More about seeing things as they are

My last post was about whether there is any meaning or significance to life, and in editing that post this morning to correct some carelessness, I mentioned the book "A Course in Miracles."  If you look up the Workbook for Students in this course, you will see how it is relevant to what follows here.

A while ago I came across a cartoon drawing, showing two young girls of about twelve or thirteen, standing close together; one is whispering into the listening ear of the other, who is looking down at the ground, "We've been wrong all this time, you don't blow at all!"

Aside from agreeing with her that it is confusing to call it a "blow job", it really prompted me to think once more about the possibility that in my ideas about life I might have been, and might be now, "wrong all this time."  And Oliver Cromwell famously said, to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."  Cromwell was an eminently practical man.

Not only do I think that I might have been wrong all this time, and probably still am, but I think - pardon me for this insult- most other people are in the same boat.

Does life matter?

The big question for me nowadays is: Does it matter what happens in life?

Almost all of us think that it matters a lot, that this is an absurd question.  I must say that I feel more comfortable when I try on the idea that it really doesn't matter.

How significant is life, really?  If you have read my blog regularly, and not just read the posts with interesting titles, you will know that I have been wondering whether we really have a choice in what we do - whether there really is such a thing as free will.  If we have no choice, then whether what happens is important, whether it "matters" or not, is a question without any meaning.  And I seem to feel more comfortable with the present moment when I am not considering how important life is.

To recap a moment, it is difficult or even impossible to show you have free will.   Many clever philosophers have tried in vain, apparently.  There is no way you can show you might have done something differently from the way you actually did it.  You can assert your freedom of choice, but that is not enough of course.  And if you are one of those people who think the brain runs the whole show, then of course there definitely can be no free will for you, because who would do the choosing?  Same applies to those non-duality-ers who have discovered there is no actual person anywhere, only a body and a mind.

I could single out some of the blogs I read - Vesta, for example, and Elisa, to mention only two of many, for whom a great part of their blog is devoted to questions about the significance or importance of what they are doing or thinking.  If they weren't like that I probably would not find them so interesting. Mine is like that, too, very often, in fact it seems to be like that right now!  Our whole world would be different if people no longer concerned themselves with what they think important, as far as choices go..  At least this whole spanking blogging community would collapse, to say nothing of the rest of the world's doings.

But would it be a better world?  I think we can still make judgments, even if we have no choices, can't we?  It's interesting to speculate on what our world would be like if we all realised we had no choice over what we do.  Could a science fiction story be written on this basis?

I'll have to try and work out just how things would be if we all assumed we had no choices.  But for the moment I am just going to sit back for a while and enjoy not thinking about the importance or significance of my life, then go and see if the washing is dry and ready to take off the line.  It's a good drying day, sunny and some wind. No moral judgment needed there, for sure.

Edit  I have been careless over the use of the word "significant."  Obviously what happens, whether we have chosen it or whether it simply happens without anyone's choice, may be significant, in that it can point to something, show or clarify something for our information;  be interesting in a cerebral way.  If however you start reading "A Course in Miracles: Workbook for Students" you will soon come across the exercise prompting you to look around you and consider that what you are looking at "has no meaning."  In other words, it has no significance apart from its existence and connection with other objects.  I'll say more about this book soon.

Better not read this if you are a devout Roman Catholic. You have been warned

Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward

couldn't resist drawing folks' attention to this scurrilous piece from The Onion

 

 

Seeing things as they are

Seeing things as they are has been a goal of mine for some years.  I read a post by Vesta yesterday in which she mentioned the beneficial effects that a friend experienced from taking a ten day course in Vipassana meditation.  The friend said "You never suffer ever again."

I thought that a big claim; but remembering the saying "pain is inevitable; suffering is optional" I investigated and found that there is just such a course starting next month in Manila, an hour's flight from our town.  I applied immediately to take part.

About forty five years ago I read a book by the British sailor, Admiral Shattock, in which he described attending Vipassana meditation in a monastery in, if I remember rightly, Burma.  Or it might have been Thailand.  It's taken me forty five years, then, to react positively to that hint!

I read that "Vipassana" means "seeing things as they are."  For me, that is a very enticing prospect,  I realise that I, like the great majority of the human race, do not see things as they are, but rather as I imagine them.  Seeing things as they are would make a big difference in my life.

Potboiler

I will not be online much for the next 2 weeks, no internet in our house; so just to say I am still around ...

The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. 


                                                                        Lao Tzu



Remember that always.

Who am I? Do I control my thoughts?

Reading Tom's latest post on The Heron Clan blog today, I fell to thinking , as Tom has been, on my identity.

For me the most interesting part is his understanding that what one does, achieves, fails in, looks like, thinks about etc does not constitute "me."

I have recently been trying on various ideas, tasting various points of view.  This is my latest  :

I am aware.  What I am aware of cannot be 'me' (something like an eye cannot see itself, but that analogy is inexact.) I am this awareness, as far as I can understand.  This awareness has absolutely no substance; if it had substance, it would be something of which I could perhaps be aware, so it would not be me.  So we are at the point that I have absolutely no substance.  

I am aware of a world apparently outside, but perhaps inside me and possibly not anywhere in particular; I am aware of thoughts, a body, sensations, emotions.

Whatever I am aware of cannot be me. So exactly what is this 'I'?  Just the awareness, it seems.

Now, this awareness does not seem to be very personal.  It certainly exists, but does not have any obvious location, nor does it really seem to belong to me. I just seem to be using it.

So is there any "I"?

At this point, my analysis comes to an ignominious end and I have not discovered how to continue it. I have not discovered any "person", but simply a world apparently containing this body through which the physical world and other bodies seem to be perceived , along with a collection of evanescent thoughts, sensations  and feelings mysteriously seeming to be "mine" but not much  under "my" control; all of which is subject to change.

Thoughts arise, but I do not seem to have much control over them.  Are they "mine"?  I'm aware of them so they are mine to that extent and by contrast with not being aware of thoughts in other minds.  Descarts famously said, "Cogito ergo sum"  I think therefore I am.  I don't find this accurate, though the translation from Latin may have something to do with that.  "I am aware, therefore I am" is my experience.  Perhaps Descartes actually meant that?  I'm no Latin scholar.
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Getting a Man

Actually, this post will not give any explicit useful hints about finding a man, if that is what you are looking for; but it might give you some encouragement.  I just want to say that my last wife, whom I met in 1963 when I  had two children and she was 19, and who lived with me from 1964 till we were divorced in 1989, has never been short of a man for periods longer than a month or two.  She is not strikingly attractive to look at, though certainly not plain;  not particularly sexy in fact a little conservative in that field (her more kinky sister called her "my straight sister"), somewhat more than averagely intelligent, the daughter of a university art professor and the granddaughter of a Baron, has a good singing voice and some ability to sight-read a line of music; is sociable, a good housekeeper, an industrious worker, a loyal friend, absolutely trustworthy with money and a loving mother to her two children and two step-children.

I don't know her secret for attracting men, except that she immediately becomes interested in any man who seems attractive to her, and makes herself pleasant to him.  She doesn't play hard-to-get or other silly games.  She doesn't string men along  but is very open about her feelings.  She has nothing to hide.

Since she and I parted she has had one or two temporary liaisons, one permanent one with an older man who died and left her his very good house, another temporary  relationship and finally what looks like a permanent one as she tells me she is getting married to him in March this year, has sold her house and bought a bungalow near her fiance's house.  Things do fall into place in her life.  She is 69 this year.

So there is obviously no call for older single or widowed women to feel there's no chance of getting another man.