to you. Later she adds ‘Take your time’. Love is patient. Take your time. Have you ever said that to someone?

From what we have seen about love thus far, we know this person is ‘in deep’. She has a beautiful love, in her head. Perhaps it will be alright. Sometimes love is reciprocated and the magic happens. We hope it works. We believe in the singer’s hope and earnestness. Sometimes we need to believe.
(If it doesn’t work, we hope a friend tells her about Anthony de Mello, and Healing Philosophy).

The Way to Love (3) – The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part three)

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out.

When we are in love we are seeing the beloved not as they are but as we are. We are projecting our own qualities into this person. Rabindranath Tagore said it so well:

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

We are seeing an idealized projection of our own self, magnified to a perceived perfection in this person. They are a beautiful creation, a work of art, in our head. This reminds me of a technique for helping one get over a lost love (I forget the source) that consists in meditating and imagining oneself to be the person one loves. The power of the technique resides in showing us through the meditation that we have the same qualities as the person we love, because we see them, we feel them, we know them. Thus we need not miss the person, for we ‘contain’ all the qualities that we loved.
Getting back to de Mello, we see through attachment-coloured glasses. Love is not blind, it is attachment that is blind. Love sees clearly because love encompasses everyone and everything, whereas attachment encompasses very little: it excludes everyone and everything except the object of its attachment.

You were in love and you felt rejected or jealous; suddenly all your mind and heart became focused on this one thing, and the banquet of life turned to ashes in your mouth.

I remember when I was going through my ‘attachment’ how it killed my enjoyment of everything else. I could hardly concentrate on the karate instructor, I could hardly read three paragraphs of a book, I could hardly enjoy the presence of my children. This is not love: it is slavery.

How can you love someone whom you are a slave to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? …Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.

De Mello shows us the path out of slavery: awareness of the folly of our dependence, our addiction to this person or to anyone. The path to freedom comes from cultivating activities that we love, activities that we engage in without regard to society or the opinions of other people, activities that are our true passion.

The royal road to mysticism and to Reality does not pass through the world of people. It passes through the world of actions that are engaged in for themselves without an eye to success or to gain – or profit actions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this Reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people – and so the ability to love them.

The Way to Love (2) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part two)

In my post Love (lost) I told you that the love I knew was all in my head. It must be so otherwise everyone my love meets would fall in love with her. In fact, my friends would have varying reactions to her from ‘She’s bad news’ to ‘I don’t know what you see in her’ to ‘She’s kinda cute’. When things were going ‘well’ and I was sitting on top of the world, it was all in my head. And when things broke down and I was filled with negative emotions, they were all in my head too. Feelings of anger, betrayal, jealousy, revenge rose and fell in me like a stormy sea. But reading de Mello I found, if not immediate peace and calm, then at least the direction to and the sight of peace and calm. And that is a lot when you are emotionally cast adrift on that cruel sea.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they who are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions.

And the clinching argument:

You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily… The way to be in charge of this situation is to be in charge of yourself, which you are not. How does one achieve this mastery? All you have to do is to understand there are people in the world who, if they were in your place, would not be negatively affected by this person. They would be in charge of the situation, above it, not subject to it as you are. Therefore your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.

Yes, someone with better relationship skills, someone with more clarity, someone with better self-control, someone with better understanding, someone who loves from a position of independence and non-attachment, someone who loves truly – such a person would react very differently than I did.
Thus there are no excuses – the answer lies within. We must change the programming. Our pain is the light showing us the way we need to change. We must become that person who is master of himself and the situation. Then, one day, we will know the way to love.

More to come in part three

The Way to Love (1) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

The title of this little book has at least two meanings: the way to love in the sense of how we should love, and the Way to love in the sense of the spiritual path to love. They are the same.
The lessons of this little book are not easy to swallow when we are reeling from the loss of a love. But they are the necessary lessons that we need to learn in order to heal and to pass to the next level of love. My copy is dog-eared and many passages are underlined. I think I had a lot of lessons to learn.
De Mello’s message is that love is basically a nightmare. Or rather attachment is a nightmare, which in many of our cases is the same thing because we don’t know what love really is.

If you wish to attain lasting happiness, you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.

De Mello shows us that we are programmed by our upbringing and by society to believe we cannot be happy without certain things – money, power, love etc. We exhaust our energies trying to rearrange reality around us to conform to our programming. Sometimes we succeed briefly, but not for long. It is an impossible task. We must change the programming instead. This reminds me of the Buddhist saying: we cannot cover the world with leather, but if we cover our feet with leather it will be the same as covering the world with leather.

On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task if the instrument you use to rid yourself of them is not willpower or renunciation but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all…

Attachment is a false belief, a fantasy in your head. Think of your previous loves that you thought you could never live without, says De Mello, and how you got over them. De Mello suggests this affirmation to ‘give the order’ to your subconscious to change the programming:

I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy.

De Mello is pitiless in hammering the message home that the ‘battle of attachments’ can never be won. If we don’t get what we want we are unhappy, but if we get what we want, the minds dwells on the one thing we didn’t get. This reminds me of what we saw in my posts on gratitude: if we are not grateful for what we already have, we are unlikely to be grateful for what we will have. When we get what we want, without gratitude we soon become bored and start wanting something else and the battle of attachments wages on. De Mello enjoins us to enjoy things without becoming attached to them, without clinging to them, without believing that we can’t live without them (because we can and do live without them).

If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it.

This brings us in fact to the right way to love: loving in a non-attached way, with no strings ‘attached’, loving from a position of independence. This goes against the way we normally love: we in effect say to the person ‘if you want to be especial to me you must meet my conditions’. Likewise, if we want to be ‘especial’ to someone we must ‘pay a price in lost freedom’.

Again these are hard lessons, when you are hurting, when you would willingly pay any price to get your lost love back. But our lost love is not coming back and usually it is better that way. And our path to healing passes through the realisation that it is better that way and why. De Mello gives us a striking way to see clearly through our pain by saying to the object of our attachment:

I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, to indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in any way that you decide is to your liking.

Once we say those words, we will either disagree with them and reveal our clinging, exploiting, deluded self or agree with them, sincerely, in which case we will feel all our attachment and dependence drop. It is likely we will not agree, in which case those words will serve as an affirmation to lead us to that place where they will become true.

I used these affirmations and I can say they help. It is a cruel medicine and it doesn’t work overnight, but it is what the doctor ordered.

More to come in part two

How to become a Work of Art - Step One

In my last post The Art of Becoming Art, we discovered a great truth: that the practitioner of a ‘way’, or ‘Do’ in Japanese, transforms it into an art form, and then, the art form transforms the practitioner into a work of art.

Yes, yes, you say, that is all very well and good, a capital idea, very noble, but what the heck does it mean? How can I, who do not practice Judo or Karate-do, put this powerful insight into practice in my daily life, right now?

Well, it is funny you should ask that because I am about to tell you what I think it means and how I plan to put it into use right now.

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I intend to stop worrying about the future and the tasks at hand - the outcome. I intend to concentrate on ‘travelling well’ rather than ‘arriving’. ‘Travelling well’ to me means putting the most important things first: health and personal fulfillment, something that I am guilty of neglecting. (As I have told you elsewhere, the reason I know something about philosophy is because I need it!) Health and personal fulfillment will be my watchwords, and the rest will have to take a number.

Step One

We do not have to practice Judo etc. to have a ‘way’. Any task worth doing can be undertaken in a spirit of practicing a way, that is, we can do it by ‘concentrating on the flawless execution of the task’ rather than ‘watching or wishing for the desired outcome'. But we can also apply that attitude as a global philosophy: whenever we worry about the future, about what needs to be done, about what is lacking, we are concentrating on outcomes instead of concentrating on doing what lies to hand. If we spend a lot of time reliving the past, we are not concentrating on the task that lies to hand.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. Buddha

If you are like me, you sometimes feel overwhelmed, oppressed even, by ‘things that need to be done’. My basement is half-painted. The snow has melted and the major garden projects are calling. The pergola is half-finished. My big re-filing project remains unbegun. A dozen tasks, big and small, vie for my free time. And guess what? I have decided to stop worrying about them. To quote John-Roger and Peter McWilliams, authors of the ‘Life 101’ books:

Whenever he thought about it, he felt terrible. And so, at last, he came to a fateful decision. He decided not to think about it.

Meanwhile, the important things like health and personal fulfillment get put on the back-burner ‘until such and such a project gets finished’. The philosophy of living in the present, of travelling well, can be summed up by this quote from Goethe:

Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

When we look back at our lives one day in old age (not that long from now) it is unlikely that we will wish we had spent more time working. It is unlikely that we will wish we had spent more time worrying about money, the kitchen renovations, the pergola. What we will wish we had spent more time doing is something that each person must answer for himself. Indeed it is a very important question. But no one can go far wrong if he puts health and personal fulfillment at the top of his list.
Yes, I will still do ‘the things that need to be done’. After I have been to the gym. When I get back from the Chinese painting course. Yes, finances and financial goals are important. But not as important as health and a good conscience.

This is the way I intend to apply the idea of the Japanese way to my everyday life. But if and when I become ‘transformed into a work of art’, how I will apply it then? Then, it probably won't even occur to me to think about it.

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If you enjoyed this post and think it might help others, please share, Digg or Stumble it with the SHARE button (mouse over for options). Thanks!

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Photo: Tao (Way) by Samantha Leo

Patience - non-desire

In today’s society, it is considered quite normal to work hard, to be ambitious, to be continually pushing towards our goals and dreams. As we discussed in my post Decrease, we are ‘hard-wired’ to expect that life will always improve, or at least our life. And in this context, we can easily slip into impatience when improvement is not forthcoming. Not to mention, God forbid, when we meet obstacles, setbacks, decrease or failure. How can we be patient in our modern way of life?
In the Tao Te Ching, we find an invaluable ally: non-desire.

We are victims of our desires; every concession to their demands, each satisfaction obtained is a defeat since, in the world of the senses, the objects of our desires are mere apparitions. This race toward illusions takes us far, always farther from the Tao. That is why ‘There is no greater error than to wish to satisfy one’s desires; there is no greater misery than not knowing how to be sufficient in oneself. There is no greater calamity than the desire to possess.’ (46)

Instead of pushing, striving, and desiring all the time, what would happen if we took our foot off the gas? What if we let go for a while? What if we were ‘attentively patient’?

The misfortune is that we encumber our lives with calculations, with expectations, where past and future, hopes and dreams, apprehensions and regrets, are mixed together in a perpetual confusion. By subordinating all our actions to the requirements of our personal desire, these parasites of the soul prevent us from having a simplistic vision of existence, because they leave no room for the unknown, i.e. for the Spirit.

(My translations from the Dervy edition of the ‘Tao Te King’).

Discover the Taoist principle of non-desire. Allow the Spirit to work its magic in your life a little. It is better at it than you.

Why did the stream dry up?

I came across the following poem by Rabindranath Tagore in that excellent French language edition of the Tao Te Ching, Tao Te King, Le livre du Tao et de sa vertu (Éditions Dervy, Paris). In the explanatory notes, the translator quotes the poem as a parallel example of the Taoist virtue of 'non-desire' in another philosphic tradition.
The poem moved me greatly when I read it. How true it is that we often ruin a relationship, a project, a situation, by smothering it with our selfish desires instead of allowing it to unfold naturally.
Here is my own English translation of the beautiful French version of the Bengali poem found in this book.

Why did the lamp go out? I covered it with my cloak to shelter it from the wind… That is why the lamp went out.
Why did the flower fade? I pressed it against my heart full of love and anxiety… That is why the flower faded.
Why did the stream dry up? I put a dam across it to keep the water for my use alone… That is why the stream dried up.
Why did the harp-string break? I wanted it to play a note that it could not attain… That is why the harp-string broke. Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941