This is never helped by my sleep being poor. But what is disrupted inconsistent sleep but a manifestation of psycho-physical unease? Throw in a persistently bad back and there you have it, the signs are all in the crippling. One sentient being suspended in mental and physical tension. The obvious solution to prevarication is to take small steps towards whatever needs doing, to break it down into more manageable elements. Gradually change the energy. But I can even prevaricate about doing that.
As I am coming up to my 65th Birthday next month I've had communications plopping onto our door mat about pension pots that mature this year. All asking what I want to do with my very meagre savings, delay taking them, or what type of pension I want to set up. I read all the stuff they send, it seems full of baffling issues, pitfalls and consequences that I don't know if they apply to me. So I just walk away from it. There are deadlines attached, to tell them what to do before my 65th birthday next month. Someone else's clock is ticking.
The longer I delay the more the delaying itself takes on a self punishing cast - of how pathetic and typical this is of me - is the milder version. I can also see that the things I'm not taking action on are also loaded with end of life, mortality issues - pension, wills, physical decay and infirmity. I then stumble across a You Tube video by an American psychologist Emma McAdams, on her Life in a Nutshell site. It was all about avoidance, as one symptom in a depressive tendency.
She uses the metaphor of a thin rectangular piece of paper to represent our emotional range. Whenever we encounter difficult emotions we can get into the habit of avoiding them, tearing them off and putting them aside. If we keep doing this we end up with a very small bit of paper with only a small range of permitted emotions on it. But, the problem with emotions its all or nothing. If we don't fully feel our sadness and disappointments then we don't fully feel our joys and successes either. Difficult emotions are not something you can opt out of. As the socially permitted emotional range of the average male can be pretty narrow in the first place, you can see what a mess this could potentially create. Avoiding dealing with an issue, prevarication, if it goes on long enough, ends up in the emotional paralysis of real clinical depression.
So feelings about death and everything leading up to that, hover around my prevarication. Plus a dislike of engaging with official paperwork and gobbledygook, that make it all loaded with a discomforting finality.
Almost as a form of light relief. I've been reflecting on avoidance of emotions and experience as a tendency we take into the spiritual life. I'm sure Buddhist teachings were never meant to encourage avoidance. But teachings about identifying hindrances in meditation, and the use of antidotes to counter them, can easily slip into avoidance of experience. There are a range of feelings and thoughts that pop up in our daily practice, and instead of gently and kindly moving our attention away from them, we either try to exterminate them, or do the next best thing, actively suppress or neutralise them with a proprietary antidote.
Somewhere in our being we start perceiving our feelings and thoughts as a battleground. Failings, obstacles, hindrances are lying in the way of our becoming a better spiritual practitioner, to becoming enlightened. Let's get rid of them. I was introduced to the hindrances and their antidotes as a relative novice, so the potential for misapplying them was huge. I certainly remember my enthusiasm on discovering there was a way to deal with the difficult emotional world that I was struggling with at the time. At last I had some tools to sort them out with. This mechanistic approach appeals greatly to men in particular, its like someone presenting you with a box if spanners, a car manual, and a car. Go get 'em boy! You'll soon have your spiritual engine humming and ticking over more efficiently. The road to Insight is clear, here we go.
Renunciation can be another misused practice. Stop doing these spiritually bad things that cause you to crave, feel attached, lustful or intoxicated and you'll be enlightened by the end of the month. Its as though you hear the message - some judicious pruning will help stimulate plant growth - and before you know it you're lopping off entire branches and felling trees. Its hard to keep it in proportion and not go all fundamentalist on it. Taoism distinguishes between there being 'real knowledge' and 'conscious knowledge'. Though the 'conscious' is only a reflection of the 'real', it is incomplete, not really the 'real' thing. So it's important not to act as if it is.
To truly renounce anything you need to have had some insight into its 'real' nature, in order to be really happy to let it go. You can't avoid experiencing the full spectrum of your 'conscious' feelings surrounding a habit or issue. Its how, with kind awareness, you'll eventually come to a 'real' understanding. Anything else could well be a form of premature renunciation. Or worse, a crude form of self denial, in danger of castrating your emotional experience. So, careful where you wield that axe Eugene.
Meanwhile I'd better dig out that pension stuff. Oh boy I hate official paperwork. It scares me to death.
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