Mandala of Being, based
on a sketch © Richard Moss
I
started today to write a rant about Obama, and about the mainstream
media -- a complaint that until we give up relying on the political and
economic system and the media to bring about needed reforms
"we're never going to learn how the world really works, and then start
making fundamental changes to our own personal beliefs and behaviour --
which is the only
way we're ever really going to make a difference, to make the
world a better place".
But then I realized I've said all this before, and that I'd only be
preaching to a choir, including myself -- people who already appreciate
these truths, but who, like me, are mostly 'stuck' trying to figure out
how
to change, how
to start using that knowledge effectively, to make a real difference.
It occurred to me it might be more useful to readers for me to talk
about how I
have been trying to become 'unstuck'.
My friend (both in real life and Second Life) Paul Heft and I have been
talking a lot about this. After my Anxious
Time article, Paul replied (in
part):
The
ordeal of a life in Anxious Time may be normal for modern civilization,
but you recognize that such normality is pathological, so please point our way out of it.
I suggest the way out involves deconstructing the world even to the
point of deconstructing our personalities, our habits of thought, the
stories we unconsciously act out--so that we can more consciously
choose how to live.
You, and many of us readers, have already cast off so many limiting
beliefs; why stop part way? ... If we really are just space through
which stuff (thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions) passes, why are
we so stressed? Why can't we just live... Why can't we know the
possibility of pain and sorrow...without feeling the victim of life or
living in perpetual worry?
Those are the questions I feel it's most important to ask right now as
we strive to know how the world works. Sure, it's always interesting to
learn more details about our economic and political systems, threats of
various sorts (climate change, pandemics, depression, war, fascism,
limits to growth, institutionalized mind control through mass media),
and ideas for the future (intentional communities, polyamorism,
unschooling, localization, permaculture, innovative technologies). But let's also wonder why
we are constantly anxious; why our minds are so often caught up in past
wrongs and future disasters that we are unable to be in and handle the
present; why we so often claim ideals yet fail to live in ways that
feel right.
Like me, Paul has done a lot of reading and tried a lot of approaches
(Buddhism, meditation) as a means to, as he puts it, "help us
deconstruct our selves-- personality, beliefs, thoughts, emotions,
mental states-- so that we can discard the parts that distort reality
and reveal the 'true self' that's ordinarily hidden." I've described
this as learning to live in 'Now Time'. I've claimed that wild
creatures and perhaps some indigenous cultures (and even some artists)
live their lives in Now Time, except during those moments when an
external stress provokes the 'fight or flight' response and forces them
to live momentarily in what I've called Anxious Time -- the time in
which most of us now live our whole lives.
Paul is currently reading Richard Moss' book The Mandala of Being,
and I was intrigued enough by his description of it to buy a copy
myself (the first time, to my knowledge, I have ever bought a book in
the 'New Age' section of the book store).
The book's thesis (my paraphrasing) is this:
When
we are not living in the Now, our minds take us to one of four
'places': the past (where we recall stories of what happened, that we
may feel guilt, nostalgia or regret about); the future (where we dream
of an idyllic future, or worry about a catastrophic one); to judgements
about ourselves (who we think we 'are' and should be, perhaps
grandiosely or depressingly); or to judgements about others and the
external environment (who/what we think they 'are' or should be,
perhaps jealously, angrily or bitterly). When we are in these
fictitious 'places' we are not ourselves. What we must do is learn to
be aware of our lack of presence when we are in these other 'places',
and how
to bring ourselves back to the Now,
so that we are continually 'starting over', beginning again and afresh,
with none of the 'gunk' that is not us, being present Here and Now.
If you've been reading this blog for awhile you can appreciate why I
would find this compelling. The idea that modern humans have come to
live so much in their heads that they are no longer really alive, and
are constantly unhappy, is one I have floated here often. There was a
recent anthropological/psychological study of prehistoric art and
writing that even suggests this modern human idea of time and of
ourselves as 'individuals' apart from all-life-on-Earth is an
astonishingly recent cognitive development, the result of a modern
social/culture propaganda (stemming largely from the invention of
language) about reality that starts at birth and has literally rewired
the human brain, so that living in Now Time, which comes so easily to
most creatures, is almost impossible for us. No wonder we are always so
anxious -- that's how the neural structures of our modern brains have
been formed to 'inform' us (or more accurately misinform us) of who we
'are'.
The problem for me with The Mandala of Being
is that, while I am convinced that Moss is onto something very
important, he doesn't seem to be able to communicate it very well
(either in writing or in his free audio seminars). I am inclined to
believe that his problem in explaining his ideas (like the problem
of many expert, infuriatingly happy meditators I know) is due
to limitations of language -- how can we possibly use language to
explain that modern language and culture have led us to live fictional
lives in Anxious Time, or how to bring ourselves back to non-linguistic
Now Time?
(Heh, Gil Friend, who has a great new book
on sustainable business out,
just tweeted me to say he'd met Richard Moss and found him "masterful".)
Our problem, Moss argues, is that we believe we are, and the world is,
what we think. So we do not live life directly, and we don't really
know ourselves. Except in rare times (like when we are 'in love') we
therefore 'become' who we are not, an idealized self with an idealized
sense of the world. Others (e.g. church and school) reinforce this by
telling us who we should be, and ultimately, we start to filter
information that reinforces our (false) beliefs of what is true and
ignores information that could tell us who we really are.
Even when we try to 'pay attention' to the moment, our
intellect gets in the way, defining and analyzing what 'attention' is
instead of allowing us to just experience it. Moss proposes some
exercises to focus our attention first on some other object and then
back towards ourselves, until we experience ourselves as a "space of
no-thing-ness" that is "more truly you than anything you can imagine
about yourself." The
space through which stuff passes!
Or as Moss puts it "Who we ultimately are, in our essence, is a potential for awareness,
but the experience of awareness itself is never reducible to a 'thing'."
Thomas King in his book The Truth About Stories
says "stories are all we are". King is from an indigenous culture, and
has studied various cultures. So if as Moss argues, these stories about
us are fiction, not who we really are at all, isn't he saying exactly
the opposite of King?
Stewart and Cohen in their book Figments of Reality,
say we are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in
our bodies organized for their mutual benefit...Our brains, our
intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more
than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to
advise these creatures' actions for their mutual benefit. We are in
essence a collective, they say. But Moss argues that we are not
our bodies, singularly or collectively -- 'We' are
only awareness, a space, a no-thing.
Can these three conceptions of who 'we' 'are' -- stories, organisms,
and awareness -- be reconciled?
That's what I am trying to resolve as, with Paul, I work through this
book.
Stay tuned.
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