2018.06.19 - Day 97

Thanks for the poem Eliza. I also agree with the sentiment it expresses.

Alma: I agree. I think that the "digging wells" metaphor works better for adherents of monotheistic religions because they believe there is only one true path.

Conversely, in his "The Ten Thousand Things,” Robert Saltzman is not a big fan of spiritual teachers like Ramana Maharshi:
‘He was an authority on his aliveness, not mine. Can Ramana tell me what spirituality is or isn’t, or define spiritual goals for me? Of course not. I’ve got to deal with what I’ve got to deal with. Plugging someone else’s Weltanschauung—someone else’s conception of the world and the place of humanity within it—into my situation can lead only to imitation and inauthenticity.’

Saltzman, Robert. The Ten Thousand Things (p. 39). Kindle Edition.

My care workers were asking me why I do meditation this morning. I always find this question difficult to answer. If I say I don't do it to get anything, that it is a break from our normal mode of doing A to get B, they just don't get that. Why would you do something if you don't get anything out of it? It seems a totally weird idea to them. Of course, there are benefits from doing meditation, and that only seems to confuse the matter further. So I just say that I am not a spiritual teacher and it is something to be experienced rather than thought about beforehand.

"The Evolution of the Bodhisattva Ideal" is the title of a talk I listened to yesterday, a podcast from a site called Free Buddhist Audio I've liked off and on, for digging just a bit deeper into some Tibetan Buddhist topics, to sort of continue the metaphor. :)

I was reminded to what extent Buddhism isn't free from misunderstandings around where to place importance. After all, even the stories that everyone agrees on, like the stories of Shakamuni's enlightenment as compared with other arhats (in this talk quite different from Shakamuni's Buddhahood), are told in very different ways, with extremely different emphasis.

I have always been drawn to the scope of these teachings, which make distinctions between big holes and small holes seem relevant, but not too important to figure out ahead of time, quite similar to contemplating the universe, in articles like the one I've had saved on my computer for weeks, "Each Black Hole Contains a Universe." I find panning out like that so comforting. Zooming in on "He was an authority on his aliveness, not mine" seems really similar, since the closer one gets, teachings may give way and reveal themselves to have been just templates... really necessary templates we are super fortunate to have been given, and given to understand, but templates nonetheless. At some point we have to fit the work to our own bodies.

The digging holes metaphor brings me to think of Pema's 'poking holes in reality' metaphor, too, but I couldn't find that in a search this morning. Time to head to the dentist again... edited 12:10, 19 Jun 2018

I did a Focusing session this morning, after missing several days. Zen's quote from Saltzman to me seems very consistent with the spirit of Focusing. It is a "method" in one sense, but it's purpose is to access a place of inward knowing, where what you find will be uniquely your own.

I finished reading William James' chapter on Will today. In the end, he declares that will is the purely mental effort that we make to direct our attention onto certain ideas rather than others, so that those ideas will then manifest as action. He says that the question of whether free will exists cannot be decided within a scientific approach to psychology, but he is a believer in free will.

As I near the end of 99 days, I feel like there are so many thoughts and threads spinning around, all interrelated, while I try vainly to take hold of a few of them and fit them into a whole that I can grasp and take home with me.

Today, I completed the first five sections of the ‘How to Make a Poem’ course, offered by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and hosted by FutureLearn, plus the normal admin things of selecting a profile pic (SL avatar!), writing the profile itself and writing an introduction.

It's a short, three week course, and the first week has 18 sections. It's too early to comment on the course material, but the people involved at the school are wonderful. Almost made me nostalgic for Manchester, where I once lived for 5 years.

I think my only worry is that course officially started in May and that late-joiners may not benefit from as much from interaction as a cohort or with tutors than people who started back then. We'll see.

Last night's writing gave me six pages of notes to read this morning. Normally there is one or two. I would have typed them up by now, and often have written a poem from them, but instead I have a bag of seeds scattered on the notepad that will take some parsing and combining. Maybe after writing this entry.

There is so much interesting stuff that other people are writing about here! Zen's care-workers have perhaps never tried to answer "Describe what an orange tastes like," let alone "Why do you eat oranges?" :) And lots yesterday too.

I'm going to stop now otherwise this will be too long a post. Please all know that I read everything you write and that's what makes this project so inspiring. :)) edited 11:58, 20 Jun 2018