The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department Of First Things First

Happy Syttende Mai  (“sit en day my“), for those of y’all lucky enough to either have Norwegian ancestry or love someone who does.

 

 

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Department of Mama Nature’s Northern Lights Dance Party

Re last weekend’s solar flare phenomenon: moiself  was  très appreciative of the postings people shared – photos of the heretofore unimaginable splendor of the skies which were taken not from a telescope, but from outside their own homes.

At the beach, MH and I appreciated the rarity of the occasion: for once, Oregon had clear skies when there was a noteworthy astronomical event.

 

 

I missed the spectacle Friday night, perhaps looking too early and thinking, ah well, it’s not here...and then in the morning we saw friends’ pictures they’d taken from the beach dunes.  We went back to that dune on Saturday night, but didn’t see any northern lights.  We still had a lovely time sky-gazing.  The silvery moonlight reflecting off the waves is its own natural phenomenon, worthy of appreciation.

 

 

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Department Of A Meditation On Meditation

In my morning meditation I’’ve been unpacking the familiar phrase, Be here now.  Taken from the groundbreaking 1971 book by American erstwhile professor-turned-meditation-guru Ram Dass   [1]    be here now is usually considered to be a prescription, a something-to-do.  But, what about thinking of it not as a prescription, but a *description?*

Moiself  has four meditation apps, three of which I mostly use for their choices of ambient music and timers.  For guided meditations and/or learning, I use Waking Up, which besides also having meditation timers offers a daily guided meditation and an expanding audio library relating to establishing or maintaining a mindfulness/meditation practice.

 

 

After having been away from the app for a time, I opened it a couple of days ago, and decided to skip the Daily Meditation ( my usual choice) to see the new offerings in the library.  Under the practice category I saw The Nature of Now, 11 short sessions    [2]    by scholar, author, and meditation teacher John Astin, and decided to check them out.  But, four days in, I’d only made it past the intro and session one.  I kept repeating session two, Being Here Now, because…well, because of observations like this:

“Be here now….those three words certainly sound like and are often heard as a prescription, something for us to do, something to practice….  In this inquiry however, I’d to flip that notion on its head, and invite you to consider that these words, as with so many others we hear in different teachings, are not so much prescriptions to do something, in order to arrive somewhere else or get ourself to some other state, but rather descriptions of the way things actually are – the way reality already is….

 

 

Astin goes on to examine each of the simple three words.  The observations he offers sound so forthright or obvious on the face of it, but are definitely not the way we – or at least, I – “practice” our daily lives:

“See that being requires absolutely no effort or practice in order for it to be so.  It simply is. Existence is already here; effortlessly, and spontaneously….feel the inescapable truth of this:  the fact that every moment, we are.”

I was much younger, in moiself’s  more cynical, late teens,-early twenties, when I first encountered the phrase, “be here now.”  I never gave it much thought, other than to deem it an example of the existential hilarity to be found in woo-woo disciplines of crystal gazers and the like:

“Be here now…oh, wwwwwooooowwwww. As opposed to, Be there then?

Looking back, was I arrogant or merely ignorant?  Most likely a combination of the two.  I certainly was ignorant of the science of meditation.  But that was then and this is now – oooh, speaking of woo…, that’s a phrase from the title of another seminal 1971 book, one of the first of what would be called the coming-of-age or YA genre, by SE Hinton.

 

 

Once again, I digress.

From what I have read and talked about with others, and experienced moiself, a common obstacle for people trying to start or maintain a meditation practice is that meditating is seen as a prescription – as yet another thing that you should be doing because it is good for you, like flossing your teeth or siccing Child Protective Services on parents who wear MAGA hats  taking a daily vitamin supplements.  Due in part to that (mis)understanding, when people approach meditation that way they can find it stressful, because the equanimity or relaxation they are expecting is not immediately apparent; thus, they think they are “doing it wrong” instead of just doing it, sans judgement or expectation and allowing….

This is tricky to articulate.  I’m no meditation expert or teacher, just someone who has a (oft times sporadic) meditation practice.  I can say that the benefits of allowing moiself  to be aware, even if it’s just aware of doing “nothing” other than observing moiself  while I’m doing that nothing, are palpable.  That simple proposition – that be here now is a description, not a prescription – I’m still chewing on it.  It’s a perspective changer, for me, that the reality of our existence, being here, is happening all the time, whether or not we are taking the minutes to sit and realize it that all you have to do is to be a human, being.  Not a human striving, or a human wanting – just a human, be-ing.

That’s enough profundity for today.

 

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [3]

“[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief.”

( Stephen Batchelor, author, meditation teacher, former Buddhist monk, from
Confession of a Buddhist Atheist )    [4]

 

 

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Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I both love it and hate it when I’m trying to be (somewhat) serious, then remember that it has been some time since I’ve included a fart joke in this space, and realize there will be no peace for me until I do.

Q.  What’s the difference between a saloon and an elephant fart?

A.  A saloon is a barroom, and an elephant fart is a BARRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOM.

 

 

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May you remember that you don’t have to remember to be here now;
May you have a good viewing seat for Nature’s next astronomical light show;
May you meditate on the utility of political rants,
anti-supernatural invectives, and fart jokes;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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[1] nee Richard Albert.

[2] Each ranging from 3 to 8 minutes long; most around 5m.

[3] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[4] Shall we all meditate on the usefulness of footnotes?