JAPAN, THE DALAI LAMA, THE QUEEN MOTHER, A MOTOR VEHICLE ... AND MINDFULNESS

I have recently returned from 10 days in Japan. I had a wonderful time with some dear friends, making some new friends in the process.

For me, the trip to Japan had about it a deep sense of life fulfilling itself. My late father fought in the Australian Army in the Second World War. He lost several mates at the hands of the Japanese. Even though he later had respectful relations with many Japanese business leaders during the 1960s and '70s he never really forgave the Japanese for what he, and many other hundreds of Australians of his era, saw as their inexplicably unnecessary gross cruelty in wartime, particularly to women and those who were otherwise sick or injured.  I can only imagine what my father would have thought, but whilst in Tokyo I paid my respects to the Japanese war dead at the famous (or infamous) Yasukuni Shrine, which is dedicated to those who died fighting on behalf of the Emperor of Japan. It is a different world now.

Now, the people I met and otherwise travelled with in Japan were, without exception, kind and compassionate to me, and I felt enriched to be in their company. Special thanks are due to Yasushi and Akiko (who now live in Australia), Sonomi and her wonderful parents Isao and Takeko, Masaka, Akio and Arisa. Showered with gifts of all kinds, and taken to the most beautiful of places, I could not have been treated better by any other human beings. Arigatō gozaimasu. ありがとうございます

In a stream of consciousness style I recall azaleas and hydrangeas in full bloom, with a splendour that I had never encountered before in my life … giant bonsais of all kinds … crows with huge heads … hot springs and traditional Japanese baths … Japanese food of all kinds … beautiful rice paper ... Shinto shrines … Buddhist temples (in particular, those of Shinnyo-en, a Buddhist denomination of which I am a member) … Japanese women in colourful kimonos … crowded but ever-so-clean trains which run on time … mist over Mt Fuji … one thousand year old Samurai castles … and much, much more. I even found one of my recent books on the law in the foreign language section of a major Japanese book shop!

To understand the Japanese it seems to me that you have to know about kata (型 or 形, literally 'form'). There is, for Japanese, a right way to do almost anything, and that includes eating, bathing, dressing, laying out a garden, folding paper, doing martial arts, and so forth. At times it seems that for the Japanese doing things the right way is just as important as, if not more important than, doing the right things. Form has always had a reality in itself for Japanese – something which is slightly reminiscent of Plato’s theory of Forms.

I got to thinking about mindfulness. Form is important (see this blog as to one suggested 'form' with respect to the practice of mindfulness), but there must never be any triumph of form over substance. Form requires effort, and mindfulness only requires just that much effort as is necessary to remain present from moment to moment with bare attention, choiceless awareness and a certain amount of curiosity. 'Effortless effort', if you like.

The day after I returned to Sydney from my trip to Japan I travelled to Canberra to hear the Dalai Lama (pictured below) – one of the most inspiring and beloved persons in the world. He said nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it was still wonderful to see and listen to the great man.

His Holiness spoke of the importance of compassion, tolerance and forgiveness. He said that it was not all that important to be religious. What was important was being a 'good human being', and ethical conduct – with ‘ethical’ meaning what doesn’t harm others' experience or expectation of happiness. He also said that all religions were not the same - which was a good thing because we are not all the same - but all religions nevertheless emphasised love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, harmony, responsibility, and so forth ... even if their respective adherents didn't always possess or display those inherent, objective spiritual values.

The Dalai Lama was asked whether, in his opinion, there was more compassion in the world today than in previous times. In his opinion, there was. His Holiness mentioned a meeting he had with the late Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (pictured below) when she was 96. The latter was apparently asked by the Dalai Lama whether she thought the world had gotten ‘better’ over her long lifetime. Without any hesitation the Queen Mother apparently said, 'Yes,' pointing to the modern day concern with the importance of human rights, the refusal to no longer accept totalitarian regimes, and various other matters. The Dalai Lama said as much, as well, in Canberra the other day, also making reference to the fact that people are no longer prepared to uncritically and unconditionally wage war for their respective countries.

I think that His Holiness and the Queen Mother are both right ... despite terrorism, the rise of religious fundamentalism, increasing consumerism, global warming and other evils.

The Dalai Lama said nothing that was directly related to the practice of mindfulness but he did speak of the importance of the ‘gift’ of life itself … and of the need to accept those things which we simply cannot change.

One such thing occurred to my wife and I yesterday when, driving back to Sydney from Canberra, the engine of my motor vehicle ‘died’ on me whilst driving along a motorway. It seems the car is beyond repair. Such is life. The car, after all, is only a material thing. Ugh.


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DYLAN THOMAS AND THE ART OF LITERARY MINDFULNESS

My two favourite plays are Under Milk Wood and Our Town. Both are wonderful examples of what I refer to as ‘literary mindfulness’ – analogous stream of consciousness writing where the form of the written text presents, in a direct, unmediated and observant fashion, images piled one on top of the other which are neither entirely verbal nor textual.

Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in 1954 as a play for radio ... a 'play for voices'. It covers twenty-four hours in the life of an imaginary - but otherwise very ‘real’ - small coastal village in Wales called ‘Llareggub’ [re-spelt, much to Thomas' dislike, in early editions of the play (see below) as 'Llaregyb' so as not to offend]. (Read 'Llareggub' backwards – pure Dylan Thomas!)

It is night. All the citizens of Llareggub are asleep. As you read these opening lines from the play, try to envisage the reality behind the words themselves. Let your imagination move from one image to the next ... ‘noting’ the pleasure or pain of each passing, ever so transient, moment ... pausing just long enough to capture the moment before it disappears into the giant abyss ... always remembering to stay present from one moment to the next.

Alternatively, or additionally, you can listen to the rich, resonant voice of Richard Burton as he reads the lines that follow.

Either way, let it be for you an exercise in mindfulness training, for that is what it is ...

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, With seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

The Dylan Thomas Boathouse at Laugharne
 '... an ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long
and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.'

 

What craftsmanship! What attention to detail! What imagery! What curiosity! And what good ‘advice’ with respect to the art of mindfulness ... Begin at the beginning ... Hush ... Listen ... Look ... Time passes ...

Your eyes are always ‘unclosed’ in mindfulness ... even when they are closed. You see, you are always watching something ... for you are ever ‘awake’. Bare attention. Choiceless awareness.

Dylan Thomas knew that life –  the one life –  was to be lived from one moment to the next. The wonder and beauty and ‘meaning’ (ugh!) of life is to be found in the minutiae of the mundane and the everyday – in 'this world order, the same for all', in the words of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus. That is reality ... and reality just is.

So, don’t look afar for what you seek. Stay with the imagery of one image after another ... and, yes, live on the 'surface' for, paradoxically, that is where the 'depth' is to be found. Take, as you find them, the events and occurrences of daily life, and accept any 'meanings' they may present. Seek not any 'hidden purpose' nor any so-called 'ultimate reality' – there are no 'ultimates' as such – other than the one order or level of reality – the one way of being – in which all things live and move and have their being.

Is that not enough for you?

Under Milk Wood: Copyright 1954 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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MINDFULNESS ON THE ROAD ... WITH A BEAT

In a recent blog I wrote about the stream of consciousness style writing of James Joyce. This past weekend I have re-read, for the umpteenth time, On the Road by the immortal Jack Kerouac (pictured below - and listen here to him reading the last page of his book). How I love that book! It's, like, cool, man, dig?

I was just a bit too young to be part of the Beat Generation, which is probably good because I am sure that I would have ended up like many of the "leaders" of the Beat Generation. In that regard I am reminded of some beautifully hedonistic words of the pre-Beat “Rumba Rhythm King from Cuba” Desi Arnaz, recalling his early years in Miami, Florida, who in his autobiography A Book wrote, “I’ll never forget those gorgeous nights on the beach, with the moon over Miami. We ate and drank, sang and played, and screwed and screwed. It was fantastic.”

The term “Beat Generation” was apparently coined by Kerouac in a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes. Holmes opined that Kerouac's stories "seemed to be describing a new sort of stance toward reality, behind which a new sort of consciousness lay."  He urged Kerouac to try to define it in a phrase or two. According to Holmes, Kerouac replied, "It's a kind of furtiveness ... Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge...a kind of beatness ... and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world... So I guess you might say we're a 'Beat Generation'.”

Kerouac was a master at writing what has beeen called "spontaneous prose" - and prose that reads like poetry ... with melody. His Joycean writing is proof that one's first thought is generally one's best. (Good advice when doing multiple choice tests.)

Beat is a state of mind ... a state of at-one-ment with the very beat or rhythm of life itself ... the very livingness of life ... and the givingness of life to itself. No wonder Kerouac linked the word "beat" with "Beatitude", that is, showing kindness, compassion, sympathy and empathy. Such qualities are inherent in the very beat of life itself and are perceptible, indeed palpable, through mindfulness. Dig it?

The lasting legacy of Kerouac's Beat Generation is the philosophical assertion, in the words of Alan Watts, that “the significance of life [lies] in subjective experience rather than objective achievement”. (See Watts' oft-quoted illuminating article "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen”. Watts was certainly no fan of Beat Zen, but he always makes for interesting reading.) 

"Subjective experience rather than objective achievement." I love those words. In this present world, where the prevailing "religion" of so many Westerners is consumerism combined with worldly success, I firmly believe that what we truly need is ... more beat!

If only Kerouac (who had been "on the road" for 7 years before he wrote the book in only 3 weeks) and his buddies had stayed grounded - "sympathetic" (i.e. "beat") - in the reality of the present moment and their Buddhism. Take these gems from On the Road:

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. ...

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” ...

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. ...

Unfortunately, too much of the moment involved activities which ultimately proved to be highly self-destructive. In time, the effusion of the moment dissipated but for a while it was wonderful ... or at least it seemed so:

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move. ...

Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

True mindfulness involves staying with whatever arises … for as long as it lasts ... with the knowledge that all things pass. Notice what is passing through your mind with choiceless awareness … by getting up close.

So, dear beatniks, never tire of practising “awareness-ing”. Let your awareness take note of what’s going on ... in and outside of your mind ... and then, in the words of Jack Kerouac, "everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat ... ."

I mean, like, cool, daddy-o.


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JAMES JOYCE: THE MASTER OF LITERARY MINDFULNESS

In recent years I have had the pleasure of rediscovering James Joyce (pictured above) and his “stream of consciousness” style of writing.

The expression “stream of consciousness” comes from one of my favourite philosophers and psychologists William James.

Stream of consciousness writing aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness, thus creating the impression that we, the reader, are eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind, thereby gaining direct, intimate and unmediated access to their personal, private “thoughts”.

Writing of this kind involves presenting in the form of written text something that is neither entirely verbal nor textual.

Take these examples from Joyce’s literary masterpiece Ulysses:

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water … Begob, ma'am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don't make them in the one pot.

Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. They aren't going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full blooded life.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

The first excerpt above is pure Zen, is it not? "When I makes tea I makes tea ... And when I makes water I makes water ..." It is also the esence of Mindfulness.

In stream of consciousness writing the thoughts and feelings of a character are presented as they happen ... from moment to moment. This is also the essence of Mindfulness – observing and simply acknowledging (without necessarily "noting" or "labelling") one’s thoughts and emotions as they arise.

In Mindfulness one does not seek to judge, criticise, evaluate or analyse one’s thoughts and feelings. One simply observes ... is aware ... and notes. However, we all do engage in such self-evaluation and criticism from time to time as do Joyce’s characters:

Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

When we find ourselves engaging in self-evaluation we need to note what we are doing and gently bring ourselves back to the present moment. Not that it is wrong to engage in self-evaluation and self-analysis from time to time, for, as Socrates pointed out, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” However, there is a time and place for everything, and we need to ensure that when we engage in self-evaluation and self-analysis we do so consciously and deliberately ... and not “mindlessly”.

One can never say this too often. Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention ... in the present ... purposefully and receptively ... deeply and openly, and non-judgmentally ... to whatever arises in the present moment ... moment to moment … both inside and outside of us.

Happy stream-of-consciousness-ing!

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