Ominous Rumblings

If you are one of the few who might care, there is a new thingy at tbnni.wordpress.com

Logopolis, part 4

https://dayone.me/rIkzBl

Oh boy, a new journaling tool. Huzzah.

Trying out a new journaling tool…

https://dayone.me/rIgzZg

Dreaming like it’s 1989

Weird restless Doctor Who dream this morning: I’m on a night time stakeout with the Seventh Doctor and Ace in a beat up old VW minivan outside my parent’s house. The driver is asleep, and the Doctor, for reasons known only to him is tranced out. Ace gets bored and does something stupid. In this case walking into the house through what is clearly the evil door, first because it is right next to the front door where the window should be, and second because it is glowing in an over saturated white light.

Inside the house everything is decorated in black and white and gray, and seen through a slightly foggy lens and video-nasty slo-mo. There is an effed-up Dalek in my brother’s old room, quite obviously insane. Bits of industrial detritus clutter all the rooms. Ace starts to lose it.

Eventually we find ourselves on the wall of some old castle overlooking a sparsely forested area full of knights in armor battling one another. The Doctor walks out and joins us on the battlement silently watching the melee below. Indeed, through out the whole dream he manages to do nothing except stand around looking knowing and enigmatic. Then suddenly some girl appears to my right and reminds me that I have the power to be decisive in this battle, because I am, after all, Excalibur. Which I pretty much take in an, “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that,” way as if it were forgetting to put the laundry in the dryer. I don’t remember anything coherent happening after that.

Pretty much your standard McCoy era fare really.

Bouncing Off the Soundboard

Hamlet: …Will you play upon this pipe?
Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet: I pray you
Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.
Hamlet: I do beseech you.
Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.
Hamlet: It is as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not that skill.
Hamlet: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

–Hamlet III, ii
William Shakepeare

I like this musical instrument metaphor for Mind. The psychology literature I’ve read tends to speak of selves, voices and personalities, as if our consciousness were made up of lots of little people each exhibiting certain characteristics and inhabiting various roles in the psyche. I’ve often found such metaphors useful myself, but I wonder if they suggest a stronger degree of autonomy to these aspects of self than is really there.

The idea of consciousness as music is one that appeals to me on many levels and helps me to understand some things that the sub-personalities metaphor does not. What if these voices are really more like notes and chords sounding from a subtle and complicated instrument. Different fingerings and actions will resonate in different parts of an underlying structure, giving voice to different sounds. As anyone who as looked at the acoustics of a piano will tell you, you can never play just one note. Striking a single key doesn’t just vibrate the strings under the hammer, but sets off a rich set of interactions within the entire instrument creating subtle resonances and overtones in organic and sometimes surprising ways. In the same way, I feel like the various aspects of self are tied together in complicated and subtle ways.

Of course this metaphor raises a question: if the mind is an instrument, then who is playing it? This is a fascinating question for which many people have expressed many different answers. The scientific materialist in me tends to think that the brain is a sort of resonating cavity and that the mind basically plays itself, but taking in stimulus and influence from the outside and incorporating that into the sound. The zen student in me is content to just sit with the question, gnawing at it like a dog with a chew toy. It gets along with the materialist because the former perspective also believes that mind is an unusual instrument that changes in response to the playing. One which can be tuned and detuned through the music itself. Cognitive behavioral therapy and healing meditation as self-tuning melodies to bring the different strings of mind into more harmonious accord. And perhaps shikantaza being the John Cage school of zen where you just open the instrument and let it resonate to the environment on its own with no conscious input at all.

This metaphor gives me a different perspective from which to reflect on another question which has been poking at me from the periphery for a while: what to make of the word “spiritual?” This is a word that the rationalist in me is reluctant to embrace, being tied up with ideas of dogmatic religion and other such activities that often feel to me like so much superstition and soft-headed wish fulfillment fantasy. Yet I also recognize that there is some value in these traditions and some referent for which I would use the word “spiritual” for lack of some other less-baggage laden term. I suspect that it’s the same thing that people who refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious” are grasping for. There is something that many of these religious and spiritual traditions can invoke which seems to carry emotional significance which is somehow “deeper” or more “substantial” than simple everyday experience. I don’t think it’s limited to religion or mysticism either. I think the same something can be found in great works of art, acts of kindness, and myriad other interactions.

This musical metaphor for Mind makes me wonder if a good definition for spiritual might be that which invokes a rich and complex set of vibrations which don’t merely resonate in a few corners of our psyche but across the full breadth of our instrument. When we feel the various phrases of our existence merge into a resonant complex of harmonics and overtones or a holistic melodic symphony, we can be profoundly moved.

This metaphor also provides an explanation, that doesn’t rely on duplicity, for why we act and behave differently in different contexts. There seems to be a natural tendency for personality to adapt to social context. We act differently around strangers than we do around family or around friends. Different groups of friends get slightly different versions of us, the observation underlying the Google+ circles idea. But it’s not always just a matter of consciously filtering our expression for the sake of getting along with people. Certainly that is part of what is going on, but if I pay attention, I find that I feel and think in subtly different ways depending on who I am with. Chatting with colleagues at work brings out different aspects of my personality than hanging out with zen folks after a retreat. In the musical metaphor, what we have are closely placed instruments which are mutually interacting as they play. The relationships we have with people are shaped by the ways in which our melodies resonate with each other. Where there is similarity, the music interferes constructively, reinforcing those aspects in ourselves which we feel strongly in others. This merges well with the idea of “shadow selves”: that what we can’t stand in others is often what strongly resonates with aspects of ourselves which we find unacceptable or abhorrent.

In this way each new connection we make with somebody brings out a fresh new combination of aspects of ourselves. Every friend, enemy, family member and lover invokes a unique timbre out of us as we play the music of our lives. And when we find someone with which we resonate deeply, who invokes a rich spectrum of sympathetic vibrations throughout our heart, then the results can be astonishingly spectacular and moving. “Kindred Spirits.” “Soul Mates.” The very language we use to describe our most powerful relationships steeped in spiritual imagery. We seem to naturally seek out those who augment huge portions of ourselves, and when we find those connections they make us feel alive like nothing else.

(With apologies to the Peart-phobic readers in the audience).

On the Precipice of Possibility

Energy without motion, but a vertiginous sense of the potential waiting to flow into action. Sensations charged and over saturated but combined with a ghostly transparent surrealism. I wonder if this is how a ski jumper feels looking down from the top of the hill.

Checking in With the Dropping Off

“Who am I?”

“Don’t Know.”

Breath in, ice tinkles in the cup of water on my belly. Breath out. Laz rolls stirs on the other side of the bed. Will he make it through the night or wake again crying out for Mama?

Still. Dust bunnies on the ceiling fan; tinnitus squall; pulse beating.

Electric thud of the A/C kicking on. Breathing again… time for bed.

“Who am I?”

“Don’t Know. Curious to find out.”

Who do you want to be today?

Yesterday I put up a profile on an online dating social network and spent much of the day answering a bunch of questions as openly and honestly as possible. It was something of an interesting experience. I assume most people approach this with lots of ideas about what they are looking for and answer accordingly. In my case, I’m coming to this with essentially no prior dating experience and having spent much of the last two years jettisoning a lot of preconceptions and social programming about relationship roles and sexual norms. (Also having spent the last 8 months doing a lot of zen which just further reinforces the dropping of habit mind and unconscious preferences.) As a result I find myself looking to filter out as little as possible and just be open to a search for love, passion and human companionship in whatever shape, form, size and situation it can come in. It’s kind of a liberating experience to realize that I could probably love just about anyone and that I’m something of a romantic blank slate. My strongest constraint is Laz, who currently at least needs to live with both his mother and father, but generally I’m kinda tabula rasa. I have interests and hobbies and quirks, but I find that there isn’t a lot I wouldn’t be willing to change. And it’s not about desperation, but rather that I find I’m just relishing the freedom of dropping off expectation.

I will be interesting to see if this persists when the actual interaction with other humans starts happening.

Interestingly, I find that today I feel like I am done with my mourning over the end of my marriage. I don’t know if it is related or just coincidental, but it just occurred to me this evening that I can think about my marriage to Sunshine and I’m not sad about it anymore. It was a beautiful marriage while it lasted, and I’m glad to be in a position to celebrate it’s ending as well as it’s beginning. In some ways, this seems like a sudden change and perhaps too fast to be real, but really I’ve been mourning my marriage for most of the last couple of years. I just wasn’t fully aware that it was ending. And maybe all this zen stuff is training my brain to make those kind of sudden shifts. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter why. I’m just happy to be dropping off all that baggage as well. Hooray!

Defusing the Bedtime Bomb

Putting the boy to bed has become a somewhat delicate operation of late. He has pretty much adopted a routine: clean diaper, pajamas, Ponyo as a bedtime story. On a good night, that’s about all thats needed. But lately he’s been somewhat reluctant to accept sleep, and his favorite form of protest at the moment is a fairly violent thrashing attack on whatever is in reach, preferably a parent. So, bedtime has become a tricky prospect, requiring significant mindfulness to radiate a sleepy calm while still being aware enough to fend off a sudden attack of feral child. I used to sorta doze with him a little bit, hoping to infect him with my sleepy vibe, but this is really not a good idea at the moment.

Thankfully, his bedtime movie Ponyo is just about perfectly suited, including a long section of mostly music which nearly always puts him down. If you can manage to navigate through the outbursts without creating too much extra tension. Hopefully these explosions of sudden violence are a phase he will outgrow. In the meantime, bedtime is a bit like bomb squad duty.

Proper Function

All formations are permanent.
This is the law of appearing and disappearing.
When both appearing and disappearing disappear,
Then this is stillness bliss.
–The Mahaparinirvana-Sutra

When he started teaching, the Buddha first gave this very simple teaching that everything appears and disappears. That is the teaching of dependent origination. It is a kind of dharma candy, a teaching expedient. The Buddha used it to open his students’ minds. But when his students’ minds matured, the Buddha grabbed the candy away from them. That is the teaching that there is actually no appearing or disappearing. Then next, he taught that appearing is just appearing and disappearing is just disappearing. His last teaching is how you find the correct function of appearing and disappearing to help other beings.

–The Compass of Zen
Zen Master Seung Sahn.

All these words about finding or attaining correct function and proper function keep bringing up strange associations for me. Physics makes use of the German version of proper function (“eigenfunction”) to describe the solutions to a variety of differential equations. Usually these are describing the motion of particles or dynamics of fields acting under the influence of forces, fields or energy potentials in the environment. For bound systems these eigenfunctions often result in only discrete solutions, like standing waves in a cavity or on a string. If the ends of a string are tied down, the only stable or standing wave solutions available will be those which have natural nodes at the ends. Other wave forms are possible, but won’t be stable.

There is a certain metaphorical alignment in the notion of these eigenfunctions and the Daoist ideal of coming into a stable, sympathetic relationship with your environment. Certainly one of the things I get out of my meditative practice is a gradual dampening of the chaotic squall of motion in my psyche toward a quiet functional synergy. In any case, as a scientist, these are the metaphors that I have available. I get what I can from them.