2018.05.20 - Day 67

Watched (or couldn't avoid seeing rather) lots of Royal Wedding scenes. It's like a vast edifice that maintains itself by spewing out new princes and princesses every now and then. It endeavors to maintain the credibility of its existence, and is having to work harder and harder to do so. Give the poor 'commoners' lots of pomp and pageantry as a highlight in their dreary existences. Give them 'bread and circuses,' as they did in ancient Rome. Well, we do like and need ceremonies and celebrations I suppose. The main objection I have is that people should be 'important' not because of hereditary privilege but from having earned the right to it. And the royal family itself, pretty decent people I think, but seem trapped and conditioned into dutifully performing their roles of, mainly, supporting various charities. It sometimes feels as if there is a powerful figure orchestrating the whole thing behind the scenes :) Rant over.

Tart is now talking about prayer - something I never felt comfortable with because I never really felt there were any deities who would bother to listen. But there is lot more to it than that. Maybe I need to be in an altered state of consciousness to grasp it.

'The paradox between the injunctions to work as if everything depended on effort and to pray as if everything depended on prayer can only be partially resolved in our ordinary state of consciousness. I have found that a fuller resolution requires considerations derived from altered states of consciousness.'

Am enjoying a bit of nostalgia lately, aesthetically. Daughter #2 needed a dress to go swing dancing in, so after her physical therapy appointments (migraines have dissipated and she's learning to care for her spine!), we've been hitting shops where ( hold onto your hats), the 80s is considered vintage now. There is some trick to appreciating parts of something and happily discarding the rest... holding lightly.

Politically, aesthetic balances and preferences are part of why people talk past each another... what a person considers vulgar taste-wise can be bundled with ideologies too well, what a person considers a 'slight' or rejection (something amplified by royal dynamics certainly!). These are also minefields in my family of origin, some of which will be maneuvered around today with my grandfather, who I'm having over for '5 hour magic soup', after a few weeks of being slow to answer his calls for a reason I won't get into here.

When I was a young child, my grandfather seemed the most free of anyone in my family, out on boats, keeping his own hours for the most part, always a bachelor. That's what I chose to notice, along with appreciating the sight and smell of polished Sunday shoes and crisp-edged hats, handkerchiefs (much changed later on)... his lighting up when I came into the room. I always forget how old he is, not sure why I do this. Last week I answered someone that he is 92, but, he is 88. Maybe it is a nod to the birthday game of always getting my new age wrong, at which I would yell at him and he'd laugh and laugh.

It isn't easy to draw lines with him, but it is that or find myself avoiding him (punishment by isolation?), so... wish us luck. edited 16:24, 20 May 2018

This passage from Tart reinforces what I posted yesterday, and more clearly brings in the idea of disidentification:

"Self-remembering reduces the intensity of the identification process. Under ordinary circumstances, you only have so much attention to give. If you exercise little voluntary control over that attention, then it largely goes where the circumstances of the moment, predictably and automatically reacted to by false personality, take it. ... When you self-remember, you voluntarily direct your attention so that you simultaneously pay active attention to what is happening outside you and inside you, as well as keep some reference object (such as your arms and legs) in mind. The simple act of voluntarily putting attention where you want it means that there is generally less attention/ energy available to power your false personality and your identification processes and defense mechanisms."
Tart, Charles T. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential, Kindle Edition (Location 5291- 5297)

The key concepts as I'm seeing it now are:
-Will
-Attention
-Deautomatization
-Disidentification

In the consensus trance, attention is caught and involuntarily focused upon the habitual thinking patterns that maintain "false personality" (what Tolle calls "ego"). Practicing self-remembering does feel a little like switching off the autopilot for a short time.

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth, at the same time as Tart's Waking Up, and it's interesting to see how these concepts show up in a similar way in both.

A busy day that included a two hour discussion with my Canadian colleague, saying goodbye to longtime friends whom we may never see again, listening to Charlie Morley's interview before free access closed, and reading another chunk of Homo Ludens. And cooking, always cooking! :)