Contagion

No matter how fortunate we are in life, it’s a challenge to be grateful, a challenge to be at peace. Rather, we seem programmed more towards irritation, scornfullness, and resentment of anything we perceive as threatening to our sense of control. The peace we crave is for ever elusive, and all we’re left with is the craving.

I’ve noticed this with older, retired people, people I look at and think: how fortunate to have left behind the day-job, the mind-numbing commute. Their kids have flown, they have all the time in the world now to simply be; they can lie in of a morning, shuffle round Tescos, or the garden centre, or read a book, watch TV. Heavens, how blessed to have all that time and space to finally decompress! But there can be nothing more ornery than the older, retired person, a person with nothing to worry about, because in the absence of real troubles, we invent them.

Me? I’ve had a choppy week this week. My vehicle was issued a recall notice by the manufacturer for transmission problems. I made a difficult journey to the dealership – time off work and all that – to be told the recall is not actually a recall, and though there’s definitely a problem with my transmission there’s nothing they can do without it costing me a lot of money. Then I was soldering a piece of wire, and a ball of red hot flux spat out, landed on my specs, crazed the lens precisely in my line of vision, so I need new specs and, in the mean time, have two weeks of squinting around this damned fog-patch while my new specs are delivered. And this is just the start. I could go on and on about all the damned stuff that’s happened this week, but it would only try your patience, and mine.

We all have weeks like this. And if I’m calm and rational about it, I can see how all of these problems are either surmountable in time, or more simply irrelevant in the great scheme of things. But still, the pain-body relishes them, creates out of them the illusion of things clustering, like pack-dogs, circling, attacking.

It was  Eckhart Tolle, who first coined the phrase “Pain body”. It exists not in a literal sense, but more as a psychological complex and therefore real enough to cause us harm if not checked. It thrives on negative emotion and is sadly the default state for most people.

At the car dealership, I regret being less than civil, regret expressing my exasperation. I regret also cursing on the way home, genuinely believing there was not one person of competence in the world willing or even remotely able to deal with anything I could not deal with myself. But this was stupid; it was arrogant. It was my pain-body speaking, my pain body thinking, my pain body being stupid. But this does not excuse it, for a man is no less a fool for allowing himself to be ruled by his pain body.

Stuff happens, sometimes even all at once, and we deal with it. Then something else happens – that’s life. But at times of sinking spirit, of flagging energy, we find ourselves braced, walking on eggshells, wondering, what the F*&k next? So here I am, nearly two decades of mindfulness, of Tai Chi, of meditation, of walking the path towards self awareness, whatever the hell that means, and it all falls away. Once more, there stands my hideous, wrinkled old pain body, unscathed, pleased by my suffering over nothing.

To subvert the pain body we must starve it of what it most craves. To do this we first make space within ourselves. A single breath is a start, we breathe in, and as we breathe out, we try to sense the energy field of the body. It sounds la-di-da fanciful, but if we can only imagine it this way, I find it’s helpful. And in rediscovering the spaciousness in the energy body, it’s as if we have dodged behind a tree, and the pain body can no longer find us. It’ll catch up with us eventually because it’s a dogged little parasite, but it’s helpful to know we can at least evade it from time to time.

A permanent solution requires a more permanent connection, or rather it requires a particular kind of connection and, you know, I can’t remember what that is because it has no shape, nor any words to describe it. It is a state of grace, and I cannot find my way home to it. Nor does it help that the world today is presented as being so full of pain, that indeed even the leadership of entire nations is in the hands of Pain Bodies. Their sub-level vibrations are infectious, forming a global pandemic, a contagion to which we are all vulnerable.

Thinking of a solution only gets us so far. It brings us to a gate, and the gate is secured by a puzzling combination of locks. The locks draw our attention because the mind likes to solve puzzles, and we are programmed to expect to have to puzzle or think our way through the world. But what we fail to notice is there’s no wall either to the left or the right of the gate. We are too distracted by the puzzle – which is in any way unsolvable – to have noticed we can simply walk around it.

Faith in anything, in particular the supernatural, in magic, the esoteric might be comforting for a while, but it’s unreliable and without that connection it falls away at a moment’s notice, leaving us naked and vulnerable at a time when we think we most need it. Even memories of particularly charged and numinous past events fade, causing us to question our experience of the mysterious side of life, and before he knows it even the monk is shaking his fist at the moon.

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Shadows and light

I’ve had a few pieces lined up for the blog recently, all smoothed and polished and ready to go, but something held me back, a little voice asking if that’s who I really was, that person, saying those things. And the answer, on reflection, was no, so I deleted them.

As bloggers, online writers, independent authors, whatever we want to call ourselves, our voices are often vanishingly small but we still have a responsibility to be true to ourselves, to say what we think we mean and to avoid saying that which is only a reaction born of personal prejudice, which is itself a reaction to the prejudice of others.

Sniping and grumpy, I had fallen foul of what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body, the entity within that awakens when we are out of sorts, low on energy, or just lost in that nameless malaise that comes out of the shadier places of the collective unconscious. His name is Grouch.

I have a sketchbook in which I keep drawings of personal meaning – inspired by dreams, and journeys into guided imagination. They form threads of fertile thought, little half trails leading through the forest of the unknown. In the quest for wholeness, for the truth of us, the mythic trails lead first to a confrontation with our only real nemesis, the shadow, the grouch. Neutralising the grouch (if we are a guy grouch) releases us into the care of the unknown woman who, if we can avoid corrupting her into a sexual fantasy, or just as uselessly projecting her onto real women, will lead us to the wise old man, to the Senex. These are ancient trails concerned with the transformation of psychic energy. They are little understood, also quickly overgrown if we neglect them.

My drawings petered out some time ago, the trail lost, ending with a curious, unfinished portrait of Carl Jung, a man whose writings on depth psychology introduced me to these arcane concepts, and prevented me from becoming rigidified in an unexamined and entirely unconscious life. To what extent I’ve been successful in exposing my shadows, I don’t know except to say there are many fragments left and I suppose my challenge is always to recognise them for what they are before I do or say something stupid.

It’s a start at least.

I remember during one of our earliest encounters, Jung said: “Take three coins,…”

So I took the coins,…

There have been coincidences too – trivial things, but each of them pregnant with a personal meaning. Jung called them syncronicities, valuable for their ability to release trapped energy, to open up a path in the personal psyche, to open up the trails again, if we can only discern their traces after long neglect.

That which changes remains true, he said, and conversely that which does not change cannot be true – or something like that. And of course the pain body never changes, is always bitter, always sniping, always disapproving of some thing or another, or some one or another, always shouting warnings of the Apocalypse if we give but an inch to the shadow forces that have put our pipe out. You’ll see him in his various guises on the news tonight, or in the headlines of the tabloid press tomorrow – whatever article or snippet gets your blood up.

Do not blog when drunk. Do not blog within 24 hours of an emotionally upsetting incident – two valuable maxims, to which I would add another: be careful of your shadow, and ask: for whom do I write? The shadow or the light? The grouch, or my self?

I finished that drawing off, added some depth to it, then deleted the stuff I’ve been writing, writing that poked a shallow kind of fun at things that ran up against my pain body, and which in turn I was looking to run up against someone else’s. Left to his own devices, the grouch resorts to a vitriolic rhetoric that only reinforces the negativity the grouch apparently derides. It adds to the black cloud, to the gathering zeitgeist of doom that would enfold us all in its shadowy wings. The grouch resists change, but that which cannot change is not true.

Speaking for myself I think I write best when it’s with a smile, or more often with the pursed lips of a sweet longing for something that perhaps never was, but one day might yet be.

Zeitgeist. Mood. These things are important, and as writers we must decide which side we’re on, because we are not only subject to the zeitgeist, we are also the shapers of it – not as individuals of course – we are, individually, too small for that – but collectively we each add a little power. Shadow or light – we take our choice.

So I began afresh. Began to write what I’m writing now. And I’m listening to Joni Mitchell as I write, to Shadows and Light, an album I enjoy, but haven’t listened to for a long time. I’m waiting for one track in particular, in my opinion the best rendition of “Amelia” in all of Joni Mitchel’s recordings. And in it there’s this one line. She sings:

It was the Hexagram of the Heavens, the strings of this guitar,..

The Hexagram of the Heavens is a reference to the Yjing, the ancient Chinese oracle, popular in western counterculture around the time of this song’s writing, popular still among spiritual wanderers and psychological depth workers. That’s why Jung gave me the three coins, to get me going; it’s how you consult it, after first suspending disbelief and being at least willing to dissolve your own prejudice.

The Hexagram of Heavens is also translated as “the Creative”. It describes inspiration, the urge to write, to express oneself, to achieve something. It is positive, it is lightness, it is spring, and summer. It is life.

Nobody else I know likes Joni Mitchell, but I connected with her music as a boy, and she’s always been there; she touches chords, some of nostalgic longing, others of an eternal capacity for love and for life, singing always sweetly through the rain and the pain of her own life. And listening to her now I feel something stirring.

I did Tai Chi, today, after a long break, born of the grouch’s resistance. The knees were creaking for want of practice, but the heart eventually attained the soft current that subdues the pain body, and then one is left looking at the world afresh: ruby leaves of Japanese maple, freshly unfurled over green lawn, all washed to deeper shades by dusk and spring rains. It vibrates, it dissolves the vitriol, it lives and lets live the freed soul. I must do it again, soon.

Small indeed is the individual voice, typing things into the metaverse. We will not change the world on our own, but like all lone voices writing out into the inky dark of night, we need to know which side we’re on at least, and what kind of dawn we want to usher in. I prefer my skies red at night, that they will bear the promise of future delight, rather than the blood red warnings of the morning.

Come out of the shadows then, dear writer, and write for the light.

Goodnight all.

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The way of the soul – part 5: shining a light on the pain body

The question the soul asks is this: why do some aspects of my life make me happy, while others make me suffer? Then we add the corollaries: number one: why is happiness so elusive, yet the potential for suffering so abundant? Second: how do I nurture more happiness and keep the suffering to a minimum?

The first corollary is concerned with philosophy and metaphysics: what is suffering? The second is more concerned with the practicalities of every day living: How do I make the suffering stop? How do I feel good about myself, about others and my place in the world?

The nature of suffering is a complicated thing; a good deal of Buddhism is devoted to its study, so I’m never going to boil it down to a thousand words. It can however, be usefully personified as an entity, one we imagine living inside of us. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls it the pain body. This is just a way of thinking, you understand. The pain body is not an evil spirit, nor an autonomous being – though it can behave like one; it’s just a very primitive part of who we are, and it loves to suffer. And where there is no suffering, the pain body is adept at creating it for us.

It’s hard to believe anyone would choose suffering as a way of life, but many of us do – not consciously of course, but more by misunderstanding the dominance of the pain body in our lives. Unchecked, the pain body grows and dictates our responses to more and more of life’s situations. But all is not lost; to shine a light on the pain body is also to shrink it. And a world observed without the presence of the pain body, is a very different world indeed.

One of the most powerful tools in this respect is nurturing “presence” in our lives. This is a very simple concept, but since the way of the soul is also one of infinite paradox, it can at the same time be rather a difficult concept to grasp, instinctively. As a first step we try to attain an awareness of our essential “self”. If we can do this, then all other things follow more easily. The “essential self” is not a vague new agey term. It means what it sounds like: it is the being we are, unhampered by all the thoughts and emotions. It is what lies underneath the storm tossed psyche. It is the very essence of who we are.

When we sit quietly, our mind fills with thoughts, some good, some bad. We might remember with fondness the good things, or we might feel something akin to physical pain at the memory of the bad. We might be fearful of upcoming events, things that worry us, or we might be looking forward to things we hope will make us happy.

If we try, we can sometimes rise above this stream of thought. The thoughts are still there, but we can now observe their coming and going without engaging with them, emotionally. We simply let them be. But if we think about it: in order for us to be aware of our thoughts, there must be an awareness beyond our thoughts, just as there can be no ripples on the surface of the lake without the water to carry them. So, are we the ripples or the water? What is this awareness that is aware of our thoughts?

Since we are most of us entirely identified with our thoughts and our memories, it can be difficult to imagine there is anything else beyond them. If we try to imagine it, we imagine it might be another way of thinking, but it isn’t. Primary awareness, the awareness of our essential self, is a place of deep stillness from where we can observe our lives without judgement, or thinking. We take the input from our senses, and make no comment. We let whatever is, simply be. It’s from this place, we get to observe the pain body at work, both in ourselves and others.

Do you know someone who never has a positive thing to say? Do you never feel positive yourself about anything? Are you a glass half empty person, or a glass half full? You might think it’s not your fault, that it is because of the insensitivity, the stupidity, or the downright cruelty of others that you suffer, or that you are somehow so “unlucky” circumstances seem always fated to thwart your happiness. But two people can be presented with the same life-situation, and see it entirely differently – one negative, one positive – and the difference is entirely a state of mind. It is the lack or presence of an active pain body.

Attaining presence we create a space in which we can observe, consciously, both ourselves and others, and it is from this enhanced perspective we can tell when pain bodies are active. The curious thing is, when we identify our own pain body, it shrinks back into the shadows. When we are aware of pain bodies awakening in others the important thing is to avoid them activating our own pain body, for pain bodies each know their kind and are most at home in one another’s company where they can feed upon the mutual suffering they whip up between them.

The pain body is responsible for much personal suffering and, through our relations with others, it is also responsible for much of the damage we do to them and them to us. Happiness is therefore a life lived without the pain body, but it requires us first to raise our self awareness beyond the level of the ego, or we might not even know of the the pain body’s existence. We mistake its painful emotional reactions as our own , and nurturing presence in our selves is the key to realising they are not.

But that’s my thousand words.

I’ll explore more on the subject of nurturing presence some other time.

Here’s more on the pain body.

And here’s Eckhart Tolle with the last word:

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