A parcel of magical, mystical delights!

I know this traditional bookshop where they still wrap things with brown paper and string. Here, you’ll find a vast collection of second hand books, all neatly categorised and arrayed in labyrinthine rows on three creaky floors. It’s been there for generations, catering for the full spectrum of tastes, from the pre Socratic philosophers to the latest Fifty Shades. It’s a rare, book-scented treasure house, a bastion of colour and pattern and calm in an increasingly bland world.

I don’t always buy a book when I go there. At least half the pleasure in visiting this place is in browsing with no particular aim other than the search for something inspirational. My choices are therefore driven as much by mood as by the titles. My price limit also varies widely according to mood, and for all I know the cycles of the moon as well. I once parted with £25.00 for a copy of Jung’s Mysterium, a book much revered by psychoanalysts – and which I have not the Latin to decipher. At other times I am loathe to part with £5.00 and come away empty handed, dejected that nothing has taken my eye. To be sure, bookshops like this are mysterious places.

Last Saturday it was Wordsworth – well, not so much him as an idea inspired by him. I’d been revisiting the Romantics, thinking back on things I’ve written about Romanticism – most of it rubbish, but some of it still holding the test of time. And there it was, lurking upon a shelf of rather lack-lustre books, pressed a little to the back as if shy of the limelight: Wordsworth’s collected poems, dated 1868.

It was a handsome little volume – red cloth binding, the pages gilded, and the backing boards beautifully bevelled so the book turned smoothly in my hands like a bar of silky soap. Inside, among the familiar poems, there were engravings – intricate drawings, each protected by its own little insert of tissue paper. It was delightful. It might have been placed there only recently – or been there for twenty years, always escaping my eye until now. Only now did it speak to me. But what was it saying? Here are the poems of William Wordsworth, Michael? Read them? No, I already own a copy of his collected works. It wasn’t that I needed another. There was more going on here. All I know is I wanted it.

An expensive book, I feared, but no – £4.50 was its considered worth, which placed it within the means of my capricious and, of late, austerity-conscious pocket. It could be mine. It would be mine.

I am not a book dealer or a collector. I do not browse these shelves for unknown money-treasures in order to sell them on. The vendor is, after all, an antiquarian dealer of some renown, so I presume the real collectors’ items have already been filtered out of this very public domain – leaving only the dross, where treasure is to be found only in sentiment. I was under no illusions then; to a dealer in books this book, pretty thought it was, was worthless.

Was it really only sentiment then that drew my eye? Could sentiment take my breath away like this and fill me with a such possessive craving for a thing that was otherwise of no use nor value to me? Perhaps it was simply its great age and the fact I have a track record in collecting old and useless things. The Sage of Grasmere had not been 20 years dead when this book was issued, and here it was, still in marvelous condition -  a little frayed at the top and bottom of the spine, but otherwise pristine. Clearly it had been respected throughout its life, and was that not reason enough to earn my own respect now? Or was it that the book lain neglected behind the glass of some unfrequented country house library, untouched by sticky fingers – and now at last had come its chance to be handled, to be loved. Is that why is spoke to me?

It was a mystery, but one I was clearly in a mood to ponder in slower time. For now the priority was merely to rescue it, to possess it.

I took my prize downstairs to the lady at the till and she looked upon it with a genuine delight. She ran her long pale hands over the cover as I had done a moment ago, and in doing so shared with me the loveliness of it.  Her actions, unconsciously sensual and simple enough on her part, were to my romantic eye like holy devotions and they amplified an already growing numinosity. Then she wrapped it carefully, folding the paper with a neat, practised precision, deft fingers twisting the knot, an enchantress sealing in the spell of that afternoon – an afternoon possessed suddenly of a richness and a fertility I had not known in such a long, long time.

I emerged from the shop tingling with something that ran far deeper than the mere purchase of an old book. But what was it?

I’ve had that book for four days now and you might think it curious but  it rests upon my  desk, still in its tight little wrapping. I do not want to open it in case the magic of that afternoon evaporates. While I keep it wrapped, you see, the spell remains intact and only good things can happen from now on. The glass will for ever be half full,… never again half empty. But such an obsessive devotion as this is stretching things, even for me, and I realise it’s in my little foible – some might say my weakness – the mystery of that afternoon is revealed.

One cannot really capture a moment like that, any more than one can capture its essence in a photograph. All you’re really left with at the moment of capture is a dead thing. As I’ve written before, and keep telling myself, as if for the first time anew, the moment comes from within and cannot be contained in any “thing”. Curiosity will eventually overcome my obsessive Romantic sentiment, and I will snip open that package to discover all that lies inside is just a worthless old book, a little more world-worn and weary than I remember it.

The real power lies always in the moment and it will always be erased by time until we can find a way of staying in the moment all the time. If we can do that then every moment becomes imbued with a mysterious presence, a presence that has the power to inspire and elevate us beyond the mundane. There we discover that the meaning of our lives – the meaning we might have searched for all our lives – was never really lost. Nor was it such a big secret anyway, nor less a thing to be toiled at, nor pondered over with our heads in our hands, nor winkled out of the dusty tomes of several millenia’s worth of arcane spiritual teachings. It was there all the time; the numinous, the sheer pullulating exuberance of life.

You do not find it in work or wealth or learning, but in random moments of spontaneous inner realisation, like with me on that Saturday afternoon, browsing the hushed labyrinth of an antiquarian bookshop. But we’ve all had moments like this, and perhaps the only secret is that we should allow ourselves to recognise their intrinsic sacredness, then trust the mind, or whatever greater consciousness lies behind it, will grant us the presence to realise them more often.

Of course a more skilled pilgrim than I would have admired that book for what it was and, without losing a fraction of the meaning in that moment, simply left it on the shelf for someone else to find.

Pass me those scissor’s will you?

Thanks for listening.

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Beginning meditation

Meditation should be a straight forward business but is too often shrouded in a mystical  fog. In fact meditation is very simple, literally as simple as breathing and should be looked upon as a basic life-skill, like swimming or riding a bicycle – things that at some time or another can prove useful, life-saving, or just life-enhancing. But where do we start? You’ve only to read a few books on the subject to realise there are so many different techniques. Which one is the best? Who knows? If you’re interested in the subject all you can do is read widely, try out those methods that make sense to you and don’t worry about those that don’t. But perhaps the best advice is to keep it simple.

In the words of Lao Tzu:

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

I’ll outline a basic technique of my own in a moment, which may or may not suit you, but as Lao Tzu also said:

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.

So you must make of this piece what you will.

Before we sit down to meditate there’s something we need to get out of the way or we’re wasting our time. What we should never do as lay meditators is have any ambitions of being lifted to a higher spiritual plane, or attaining enlightenment, or discovering the delights of astral travel,  because it most likely won’t happen. I’ve been meditating off an on for around twenty years and I don’t know what any of these things are supposed to feel like, but I do know there is a belief that meditation is the key to them. While this may be true for certain dedicated individuals, you’ll find no secrets here.

Enlightenment is a serious business of course, but you don’t achieve it in the hours either side of your nine-to five, nor even in one of those expensive weekend workshops. You’ll most likely need to become a monk, or a hermit, or some kind of self flagellating ascetic, and unless you’re willing to give up just about everything else in your life for the pursuit of that one goal, then you should forget it, otherwise you fall into the trap of New Age Materialism. And materialism is like opium: sweet dreams for a while, but ultimately useless.

Society programs us from an early age to be ego driven and goal orientated – we have to do well at school, pass our exams, get a good job, earn some money, get a house, a bigger house, be successful and so on. It’s counter intuitive then, to grasp the notion that in order to feel good for longer than five minutes we have to forget this “achievement culture”. We have to let go of any ambitions. New age materialism? You’ve only to look all those self help books, and all the money you’ll need to spend in order to achieve the promise of a happy, fulfilled and enlightened existence. But of course the answer isn’t in the next book, nor the next new age trinket – just like for most of us meditation isn’t about sitting down with a mind to gaining spiritual awareness, or opening the door onto  an astral plane.

Having said that, we’re obviously looking to gain something, or we wouldn’t be doing it. But as lay meditators I would argue we’re looking to achieve only a degree of clarity, we’re looking to feel better in ourselves, which is a much more modest goal than that of attaining Buddhahood. Let’s just say to ourselves we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know how we’ll feel. or where meditation will lead us,…

We’re happy to simply keep an open mind.

So why meditate?

Hopefully by now we’re no longer troubled by inappropriate ambitions in our meditation. But, at a basic level, meditation can bring about a gradual change in our outlook, in particular our sense of personal well-being, simply by calming us down and enabling us to remember who we really are.

What does that mean?

We are happiest in life when we are comfortable in our own skins, when we like ourselves, when we can look in the mirror and say to ourselves – yes, that guy/girl is okay.  I’m not talking about becoming conceited or narcissistic here – it’s more a case of being at peace with yourself, also having a sense of the rightness of your life’s direction, even though it might not be clear to you or anyone else what that direction is.

If you’re not blessed with what contemporary society considers to be “good looks” – for example, if you’re fat or bald, wrinkled, over 25 and short sighted – no amount of meditation is going to change that, but what it can do, is enable you to look in the mirror, at your fat, bald, wrinkled, ageing, short sighted self, and be comfortable with it by virtue of a confidence in yourself and your God given right to simply be – how-ever, and who-ever you are.

Such a state requires mental clarity, and meditation restores clarity.

What does clarity feel like?

It feels calm.

Calmness comes from stilling the mind. It comes from slowing down the rush of one’s thoughts. If you take a glass of muddy water and you keep stirring it, this is a good illustration of the way the mind feels with its swirl of thoughts. If only the mind could become still enough for the sediment to settle and for clarity to be restored.

Meditation restores clarity.

Clarity feels calm.

So meditate. -

How to Meditate

There are many meditation techniques. What I’m about to describe is just one of them. It blends Buddhist mindfulness with a little Daoist internal energy work. But don’t worry about what that might mean. If you’re in a dark place right now, any meditation technique will help you. Whatever method you decide upon, do it every day until you feel steady enough to start forgetting the practice. If you should start to wobble again, dust off your meditation notes, or see if you can find the link to this blog posting, and start doing it again.

That’s how you meditate.

As for the method, I’ll summarise the main points at the end, so if you’re patient to get on then skip to there, otherwise here’s the nitty gritty.

1) How long shall we meditate for?

The first thing we need to do is decide how long we can spare to meditate. Ten minutes is a good starting point. As you get into it, you’ll naturally want to increase the time you spend doing it. I generally aim for about thirty minutes, but when I’m really in “the zone” I’ve been known to go on for an hour or more.

Normally I take a dim view of any gadget that’s touted as being essential for your spiritual, emotional or physical well being, but I make an exception here, because we’re only talking about a simple timer. If you can set a timer, do so – an egg timer, an oven timer, an alarm clock, anything that pings or rings or dings, but without tick tocking all the time while you’re doing it. The timer lets you relax. You’re not constantly wondering if your time is up yet and checking your watch. So, get your timer, set it, and forget it.

If you don’t live alone – and especially if you’ve got children running about all over the place, you need to be honest with them about what you’re doing. So, tell them: “Look, I’m going to meditate. I know you might think that’s a bit weird, but I’m really serious about giving it a go, and I do not want disturbing for the next ten minutes.” Or you can try:”Come and get me if the house is burning down – otherwise I’m not here, okay?”

This probably won’t work, but at least you’ve done your best, and hopefully they’ll get the message eventually. Be kind to them, and be kind to yourself. Don’t be angry if you get disturbed. Anger is the opposite of where we want to be. If they burst in, think of it as an opportunity for measuring how far away from being angry you are.

Anger, under any circumstances is really bad for you.

Fortunately, with experience, you’ll find you can shut down and meditate anywhere, even an airport terminal – though I admit it’s not the ideal place to start. Also, very few of us can enjoy the luxury of a private “meditation room” so just use your common sense and go somewhere you think you’ll be the most comfortable and the least likely to be disturbed. If that means doing it in the bathroom, then so be it.

Now sit.

2) Sitting

In an instructional video on the subject of Chen Style Tai Chi, Grand Master Chen Zheng Lee describes the process of meditation with  disarming simplicity:

He says: “Just sit quietly for a while.”

Really – don’t get hung up about it – just sit.

If you can manage a “full lotus” without it hurting you, then go for it. If not, just sit as best you can, legs crossed or splayed open, it doesn’t matter – the main aim is simply to provide a comfortable and stable base from which to align your back gently upright.

The back is the important thing here, and we can achieve something like the right posture if we imagine our heads suspended from a thread attached to our crown and pulling us gently upright, with our back hanging from it. Don’t worry too much about this – just do what feels comfortable. Roughly speaking the right position is somewhere between slouching over and sitting bolt upright.

If you can’t sit on the floor – if you’ve got troublesome joints and struggle to get down, or get back up again, then sit in a chair, but again, pay attention to the posture of your spine and avoid the temptation to lean back into the chair. In his famous book on Microcosmic Meditation, Mantak Chia rejects outright the idea of sitting cross legged on the floor, and heartily recommends using a chair. Confused? Me too. Don’t worry, just do what you want – we’re not looking to move the earth here.

So, now we’re sitting.

What next?

3) Quelling the restless mind

What’s next is you’ll be interrupted – if not by someone you live with, then by someone you share your head with. It’ll say something like this: “I’m not comfortable. Can we move over a bit?”

So, you’re an obliging soul and you move over and sure enough in no time at all the voice comes again: “This is no good either,” it says. “My leg’s killing me.”

You can put up with this for only so long, shuffling about, sitting this way and that, hands resting here, there and everywhere, but then some point you’ve got to say: “Look, we were perfectly comfortable a moment ago. So what’s changed?”

Quietly but firmly, say “NO” to the nagging voice.

This is the first step in letting go.

Settle into position and do not move from that position until your time is up. Really! Relax into it, then freeze. Become an inanimate doll, a living statue. Do not move a muscle. Not even one millimeter.

So, now we’re quietly resolved not to move. What happens next is we encounter the annoying conversationalist.

This is like when you’ve been given an important job and you want to focus on it, but you’re constantly interrupted by others with nothing better to do but tell you about their holidays, or a bit of silly gossip. It’s that child in your mind again – assailing you with a string of thoughts. What do you do? Well, you can’t consciously stop it, no more than you can consciously stop breathing. So, like with the real life gossip, you take a step back, and you only lend half an ear, while remaining quietly focussed on your task. And our task, remember, is nothing more complicated than sitting quietly.

Let your thoughts come and go. Don’t try to stop them, but try instead to avoid actively dwelling on them. If you catch yourself lingering over something, don’t be hard on yourself – just let it go, brush it gently aside, say to yourself – I don’t want to be thinking about that right now. It is ultimately our aim to subdue these flittering thoughts, but it’s early days yet and one never counters force with force. This is your own self we’re talking about  after all, so be gentle. No sense in beating yourself up over it.

No sense in getting angry.

Anger is the opposite of where we want to be.

What now?

We breathe.

From the Dantien.

4) What’s the Dantien?

Chances are, in the human biology you learned at school, there was never any mention of the Dantien. The reason for this is the kindest thing western medicine has to say about it is it’s imaginary. However, if you take the  trouble to imagine it, to focus your thoughts upon it as if it were real, then, eventually you will feel it as a physical presence, as something moving, something swelling, something firm, warm, tingly and inexplicably energising. Then try telling me the Dantien does not exit.

Where is it?

If you rest your hand on your belly, put the tip of your index finger into your belly button, then press down gently with the tip of your little finger, that’s where your Dantien is, a few inches inside your lower abdomen. Familiarise yourself with the idea of this “imaginary” thing called the Dantien and try to persuade your mind – perhaps against its better nature – of the physical reality of this region inside of you. Nurture it ,even when you’re not meditating. Think about it and see if you can feel it. What we need to do is wake it up and we do that, in part, by breathing. If you’ve never felt your Dantien before, don’t be afraid. This is the most intimate part of you, the very centre of your being. It’s like the best friend you never knew you had.

5) Breathing

The way we breathe in meditation is important – in fact the way we breathe is meditation, so I’ll take a little time to describe it.

We should always breathe through the nose. Take notice of your own natural breathing, and if you discover you’ve fallen out of the habit of using your nose, then try to re-educate yourself. Nose breathing is the proper way to breathe and without too much effort it will become automatic again. Of course if you’re troubled with a blocked nose, then forget what I’ve just said and breathe through your mouth.

To help you breathe through your nose, close your mouth and touch the tip of your tongue to the hard palate just behind your top front teeth, and keep it there. You might have read about this somewhere before. Various reasons are given for it  depending on the kind of books you read. A Kung Fu fighter does it so his tongue’s out of the way, and if he gets kicked in the face, he won’t bite it off. A serious qigonger will tell you it’s to complete the circuit on the conception channel that runs down the front of your body, that Chi can’t settle in your Dantien without it. For us lay meditators, it’s best to think of it as being simply a way of double sealing our mouth in order to re-enforce the message to our brain that we’re really serious about wanting to breathe through our nose.

So,…

Nose breathing.

When we inhale, we imagine the air being drawn into the Dantien, as if the Dantien itself were a kind of lung, swelling out and sucking in air. To help with this we breathe with our abdomen rather than our chest, which might seem odd. In fact what we’re doing is filling our lungs from the bottom up, so as we breathe in we push the belly out – this causes the lungs and the diaphragm to extend downwards. This is called abdominal breathing. Over time this technique will increase the capacity of the lungs and encourage a longer, slower breathing rate.

It’s healthier to breathe this way, the lungs take in a much greater volume of air and the blood becomes more highly oxygenated. It also stimulates the lymphatic system, clearing out toxins and generally any nastiness we can do without. Once your body becomes familiar with the feel of abdominal breathing it seems to become automatic, so its well worth playing about with as a technique in its own right, even when you’re not meditating.

The average, non-meditating adult breathes at a rate of between 12 and 20 breaths per minute, when resting. The higher the breathing rate, the shallower each breath is, with some people seeming to breathe only with the very tops of their lungs in a series of rapid, short, panting breaths. Everyone’s different and results will vary but after practicing for a number of years, my own natural respiration rate, at rest, is around four or five breaths per minute, and during meditation it will drop naturally to about one and a half breaths.

The Dantien and the breath are important in meditation, at least the way I practise it, and even when we’re not meditating, its good to become familiar with the feel of them. When we breathe in, we imagine the Dantien swelling as the belly expands, imagine the air being drawn down to the Dantien like a cool, silken thread, but when we breathe out, rather than imagine the Dantien collapsing, it’s as if we seal it off, it retains the air, and as the belly contracts to normal on the outward breath, the sensation in the Dantien is one of compression, compaction, or consolidation.

All of this might sound a bit silly, and to begin with it will be an entirely imaginary exercise, but if you’re patient you’ll eventually begin to feel the Dantien, feel an “energy” building up in it, and once you’ve made it’s acquaintance – even if you don’t meditate for a while, you’ve only to settle your thoughts upon it again and you’ll feel it stirring. Exactly what the Dantien is, I’ve no idea, but to feel what I can only describe as the breath energy building up in it is a very relaxing and a very comforting thing.

Getting a feel for the Dantien then is one of the milestones in the kind of mediation I do. It won’t come right away, and we shouldn’t try to pursue it, or in any way become fixated upon it. The Dantien is like a cat purring on your lap. Stroke it, feel its heat, it’s comforting vibration thoughout your body, but other than that leave it alone.

Getting a feel for the Dantien goes hand in glove with the feeling of relaxed, slow, deep breathing. Once you develop the feel for it, you’ll discover that focusing upon it has given the mind something else to do and you’re less troubled now by flittering thoughts.

But you can go further.

It also helps to listen to the sound of your breath.

So listen.

If you can hear your breath while you’re breathing, you’re breathing too fast. It’s when you can hear only the sound of your silent breath that you enter into a deeper state of meditation.

5) The sound of the silent breath

A Zen koan? The sound of the silent breath. It’s like the old chestnut about the sound of one hand clapping, it doesn’t make sense at all – but really it’s very simple. If you breathe normally, and listen, you’ll both hear and feel the air moving in and out of your nose. Breathe more slowly and the sound and the feel of it will fade until you reach a point where you only know you’re still breathing because of the almost imperceptible movement of your abdomen. There is no sound, no sense of the breathing process in your ears or your nose. This is the sound of the silent breath.

Slow down.

See if you can find it.

Congratulations.

You’re meditating.

Summing up

(1) Decide how long you’ve got to spare. Set a timer.

(2) Sit, back straight and not touching anything. Legs crossed or open, on the floor or on a chair. It doesn’t matter. Relax.

(3) Settle on a position, say to yourself this feels okay. Relax.

(4) Don’t move a muscle until the timer pings.

(5) Say to yourself, I don’t want to think about anything right now, but don’t try to stop your thoughts arising spontaneously – it’s impossible. Aim for a centered, calm, unthinking zone. If if thoughts arise and you catch yourself dwelling on something, brush those thoughts gently aside.

(6) Close your mouth, touch the tip of your tongue to the hard palate just behind your top front teeth.

(7) Imagine your Dantien

(8) Breathe through your nose if you can. Imagine the Dantien sucking the air down when you breathe in. Imagine it is the Dantien, rather than the lungs doing the breathing. Blocked nose? Then obviously breathe through your mouth.

(9) As you breathe in, let the belly expand. As you breathe out let the belly relax back naturally, and see if you can fel the Dantien purring.

(10) Follow your breaths, slowing them down until you can’t hear them any more.

(11) Be sensitive to any feelings coming from your Dantien.

(12) Relax and enjoy them.

(13) Let the timer ping.

(14) Get up and go about your day.

Meditation, when and how often?

This is really up to you. It depends on your lifestyle and how much time you’ve got. If you’re being a martinet about it, set a specific time aside every day in your private meditation chamber, preferably some ungodly hour in the morning. If you have the discipline to do that, then go for it. See if you can manage an hour a day. Otherwise don’t worry about it.

If you’re a suburban creature with a nine to five, living with a houseful of other active folks, most likely setting any kind of specific timetable for meditation is useless as it’s inevitable some familial crisis will interrupt your neatly ordered existence. In practice you need to be flexible then. If you’re feeling troubled and tense, then try to meditate at some point every day, gradually bringing up your time spent in the zone from ten to thirty minutes. Afterwards you’ll feel steadier. Calmer.

What you shouldn’t do is get into a situation where you feel guilty because you’ve missed your meditation, either because something came up and you really didn’t get the time, or you felt an internal resistance to the idea. We’ve all been there. Be kind to yourself. Don’t feel guilty.

Me? After attaining a certain degree of steadiness from meditating every day, my practice falls off and becomes sporadic. I don’t think this matters. You come back to it when you need it. I’m not aiming for Buddahood, just a little clarity.

What does clarity feel like?

It feels calm.

___________________________________________________

Books I enjoyed and found very helpful with meditation are:

Mindfulness: Bante Gee

Being Nobody Going Nowhere – Aya Keema

Starting to meditate – Professor David Fontana

The Healing Power of  Dao – Mantak Chia

The Dalai Llama’s little book of Calm – the Dalai Llama

The Secret of the Golden Flower – Cleary/Wilhelm

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle

The Lavender and The Rose  – Michael Graeme

(only joking about the last one – it’s rubbish)

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Letting go

I talked last night about letting go of our anxieties and I’m conscious now of  making it sound easier than it really is. If we are born with a personality that is prone to anxiety, depression, or any other form of psychological turbulence, ” letting go” is more of a lifetime’s work than something that can be taught in a one off session – it’s part of who we are, and we’ll never be described as “normal” in the clinical sense, but then who is normal? On the upside, with hindsight, for a writer, it gives us a lot of interesting material to work with – though it might not feel like it at the time.

Of course, we can be brought quickly back onto the straight and narrow with the aid of drugs like SSRI’s. These alter the way we experience emotion, and can be quite powerful, but speaking as a layman, they also have their downsides. If your depression is so deep you’re literally at risk of razor blades in the bathroom, then SSRI’s can save your life, so we shouldn’t be too squeamish about taking them. Equally though, I know people who are stuck on them and for no reason I can see, other than they’re not aware of  any other option.

I spent a short time on SSRI’s myself, following a stressful transition in both my work and personal life, back in the nineties. This was a decade when they seemed to be handing them out like sweets. Prozac in particular was hailed as the new wonder drug – a substance that would render things like depression and anxiety a thing of the past. Well, Prozac’s still with us, but so are things like depression and anxiety.

Before taking Prozac, I was jumping at shadows, I was anxious about things stretching way into the future, things that might never happen. I’d break out sweating for no reason, I’d get dizzy behind the wheel of a car, mainly because my neck was so tightly screwed up I was shutting off the circulation to my brain – and I’d only to be trapped in a room full of people before I was imagining I was going to faint – probably for the same reason.

On reflection I recognize the root cause of my anxieties was not wanting to be where I was. But my societal duties and my apparent life’s path – including the basic need to go out and earn a living – insisted I endure situations I found absurd, not only that, but situations in which I was obliged to act and speak as if I thought everything was “normal”, that I’d somehow bought-in to the collective delusion. You can only do that for so long before your unconscious erupts on a volcanic scale, laying waste to your life, prompting you to rise phoenix-like from the ashes, hopefully on a more psychically sincere path. If you can’t do that, there’s a chance it’ll simply pull the plug on you and find a more willing companion next time around.

On Prozac, however, fitting in was no longer a problem. I also discovered astonishing levels of self confidence. A bomb could have gone off and I would not have moved, except to brush the dust from my shoulders. If the boss had shouted at me, I would have felt confident enough to tell him what I thought, then wee on his desk. A wonder-drug? Yes, and with good reason; my early days on Prozac were a revelation!

However, I lasted only a short while before the side effects kicked in. I found myself unable to sleep. I remember I didn’t sleep for a whole week, and that put me into a darker hole than I’d been in in the first place. You can get tablets for insomnia of course, and I was offered them as a quick fix, but I decided to make a break at this point and began the long road to becoming a closet hippy instead. Twenty five years later, I still wear a conventional collar and tie to work, and I draw a salary that’s been uninterrupted by time off for “stress”. But there’s a yin-yang pendant and a tree of life next to my skin, and my wisest confidant is a book called the I Ching.

This wasn’t an easy transition.

I was 28, a self styled mathematician and a physicist, having just completed 10 years of studies. To my mind, if you couldn’t plot its trajectory, or describe its behaviour with differential equations, “it” didn’t exist. I was rational, and a materialist. Many tread that path their whole lives, carving out impressive careers for themselves. Not me. It took a while for me to realise the stuff I’d learned was already a hundred years out of date, and that while there were many aspects of life you could explore, extrapolate and interpolate with the calculus of Isaac Newton, there were others it wouldn’t touch. The mind was one of them. For that you needed to get weird. Even Newton knew this, and wasn’t afraid to get weird himself.

So I got weird.

I started on the body with Yoga, then on the mind with Jung, then on both body and mind with Tai Chi and Qigong. For the spirit, I circled Daoism, Buddhism, then came back to Jung again – it was he who taught me there can be no dichotomy between psyche and spirit. I walked, I read, and I wrote. I’ve been doing that for 25 years, and I’ve still no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ve never since felt the dark depths of despair that SSRI’s dumped me in. I’ve since faced far more stressful situations, without a serious wobble, so I must be doing something right. As for certainty though, you can forget it – about the only thing I know for sure in all of this is that what’s real is not always what you can plot on a graph.

As Jung said, what’s real is simply what works.

And it changes, all the time. What’s right for you now may not work in another year or two. You have to keep pace with your changing psyche. As Jung also said: All true things must change, and what does not change, cannot be true.

It might not sound like much of a cure – a quarter of a century of faltering steps along an essentially intangible mystical path, but reality was transformed for me once I took those first steps, and I feel the world has in all that time been coloured a more vivid shade of life than it ever would have been on SSRI’s.

A critical look at the dynamics of human interaction on a global scale reveals the disturbing fact that the world has evolved into a profoundly sick beast, that we live out daily the madness of the collective unconscious, pretty much as you can see it lived among the inmates of any institution for the seriously disturbed. And we participate in it because we have no choice – we’re all imprisoned by the essentially delusional values of money, and status, and even things like national or religious identities.

SSRI’s make us conveniently forgetful of this madness, allowing us to go on living in the world, but in ways that are making us increasingly ill. For the mystic to live in such a world, and see it as he does, does not make for comfortable viewing, but it at least grants him the ability to rise above the bullshit, to see it for what it is, and to maintain his psychical integrity rather than being negatively influenced and dragged down into the depths of hell by it.

But how do you let go? How does the office worker, the teacher, the health care professional,… all of them oppressed by organisational structures based upon delusional understandings of the human psyche, and metered by the dollar,… how do they let their anxieties go?

Well, the transcendental path is the only one I know, and your journey starts when you can deal with any negative materialistic reactions you might have to that word: Transcendental. The next step is looking that word up, understanding what it means to you, and then realising what a big word it is.

But the bottom line in all of this is it’s a personal journey. You can seek help, talk to people, read books, research the internet. But at some point you have to take charge of your own psychical destiny, and do something about it. Don’t worry that your actions might seem weird, because then you’re falling into another common trap – that of living your life through the eyes of someone else, someone always critical and questioning of your rational grip, of your right to be whomever you want to be. We’ve all done this. Recognising it, again, is one of the first steps to being free of it.

I could talk about meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, Jungian Psychology, non literal reality, the Romantic movement, looking for meaning in our dreams, guided imagination – as I have done at at various times in this blog, and shall do so again,… but none of these things may be right for you, so just find what works, and get on with it.

Come to think of it, I haven’t talked about meditation.

I may do that next.

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Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Exploring duality on Darwen Moor

I drove up to the Royal Arms at Tockholes today and stretched my legs on Darwen Moor. My ancestors were weavers and mill-workers in this area, and would have been intimately acquainted with the ancient byways that criss cross these rather bleak hills. How can I describe Darwen Moor? Technically it’s an upland plateau, though more poetically I can’t help thinking of it as a dour blend of gritstone, peat and heather – black as a hag’s teeth in winter. And there’s a tower.

I needed the air. And I needed my ancestors.

A dull daily commute, followed by pastimes that center upon the contemplation of one’s navel can lead to some very insulated ways of thinking, particularly when we start probing the nature of reality. Many an unfortunate hippy has passed this way, picked up on the Buddhist idea of “Maya”, misinterpreted it, and concluded that the world we think of as real is just an illusion, that attachment to it is the biggest delusion we can fall foul of, and that the more valid experience is a total retreat into an imaginary inner world, aided, if necessary, by powerful hallucinogens.

But we need to be careful.

Personally, I prefer the notion that having a keen and clear-headed handle on the ways of the physical world is far from delusional, if only because our mortal contract insists we spend so much time learning the ropes here in the first place. I like the Daoist view which describes us as being caught with our feet in both camps, that we exist partially both in the inner and the outer world, and that we can’t make sense of either without paying due attention to both.

So, it does you good to get out once in a while, to climb the muddy trails up into the clouds, far above the towns and cities, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of your mortal nature by the feel of the wind on your face. If I had a more thrill-seeking personality I’d probably take up skydiving or base-jumping. As it is a walk in the hills is usually sufficient to re-calibrate and ground my sense of reality.

Temperatures have been getting down to below freezing here and the visitor center carpark at the Royal Arms was slick with ice. As I picked up the trail, I found the ground hard with frost and the paths, normally glutinous mud and stagnant pools of water, were rendered difficult with long stretches like rivers of ice. My instep crampons would have been useful, but I’d left them at home because this is only Darwen Moor after all, not Helvellyn, though the winter weather has been known to kill people up here. I decided to chance it anyway, trusting to luck there’d be enough clear stretches to get me to the tower and back without breaking a leg. I find walking boots are useless in conditions like this, hard soled and slippery as hell, needing the addition of steel spikes to bite. The fell runners were faring far better in their soft soled trainers. I cringed at the sight of their bare legs. It was cold. Biting cold.

As I walked, I was thinking about a passage in the story I’m currently writing. The heroine, Adrienne, has survived a near fatal car accident that’s left her haunted, not least by a classic near death experience – tunnel of light, meeting dead relatives and all that. The hero, Phil, is a survivor of a different kind of accident – a helicopter crash at sea that left him traumatized  having been tossed in a rubber boat for three days in a storm, thinking he was going to drown. He suffered hallucinations towards the end, and ever since has experienced lucid dreams and an uncanny intuition apparently guided by imaginary conversations with his great great grandfather. (Don’t ask me where I get this stuff from)

Anyway, when these two meet, their chatter inevitably circles around the meaning and the nature of reality as they try to make sense of their experiences, as well as dealing with the psychological damage from which they’re still both still suffering. At one point, Phil is wondering if they’re not both actually dead, that neither of them in fact survived their accidents, and that what they think is real life is actually some kind of strange mutual lucid dream experience, or a kind of purgatory. And how would they know otherwise? But Adrienne isn’t impressed and retorts that she knows what “dead” feels like,…

“and it’s a whole lot better than this, Phil. No, this feels pretty much like being alive to me.”

So,…

Ice on the ascent. You slip – best case, you bruise your gluteus maximus. Worst, you go over a crag and break your neck. But crags are few on Darwen Moor, and the way is relatively easy, plus they’re a hardy lot round here and I had plenty of company on the way up, most of them moving faster than me – not just hardy walker types, but rosy cheeked families out for a bit of a blow. I seemed to be testing every step, or paused fiddling with my camera, while my overtakers tramped gleefully on, passing me with a neighbourly “Ow do.” Maybe I should get out more. Maybe I should should swap my shamefully underused Brashers for a pair of cheap soft soled boots from the discount store, and simply learn to walk again?

It’s not a long hike to the tower from the Royal Arms, only a couple of miles, and well worth it. It’s one of the most impressive follies in the district, built in 1898, and a magnet for generations of walkers. Unlike many such structures these days, it isn’t fenced off and boarded up. You can still climb up it, and in spite of being in one of the bleakest spots in the West Pennines, it shoulders the weather well. With a little TLC over the years, it’s maintained its structural integrity, and bourne the occasional insults of vandals good naturedly. From inside, via a spiral stone staircase, you can access a mid level viewing balcony. If you’ve the nerve for it, you can press on to the top. The stone stairway ends just short of the top where you then climb a short section of iron spiral steps, to emerge through a doorway in the upper, glazed, pergola-like dome. This gives access to the upper turret, raised some eighty feet above the moor. The views from here are breathtaking, but I’m no good with exposed heights and usually need a braver companion to goad me into making the ascent.

The tower has lost its glazed dome twice, once in 1947 in a gale, and again more recently in 2010. The latest impressive replacement was built by a local engineering company and was lowered gingerly into place by helicopter back in January this year.

Ostensibly built to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, the tower also celebrates the victory of local people who regained their rights of access to the ancient trails hereabouts, and which had been blocked by the absentee landlord who was more concerned with rearing grouse for the guns of the monied classes. It was an unfortunate fact that much of the British uplands were once denied to the local population until the mass-trespass movements began the long process of winning those uplands back. The most famous of these was on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout in 1932, but it all began here over Darwen in the 1890′s. It’s a sad fact however that access wasn’t enshrined in law until the Countryside and Rights of Way act in 2000, over a hundred years later. The moral is you don’t need to be a sage to appreciate the restorative nature of the uplands. Spend your working week doing 12 hours shifts on a loom down in a smokey town and you’ll appreciate it well enough.

I didn’t climb the tower today. I was feeling a bit done in to be honest, plus the light was going and there was sleet in the air. And, all right, I’m chicken.

Fear – rational or otherwise – and conflict, also the wind biting your nose, and the ever present risk of a slip, of physical injury. Yes,… like Adrienne says: Feels pretty much like being alive to me.

Yet I know the Buddhists have a point about Maya. I glimpsed it once in a brief moment of staggering awareness – that at a certain level of perception what we see and experience in the world is a mental construct, that there’s no difference between who we think we are, and what we see in the world. We are indeed “that“. But adopting this philosophical stance doesn’t make things any easier for us at the operating level of reality. We have no choice but to go with the world as we see and feel it, being bound by physical rules that restrict our ability to mentally manipulate our realities, rules that render us fragile in a world that can seem brutally impassive, rules that mean when we trap our finger in the car door, it hurts, and when we find ourselves on an ice-bound trail in the British uplands, we’re going to have to watch our step.

But this kind of thinking raises a paradox that haunts me: If I am what I’m looking at, then who are you? Since there’s nothing special about me, you must also be what you’re looking at, and if we’re both looking at the same thing, then at some unimaginable level we are the same, you and I.

I’m afraid my rather dull abilities as a philosopher won’t carry me beyond this point – how we can be both separate and unique expressions of spirit, yet also be the same. How can I look at the world, and at the same time construct it, yet do so in such a way that it makes perfect sense to you, as your world makes sense to me? There are many expressions of philosophical duality but this one beats the hell out of me. So I find myself slithering over the moors on contemplative walks, admiring the views, taking photographs and occasionally talking to myself.

Still, it’s better than fretting about the gas bill, or the price of petrol.

I made it back from the tower without incident, the only downside to the day being that the visitor center cafe was closing, and I didn’t get my bacon butty.

Damn.

Goodnight all.

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I think, therefore I forget who I am.

The question of identity is one that reaches to the core of who we think we are, obviously, but it also has a bearing on how we view the nature of reality and our place within it. It’s unfortunate then how we often misinterpret our identity, mistake it for the mask of what we think we are, or even what we think we’d like others to think we are. We parade this mask every day and we sell it on the world’s stage, trying to convince even our own selves it’s the nearest thing to who we think we really are.

When seen through the eyes of this mask, however, the nature of reality becomes distorted, our vision clouded. It renders us vulnerable to seduction by things we should value the least, vulnerable to injury from things to which we ought to be naturally impervious, and it renders us prone to discarding as worthless the keys to unlocking a deeper understanding of the authentic nature of our selves.

When tested, when challenged by life, our imperfect mask can slip, it can tear, fall apart, disintegrate. If we identify too closely with the mask, we imagine it is our own selves under threat, our own selves tearing, falling apart in the face of the seemingly insurmountable pressures reality imposes upon us. We see it as a battle for our lives against a myriad unseen foes. It can be a terrifying experience.

We lose our footing, and we fall.

It’s important then that we pause occasionally, lift the mask and look beneath in order to get a glimpse our original self, our immortal and indestructible self. We needn’t worry; we are none of us as ugly as we fear – unlike the mask which is guaranteed to be a misshapen parody of our life’s potential, our true self.  Seeking our original face, remembering who we really are, and being content with that, is the only way of being truly grounded in the world and, being grounded, impervious to its storms.

I’m reading Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of now” again, a much thumbed copy, one I borrowed from a colleague who has already loaned it out to various people, countless times, but always seeks its safe return. In its current condition, you wouldn’t get ten pence for it in a charity shop, so battered and creased it is, but I take its fragile state as a testament to its resonant power, that people want to come back to this precious little book, time and time again, in order to refresh themselves, and remember who they are.

Like many spiritual teachers, Tolle is at pains to point out that we are not our thoughts. He tells us it was Descartes who coined the phrase: “I think, therefore I am”, but he urges us not to listen, that who we are is actually not defined by our thoughts at all. A more accurate phrase then might be: “I think, therefore I forget who I am.”

This is a difficult concept to grasp in a culture where we are taught from an early age to identify very strongly with ego consciousness. Ego is easily bruised, and then we find ourselves pointing fingers at the bruiser, seeking redress or even financial compensation for our woes. I’ve read and written about, and pondered on this over the years, but reading and writing, and pondering aren’t the same as getting it. I’m still in the process of getting it, and it looks like being a lifelong journey.

When we sit down to meditate, we are immediately confronted by the rush of our thoughts, chattering, nagging, slipping in under the radar of awareness, so that suddenly we wake up in the middle of our meditation, realise half our time is already gone and we’ve been lost in a storm of anxieties, instead of forgetting them – which is what we originally sat down to do.

Once in a while though, we catch ourselves. We say, no, I don’t want to think about that right now, and we brush our thoughts gently aside. They always come back, but in the between times we eventually become aware of a mysterious part of our selves observing our thoughts. This silent observer seems to sit in the background, watching their ebb and flow from a perspective that is one step removed from the self we think we are. This observer, this silent watcher, is clearly a part of who we are and it’s interesting to note how disconnected from the material world this normally hidden part of our selves is.

To this mysterious, and possibly higher self, all the worldly goings on are no more than froth; all the wars and the famine and the strife are no more than the fleeting interplay of a moment’s light in the deep, dark stillness of eternity. Finding our way into the unambiguous presence of this almighty sense of inner knowing is one of the hardest and most ambitious adventures any human being can undertake but, unlike climbing Everest or voyaging to the moon, it is an adventure open to any one of us.

Such existential musings have been brought into sharper focus for me recently – this business of who I think I am. It started when I saw some of my self-published novels for sale on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace. They were being sold under my name, but I’ve no idea how they got there or who was really selling them. For a moment, it was like staring at myself from across the threshold of an alternate reality – and even though I knew someone had simply stolen them, my sense of identity had been sufficiently shaken to make me think again about who I am and what my purpose is in the world.

The novels – three in all – were the sum labour of about five years work – pleasurable hours gleaned in the evenings and weekends of my day to day life. I’m not saying they’re great novels. They are what they are, I write the way I write, and when I’m done with my stories, I give them away. Certainly, they are of personal significance to me, but only in so far as the events and dialogues they describe are the roadmap of  a personal psychical journey. They plot my trajectory from the immature and egoic masks of youth, to this middle aged guy who sits blinking up now into the starry skies of an evening, partially unmasked at times yet still, it seems, none the wiser for any of it.

That someone else came along, cut and pasted those five years into a hastily cobbled e-book, called themselves Michael Graeme, and tried to make a few bob by pirating stuff I give away for free, should be neither here nor there to me – that is if I’m thinking straight and can avoid my ego feeling bruised. Even the fact that I have to prove my identity, and my legal right to call my thoughts my own, to the almighty Amazon, again, should be of no account to me,… that is if I am sufficiently secure and grounded in the knowledge of my own identity.

On this matter, the muse quietly takes my ego in her arms. She soothes away the angst with the warmth of her embrace, then she brushes off the dirt and reminds me I am not my thoughts, not my words. I am the silent watcher, she says, and like her, always a few steps removed from the tangled web of collective hope and expectation we mortal beings cling to, and which we call reality.

My mysterious Amazon doppelgänger did not make that journey. Their actions betray only the fact that they have not evolved emotionally, spiritually, or philosophically very far at all in human terms. Their life’s journey has been perverted by a misidentification with a mask they take as being the most fitting, but sadly one which makes them only ugly to the rest of us.

One of the hardest things to grasp in the quest for  maturity, and a sense of groundedness is that the right thought, the right deed, is right whether anyone bears witness to it or not, whether you profit personally from it, or not, whether the intrusive cameras of that reality TV show are switched on, or not.

The existential contract outlining this, our three-score years and ten of material reality, requires no verifying witnesses, and the presence of only two signatures, in order to make it valid and spiritually binding – our own, and that of the eternal sense of being rising beyond even the silent watcher of our thoughts.

I am, but what I am none cares or knows (John Clare, 1848) – we are each the self consumers of our woes. For “woes” here, we can read “thoughts”, which are for ever poised ready to warp into woes at a moment’s notice. We must all try therefore to remember we are not our thoughts, otherwise we end up consuming what we perceive to be our only self. This in turn results in a distorted vision of reality, one in which we see only a barren wasteland of broken promises and ruined hopes – or to quote John Clare again – the shipwreck of our life’s esteems.

But much as I revere John Clare, it really isn’t like that.

The times when reality comes most sharply into focus are the times when we are thinking about it the least, when our thoughts are stilled. Then a truer vision comes rushing in, presenting the nature of all things in their sublime glory – not as separate, but as an integral part of who and what we think we are.

It’s always been this way. It’s just that we’ve forgotten.

Good night all.

Graeme out.

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As plain as the nose on your face? Fooling around with Swara Yoga.

Swara Yoga – balancing the mind?

Does Swara Yoga prove a link between human biological cycles and the cycles of the sun and the moon?

I’m amazed I’ve managed to live as long as I have while only recently noticing that there is something very interesting about my nose – not just my nose, but everyone’s nose. If you don’t know what I’m on about, may I suggest you try a simple experiment? Close your mouth and breathe in through your nose. So far so good? Now, lightly press a finger against the side of one nostril, sealing it off, then breathe in gently. Okay? Now, release the blocked nostril, seal up the other one and breathe in again. Notice anything odd? The chances are you will find that while one nostril feels relatively clear, the other will seem a bit congested, requiring more effort to get the air through. If they both feel about the same , then try again in another thirty minutes. Keep checking throughout the day.

What I’m driving at here is that at certain times of day you’ll notice one nostril will feel clearer than the other.

And they alternate.

This phenomenon has been known about for a long time of course. It forms the basis of an ancient technique called Swara Yoga – swara meaning “flow of air”. It was developed to a sophisticated degree in India, and reputedly goes back to the pre-Vedic era, which would make it over four thousand years old. What these early scholars proposed was that the switch from one nostril to the other was also accompanied by a change in humour, or mood. Taking this a step further, they surmised that the timing of these cycles was linked to the lunar and solar cycles as well the cycle of the then known planets. From these ideas, they developed a complex system which placed the individual’s natural rhythms in the context of the greater rhythms of the earth and the universe.

As well as paying heed to the rhythmic alternations between right and left nostril breathing, it was discovered that the cycle could be adjusted, so that if you found yourself running out of sync with the natural world, so to speak, you could bring yourself back in line – or you could temporarily change your mode of breathing in order to suit whatever it was that you were doing. Early paintings of swamis and gurus sometimes show them with a crutch-like stick under one armpit as they sit meditating. Leaning on the stick, known as a “danda”, applies pressure to the armpit, and this was said to change the dominant nostril. There was no point meditating, they believed, if one nostril was more dominant than the other and the aim of these early swamis was to achieve a state of balance – a special condition where neither nostril is dominant.

The Two Hemispheres

Support for at least for some of the observations of Swara Yoga, comes from recent medical studies of the brain. The brain is divided into two halves – the left and right hemispheres, and it is known that each hemisphere tends to specialise in a particular mode of thinking. The left hemisphere shows greater levels of activity when we are presented with puzzles that require a rational, calculating, analytical or a linguistic approach. On the other hand when we’re engaged in artistic activities such as painting, drawing, writing, or anything else that demands a creative, abstract, fuzzy or intuitive approach, the right hemisphere becomes more active.

As individuals, we all have a particular preference for either left brain or right brain thinking. This is simply a part of who we are and how we approach life. However, studies have shown that the brain switches dominance between hemispheres several times during the day, alternating between left brain thinking and right brain thinking. Obviously, the whole brain is available to us regardless of the time of day, but there is a suggestion that we are better at tackling rational, logical problems at a time when the left hemisphere is dominant, or to put it simply, when our brains are in the correct mode.

Returning to the subject of Swara Yoga then, and the idea of an alternating, dominant nostril, it’s interesting to note that the same medical studies of the brain have also identified a direct link between brain mode and breathing. When the dominant nostril is the left hand one, it is the right hemisphere of the brain that is dominant, conversely, Right nostril: Left brain. This seems to suggest that the early pioneers of Swara Yoga were correct in their observations and that there was indeed a link between the flowing nostril and the humor or mood of the individual. For a start, Swara Yoga seems to grant us a reliable indicator for judging which brain mode we’re in, a claim backed up by respectable scientific studies:

Left Nostril Clear = Right Brain mode: Creative, intuitive.

Right Nostril Clear = Left Brain mode: Rational, analytical.

But we can go further.

If we’ve been particularly diligent with our experiments, we might have noticed that during the switch-over from one nostril to the next there was a period when both nostrils felt about the same. This period corresponds to an exchange of energy between the two brain hemispheres: one is powering down while the other is ramping up. It’s during this hiatus that it is believed we are more prone to making errors or to lapses of concentration. If we can be aware of these crucial change-over periods, we can use them to time our natural breaks in the working day and to avoid pursuing any definite goals. Creative problem solving can be reserved for our right brain periods and tricky analytical problems for the left. Remaining in tune with our own rhythms in this way we can stay fresher throughout the day and feel less drained at the end of it

Or so the theory goes.

Astrological Cycles

Delving more deeply into Swara Yoga, we learn that, according to the theory, our body’s rhythms do not remain fixed but vary, according to the time of the month and the year. Also we are told that it is inadvisable to carry out certain types of action at particular times of the lunar and solar cycle, also the cycle of the major planets. This sounds like Astrology, and indeed it is.

Astrology, as opposed to Astronomy, has rather a bad press in these rational times. There are many types of astrology, but they are all based upon the same premise – that the position of the major heavenly bodies at a given time can influence both world events and the lives of individuals. The most obvious mechanism by which the heavenly bodies achieve this, according to some astrologers, is by virtue of their gravitational field. However, the rational arguments against astrology also tend to hinge upon gravitational forces, saying that, for the major planets at least, the effects of their gravity, as felt upon earth, are far too weak to have any conceivable effect, that, in fact, the computer I’m typing these words into is exerting by far the greater gravitation pull upon my brain than, say, the planet mars. But what about the sun and the moon? It’s obvious that they exert a significant gravitational force on the earth – enough for example to raise the tides by twenty feet or more, twice a day! But are these tidal forces also sufficient to raise psychological or physiological tides in living things? There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that they do, but scientific studies seem divided on the issue – some saying “no, don’t be stupid”, others saying “maybe – but we need to do another study to be sure because we dare not come right out and say that it does”. These studies have looked at things like fluctuations of the stock-market, accident and emergency admissions, also plant growth and other agricultural phenomenon. Perhaps the most obvious monthly cycle that all women – and married men – are aware of is the female menstruation cycle, or the dreaded “time of the month”. As its name suggests, this seems timed perfectly to a lunar cycle, all be it a personal one, but again the scientific evidence tells us there is no proven link, and that it’s just as likely to be a coincidence.

Now, personally, I have always been open to the idea that at least the solar and lunar components that raise tides on earth, could have an effect on human behaviour, for no other reason than that they appear to have a very large effect upon the earth. I have long been intrigued by the anecdotal evidence that supports this notion, and equally puzzled by the scientific studies that refute it, but a quick reminder of how gravity actually works makes it easier to see why it seems unlikely that gravity can be having any effect at all.

Tidal ranges vary with the phase of the moon. For example, at the full and New Moon periods, the tides are notably higher than at other times of the month, so it might, at first glance, seem unreasonable to deny that there could be a similar effect occurring in living organisms. However, the actual forces involved are still very small. It’s also wrong to imagine the moon as somehow “pulling” the earth’s oceans up into great bulges in order to form the tides, rather like a giant magnet. The mechanism is actually quite different, with the oceans “shearing”, or flowing sideways by a tiny amount which, although small, when taken taken overall adds up to large fluctuations around our coastlines. It is only by virtue of the almost unimaginably uninterrupted vastness of the earth’s oceans that the moon and sun can have any effect at all. The world’s substantially enclosed seas – the Caspian and the Black sea for example exhibit virtually no tidal variation.

When we try to get a feel for the actual force involved, we learn that it can only be detected by the most sensitive of instruments. How small is it? Well, if we imagine a butterfly resting on the back of our hand, the force it exerts upon us is many thousands of times times greater than the force exterted by the moon. Given this understanding then, a link between lunar phase and any human biological or psychological rhythms begins to seem seem less probable.

There is, however, another mechanism by which the sun and the moon might affect all living organisms, giving rise to cyclical variations in physical and psychological states: Geomagnetism.

Before going on to look at this in more depth, let’s see if Swara Yoga can point to any evidence of such a cyclical pattern in a human being – i.e. me!

A Personal Study

Swara yoga recognises the following three modes of breathing:

i) Left Nostril (called Ida)

ii) Right Nostril(called Pingala),

iii) Both nostrils (called Shushumna)

The left nostril is associated with right brain activities: inner, mental, feminine, intuitive, abstract. It’s associated with the nightime, and the moon. The right Nostril is associated with left brain activities: logical, masculine, analytical. It’s associated with daytime and the sun. Breathing through both nostrils is said to be associated with spiritual activities: meditation, peace, equilibrium, oneness. It’s time is one of transisiton between dark and light ie at sunset or dawn.

According to the theory the active nostril should flow for 60-90 mins, then 1-4 mins Shushumna (both nostrils), before the other nostril becomes active, again for 60-90 mins etc

In Swara Yoga, both the sun and moon are said to have an influence on our breathing pattern. The lunar month is divided into thirty lunar days (in accordance with the Hindu calendar). The month is split into two halves, either side of the full moon, each half consisting of fifteen lunations, or “tithis”. The first half of the month is called the bright half, a fifteen “tithi” period during which the moon waxes progressively brighter. The second half, as the moon wanes is called the dark half.

It’s important to note that we are not talking about ordinary calendar days here but degrees of lunar separation with respect to the sun – a “tithi” or lunar day in the Hindu calender being a value in multiples of 12 degrees of separation. It’s duration in actual clock time will vary and in order to accurately relate this lunar day to the calendar day it’s best to use a special calculator such as the Panchang Calculator at http://www.swarayoga.org.

These fifteen days are split into consecutive periods consisting of 3 days each and, according to Swara Yoga, during the bright half of the lunar month, the left nostril should become active at sunrise on days 1-3, 7-9, and 13-15. On these days, the natural cycle will then involve an alternation between left and right nostril, and the rhythm should adjust itself so that the right nostril becomes active at sunset. On days 4-6, and 10-12, during the bright half of the month, the right nostril becomes active at sunrise, the alternating cycle of left to right nostril adjusting itself so that the left nostril takes over at sunset.

During the dark half of the lunar month, the process is said to be reversed – the right nostril taking over at sunrise on days 1-3, 7-9 and 13-15, the cycle adjusting itself over the course of the day so that the left nostril talkes over at sunset, while on days 4-6 and 10-12, the left nostril takes over at sunrise and the cycle adjusts itself so that the right nostril takes over at sunset.

Swara Yoga then suggests that we should be able to detect the effects of both the time of day (solar) and month (lunar) on our breathing patterns, simply by observing the air coming in and out of our nostrils.

The trials

Checking for the dominant nostril should only take a moment. You press lightly on the side of the nose, gently closing off one nostril, and you try to breathe normally through the open one. Repeat on the opposite side. Usually, the difference between them will be distinct. However, sometimes it will be hard tell and you end up guessing. If you have the time you can check throughout the day at regular intervals say every thirty minutes, check also if you wake up before dawn, and try to remember which nostril was flowing, so you can make a note of this also.

All of this might be difficult, depending on your lifestyle, but it only takes a second and if you’re discrete, it can be done in the company of other people without them realising what you’re up to.

Initial results

I managed to maintain a fairly close eye on my breathing for a period of two weeks, either side of the full moon, which occurred on November 15th 2008. The first thing I noticed was that my own rhythms were nowhere near so neat and regular as Swara Yoga says they should have been. Far from having a regular left to right rhythm lasting ninety minutes per side, with a thirty minute changeover, one side would dominate for most of the day, with only brief periods of change of an hour or so, before reverting back to the dominant nostril, which was the right nostril (left brain thinking), during both the run up to the full moon, and after it.

There was however a noticeable changeover from one nostril to the other at dawn, the left nostril(right brain) usually operating before sunrise, before the right one took over and largely dominated throughout the day. There was no noticeable change-over around sunset. Unfortunately then, I could not say that the lunar phase had any bearing at all upon the results of this, admittedly, rather brief study. As for the sun, I was intrigued by the changeover at dawn from left to right breathing – However, the fact that there was not a corresponding switch back from right to left breathing at sunset suggested there might be something else going on here. I can only speculate on this, and believe it might have something to do with light. At the time of the study, dawn coincided with my normal get-up time, while at sunset, the darkness was rendered ineffective by the use of electric lights until I finally went to bed – in other words the normal daylight cycles had been substantially interfered with by artificial light, and this could have explained why my breathing didn’t exhibit a changeover at sunset. Another explanation could have been simply down to which side I was lying while sleeping. Pressure applied to one armpit is said to cause the nostril on the opposite side of the body to become more open – therefore it could be that my sleeping habits determine which nostril is dominant when I wake, rather than any environmental factors.

Another pattern I noticed was that when my left nostril was flowing, (right brain) I was often writing or engaged in some other “artistic” activity, though I cannot say for certain if I was drawn to these activities by the brain mode, or that by sitting down to carry out these activities, the brain mode was forced to switch over to suit what I wanted to do. I did try to deliberately change the flow of the breath by physical means – applying pressure under the armpit as though with a yoga danda, but without success, though this could simply have been due to my lack of skill in this area. Further experiments in simply lying on my side, did reveal a seemingly reliable correlation – lying on my left side would cause the right nostril to open and vice versa.

Conclusions

I found no convincing evidence of a lunar or solar rhythm affecting the patterns of my breathing. However, there were a number of curious observations that suggest at least a practical, physiological basis – if not an astrological one – for the practice of Swara Yoga.

(1) I found it was possible to change which nostril is dominant by lying on your side – the higher nostril being the one that would dominate – so if you lay on the left side for a while the right nostril will dominate and vice versa.

(2) I found that when most absorbed in right brain type activities – writing, drawing, the brain mode was correctly indicated by the more dominant nostril. Therefore, either the brain mode lured me into carrying out those activities, or persevering in them caused the brain to switch over to suit the situation in hand.

This has certainly been an interesting subject to play around with. Though I was unable to confirm the effect of the full moon on my breathing patterns, there is a clear link with the dominant nostril and the dominant brain hemisphere. Also, as the Yogis have been telling us for thousands of years, it would seem we can change the dominant nostril. Techniques for doing this vary – the most reliable one for me being simply lying on one side. Whichever nostril is the higher – i.e. furthest away from the ground will become dominant. This has possible applications in mediation and overcoming writer’s block. The Yogis aim for the balance point – neither left or right brain dominant. My own meditation comes nowhere near the level of sophistication achieved by more dedicated adepts, so I’m happy to accept their greater knowledge of these things for now. But if you do meditate, it might be worth considering this aspect and experimenting with it. However, for me, meditation is about letting go and it’s perhaps not wise to become distracted over the presence or the absence of a dominant nostril

For writing, things are a little clearer: you need a right brain bias. That’s when I find it flows best of all – the words I mean. So if you’re a writer and you’ve hit one of those dark periods when you’re really struggling with it, perhaps the best thing you can do is go and have a lie down on your right side for a bit, check the left nostril – and therefore the right brain – is dominant, then sit down and try to write some more.*

References:

Swara Yoga, the Tantric Science of Brain Breathing: Swami Muktibodhananda, Bihar, India

*errata – I’ve had my left and right brains muddled up in this paragraph. Apologies for any confusion. Right brain thinking is of course associated with artistic activities like writing and drawing – not left brain as I have been showing here for a while.

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The Garden Buddha

Some time ago now, my good lady was a guest at a church service in London. The sermon, she said, with a mischievous twinkle, would have interested me because it began with the showing of two pictures, side by side, one of Christ nailed to the cross, and the other of the Buddha, serenely floating on a cloud. However, this was not an example of ecumenical harmony  – indeed it was quite the opposite. The illustrations were used to show how Christ was very much involved in life, quite literally nailed up and suffering on account of it, that this was what life was all about: being in the thick of things, and really suffering. As for the other fellow, well just look at him: floating about serenely, eyes closed, completely out of it. How involved is that? One is living with suffering, the other is avoiding life by retreating into a sort of cloud-cuckoo land.

Now, I was a little surprised by this as I’d imagined the various religious genres were less prone to taking a pop at one another these days, though I suppose of all the non-christian religious icons that might have been chosen for such undeserved denigration, Buddha is probably the one least likely to have taken offence.

Anyway, for a moment, I found myself feeling quite cross, which was surely what my good lady, had playfully intended. I was cross because the vicar or the speaker, or whoever this person was had obviously missed the point and was demonstrating only their ignorance of Buddhism. Moreover, as a spiritual leader, they really should have known better than to speak in such an ill-informed way about another tradition. Surely, no one understands the nature of suffering, its reality, and its causes, more than the Buddhists! Also if it’s possible by analysis to root out the causes of suffering, eliminate it as much as is possible, and live a happier, more peaceful life as a result, as the Buddhists suggest we can, then what’s wrong with that? How could the speaker not have understood this? I mean, it was ridiculous! It was a cheap shot, playing to an audience of the already converted. How antiquated! How perfectly,….. medieval!

Then as if he’d been sitting up on the back row of the theatre of my mind, I heard Buddha break out into an enormous belly laugh, not at news of the sermon, but at me, at my crossness. I saw the joke, and laughed too, laughed at myself. You let it go. You recognise the snare, you disentangle yourself from it before it’s had time to do you any damage, and you move on.

I’ve been studying Buddhist and Taoist philosophies now for about a decade,  looking for parallels in  various western humanist ideas, and trying to apply the stuff I’ve picked up in both my basic approach to living, and also in trying to understand life a little better. I’ve had a small statue of the Buddha in a corner of my garden for several years,  but this is more on account of his role as a cultural icon, than a religious one  – I bought him from a garden centre. I’ve certainly never considered myself to be a Buddhist, because I always reckoned there was so much more involved than I probably had time for, and I wasn’t sure I really “got” Buddhism that well anyway. I have some books, I explore meditation, I sometimes seek out the Dalai Lama on You Tube, but it doesn’t make you a Buddhist, does it? I mean, I don’t want to be pinned down, and labelled as anything really. I’m not that familiar with the Buddha’s Dhammapada, and find myself more naturally drawn to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Also, it has to be said, I rather like the idea of Lao Tzu putting all his wisdom into those wonderfully enigmatic verses, before disappearing into the sunset with a dancing girl, and leaving us all to it. (at least that’s what I heard)

For a moment though, after Buddha laughed, I realised I understood more about Buddhism than I’d perhaps given myself credit for. It crystallised, and in the letting go of my childish pique, I became a  Buddhist – at least for the moment – if not actually a real one, then perhaps a sincere garden one, one who has gained much spiritual,  psychological and philosophical mileage from reading the ideas of a character, who, in modern times has sneaked into the West in disguise as this cultural icon, rather than an overtly religious one.

Conversely, I failed to understand why picture of the suffering Christ was spiritually superior.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me? To suffer is to live? I don’t think the Buddhists would argue with that one, but there seemed to be a suggestion that it was somehow more virtuous to suffer, and unrealistic to seek an end to suffering – that indeed this could only be achieved by retreating from the world into a kind of meditative bubble in which we might as well not be alive at all.

But meditation is not an escape. We do not hide in our meditation – indeed, psychologically speaking, the opposite seems the case to me, most of us only able to get by in our day-to-day lives by hiding all sorts of things from ourselves, all the time. There is nothing more fantastical therefore, than the perception of reality many of us weave for ourselves. Meditation, on the other hand, gives us a chance to step aside from the illusion. In meditation we seek to achieve nothing at all for a while. We just stop. And if we stop often enough, the mind begins to simmer down a bit, and eventually, when we’re not meditating, we begin to see things differently, and react to situations differently, because a part of the mind that was subdued before, has the chance to get a word in edgeways now. Meditation then, is not sitting on a cloud and hiding from reality. It’s about establishing for yourself a subtly different view of what that reality is.

Our actual life is no different. We still suffer. We have the same disappointments, shocks and upsets as before. Family and friends pass away unexpectedly, we still get ill, crash our car, lose our wallet, the doorbell rings in the middle of our tea and there’s some evangelist trying to convert us to their particular brand of religious extremism, our computer gets a virus, and we break our wristwatch. Then there are more subtle  forms of suffering that one might call self-inflicted, and are  caused simply by the way we view the world through the distorted lens of our attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

Buddhism then does not change the things life throws at you. It just makes you see them differently, so you suffer less emotional damage as a result. And of course seeing things differently dissolves our unhelpful attitudes and our petty prejudices, so that self inflicted suffering, at least, ought to be attainable by all but the most benighted of souls.

The Buddhists say we suffer in life because we’re attached to it – not just to life, but to the details that make up our lives. Things can never really be the way we want, they say, because things just don’t last. They are impermanent, yet we try to fool ourselves into thinking everything’s going to last for ever, and that certain things are valuable enough to be worth pursuing at any cost – money, fame, material goods, or even less tangible things like love, health, happiness, or the respect of others. The pursuit of anything gives rise to feelings of passion, excitement and greed but once we have attained something our desire for it vanishes, to be replaced by the fear of its possible loss. Its loss is inevitable, eventually: whatever it is, it won’t last, but we still cling to it.

What can we do then? Well, according to the Buddhist method, if we can accept our troubles are caused by our desires, then naturally we can reduce our troubles by desiring things less, by recognising more the impermanent nature of the world around us and the things in it, and getting less worked up by unhelpful ambitions to hang onto things for ever, be they stuff, states of mind or even just ideas about the way things are. If we can find a way of looking at life dispassionately, if we can recognise the impermanent nature of things, and be less inclined towards attachment, that is the secret of a happier life. Happiness therefore is not hanging on against the odds – it is letting go. The pursuit of happiness is inherently self defeating and the secret is that the giving up of one’s ambitions to be happy, leads to the greatest happiness of all.

As with all the things I witter on about, they should not be looked upon as self-evident truths, or beliefs that I wish to force down the throats of others. They are merely the things I think, and, in the words of the writer Flannery O’Conner, I tend to write in order to see what it is that I think. And I have been led to think this way because I find that if I apply these thoughts, I feel a little better, and fancy I can sometimes see a little further than the end of my nose  – which is really the best any of us have to go on.

To live is to suffer, sure, but the idea that it is good to suffer any more than we have to sounds more like self-indulgence to me.

Michael Graeme

www.mgraeme.ic24.net

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Self Help for People Who Panic

Being a holistic approach to coping with a nervous disability, a rejection of therapeutic druggery, and the values of secular society that would have us believe it alone possesses the key to the meaning of our lives.

In this essay I speak as someone who has suffered from a troublesome psyche since I was a boy. My earliest encounter with it was an inexplicable feeling of dread in large social gatherings such as school assemblies or church services, a dire panic at having to stand through hymn-singing because I had become irrationally convinced I was going to faint.

The medical profession call these episodes panic attacks and, since the 1990s, have controlled them with a family of drugs called SSRI’s. Two of the most common of these are known as Prozac and Seroxat. In fact they’re prescribed for a wide variety of emotional problems: anxiety, depression, or indeed anything that prevents us, emotionally, from somehow “fitting in” with the world. They work by altering the way the brain handles serotonin and essentially alter what an individual sees as stressful, like putting on dark glasses in bright sunlight. My personal experience of SSRI’s was brief and unpleasant though useful by way of being a formative experience, one that was instrumental in pushing me into a more holistic view of things.

I’ve never understood the cause of my own panic attacks, which somehow added to the feeling of helplessness when I was in the middle of one – but fortunately, their grip has slackened in recent years, and though I hate to tempt fate, I can’t remember the last time I had one – though the old defence mechanisms are still a part of my routine: when entering a room of people, say at a lecture or a music concert, I still naturally take up a position at the sides, by the aisles, and in line of sight of the exit, so I can leave with the minimum of fuss should I begin to struggle with myself later on. Even in my darkest days, I never actually had to make a desperate bolt for the exit, but reminding myself of these facts did not help struggling against the urge when the mood was upon me.

The problem morphed and splintered over the years into a number of other related manifestations. For example, at concerts of classical music, where the listening experience tends to be subtle and intense, I once developed the peculiar habit of wanting to swallow in order to ease a certain dryness of the throat which threatened to erupt into a cough. Swallowing would then become compulsive, and had to be repeated every few seconds until I lost all sense of pleasure in the music. Thus, concerts that should have lifted the spirit left me feeling only jittery and ashamed of my weakness. I would also sometimes suffer a peculiar sensation of imbalance when walking into a room full of noisy people, say at a party or in a crowded restaurant. Outside I would be fine, or if the room were empty, but in a gathering of people, my legs would become strangely tense and wobbly and the floor would become like the swaying deck of a ship. And again there was the situation of being cornered by the consummate bore, the person who told you everything about his life from birth to the present day by way of answer to even the most succinct enquiry. How often have I found myself trapped, not listening, for what seemed like hours, afraid of breaking out into a sweat, afraid of a dizzy spell coming on, and too polite, too sensitive to the bore’s feelings to break him off abruptly, stick my finger in his eye and run screaming for fresh air and freedom?

Yet another peculiar manifestation once concerned my driving. Many years ago now, I suddenly discovered that at certain key points of my daily commute I would experience the very real sensation that my forward motion had been arrested and that I was slipping backwards. This last peculiar episode was perhaps the most frightening because, unlike all the other “trigger environments” driving was not something I could easily avoid: it threatened my freedom to get about.

Somehow though, one muddles through, unable to explain to others for fear of being labelled a nutter,… and the medical profession unfortunately, I always found to be less than helpful. For all the good intentions of the British National Health system my personal experience of it is an inability to deal with any illness that does not show changes in blood and urine samples or cannot be quickly fixed up by a few stitches, a plaster cast, or a dose of antibiotics. There was a doctor, some twenty years ago, who listened to me for all of five minutes. I seemed barely to have begun explaining myself before the man was confidently writing up a prescription for what turned out to be the new cure-all wonder-drug: Prozac. For a few days this was my one and only foray into the chemically adjusted reality of the then modern age. My experience of it was short lived and, though rather distressing, I view it now with all the detachment of an impartial observer, and with the magnanimity of one who has learned his lesson.
For a time it was like putting on a warm straight jacket. A bomb could have gone off and I would not have cared, nor I suspect would I have moved, except perhaps to glance up slowly and brush the dust from my clothes. I was stoned, literally, it seemed, turned to stone. Unfortunately it also stopped me from sleeping, for sleep is a human thing and stones have no need of it. After about a week of doing pushups into the small hours, in order to wear myself out, in the vain hope of encouraging a collapse into a fatigue induced stupor, I experienced for the first and only time in my life a profound sense of drug-induced despair. The whole experience of the medication was far more emotionally disturbing than the occasional fit of the jitters I was trying to cure, so the Prozac went into the bin.

Nowadays I no longer trouble the medical profession with any ailment that I cannot point to such as a sore thumb, or a swollen eye. Of course, this probably means that if I contract a fatal disease I shall probably die from it – but the chances are I’ll die from it anyway, so I’m willing to take the risk.
My slow road to regaining control over my life began with the memory of an experience from my first year as an engineering apprentice, in the latter days of the 1970′s. While doing basic training in manufacturing processes, a colleague injured his finger on a machine. This caused him to swear and me to faint. I was seen by the work’s doctor as a precaution and he advised me to get back on that machine as soon as possible, and to consider taking up some form of transcendental meditation. The machine part made sense, but the meditation did not. I possessed a very rational mindset in those days and I rejected anything that was not grounded in material “fact”.

But always, I wondered.

Later, following the Prozac episode, I overcame my overwhelming prejudice and bought a book on Hatha Yoga. I learned a few basic postures and some breathing exercises, and much to my surprise, they seemed to work. The jitters did not entirely pass, but they were suddenly subdued, and the fact I had discovered at last some means of holding them at bay was itself crucial in changing my life. I turn to Yoga now, and other esoteric practices, whenever I feel the jitters coming on and the jitters duly pass. I’m afraid I’m not disciplined enough to practise all the time and I’ve never attended a Yoga class or anything, but even doing these exercises in a half-assed way, succeeds where the medical profession failed completely, either due to lack of time or interest. To be clear, the jitters are still there, for it seems it’s a part of my nature to incubate them, but I am no longer at their mercy, and I get by.
Perhaps after all of this I have given the impression of my being a twitchy, jumpy neurotic, the sort of person you’d easily pick out of a crowd, the one who leaps a mile whenever anyone says “boo”, but you’d be wrong. People who know Michael Graeme’s alter ego (or is he mine? I forget these days!) describe him as “laid back”, to quote the vernacular, which always makes me smile. Appearances can be deceptive you see? Next time you look into the eyes of someone you think you know remember this: you do not know them at all, though you might like to think you do. What you see is a mask. The reality lies somewhere beneath and that reality might both surprise and disturb you.

I say I don’t really understand the origins of my own particular neuroses, and this is true, at least in any detail, but in a broader sense I think I understand them well enough. Psychologists tell us a neurosis is born as the result of an event that we find uncomfortable, frightening or embarrassing. We may no longer remember what that event was because we’ve shoved it deep into our unconscious mind and we’re pretending it never happened. We hide from these things, but the unconscious is very good at remembering what we would otherwise choose to forget, and so we are never truly rid of our skeletons. They become suppressed, and therefore troublesome. Once this happens we’re stuck unless we can afford the time and the money to have someone painstakingly analyse us and expose our fears for what they are. Personally I’ve not gone this far. I probably would if I could afford it, but I’m just an ordinary Joe, and psychoanalysis is a luxury for the wealthy, for the people whose mortgages and pensions haven’t been screwed by twenty years of robber-barron economics. It’s for the ten percent of the population currently sitting at the top of the global financial food chain, rather than the rest of us who are sitting nearer to the bottom, and sliding ever closer into ruin.

So, I live with it, and for most of the time, I’m as happy as the next person. On the positive side, I have sometimes found my neuroses useful, and looking back over the years I see a definite pattern to their awakenings. These patterns correspond to changes in my life, changes of direction when I’m sailing close to the wind, when I’m involved in situations or relationships that are likely to do me harm. In a positive sense then, my neuroses can be viewed as warnings to change course, now! Or else! Unfortunately though, we are all prisoners to a way of life and to some extent also the life choices we have made, and changes of direction are not always possible, no matter what our unconscious is throwing at us.

Personally I’ve come to believe that our natural inclination as human beings is not to live in the sort of society that the secular west is becoming at all. I believe we are meant to live a much freer, more open sort of life, closer to nature perhaps, less regimented, less structured, one where people are free to engage with their spiritual or psychological sides without being exploited, brainwashed or just plain hoodwinked by either charismatic charlatans, or organised religions. Too much conformity, too much of doing what we’re told, rather than what we please is bad for us. Bad for our psyche, bad for our spirit. As Aleister Crowley once wrote [and I paraphrase]: If it harms no one, (and presumably this includes ourselves), then we should be able to do as we like.

My first brush with the pain of compulsory conformity were my school days, which I hated with a passion from beginning to end. I was taken from the meadows and woodlands around my home and placed in the stifling confines of primary school. It was to be the first of many yokes – each one telling me I could not be what I wanted to be. I could not even have the time to think about what I wanted to be. There is a system to life you see? It imposes itself upon you. You do not shape it. It shapes you. So we become, not really ourselves but a mask in the form of what we believe, or what we are taught will be acceptable to society. We measure our words, we do not say what we feel, yet at the same time try to convince ourselves that we do believe in what we say. The illusion is complete: Individual and society engaging on terms that are mutually delusional.

Then comes work and marriage and children, and mortgages and pension provisions, so you will not starve when you grow old. And all the time a part of you is thinking: I’m really not meant for this. There’s something else I was supposed to do with my life, except there’s no longer any time to remember what it was. I do not care about money or fine houses or fashionable cars – easy for me to say perhaps: I have a roof over my head, not a big house but a nice one, and I drive a seven year old car, but – I think I’m old enough now to understand the trap of our possessions. All I have ever really wanted is to be free, to think my own thoughts and simply “be”, without having to speak in a manner that I believe will be pleasing to someone else, so that I won’t get fired or be thought of as strange. And I’ve long held the belief that my own neuroses are the inevitable consequences of being entangled in a world, in a system, and to a lifetime of conformity that I was not designed for.

If this is true, then there are an awful lot of people like me, and I fear my own neuroses are as nothing compared to those endured quietly by others. If you count yourself among our number then this essay’s for you. It may not bring you much comfort beyond the reassurance that you are not alone. But also I hope I can show you that far from putting you on the outside of life, your differences actually make you all the more a part of it than the seemingly happy majority who have never experienced the power or the horror of a sudden volcanic eruption from their unconscious mind.

For a person to suffer under the pressures of our society does not mean that person is in any way weaker than others,… just more sensitive to the absurdities and, to be quite frank the sometimes outrageous indignities we have to endure. Are we the crazy ones or are we simply the only ones left with eyes to see?

It is no measure of health to be to well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

J Krishnamurti

I’m too old to have any illusions about our way of life in the west, which since about 1985 seems to have been slipping into a sort of neo-conservative, survival-of-the-fittest, free market, free for all, one in which it’s assumed we’re all out to get whatever we want regardless of the heads we must trample in order to get it. But I refuse to join in such a cynical and demeaning game, and am presently trying to see my way through to retirement in as inoffensive and inconspicuous a manner as possible. Then, I tell myself, I’ll have a couple of decades to savour my freedom and soak the neuroses out of my system, that perhaps then, in the brief decades remaining, I will finally remember what it was I was supposed to have done with my life.

But the way of life that supports us has shown itself to be founded on a philosophy that’s no longer sustainable, and it looks like the financial securities we took for granted twenty years ago simply won’t be there when we finally come to rely upon them. Indeed, our politicians are presently laying the groundwork for an argument intent on convincing us that some of us may never retire at all, and if we insist on doing so we will live in a sort of grey poverty until the end of our days.

For all my dislike of our way of life, I always had a faith in its reliability. I may not like it I thought, but the system seems to work, well not any more. In five years time the mortgage on my house will mature, and after paying my dues to the building society every month for the past twenty five years, it looks like I will still owe as much as when I started. The financial mechanism that was to provide the money needed to pay it off has simply collapsed. As an example of the utilitarian depths to which our financial institutions have now stooped, I contacted my mortgage company, trying to find the best way of sorting things out, the way that was going to be least financially crucifying, but they refused to advise me, claiming it was no longer their policy to do so. They could sell me a “product” that was of benefit to them, on their terms, but their responsibility went no further than that. I suppose I was naive for even asking. My mortgage payments have now trebled.

Also, the same financial system that was to provide a pension in old age, I discover can no longer do so unless, again, I treble the contributions I make. So it seems all the promises that were made have now been broken by the small print that basically absolves the financial vendors of any responsibility. In the 1980′s we dared to harbour dreams of retirement in our fifties in order to pursue the things we all wanted to pursue, outside of the world of mundane work, but twenty years later we are waking up to the reality of a life spent in debt and servitude, for the term of our natural lives.

My apologies for the rant, but generally what I’m trying to illustrate here is that, these past years, and especially since the turn of the century, society has shown itself to be in state of undisguised crisis. There is a climate of uncertainty, and fear. Indeed we find ourselves subjected to an apocalyptic vision in which we dare not move or even breathe for fear of armageddon – either from a terrorist outrage, or a climatic upheaval of Old Testament proportions. Both government and increasingly influential fundamentalist religions seem united in encouraging this belief.
Now, in a sense all of this comes as a relief to me because it suggests I was not wrong to have spent my whole life viewing the world with an attitude similar to one of politely enduring the irritations of an obnoxious relative. The truth is out; it wasn’t just my imagination: he was obnoxious after all!

Life goes on, but there is an appalling sense that the future will be radically different from the one we imagined. And I’m not talking about the threat from global terrorism. In spite of the terrible outrages perpetrated in recent years, you’re still about as likely to die at the hands of a terrorist as you are from being struck by lightning, and far more likely to die as a result of a drug related gun crime, or a stupid car accident. What I’m talking about here is the death of hope, the death of meaning, and the loss of any dreams of comfort by way of compensation as we enter the latter part of our lives. What need have we to sit and think, to while away our latter years in idle pleasure,… when we could be earning our keep and paying our taxes until the day we drop?

Depressing, isn’t it?

If you suffer from your own neuroses, take comfort from the fact your sufferings are not your fault. They are perhaps the result of a society imposing something upon you, asking you to accept something as being normal that your natural self, perhaps your unconscious self finds simply too outrageous to bear, but is too polite to say – so you’ve swallowed it and it’s been giving you indigestion ever since.

Now, there’s not much I can do about the slow demise of western society, the breakdown of the family, the flood tide of drugs that lay waste to entire communities, the philosophy of slash and burn economics, or the rise of meaningless terrorism against which there appears to be little defence other than a knee-jerk leap into the Orwellian nightmare of a techno-totalitarian state. The social exterminations wrought by the utilitarian swings of the global economy are equally quite beyond my influence. I’m just an ordinary man tapping words into an old computer. I cannot save your mortgages, nor your pensions, and if the retirement age is jacked up to seventy five, or even abandoned altogether, there’s not much I can do about that either.

What I can do however is reassure you that it’s not your fault, that the jitters you feel are the natural consequences of enduring something that is alien to the nature God gave you. What you can do, however, is accept yourself for what you are. The jitters, the neuroses,… these are differences in you that serve only to affirm your humanity. They do not separate you from anything other than the false idea of conformity to some rosy image of what a normal human being is supposed to be like.

My own neuroses over the years have carried messages for me that I was too deaf to heed at the time. You’re going the wrong way, Mike, they said. Pull back, stop, turn the car around! Meanwhile poor Mike couldn’t imagine what was going on. He didn’t have a stressful lifestyle, he wasn’t some ruthless, corporate go-getter, and his marriage wasn’t on the rocks. So what was it that got under his skin so much that at times he wanted to scream?

In this sense, my neuroses seem to have had the same intent as bad dreams, not just the expression of an anxiety, but a clue also regarding their cause, and cure. The agoraphobic is perhaps the most illustrative of the meaningful malaise. I’ve known a few agoraphobics over the years, and this condition for the sufferer, and their loved ones is no joke. A normal, attractive, healthy person becomes by degrees less confident in dealing with the world until a state is reached where the whole world is viewed with such anxiety that the person withdraws completely, feeling safe nowhere outside the bounds of their own home. They get by, day to day, but survive in a sort of prison of their own making. It is a total disengagement from a reality they have come to abhor. In order to be cured the agoraphobic has to lose their dread of society, or at least become more accepting of it.

But what if it’s society that’s at fault?

What if it really is better to withdraw than to sup with the devil himself?

For me, it was the school assembly and the church service, a lack of comprehension and a total reluctance to be away from the things that meant most to me in my childhood. Conformance was demanded, but as a result I have always been stubbornly elusive when it comes to committing myself to anything I do not wholeheartedly believe in. The trouble is, there seems to be so little worth believing in, so I slip through life unconnected and uncommitted to anyone or anything outside of my own close family. The only exception seem to be my writings which bear witness to life through these, my own eyes.
I did not rationalise it this way at the time. I only knew I was afraid of something, afraid of the inexplicable physical manifestations, the tension, the dizziness, the increased pulse. So the physical symptom, the sense of strangeness, became the thing to be feared, and for many years the root cause was overlooked.

The medical books tell us that our flesh and blood bodies have developed a physical response to things that frightens us. Our heart-rate goes up, we become tense, poised ready either to fight for our lives or run like hell. But how can you run from a reluctance to conform? How can we run from the demands of our society, from the responsibilities we all have and which inevitably involve facing up to things we’d really rather not do? Indeed we’re conditioned to accept this as a normal part of our lives. But equally we hate it.

It’s easy to stand up and begin whining on behalf of everyone who’s experience of life has left them jaded and jittery, but that’s not really my aim here. My aim is more to look at society and ask the question, what is it that we are afraid of? We have no control over the life we are born into and therefore it seems cruel that we should come up against circumstances over which we have no control but which nevertheless are sure to drive us mad – not all of us perhaps – just those unable to adapt or to cope well enough with the reality of the world as we see it.

In my own case, it has always been a fear of emptiness, that our lives mean nothing. It has always been my desire to explore life in a way that was most meaningful to me. This seems to be a thing that gains the approval of my unconscious because time spent in focussed introspection is time rewarded with a sense of calm, while time spent dealing with the day to day chaotic scatter of a workaday life is punishable by tiresome neurosis – at least it was until I came to believe that there was indeed nothing more to society than a chaotic scattering of half-bakedness.

To be sure, it’s a closely guarded secret that “society” is not actually the purpose of our lives at all. It’s more the stage on which we play our life out. It’s when we come to believe that somewhere in society might lie the secret of our purpose that the problems begin. Society itself holds no meaning whatsoever. If we want to experience any sort of genuine fulfilment, then we have to provide that meaning for ourselves as individuals. True purpose is the indefinable belief in something “other”, something outside of society, like the guiding hand of a beloved parent. When we let go of our parent’s hand as children, we suffer the bewildering crowds as they swirl around us, careless and oblivious to our need. We fear the loss of ourselves, the inability ever again to feel the warmth and the sure guidance of those we love. We fear losing our centre, losing our self.

Now and then, when I’m feeling particularly tired and jittery I will experience a moment of complete disengagement. It can be anywhere – in a meeting at work, in a restaurant, or when chatting with others. It comes suddenly – a sense of shifting outside of myself and of leaving behind only a disorientated shell, a shell momentarily paralysed and fearful for its existence, alone in these strange surroundings without a guiding psyche. It is unlike a daydream, for in daydreaming the action always takes place inside one’s head. What I call the disengagement of my soul is quite different. In disengagement of the soul,… the soul seems to momentarily slip out of the host.

I might be fearful for my sanity, prone as I am to such episodes, but I’ve experienced them since childhood and they seem to have done me no harm. They are not, then, a symptom of advancing madness, but more perhaps a looseness of grip. The feeling is one of bearing witness to a dream, a feeling things are not real and that I need to wake up and find my true self, my true reality, except of course the self that is dreaming protests that it is the real self and I’d better hang on to the dream because it’s all there is!

Well,… such are the storms that periodically sweep this particular mind. The worst thing is the suspicion that I am alone in these experiences, that only the inmates of an asylum can experience anything worse, but of course I am far from alone, and my storms are as nothing compared to some – rendered sluggish perhaps by the chemical quagmire of Prozac or Seroxat, but there all the same.

Now, it might seem a little childish, harking back to pre-school days as being the happiest of my life, or later, the temporary freedom of those delicious six week summer holidays when the time stretched out each morning, an infinity of choice, and when each day was a pleasure sipped like fine wine. But you can’t live like that, can you? You have to make a living. You have to contribute to your society by paying your way, and paying your taxes. Of course you do, but what you must not do is look to society, nor even to the people around you, to provide the meaning in your own life.

As Margaret Thatcher once famously said: “there is no such thing as society”. Now, I’m not sure in what context this was meant to be taken, but from one particular angle at least, I find myself in agreement with the Iron Lady. Society is an abstract concept of varying parameters that are entirely dependent upon an individual’s perception. Society does not feel anything. It does not look down upon individuals with either compassion or contempt. It owes us nothing, as we owe it nothing beyond our legal dues. It is simply an organisational structure, and I’m afraid to say that in modern secular terms this boils down to people who are either customers or salesmen. How many times a day does your telephone ring with someone trying to sell you something? In short, there is no meaning to the secular society beyond a system of financial transactions.

The only practical advice I can offer, if you don’t do it already, is to do as that old medical officer told me, mysteriously, so long ago, and that’s meditate, which is really no more than sitting quietly and alone from time to time. Some people buy books and tapes and learn to do it in the way of the great meditative traditions, while some go to classes, and this is fine if you can make the time, because the deeper you go the better. Do it every day if you can. If not, if like me the kids burst in, or start to whine every time you sit down, then just do it whenever you can, even if it’s only for a moment. And when you’ve done it, remember that the way we live our lives does not provide the meaning to our lives. Meaning is what we carry in our hearts. It is personal, meaningful in a way specific only to ourselves. Others need not share our vision, or indeed know anything about it at all. Our vision, our sense of meaning is ours alone.
In meditating, we cut back to the centre of ourselves, we reach out for the hand we let go of at the moment of our birth, the only thing connecting us to something safe and sure in a world that is otherwise completely bewildering. That hand is there for each of us and it has nothing to do with this world at all,… it is completely beyond it. We have only to touch it in our minds, for a kind of enlightenment to ensue.

And it goes something like this:

If contemporary society truly possessed the meaning of our lives, it would not offer it back to us for free. We would have to pay for it, and the price would be so high that only a few elite individuals would ever be able to possess it. Or, it would be owned by a mega-corporation that might allow us to pay for it in instalments over a lifetime, with the promise that, like our homes, it would eventually be ours. However, there would probably be something in the small print that absolved the mega-corp from any responsibility when at the end of our term it presented us with a dog eared piece of paper with the number 42 written upon it.

[if unsure Google 42 "meaning of life"]

But the meaning of life is not a thing, not a number, not an equation, nor is it an explanation of any kind, for there is not a question that can be adequately framed to solicit anything approaching a satisfactory answer. It is much simpler than all of that. It is a state of being, a state of grace, and I’m sorry but that costs nothing at all, and it is the birthright of every one of us. What is it? You know what it is. Just sit still for a moment, close your eyes and listen to the sound of it coming from that space between your ears, and no, I don’t mean the tinnitus! Maybe you can even see it with your mind’s eye, but rest assured, if you sit there often enough, pretty soon,…

…. you’ll begin to feel it.

Michael Graeme

April 2007

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