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 I can become very quiet and withdrawn, my interactions struggling under a weighty blanket of lethargy.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

FEATURE 28 - Linton Kwesi Johnson

It being the 50th Anniversary of the founding of Island Records they've re-released a number of their most significant albums. So I've already picked up Marianne Faithfull - Broken English for a fiver. Last week it was Linton Kwesi Johnson's - Forces of Victory. Similar to John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson's career seemed to blossom so fully in the mid-eighties, and was so much identifited with that era, that he's done precious little since. This album along with Dread, Beat & Blood, was such a politicised peach, a real product of its era, of recession, SUS laws, and rising National Front activism. Nothing much has changed, only the names we call things by, so this record still seems painfully relevant to me. Forceful words here are toasted over equally forceful music, characterised by a subtle, well rounded dub sound, engineered by Dennis Bovell. It's hard to not want to pick all of these tracks out as highlights, but my personal favourites are - Sonny's Letter - Independent Intavension & Fite Dem Back - with its catchy, but disturbing football style chant -' smash their brains in, cos they aint got nothing in em'. He still performs from time to time apparently, but his recorded output has all but ceased.

DIARY 108 - Fortuitous Times

108 is considered in Buddhism, via a sort of reverse logic, a rather fortuitous number. It's said to be the number of defilement's that have to be overcome before one can become Enlightened. One must assume then that its fortuitous because there are considered to be so few. Irrespective of this fact, this is my 108th Diary entry. Regardless of how few, or many, of the defilement's I've managed to further entangle myself with whilst writing this blog - I've been devoted to it for some time. The blog sphere itself might be considered a contemporary defilement - built as it is on ego,pride and self aggrandisement. Whether anyone else is really that interested in the neurotic twitterings of a fifty something gay Buddhist, I obviously still flatter myself by believing that somebody might be, apart from me that is. So I continue to web-ramble.

Anyway, this is by the by. Fortuitous news arrived last week in the form of David's Public Ordination, and his new Buddhist name - Jnanashalin (pronounced KneeYah-Na-Shah-Lin) This means 'he who is distinguished for knowledge', which like all such names recognises a distinguishing characteristic, whilst also giving one a challenge to live up to, if not exceed it - mostly by becoming Enlightened I expect. Jnanashalin apparently, after a little unease, does like his new name. I know it was quite an area for nervousness for him, would he like his name? Well I do, and obviously I'm well pleased, and proud of him for having taken this great step in his life. There is quite a bit of adjusting for me too, and this is not just limited to the spell checker on my computer wanting to change Jnanashalin to 'cannonballing'. I'm still having to make a very conscious effort to use his name, with often a microseconds time delay whilst I stop myself saying David and replace it with Jnanashalin. The turn around is getting quicker,though occasionally I refer to him during conversations, and I'm suddenly gripped by uncertainty - did I say David or not just then? It's not just the name, but also a marked change in one aspect of how I relate to him - as we are both now members of the same Western Buddhist Order, with all its eccentricities, virtues and flaws. Well, his return is a little over a month away, so I'll find out soon enough how it feels for him. It's all quite exciting.

Since my last posting I've at last moved on from managing Windhorse Customer Services. It feels such a great relief. My new temporary post in the Property Team, is suiting me much much better, and I'm quite looking forward to going into work once more. I don't have quite the breadth of experience and practical skills of some of the team, but I can helpfully contribute in specific areas of detail and decorating. This is only a brief two month secondment, whilst two guys from that team are away getting ordained. Once they return in August, I too will move on to the delights and rhythms of Warehouse work. This last weekend, I was up in Sheffield as part of a team re-painting one of our shops there. I think it went relatively smoothly. It was the first real test of how my back would hold up over three twelve hour working days consecutively. The answer is quite well. My usual lower left back ache I hardly felt. My back felt tired or sore, ached in an understandable way, but not painfully so. So that proves the effectiveness of three months of my back exercise regime.


The only down point of the Sheffield weekend, was the B & B, which was above a gastro Pub, which on the first evening had late night opening i.e beyond midnight. I got precious little or no sleep. There were numerous loud half cut conversations of smokers, or people waiting for a taxi, on the outside pavement, or fellow B&B residents singing the same chanting refrain over and over at half past three in the morning. The room itself was quite well decorated, but with no en-suite. The toilet and showers, however, were outside my room, and combined with the laminate flooring in the corridor there was almost a perpetual echo of platter, clatter and natter along to it. Every time I was on the edge of dropping off, there would be the loud creak of a door opening, and a bare footed waddle and slapping noise along the floor, a discernible peeing noise, and the noises in reverse, concluding with a turning of a latch. Lying there kept constantly awake by all this noise from the thoroughfare, I began to hear sounds and wondered exactly what it was I was hearing. At one point there was this muffled distant noise that reminded me of a pigeon cooing. After a while I noticed it broke off and resumed rather too irregularly for that to be so. Then it suddenly dawned, and I was quite startled if not surprised by the realisation, though quite why I couldn't say, that it might be the noises of human love making, or worse still, pigeon lovemaking!

At the end of this week, on my birthday in fact, I'm off to Padmaloka once more, on The Mythic Realm retreat ( formerly known as The Mythic Context). I'm more than under prepared for it. All the work transition stuff, getting used to the work itself, visiting parents, and the full on nature of the last weekend, have left me a tad behind schedule. There is not usually study on this retreat,which is fortuitous, it being more devotional in orientation, which is why I wanted to do it. I'd like to work more consciously on opening up the more expressive and directly passionate side of my Buddhist practice. One of the insights from my previous retreat was the rather self-contained nature of my sraddha in this respect. Whilst I am quite a strongly emotional person, I have over the years hidden this behind a reserve, that I can find quite imprisoning at times. I believe this could have developed decades ago as a result of previous occasions where perhaps I've been too emotionally open and have been hurt as a consequence. It might simply have been, being hurt or let down by things that I've been in love with, in all the forms that this can be experienced. So I'm rather emotionally guarded in this area. After so long its difficult to know how I could effectively break out of this habit. Anyway, I'm hoping to do work on this whilst at Padmaloka.

A fortnight ago I finally finished a small seed syllable painting ( shown left) I've done as an ordination gift for Jnanashalin. I'd already finished one for Maitrighosha , formerly Paco, (shown above right) over six weeks ago. I'm quite pleased with the way these have come out, and can see this might be a subject matter which might be fruitful to take my painting in. But its a measure of how busy I've been lately that its taken me three months to complete just two small 6 x 8 pictures. Perhaps now I can get down to focusing on developing my other work that I put on one side whilst I did these. If only I didn't keep finding these seemingly small side projects I get interested in too, like photographing of the dappling effects of sunlight in our room, or making proper hanging fixtures and hanging cloths for the community shrine room, or finding an old meditation stool my Father made for me years ago that I'm refreshing by painting it a deep blood red. I've decided to stick a small Buddha medallion on its base, and to make it mythical, in my eyes at least, into a 'Diamond Throne'.

PRACTICE 2 - Dotoku, Sendaba & Buddha Nature

Some of the fruits from my recent study of Dogen's religious philosophy

DOTOKU

"I await the time when I do not speak and then hear immediately"
TUNG SHAN

Dotoku is the central concept that all Dogen's philosophy subsequently develops out from. He does this by fully exploiting, then expanding further, the linguistic ambiguities inherent to Chinese characters, where they can mean two things simultaneously. Essentially dotoku means both - attainment of the Way & the means to the attainment of the Way- the actuality & the possibility simultaneously. This idea Dogen adopts and then takes it off into territory, that sometimes is only implied in the early Buddhist sutras. Dotoku provides the essential underpinning for his contention that Practice and Enlightenment are 'intimate', are one with each other.

We can become accustomed to seeing practice only as a self-initiated endeavour that will help us realise Enlightenment, practices that at some point we'll need to abandon. So its hard to shift perspective from this, to seeing the action of practice as being initiated by Enlightenment, urging itself to be made manifest through our practice. The danger in this view is that it can be taken too literally - it isn't meant to imply that we are already Enlightened. The emergence of the Enlightened state is still entirely dependant on conditions. For Dogen we express, in accordance with the degree of our faith, vigour and application to our practice, the Enlightened state through that practice. Likewise, all things which we think of as 'standing in for' as representations of this ineffability, are not just symbols of them, but manifestations of the symbolised itself eg - the vajra - the 'adamantine' symbol for the energy that cuts through to the true nature of reality - isn't according to this view only something that represents this energy, it is a manifestation of it.

SENDABA

"You experience and penetrate the inaudible when words are uttered"
DOGEN

Sendaba is a word that has an infinite variety of possibilities for meaning and expression. It is traditional in Buddhist doctrine to see language as a rather inadiquate means for transmitting the truth of the Dharma. The emptiness of sunyata, of our self, language, ideas and concepts, is fundamental. But, rather than seeing language as being limited by its emptiness in its ability to express the ineffable, Dogen turns this assumption on its head and says that linguistic expression of the ineffable is sendaba - infinite -as infinite as the means through which the Enlightened state can be manifested - through words, sutras, mantras, symbols, sraddha, nature, dreams, myth, philosophy, illusion and the creative imagination. Through all these things the ineffable can become 'intimate' with us, because they are all essentially sunyata - empty - without a defined, and therefore fixed, meaning. But what makes this sense of them grow and develop in this 'intimacy' is wholehearted action - 'the mustering of the whole body-mind' - 'the total exertion of a single thing, is one with that of all things' This means that intention, volition and action is vital for creating the conditions for this 'intimacy' to arise in our consciousness. Enlightenment/Buddha-nature is not a passive, but an active state


BUDDHA - NATURE

"Buddha- nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously"

DOGEN

Buddha-nature cannot in Dogen's scheme of things be divorced from this 'intimate' wholehearted exertion. This is seen as a form of 'actional understanding', that any positive spiritual action can have a consequence in making Buddha-nature arise and be more manifest. So Dogen's view of Buddha-nature is not that it is either eternally present, nor provisional, but that it is realisable through the devoutness of our actions. This means that Buddha-nature has to be 'intimately' connected with - prattitya samutpada - conditioned arising -as truly seeing the nature of the latter is, according to Dogen, an expression of the former. In this, Dogen was parting from the contemporary Japanese view of 'original enlightenment' as some sort of permanent, and therefore eternal force.

I've been seeing this relationship as being similar to that between a light bulb and a light switch. A light bulb is designed to be able to manifest light, but it needs to be switched on. In this sense you could say it has potential for light, but does not yet possess it. It is probably more helpful to say that a light bulb has the capability for manifesting light, but it is only able to do so if certain conditions are in place. Primarily, that there is a means of creating the energy, a means to connect that energy to the bulb. a means of creating and fixing a switch to that connection, someone to turn the switch on, and once switched on, a working light bulb through which the energy can manifest as light. If all these conditions are present then the light bulb maybe said to be capable of being lit. This metaphor outlines the relationship to Buddha-nature to us - we have the capability for the realisation of Buddha-nature - but if we don't create the conditions for it to through practice, it simply will not fully manifest.

DIARY 107 - Weebles Wobble - but they don't fall down!

THE RETURN

Since coming back to Cambridge, it has been far from easy to settle back into my usual routine. I all too easily dropped into 'busy mode' - too much shopping, dashing around, and generally being on the go for too prolonged a period. By the end of that Saturday I was shattered. Whether I objectively had a lot to do is hard to say. The rest of the week continued to be characterised by a sense of being overwhelmed, as if I was asking too much of myself - this may have been so. It was my last week working in Customer Services, which put a real strain on my ability to apply myself to the situation. By Tuesday I found myself exercising so much willpower to get through the day, that I spent all the following evening in an anxious panic, unable stop myself from being busy. Consequently I was spark awake most of the night. This is not how I usually find returning from retreat, I usually manage it much more evenly paced and smoother than this. I've been strained and sleepless for a lot of it.

On reflection perhaps it would have been better if on my return I'd started immediately in a new team, rather than reminding myself how stressed I get by the old one. In future I need to be more conscious that what I think I'll find easy to do, from the perspective of a month ago, I might not actually find that easy to do when the actual moment is upon me. It seems hard for me to imagine with out the immediate context of the present moment being there, how I'm actually going to feel. An classic example emerged this week. A month ago I said I'd be willing to be a back-up person for when Customer Services are severely under resourced. However this week, when I was asked if I'd help them out in a fortnights time, my response was a very alarming feeling of despair at the thought of this, mixed with regret that I'd said this, with a stoical sense of duty, that perhaps I should override my feelings ( yet again ) and honour my initial promise. I have, however, said I can't, at least on this occasion, help. I've made no future promise. I just need to experience myself out of that context for a while, before plunging back into its 'hell realms' like Bodhisattva Kshitigatbha. I think I've given enough of myself to that situation for the time being, I felt no guilt about saying no, only relief.

Thankfully, this week has now come to an end. Normal service has been resumed. I decided in the end that the only thing to do in order to restore correct perspective and a more balanced effort to the situation was - more practice. So that's what I did, and the sense of being psychically disjointed, with neither the retreat or my return coming together into a satisfying integrated whole, did finally calm down. So this has not been one of my best weeks, but by no means one of my worst either.