Zen and the Art of the 5 Principles

22

As I walked with the others I discovered was that there were more than simple rules.

As I walked with the others one of the things that I discovered was that as well as simple rules there are simple exercises that each of us can do to con­vey a feeling of willingness from our conscious selves¾our egotistical selves¾to our Spiritual Selves or Higher Power. 

One of the other discoveries I made on this trek was all that I had to do was to ask, “What’s Next That You Would Have Me Do?” and the other prerequisite is that I mean it as I ask it.  Whatever that was, would present itself in some fashion before me to be done and all that I wound have to do is get on with doing whatever is next before me.

The oddity is that by me doing so it is a clear message that demonstrates my willingness to do whatever it is that is necessary to get on with being healthy. 

Not just as an abstract idea, but as an experience.

The concept of subjective and experiential is crucial. 

Out Of The Head And Into The Heart

One Of The Longer Journeys

Anyone One Of Us Will Ever Make

Oh God … What Will I Have To Do Next? …

I Am Trying To Remember, That This Is Only What I Have To Do … But Will It Be Fun???


“Next” cried the conductor, as if he were saying “all-a-board” … What is next for you?

A Controller Doesn't Trust

A controller doesn't trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life. There is no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.
--Rita Mae Brown

It is very hard for most of us to see how controlling we are. We may feel uptight or careful, but we haven't seen it as controlling ourselves or controlling how people respond to us. We may be worried about a loved one's behaviour or safety, but not realize our hovering over that person is a controlling activity. We may be keenly aware of other people's controlling behaviour with us, but unaware we have equalled their control by monitoring them and trying to change their behaviour.

What a moment of spiritual adventure it is to risk living through the pain! When we do not seek an escape or a quick fix but have patience with the process, new possibilities often do develop. We can only let go of our control - or turn it over to our Higher Power. And we will do it and forget, taking control back within minutes or within an hour. Then we let go again.

Today, I will submit to the insecurity of a changing universe and have faith that I can live through the process and grow.


from Hazelden Thought of the Week

Zen and the Art of Walking Lightly -- Ch 7

7

Ask Yourself Whether You Are Happy? Then Notice That When You Do, You Cease To Be So ¾ The Laws Of Paradox At Work!

A long time ago, long before I ever considered writing these lines, I made an interesting discovery.  At the time of making it, it was more of an observation than a discovery. It took all the intervening time for me to realize I had made a discovery, I suppose it was the slowest epiphany on record. 

What I also discovered was that most people have been aware of this phenomenon since the dawn of time. 

Yet, I think the word discovery is appropriate, because even though it was well known, I had never come across it described or theoretically explained in any of the psychology, sociological, philosophical or psychiatric literature I had studied over the years: which in my case primarily happens to be psychology. 

So, directly or indirectly, or intentionally or unintentionally, I spent the intervening 20 or so years, nearly a quarter century, investigating this elusive phenomenon, through the facility of my practice of psychotherapy.

Here is the observation I had noticed a long time ago; happiness is not something that happens randomly.  This thing has form and it follows rules and they seem to be:

· Happiness does not happen because of good luck or because the fickle finger of fate picks you out for some grand event.  No one is special and conversely no one is non-special. 

· Happiness is not something that can be purchased nor can it be controlled or for that matter caused to occur on command by some grand authority.  Although many have tried.

· Happiness does not depend on the world about us, although conversely the world about us can affect some of the various outcomes of its occurrences.

· Happiness seems to be more an interpretation of the world both about us and within us, with all of this being taken in some sort of strange mix or recipe that is constantly changing and is difficult to replicate.  The formula might not work the second time the way it did the first time.

· Happiness, in fact, seems to be a condition that we must be prepared for, that we must cultivate and nurture, and then be prepared, if necessary to de­fend, but not from a place of unity but rather from a place of deep privacy¾as an individual. 

· The variations on the happiness formulas seem to be more effective with those people who have learned to work with inner experience(s). It seems that they will, to a certain degree, be able to determine the quality of their lives as it relates to having or not having happiness.

· The ability to determine the having or not having of the presence of happiness seems to be as close as any of us can come to causing happy to happen.  It can be a conscious decision to be or not to be, pardon the pun, but not always.

· It also seems a given that we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it.  The very effort of trying to search for it seems to defeat our every effort to have or possess it.  Happiness cannot be owned; it can only be experienced.

· Happiness seems to be the process of being fully involved with every detail of your life, subjectively not objectively. 

· The key statement in describing the process of being involved in life seems to be as completely as possible, and completely as possible does not seem to depend on any opinion or definition of what is good or bad or how those cognitive markers of good or bad are held in the mind of the beholder.  Just because you are prepared to fight to the death for your beliefs doesn’t mean they are true.

· Happiness seems to occur because of the intensity of the involvement with life and not in the outcomes that intensity seems to want to provide so that it could be easily seen and judged by others. 

· Degree of intensity of the involvement necessary to induce happiness will vary from individual to individual as well as from situation-to-situation.  Thus it follows that degrees of intensity i.e. very intense to mildly intense are not markers that can determine the outcome of creating happiness.  It is just a necessary factor that varies from time to time. 

· The Laws Of Paradox seems to affect the outcome of having some or not; for instance: don't aim for it because the Laws Of Paradox will tend to cause you to increase the size and shape of the target you have set for yourself and then at the same time cause you to miss with greater frequency.  Something like Chinese handcuffs, the harder you try the more difficult it becomes. 

· Happiness and success cannot be pursued for their own sake.

· Happiness and success, to be most effective must sneak up from behind and envelop us ... It is something that happens to us while we are busy doing something else … as the inadvertent, unintentional after-effect of our efforts to simply get on with the business of being ourselves and by doing whatever is next simply because it is there and needs to be done.  Then this seems to need to be taken into consideration with the effort made by the individual to be willing to work in the shadow of his or her spiritual self and then deliberately attempting to work with the spiritual forces of the Greater Way of Things.

· Again paradox.  The Art of Trying Not to Try.

· So how can we reach this elusive goal that cannot be attained by a direct route?  My practice and practices of the past 20 or so years has convinced me that there is a way. 

· It is a circuitous path of going nowhere the long way in search of someone who was not lost and there all along … You. And it can only begin with a willingness by the participant to want to make the journey.

 

1)               Describe how comfortable or confined you are in your present ­shell.

            2)              When did you "crab" last (if you remember ever doing so)?

            3)              What circumstances helped you to do this?

            4)              How close are you to the next casting of your shell, or "crabbing"? 

            5)              What do you need, or need to do or have happen, in order to do this?

Some Observations On “The Same And Different”, Now That We Know We Are In A Shell Game

In our lives we remain the same in some ways and we change in others. 

1)               As you look back over your life, as a child, as a youth, and now as an adult, how have you been the same all your life?

2)              How were you different during those periods of your life, as a child, a youth, an adult, and now? 

3)      What were the circumstances that helped bring these differences into being?

Remember:

You Don’t Make Things Different

By Keeping Them The Same

Zen and the Art Of Walking Lightly Ch 8

8

Happiness And Perception --- The Premise

How We See The World And What Really Happens In The World Are Often Two Different Things. 

Our perception is the business of what and how we think we see and that is coupled with what and how we believe we have experienced what it was that we thought we saw. 

Next, our opinions and interpretations gleaned from what it was that we thought we saw … our perception(s) are formed as the result of a multitude of happenings occurring in ways and combinations that most of us are totally unaware of and never would have imagined happening to us in the first place:

(a)            Our perception and interpretation of what it is that we think we saw … our perceived or understood experience … seems to be the result of the outcome(s) of many minute forces interacting with each other in a myriad number of ways, forming events-sequences.

(b)           These event-sequences themselves act and interact with each other to form perceptive imagery and this process will eventually lead one to forming opinion(s). 

(c)            Opinions can and do stack up and as they do they can become motivational and that motivation in turn moves us into an action or into a series of actions.

(d)           There seems to be a hierarchy to this entire process of event sequencing. 

(e)            It also seems to be a quadratic process and not (necessarily) a linear process, although it can be a linear process in simple interchanges.

(f)             Thus it extrapolates that the vast majority of events that happen in our lives happen at levels of awareness that William James would call as other than normal waking consciousness perceptions or in the unconscious mind.

Small Events, Cumulative Events And Effects

Small events happen, i.e. the blood/chemistry level shifts in the body because of the ingestion of some form of sugar; this shift in blood chemistry begins a process of cause and effect that has an impact on the individual and the individual’s environment. 

Because the small events can and do interact with other small events the result of those interacts create what I call cumulative events and cumulative events have cumulative effects. It is the cumulative effects that are noticed by the individual as happenings in real time. 

Extrapolating from the sugar ingestion example, as that set of event sequences shifts through the entire system, eventually a mood shift will happen … cumulative effect ... and the person begins to interact with other people in a way that is different then it was a moment ago … i.e. watch any child at a birthday party who has had too much cake and ice cream … The same principal is true for the cumulative effects as it was with the small effects thus the shift and mood swing can set into motion other events that collect into major cumulative effects. 

Major cumulative effects can be clearly seen as activities or states of being as they collect one on top of the other so to speak. Then their quantitative and qualitative result begins the process of us defining how it is that we think we are feeling, good or bad, happy or sad, angry etc., and how it is we interpret others and this in turn sets into motion our responses to what it is that we think is happening to us in the conscious here and now. At the unconscious level something totally different and unrelated is really defining how it is that we think we are seeing things.

This sequencing process from small to cumulative to major cumulative is happening constantly and, this is the important part, it all happens outside our control. 

Life’s conundrum seems to be; that when we arrived on the face of this planet we got a space suit to survive in ... this body … and some of the instructions for its operation lay hidden in the genetic structure and are not readily available to the conscious mind. 

Second to the genetic factors are forces that are at work in our lives over which we have no control that lay beyond the space suit such as the pull of gravity, the pollen in the air, the historical period into which we are born. Innumerable other conditions that affect us socially, physically, emotionally and spiritually will determine how it is that we see and what it is that we believe we see, and how it is that we believe we should feel about what it is that we think we see. None of these will affect what is there to be seen. That is inert.  Probably, what is most important is how and what it is that we might just do based on what it is that we think we feel and see.

To look closer on the particular event at any given point in time one has to be able to begin to look into and to see the event sequencing and the interplay of the outcomes of the various sequences. Much as a diabetic has to consider that his disease at the molecular level is effectual at the inter-social level even if he cannot see the interplay in its minutest form. 

A coarse example of event sequencing from history goes almost unnoticed by history.  It is the story of King Henry the 8^th of England; he was riding horseback one day, fell off and struck his head and lost consciousness for several moments.  From that point on he pursued a frantic obsessive search for the perfect mate, and the rest is history. 

The question bears asking: what if he never fell? Or what if he did and never hit his head, what would history say about him?  Would there be a Church of England? Would Elizabeth 1^st even exist? Would Anne Bolin have lost her head? This list can extrapolate all through history, and this is just one tangent.

My point is; what I do with something today, even though it appears to be the same as I did with it yesterday, does not … necessarily have to be … not does it mean … even though it could … that it holds the same event sequencing. The higher probability is that in all likelihood at the more subtle levels there are in all things … probability differences … and these probability differences reside in the event sequencing process. 

Thus it follows that no matter how hard I try to repeat a particular set of circumstances that seemly brought me pleasure initially, it just won’t work the same way twice … sometimes it will be close, but never exact, and sometimes not at all.   

We are not privy to all the inner workings of event sequencing and staging and because we are not, the coarseness of our own conscious awareness, our thinking patterns, prevents us from seeing what is really happening at the deeper levels of our psyche.  It is not part of what we perceive to be our normal waking consciousness.  Thus the understanding of why we think our world is the way it is may have absolutely nothing to do with the real cause and effect cycles that are happening in our world.