Buried Treasure

I've been thinking a lot about the Treasure in "The Alchemist". I do think it's about the journey, but it's also about the treasure. It's about the fact that the treasure has been there all along - in a place you are so familiar with.
The treasure for me has been about finding myself. Everything I was looking for has been here all the time. The journey has been about searching for that Treasure, buried beneath all of the layers of how I've seen myself. And I guess that's the process of Alchemy - purification, not so much in the sense of seperating good from bad, but taking away the illusion until all that is left is Gold. Going deeper and deeper until you find the whole Universe inside. This is eternal life!

The Heroe's Journey

The following quote by Joseph Campbell is quite easy to find on the net, but I've recently a really profound experience that made it really come alive for me. So I thought I'd share it and save you the trouble looking for it ;)

We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us - the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
(Joseph Campbell. The Hero With a Thousand Faces)

Breathing

As human beings we feel the need to cling to every good thing that comes our way. We cling to things, to money, to experiences. We feel we need to possess all that is good because we fear that if we don't we will be left empty. But when we hold on to something good we find it doesn't do what we expect it to do - to fill that hole, to make us whole again, and so we are disappointed and collect more stuff. We eat more food, we drink more wine and collect more and more things. And we worry that we don't have enough and no matter how much we collect, it's never enough.

But when we breath, we don't hold on to the breath. We breath in, the breath does it's work, and we let it go again. And yet there's another breath, and another. When we let go the universe provides what we need. Everything in the universe is constantly moving and changing, as if the whole universe is breathing in and breathing out. Connecting with that rhythm is one of the hardest things to do, because it means dying - letting go of everything, letting go even of that which we call "me". And as each layer is stripped away we discover that we haven't lost anything at all, but we find who we really are. And we discover that the universe hasn't got it in for us and that we aren't so seperate and alien afterall.

So breath in, breath out and find the rhythm of the breath and let it permeate you life. Take what you need and then let go again.

The meaning of Myth

I found the following quote a few years ago. It's probably this quote that started me thinking a bit differently about the word "myth". This led to the study of Jung and the concept of symbols and archetypes, Joseph Campbell's awesome understanding of myth and a few other things. It comes from a book I bought for R5 at a second hand theological bookstore. The title is "The Primal Vision". by John V. Taylor. It's a stunning book and in a chapter on "The Language of Myth" he quotes someone by the name of Nicolas Berdyaev:

Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality... The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought.
Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people...; it brings two worlds together symbolically. (Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and Spirit)

The Journey

Paulo Coelho's book "The Alchemist" has to be one of my favourite books. I was chatting with some intersting people this morning and the book came up. As we were talking one of the people mentioned that the treasure at the end of the book is a bit disappointing. I thought about that for a while and to be honest, I couldn't really remember what the treasure was, but I remembered, in detail, the rest of the story. I guess the treasure at the end wasn't as important to me as the journey itself. While the treasure seemed to be the driving force behind the journey, the book without the journey would have been, well, pointless. And maybe that's the point. It's not so much the destination that's important, but the journey we take to get there.

Polyrythms and Ideas

One of the things you need to learn as a drummer is to play different things with each of your limbs. This is known as independance. I can play one pattern on the kick drum, another of the hi-hat or ride, another on the snare, and perhaps my left foot is playing another pattern with the hi-hat foot pedal. To someone starting out, this is usually quite difficult and you often find one limb trying to follow the other. A little way down the line this becomes quite easy and natural, and it's one of the things that can make a great rhythm.
The next challenge is polyrhythms. This is similar to what I've just spoken about except your playing two or more rhythms at the same time. For instance, you may be counting 1-2-3 on the base drum, but at the same you'll play 1-2-3-4 on the ride cymbal - on top of the first rhythm, or even 5 and 4 and so on. Played correctly, you get a really interesting and sometimes hypnotic rhythm.

What does this have to do with my point of view?
Well, some people act as if there is only one way of thinking. They acknowlege that there are other ways of looking at things, but they feel their way is perhaps better than other ways of looking at things. This is usually quite evident in a debate between science and religion, or in understanding concepts like energy, spirit, soul etc.
But, is it not possible to have different points of view at the same time - views that seem to contradict each other?
I have found that it can be quite helpful to entertain that possibility, and quite often there is something else that emerges when you do that. Something emerges that, I find, is more true to me and my experience of life.
I think that it goes back to the concept that theories and ideas can never fully map out the true experience of living. Real life is messy and there are always grey areas - areas of mystery that no theory will ever quite cover. Holding two conflicting ideas at the same time can push you into exploring these grey areas with more honesty.

Truth is often found in the balance between two opposites.

talking about God

How do I experience God? God is like the air all around me and in me. I breath it in and breath it out. Without it I would die. I know it is there, but it's only when I'm really still, or desperate for breath, that I seem to notice it at all.

We want to think about God. God is a thought; God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. He's beyond Being, He’s beyond the category of being and non-being. Every religion is true in this sense: it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. He who thinks he knows doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.
(Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth)

Honesty and spirituality

I love bookshops. The way a book is able to speak in silence gives me a sense of peace. And that moment of opening a new book, connecting with someone else's mind for me is real magic. The fact that I can write these words and somehow convey to you my thoughts is nothing less than miraculous, something we take so for granted.

But it's also possible to hide behind these words. If I'm careful and clever I can make it sound as if I have all the answers. Well perhaps I can't, but many of the authors I read get it right. I read these books and I must admit that I feel quite small. I can never seem to 'get it right' in those 10 steps that the author guarantees. Maybe it's because some books belong to the world of ideas and ideals, where the raw reality of living seems quite distant.

Every now and again I find a book where the author has dared to let me in on their real life. One of the chapters I read last night was honest enought to speak about the dark side that exists in all of us. Another book I'm reading is about sex and deals with stuff that most of us think, but would rather not admit.

Sometimes I ask myself if I hide behind all the books that are stacked beside my bed, as if by reading them I can escape for a while. Escape from what? I think it's the escape from being alone with myself, or the fear that I am nothing extraordinary..

And I think that perhaps this is why the spritual path is often one of stillness - because in stillness I need to be honest and face my doubts, my fears and my demons. I say 'my' because they are part of who I am. And strangely enough, by embracing these things , I find stillness and peace and relax into the knowlege that I am here and I am living, and I share this life and these feelings with other real human beings - and I don't feel so alone with myself anymore.

The difficulty of communicating experience

I have been tempted to delete the last two posts in this blog because when I read them, they just seem so inarticulate and don't really get across what I've been trying to say. I realise now, though, that this is the whole point. It's a paradox to be writing about how experience is beyond words, when the very thing I'm trying to do is to put into words my experience. Perhaps It's better for me to leave the last two posts and call them poetic licence or something, because they are, in effect, communicating the point I was trying to make.

It's interesting how the Universe speaks to us...
I was thinking about this topic and how to communicate it and I happened to pick up a book I am reading. It's by Joseph Campbell, called "Myths to live by". The chapter I was busy with was on Zen. It just seem to jump out of the page as if the author had been reading my mind. This is what it had to say:

"..it is actually impossible to communicate through speech any experience whatsoever, unless to someone who has himself enjoyed an equivalent experience of his own..

..Life defined is bound to the past, no longer pouring forward into the future......anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life..

..(Zen) holds to the realization that life and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning; the idea being to let life come and not name it. It will then push you right back to where you live - where you are, and not where you are named. "

Spirituality from the ground up

In my last post I spoke about words and ideas and how they point to the experience of life, rather than being the thing itself. I hope to expand on that, but I would like to first try and explain the way I approach these things.

Wearing different hats

Edward de Bono has a book entitled "Six Thinking Hats". The idea is that you put a different thinking hat on, and approach things in different ways. I find it really helpful not to commit myself to looking at things only one way, but try a number of approaches - looking at the same thing or subject matter from different angles. We can be so dogmatic about some things, and often all it takes is to look at it from a different angle and then we see it differently.

The thing to learn is that we don't need to commit ourselves to viewing things one way. For instance, in my last post I argued against a sort of platonic way of approaching various subjects. That doesn't mean that I need to identify myself with that argument, it is simply another way of looking at things that allows me to see the bigger picture better. It also gives me more freedom in writing my thoughts. I don't need to hold myself only to that which I've written and I have the freedom to contradict myself.

Starting with experience

Much of what we call 'beliefs' has a top down approach. What I mean by this is that we're taught something, or read something about God, or about life and we start with that idea. Ideas like fate, destiny, reincarnation, heaven, hell, spirit, angels, ghosts, demons, etc.
We then assimilate that idea into our belief system, and then, when challenged, we argue for its existence. We possibly then see that what we understood the idea to mean doesn't fit into our experience of living and so we reject the idea.

I came to a point in my life where I wasn't sure if I really believed all the stuff I claimed to believe. So, I made the decision to start from scratch and get rid of all my ideas and look at what I experience in life without being influenced by what I'm supposed to believe. (Now I know this is practically impossible - we always carry some beliefs with us, but I find that the exercise is very useful).
What I discovered doing this, was that there are experiences that do fit into some of the ideas and beliefs that I once held, but that the words used to describe the experience was never quite enough. It's the same as if we had to try and explain experiences like bungee jumping or making love to someone who hadn't had the experience. Words never fully capture the experience. To fully understand it, you need to experience it.

So - to summarize:

Spirituality, for me, is about living - experiencing life, and then finding ways to share that with others, as well as trying to understand what it is that others experience.

In the next few weeks I would like to look at a few of the things that didn't initially make sense to me from an idea point of view, but when I looked at them from an experience point of view I was able to make space for them in my mind.

Please feel free to comment ;)

Fate, destiny and the journey of life

Some words seem so final. Words like fate, words like destiny. And so we are often left with a decision as to whether we believe in these words, to believe in fate or destiny.

Most people I speak to like the idea of having free choice and so choose to reject the concept of fate or destiny. Perhaps it would be a good idea to define what we mean by the terms, but I don't think that solves the problem. The problem I'm talking about is the fact that we have words like fate, destiny, spirit, God or any of those words which it has become almost fashionable not to believe in. Where do they come from? Do we need to treat them as if the word itself contained an idea, and that idea was some kind of law, or reality that one can accept or reject?

Perhaps another way to look it is that words are signposts, pointing to what we experience in life. Sometimes it seems as if my life is being directed by an outside force. The word I could use to describe that experience could be the word 'fate'. Or sometimes it seems like everything fits together, so many meaningful coincidences it's like there's some providential hand guiding me and helping me along. Have you ever had the experience of doing something and your whole being resonates with what you're doing and you know intuitively that this is what you were made for - this is your destiny? And so once again a word fulfils the need for expression, the need to communicate the journey to others.

Some say that the realm of words and ideas is the true reality in that it is more perfect than the day-to-day, messy business of living. They say that the material world is the shadow of this archetypal realm. But I think that it's the words we use that are imperfect. The fact that we can communicate at all is miraculous in itself, but it is still only an imperfect representation of the journey of life, the experience of living.

The problem with religion is that it relies on words and ideas first, instead of recognising the context that formed the words and ideas, and so the words and ideas become law, seperated from the life that they were supposed to reflect.

I am, however, grateful for words, no matter how limiting they can sometimes be, because it is through words and ideas that I can communicate my journey, and connect with and learn from others, even if they lived two thousand years ago.

The lesson of the coin

A magician plays with a coin in his hand. It rolls over his fingers, and then flies into the air. He catches it again and holds it up to your eyes. As your eyes focus, you realise that there is no coin. And yet you are so sure that the coin was there only a second ago, and he smiles and says that there was no coin, it was only in your mind. And you wonder if he meant that there never was any coin at all, or if he's only talking about the coin that you thought he held before your eyes. But it doesn't matter, since you suddenly realise that reality isn't all it's made out to be, and that the reason things are as they are is because you see them that way....

My favourite times of day

Dawn and dusk are my favourite parts of the day. Just before the sun goes to sleep, or as the world is about to wake up. Whenever I've gone for a walk early in the morning, there is something about the freshness of the new day that makes me feel alone, but not a lonely kind of alone, but a peaceful aloneness. The air is fresh and loaded with potential and I feel alert and awake and aware that I'm part of something much bigger than myself, that I'm connected to this world that is waking up. I know that in an hour or two the world will be full of chaos again, the noise of traffic with everyone hypnotically following the beat of business. But for a while I'm at the place where the world was created and everything is new.

Dusk is my other favourite. That time between night and day, darkness and light and I feel like I can stretch out and touch another realm, the place where magic is alive. Between waking and dreaming, concious and unconcious, between matter and spirit, that which is thought to be real and that which is imagined. This is when I like to sit in my garden and half close my eyes, but not all the way. And as my eyes adjust I see the energy that is given off by the plants and trees, and I look down at my hands and I too am surrounded in moving waves of energy. Of course there's the skeptic in me saying that this is only because I'm squinting my eyes slightly, and it's probably true, but I choose to ignore it and enjoy the experience, and my imagination and the real world dance together.

The meaning of - well anything really..

I often hear people saying "it's just psychological" or "but that can be explained", almost as if something can be explained then it no longer has any deeper meaning.

Things have different meanings depending on your attachment to them. To a logger, a forest is there to be cut down, the wood is there to make money. To an inhabitant of that forest, it is home. To a builder, a house is brick and cement; to an architect it's a design and to the people living there, a shelter and a home - full of memories and meaning.

An email between two people is, on one hand, 'just' data. To the people communicating, however, it is something rich with meaning - these electronic impulses that move at the speed of light have meaning. What I'm writing will be stored as "just data" somewhere. I have no idea where, but as you read it, it comes to life. Perhaps it will mean something different to you than it does to me, and even if no-one reads it, it is meaningful for me to write - to try and put in words some of the things inside my head.

So - the next time you hear someone say "it's just... whatever" - perhaps think about the idea that meaning goes beyond just one way of looking at something.

Aeroplane food and the meaning of life..

Last night my wife and I were having a great conversation and it somehow went on to the topic of space travel. I mentioned something about the fact that one day we won't need to go to space, we would probably be able to buy the experience. Ok I'm all into sci-fi and everything, but it goes beyond that. Since all of our experience of things like is as a result of sensory input, I don't see why we won't get to a level of virtual reality one day where we actually experience these things - touch, see, smell etc. - without actually going there. Her reply was that it would never be the same because we would make it too perfect and that part of travel is the uncomfortability - if that's a word. The smell of an aeroplane cabin, having to wait for your luggage etc.
I realised that what she was saying is so true of life. While we long for the ideal - that perfect thing that will make us happy, it will always be incomplete without us being able to appreciate the mundane. The meaning of life is all about living - every experience - good and bad.

So - this morning I was up early to go of to JHB. After a good meeting in the land of thunderstorms I was dropped off at the airport again. When I reached into my briefcase I realised my wallet was gone. Now everything that I needed was in my wallet - my ID to be able to catch the flight, my credit card to buy lunch, the ticket for parkade so I could bail my car out.. you get the picture. Fortunately it was left in the car and will be returned to me tomorrow - but I was still stuck with having to get home somehow. So I decided to just go with it. I managed to convince them that it was me so they let me on the plane. Perhaps it's my honest face, or that I'm skilled in the art of Jedi mind tricks (I wish) - but I got the boarding pass. The next thing I found out is that the ticket wasn't on the el-cheapo-buy-your-own-food-airline but with another airline who actually gives you food onboard - so I didn't need to buy lunch. And when I arrived back in CPT the guys at the parkade let me out - with no charge. Now I'd been there the whole day - so that should've cost me around R100 - but they let me out for free. So - losing my wallet saved me around R200 - since I didn't buy lunch either. I find it really cool that when you go with the rhythm of life instead of fighting against it how these things seem to often just work out :)