Bookmarking Serenity In Your Life

Have you heard of the Serenity Prayer? Many people credit Reinhold Niebuhr with writing it sometime during World War II. It begins “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” It seems to transcend religions and has entered popular culture. You can find it printed on plaques, mugs etc. for better or worse, and it is often seen in a shortened form illustrated above.

It was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. I recall it being in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It was in an interesting film, Rachel Getting Married. It was on an episode of King of the Hill when the school principal asks Hank “Are you familiar with the serenity prayer Hank? Cause this is one of those things I can’t change.”

I’m not concerned about whether or not Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the prayer, and I like that the prayer has been adopted and adapted by others. Every once and awhile, it crosses into my life. I came across a copy of the prayer today on a sheet of paper folded into one of my old journals from late 2001. I know just why it was in there. A bookmark on my life.

I don’t know if you literally bookmark things in your life with paper in a book very often, but we all certainly set bookmarks in our life using objects. I could create a long list of things that bring me back in a flash to a time in my life – books, ticket stubs, a pebble, a record album, a restaurant receipt, airline ticket, vacation souvenirs…

I guess we are more likely to intentionally bookmark the good times in our lives, but I think we also mark the bad times, perhaps unintentionally.

That folded copy of the serenity prayer takes me back to an early winter that was difficult for many people following the events of September 11, 2001. I would have told you then that those events were not the reason that I had crashed into a deep depression, but looking back today, that bookmark reminds me how distorted my perceptions were then.

That piece of paper bookmarks not only the start of a really bad period in my life, but also a very early sign of how I would pull out of that period – a process that took about four years.

I don’t follow the prayer as a life philosophy. I don’t accept all my hardships and just trust that any power or being can make things rights. I firmly believe that you are the most important cause of change in your life. But the first seven lines of the serenity prayer are an approach that I do try to follow.

There are, for me, two parts to the prayer. The first part (minus God) feels almost Buddhist. The second half is more Christian. But I read it as a sonnet – 14 lines of direction, two parallel, but separate paths.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.

If all this is not at all in your philosophy, maybe you can connect better with the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip version of the prayer: “Know what I pray for? The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference.”

Walking Meditation

Walking meditation. Meditation in action.

Have you tried meditation? Many have. Many have failed. Meditation is more difficult to do well than a novice would suspect. Walking meditation might be a good way to enter the practice of meditation. It is easy to practice. It enhances physical and mental well-being. It has no cost.  It gets you outdoors (usually). It is a practice found both in Taoist and Buddhist traditions.

One problem I have with meditation is my own physical inability to sit still for any long periods of time. I may get some argument from “experts” on my personal take on walking meditation, but I see the focus in walking meditation is with my body actually walking – the steps, the feel of the ground, what is before me. In seated meditation, the focus is on the breath.

This is eyes-open meditation.  You are not so much withdrawing from the world as with the seated form of meditation. Your are IN the world. (Yes, it can be done indoors too.)

You need to be aware of things around you – if only not to trip and fall – but aware of the sunlight, shadows, the wind, raindrops, bird songs, and even people or traffic. Being someone who is too easily distracted, I feel less guilty when my mind wanders in walking meditation.

You might think that walking meditation sounds like just taking a walk. If you walk from your home to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket, is that walking meditation? It could be, depending on how to make that walk. But in walking meditation, you need to be very aware of your own body. The first time I did it (with instruction) was in a wooded setting where we could walk for a half hour without encountering other people or signs of people. It was not an “interesting” wooded path, but rather just a dirt path through a fairly monotonous landscape.

The idea was, of course, mindfulness or awareness of our own self with a minimum of distractions. I suppose that a master of walking meditation could walk through the New York Port Authority Terminal and stay focused.

Walking meditation sessions are generally 15-60 minutes. They are not hikes. In fact, you could easily create a loop walk that takes only ten minutes and complete it several times. In my first experience, it was used as a break between two sitting meditation sessions.

You could do it in a large empty room indoors. You might think that a large Gothic cathedral might be a good place indoors, but think of all those distractions – including the connections to other contemplative and spiritual practices.  A shopping mall? I think not. That’s for exercise.

Wherever you choose to go, you should walk without a destination. Focus on being somewhere rather than getting to somewhere. It really is the journey and not the destination.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

from “Little Gidding” (No. 4 of the  Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot)

Most practitioners start by walking a bit faster than normal, and gradually slowing down to a normal pace and then even slower, until the pace begins to feel somewhat unnatural.

You certainly don’t ignore your breathing. You are mindful of it without trying to control it or have it control your walking. Your breath should be deep (from the diaphragm) but not so artificial that it takes away your attention. You can coordinate it with your steps. Perhaps as you inhale, step with your right foot and with the left foot, exhale. Again, if this feels like some kind of exercise, it’s wrong and it will take practice to do this without thinking about it. You breathe all day without giving it any thought – so it can be done. To do it with thought is harder.

Your eyes can be focused on the ground in front of you. Some people suggest walking with a kind of soft focus vision where the eyes relax and unfocus. Your vision is  not blurred, but wide, taking in all around you, but not in detail.

There are many guides to this meditation – some online and others as books – that can formalize the practice and expand on the philosophy. But I suggest you begin on your own with these simple instructions.

I find that the woods in winter has a simplified landscape, and the cold air has a way of heightening my hearing that is helpful in my meditation.

• Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
• Walking Meditation (with DVD & CD-ROM)
• and The Long Road Turns to Joy: A Guide to Walking Meditation are all
  by Thich Nhat Hanh
• http://www.yogateacher.com/text/meditation/on-line/walking.html

Doing Intention

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I don’t really feel guilty that I have read Dan Brown’s books – Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, The Lost Symbol. As an English major and teacher for many years, I have read a lot of the books that get shelved on the “Literature” shelves, so some fast “Fiction” reads are completely justified.

I like that Brown touches on a lot of other books and topics that I end up wanting to know more about. In The Lost Symbol,  a book that he mentions is The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World. That book got a nice sales spike and brought attention to its author’s work.

Dan Brown writes “…human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body. A highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study – theintentionexperiment.com – aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world.”

Noetic theory or noëtics is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intuition and its relationship with the divine intellect. Can our collective thoughts change what happens in the world?

Some people have compared the intention experiment (and “doing intention”) to a kind of praying without religion.  Lynne McTaggart interviewed many intention masters in her research including Qigong masters, Buddhist monks, master healers – and also scientists.

In simple terms, if a group of people (10, 1000, a million, millions…) direct their intentions towards a single purpose will it have an effect on events? What if the people are disconnected and distant from each other and the event?

I told a friend the theory and he said, “Oh, like the Force in Star Wars movies?”  That makes it seem silly, but it’s not the worst analogy.  A catastrophic event occurs on Earth and millions turn their attention and intentions towards it. Could that be measured?

It seems to me to be related in a way to McKenna’s Time Wave where intention is described (somewhat differently) as novelty.

Is her work real science? I don’t know.  Is The Lost Symbol real literature?

I checked out McTaggart on quantum physics, consciousness, time and intention, in an interview with Alan Steinfeld. Even if you are a scientist based at Princeton University, that doesn’t mean you will be taken seriously when you work in these realms. The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others.

On the website, noosphere.princeton.edu, they describe their work this way: “We collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.
Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. When millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network data show meaningful departures from expectation. This is a powerful finding based in solid science.
The subtle but real effects of consciousness are important scientifically, but their real power is more direct. They encourage us to help make essential, healthy changes in the great systems that dominate our world. Large-scale group consciousness has effects in the physical world. Knowing this, we can use our full capacities for creative movement toward a conscious future.”

Can they track something happening in a global consciousness that coincides with an event – for example, when it was the election of President Obama? They believe they can.

The website and their sites seem to be inactive as of today, so I wonder if it is a matter of funding or if they have given up on their theories. Knowing what I do about academia, I would say it is the former.

The history of controlled laboratory research on interactions of human consciousness with physical random systems tracks the development of microelectronics and computers. The first large database experiments were conducted by Helmut Schmidt, at Boeing Laboratories, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The number of experiments and investigators grew over the next decade, and in 1979, Robert Jahn, at Princeton University, established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory to focus on an engineering approach to the question of whether sensitive electronic devices including random components might be affected by special states of consciousness, including strong emotions and directed intention. The PEAR lab closed in 2007.

Weekend Monk

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Maybe what I need to do next weekend when I’m back from vacation is be a monk for a weekend. Or for a month.

I actually found a program called Monk for a Month that is a cultural immersion and spiritual development program in India and Tibet. That may be further and pricier than what I want to do.

Okay, I know that living in a traditional Tibetan monastery high in the majestic Himalayan mountains along the India-Tibet border and studying Tibetan (Vajrayāna) Buddhism with native scholars isn’t the secret path to knowing or peace, but it might be a path.

I know the basics. I have done weekend retreats to a monastery. One weekend in the dorm, I got badmouthed by other novices because I snored. So much for the Four Noble Truths:

1. They start with this bummer: Life brings suffering. Pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, depression and death are all a part of living; life in its totality is imperfect and incomplete.

2. The origin of suffering is craving, desire, and clinging to impermanent objects and ideas that cause suffering,

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable by releasing ourselves from sensual craving and conceptual attachment and reaching the state of Nirvana.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering is to follow the “middle way” between self-indulgence and self-denial.

I can handle a middle way but I found that desire and those cravings and clinging were things I quite like.

Then we start on the Eightfold Path. Just 8. Not even a twelve-step program to end suffering. But not easy. If it was, we could all be enlightened.

1. Right view – to see and to understand things as they really are
2. Right intention – the volitional commitment to ethical and mental self-improvement
3. Right speech – to tell the truth and speak with kindness and gentleness
4. Right action – do no harm, act honorably and with compassion
5. Right livelihood – to earn one’s living in a righteous way
6. Right effort – to exercise constant vigilance in attaining wholesome states
7. Right mindfulness – clear perception, clear consciousness
8. Right concentration – single-mindedness on wholesome thoughts and actions

I actually think I am pretty solid on at least 5 of those 8. But, like the writer Dinty Moore, I was an “accidental Buddhist:.” He “failed” at being a Buddhist on one of those weekends too. But he got something from it. So did I.

Of course, I didn’t get a few books out of it like he did. He wrote The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, American Style. I wrote some poems. No books.

Moore’s bio is one I can identify with very easily. Born and raised in Pennsylvania he spent his formative years “fishing for bluegill, riding a bike with a banana seat, and dodging the Sisters of St. Joseph.” He earned a BA in writing from the University of Pittsburgh, did all the odd jobs that are required of the writer, got the MFA in fiction writing so that he can teach creative nonfiction seminars and edit an internet journal and teach at Ohio University. Is he on the path?

Am I on the path? We are all on the path. Some of us are moving forward better than others.

We are not meant to become the Buddha. Suzuki says during an introduction to Zazen: “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature.” Thinking about the Buddha is a delusion. It is not awakening. One must destroy preconceptions of the Buddha.

Spending a week with my grandchildren, 3 years old and 9 months old, they are on all the paths. They know all the truths. And I want them to hold on to them and the path as long as possible. I will follow them there.

Monk for a weekend? Just another weekend in Paradelle.

Weekend Mind

This blog is called Weekends in Paradelle and Paradelle is an imaginary place that I go to on weekends. Of course, just because it is imaginary doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It does.

I thought about that when I read Weekends at Bellevue by Julie Holland. Yeah, there’s the weekend connection, but what came to mind was also the idea of being someplace that is not real, and yet you ARE there. Is that crazy?

Julie Holland’s memoir is about her nine years as a doctor on the weekend shift at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. Even people who don’t live in New York City have heard of Bellevue.  If you get sent to Bellevue, you must be insane, is the way most people think about it.

In her stories of those years, we meet drunks, sociopaths, schizophrenics, and a lot of mentally ill homeless people who have no place to go and choose crazy as a way to find a warm place to sleep. She was in charge of the psychiatric emergency room, doing that strange triage that decides who goes upstairs to the psych ward, or off with the police or back to the streets.

The book was an easy read with lots of short chapters and a style that lends itself to my on/off reading style. I had heard her interviewed years ago (on Science Friday and on Fresh Air) and she said she was afraid the book wouldn’t read like a book. I think she means that there isn’t really a narrative thread to it, and it doesn’t build to some big ending where something extraordinary happens.

It covers some of her personal life that led her to Bellevue (student days, rock and roll dreams) and her own psychotherapy sessions. We learn about her sexual explorations and her marriage and then about the birth of her children which leads to her deciding to leave the hospital so that she could live a more normal work-during-the-week and get-away-on-the-weekends existence.

One lesson to take away from the book is the fragility of our mental state. She writes online:

“No one is immune from mental illness.  Over the years, I admitted heiresses and art dealers, altar boys and college students, homecoming queens, studio executives, bankers, lawyers, correction officers, and the list goes on. No matter who you are, what you do for a living, how much money you have in the bank, or how often you go to church, circumstances can transpire that will bring you to Bellevue. This is one of the hardest lessons for our patients to learn.

My years at Bellevue taught me many things, life lessons I could never have hoped to receive elsewhere, but the main take-home message was this: cherish your sanity, for it can be lost in the blink of an eye. Sometimes I saw the same patients repeatedly, alcoholics and addicts who were hitting bottom in regular cycles, showing up when their funds ran out. Other times, however, I met patients with no psychiatric history, who ended up at Bellevue when a bad break-up led to a suicide attempt, or a shared cigarette at a bar led to a PCP-induced psychosis. There are so many ways in which a life can suddenly unravel, and many of my patients could specify just when that started to happen for them–whether it was joining the army, leaving home for college, or living through the death of their child.”

In one interview, she surprised me by talking about her interest in the use of psychedelic drugs as treatments. Back when she write the bookmore than a decade ago, that treatment was far less acceptable than it is becoming now. She was also interested in research being done using medical marijuana (cannabis) and how psilocybin (magic mushrooms) might be used to aid people dying.

She has written a book on MDMA (ecstasy) called  Ecstasy : The Complete Guide : A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA. The book is described as being a source of reliable information for recreational users and for educating the public about potential clinical uses for the drug. MDMA was used as an adjunct to psychotherapy for over a decade until the Drug Enforcement Administration classified it as a Schedule I drug in 1985. It then went underground and is today increasingly popular as a party drug.

She also mentioned referring her patients to books like The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. That’s a book that has the “simple” message – that living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment.  Simple in quotes because it is hard to even describe to someone what “living in the now” means. Give that book a chance and read the first two chapters and you may find yourself becoming more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of your ability to live in peace and happiness. Tolle even includes “breaks” in the book suggesting that readers close the book and think about what they have read. It’s not meant to be a book to read over the weekend and then change your life on Monday morning.

Holland says: “Many of the people I encountered at Bellevue tried strenuously to convince me that they did not belong there. Or vice versa. A big part of my job was learning how to separate the genuinely disturbed from the fakers (some people actually wanted to be admitted to Bellevue, if only for the promise of a clean bed and three meals a day), and to identify the people who had been misunderstood, misdiagnosed, who weren’t mentally ill at all. After a few years of Bellevue experiences under my belt, I developed a sixth sense for what real crazy looked like, sounded like, and yes, smelled like.”

That line between sane and insane is not very sharply defined. The line between the real world we live in, and virtual worlds online is less clear every year. What about the places where we live and places that we go in our mind when we meditate or read or write. Do you see these lines of separation clearly?

I escape to Paradelle on weekends. It exists in my mind and online. How would that be viewed in the waiting room at Bellevue? I’m not barking like a dog, running naked through Times Square, or claiming that I was shoveling snow with the Buddha last weekend. So, I’m not crazy.

Holland again: “There is a diaphanous membrane between sane and insane. It is the flimsiest of barriers, and because any one of us can break through at any time, it terrifies us, causing us to turn our backs on those who remind us of this painful reality. But spending so much time with people who marched out of the lockstep of sanity has made me less forgiving of the way the mentally ill are ostracized and shunned. We owe them something better. And we should remember that the barrier separating “them” from “us” is not nearly as secure as we might think.”

We worry about having a heart attack or getting cancer, but Holland reminds us that the odds are a lot better that we will suffer from a mental illness. Think about that.

Navel Gazing

Since the dawn of time – well, for a very long undefined time – the navel has been the focus of some reflective form of philosophical contemplation. This is known as omphalopsychism.

Why do people stare at their navel? Maybe it is because the navel literally represents the location of their birth. Maybe it is because that’s just where your eye falls when your head drops during meditation. Think of the Buddha’s well-define navel. I’m guessing that he did quite a bit of navel-gazing.

The navel is also called the umbilicus or omphalodium or just the belly button. Of course, it is scar tissue from where the umbilical cord was originally attached. That’s a pretty serious and symbolic connection.

Today, we also use the expression “navel gazing” to mean self-contemplation. Obviously, thinking about yourself is important. Know thyself. This ancient Greek aphorism was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi – according to the Greek Pausanias. It has been attributed to Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, and others. Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, when it was a major site for the worship of the god Apollo after he slew the Python, a deity who lived there and protected the navel of the Earth. The site was considered the center of the earth, represented by a stone, the omphalos or navel, which Python guarded.

So what was KNOW THYSELF telling those who entered the temple? Perhaps, it simply meant that if you can understand yourself, you can understand other humans as well. Simply meant but not simply accomplished. Then again, most of those ancient Greek philosophers thought that no man can ever comprehend the human spirit and thought thoroughly. So, were they asking the impossible?

Another more mystical, interpretation focuses on “thyself” as meaning the ego within the self, the I AM consciousness.

Rodin’s Le Penseur (The Thinker) at the Musée Rodin

I don’t know of any official navel gazing groups around today, but omphalopsychite groups have existed throughout history. I was reading about the Hesychasts, a sect of quietists who practiced gazing at the navel to induce a hypnotic reverie. The Hesychasts believed that through a rigorous regime of asceticism, devotion, and deep contemplation of the body, a mystic light (the divine light of God) could be seen. This was partially based on Christ’s injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to “go into your closet to pray.” 

Today, we also use the expression “navel gazing” to mean something negative. In some uses, it means excessive introspection, self-absorption, or concentration on yourself or on a single issue.

With the more widespread use of mental health therapies, you can easily see both definitions at work. First, you must know yourself and examine your own behaviors in order to recognize what is causing your problems. But, become too deeply involved in that looking inward and you will no doubt need more therapy and medication.

Deeper Gazing

Quietism (philosophy) and as a Christian philosophy

Rodin’s Le Penseur (The Thinker) at the Musée Rodin