Aladdin’s Window

I’ve been thinking recently about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Every culture has a version of this myth, for nothing is more universal than the theme of losing love due to a lack of faith.  In the Greek version, Orpheus is a Thracian poet engaged to marry Eurydice.  On the day of their wedding, however, Eurydice is fatally bitten by a snake.  But Orpheus doesn’t give up on his love.  He descends to the underworld and convinces Hades, the god of the dead, to let Eurydice return with him to the world of the living.  Hades agrees on one condition: Orpheus must walk ahead of Eurydice and not look at her until they reach the surface of the earth.  Orpheus agrees, but just before the couple arrive back in the world of the living, Orpheus doubts that Eurydice is behind him.  He turns around to check, and the god of the dead seizes Eurydice for all eternity.

We talk a lot about the importance of faith, but rarely do we have any idea how we can cultivate it.  How do you walk ahead of what you love without looking back?  We tend to think of faith as a type of willpower, but this is precisely the reason why we have so little of it.  You cannot will yourself to have faith; you can only try to understand what draws you away from it, what makes you keep looking back.  Our insecurities are different, but they are all the same in stemming from a need for external specificity, a need to “see” a solution in front of our eyes.  This is why Plato insisted that desire itself is not what makes us unhappy.  What makes us unhappy, he said, is desiring what is visible rather than desiring what lies beyond the seen world.  In yoga, there’s a similar idea of pratyahara, or “withdrawal of the senses” in order to find a deeper fulfillment of one’s desires.  Both these ideas get at the same point: the visible world will always let you down, for what you will find in it, over and over again, is nothing but the message that what you want is not yet here.  And the more you keep turning to look at what is not yet here, the more you will unconsciously work against attaining your desires.

This all sounds very mystical and possibly useful only to yogis or saints, but nothing could be more practical.  When people desire, say, a new lover or a new job or a healthier body, they generally make the exact mistake Orpheus did: they cling to an overly specific vision of how things should turn out, and their specificity reinforces the idea that they are, in fact, different from what they love.  For example, when a person wants a new job, his usual line of thinking is something like, “I want a new job that pays at least 60K and lets me travel.  I interviewed for one like that once, but I didn’t get it …”  Notice that this person’s only roadmap for attaining his desire is a list of things he doesn’t have.  That means that when he starts looking for this job, his mind is telling him, “You must be who you are not,” which is, of course, an impossible demand.  If the poor fellow listens to that voice, then no matter how much he exerts himself, he will always instinctively gravitate towards acting like the poor schmuck he already believes himself to be.  This is the same reason why people so often want to find loving relationships but don’t: their picture of what they want is always based on what they don’t yet have, so naturally, they don’t believe love has anything to do with them when it comes to find them.  And that only makes them want more painfully than ever.

The way out of this downward spiral is to shift from desiring what you can see to desiring what you can feel.  For example, if you want a new lover or a new job or a healthier body, start by asking yourself, “What would it feel like to be satisfied with my lover, job, body, etc.”  You can use words at first, but this practice works better if, gradually, you start to feel the fulfillment of desire in your body.  This might seem impossible, and there will certainly be a part of the mind that objects: “But I can’t feel the fulfillment of desire until I get that new lover or job.”  So you have to ask yourself if that’s really true.  Have you never felt love before?  If that were true, you’d be dead.  Have you never felt materially cared for?  If that were true, you’d be dead.  As you start to play with desiring feelings instead of things, you start to realize that you have a profound ability to tap into the inner form of desire.  You also see the ways in which you already have what you want, which only makes you feel that you deserve to get more of that.

So here’s an abbreviated practice that puts these ideas into motion.  Either thinking with your eyes closed, or writing on a piece of paper, answer these questions:

1. What don’t I like about my life right now?
2. What does that say about what I do want right now?
3. How would it feel to achieve what I want?
4. In what part of my life do I already feel that way?

As you work with desiring feelings, you find that material things come to you more easily, but you also find, ironically, that you need these things less and that they are intrinsically less satisfactory than the feelings underlying them.  Is the purpose of love to keep another body close to you at all times, or is it to feel love?  Is the purpose of money to keep piles of paper close to you at all times, or is it to feel the sense of unfolding and possibility that money represents?

Of course, our advertising culture is constantly saying the opposite of this, namely, that material things are what create desires in us, and this means that the only way these desires can be fulfilled is by possessing the specific material objects that caused the desire in the first place.  But the premise of advertising is sort of like the idea of Hell: if you don’t believe in it, you find it has no power over you.  You have to give consent to the idea that the ways to fulfill desire are scarce in order to experience that scarcity in the world around you.  I always cringe a little when I hear progressives railing about the unhealthy standards of beauty in our media and how we need to replace “their” standards with “our” standards.  These ideas are well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful, for if you believe that feeling attractive comes from looking a certain way — whether that way is similar to or different from what you see in ads — you will still breed low self-esteem in yourself and others.  The idea ought to be to teach children how to feel beautiful rather than simply replace one external image with another.  A child who has been taught how to desire feelings rather than images will not have a problem living happily in a world full of advertising.

We find desire painful primarily because we have no felt sense of what the fulfillment of desire is like.  We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of desires as itches we have to scratch that, like real mosquito bites, our desires have been scraped down by us to the point of being nothing more than bleeding scabs.  But what if the purpose of desire is to teach us freedom, the way that in any creative act such as music or painting, desire expresses itself as a widening of what can be rather than a narrowing of what is?  What would it be like to live life that way all the time?  It sounds like magic, as all things that take practice do before a person has practiced them.  But in fact, the path to experiencing desire as freedom involves the repetition of a very simple practice: Find some aspect of your life in which you experience desire as something unstrained, effortless, and free.  Focus on the feeling of that, and ignore for the moment any thought that makes you lose that feeling.  Don’t look back to see if your love is still there.

Ernest Hemingway used to give this piece of advice to writers: Always end a writing session when you’re in the middle of a great idea.  That way, when you come back to your writing the next day, you’re faced with your genius rather than your limitations.  And the same is true of the art of happiness too.  If you want to face the parts of your life in which you aren’t yet fulfilled, you have to start in the middle of what is already working and try to make connections from that point.  Whatever there is in the external world that you need in order to make those connections will come to you from somewhere beyond your present horizon of consciousness.  You don’t need to struggle to find the links.  You just need to learn how to resist the temptation to make the connections happen by force of will.

There’s a story in the Arabian Nights about a magical castle that Aladdin and his genie built for a powerful Sultan.  However, they left one window in the castle unfinished.  When the Sultan saw the castle, he was unimpressed.  “My architects could easily make a castle twice this size,” he said.  “And why didn’t you finish the window?”  Aladdin replied, “Your Majesty, I wanted to give you the pleasure of finishing the building yourself.”  The Sultan sent for his best architects and builders, but none of them could find the right stones and jewels to complete the window.  The Sultan grew more and more frustrated, until he said to Aladdin, “If you finish this window for me, I’ll give you whatever you want.”  Aladdin and the genie already had the right stones and jewels, and they did this easily.  The Sultan made Aladdin his vizier and gave him more riches than Aladdin could ever have dreamed of.

The moral of this story is that desire isn’t a call to bring our lives to material completion.  Desire is a call to understand the value of what is still unfinished.  For we make ourselves poorer by wanting to tie up all the loose ends of our lives prematurely, whereas, in fact, it is in the vacuum of what has not yet been completed that all our power lies.  So when we find ourselves wanting something, rather than struggling to attain something or struggling to rid ourselves of the desire, we would do well to answer this basic question: What thought can I think right now about what is unfinished that will feel good to me?  For these thoughts are a window into a world that has more value than anything we’ve yet seen in this one.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose adventurous brand of storytelling-folk rock has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the fall of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

The Magpie Art

If you want to live a happier, more creative life, be like the magpie bird, who makes her nest out of the shiny objects she collects.  The magpie does not ask whether these things “belong” to her, or whether she truly deserves them.  The magpie cannot even tell the difference between ordinary glass and diamonds.  She knows no pedigrees or standards other than those of brightness.  She just gathers up the lights in her life, and in doing so, makes a home through them.  This is something we can all do, you know.

A friend of mine tells a funny story about meeting Lou Reed.  He was with a group of musicians at some gathering, and Lou showed up.  The musicians started to talk about their early influences, and someone mentioned an obscure, early-60’s R&B tune.  Lou got very animated and said, “I loved the guitar solo in that song, man!  For years, whenever I’d write a melody or riff, I’d hear that solo in my head.”  Then Lou began to sing the solo, but what came out of his mouth, according to my friend, was totally monotone and lacking any resemblance to the original song.  That was when my friend realized Lou Reed’s genius, he said.  What makes him great, he said, is that Lou gives voice to what he loves and doesn’t care whether it corresponds to the outside world.  That right there, I thought, is a perfect summary of what it means to be an artist: to have the ability to be true instead of to be merely accurate.  But there’s a lot of conditioning we all need to get rid of in order to get to that point.

Happiness is no different, whether or not you consider yourself an “artist.”  To be happy, you have to find the true voice inside you, the voice that really wants you to be flourish.  This can be hard to do, because at every moment the mind is filled with a great many voices, much like a committee.  And we’ve become so used to the chaos of committees, and so superficially attached to the idea of being democratic, that we feel obliged to accurately express and support every voice in our committee.  This is why we’re so overwhelmed by doubt all the time.  A clear and bright thought is actually always there in the mind, but rather than just give ourselves to it, we feel compelled to let other voices drone on and on: Dad’s voice, our sixth-grade teacher’s voice, the parish priest’s voice, etc.  We make up our minds to go do something good for ourselves today, but we can’t get out the door because we have several decades of speeches to listen to and faithfully transcribe.  Our intentions for life are like that bad college paper in which the insecure undergraduate clears his throat for twenty pages and then trails off, just before dawn, with a drowned-out whisper of a great idea.

My teacher says it much more simply: “If you try to talk to yourself with love and find that the words sound fake, that’s because it’s not really your own voice that you’re hearing.”

So how do you find your own voice?  That actually isn’t the right question.  You already have found it.  The right question is how to develop the strength of mind to be able to hold that voice in your awareness and keep it from getting drowned out by others.  And the answer to that question is: whatever you put your attention on will grow and become stronger, so you have to be unrelenting and constant in putting your attention on your own voice.  You also have to be very careful not to fall prey to concepts of “discipline” and “hard work,” for these are usually words spoken by other voices that don’t have your best interests in mind.  For example, let’s say you want to get back to playing the guitar after many years.  So you say, “It would make me very happy to play the guitar again.  But what if I’m no good?  Well, I might be okay if I work hard at it.  It’s going to be tough, though, because I have that meeting next week.  I’m already forty years old.  Hendrix was long dead by the time he was my age …”  It’s important to be really clear that in this long train of thoughts, only the first sentence has any value.  All that stuff about working hard and overcoming resistance is just a tricky way of saying that you are essentially different from what you love.  Do you really want to play the guitar?  Here’s how you do it:  Every day, make a list of things you love about playing guitar and tell yourself you will put to the side all ideas about “practice” and “hard work.”  Once you let yourself love what you love and learn how to protect that love, you will rush home after work to play guitar.  Effortlessly.

Here’s a practice I’ve been getting a lot out of recently: every morning, for at least twenty minutes, I write a list of things I love that I’m already doing.  I start each sentence with the the words, “I already am …” and let words of appreciation cascade however they want to.  It doesn’t matter if I already am remembering to water my plants or already am doing big, “serious” projects.  Big and small don’t matter.  What matters is that, like the magpie, you see the lights in your life, and learn how to collect them.

“Yes,” I hear someone say.  “That’s all great, but to accomplish your dreams you need to plan and organize.”  But that’s the classic trap.  Dreams organize themselves if you keep focused on them.  This is the basic difference between having a “vision” and just daydreaming.  A vision is a picture of what is coming that is so clear, so compelling, that all your actions effortlessly organize themselves around that picture.  Daydreaming, on the other hand, is quite destructive, because for the most part, a daydream is a fantasy about what you want followed by a hundred reasons why you’ll never get it.  Think about your sexual fantasies honestly.  You tell yourself that it’s fun to daydream about being with someone, but if you look closely enough, that train of thought is often quite painful.  It usually goes something like, “I’m really attracted to that person.  Maybe she’ll notice me.  Wait, she didn’t really notice me that other time, did she?  But I’m good-looking, right?  Sort of?  Maybe I should go to the gym more …”  Etc., etc.  We have a sort of amnesia with our daydreams, so when we think of them later we just remember the first part, i.e., the attraction.  But actually, our daydreams usually consist of long hours of reciting our flaws and shortcomings.  That’s damaging, and it also reduces the chances of bringing any type of confidence into our lives, sexual or otherwise.

Vision is different.  Vision involves inevitability.  This is why people who have vision say they can “just see themselves” doing such and such.  That sounds like magic to many people, but that’s because those people don’t understand how action is organized.  We don’t do what we command ourselves to do.  Haven’t you noticed that yet?  We do what we believe to be inevitable, which means that hard work without vision will produce some good qualities like discipline and a equanimity about life, but will not get us fundamentally closer to the happiness we’re seeking.  To find happiness, you have to know already what happiness feels like.  Isn’t that a paradox?  Not really, because you are already happy in some ways, and if you can just put your attention on the feeling you feel in those areas of your life, you can touch into a dimension that lies beyond time and space.  In other words, you don’t have to psych yourself into believing what you don’t already believe, or chant some New Age affirmation that you secretly have no faith in.  You just have to believe what you already believe, so long as you choose the beliefs that make you happier and brighter.  Happiness isn’t based on conditions, actually — it’s always there.  But those words won’t help you unless you start tasting, moment by moment, the ways in which you’re already doing well, and start to gather those into a single, unified vision of the future that is already true.  As that old Feist song goes: “Collect the moments one by one.  That’s how the future’s done.”

Another way of saying the same thing is that both happiness and creativity are actually organizational problems.  We tend to think of organization as having to do with planners and Blackberries.  But those are just tools for processes that exist beyond the realm of machines.  True organization is letting what is important, what is true, move into the center of your being, and letting all other things revolve around that.  No books or techniques can teach you what is important.  You know the truth of organization by your feelings in the moment: if a thought makes you feel bad, it is bad, and you’re on the wrong track; if a thought makes you feel good, it is good, and you’re on the right track.  Of course, some thoughts feel good in one moment and then turn bad, and vice versa, but you don’t need to worry unduly about that.  If you stay truthful and observant, as the Buddha said, you’ll learn which thoughts actually stay good and which can turn on you.  But first of all, to do any of that learning, you need to have a respect for your own ability to choose the thoughts you think.

So keep collecting the lights in your life.  There’s no other way to make a home in this world.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose adventurous brand of storytelling-folk rock has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the fall of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

The Uses of Sorrow

A man said to Nisargadatta Maharaj, “Sir, when I hear you speak about a state of total freedom from pain, my heart understands what you are saying to be true.  And yet, if I am honest, I have to admit that most of the time, I experience nothing but the deepest suffering.”  Nisargadatta Maharaj said to the man, “That is not quite true.  You aren’t experiencing suffering.  You are suffering your experience.”

We tend to think of pain as something solid.  We receive a cut on the finger or a cruel remark from someone we love, and the pain appears in our awareness as fixed and permanent.  It doesn’t matter whether we intellectually know that the cut will heal and the remark will fade from memory.  There’s a part of the mind — the part we usually put in control of our lives — that cannot comprehend change.  And because this part of the mind cannot comprehend change, it can only deal with pain by telling stories about it.  The pain comes, and this storytelling part of the mind grabs onto it and begins to narrate: “I don’t like this,” “This isn’t fair,” “Why are things so hard,” etc.  In this way, the inconstant nature of pain becomes more unclear to us and our ability to deal with it that much more difficult.  It’s a sad irony that, in our culture, people spend so much time trying to train their bodies in order to be free from pain, because as long as their minds remain untrained, their bodies will always be in pain, no matter how “healthy” they may be.  This is because the burden of pain is carried not by the body, but by the mind — specifically, the part of the mind that cannot grasp impermanence.

So what’s to be done?  We can’t simply turn off the storytelling part of our minds.  In fact, we will be narrating our lives for the rest of our lives.  The problem actually isn’t the fact that we tell stories so much as that we tell such painful and damaging ones.  Specifically, what is painful and damaging about the stories we tell is that they keep us from seeing the processes of cause and effect through which pain arises and passes away — through which it is not permanent, not eternal.  For example, let’s say that I stub my toe and the thought arises, “What an idiot I am!”  These words have a doubly damaging effect.  For one thing, they obviously aren’t kind.  But on an even deeper level, they replace my direct experience of the arising and passing away of pain with a judgment (i.e., I’m an idiot) that creates the illusion of a solid and permanent conflict.  The problem of a stubbed toe is actually just how to wait for the unpleasant sensations to pass, but the problem of being an idiot is, unfortunately, a long-term one.  In fact, this judgment of being an idiot is intolerable, so the mind will generally try to free itself from its own tyranny by passing an opposite judgment — for example, “No, I’m not an idiot!  It’s just that some other idiot left that object in my path!”  And so on.  The judgments build, and with them, our sense of the overwhelming and inescapable nature of pain builds too.

Similarly, on an emotional level, the two biggest impediments to our ability to see pain in terms of cause and effect are anger and guilt.  We’re very attached to our feelings of anger and guilt, and we love to make the case that these feelings are important.  And yet, there is something dishonest about anger and guilt.  I like the way Marshall Rosenberg, founder of the Non-Violent Communication movement, puts it: anger and guilt are responses to poorly defined needs.  In other words, they imply a lack of clarity about what pain is and where it’s coming from.  For example, if someone pushes me on the train and I get angry, it’s usually because I have some perception in my head that this person is “inconsiderate,” etc.  Now, not only is this perception more likely to cause me to act in a violent way (verbally or physically), it’s also going to make me feel more helpless, because I’m less in touch with what can actually be endured.  In other words, there’s no way for me to tolerate the presence of a fundamentally, permanently inconsiderate person.  On the other hand, if I could get in touch with my needs in that situation and identify them, I’d probably discover that what I need is, say, comfort or respect or safety.  And these are things I can do something about, because even if the guy on the train doesn’t help me meet my needs, I can see about changing my situation so that they are met some other way.  Suddenly, the discomfort I’m feeling seems much more tolerable.

Guilt is just the flip-side of anger.  Let’s say I make a comment to someone that I wish I hadn’t made, he gets upset, and then suddenly I’m filled with guilt.  The guilt is the consequence of a perception I have about myself, namely, that I’m bad.  This judgment is impossible to endure, because it cuts me off from any possible further action.  If I could put myself in the other person’s shoes and get in touch with his needs, however, I could see what I could do to help him meet his unmet needs.  Maybe he needs understanding or kindness or respect.  These are things I can help with, even if I don’t like him very much or find it impossible to communicate with him directly.  At the very least, I can offer him silent empathy for what he’s lacking.  In that way, I can be of genuine service and I can also bear the consequences of my own unskillful actions much more comfortably.

When we see pain in terms of unmet needs, something miraculous starts to happen.  Not only do we lessen conflicts between one another, but also, our relationship to waiting changes.  We’re not used to being patient with the parts of our lives that we don’t like.  This is not, however, because we are fundamentally impatient people.  Our lack of patience comes from the fact that we are lost in our stories and judgments about the world.  It’s pretty much impossible to be patient with an eternal judgment such as, “he’s no good” or “I’m no good” or “life is fundamentally very hard.”  On the other hand, unmet needs cause us a different kind of pain, one that might be unpleasant, but one that is not impossible to bear.  If I can focus on the fact that my need for, say, recognition or intimacy or comfort isn’t getting met at the moment, I immediately start to have compassion for myself.  And in that compassion, waiting suddenly becomes tolerable.  I begin to see cause and effect.  I begin to see the arising and passing away of my suffering.

Here’s a practice I recently read about: it’s called keeping a “Waiting For” list.  The idea is to write down all the things you need to wait for before you can move forward in some part of your life, then to write why you need to wait for these things, and finally, to write exactly how long you are willing to wait.  The beauty of this practice is that it allows you to get in touch with your “blocks” as unmet needs, and this, in turn, actually brings you peace of mind.  For example, let’s say you are involved in some sort of group project, and one of the members of your group does not return your calls or emails.  Now, normally, we think, “This person is totally incompetent,” which of course is an intolerable thought, because here I am, totally at the mercy of a fundamentally and permanently incompetent person.  (Actually, we often start thinking these thoughts as soon as a project starts, so we’re already primed for frustration.)  However, if I write down, for example, “I’m waiting for an email from this person in order to get this piece of information, and I’m willing to wait exactly three days,” something shifts.  For one thing, I don’t have to carry the burden of the other person’s supposed character defects.  Also, by writing down a concrete measure of time, I can forget about the issue for the next three days.  And finally, if it’s information I need, I can start brainstorming for alternative ways of getting it.  In this way, waiting becomes a creative, rather than frustrating act.

This practice of getting clear about waiting goes much deeper than simply waiting for emails.  There is so much of our personal and spiritual growth that involves waiting.  Many of the traits and strengths and abilities that we wish to see in ourselves are already in process of forming.  The question is whether we will undo the positive work we have started by making this period of waiting for results a painful one.  All too often, when people become discontent in life, the problem isn’t that they aren’t working towards what would make them content.  The problem, all too often, is that they are doing the right work but simultaneously developing all sorts of inner misery by the attitude they’re bringing to waiting.  Part of the problem is their lack of faith, but an equally important part of the problem is their lack of heedfulness about the thoughts they think while waiting.  It does no good to make up your mind that you will work hard at something if you are unaware of the thoughts of doubt that inevitably come as soon as you make up your mind.  Waiting, in other words, is not just doing nothing.  It’s an active process of protecting your incomplete virtues from the thoughts that have come to destroy them, just as a farmer waiting for his crops to grow doesn’t just sit there, but rather, must weed and water and protect the seeds he’s planted day by day, minute by minute.

If we truly understood this active process of waiting, we wouldn’t be so scared every time we experience some sadness or setback in the mind.  We would see our sorrows as part of a larger process by which we learn to comprehend pain so that we can eventually be free from it.  We would view our sorrows with a spirit of adventure, not by focusing on our stories about the world, but rather, by gazing at the horizon that our struggles are leading us to.  We would truthfully understand the sentiment Mary Oliver expresses in her poem, “The Uses of Sorrow,” when she writes,

Someone I loved gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose adventurous brand of storytelling-folk rock has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the fall of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

At Play In the Fields of the Lord

One of the greatest spiritual temptations is to confuse unconsciousness with higher consciousness.  We all do this at times.  We pray or dance or meditate, thinking we’ve attained some heightened state of awareness, when in reality we have only regressed into our our habitual trances and dreams.  And still, there is part of the mind that wants to convince us that our stupors somehow magically make our lives better.  Flaubert grasped this seduction well in the last scene of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which Saint Anthony wishes to become pure inanimate matter, to feel nothing but what the plants and stones and rivers feel as they exist without consciousness or will.  And it’s true: there’s great comfort in the idea of coming home to a fixed and natural state of being.  The problem, though, is that we are not like plants and stones and rivers, for we cannot stop being conscious, nor can we stop altering our experience of the world though our intentions.  So when we try to let our awareness run free and merge into the flow of life, we only play at doing so.  We are like those children who cover their eyes and pretend the whole world has vanished, when in reality we are just looking at the insides of our hands.

Now, oblivion takes many forms.  There are the obvious oblivions we seek through sleep and drugs and TV, but there is also a subtler kind of oblivion, namely, the oblivion of identity, and this is perhaps the hardest to resist.  When we think, “I am such-and-such a person,” our consciousness plays a game of hide and seek with itself in which we seem to be seeing something new, but in reality, we are only seeing our habitual projections.  Our culture encourages this sort of oblivion, because if you give a person an identity he becomes that much more pliable.  In particular, it teaches us to confuse the distinction between action and identity, so that we think that by assuming an identity, we have removed the distance between ourselves and our goals.  For example, a person hears about yoga and thinks, “I should try that,” and immediately our culture is there with yoga mats and yoga accessories and yoga jargon to tempt him with the thought, “I am a Practitioner of Yoga now, so I can stop paying attention to my actions.”  Enter sex scandals and power trips.  The same is true of religion and therapy and so many other wonderful activities that our culture has somehow managed to adulterate with this oblivion of identity.  I’ve seen very idealistic people practice various forms of self-improvement for decades and not find themselves any more happy or joyful or content.  And the reason is usually that a strong sense of identity connected with these practices has obscured their ability to see what it is that they are actually doing.

I think one of the reasons people are so susceptible to the oblivion of identity is that they have never learned to set goals for themselves in their practices.  This might seem like a strange way to put the problem, especially because we often associate goal-setting with highly ego-driven people — we often picture goal-oriented people as power-hungry businessmen on the one hand, and “spiritual” people, on the other, as those who embrace goal-less-ness, “radical acceptance,” and “open awareness.”  But in fact, not having goals is the best way to let your life become dominated by your ego, for in the absence of goals to remind you that you have not yet become the person you want to be, your sense of self swells to fill the empty space.  This brings you in greater conflict with others, and it also obscures your ability to see clearly what you’re doing with your time.

Furthermore, setting goals frees us from the oblivion of identity by allowing us to “put down” all the thoughts that fill our heads and clog our awareness.  In cognitive science, there’s a concept called “distributed cognition,” which is the idea that stable forms of knowledge are ultimately not found in individuals, but rather, in environments.  If you’ve ever made a to-do list and found yourself soothed by that activity, you already understand this principle.  The reason making a to-do list is calming is because you don’t have to hold your sense of incompleteness inside yourself.  You can put it down on paper and trust that you can attend to its various components one by one without being overwhelmed by any of them.  By contrast, if you insist on keeping everything in your head at all times, if you insist on thinking every thought that arises, not only will you be powerless to deal with any of them, you will also have to fight against the resulting pressure by asserting your sense of self.  This is why the first rule of any spiritual or creative practice is to “put down” a desire for results, not in the sense of forgetting, but rather, in the sense of putting-into-time.  This is the only way to be at peace with desire.

So what does setting spiritual and creative goals look like in practice?  In the business world, people often use the term “horizons of focus,” which means grouping goals into periods of time — for example, today, tomorrow, the next three weeks, the next three years, etc.  It’s pretty clear to anyone running a company that what you need to do today (e.g., order more printer ink) is different from what you need to do over the next three years (e.g., set up another office in London.)  And yet, creative and spiritual types often approach their practices without differentiating between periods of time.  Many artists, meditators, and devotees see their work as an undifferentiated stream of effort that will be more or less the same today, tomorrow, and the next fifty years.  This attitude makes creativity and spirituality not only lifeless, but actually dangerous, for as a person’s goals become more nebulous, his perception of identity expands and the sense of “I am talented” or “I am holy” engulfs his awareness.  When this happens, he either can give into these perceptions or fight them with an artificial sense of humility, but either way, his mind becomes engaged in struggle.

I’ve been thinking recently about the Buddha’s “Seven Factors of Enlightenment.”  The Buddha understood better than anyone the way in which inner searching can easily turn into self-absorption.  That’s why, I think, he paired the first factor of enlightenment, “mindfulness” (sati), with a second factor, “analysis of qualities” (dhamma vicaya).  “Mindfulness” means to keep something in mind over period of time, so despite what many people think, it is an intrinsically goal-oriented activity.  If you don’t have a sense of what you are looking for in life, a sense of the goal, you won’t be able to focus on one thing and “be present,” because the present is always intentional, which means that what you find in it depends entirely on how you envision the future.  Our advertising culture has started to co-opt the term “mindful” to use as type of identity, so that, for example, a person can tell himself that he is engaged in “mindful eating” and automatically feel superior to others who are supposedly eating mindlessly.  But the reality is that no action in the present will make you wise unless you understand its relation to the future: to who you are trying to become and to why that transformation is meaningful.

This is where the second factor, “analysis of qualities,” comes in, for in order to have a meaningful goal, you need to be looking at every moment in terms of cause and effect, that is, in terms of the causes that are left to be developed.  You can’t just “practice” in some open-ended way.  You need to understand exactly what work remains.  In what parts of your life are you still suffering?  In what parts of your life are you still blocked?  Can you envision your life without that suffering, without those blocks?  And if so, what are the concrete steps needed to attain that vision?  If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’ve wasted many years in both my spiritual and creative lives trying to find fulfillment by just showing up.  80 percent of life might be just showing up, as Woody Allen suggested, but without the other 20 percent that consists of clear vision, the showing up ultimately leads to a sense of fatigue and a sense that one still hasn’t received the recognition one deserves.

In Peter Matthiessen’s book, At Play In the Fields of the Lord, an American commander named Lewis Moon is sent to the Brazilian Amazon to bomb a local tribe called the Niaruna.  Moon, who is half-Native American himself, suffers a crisis of conscience and decides to change sides and defend the native people against the capitalists and missionaries who are trying to uproot their traditional way of life.  But Moon lacks insight into the complexity of his situation, and one night he takes an Indian drug and decides to return to his “native roots.”  He goes to stay with Niaruna, not realizing that he is inadvertently infecting them with a disease he is carrying.  The native people all get sick and die.  Matthiessen’s story is an allegory for what happens when people substitute a sense of identity for clear seeing.  We all want to take a drug that returns us to some sort of pure and primal consciousness, but that’s not how true transformation works.  We awaken not by changing sides, clothes, or personas, but by doing the work that lies in front of us, and understanding clearly why that work is there.

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose adventurous brand of storytelling-folk rock has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the fall of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

Come As You Are

The spiritual teacher Mooji says that the most frustrating thing he hears from his students is the remark, “Mooji, I have so many questions!”  “How is it possible,” he says, “that a human being could have more than one question at a time?  Perhaps he thinks he has more than one question, but he must mean something else by this.  Many thoughts, perhaps, but many questions?  Impossible!”

We constantly confuse thinking and experiencing.  We imagine we are in love because we think about love.  We imagine we are solving problems because we think about problems.  We do this with all the big questions of our lives: “What should I be doing with my time?”  “What am I upset about?”  “Where can I find true happiness?”  We imagine we are asking these questions because we are thinking these sentences.  But a question isn’t a sentence or a series of words ending in an upward inflection of voice.  A question is a way of being.  Specifically, a question is a way of being that involves the intention to wait for a true answer.  So when we think one thought after another without having any intention of waiting with any of them, we aren’t asking questions at all, even if we use the right punctuation marks.

Truly asking a question is like going to an airport to pick up a good friend.  You can’t be at five different airports waiting for five different people at the same time.  You’re going to have to make the trek in one direction, head towards one gate, and then, quite possibly, sit for a very long time.  If it’s for a good, reliable friend, though, you don’t care.  You know the friend will show up eventually, and you know the wait will be worth it.  But the way most people approach the deep questions of their lives, you’d think they’d never known any good, reliable friends.  It’s as though they think, “It’s too risky to go to one airport.  Maybe I’ll just wait at home and see if someone nice rings my bell.  Or maybe I’ll just be learn to be satisfied with the people who are already around me.”  In this way, we develop an entourage of thoughts and facts in our minds.  These bits of information about the world are like those fake friends we know “from around” who aren’t really there for us, even if they’re always there with us.

But this is how we live, most of the time, and more tragically, this is how we love.  If the deepest question in life is, “How can I experience real love?” this is precisely the question we think we ask on a daily basis but rarely ever do.  True love, you could say, is an answer for which we’re usually too impatient to ask the question.  And because we can’t ask the question with any intention of waiting, we hastily try out loving people who cross our paths, and then, when we fail to be satisfied by them, we blame them or we blame love itself.  It’s like blaming “5” because it ended up not being the answer to “2 + 2 =”  It never occurs to us that the question, “How can I experience real love?” might have an answer that would be impossible for us to be acquainted with ahead of time.  The answer might not be a person at all.  It might be something, some presence we’ve not yet seen in this world, but which we nevertheless might come to know by living in the question.  That prospect sounds risky, of course.  It sounds like the sort of blind faith of which we think only stupid people capable.  But what exactly are we using to evaluate the risk of waiting?  Are we scared of waiting because we’ve been disappointed, or are we perpetually disappointed because we’ve never yet learned to wait?

It’s interesting that waiting is such an anxious activity for us.  Of course, sometimes this is natural: waiting at the doctor’s office to find out whether you have a terminal illness is no fun.  But this is not the only kind of waiting that life offers us, even if we so often act as though it is.  There are other kinds of waiting — for example, taking a bath, in which the waiting is waiting in a tub full of warm water.  That sounds like a strange example, I know, but it actually isn’t, for when we know we are in the right place, waiting can be a kind of pleasurable absorption, in the same way that luxuriating in a bath is not an anxious precursor to something else, but rather, the main event.  Sometimes waiting is a type of becoming-full in which the reward happens in the waiting, not just in the future.  But we were never taught to live or love this way.  We were taught to run as many baths as possible and never sit in any of them.  We know a lot about opening the taps of our hearts, but not much about staying immersed in their flow.

Now here’s the important part: learning to experience waiting as pleasure is something we learn in our bodies, not in our minds.  Think again of taking a bath.  What convinces you to stay in a bath rather than leap out is not the thought, “I should stay here,” but rather, the ability to know pleasure in your body.  And this is why the waiting that love demands is not just the abstract thought, “I’m waiting for love to appear” or “I’m waiting for this relationship to work out.”  That sort of waiting is waiting in the head, and it isn’t very pleasurable at all.  But if you look into your body, you will discover that there are parts that feel good, right here, right now.  Of course, you may feel pain in parts of your body, but if you look honestly you will see that pain is not 100% of your bodily experience.  If it were, you’d already be dead.  So once you understand that there is already some pleasure in your body, you can begin to choose to focus on that pleasure.  And if you allow yourself to stay with the small but real pleasure that already exists in your body, you will see that it starts to grow and pervade your whole physical being.  Pretty soon it feels good just to have a body, just to be alive.  But you’ll never know that kind of pleasure unless you keep your attention in one place, unless you learn to wait.

This is love itself.  We were taught to think of love as another person, but if we can’t feel love in our bodies, we can’t feel love with others.  We might think we are “loving” others when we lose touch with our bodies and flee into the thoughts in our minds, but this “love” never can be real.  It can neither last nor satisfy.  It’s hard for us to believe this.  When we look for love in our bodies rather than in our stories, many fears visit us.  They tell us that we need answers and confirmations from the outside world.  We need a wedding, a bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates.  They tell us we shouldn’t trust the small and steady glow that we feel welling up inside.  These fears open the doors of their limousines and implore us to get in.  But in the end, the choice is ours whether to leave with them or to wait right here.

All your life, you’ve been told there was someone you were supposed to be.  This confused you, of course, because the person you were becoming never yet existed, so you were forced to try on the world’s false answers to the question of who you are like a person trying on a set of badly fitting hand-me-downs.  Even when you tried to break with society, to break with the crowd, you still tried to wear the clothes of Christ or the Buddha or Jimi Hendrix.  You never believed you could come as you are to love, simply by learning to care for the small glow of pleasure that comes just from having a physical form, that comes from asking for love from yourself and then waiting right there in the small but happy waiting place of your body.  But the more you wait, the more you will believe that you are the one you’ve been waiting for.  You yourself are the feast.  Take your time or hurry up.  The choice is yours, so don’t be late.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically- and lyrically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost