DIARY 112 - At home with the goldfish

I took this week off work. Originally I wanted to take a weeks solitary retreat in October. But then work restricted October leave, and suggested anyone wanting time off take it in September. After asking around various venues nothing quite fitted the time I had available. I adjusted my expectations, deciding to stay at home, on not quite a holiday, but by no means a solitary either. Jnanasalin was away during this period for about five days, so I had a chance of being alone at least some of the time. The week before, I heard of a vacancy at a solitary retreat venue, but by then I was mentally readjusted to being 'at home'.

Abbey House during the day,at least in my half of it, is relatively quiet, with few phone calls. Theoretically, it seemed it possible to have a degree of undisturbed space for reflection, practice, reading, writing, painting or just generally hanging about. I remained open to it being all, some or none of these. With Jnanasalin's return and adapting to the physical demands of a new job, happening at around the same time, I've found myself operating a lot in a responsive, adaptive mode. I've felt as if I was out of focus, a bit blurred at the edges, spiritually speaking.

As it turned out I did no more meditation practice than I normally do, if anything slightly less. I read daily from the Digha Nikaya. For a few days I was writing a Shabda report ( Shabda is an internal publication of the Western Buddhist Order, where members write in about there lives, thoughts and practice.) Writing this began turning my mind to exactly what my semi-solitary reflections were going to focus on. It was clear I wanted to deepen my understanding and practice of Kalyana Mitrata ( spiritual friendship ) in some way. I couldn't locate a specific Sutta, or commentary, that went into this in any more depth than I'd already imbibed or intuitively grasped.

In the end, I came back to an old favorite -The Four Samgrahavastus - often referred to, perhaps a little too grandly as The Means Of Unification of the Sangha. For four days I spent a few hours each day reflecting and writing on these. I didn't look into the specific detail of my practice, but explored widely how one practices the Samgrahavastus, to understand better how they could benefit both oneself and the Sangha. The Samgrahavastus are - Generosity - Kindly or Affectionate Speech - Beneficial Activity - Exemplification. Through my reflections it became clear how fundamental generosity was, as the essential underpinning to all the other Samgrahvastus'. The other three are either a natural outcome of practicing generosity;in that through practicing generosity you would be kind and affectionate for instance. or the resulting fruit of it; in that others would benefit from it, or would be a quality you would exemplify.

The Four Samgahavastus are sometimes referred to as the altruistic activity of a Bodhisattva ( a being who vows to save all sentient beings before accepting full enlightenment themselves ) This act of delay, to put other peoples needs before your own, is the ultimate generous impulse. So this unsurprisingly brought me back to a central tenet of our Order - The Bodhisattva Ideal, its something I don't always readily recognise that I practice. After all, I'm not, ultimately, practicing Kalyana Mitrata for my benefit at all. In looking at myself, I acknowledge that I'm already willing to drop what I'm doing to make myself available to others, if I'm able. Supporting others seems a central, almost instinctual, practice for me, and even through this recent 'out of focus' period, what I've been doing is being a stable, supportive presence for others benefit. This may largely unconscious competence, but there does appear to be a reliable consistency to how I am, that others appear to find valuable, and have said so on a number of occasions to me.

What resulted from these 'at home' reflections, is that there doesn't appear to be anything I need to specifically add to what I currently do. But, I could get more behind what I do quite naturally, and deepen that purely by making it more consciously a practice. To seize opportunities to be generous, in the moment of them. Though generosity, as an activity, doesn't necessarily have to be seen at all, nor does there have to be an explanation or reason for it, either. It just needs expressing as a natural efflorescence of being human. But once I set out to practice this, the first thing I encounter are the current boundaries, those moments where I stifle the impulse, or self-censor it. So to keep this intention alive, and those boundaries permeable,will be a practice in itself. I'll need to remain alert. I could easily switch off to it and settle back into the usual groove of behaviour. To bring this generosity of spirit more consciously to mind, or my intention will easily evaporate.

By Friday, if I was a broiled chicken, I think I'd be described as a little spiritually overcooked. I began to find myself flagging, if not strongly resisting doing any further practice. A period of absorption was required, if not demanded, of me, so I took my foot off the accelerator and chilled out. As if knowing this, my room in the house was instantly surrounded by external activity and clatter, as numerous people appeared to prepare windows for repair or paint. I was no longer entirely alone during the day. My only way to escape this was to go out, to stroll, shop or cook. Cooking is a great way to be generous towards my community, in my case by preparing more elaborate meals than I would normally do, or making cakes. I can view cooking for the community as simply a duty one does as a member of it, maybe even as a chore at times. Its also an opportunity to give in a very practical way, meeting an obvious need, one which also delights and pleases others.

Its all too easy to become over preoccupied with my apparent needs, my need for time and space, my need to write or paint, as if my enjoyment of life truly depended on it. I often neglect the easy satisfaction to be gained from generosity. There is a fulfillment, a completeness and calm to be gained from it. It's as if all the angst ridden striving for self-expression is far too obsessively driven to really give us what we want - which is to be restfully at peace with ourselves and the world. Rather than settling the mud in the water, it repeatedly stirs it up. Essentially generosity is not an act of self-expression, it moves us away from a completely ego centred existence, in the direction of self-transcendence. The intensity of that self-centred view melts away once one begins responding to desires to help, to give to others in often quite astoundingly simple ways. Generosity doesn't have to be a big deal, in fact its probably better kept low key, otherwise ones ego is likely to want to steal the lifeforce of your new pet goldfish.

FEATURE 31 - Gyorgy Ligeti

Like much of Ligeti's work 'Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes' has a premise and execution that has such a barmy surreal charm to it, you can't help but smirk as you listen and watch it unravel. He wasn't entirely serious was he? He must have had his tongue firmly in his cheek most of the time, simultaneously goading both serious classicists and serious philistines to fulminate in their respective corners. Whether you consider it music or not, seems kinda irrelevant,as an event it does seem to entertain and engage your attention regardless of however you choose to designate it You gotta admire the sheer gall of the guy.

FEATURE 30 - 9/11 - The Falling Man

As the anniversary of 9/11 comes around once more there is no more poignant visual reminder than this picture of a man falling from the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Channel 4 chose to rebroadcast a programme called The Falling Man, to mark this sad date, http://www.channel4.com/programmes/911-the-falling-man/4od#2934914 which is well worth viewing. The films of people falling from the tower were so emotionally charged and visceral, they moved me to tears. Imaginatively you place oneself in their position, cut off on the top floor of a burning building, increasingly heat and smoke about to reach you, to cruelly bring your life to an end. You are trapped. At that point what would we decide ? To stay and surrender ourselves to the looming conflagration - or to take what control we have left over how we are to die, jump into the air and fall thousands of feet, hitting the streets, as one person described it, 'with a thudding sound like a sack of potatoes.'

As the 10th Anniversary looms closer, the growing clamor of conspiracy theories are in danger of drowning out how this was fundamentally a human tragedy. Thousands of innocent Americans died in a matter of hours in an horrific manner, which should never be lost sight of. But there is also the tragic background to this event - of the suicide hijackers themselves, who conceived this plan to reek revenge for the suffering their own ordinary people, on the US government and its people, whom they believe are responsible for supporting this oppression. When conspiracy theorists high jack 9/11 for there own purposes, all this gets lost in their aberrant conjecture.

I have been quite disturbed and shocked by some of these theories -that the US government would knowingly sacrifice thousands of their own people in order to bring about a war for geopolitical advantage. It's as if two airplanes hitting two of the tallest towers in the world, causing massive causalities and finally structural collapse, done purely as an act of revenge, is not inhumane and unbelievable enough. We have to give a more reasonable explanation that, bizarrely, becomes even more fantastical. Were it to be true, then two planes hitting the Twin Towers, was the minor abomination against humanity.

We choose to believe what we like. I fundamentally cannot believe, or get a handle on, the Machiavellian nature of these conspiracy theories. I don't believe governments have that much forethought, or the ability to foresee outcomes, or control events in this way. I think they are far too incompetent, and gaff prone to pull this audacious sort of thing off. Governments are usually focused so much on short term popularity, and getting re-elected, they can't think beyond the confines of their current term in power. There may be cause to doubt or be sceptical about the story as they present it to us. But I'll wager that the reasons are more about them, in a panic, trying to hurriedly cover someones back, or the secret services strategic incompetence, than covering up a grand abdominal plan.

The events surrounding the Two Towers are unique, its not normal, it doesn't conform to reason. People do strange, odd, even barmy sounding things in the face of such a cataclysm. The conspiracy theories attempt to give the unreasonableness of this act of violence, a unreasonable reason. There has to be an overarching reason, it can't just remain incomprehensible. Its one way of trying to come to terms with its horror. Some people too readily believe these theories because they reinforce existing prejudices - that the US is the source of all evil - in the face of which we should be vigilant and sceptical, in order to oppose their satanic works. What I find somewhat incompatible with this standpoint, is that folk hear the need to be sceptical, and then abandon their scepticism to believe the sceptics, lock stock and barrel i.e. entirely uncritically. What they say becomes the unvarnished truth, simply because they're defacto -Not The Government - they must be telling it how it is. We don't even know who these conspiracy theorists are,where they are coming from, what private agenda or vested interest they might have. How selective they've been with the evidence, what has been deliberately ignored, or left out? How balanced is their judgement?

In this age of cynicism, yes, we do need to be suspicious about a governments motives, and the spin they put on things, but we also need to remain suspicious about the motives and spin of alternative viewpoints. Otherwise, we'll be making judgements based not on the broad basis of established facts, but on speculative conjecture, suppositions, assumptions, or worse than that blind prejudice. Hitler was once a lone voice of truth.

PRACTICE 4 - Learning to go with the grain

Quentin Crisp was a man of great wit and occasional clear perception. His well honed remarks cutting cut right through any cant or sentimentality around a subject, piercing the truth of the matter. That the rapier like speed of this might tend towards waspish insensitivity, was a failing. He wasn't always a pleasant man to be around. But we all can so easily get carried away with the cleverness of our wit at someone elses expense, that the hurt given to the object of it becomes overshadowed by the self- intoxicating delight of the retort. Humour without the barbs being extracted first, is something I've been very prone to in the past. On occasions something still pops out of my mouth that brings regret and shame about my speech in its wake. Someone recently asked me to explain what something was, and instead of giving them a clear explanation, I responded with a sarcastic parody. They asked for facts and what I gave them was a soured opinion. It highlighted that I still have a little jaundiced devil that likes to come out for an airing from time to time.

However, what brought dear Quentin to mind wasn't this, but a particular aphorism of his. It concerns how he came to terms with other peoples response to his effeminacy - "the time comes for everybody when he has to do deliberately what he used to do by mistake" - for Quentin he saw this as the only way to get 'the joke' of people laughing at or mocking his appearance, onto his 'own terms'. Though this obviously had a defensive advantage, it also developed a seemingly unshakable confidence in who he was. Quentin Crisp would never have been seen dead joining a gay support group, or any group for that matter, for him belonging to a group was an act of self betrayal. This is why he was, who he was, in some depth. For him if we were here for any purpose at all, it was to fully embody who we are, to pull back the blanket of self limitation and conformity to uncover what our individual 'style' looked, smelt and tasted like - "ask yourself, 'if there were no praise, and no blame, who would I be then?' Then you'll know who you are, and what your style is."

Knowing deeply who one is and being firmly confident in that, is a state not that easy to achieve. We can misperceive ourselves, lack clarity or honesty, or simply be mislead by what we think we are doing. Arrogance can often be mistaken for confidence, and passivity be mistaken for humility. Though Quentin Crisp habitually drifted towards arrogance and rarely countenanced humility, the origin of his confidence was undoubtedly born out of real pain, from regularly having to face adversity. We all tend to learn this way, to find out what sort of person we are through wrestling with our character and the circumstances bequeathed us, often from birth. If self-awareness is present this can be instructive, if it is absent we can often be blown unconsciously hither and thither by the eight worldly winds of praise & blame, gain & loss, fame & infamy and happiness & despair. We often waste our energy and initiative, seeking resolution to our internal suffering by attempting to alter ourselves or the external world to fit our preferences. This frequently sets us at odds with the natural grain of reality, or even ourselves, and we all know how difficult it is to plane against the grain of a piece of wood. We rarely try to do the opposite - to go with the grain. Perhaps that seems far too easy, it couldn't possibly work, could it? Isn't there a danger here of accepting the unacceptable? Yet lets not lose sight of the fact that to plane simultaneously with the grain of our own character and that of reality is a state of integration that's a precondition for Enlightenment. This isn't really about self-acceptance, but alignment with how things really are with ourselves and reality.

That state of Enlightenment can seem so lofty and unachievable, but all journeys begin somewhere. Quentin's little aphorism points towards a very practical starting point - to do 'deliberately' what we've previously done, perhaps not by mistake, but certainly more from personal instinct. You begin by noticing the things you do automatically without thinking, what you do from preference because its of innate unquestionable value to you, positive skillful habits that you may have always cultivated, perhaps even before becoming a Buddhist - the things that in essence we've always put personal faith in. Well, Quentin Crisp suggests these are what you should cultivate more consciously, to plane with the positive grain, the 'style' of ones own character, not against it. I do emphasize here that its the positive skillful things that should be done more 'deliberately', we shouldn't encourage unethical behaviour for instance. Such negative unskilful habits at best should be seen as 'flaws' in the wood. If done with kindness and skill, even such apparent unethical 'flaws' can be eventually be worn smooth and integrated by practice, bringing a uniquely individual grain and patterning to the final polished finish.

In the earlier decades of my life I expended far too much time and effort in trying to be something I either wanted to be, or thought I should be, but in either case I was not. But, to an extent, even these repeated efforts eventually taught me two things - what I was not - and how futile and painful such efforts were. Though one should develop and acquire positive personal behaviours, one has also to recognise somethings are so hard wired into how we are that changing them might take a lifetime or more, if ever. Would that be a good use of our energy, effort and time? Though its good to know where our weak areas are, there is greater benefit to be had from identifying and working from and with ones strengths. Otherwise its like constantly trying to stay upright and balanced on a wobbly bridge.

I know, for instance, not only how much I've benefited from kalyana mitrata (spiritual friendship) personally, but also how a natural sense of empathy,and wanting to be helpful, even if that's only in being a good listening ear, are all things I do quite instinctively. Lately I've been giving further reflection to how I might take this aspect of my spiritual practice deeper. I'm not clear, as yet what form this might take, but it will inevitable mean giving more of myself in someway. This would be like rubbing nourishing polish into wood, or applying varnish to deepen and bring out its inherent grain. Somehow I need to stretch myself, to test the muscles of this innate tendency in order to deliberately strengthen it. To get, not 'the joke', but myself more fully aligned with the reality of my own terms.

DIARY 111 - Sleepy Hollow

Don't understand particularly why, but this week I was tired. It wasn't that work was harder or more grueling, if anything it was a bit on the light side. I slept badly on Wednesday night, waking half cold and half sweating at 2am, and failed to get back to sleep after, as is my usual pattern. Now, I have these evenings, but normally I can easily work through it. By Thursday evening, however,I was mentally functioning on low wattage. This carried over into Friday morning, though I'd slept better overnight, and felt OK when I got up, as soon as my bum hit the meditation cushion it was obvious this was not going to be high quality concentration. It had all the qualities of watching paint dry, in that not much was happening very very slowly. After three quarters of an hour I'd only got to the second stage of the Mindfulness of Breathing. Time had flown by, but not in an exalted focused state of mind, but in a fog filled absence of clarity and awareness. Oh well, the day could only get better, I thought. Extreme tiredness causes me to partially close down communication. I can become very quiet and withdrawn, my interactions struggling under a weighty blanket of lethargy. Things perked up a little later on, perhaps the looming relief of the weekend helped lift my energy and spirits.

The weekend has been lovely, so far. Last night we had a delightful meal out at La Margarita, our favorite Italian restaurant in Cambridge. This was to celebrate missed birthdays, Jnanasalin's ordination, and starting new jobs all round. In the morning we took our usual walk into town to shop and have a coffee in the Cafe Nero in Heffer's bookshop,followed by a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum to view an exhibition called Endless Forms - Charles Darwin, Natural Sciences and the Visual Arts. I was quite excited by the idea of the exhibition which was to explore how the idea of Evolution affected the Arts. I found the exhibition a major disappointment. It took a very limited and somewhat academic perspective on its subject matter. But this is Cambridge after all, what do you expect? I would guess the curator is more a scientist than an artist. The overall impression it left was the effect of evolution on the Arts was mainly in subject matter, in a prevalence of paintings featuring apes,exotic birds and dramatic depictions of geological formations. There was a cursory ramble through the Pre-Raphealites and Impressionism without clearly stating what the influence was, and that's as far as it went. The exhibition ventured not out of the safety of its nineteenth century haven.

There is, to my mind, a larger range of possibilities to be explored, as the evolutionary idea filters through into the Twentieth century. Utopian movements like De Stael, Futurism and The Bauhaus, even late 20th Century Minimalism are shot through with raising humanity to new purer heights. Once we accepted the idea of evolution as being essentially true, we appeared to want to take hold of, and control our future destiny that went far beyond any Millennial or Post World War effect. Though it would be controversial, a look at fascistic and communist art movements in Germany,Italy and Russia in the Thirties, might have been revealing. Darwin's idea has its artistic and political down side too, if deliberately misinterpreted or taken incorrectly. There is also modern process orientated art,or digital interactive computer based work that evolves and learns from what it did previously, even the work of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy owes an aesthetic debt to Darwin. The exhibition seemed to barely scratch the surface of its chosen subject matter in so many ways, it seemed positively pedestrian.

Jnanasalin and I watched a fascinating programme of Channel 4 called Trantasia. It was all about a beauty pageant in the USA for those who are male to female Transgender. It was often funny in a touching way, whilst remaining, for me, essentially perplexing. It is really hard for anyone to grasp how difficult things are for them. As a gay man I can empathise with a sense of always being on the outside, but I can't really know how it feels to be a woman in a male body, or visa-versa. I've known a few transgender people, and this programme didn't particularly remind me of them. It was after all in the US, where there are, apparently, no holds barred. The difficulties and desires remain essentially the same - the ardent wish to be seen and to 'pass' as a women, and the extreme levels of surgery and finance they go to to transform there external appearance to more accurately represent their internal experience. What I found perplexing was that quite often their view of what constitutes the feminine is so resolutely a masculine viewpoint i.e. big tits, velvet soft skin,voluptuous lips, shrouded, if not concealed, beneath faces heavily plastered with cosmetics. This is the most archetypal of male perspectives of what is womanly. There were a few who achieved an ordinary degree of femininity, but the majority ended up as uber-femes, and looked for all the world like very bad drag queens. Now drag queens generally send up, not femininity necessarily, but the masculine view of it, its part a homage and part a camp parody of this. There wasn't even the merest hint of irony in these transgendered beauty queens, they either had very low self esteem or an extreme self belief - both of which seemed to have somewhat lost touch with reality.



There was a view that the pageant was going to help them become more acceptable to the outside world. However, at one photo shoot in the streets of Las Vegas, some of the contestants couldn't stop themselves from thrusting their hormonal crotches and silicon based bosoms in the faces of a bemused group of men, who looked collectively embarrassed and bemused. After all, no self respective woman would behave like this, unless she was a street hooker. It seemed to do the opposite of making them seem more acceptable, some of the contestants themselves were disgusted by this OTT, rather slutty behaviour. Overall there was a sort of feisty camaraderie, but also a confused grasping for something which was going to be everlastingly unobtainable, which left me feeling quite sad.

FEATURE 29 - Musick Non Stop Electro Pop

There is currently a style revival of eighties electro-pop going on. The electronics being sparse, stripped bare of any pretense of being 'real' instruments that could be plucked, banged or twanged, this music is deliberately tinny and unaffectedly artificial. In the eighties this brought the vocalist to the fore providing human warmth, to contrast with the grey coolness of the musical backing. This was the era of richly toned, if not melodramatic, vocalists such as Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet, Phil Oakey and Marc Almond. In this regard the current electro-pop revival falls short, in that the singers are distinctly not in that league, varying from singers whose vocal ability and range is polished - Little Boots - to dull and out of tune - La Roux. This can mean the vocal interplay with the electronics frequently falls on its heavily made up face.

LITTLE BOOTS
Her debut album 'Hands' bursts into galloping, foot stomping, high energy life on tracks such as 'Remedy','New in Town' and 'Stuck on Repeat'. Sorry it doesn't fit my blog better, You Tube have altered their set formats.



Her abilities as a tune smith are undoubtedly well honed, though lyrically she veers far to often for my liking into a banality you hoped had died there last breath with the demise of Stock Aitken & Waterman. The album is strangled by the hands of its production values, making arrangements fussy and overladen with layers of detailing that get buried in the accumulated sediment. A quality of electro-pop established by its progenitors Kraftwerk is a sharp and crisp clarity to the overall sound. Hopefully in future she'll do more performances as minimal as this one on 'Later with..' This is a pure delight, the song 'Meddle' is the undoubted highlight of her album, a quirky beat, accompanied by a beautifully articulated melody and lyric, this is a stunner.



Vocally Little Boots in the mode of Kylie and Madonna, in that she's not particularly an outstanding vocalist, and can easily bland into the indistinguishable gaggle of 'noughties' female singers. Musical references and straight steals of electronic beats and riffs abound, so she's not breaking any new boundaries here either. The duet with Phil Oakey on 'Symmetry' is a nod towards someone for whom she owes more than a pound or two of her royalties too.

LA ROUX
Poor La Roux, undoubtedly she leads the electro-pop eighties revival, complete with outrageous haircut and clothes. She also best captures the musical style, particularly on her hit 'Bulletproof'.



This is spot on, and here at least the production values are correct. If only her vocals were up to it, on her eponymous album these are frequently not just feeble but excruciatingly off key in the worst karaoke tradition. She should be severely restrained from ever singing in falsetto ever again as on 'I'm not your toy' or 'In for the kill'. In contrast to 'Little Boots' the tunes are often quite flimsy affairs. This can be forgiven, overlooked or even transcended if you have the lungs and larynx to brazen it out, but faced with La Roux's major Achilles heal, you're left with too many songs that rarely transcend the poverty of melody. The best of the bunch are the tracks Colourless Colour', 'Tigerlily' and 'Quicksand'. Here is a truly awful live performance of 'I'm not your toy' if your stomach can last more than a minute into this, then award yourself a gold medal.

QUOTATION MARKS 28

You have to really wallow in it

before you know it's muck

SANGHARAKSHITA

PRACTICE 4 - Input & Output

INPUT

Over the last few weeks I stopped listening to music. Well, to be honest, I had to stop listening to a specific piece of music - the debut album from Florence & the Machine, called - Lungs. Now it's a good album, but no more addictive than countless others I've owned. It is, however, new music, and I've never been able to resist the fresh sense of discovery as you become acquainted with an album, as the artists style and distinctive way with song structure emerges. In the past this was something of an addiction, constantly listening to a CD until I'd know every nook and cranny of it, then there was a brief pause before I sought another musical kick. I'm more discerning these days, and have some understanding of how this cycle of craving for musical innovation disguised a whole load of dukkha that I was completely unaware of until I became a Buddhist. Music still remains a great source of pleasure, one that I get a form of life enhancing delight from. With Florence & the Machine I did, however, hit a little difficulty.

Sometimes you can't get tunes out of ones head, that's almost a universal experience. They'll also crop up in unexpected venues, like in ones meditation. In meditation I've usually been able to gently train my attention to move away from it, to focus on the practice in hand. With Florence & the Machine, it just would not go away. I would be meditating, doing Mindfulness of Breathing, Metta Bhavana, even my Sadana, and tracks from the album would be playing in the background ALL THE TIME. They never stopped playing, no matter how much I focused on the practice, stayed relaxed and un-flustered by this background accompaniment, it persisted. I began to notice some aspects that were contributing to this; if I listened to it on headphones it was ten times worse; and the frequency I plied it. The longer the time I left it between playing the album the intensity of this Muzak effect began to fade, but would return with a vengeance the moment I gave it a spin again. So I've been experimenting with a few days music free, and then a week, ten days and the difficulty passed, from internal hearing.

Sangharakshita advised that in our noisy world filled with mindless chatter, we need to reduce input. Input these days comes from all directions and media. Its not just music we can be bombarded by. I've also recently decided to stop listening to Radio 4's Today programme. This daily breakfast dose of John Humphries, and the tone of cynicism and derision that pervades the programme, I found this was a far from ideal set up for the day, particularly so after a double sit of meditation with senses attuned to subtler nuances. As some one who can be easily prone to cynicism, I hardly need outside influences reinforcing this not very pleasant tendency. We feel obliged as world citizens to be well informed about so much, otherwise we aren't performing our duty as human beings. But as Quentin Crisp succinctly describes it - 'People see so much more going wrong with the world over which they have the same meagre control as before'. So however much we are better informed about the world, the large majority of news is just input, which we can do very little to resolve externally, so it hangs around like sediment in our psyches. The responsibility to our hearts and minds to hold all this clutter weighs heavily upon us. Information can cultivate concerns over which we have no real power to take effective action. To hear of other peoples suffering and be unable to ameliorate or heal it, is a painful experience, however potentially insightful it possibly may be.

OUTPUT
Besides ceaseless input, there can be the equally seductive activity of ceaseless output. The desire to keep busy, to always make productive use of leisure, as well as work time. In this way I can find it difficult to just stop, to do nothing, and tune in with myself in a totally unstructured way. Its yet another aspect of restlessness and worry - what happens when I do nothing for as long as possible? - nothing untoward is usually what happens. Taking in all that input is one form of output, reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, watching TV etc. The rest consists of a wide range of activities, ranging from meditating, to domestic chores, spending time with friends and painting. Sometimes these things compete for space, and my life can feel overcrowded with the 'things I need, must, or want to, do'. The demands of modern life are not an externalised, but an internalised coercive force, bound up inextricably with our sense of who we are, or would like to be seen as.

Maintaining a simple life appears to be founded on keeping these activities in a reasonable perspective. To make good honest judgements; what is important,what is just an unreasonable expectation, or a wild imagining, what would be reasonable to do in the time available? Sometimes it remains a bit of a juggling act, even when I am clear what my priorities are. It depends what sort of output activity it is. By its very nature ironing is never going to be as deeply satisfying as reading the Dharma or meeting a good friend, but it still has its own intensifying level of necessity, that needs to be dealt with at some point. The lawn at Abbey House, is quite large, and during the summer it needs a regular weekly mowing. I watched this week as the rain fell, and the sun shone soon after, the grass rapidly shooting up. Cutting the lawn began to rise up my must do list, but time available to do it was limited. Yet did I really want to spend an hour and a half of a weekday, after a long days walking up and down a warehouse aisle, walking up and down a lawn? I could only put this off only for so long, before I would have to adjust my priorities.

If everything does come at you with guns blazing for attention, then perhaps you are asking too much of yourself. What we think of as important or not important is largely subjective. In the greater scheme of things whether we hoover carpets or paint pictures are equally meaningless or meaningful activities. We chose, and bring our subjective judgements to these activities, our likes and dislikes, and rapidly turn them into fixed objective needs. However mundane the task, sometimes there is a simple necessity to just keep on top of things, whilst not ignoring ones personal need for creative activities that sustain you. If we turn around our viewpoint,a mundane practical task can also be a good space for thinking or processing or planning the day.

To be alive, to be able to do anything at all, is a joy in itself. If our needs of life were to become simpler, could we be satisfied with any activity? What we want from our life and whether its easily attainable lies at the root of most suffering - because not getting what one wants is objectively painful. But as Sangharakshita observes, sometimes the deeper problem is when we do get what we want - because the dukkha of this is concealed beneath a healthy surface of vibrant pleasure. Sometimes, whether its output or input, we are just trying to block out that existential pain - what could be wrong with that?

FEATURE 28 - Sheringham Sunset

DIARY 110 - The Man Returns

Well, the man has returned, beaming brighter and more relaxed than I've ever seen him. He's also come back having shaved his head and several pounds from his weight during his four months in the heat of Ghuyaloka. Both haircut and being thinner suit him. A group of us collected Jnanasalin with two others from Stansted Airport, where with resounding cheers, garlands and hugs we welcomed them back to this swine flu infested isle. Jnanasalin looked a little weary at the time, weighed down no doubt by his huge rucksack, and the suddenness of the vulgar blasts from samsara that is Stansted Airport. Ah! the mixed blessing that is Stansted Airport - oh lets not get started on that one again!!!

So over the last week and a bit there has been a slow, almost imperceptible re-adjustment for both of us. Jnanasalin, to the manifested world that is Cambridge, and me to his presence being around once again. Its all gone fine. Jnanasalin has been tired a lot of the time, samsara imperceptible drains you of energy you know! Today he's seemed more his usual perky self, so I think he's reached some sort of stasis with his return. He's come back with bundles of ideas, inspiration and projected future plans that will take a few years to fully unfold, as he settles into life in the Western Buddhist Order. Basking in the evident shadow of his four months practice has further rekindled my own desire to take my own level of practice further.

Last weekend we both went to the Combined Order Convention at Wymondham College. This was our first Order event together,which is something we'll need to get used to, and learn how to attend based on being two individuals, who are both Order Members, without adopting a public pretence we aren't a couple for the duration of a retreat etc. Eventually this will become second nature, but for the time being it still has a frisson of novelty and genuine delight to it. One's first Convention can however be a daunting event, it was also my first for what I can only say is too many years to mention. I think we mutually gave support to each other, so we held it all together. After an initial feeling of being totally overwhelmed by it all, I think we both managed to largely enjoy our few days there.

The Order I belong to is going through 'interesting times', of yet another period of self-doubt. This time its an uneasy, and occasionally fractious, debate over the 'unity and diversity' of our practices, and where the natural boundaries of them should be - if any. Sangharakshita, the founder of our Order, recently stepped in, in an attempt to bring some urgently needed clarity and gravitas. His intervention has not been without the additional complications of projection and subsequent reactivities inherent to him being the Order's 'father figure.' Even he cannot set things down it would seem. Restating what his original intentions for the Order were, does at least damp proof the foundations from further corruption. We cannot pretend we didn't know. The Convention was thus largely devoted to exploring a hot hot topic. Whilst I appreciated the need for the debate, this perpetual probing and re-examination of the minutia of the Order, seems overly self-absorbed to me. It became reminiscent of group therapy, but for the entire order. I have to try hard not to find this focus dispiriting. More broadly, in coming together in such large numbers one can also experience the Order en-mass, practicing together, sharing perceptions, and by more deeply unfolding the Dharma we could leave revived, our sraddha freshly inspired? Well, there was some of that this time too, but hedged round with a polite nervous harmony. As we have not yet found an effective way to calm unsettled seas, I think this one has some way to run yet.

This was my first week picking orders in the warehouse, and helping in the kitchen two mornings a week. My feet have gradually become accustomed to walking most of the day in heavy sweat inducing boots. My back has largely held up, though it was beginning to twinge by Friday afternoon. As my bodily stamina increases over the next few weeks, we'll see how this goes. My back exercise regime is proving essential in maintaining a healthy level of support. I know the troubled area hasn't gone away, but it's not nagging at my psyche all the time, as yet. So not a bad start, and I'm quite enjoying the pace and rhythm of the work. This week has also been one of the most humid of the summer, which itself can have an energy draining effect all its own. So I have felt weary, and I've found myself quiet and withdrawn a bit during the evening, which is my usual pattern when I'm tired. Again I expect this will change as I adjust to the physical demands of the work.

FEATURE 27 _ Bonnie Tyler Parody

I wont even try and describe this, its just hilariously funny - Watch and enjoy.

FEATURE - Florence & the Machine

From the moment I heard 'Kiss with a Fist' you knew this woman had something interesting to say. On that early release a trifle punky in image, she sounded like a ballsy reincarnation of Chrissy Hinde. Though I'm sure Chrissy would never be seen in striped leggings and such a short short skirt. She appears to be developing a style now, more akin to Kate Bush as an elfin hippy,garbed in gosamer thin dresses wafting around like an Alice in woodland, doing erotic pagan rituals. All the same 'Dog Days' is a wacky and wonderful track that builds up a crazy whirlwind. Unfortunately the embed for the video on U Tube has been removed, so you'll have to imagine the visuals from the audio. For once here is someone who appears to live up to their hype.

PRACTICE 3 - Delving Into Devotion

Buddhist devotional practices are diverse in form, though the intention always remains the same - to cultivate receptivity and openness to the sublime in reality. Whether we call it Nirvana - Buddha Nature or Enlightenment matters not, these are really just different 'brand names' for the same thing - a state of liberation from conditioned existence. For Westerners, to fully surrender to devotional impulses is not easy, it often has uncomfortable associations, because it too closely reminds us of Christian image worship, of a supreme Godhead. There are many representational forms of the Buddha, and extravagant portrayals of archetypal Bodhisattva's. To the outside uninformed observer a Buddhist lighting incense and prostrating themselves before such images, can look like we are worshipping them as Gods. But there is no Godhead in Buddhism, and what gods there are, are prefaced by a lower case, rather than a capital G. Mostly the gods and goddesses come to worship and bow down before the Buddhas and Bodhisattva's to honour and praise their achievement's, not demand it for themselves.

Buddhist worship is a mixture of reverence - for the Buddha's achievement - and aspiration - for ourselves to do likewise. I was reflecting on this whilst I was on the retreat 'Entering The Mythic Realm.' It struck me that most of the time we were operating in either of two modes - a mode of evocation - or a mode of invocation. We were either attempting to evoke higher meditative states, a fuller sense of Going for Refuge, or we were trying to invoke the Buddha's & Bodhisattva's to be present and witness our Going for Refuge. By the end of the retreat I'd come to the conclusion these two modes were coterminous, almost to the point of indivisibility. When we do anything that brings our own Going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha more vividly to life, it simultaneously brings the Buddhas & Bodhisattva's more vividly present too. They appear like moths around the flame of our sraddha, to witness, bless and encourage our endeavours. We don't need to do anything more than practice effectively and wholeheartedly.


Sraddha is an indivisible response of body, speech and mind, integrated and focused on awakening. Sangharakshita describes sraddha as a response of ' what is ultimate in us to what is ultimate in the Universe'. Sraddha (faith is a poor comparison) is the driving energy, the fuel on the motorcade of devotion. This is neither a neat, logical or completely graspable thing, if it were, it would be a still born experience. Which is why its not always easy to just tap into our sraddha at will, though devotional practice can be a help, sometimes. However, there are times when it just will not be evoked, when our internal or external conditions just get in the damned way. I am quite a passionate emotional person, and even though I see myself as a 'faith type,' for some reason my devotional practice has previously been bedeviled by personal reservation's and petty resistances. I've tended to hold myself back from responding to the sudden inspirational impulse, the instinct for what I need to do is thus inhibited. On this retreat I began to stop stifling these impulses. I think my reservation's were disguised forms of doubt about whether the practices work, or perhaps fear that if I gave myself fully to them, they would. Puja and prostrations only work if you do give yourself to them, surrender fully and don't hold back.

There was a brief moment during the worship section of a Sevenfold Puja, when we were circumambulating the stupa. Instead of mindfully kneeling, bowing and offering incense, I began falling instantly to my knees. At one point I dropped so rapidly to my knees, that as they touched the ground, for a moment I was in a state of devotional confusion, I wasn't sure exactly what it was I was supposed to do once I got down there. Regaining my composure, I fumbled my anjali mudra together, bowed and got up. For that one moment I'd given up trying to control my every action and inspiration, I just surrendered into the feeling of that moment.

What I learnt, and it seems an obvious thing to state, is that for a sense of devotion to be evoked, I need to find a way to express this physically. Not just physically, but also using my imagination - my mind needs to be engaged visualising the content of the words of a puja and prostrations. Those words themselves need to be meaningful, poetic and evocative in order to lure my emotions into engagement. If all of these three things combine, devotional practice becomes something much greater than its individual constituent parts. If devotion is an indivisible action of body, speech and mind, to stir the desire for awakening, then one of these three on their own will not be enough.

DIARY 109 - Becoming attuned to mysterious things

I returned recently from the retreat at Padmaloka called 'Entering the Mythic Realm', and now feel well engaged with the less logical, and therefore intangible aspects of my self in devotional mode. After some years of feeling not quite as open hearted in my connections Puja and Prostration Practice as I would have liked, I think I finally discovered some ways around my resistences and reservations. It's not easy to fully convey the effect of this retreat upon me by just literally describing what we did in words. I'll probable attempt to write more specifically about changes in my devotional practice later. I took along a note book and wrote in it most days. The deeper my engagement with the retreat went, the more my desire to put it all down on paper diminished. I found that I could only get a clearer sense of how my unconscious depths were responding by writing in a semi-automatic fashion, sometimes it came out as poetry, sometimes as prose. So here are a few selected highlights.

In the fertile valley, I feel impoverished.

At the foot of a mountain, I lack height.

I look at the barreness of reality,

I look, and I look, and in that looking,

I gaze empty headed, and empty eyed,

seeing only the prickliness in a peach.

27/06/09

Given time, a hand is useful.

Locked digits, aged and worn,

loosen with the lubrication of action.

Given time, a heart also races.

28/06/09

Wise men at the door,

begging - as usual,

not for gold, silver or rubies

but just to come in.

29/06/09

The months fly on like geese from a field,

noisily, then out of hearing.

30/06/09

Where nothing is,

is my reflection.

That is where the problem is,

is in my reflection,

and in this response is the is,

is that it?

or am I making is

a more complicated thing than it is?

04/07/09

Given time and space

nothing happens

more frequently

than one would imagine.

05/07/09