Divine Hypnosis

Wayne Liquorman has a very illuminating metaphor for Enlightenment - losing something you never had in the first place, but was causing you unnecessary suffering.

Imagine being in a town where all the inhabitants have been hypnotised to thinking they have stones in their shoes. Except you, on whom the hypnotism has suddenly lost its power.

Everyone wants to know how you walk about so comfortably, and don't seem to worry about the "stone in your shoe."  You try to explain that they don't really have any stones in their shoes,  and although they look for it and can't find it, they cannot help believing they have a stone in their shoe that makes walking painful.  Hypnotism is like that: it can make you believe something that has no foundation in reality.

The Thin End of the Wedge

Rose is one who has always found it hard to apologise; she maintains she does no wrong.  In fact she isn't a naughty girl, doesn't smoke, drive fast,  spend much money on my credit card (she has no access to it anyway) swear or become much overweight.  She does neglect stuff, though. Twenty years ago she used sometimes to apologise, but always tacked on a sentence or two purporting to show that it couldn't be avoided or was my fault anyway.  She doesn't do that much nowadays, I am happy to say.

OK.  She agreed with me some weeks ago that her laptop (and mine) would be closed down by 10:30 p.m.  Last night hers was still open at 10:33, and that isn't the first time she has broken the agreement.  So when we were in bed and I had made sure sure she was in a good mood, I said to her:

  "We have an agreement that laptops will be off by 10:30, and yours was still on at 10:33, maybe later.  I'm going to test your sincerity.  Will you agree that if your computer is not shut down by 10:30 YOU will come to ME and apologise, admit that you were late shutting down your computer by, for example, three minutes, and ask me to give you three smacks with the hairbrush?  One smack for every minute?"

To my surprise she answered with a giggle,  "Tee-hee!  Yes, all right!"

I ran with this and continued, "And if you don't come to me straightaway but I find out and have to confront you with it, it will be double - two smacks for each minute?"

There was no laugh in response to that, I was sorry to note.  I will try to find out if the computer (Windows XP) keeps a log file of times of events, if it does it may come in very useful.  I will type out this agreement and ask her to sign it, we'll take it from there.

Wisdom

Extract from "I Am That", a compilation of conversations with Nisargadatta Maharaj.

12. The Person is not Reality

Questioner: Kindly tell us how you realised.

Maharaj: I met my Guru when I was 34 and realised by 37.

Q: What happened? What was the change?

M: Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. I saw that in the ocean of pure awareness, on the surface of the universal consciousness, the numberless waves of the phenomenal worlds arise and subside beginninglessly and endlessly. As consciousness, they are all me. As events they are all mine. There is a mysterious power that looks after them. That power is awareness, Self, Life, God, whatever name you give it. It is the foundation, the ultimate support of all that is, just like gold is the basis for all gold jewellery. And it is so intimately ours! Abstract the name and shape from the jewellery and the gold becomes obvious. Be free of name and form and of the desires and fears they create, then what remains?

Q: Nothingness.

M: Yes, the void remains. But the void is full to the brim. It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.

Q: By potential you mean the future?

M: Past, present and future -- they are all there. And infinitely more.

Q: But since the void is void, it is of little use to us.

M: How can you say so? Without breach in continuity how can there be rebirth? Can there be renewal without death? Even the darkness of sleep is refreshing and rejuvenating. Without death we would have been bogged up for ever in eternal senility.

Q: Is there no such thing as immortality?

M: When life and death are seen as essential to each other, as two aspects of one being, that is immortality. To see the end in the beginning and beginning in the end is the intimation of eternity.

Definitely, immortality is not continuity. Only the process of change continues. Nothing lasts.

Q: Awareness lasts?

M: Awareness is not of time. Time exists in consciousness only. Beyond consciousness where are time and space?

Q: Within the field of your consciousness there is your body also.

M: Of course. But the idea 'my body', as different from other bodies, is not there. To me it is 'a body', not 'my body', 'a mind', not 'my mind'. The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way.

You may not be quite conscious of your physiological functions, but when it comes to thoughts and feelings, desires and fears you become acutely self-conscious. To me these too are largely unconscious. I find myself talking to people, or doing things quite correctly and appropriately, without being very much conscious of them. It looks as if I live my physical, waking life automatically, reacting spontaneously and accurately.

Q: Does this spontaneous response come as a result of realisation, or by training?

M: Both. Devotion to you goal makes you live a clean and orderly life, given to search for truth and to helping people, and realisation makes noble virtue easy and spontaneous, by removing for good the obstacles in the shape of desires and fears and wrong ideas.

Q: Don’t you have desires and fears any more?

M: My destiny was to be born a simple man, a commoner, a humble tradesman, with little of formal education. My life was the common kind, with common desires and fears. When, through my faith in my teacher and obedience to his words, I realised my true being, I left behind my human nature to look after itself, until its destiny is exhausted. Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. After all, as long as one is bur-dened with a person, one is exposed to its idiosyncrasies and habits.

Q: Are you not afraid of death?

M: I am dead already.

Q: In what sense?

M: I am double dead. Not only am I dead to my body, but to my mind too.

Q: Well, you do not look dead at all!

M: That’s what you say! You seem to know my state better than I do!

Q: Sorry. But I just do not understand. You say you are bodyless and mindless, while I see you very much alive and articulate.

M: A tremendously complex work is going on all the time in your brain and body, are you conscious of it? Not at all. Yet for an outsider all seems to be going on intelligently and purposefully. Why not admit that one’s entire personal life may sink largely below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly?

Q: Is it normal?

M: What is normal? Is your life -- obsessed by desires and fears, full of strife and struggle, meaningless and joyless -- normal? To be acutely conscious of your body is it normal? To be torn by feelings, tortured by thoughts: is it normal? A healthy body, a healthy mind live largely unperceived by their owner; only occasionally, through pain or suffering they call for attention and insight. Why not extend the same to the entire personal life? One can function rightly, responding well and fully to whatever happens, without having to bring it into the focus of awareness. When self-control becomes second nature, awareness shifts its focus to deeper levels of existence and action.

Q: Don’t you become a robot?

M: What harm is there in making automatic, what is habitual and repetitive? It is automatic anyhow.

But when it is also chaotic, it causes pain and suffering and calls for attention. The entire purpose of a clean and well-ordered life is to liberate man from the thraldom of chaos and the burden of sorrow.

Q: You seem to be in favour of a computerised life.

M: What is wrong with a life which is free from problems? Personality is merely a reflection of the real. Why should not the reflection be true to the original as a matter of course, automatically? Need the person have any designs of its own? The life of which it is an expression will guide it. Once you realise that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.

Crush

A couple of years ago I noticed a girl working in one of the stalls of our town market.  Her employer was called Max, and he was a big, smiling man, well known in the market.  Every time the girl and I saw each other, we exchanged smiles and glances.   I guess she was about fifteen or sixteen.  I felt curiously happy when we met, and one day I said to her, “I am always happy when I see you!” She made some reply, I think it was “Thank you”.  I saw her quite often when I passed that stall or bought something there, though there were long periods when she was not there.

About two months ago our old market buildings were torn down to make way for a department store, and many of the stallholders moved to a new market building which had been built some distance out of town.  Max lost his quite big market stall.  For a long time I did not see Max or the girl and I missed her, felt uneasy.

This morning I asked someone I knew who had taken a stall in the new market building if Max had a stall there.  “No,” he said.  “He has a small store in Gomez street opposite UCPB bank now.”

Of course I knew that little store but had never thought of it as being Max’s, despite a sign with his name over the opening.  Max is a common name, after all.  So I went there and seeing some chilli peppers in a box in the front of the shop, I picked up a handful, greeted Max  and handed them to the female assistant so I could have them bagged and pay for them.  She started looking at me in a steady way, and I suddenly realised that this was my girl.  She was taller, older, more grown-up with a different hair style, different clothes, but her steady smile and intense glance was there all right and I began to feel as though a big empty space in my chest was filling up.  I smiled at her in return and the usual silent, wordless understanding was exchanged between us.

For the remainder of the day I have felt this warmth in my chest and the unease at not seeing her had gone.  I have never even asked her name.  I would like her to be near me for the rest of my life.

Afraid to die?

You’ve been barking up the wrong tree

You think you want out of this

But what you most long for is to be right in it

You think you want it all to stop

Yet what you’re yearning for is the start

You think you’re afraid to die

In fact, you’re afraid to live

Scared witless by your untamed aliveness

You think you want love to make you whole

When really what your heart most wants

Is for love to take you apart

So that you can taste the sweet fruits of annihilation

You think you should keep it all together

Your true longing is for it all to fall apart

So catastrophically that you’ll be left with nothing

And the game will be over

I know, I know

It all got so horribly complicated

And you thought that’s what life was

Trust me

When you see the sheer simplicity of this

It will take your breath away

(From Fiona Robertson's blog

useful spiritual writing)

"Women should obey their husbands"

Here is a interesting article from the New York Times, 14 March 2013.  Referring to a UN declaration to condemn violence against women, I found the final sentence of particular interest: 

Muslim Brotherhood’s Statement on Women Stirs Liberals’ Fears

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL-SHEIKH

CAIRO — During its decades as an underground Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood has long preached that Islam required women to obey their husbands in all matters.

“A woman needs to be confined within a framework that is controlled by the man of the house,” Osama Yehia Abu Salama, a Brotherhood family expert, said of the group’s general approach, speaking in a recent seminar for women training to become marriage counselors. Even if a wife were beaten by her husband, he advised, “Show her how she had a role in what happened to her.”

“If he is to blame,” Mr. Abu Salama added, “she shares 30 percent or 40 percent of the fault.”

Now, with a leader of the Brotherhood’s political arm in Egypt’s presidential palace and its members dominating Parliament, some deeply patriarchal views the organization has long taught its members are spilling into public view. The Brotherhood’s strident statements are reinforcing fears among many Egyptian liberals about the potential consequences of the group’s rise to power and creating new awkwardness for President Mohamed Morsi as he presents himself as a new kind of moderate, Western-friendly Islamist.

In a statement Wednesday on a proposed United Nations declaration to condemn violence against women, the Brotherhood issued a list of objections, which formally laid out its views on women for the first time since it came to power.

In its statement, the Brotherhood said that wives should not have the right to file legal complaints against their husbands for rape, and husbands should not be subject to the punishments meted out for the rape of a stranger.

A husband must have “guardianship” over his wife, not an equal “partnership” with her, the group declared. Daughters should not have the same inheritance rights as sons. Nor should the law cancel “the need for a husband’s consent in matters like travel, work or use of contraception” — a reform in traditional Islamic family law that was enacted under former President Hosni Mubarak and credited to his wife, Suzanne.

The statement appeared in many ways to reflect the Brotherhood’s longstanding doctrine, still discussed in classes like Mr. Abu Salama’s and in the group’s women’s forums. Feminists said its statement also may reflect the views of most women in Egypt’s conservative, traditionalist culture.

In an interview on Thursday, Pakinam El-Sharkawy, President Morsi’s political adviser and Egypt’s representative last week at the United Nations commission, sought to distance the Morsi administration from the Brotherhood’s statement.

The Brotherhood, she emphasized, does not speak for the president; he has resigned from the Brotherhood but remains a member of its political party. “Does any statement issued by any political party or group represent the presidency?” she asked. “It’s not the presidency’s institution, and it’s not an official entity.”

The Egyptian government, she said, “is working with all its powers and policies to stop all forms of violence against women.”

The government objected to the United Nations declaration condemning violence against women, she said, only over issues like whether to describe restrictions on abortion as an act of violence against women. That offended the cultural norms in many Arab and African countries, she said.

Asked about the statement’s apparent attempt to shield marital rape from legal prosecution, Ms. Sharkawy brushed off the issue as an irrelevant foreign concern.

“Marital rape? Is this a big problem that we have?” she said, suggesting that it might be a Western phenomenon, while sexual harassment in the streets was a far greater concern in Egypt.

“Should we import their concerns and problems and adopt them as ours?” she asked. “We’re talking about things that aren’t widely agreed upon, like abortion. We can’t give women the freedom to have abortions whenever they want.”

Do not pick issues not pressing in Egypt, she said, “and then tell me that I’m in a conflict with the international community.”

Some Egyptian feminists, though, called the statement a vindication of their warnings that the Brotherhood might lead Egypt in a more conservative and patriarchal direction.

“They do not believe that when domestic violence is present, the women should resort to the justice system or the legal process,” said Ghada Shahbandar of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. “It should be kept at home and under the protection of the family — that is their claim. And there is no such thing as marital rape because a husband is entitled to have sex with his wife any time that he wants.”

“This is the first time we have heard it said publicly on the world stage,” she said, “but this has been in their rhetoric for ages.”

In his seminar for prospective Islamist marriage counselors, Mr. Abu Salama justified the group’s approach to marriage by explaining that Islam also required husbands to be compassionate, just as it required women to be obedient.

Quoting Muhammad’s injunction that a man “must not fall on his wife like an animal,” a textbook in Mr. Abu Salama’s class said Islam instructed men to engage in foreplay before sex and attend to their partner’s satisfaction. As for inheritance, Islamic scholars have argued that a son should have a greater share, but also an obligation to look after the financial well-being of a sister.

But Mr. Abu Salam also argued that husbands should keep their wives under tight control. “It’s the nature of the weak to overstep the required framework if she is given the space and the freedom, like children,” he said in the seminar. Most of the women nodded in agreement.

Closing its statement on the proposed United Nations declaration, the Brotherhood appeared to go even further. The provisions discussed are “destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution,” the statement concluded, and “would drag society back to pre-Islamic ignorance.”

Telepathy in mosquitos?

Around five in the afternoon here, mosquitoes become lively and start looking for their evening meal.  When I am sitting outside, perhaps with a drink, I become a target.

It may happen that I notice a mosquito landing on me and starting to feed (they don't waste time), and prepare to swat it.  About fifty per cent of my attempts to do this miss, no matter how fast I try to move.

But sometimes I am engrossed in reading, writing or playing freecell, or just doing nothing much, and don't notice a mosquito landing and starting to feed.  However, my body reacts automatically and my hand will move without any conscious intention on my part to scratch or rub the itch the mosquito is causing.  Even though my hand moves relatively slowly, it's surprising how often the offending mosquito gets squashed in this way, when my conscious attempt might well have failed.

Having read some of Cleve Backster's work on biocommunication, with plants and a polygraph,  it has occurred to me that perhaps the mosquito that I notice and prepare to swat has been forewarned by my conscious intention, whereas when I don't have any conscious intention to swat, it receives no such warning and moves too late.

I wonder if others have noticed this phenomenon and if so, what their explanation might be?

Pleasant energy

From time to time, unpredictably, a kind of smooth, pleasant energy starts flowing in my body.  It's quite mild and sometimes I realise it has been there some time before I have noticed it.

It doesn't have any particular location, in fact I am not even sure that it is my body which feels its presence.  But where else could it be happening?  I never try to start it up, but sometimes I can control it just a little, make it a little stronger or weaker.  It's something like the feeling I get when practising Qi-gong, but more pervasive and diffuse.

If we are going to find out something new, we have to be ready to admit we have been wrong all the time.

Think about this for a moment:  If you can perceive something - be aware of anything - in any way - see it, think about it, feel it, hear it, smell it, that something is not you.  You must be the one doing the perceiving etc.  You are the one aware of whatever-it-is.

If I have an opinion about my self, that "myself" is not me.   If I notice a thought, that thought is not me.

"I" cannot have any characteristics, because those characteristics can be noticed and described, so I must be the one noticing them, so they are not a part of me.

So everything we think we know about ourselves is just not a part of ourselves at all.  It's like clothes we put on. And even that simile doesn't go far because clothes have to go on a body and this "I" has no solidity.

What we think of as "the real me", or some such descriptive phrase, is not me at all.  It's a bunch of thoughts and habits of thought.  And what are habits but thoughts we habitually think.

Just what is this "I", then?  Seems it's just pure awareness.  It cannot have any characteristics, any distinguishable parts.  It can't be unique in any way, because that uniqueness could be described, I could be aware of it, so it cannot be a part of the awareness.  Eyes don't see themselves.

Seems this "I" is not personal in any way.  That's a difficult thought to have.  Perhaps this whole "I" business is just a gigantic illusion?

The "tragedy" of death

My son died a few years ago.  He was 37.  It was a tragedy.

Or was it?

Death comes to all of us, apparently.  It's normal.  Everyone does it, sooner or  later.  The demise of this fragile body-mind organism is an everyday occurrence.

What's tragic about it?  The tragedy is in our thoughts.  We, looking on, talking about it, make the tragedy.  It doesn't exist anywhere except in our minds.  There would be no tragedy were it not for people making it so by means of their thoughts.

When I die, please for your own sakes don't anyone make it into a tragedy!  It will be just a normal occurrence.  Perhaps for a while some will feel a sense of loss, if they have got used to having me around; but I hope no more than feels absolutely necessary. 

end of suffering?

"The closest that the mind can come to representing who we are is the thought ‘I’ am'. But that thought is not who we really are. Whether that thought is there or not, we still exist. We know the thought 'I am'. That thought is the start of the false sense of an individual, a separate ‘I’. Because we didn't know any better, the mind attached other labels to this ‘I’ thought, such as 'I am good,' 'I am bad,' 'I have this problem,' and so on. But those thoughts don't have anything to do with us, because the very ‘I’ thought itself, the sense of separation, is not actually who we are. Once you see the falseness of the ‘I’ thought, that what we are is not an individual person at all, the identifications and ideas of a lifetime all collapse because they are all based on a false premise.

There is no practice to overcome suffering. It is simply a matter of seeing that the false ‘I’ is an assumption, that the whole mechanism is a conceptual house of cards. Then a life­time of suffering evaporates. As Bob (Adamson) says, without the cause (the ‘I’), can there be any effects (psychological suffering and bondage)?

As I sat on his couch at one of his talks listening to him say 'There is no person,' suddenly it hit me. I looked and saw that right now and here, there is not a separate person in the picture at all. In that moment, all my doubts and confusion evaporated. I realized that all problems and questions stem from the sense of an ‘I’ that was assumed to be there at the center of my life. Upon actual looking, I discovered it was not there at all. Fifteen years of meditating could not accomplish what occurred in a few moments of direct looking. In that recognition arose a direct and immediate sense of clarity and peace. I intuitively felt that the searching was over. "

John Wheeler, "Awakening to the Natural state"