Was I the only one last night who had a hip hop session on the iPod in the middle of the night, followed by listening to a Pema Chödrön talk? I suspect so. The beginning of a series of talks on shenpa (how we get hooked):
Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens — that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place — that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you — they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child — and, shenpa: almost co-arising.
At one point last night she talked about going to the place no one wants to go to. This is exactly my path over the last decade and more. The hardest journey but maybe the only worthwhile one. And I am open to the possibility that there is no journey, and no place to go, but while time and space bound, is there anything else to do but address the issue? Of course, there is another, more common, more exhausting option: run and keep running.
A short taster:
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My cheap pedometer collapsed today and refused to count. I stomped around watching the display and the counter wouldn’t budge. A new, better one, is on it’s way.
Today I turned 40. It feels like quite a milestone, and at the same time nothing special at all. I feel pretty much like when I was in my early 20s. My body is stronger and definitely healthier. I would say I am less fearful and more grounded. These are the things that count for me. So now I am middle aged! That’s pretty cool. I can relax a bit, be more eccentric, and more myself. A couple of changes I’d like to make: to walk every day, to relax about ‘how I should be’, to accept things as they are, and some of the struggling of youth can retire gracefully. No wars. I surrender. I reckon I’m a third of the way in – I’m going to be around until 110 or 120 years old. Why not? 40 years… a long time, and yet over in a week or two.
All the birthday wishes and facebook birthday messages is really fun and heart warming – thank you to my diverse and widespread friends.
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300 years of fossil fuels in a 300 seconds animation:
What’s going on? Two days without going out. Well, one trip out to the bathroom, down to Room 7 while the new tiles set in ours. Just four days left of the yoga course, day 23’s practice, focussing on leg poses, on getting up around 10. So quite a bit of reading, watching, listening and browsing today, along with sleeps whenever I’ve needed to.
24 years later, a video continuation of Fight for Your Right to Party starring Frodo and Seth Rogan. For real. Coming soon.
Got a spare hour and twelve minutes? Of course you haven’t. But if you have, this is a good watch, if just for the guided meditation at 20:00. He’s even talking about choiceless awareness at one stage. So many good lines in this speech by Jon Kabat-Zinn, talking at Google HQ no less. I have a lot of respect for the Mindfulness bunch. They always have the assumption of a witness, an entity beyond or above all this ‘small self’ stuff, but as far as it goes, this is excellent.
Came across George Watsky’s work. Rapper, poet, actor as far as I can tell. The rap stuff is kind of Geek Rap but not quite, and it’s very listenable. For sure not your average kind of rapper. “The ghost of Gandhi loves me”
Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble
And a little old Frenchman writing about resisting the system that’s causing this mess, is breaking publishing records with his little red book:
Take a book of just 13 pages, written by a relatively obscure 93-year-old man, which contains no sex, no jokes, no fine writing and no startlingly original message. A publishing disaster? No, a publishing phenomenon.
Indignez vous! (Cry out!), a slim pamphlet by a wartime French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, is smashing all publishing records in France. The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the “insolent, selfish” power of money and markets and by defending the social “values of modern democracy”.
The book, which costs €3, has sold 600,000 copies in three months and another 200,000 have just been printed. Its original print run was 8,000. In the run-up to Christmas, Mr Hessel’s call for a “peaceful insurrection” not only topped the French bestsellers list, it sold eight times more copies than the second most popular book, a Goncourt prize-winning novel by Michel Houellebecq.
If you like presidents and hams, look no further. This is indeed proof that Obama is NOT a muslim.
An indoors day. Watching several episodes of Everest: Beyond The Limits. Why is it the only thing climbers think to say is: “There’s no one higher than me in the world!” “Top of the world, baby!” Such long queues going up and down, with gridlock at the Hilary Step, the last technical climb before the summit. People are leaving earlier and earlier to get ahead of the crowds. In Into Thin Air, they were leaving around midnight, and now some climbers leave around 21:00, meaning its still dark when they summit. Ummmm, a bit daft really.
The afternoon, researching tents with Caroline. I have a The North Face tadpole, a little green 1-2 man which isn’t so comfortable for two-man car-camping. On other trips we’ve borrowed one of the school’s, but we wanted one of our own. After looking around, fixing a price and checking reviews, we went for an Outwell Nevada M. This is a family tent, so loads of space. We got a deal that included a footprint groundsheet, floor blanket and front extension. As soon as it gets a bit warmer we’ll try it out, maybe on the Isle of Wight. It’s kind of both our birthday presents.
Otherwise, apart from the daily yoga, some browsing of the horror and the humour…
How not to streak:
The possible use of synthetic biology to clean up the Gulf oil disaster:
SYNTHETIC GENOME BIOREMEDIATION
Toxic crude oil and gas can be changed, altered, or eliminated by microbes. Natural microorganisms in all the oceans, such as bacteria, have been known to do this over time, usually lasting decades and beyond. It’s a slow natural process. Yes, natural biology can do the job, but under continual flow conditions there is no possible way all the hydrocarbon-hungry microbes in the entire world can eliminate that much oil and gas fast enough. Time is the critical factor.
For the past decade, synthetic biology has been the new science realm. We now have engineered genetic biology that synthetically creates RNA and DNA sequences for both viruses and bacteria.
In the 1980’s, the fad was designer jeans. Now, we have designer genes.
Soon after the Deepwater Horizon inferno, U.S. government scientists – with grant funds supplied by British Petroleum – started giving us solid clues as to what they were doing with all that crude oil and gas. In May 2010, National Geographic quoted Dr. Terry Hazen from the U.S. government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who said,
“…we could introduce a genetic material into indigenous bugs via a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria – to give local microbes DNA that would allow them to break down oil. Either that, he said, or a lab could create a completely new organism that thrives in the ocean, eats oil, and needs a certain stimulant to live…”
Between the global economic downturn and stubborn unemployment, the last few years have not been kind to the workforce. Now a new menace looms. At just five feet tall and 86 pounds, the HRP-4 may be the office grunt of tomorrow. The humanoid robot, developed by Tokyo-based Kawada Industries and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, is programmed to deliver mail, pour coffee, and recognize its co-workers’ faces. On Jan. 28, Kawada will begin selling it to research institutions and universities around the world for about $350,000. While that price may seem steep, consider that the HRP-4 doesn’t goof around on Facebook, spend hours tweaking its fantasy football roster, or require a lunch break. Noriyuki Kanehira, the robotic systems manager at Kawada, believes the HRP-4 could easily take on a “secretarial role…in the near future.” Sooner or later, he says, “humanoid robots can move [into] the office field.”
The plan was to drive to Selborne, bus to Alton and walk part of the Hangers Way back to Selborne for 10 miles or so. It was so cold, grey, misty when we were waiting for the bus that we quickly decided not to do a long walk, instead scooting up the 250 year old Zig Zag Path to Selborne Common. It’s always a little spooky up there with the old trees, mosses, twisting parasite plants and enclosed feeling, and the mist only heightened that. Still, it was pleasant to walk for an hour, remembering our very first walk together in Rishikesh, nearly twelve years ago. That time and this, C got a thorn in her foot.
Scenes on Selbourne Common:
Two Tone Tree
Fallen Tree
View from the Zig Zag Path
Misty Selborne Common
Then we piled down the A3 to good old Pompey for some shopping and cinema. The big sports shop is closing down. We picked up a couple of camping mattresses for £7, a foot pump for £3. A solar pedometer for £5 and some camping cutlery for a quid.
Saw a film: The Kings Speech. It’s a good one, especially for anyone who, like me, is afraid of public speaking. Poor guy, muddling along as a mere Lord and next minute he’s the bloody King thanks to his love-stricken brother (who due to odd casting is way to young to be his older brother). The speech therapist comes across well, a healthy dose of irreverence to position and tradition within a kind heart, with real ability to help. The overall feeling is that despite privilege and power, these people are just like the rest of us. I also enjoyed seeing Helena in a non-weirded-out rol.
This was a great scene, where Lionel the therapist has been found out not to be an actual doctor, and due to appearances the King is dismissing him:
King George VI: [Logue is sitting on the coronation throne] Get up! Y-you can’t sit there! GET UP!
Lionel Logue: Why not? It’s a chair.
King George VI: T-that… that is Saint Edward’s chair.
Lionel Logue: People have carved their names on it.
King George VI: L-listen to me… listen to me!
Lionel Logue: Why should I waste my time listening to you?
King George VI: Because I have a voice!
Lionel Logue: …yes, you do.
and this:
Lionel Logue: [as George “Bertie” is lighting up a cigarette] Please don’t do that.
King George VI: I’m sorry?
Lionel Logue: I believe sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you.
King George VI: My physicians say it relaxes the throat.
Lionel Logue: They’re idiots.
King George VI: They’ve all been knighted.
Lionel Logue: Makes it official then.
(See clip below)
But my favourite thing dear old Lionel said was:
“You don’t need to be afraid of the things you were afraid of when you were five years old.” How very true, yet here we are, children in adult’s bodies.
Here’s an interview extract with the spectacularly named Lena Fokina, the woman in the video:
The first thing everybody here thought when they saw your baby-swinging video was “Holy shit!” Then they thought, is it real or fake? So: Is it real? If so, who is the baby?
The child was born in the Black Sea region. Her name is Platona, and she was two weeks old when we took that video. We have a lot of children like her here. They are early readers, singers, talkers, swimmers. You haven’t seen anything like it anywhere!! And there’s swimming with dolphins, scuba diving with them… Come to Dahab!
And are they early readers, talkers, and so on because of baby yoga?
Not only this. It’s just one reason.
What else makes them so talented then?
Love for each other and to one another.
I have two small children and I was, you know, careful with them when they were newborns. So it was hard for me to watch your video. It looks like it has to injure the child. Their hands? The cartilage in the joints? Their brains?
No. It makes the hands stronger.
Did you know that YouTube took the video down because it was in violation of their policy on “shocking and disgusting” content? What is your response to that?
Did they notice that the babies aren’t crying—they’re even laughing—and that this system has been used for over thirty years in Russia and the children are all alive and healthy? If you need more proof, the best thing is to come see us.
Have you heard from people who are upset about the video?
Everybody in Dahab is satisfied. What’s more, a British film crew made a documentary about us, and interviewed the parents.
At the end of your video, it looks like you’re trying to get the two-week-old baby to walk. Is mobility the goal of your baby yoga?
Yes, more mobility, and other goals. First off, more trained skills. Second, more freedom. Third, independence. We learn from nature and teach our offspring to survive. Come to Dahab; we’ll be glad to show our classes and our children. How old are your children?
Four and two years old.
The happiest age!
Da, da. You say you “teach offspring to survive,” but it looks like what you’re doing could kill them. Have you ever had an accident while swinging around a baby?
I don’t recall any. Another objective of our yoga: to teach parents and children to interact so that everything will be in harmony.
How much training do you need to do this baby yoga?
It depends on the sensibility of the child’s mother. Sometimes it only takes one training session.
Do you think mothers who are afraid of this kind of baby yoga just aren’t brave?
Yes, those people have problems of their own. One more objective here is to get the parents’ own activity and movement levels up.
Last night I began packing for the Lake District staff week. So far: ice skates. Then lay down and listened to music until sleepy, again lots of energy coursing through my body. It doesn’t make me jump and twitch and shake like it used to; the channels are clearer. Following a beat, a refrain, a melody took me on many journeys. Just stay with it and music can be magical, not just a distraction or entertainment.
Yoga this morning, a review day of the eight postures learnt so far in the course. The first four days of sustained practice are very familiar to me – the loosening up of the body, unwinding tensions, increased energy, greater awareness. It’s now that things get interesting and less predictable as these trends continue. While sitting I searched for the sick feeling of the last few days but only sensed traces of it. Often as thoughts ceased there was an immense presence of now, a pervasive energy tangible yet non-personal.
Back at work my lower back feels much stronger and I am sitting straighter. I feel it loosening up, too. I firmly believe yoga is the best prevention for back troubles. After all, most back pain is initially caused by weak back muscles. Look after your back – stretch. Gently.
WordPress are promoting postaday2011 (or postaweek2011). Today’s theme is: Share something that makes you smile. This works for me every time (although I do feel a little sorry for him, poor little blighter):
Perhaps even better, the remix:
Right, on with the packing, and laundry. Hoping for more anti-zap.
Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself —
And there isn’t one.
~ Wei Wu Wei
Again some mighty weirdness during the night. Does anyone really understand what happens to consciousness during the night?
I definitely need to sleep longer during the winter; the 0730 alarm felt like 0530 and that’s after going to bed around 2200. After a wash and brushing teeth I continued with the 28 day yoga course. The addition of supine twists and standing hip rolls brought the emphasis to the waist and lumbar spine.
Sitting afterwards it is clear that awareness doesn’t need ‘doing’, and any direction, choice or purpose in the awareness prevents natural occurrences unfolding and expressing. The prevention of this is what I have been trying to do all this time and limits existence, but seems safer that way. In sitting quietly, the subtleties of this controlling become apparent and can be understood.
Some snow in the air this morning and a few flakes falling as I walked to lunch. The school is still very quiet, with less than ten people eating pizza at the kitchen the table, quite cosy. The scrap metal man gave us a pack of beers as a thank you. I guess he doesn’t know Brockwood very well. Or maybe he does. Some more snow in tiny flakes this afternoon, like dandruff from hair clouds.
Before work in the afternoon, reading an article in the New York Times, as the Bank of America braces itself for possible postings on Wikileaks. They haven’t been mentioned by name, but when Assange said he has evidence to ‘bring down a bank or two’ it is suspected Bank of America is involved:
That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.
“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”
I am working on the transcripts of Krishnamurti and David Bohm in 1975, a series of twelve conversations they had together. Bohm does well to draw out precise meaning from K, while the two of them explore deeply the questions of what is truth, actuality, the limits of thought and the nature of desire. Bohm has the tendency to describe while K tends to unfold and both of them together sustain a serious inquiry into the most important subjects. I am on the last transcript now; here’s some extracts:
David Bohm: Desire includes belief and hope. That is, belief amounts to accepting something as correct because you desire it to be so – because otherwise you have no proof, you see – and hope is just simply the belief that what you desire is going to be realised. So all three are one and the same. I think belief is in some ways more deceptive than plain desire.
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DB: Self-deception: I believe that I am the same as something greater because I feel better.
…
DB: The point is that we can’t go on with desire [leading our actions]. I mean, if we do our society will be destroyed.
…
DB: Thought tends to think that consciousness is a manifestation of a being or an entity who is deeper.
K: Yes.
DB: Who is not only thinking, but thinking correctly, more or less, and who is also seeing, who is perceiving, his thinking is describing his perception, and who is also experiencing, you see. I think that’s important. That gives a sense of reality that this being is the experiencer who is experiencing the sensations.
K: Quite.
DB: And all that makes the thing very real, a reality independent of thought. If all that were not present then the sensations would not be regarded as all that important by thought. Thought is now trying to produce a better set of sensations in order to make you feel better, you see, the state of…
K: Yes – better sensation, more sensation.
DB: More and better. It doesn’t want worse, you see. (Laughs)
K: (Laughs) Yes.
DB: Now, you see, that’s an inherently crazy activity, because the only point or function of the sensations is to give you some factual information. And if thought tries to make them better it can no longer give you any information, you see. And the whole thing anyway is self-contradictory because that very attempt cannot be kept under control, and so on.
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K: So we come back to the point: the content of one’s consciousness is the product of desire.
DB: Well, in general.
K: Yes, apart from the knowledge, functional knowledge, the rest of it is the movement and the accumulation of sensations and desires.
DB: Yes, it’s some sort of imprints which contain the records of all that and the instructions to produce them again.
K: Yes, yes – again. Memory.
DB: Yes. It gets stronger and stronger.
K: Yes. Now, can that movement of desire come to an end? Should it come to an end?
DB: Well, it seems from what we have said that it should.
K: But I mean, all the religions though they say this, yet they become monks in order to identify – you follow?
DB: But I think that’s the self deceptive nature of desire. You see, one thing that happens when the brain begins to see the destructive nature of desire, it begins to think, ‘I would rather not have desire.’
K: Yes.
DB: But it begins to desire a state of non-desire, you see.
K: Yes, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Desires a state of non-desire.
DB: And therefore the whole thing is silly, you see.
K: Of course.
DB: And desire has this self-deceptive nature – I can desire not to be conscious that I have desire, you see, and therefore that will vanish from my consciousness and I will have no desires. (Laughs)
K: So our question is: can desire, which brings illusion, self-deception, and all the complications of objective, changing desires – can the root of the desire be dissipated? I think it is only then that you see what is truth.
DB: Well, I mean, that is very clear to me. As long as there is desire nothing can be done.
K: Nothing can be done – absolutely. You see, sir, but it’s very difficult because most people think desire is necessary to live.
DB: Yes, I know that. That’s part of our tradition.
K: Now, is it possible to eliminate altogether desire?
…
Unfolding the laundry from the tumble drier, it was mega-charged with static. A little fluffy pad that somehow got in the laundry leapt from C’s hand to the clothes. I then tried to video it as a magic trick but it didn’t turn out like that. We discovered ‘anti-zap’!
Was full of energy last night and wasn’t sleepy until after midnight. I then slept until gone 0900 with some drama filled dreams of which I can’t remember. It’s rare that my dreams don’t contain trouble of some sort. Last night’s were tinged with the remnants of Winter’s Bone.
We spent the morning on another driving session. Again, a big improvement. C felt like a driver rather than a learner, and I didn’t do much of that pressing on the floor when I feel out of control in the passenger seat. We stopped at Sparsholt, out the other side of Winchester to take a walk in the countryside, passing through the grounds of Lainston House, a fine country house built in 1700. It’s now a hotel, it’s residents including Ricky Gervais and Sting (who maybe shared a suite).
Veggie stew for lunch, then a little sleep. Skimmed through The Magicians from last night’s TV. This street magic trick with Mr Banjo of Diversity had me wondering:
I suppose the bench isn’t really a bench, or he’s lying on a ledge behind the back rest. Or it’s just, even more boringly, videoshopping and stooges. On the whole the programme made Derren Brown look like a sublime genius.
Imagine the whole of France and Germany flooded – that’s what’s happened in Australia. Worse floods on record. This is why they call it climate change not global warming. Weather patterns are getting more and more unpredictable and extreme. More to come no doubt.
Yoga around 1700 for an hour, with 15 mins sitting. A basic class with Triangle, chest openers, cobra, seated forward bend. During the sitting I felt a sick dizziness close by that seemed to be generating the ceaseless thinking. I went towards this sickness and was engulfed in a kind of drunk haze, yet was somehow surprised to find that I was still sitting still and straight.
Watched some of Countryfile for the part with the Severn Bore, a small tidal wave that channels up the narrowing estuary on the spring tide. The record for riding it continuously is 7.5 miles, but the daft presenter only manages a little surf.
Later, watched Salt, in which the lady with the big eyes, pouty lips and cutest nose prevents nuclear Armageddon in a rather brutal and twisty manner, with a hint of Bourne.
What’s really real? How we describe reality, in everyday language, in religion, in science, tells as much about our minds as it does about what we are describing. The tendency to act on the basis of ‘naive realism’ is prevalent historically and today, believing what we experience is truth when it is only a model, a ‘reality tunnel’. Philosophers and sages have pointed this out yet we still fight each other because of our rigid religious views.
The audio quality of the video improves as it goes on:
I really enjoyed watching this video of Bath from 1962
John Betjeman made some good points (albeit sarcastically), and right at the time the planners were considering redeveloping vast swathes of Georgian Bath. Things have turned about now, with the neo-Georgian Southgate shopping centre replacing the 60s one, and hiding the car parks below ground.
BTW, Camden Crescent was not completed because the ground up there on the hill couldn’t take the weight. You can see in the video how far it was supposed to stretch beyond the central colonnades.
Through deep snow (for the UK) and thick fog to West Meon. Very quiet. A little eery. Highly enjoyable. Sorry, my lens was damp by the end leading to some warping.
Dawkins simply and concisely explains why: we can’t see evolution; that myths are myths whether in a holy book or not; the link between religion (and any -ism) and war; and the importance of evidence over stories.
Falling Awake 