ARTICLE - I Let Go - No 3

TO TURN ASIDE IS

to alter - to ameliorate - to anticipate - to avert - to avoid - to bar  - to be changed - to be converted into - to be renewed - to bear off - to beat off - to bend - to blench - to blink - to to block - to blunt - to bottom out - to branch off - to break - to change - to change the bearing - to check - to chill - to chop, to chop and change - to come about - to come around - to come round - to cool - to counter - to cringe - to curve - to damp - to dampen - to debar - to deflect – degenerate – depart - depart from – deter – deteriorate – detour – deviate – digress – disaffect – discourage – dishearten – disincline – disinterest – distract – divagate – divaricate – diverge – diversify – divert – dodge - draw aside - draw back - drive back – duck - ease off - edge off – estop – evade – exclude – excurse – fade - fall back – fend - fend off – flinch – flop - fly off – forbid – foreclose – forestall – gee - get sidetracked – glance - glance off - go astray - go off - hang back - haul around – haw - head off – heel – help – hinder - hold at bay - hold off – improve – indispose – jib – jibe - keep at bay - keep from - keep off - make way for – maunder – meliorate – mitigate – modulate - move aside – mutate – obstruct – obviate – parry – preclude – prevent – prohibit - pull back - push back - put back - put off – quail – quench – ramble – rebuff – recoil - reel back – repel – repulse – retreat – revive - rule out – save – sheer - sheer off – shift - shove aside – shrink - shrink back – shunt – shy - shy off – side – sidestep – sidetrack – sidle - start aside - start back - stave off - steer clear of - step aside – stop – stray – swerve – switch – tack - take a turn – trend – turn - turn away - turn back - turn from - turn into - turn off - turn the corner - undergo a change – vary – veer - veer off – wander - ward off – warp - wean from – weasel - weasel out – wince - worsen

ARTICLE - I Let Go - No 2

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO LET GO?

Its a bit of a spiritual cliché to say 'just let go' its often used in such a glib manner as to make it sound easy, which it is not. For when one consciously trys to do anything, it usually turns out not to be what you're doing at all. If a theatre director asks an actor to walk naturally across a stage, they cannot do it. Whatever walk the actor does, however natural it might seem, it is self-conscious and contrived. That's what an actor does for a living, they're accomplished fakers of behaviour and emotions. Likewise when someone says to 'just let go'  the last thing you're able to do is really 'let go'. We might physically or mentally be able to fake 'letting go', but the grasp of our attachment returns the moment we stop making a conscious effort.

When anyone says 'whatever you do,just don't imagine any blue elephants' that's all you can do. So the moment you're asked to 'just let go' of anything, the first thing you'll experience is the strength and stickiness of your attachment to it. In such situations just accept this is how it is, breath and relax. For even if something is a pretence it can give us a feel for what it is being mimicked. In the same way an actor can portray a human dilemma and make it seem so real we feel moved by it. Even a faked 'letting go' can provide a glimpse of what real 'letting go' might actually be like. Practice makes perfect. At the very least its useful information. Ifwe are able to clearly observe what we are experiencing. Understanding the lived nature of our attachments in ever greater depth, does prefigure and will define how much 'letting go, turning aside or putting down' we can actually do. Its so easy to fool ourselves into believing we've let go of something, when we really haven't.

Our minds imagination envisages 'letting go' and its as if we are already there. It is almost  a defining characteristic of imagination, that it can shows us things we've not yet experienced. Going beyond what we currently see, know, or are yet capable of. Our ability to 'let go' is not limited by our imagination, nor by our intellect, but by our emotions. We are often capable of changing our minds in an instant, but our emotions run on a much slower time scale than that. Emotions are more like a deeply buried underground stream, one that's guarded by a grumpy old water god whose not going to change its direction quickly. In fact he's a bit of a curmudgeon and will resist all unsolicited change with a vengeance.

Our emotional streams can be like that, deeply carved and embedded, stubborn, remote, convoluted, hard to fully know, let alone redirect. This only encourages us to continue gripping onto more recognisable things for comfort, even though we might clearly know they are doing us no good? We strangle the idea of change with the hands of fear and familiarity. We become trapped by the known, and frightened by the unknown. This is a  human place of dis-ease, overly preoccupied with our dissatisfactions, regrets and mental conflicts. For whilst all this is going on, something else cannot be realised, potential cannot be tapped or released, desires or aspirations cannot be fulfilled.  All movement is prevented by this emotional gridlock.

Our emotional views of ourselves and the world, form themselves into a sort of existential prison. We'd like to escape it, but the key to liberate us from the darkest dungeons of our mental habits, eludes our grasp. In this self created prison you maybe fed and clothed, but your desires are limited by the contained perspective of the dungeon itself. Everything is carefully overseen and managed by habit, Anything that fails to conform is ruthlessly repressed, controlled and sometimes killed off outright. We become both the prisoner and the prison warder.

We talk vaguely of the need to be liberated from this, without being clear how it will come about. However, the power to act remains in our own, though undoubtedly shackled, hands. It is theoretically possible to 'let go' of, 'turn aside' from, or 'put down' all of our self limiting views, habits and attachments. Though I would be the first to acknowledge that this is not a straightforward process. It takes time, perhaps a lifetime to achieve, if that!. Self-deceptions and mis-perceptions lie all around like trip hazards. The most obvious ones being; what is 'letting go' actually, and how on earth do you do it? Its inevitable then that we will be holding incorrect or wrong views about 'letting go' - over idealised 'letting go' - premature 'letting go' - inappropriate or misguided 'letting go'.Our first task then, will be to get a clearer understanding of what 'letting go, turning aside and putting down' actually means.

ARTICLE - I Let Go - No 14

OUT BRIEF CANDLE

'Life is an instantaneous situation, and death is also an instantaneous situation. It is the same, for example, with winter and spring. We do not think that winter becomes spring, and we do not say that spring becomes summer.'

There is no single instance in time, or distinct place identifiable as a watershed in any process of change. Where does winter became spring, life became death, a teenager become an adult, an enthusiasm become indifference, attachment become letting go? What we are unable to emotionally perceive that our experience is just an 'instantaneous situation.' What we feel is that this present instantaneous experience melts imperceptibly into the next. We knit them together, as the person that is perceiving them, into a continuity that has a self, with its own separate time-line and history. Through memory we are able to recollect that there was a process that we went through. So then we can retrospectively say we've 'let go' of something, and when approximately this occurred.

However, our real existential predicament of constant irrevocable change is propelling us into letting go, turning aside or putting down every moment of our lives, often with no time to breathe between.  Life 'creeps in this petty pace from day to day' and we weep over the constant fighting or the surrendering our lives to it.  Every moment lost and let go of, makes way for the arrival, the gain, of the next. We cannot adjust, or stop this process. We might weep unconsciously, but there is a need always to move on to whatever the next moment brings.

I Let Go ~ and move on.

ARTICLE - I Let Go - No 13

LOOKING OUT FOR A VOCATION

Towards the end of 2009 I had a moment of insight into a personal aspiration I'd been carrying a torch for, for many decades. The view was a simple one - that I could be fulfilled, specifically by discovering a personal vocation. It's hard to say how long I've held this for, or where I picked it up from. I'd conjecture that somewhere in my mid teens, as my imagination began generating possible future careers, I'd picked up the notion of a vocation as some sort of gloriously ideal job. It is held in high esteem in our culture, it appears to go beyond celebrity or wealth as an aim. Having a vocation is seemingly its own reward, one that can even redefine what being wealthy and successful is. Now wouldn't you want that if they could find it?

Everyone understands that finding a vocation is a rare, feeling fulfilled is almost a god given gift or blessing, it makes you very special. The majority of humanity that's ever existed has never found their personal vocation. What dreams people have had tend to crumple in the face of a hostile indifferent world. Ending up living lives that at best they can tolerate, on occasion might enjoy, but more often than not have to endure long enough to drown their in alcohol or drugs of an evening.

Not wanting to accept that, for the last forty years or so, I've just carried on searching. Maybe I'll be an artist, a designer, an actor, a performance artist, a poet, a writer, I'll work in a shop, run my own shop, become a Buddhist, work in Right Livelihood, work in a crematorium, a warehouse, in customer services, the list goes on. Spreading out over four decades, the ideal of finding a vocation has worn thinner and thinner. As I've aged my options I have became fewer, the chances of my finding a vocation were shrivelling before my eyes. By 2009 the idea of finding a vocation though threadbare, I couldn't quite let go of it, I couldn't abandon it fully. I could not let go.

What I saw myself becoming should I find a vocation, was so woven into the DNA of my Self. It would have felt like a crushing defeat to just let go it it too precipitously. Howeve, the insight I had was that I was never going to find that personal vocation now, that I just had to drop this expectation. It had only ever caused me suffering anyway, and as I've grown older its contributed to making me increasingly restless, to changing my style of work every eighteen months, two years. I could no longer hold down a job that was the same stuff day in day out, week after week, year on year. The actuality was I had regular, but quite ordinary work, but the weight of this ideal of finding a fulfilling vocation, was crushing all the spirit and meaning I might find in it. I still haven't fully let go of it, its hanging around somewhere in the background, but I have put it down.

When you put anything down, its because you've finished with carrying it, you can't take the weight of it, you're not prepared to be burdened by it any more. One of the Buddha's similes for the experience of Enlightenment is that its like a profoundly heavy burden being lifted from off your shoulders. Any smaller insight bears this sense of profound relief in its wake. Though I've been prepared to let go of the idea of carrying my expectation, its not fully let go of. It's still lingering, weakened but not broken. There's still the option to pick it up again if circumstances look hopeful. So, I've put it down, I've not really let go of it, I have to keep turning aside my attention from it. Be vigilant lest I get embroiled in it once more.


The implications and ramifications of this are still unfolding, if not rattling the scaffolding surrounding my habitual way of operating.

ARTICLE - I Let Go - No 12

DREAM LIFE THE WAY YOU THINK IT OUGHT TO BE

Was I idealistic as a teenager?  Whilst I don't remember myself as being so, that could just be retrospective self-censorship. A blinkering way of seeing myself as - 'not the idealistic sort.'  Its true, though concerned, I rarely put much energy into political, social or environmental campaigns or activism. I was not affronted enough by the imperfections of the world.  Large scale 'we must change the world' philosophies,  I found unconvincing. In my experience lasting transformations are individual ones. Visionary revolutions, not founded on the mass confluence of individual desires for change, inevitably end up with intolerance and oppression. Yet my reluctance to pin slogan badges onto my lapel, didn't mean I lived passively in a self-contained bubble. If I look objectively at what I chose to do, its clear that I was driven by an often quite passionate desire to make the world in some way more beautiful.

There was, however, frequently a disparity between what I allowed myself to believe I could do, and what I envisaged myself becoming in my more unconstrained and florid moments of fantasy. I did dream of myself, my life and the world in a way that I thought it ought to be. Though I was frightened of these dreams failing me. Fearful of their perceived fragility, as though their loss would crush me. On occasions this did prove to be so. Paradoxically it was the untested dreams or aspirations that remained unfulfilled, that I found hardest to bear. My heart has been depressed, by too many dreams staying perfectly wrapped up in my imagination. After a while these expire, quietly,without kicking up a fuss- but leave a lingering mist of condensed decay.

A typically intense, yet shy teenager I escaped into extrovert fantasies, whilst really being easily intimidated and risk averse. A bit more push and plucky initiative from me may have worked.  But that was not how I was, no matter how much I might have cajoled or castigated myself at the time.  As a naïve, yet hope-filled, young man, I neither fully understood how the world worked, nor really what motivated or made me tick. I thought being successful in life was all down to self command, self-control and self-discipline. All things that at the time I saw my self as lacking. So frequently I expended my youthful energy boxing myself into a pugilistic corner. The bruises that still remain were all of my own making.

In 1974 I was seventeen, and I'd moved to Hull to do a years Arts Foundation Course. For the first time I had full liberty to be and do what I wanted. I found out who I could be, what I wanted from life, without the constraints of home, or my desires being mediated in anyway through my parents.  I discovered what being independent could be like. I was rather anxious, with a slippery grasp on confidence. I was a bit internally conflicted; caught between a natural impulse to be gregarious, outgoing and genial, and often feeling insecure, introspective and too internally preoccupied to express that. Some days I could ease gently into extroversion, and everything would flow and flourish. On others it was like that more ebullient self was lying comatose in a darkened room, leaving me hiding behind my poetry book in the corner of a local pub, whilst nursing a beer. This on/off dichotomy in how I interact with the world, is something I've come to know all too well.

Early Teenage Dreams

The melodramas of teenage dreaming. Imaginations only just past childhood reach out for what may or may not be unattainable. Are these innocent dreamworks possible or impossible? Pure and as yet untransformed by contact with the crucible of the world. All adult life lies ahead. Still a series of questions to which there are few incontrovertible answers. Who knows exactly who or what you might become? There's a sense for how the cards are cast, but not what might be made of them.  All is to play for.  Those first cathartic moments of disillusion and disappointment, the anger and angst. Overly dramatic and critical of life and the world, they set the colour and tone for future dreaming about the world– the search for a pristine and more golden utopia.  

I dreamt of becoming a poet

It started almost with the first burst of teenage hormones, science fiction and David Bowie. There's a strong vein of extra-terrestrial madness running through my early poetry. What they lack in skill of execution, is made up for with naïve ebullience. They're not good. I thought I shouldn't actually read other poets, in order to preserve the unique untainted nature of my talent. Once I found an enthusiasm for Dylan Thomas, things improved - rhetorically. The poetic muse has always had an erratic heartbeat, mostly murmuring these days when I'm on retreat. A good indicator though for what's going on in the deeper end of the swimming pool.    

ARTICLE ~ I Let Go - No 11

THE THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

I suppose I may have dreamed whilst I was in the womb. What those dreams consisted of is hard to say, probably vague unspecific feelings of pleasure or discomfort. A babies experience in the womb most likely consists of relatively unrefined sensation. Can they even dream? Is dreaming or the desire for something other than what is currently happening, dependent on having experience of there being a choice. If all you've ever known are the comforting susurrations of the womb, with no experience of unmuted light,freedom and sensory stimulus - would you nonetheless become bored with the darkness, and the attendant limitations to movement and sensation? Wouldn't you dream of it being different? Receptive and affected, but able to do little about the containing envelope of ones own Mother's emotional states. Wouldn't you feel an impulse to kick at the walls and rebel?

A babies birth can be a thing of wonder, yet also a pain filled process a mother goes through. But what on earth must the baby be feeling about it ? Does it want to stay put in the womb warmth that it loves and knows? Has it dreamt for weeks and months of being released into whatever is outside? It doesn't yet know that the outside world will feel colder, more exposed and feel less interdependent. To live in an unfocused brightness, a place of shadows and voices, that will leer out at you from the unknown. Recognising only the familiar tones of its parents voices. Does it fall into and welcome life, or is it reluctantly pushed? Expelled harshly from Eden.

Whilst pregnant with me, my Mother may have been understandably quite anxious. She'd had a miscarriage between my sister's and my birth, shortly before my inception. I know from what my Mother has told me,that my birth was prolonged; starting in the afternoon and on through the night. Until I finally popped out my head in the early hours of the 26^th June 1957. I was, what was considered then, a very big baby. Very pink, very wrinkled and very hairy, apparently, and well over nine pounds in weight. In the early days of life asleep under fluffy blankets in my cot, what went through my mind? If I dreamt of anything specific, what was it I dreamt of? How seminal an influence on my attitude towards the world was the nine months I spent in my Mother's womb, and the emerging from it into the world?

As much as I might be tempted to conjecture about this, it would be futile. What makes us how we are is a complex tangle of crossed wires. It's impossible to fully know or unpick the philosophical underpinning, let alone the practical mechanisms of karma and rebirth. Not that it stops people putting huge amounts of intellectual energy into trying to unravel or dismiss them. So I'd best leave it there, and focus on to what I know and have experienced – The things that my dreams have been made of. Not the nocturnal, but the aspirational, the vocational, the ideal dreams I had, or still have for my life.

Childhood Dreams

A child dream or see the need to become anything. They try on occupations as imaginative roles for play, they don't necessarily wish to become a King say, in later life. Nevertheless, this dressing up and acting out of an admittedly childish view of adult life, helps them learn through broad mimicry, how a person might choose to live, work and play. We try things on for size, copying how grown ups interact with the world, and find out what the consequences of behaving well or badly are. All from a position of little or no understanding of what an job might really entail. Nor whether we will have the necessary talents, opportunity or determination to take it up as a career in later life. As a child we wear our dreams lightly, with no sense of our making a longer term commitment,

I had a dream of becoming a fireman

As a child, I had a red trike. I threw anything I found in the streets into its swing lidded boot. Sometimes it would be leaves or earth, but quite often it was stones or nails. I just loved the way they loudly rattled as I tore around cobbled back streets, and up and down snickets, making one hell of a row. In addition I made ringing noises like a fire engine. The neighbours complained, but I remained fond of seeing myself as a fireman. A ragged shadow of this early enthusiasm passed briefly across my mind in my teens, as I imagined what my future might be.

I had a dream of going to Egypt

It's hard to say what initially sparked this. However, in 1956 ,the year before I was born, MGM's blockbuster The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, was released. I remember excitedly queuing to see it as a very young child. Most likely it was this that fired my imaginative engagement. Whatever the prompt, the result for me was an early compulsion. From then on I avidly sought out and devoured any book about Egypt, and readily turned any tea towel into Phaoronic headdress. This imaginative engagement has stayed with me. In 1988,in order to fulfill a lifetimes desire I went there on holiday for three weeks.

I had a dream of making perfume

Fired up to become young entrepreneurs, a friend and I decided to become perfume makers. We started by collecting rose petals, well, we stole them really. Surreptitiously creeping along the gardens of our terraced street. Not paying too much attention to quality control, we just tore off flower heads till we had a bucket-load. I think to us perfume manufacture seemed the same as beer making. We soaked the petals in water as long as we thought appropriate, bottled up the result and went round the self same house we'd stolen the petals from, to sell them our 'rose perfume'. Well, there's capitalism in the raw for you.

I had a dream of becoming a vicar

When I was seven I had a good boy soprano voice. Being brought up a Methodist, there was no choral tradition. So my parents obtained me an audition to join the Halifax Parish Church choir. This expanded my horizons, and nourished my appreciation of church architecture, music and ritual. For in comparison to the stripped back simple services of non-conformism, the Church of England seemed a much more ancient,richer and emotionally engaging seam of devotion than I was used to. At home, I found two small candlesticks, a wooden crucifix, turned my desk into an altar and performed daily services for a while, casting myself as the vicar.

I had a dream of joining the Royal Navy

There was a school trip to see a Royal Navy ship in Goole Docks. All I remember now, is the pack of cards with silhouette pictures of navy ships I was given. Never particularly fit or combative, I suddenly wanted to join the Navy. A life of heroic action wasn't what I wanted, it was to ride on the ocean waves. I'd read adventure novels so I had a fictional conception of what this might entail. The desire was to explore what the wider world was really like. I discovered I was largely an adventurer in carpet slippers. So a life in the Navy, was not to be.

I had a dream of becoming a historian

My early reading about Ancient Egypt, Kings & Queens of England and Church architecture, built the foundations for a lifelong fascination with history. As a child I wanted to read about people and events that actually happened, and not entirely imaginary versions. I thought then that perhaps I'd become someone in the world of history, maybe an archaeologist. No one seemed able to tell me what else might be done with a love of history. Unable to discover what my options with history really were, I turned my face in an entirely different direction. History became demoted to an enthusiasm, not the personal vocation I had originally envisaged.  

ARTICLE ~ I Let Go - No 10

FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE


Recollecting some of my past activity,

what I did, and what I would have wanted to do

Good times for a change
See, the luck I've had
Can make a good man turn bad

So please please please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want
This time
Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time
Lord knows, it would be the first time

Lyrics to - Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Wantby Morrissey / Marr

Such is the power of maudlin self pity to move me, when expressed via a song lyric. That Morrissey's melancholic, burdensome level of disappointment with life,as much an existential statement as it was popular poetry, struck a very plaintive chord with me. Why this was so, I'll sketch out here only in brief. For what I'm about to describe is the youthful optimism and the dreams and desires I held for myself, and how these gradually fell apart as they encountered the indifferent nature of concrete reality. It seems from a Buddhist perspective, thirty plus years later, that this was kind of inevitable, with things 'being impermanent by nature' etc. The affect on me,however, was much longer lasting than you'd think.

Like most young men in their late teens / early twenties,I was quite unprepared for my first contact with the world, as it actually was. My parents, the extended years as an art student, and my own unrealistic daydreaming, had all sheltered and protected me from the harsher realities of life, I would need to earn money, to afford a place of my own, to have food, clothes and a social life. To do the things I enjoyed would entail working. That a job that might have little meaning for you, could take a toll on the energy left spare at the end of a day, had never occurred to me. Nor that a life spent just earning a living, might wear thin your positivity, aspirations, and curiosity about life.

In the mid-seventies, the UK was in the midst of a dire economic recession. There was a huge level of unemployment,high inflation, and social unrest. A power struggle between the unions and the Labour government was on the brink of bringing the country to a standstill. If there was work available it was often low skilled,low paid, physically hard work. My dream, if I had one at all, about work (apart from not working at all) was only to do something I enjoyed. I left comprehensive school with a scattering of middling 'O' level grades, with a plan to go on to 'A' levels. During the lazy hot days of the summer holidays,a growing antipathy towards further study and exams burgeoned. Much to my parents consternation, I abandoned the previous plan to go on to further education.

I loved gardening and just getting my hands dirty. So I applied for, and got, a job working in the Scunthorpe Parks Department. I arrived on the first day, fresh faced and quite nervous, walking towards the staff hut with a flask of coffee and a lunchpack. I wonder now whether these more experienced men saw me coming, and wanted to test what my metal for hard physical work was. For on that first day, there was no gentle mowing or trimming of edges of flower beds. I was set to hoeing weeds from an uneven patch of ancient,but still extremely tough tarmac. By the end of a second day of this, my hands were raw and blistered, and suddenly further education seemed an infinitely more preferable option. This reversal further infuriated my parents, as they quickly tried to ascertain if I could still go to sixth form at all. I might have had to wait another year, as the new intake had already started. The Sixth Form Principal said he was still happy to have me, so I joined albeit a week or so late.

I'd been trying for years to determine what my future career might be. I had my dreams, but essentially I was scared of them. Mainly of what they might require me to do, and how secure they might be. I was naive, insecure and lacked sufficient confidence in my interests and talents to really get behind them. I subtly betrayed my integrity, by trying to sidestep my low self-esteem and high anxiety. This made settling on a career choice doubly difficult. My choices were made by what I unwittingly stumbled upon. These showed me one way forward, to follow the line of least resistance that I'd find easier to do.

From my childhood through to teenage years, history had been vaguely what I'd envisaged my life would revolve around. It was always my best subject, what I was most fascinated by, and loved. Had it not been for the confident encouragement of my art tutor at sixth form college, I might easily have become some fusty history teacher specialising in an obscure aspect of 12^th century monasticism. Perhaps instinctively I knew I might not be suited to the painstakingly detailed research of a career in history. Being an artist felt somehow sexier. So I remained an enthusiastic amateur, but didn't take up the route of making history my profession.

I have often found some aspects of my character difficult to explain, or find adequate expression for. Nothing seems to quite match my needs for long, I become restless for fresher fields all too soon. There's often been an uneasy relationship between the introverted and extroverted sides of my desires. I rarely finding myself truly comfortable with either for very long. Introversion can quickly turn into a stifling prison, whilst extroversion exposes the underlying raw anxiety, and scares me to death. I am simultaneously bigger and smaller than I imagine. Switching polarities all the time.

My eventual career in the arts was founded on a laudable, but admittedly naive dream. An impulse to improve or make the world a more beautiful place. This wasn't driven by an ardent desire for self-expression, but a more altruistic desire to put my creativity towards making something that was of practical benefit to everyone. I flirted with becoming an artist whilst on my Foundation Arts Course in Hull. Though, to be honest, I knew I'd find it hard to sell this idea with enough conviction to my parents. Who'd view ' being an artist.' as synonymous with being a sponger,drug taker and time waster. I had inculcated this inner pragmatic voice over the years of living with my parents. Frequently ruling out many dreams before I'd even tested or spoken of them.

So I decided to become a graphic designer instead of an artist. From today's perspective, it seems that somewhere in my late teens I did seem to surrender who I was, and what it was I wanted to do, up to the hands of fate. My decisions were directed by my dreams, only to the extent my levels of confidence and anxiety would allow them to be. Nevertheless, the alluring deluding siren of Art did captivate my imagination, and pulled my infatuation away from history. Whilst the pragmatic tone of my internal critic, did for a while stifle a fuller embrace of the pursuit of art. These days, I may view some of these decisions with a tinge of regret. But this is after all what I did, and it cannot be undone, just be more gently understood.

Old dreams can be difficult to really put to bed. Whilst your head might be being turned by fresher things taking place in the present, these dreams might simply be sulking in the corner of the pub, downing pint after to pint, dulling the experience of being ignored. One may have put down and turned aside from old dreams, but you may have not yet truly let go of them. It's as though, whilst there's still breath left in your body, there's still hope.

The graphic design course I eventually was accepted on, was at Leeds Polytechnic. It had a good reputation. As it progressed, we all got to know from painful experience that it's reputation was somewhat in tatters. Most of us became embroiled, and were used as pawns, in the egotistically driven power politics of the tutors in the department. Whose side you aligned yourself with, affected how much a tutor would help,support and guide you. In the end your allegiance could well decide the level of degree you'd be awarded. The head of the department, we found out later, had been having an affair with one student who ended up being awarded the highest degree in our year. That's indicative of how corrupt it was. By the second year, I'd extricated myself from being manipulated by certain tutors. I was disillusioned not just with the design course. I wasn't at all sure now that a career in graphic design was what I wanted to do with my life any more.

The final year of the course arrived, and my projects were incomplete and lacked a consistent aesthetic and design approach. Some of this was due to the uncertain confidence I had in them. This was, in part, what had led me in the first place into being pulled this way and that, by tutors with very differing ideas about design, and the creative process. By the time of my degree show, whilst a lot of my work showed promise, it had not been either refined or fulfilled. I had very few fully completed projects. What finished work there was, was achieved by hard graft and a personal determination not to be beaten by the dysfunctional ethos of the department. This was how my degree course drew to an end.

I finished in the early summer of 1980. Before I left, I was informed, in a rather patronising tone, by the Principal that I'd been given a degree (with no honours) almost as the best they could do under the circumstances. If I wanted to go on to teaching I'd have to retake my final year, and hope to get a better result. By then I just wanted out, the thought of staying on anywhere for another year seemed an horrendous prospect. Besides, I had only persisted with it this far in order to demonstrate to myself I could actually complete it. To have something to show to my parents to justify three years of further education. Unfortunately, I wasn't always able to so easily avoid disappointing them over the next few decades.

Out of necessity I had to return home, for ten rather frustrating and disheartening months. It was hard to re-accustom myself to the constrictions of living in a quiet rural village, with ones parents! Particularly after engaging in the life of a bustling city, with its freedom to do whatever I pleased. The contrast and sense of loss felt dramatic. 

Then there was the signing on for benefits. As I lived in a rural village I was sent a form once a fortnight, that I had to get someone outside my family to witness me signing. This entailed going into the local butcher, who seemed willing to oblige me in the midst of serving customers. As the months clocked up, this process felt more and more a humbling thing to do. Thus it went on throughout the summer,autumn and winter of 1980/81. The year before, the recently elected Thatcher Government had instigated a radical redirection of the countries economic priorities, and we were once again teetering on the edge of a recession. It seems that my career choices would always be taking place whilst the country was in the midst of one.

In the meantime I continued sending out job applications, with an increasing lack of confidence. This resulted over the ten months, in one weeks work experience in a design studio in Grimsby, and two job interviews. I was almost about to give up, when the second of these, thankfully landed me a job in the design department of a book publisher in Mayfair, London. So in April 1981, I finally started my career as a graphic designer, and moved to London. I ended up living in North London, because family friends there offered to put me up for a while. The suburbs of Crouch End, Muswell Hill and East Finchley, were my stomping ground for all the years I lived in London.

The job at the publishers showed me what day to day work as a graphic designer was actually like. It was all a bit humdrum and pedestrian really. The Art Director chose the images for the book covers, often even down to the style of lettering. What creative input you had, might only be doing the artwork, choosing the colour on the spine, or the text size etc. As our Art Director was somewhat colour blind, and I have a good eye for colour, this job of selecting colours often fell my way. Occasionally, I was given an enjoyable layout job for the inside of an annual film review book, or an illustrated compendium of Sherlock Holmes stories. But this was rare, and it felt as if my time on the degree course had been lived in an entirely alternative universe, one I was unlikely ever to see again.

Towards the end of that year the publisher I worked for was bought by an American company. They sold off a popular imprint, and instigated a series of staff cuts across all departments. As the last one to join the art studio, I was first to be given the push. So, seven months after starting my first job, I lost it. To say I was devastated, would be an understatement. I eked out my redundancy money into the New Year. Telling no one, least of all my parents, that I'd lost my job. The whole idea of going back on the job hunting trail, dragging my portfolio across London, appalled me.

After one desultory visit to a design studio, where my work had been viewed in the same manner you'd casually flick through a Sunday magazine. I felt pissed off and angry, as I sat on the Northern Line heading back home to East Finchley. As I got off the train and walked up the side path leading to the estate where I lived, it suddenly came to me that I didn't have to do this any more, if I didn't want to. In fact I wasn't going to do this any more. I'd be prepared to do anything, I didn't mind what - dig holes – sweep the streets – be a newspaper vendor -anything but this. This is the only time, that in one moment I completely let go. I completely and irreversibly let go of the idea of being a graphic designer. The effect on me was instantaneous and immense relief. There was an ebullient, if not intoxicating, sense of liberation from a commitment that had become oppressive and restrictive.

The first such job I got was as an Art Shop Assistant in Barnet, My arts background, meant I was ideally suited to working in Art Shops. I was not to know then, that this step would be so significant. For working in retail would consequently absorb most of my working life. I worked in this shop in Barnet for about eighteen months. When the business was sold to new owners, they kept me on long enough to learn the ropes from me. Then on my first day back after a summer holiday, they made me redundant. Sending me off with a few weeks money and a cheap transistor radio ( the sort of thing you get given free with stationery deals) as my parting gift.

Though I found another job in an Art Shop in Crouch End within a few weeks, being made redundant twice within two years did somewhat strangle the life out of any remaining idealism I had. Over the following years - the erratic sleep pattern I still suffer from started - I became increasingly biting and cynical in my conversation - the viewpoint that 'I never got what I wanted' gradually became more firmly entrenched. It remained there unquestioned and unanalysed until I'd been a practising Buddhist for many years.

By the time The Smiths had become famous in 1983, I was twenty five years old. I'd already given up on a career in design, and lost my job twice. So some of the keening phrases of 'Please, please, please, let me get what I want' expressed the tone of sentiment and despair, that lurked hidden beneath my external shell of hardened apathy. I did still care about my life, and what I did with it. I just couldn't bring myself to be idealistic about it, and hence vulnerable to disappointment. I hadn't allowed myself a dream in a long time. Pragmatism and aesthetic distraction, were now the rules of my life.

Every subsequent set back, heartbreak, business failure, or dream that got deflated, further reinforced the view that 'I never got what I wanted.' It actively cultivated a spirit of discontent with whatever was happening around me, and an inability to stay for long with situations that disappointed or disillusioned me. Until much later in life, this prevented me from seeing how fortunate I'd been to stay employed despite all the numerous recessions. Nor the true value of other benefits my life, jobs and circumstances had brought me. Though perhaps not fully meeting my ambitions, I've still been able to do a huge amount with my life, however underpinned it may have been by despair, and wavering levels of self-belief and confidence. Perhaps this had not been what I desired in my dreams, and 'never getting what I want' was really a melancholics habitual way of saying - my life turned out entirely different to how I first dreamt of it.

I let go
I turn aside
I put down
what I have been
or would have wished to be in the past

ARTICLE ~ I Let Go - No 9

PAST ACTIVITIES

I let go, I turn aside, I put down

all agreeable or painful memories

relating to what I have done

or would have wished to do in the past

relating to all the episodes of my past activity.

I am packing to leave a place where I've been staying with a group of friends. I'm stuffing things into my holdall in a hurry, roughly throwing a seemingly odd selection of items into it. My friends wait impatiently upstairs for me to get my act together. Finally I pull the zip up, and put the bag down whilst I go find my friends, to tell them I'm ready. When it comes time to leave the gallery we are now in, there are many similar bags strewn in parts of the room. I start searching for mine but cannot find it. The bag contains important things such as my most treasured paintings and writing. What follows is a relentless, exasperating and ultimately fruitless search to find where the bag now is.

I have dreamt this dream, or a variant on this dream many times over a number of decades. Each time there is an important bag to be found. The emotional impetus is to find what has been lost. The dreams have their own individual 'feeling tone' related to what has been lost and why it has to be found. This can be driven by a nostalgic urgency to rediscover, be confused or bewildered by conflicting pulls, be disorientated in unfamiliar surroundings, or be driven by an unspecified existential anxiety. What does the bag mean?


Though I cannot recollect these previous occasions in minute detail, I believe this type of dream does happens at specific times in my life. When I find myself in a place of unknowing. For what ever reason, my faith or spiritual compass has become unreliable or unreadable. I look back over my shoulder to the past as a way of regaining my bearings, or reconnect with something I seem temporarily to have lost sight of. I believe it really is as simple as that. The dream puts me through the mangle of emotional distress, and out I come pressed flat on the other side. Perhaps this is in order to wring some sense out of me, or to demonstrate the barren futility of looking backwards with sentimental eyes.

Whether its real, nostalgic or a dream, we cling to a sense of our personality and its history as a drowning person does to a buoy. To have no memories at all, would feel like we had lost all sense of who we were. It seems its important for us to know where we've come from, in order to have continuity and meaning in the present. What we've done in the past, who we've been, the successes and failures, its pleasures and its pain, all contributed, for good or ill, to who we believe we now are. Our self-image, our self-esteem, our self-confidence rest on the imperfectly remembered foundations of what we've previously experienced. These memories are so frequently double edged ones, simultaneously telling us who we are and who we are not. What we can and what we cannot be. What we are capable of achieving and what we are not capable of achieving. In this way memories can be both a blessing and a curse, the very act of definition placing a limitation. Inverting the commas, inserting the closed brackets and full stops.

We cannot avoid having 'agreeable and painful memories' they are the psychological outcomes, the sifted residue of every experience we've ever had. Well, perhaps not the original experience itself, but more the emotional responses we've subsequently had to that original experience. Falling off a bicycle and cutting ones leg, is an undoubtedly painful experience. We make this sense of personal injury more acute if we subsequently self-recriminate and punish ourselves over a perceived personal failing, or remonstrate internally or actually with someone else whom we see as the cause of our emotional pain. All our feelings, whether agreeable or not, are twofold; they have a physical and a mental companion. The Buddha referred to these as the twin arrows that cause us to feel pained; first by the event and then our response to it.

Its worth noting that our emotional reactions to an event, whether we felt hurt or pleased, is often the only thing we end up remembering. These subjective recollections based on our feelings, are seldom about the objective facts of the original situation at all. Retrospectively we self-justify how we have responded by turning these feelings into a incontrovertible hard fact, where even the the irrational can be rationalised.

Imagine there is a friend whom you work with. They appear to be evading your company. Don't stop to talk to you, turns away or ignores you when they pass in the office corridor. It would be very easy to feel hurt and to take it personally, to start assuming what the motives are behind this behaviour. Perhaps you've done something to upset them, or maybe they want to dump you as a friend because they think you're boring, or they're just trying to further their career and see you as holding them back – after all they were always quite selfish and looked after No1. It doesn't take long to actively cultivated a dislike, if not a hatred for them. Then one day, they confide to you that they've been struggling to come to terms with having a quite serious illness. Suddenly this fact puts everything you've experienced into a different perspective. Your assumptions we're not based on fact at all. They came more out of personal negativity, weak self-esteem or mild paranoia, which perhaps now you can take responsibility for – and rightly feel ashamed of. There was no rational basis at all for what was assumed.

The first of our verses refers to two events that these 'agreeable or painful memories' emerge in response too – 'what I have done or would have wished to do in the past.' In other words, what we wanted to happen, and what actually happened – the dream and the rather more mundane reality. Sometimes what is dreamed of and desired, does actually happen. We generally find that an agreeable experience, and this causes us to feel to some degree of personal pleasure or happiness. Sometimes what is dreamed of and desired, doesn't happen. Mostly we find this disagreeable, and it causes us to feel pain, disillusion and unhappiness. There is the desire, then what actually happens. Our response will be coloured by to what degree our original desire was fulfilled or not. If we find ourselves experiencing huge amounts of emotional suffering, then the source of it will rarely be found in a single event, but in our general expectations of life. Our desires and cravings for a specific, pleasurable outcome.

' The tragedy is not that we don't get what we want, but that we do get what we want, and then we're stuck with it, and very often we find that it's not what we wanted at all.'1

Counter intuitive as what Sangharakshita is saying may sound, he is pointing us towards two really fundamental human delusions - that we think we know what we want, and believe reality can be conformed to our desires. Every time we do get what we want, our confidence in this delusive tendency is revived and reinvigorated. Even if the number of times we're disappointed with the result, or not getting what we want vastly outnumber the times we do. What is it that would keep a gambler betting on racing horses when they lose nine times out of ten - can it just be hope springing eternally?

A child might go to bed every day ardently wishing for a wonderful new toy for their birthday or for Christmas. A starving man in a drought stricken country might kneel to his gods, fervently praying and wishing for rain and food. A woman might not be able to start her day before she's checked what her stars say on an astrology website. A young couple wanting good weather for their wedding, keep looking at the Met Office advance weather forecast for reassurance. We travel hopefully, but rarely confidently. All sorts of people, from vastly different backgrounds or cultures, act on the basis of superstitions, they carry talismans, wear lucky clothes or shoes, or perform certain ritual behaviours in an attempt to determine or fix a wished for outcome. We can hold a strong belief in the power of our thoughts, that the depth of our heartfelt desire can determine the conclusion we want. We can do this without fully realising its what we are doing. I certainly have had a version of this view right into my adult life. Ironically, after all my years of wishing and hoping and still not getting what I wanted, it wasn't the inadequacy of wishing where I placed the blame, but on myself and the inadequate feebleness of my wishing. This contributed in the long term to the cultivation of a view of myself as someone 'who never got what he wanted.'

I let go
I turn aside

I put down

what I have been

or would have wished to be in the past

1 - Taken from Peace Is A Fire, By Sangharakshita , published by Windhorse Publications 1995

ARTICLES ~ I Let Go - No 8

THREE FOLD NATURES

From time to time I decide to sift through my material possessions with the intention of trimming them down. This desire to physically throw out, give away, or recycle some aspect of my extended family of stuff and things, is familiar territory. When I was younger I lived for several years in the bedsit land that spreads in terraced braids across North London. If you've ever lived in, or visited, a single person bedsit, you'll know that space is at a high premium. There'll be a bed, sink, cooker, wardrobe, armchair and not much else. I had to live with the minimum possessions the room could hold. As an avid reader and music enthusiast I regularly had to prune my bookshelves and record collections, before I ran out of floor or shelf space. It seemed the only way to manage this gradual acquisitive accretion. Unless,of course, I preferred to live with books and records stacked and strewn across the floor like an endlessly shifting tide of scum. I didn't, but some people do.

The motives for this regular purging were mostly practical ones. I knew my interests were often fleeting, passing intoxications. Basically, just personal fads. Much of what I read I knew I'd never read again. The fast moving trends in my musical tastes meant that artists I was passionate about one month, I'd be indifferent towards the next. So to some extent this pruning, refined and adjusted my possessions to keep them up to date. Aligning them with where my current enthusiasms were. It was in the nature of this craving for the new, that it satiated my hunger only for a while. I became used to the shifting impermanence of my musical appetites. As long as I could buy myself a thrill, then I was happy.

This restless craving has been frequently matched by another- a craving for pastures new. The desire to find a place where I could be free from dissatisfaction,disappointment and boredom. To date I've moved house or town not once or twice, but nearly two dozens of times. Only in the process of moving, as the boxes of packed up belongings mounts, that you notice exactly how much you own. Do I own enough to fill a small white van,once, twice or thrice,or is it now measured in the number of transit or full scale removal vans? To move is stressful because of the practical as well as psychological logistics. The difficulties in relocating the external aura of our possessions mirrors that for ourselves. After all, we are packing up and relocating our whole extended identity. As this cardboard haystack gradually fills up the removal van, it can feel like its getting psychically heavier. As though our spirit and ability to be free to spontaneously up sticks and just move, is being seriously hampered by having to cart our beloved possessions along behind us.

We tend to accumulate possessions in situations where we feel settled. Its an essential part of putting down roots - when our belongings find a place to belong too. They fix us to a particular place and way of living. As we filter through what we own, we are bound to review or weigh up who we've been and who we currently are. Should we keep that book – is it time we jettisoned that gift we've never used, but sentimentally still hold onto? We instinctively understand that we could discard forever all the residual memorabilia of who we once were. There are other things perhaps we'd like psychologically to put behind us, but can't. To be rid of the objects that remind us of a difficult period in our lives, to erase all evidence that the pain of it ever existed – might be a seen as a first step in getting over it.

Our possessions are like exhibits in a museum that holds all our past life experiences, a physical memory bank. A person, a place, a snapshot image of us – enshrined in a book, record, picture, ornament, piece of furniture or clothes. These define, but also confine who we are, or can be. Today, the size and range of what I own, I can sometimes find imprisoning. The sense of ownership feeling oppressive. Its as if I'm existentially being held under water. Drowning under the weight of my physical possessions. No longer able to swim freely or unencumbered. Over the years the number of my dependants has grown obese through regular feeding, clothing and emotional support. A drastic diet is nearly always called for.

This weightiness is felt on a gut level. I really don't need them resting so heavily on my shoulders. If I visualise myself as being free, I see myself throwing of clothes as I run naked across an open field. As if I'm casting off all the cares, concerns and obligations my world and I place upon myself. Leaving everything scattered behind me as I run free of all physical, mental or spiritual possessions. This visionary image pre-dates my life as a practising Buddhist, which in a way was begun as a practical way of actuating it. The Buddha himself, described the state of Enlightenment, as feeling like a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as though he'd put down a burden he'd been carrying, How to be truly free, is a question that often drives humanities search for meaning and purpose.

These days, as a 'good Buddhist' I frequently question myself about the whys and wherefores, of whether I should really be owning so much? Wouldn't I feel so much better if I was free of it all? and think that I would. These things, however, are never quite as simple as one might first think. If anything the act of throwing away is the easy bit. What is difficult is examining and scrutinising what ones reasons for doing so are. What was your volition and motive in doing this? Our motives are generally either mixed or conflicted, which is OK, just as long as we know they are. The degree of clear-headedness and purity in our motivation to take action,will define how spiritually effective our renunciation will be. It is, therefore, hard to dispose of our possessions in a vague, superficial or absent minded way. To consciously throw something away, put it down and walk away from it, is a deliberated act.

Tradition says that when the Buddha left behind his princely life of wealth and privilege, he took nothing with him. He let go of owning anything other than the most basic of possessions required to survive - a robe and a bowl. He instinctively knew he had to do this if he was to achieve what he wanted to spiritually. This 'going forth' as its traditionally called, into a homeless, possession-less life became the prerequisite act, an essential foundation for the future spiritual progress of his disciples. It has become synonymous with the beginning of a persons aspiration for liberation.

My past life, my present life, the history of my desires and attachments are preserved in all my material possessions. They represent outwardly who I am. Who I am has a threefold nature – there is the real true me - the me I desire to be - and the me I want the world to see. The Vidyavajra that others see, ranges across a spectrum from the authentic to the artificial. My possessions are hence also a mixture of those that truly represent me and my interests, and those that are window dressing. Contemporary Western consumer culture exploits this threefold nature of - who we currently are - what we'd like to be - and how we want others to see us – in order to get us to buy things. We buy because of the need for one brief moment to transcend our limitations. Quite often we are trying to overcome the dullness of our poor self image. To possess something we imagine will complete who we want to be, or be seen as. To have it - is to be it. This is not just an expression of our individuality, but the living out of a worldly form of liberation. I am free because I can buy whatever I want.

For this to work, one hasn't to care too much about what maybe the exploitative origins in distant lands, where much of what we buy is made. One person's liberty can often come at a cost to someone else's, far far away. Its rare for any material possession to have an origin entirely free of some veins of exploitation, guilt, embarrassment or some level of distaste or regret. Our wealth and need for self-expression can therefore carry with it something uneasy and unethical lurking in the background. So if we can let go and be free of the need to fulfil the craving and desire to buy it can be quite uplifting and insightful, even an ethical release.

Ajahn Brahm, defines freedom in a different way to this, one that is important to our reflections on letting go;~

'Freedom is being content to be where you are.

Prison is wanting to be somewhere else.

The Free World is the world experienced by one who is content.

The real freedom is freedom from desire, never freedom of desire.' 1

So being free to have anything we want, can have its origins in a deep seated, even unconscious discontentment. We often don't care what we do in order to get some relief from this, just so long as we get it. We are imprisoned by our need to be someone else other than who we actually are. So looked at from the perspective of freedom, the process of letting go as outlined in the verses, are pointing towards a way to liberate us from the compulsive following of our desires. First, when we put something down,we are saying we have the intention at least, to be content to stay put, and be with who we are. Secondly, we turn our attention away from any desire or attachment to being anyone else or anywhere other than right here. Thirdly, we conclude by discovering we have developed a contentment with who we actually are, and are no longer pulled all over the place by our desires and attachments. So we have here - setting the intention to be free, the desire to find a way to be free, and to be really free. To put down, to turn aside, to let go.

So finally, we have come to look at our verses, and what is the first thing we notice about them? Well, it is significant that each individual verse is prefaced by the same three phases – I let go – I turn aside – I put down. It would be a mistake perhaps to say these are sequential in how they should be read. We don't necessarily first let go, then turn aside and finally put down. As I've previously suggested, the opposite is experientially more true - that first we put things down, then we learn to turn our attention aside from them, and somewhere further down this road we realise we've let go of them. This is just my way of viewing and couching this. It might equally true be to say that letting go, turning aside and putting down are threefold aspects of one progressive cycle. One we go around and around. Perhaps spiralling upward with each circuit of putting down, turning aside and letting go. It may be the same impulse 'to let go' that is driving it all the way through, but it gradually permeates ever more widely and comprehensively.

Currently I view these threefold stages of letting go, as linked to the Buddha's Threefold Path, of Wisdom, Meditation and Ethics. I put down, seems an ethical impulse to stop doing something because it is in some way spiritually detrimental. It's weighing too heavily upon our spirits. We may not yet fully see the wisdom underpinning this, but we feel its ethical imperative nonetheless. But that compulsion alone is not going to be sufficient. Habit will keep drawing, if not sucking, us back into picking up what we've only recently put down. One has to keep turning aside ones gaze and mental attention from dwelling upon it once more. This requires a kind but vigilant awareness, a disciplined form of mindful attention. Something that is primarily cultivated and deepened through Meditation. This practice of turning ones attention away time after time, will gradually wear out and rub away all trace, and erase the root mechanism of our original attachment.

We leave no track marks in this epic journey. Its a journey that is curiously one of self-forgetting. A form of deliberate amnesia created by repeatedly turning your face away from the ardour of ones love for a thing. Until the ardour vanishes. When these things finally dip well below the conscious radar, when we've truly forgotten our attachment, then we might truly see that we've let go. Perhaps there is real wisdom in this seeing. Though our former love or attachment may still be surrounded by an aura of nostalgia, it is now seen for what it was, and more importantly for what it was not. The wisdom, lies in the seeing through. The process of letting go concludes when we can see right through our former love and attachment to something. What was once seen as a solid tangibly visible object of attention, is now seen as a figment of our fevered imagination. Seeing through the self-conjured nature of our love-filled attachments, is true wisdom.

The moment I start to consider throwing possessions away, is the moment I feel my attachment to them most strongly. This is often the moment,at the first hurdle, that my whole intention of putting things down starts to wobble. In order say, to make the process of disposing of redundant books easier, I've taken to making several piles to represent the full spectrum and degree of my attachment. Starting on one side with the stuff 'I definitely will not bin', the next being 'I would, if I was brave enough', then 'I ought to, but wont' then 'maybe, but not just yet' and ending in 'definitely wont, these are too precious' When these sort of responses emerge my intention to have a thorough clear out, falters badly. If I don't develop some firm resolve to see through my intention, the whole exercise will be a waste of time. I'm not turning aside from my attachment, I'm experiencing it and cuddling up to it, like a teddy I'm still rather too fond of.

This is not a new, nor that unique a response. It's not just me who experiences attachments, we all do, Our becoming attached is part and parcel of our coming into closer relationship with anyone or anything. The issue is really whether we can use this as a means of gaining personal insight or not. To create some distance from our attachments so we have some sense of there being a choice whether to respond or not. Otherwise we simply become ever more tightly enmeshed with and bonded to them? We all need to eat food in order to survive, to have energy for all the things we like to do. We can also enjoy and love good food, without it necessarily becoming a problem. There is no point when living in a world of pain, in prematurely eschewing the little pleasures that life can bring us. But when our love of food becomes more akin to an obsession, or a compulsive behaviour, causing us to balloon in weight and size. When love of food makes us become dangerously obese, then something has gone seriously wrong with this pursuit of pleasure.

Freedom to desire, to buy whatever I want when I want it, will not make me permanently healthy and happy. It may well bring about the opposite. Overtime, my youthful enjoyment of what was new and invigorating in popular music, began to lack depth. It drifted from being a simple pleasurable pastime into something I had to do, no matter what. Art that is genuinely new and innovative, can quite easily slip into being merely novelty. Though thrill inducing it may be thin beer, with no aesthetic life or enjoyment beyond its initial effects. Eventually I did lose not just my perspective, but also my desire and enjoyment of music for quite some time.

When I first became a Buddhist, I mistakenly thought I'd have to forgo enjoyments such as poplar music. However, this side of Enlightenment, when we are not yet free of our desires and attachments, and the depth of our practice is still too shallow to replace more worldly pleasures, we do still need them when things get emotionally difficult. We can do so in full knowledge that that's what we are doing. As Sangharakshita said regarding times when we encounter difficult mental states:~

'When all else fails, distract yourself' 2

1 - Taken from Who Ordered This Truckload Of Dung? by Ajahn Brahm, Published by Wisdom Publishing

2 - taken from Peace Is A Fire by Sangharakshita, Published by Windhorse Publishing.