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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Lander - Episode Two - Widewing (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/1333436499-lander-episode-two-widewing?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_reading&wp_uname=ulfwolf&wp_originator=DrEyljGUW2eTsY9v%2BZBAX0ZiBkhbcDLWSrnMBLk7YAKVR8WI2duJwnirVvtlARenjq%2BlLRHNI0uk1U%2FhTb2Nd4%2FI1Y%2B6nZw2DuvkaL35aRfbb%2B0HHjPofoBeswvWdsxf These are the rules: If you have been true to those you loved; if you have been true to your word; if you have not been vain; if you have followed you own heart; and if you have placed personal integrity over gain and comfort; then, just like gravity makes sure that what you drop will find the ground, you now get to be an albatross, the reward of a life well led. :: A sailboat with a crew of three goes down in a fierce storm somewhere between South Georgia and Gough Islands in the Southern Seas. All three drown. Though one of them not entirely.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Alice Thinks (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/story/227640758-alice-thinks?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=ulfwolf&wp_originator=Rvz7zZ15lPFLHBRx2pagZtn4iK6GcaeC9wDZU5Ok3aMi6VdviJo6DFt34t%2BTK4J3ywm%2BrFcb6gN6puhx5Q9CTmtw2Dm3SvaBJ%2BYDlK9Hy3SPgGp%2FDP00Qg9YMR6lfY7J She knows from experience that the trick is to stay really quiet. Really, really quiet. Quiet as a stone person in a square, or as a mouse or a chair. For if she hears you she'll find you and then she'll teach you a lesson. But it's so stuffy in here, and she really, really needs to pee.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Lander (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/story/339145344-lander?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=ulfwolf&wp_originator=hxQLTqxlXSPW3pXj%2FhPCUKvZVhKedFS9okbm%2F8z24a76JDHv2pczibFI89aOpFRRY1xGbv3%2FFhUPPhUEN2wYO%2B4qhykhPX5KhXmVUBgzhv1Z%2F23YlbYHMNSrfvpzBMdc These are the rules: If you have been true to those you loved; if you have been true to your word; if you have not been vain; if you have followed you own heart; and if you have placed personal integrity over gain and comfort; then, just like gravity makes sure that what you drop will find the ground, you now get to be an albatross, the reward of a life well led. :: A sailboat with a crew of three goes down in a fierce storm somewhere between South Georgia and Gough Islands in the Southern Seas. All three drown. Though one of them not entirely.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Elements of Fiction: Interest (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/story/339233853-elements-of-fiction-interest?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=ulfwolf&wp_originator=kE0Zu9SC4NXEcbRiJa8VAgkVmTaNUKQfFTj4CklNJYcwJbwqxJIHFyAG%2Fe5RpKjD3nM1an4MmeAc4%2FB%2BrO4%2B5tndq11sYyhHiJaOdetzHVsim3eZX8j1Wcm2nm0B2%2Fmq It was John Gardner, the legendary teacher of the craft, who voiced my challenge. The elements of fiction, he said, like the words in a language, are finite. Oh, are they? I thought; then set about collecting them. Or, more precisely, I set about collecting authors' quotes about them. This endeavor set out as a cheat sheet, a short list of those elements I recognized and documented (by quotes), but soon it took on a life of its own and grew beyond all reasonable proportions. Ten years later (and about ten years ago) and at about 400 pages, I was done looking; even though I could, truly, still look for and find more elements and quotes to support them. By then, the project had served its purpose and it had made me (at least to my satisfaction) a better writer. This collection of quotes-I call it a survey-has been lying dormant on my hard drive for a few years now, and I thought perhaps this would be a good time to share the spoils.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Wrong Turns--Right Turns
Wrong Turns—Right Turns
My Serpentine Life
 Before I raided my piggy bank in the summer of 1954 I had never stolen a thing, not a dime, not as much as a discarded breadcrumb. But for the next nearly ten years, I grew into an enthusiastic and practicing klepto, a habit I didn’t (couldn’t) shelve until late one afternoon in very early 1964.
How I saw it: recouping what you need from your own money in your own piggy bank could not possibly be stealing, could it? And since I needed exactly 15 Swedish ore to replenish my weekly allowance back up to one full krona so I could see a matinee film I wanted to see (for, yes one full krona), and since my good friend whose family lived across the third-floor landing had recently showed me how to use a plain old dinner knife to tease coins out of the piggy’s slit, and since I found that I was good at it, I not only retrieved the needed 15 ore during this clandestine raid but nearly a full additional krona in small coins.
Looking back over my klepto-years, what strikes me as very odd is that I was always found out. I don’t know how my parents (primarily mother) knew that I’d pilfered a krona or two or so from my neighbor, but they did, and I then had to confess to the neighbor and ask for forgiveness and be very contrite and all. A few bare-assed spankings, delivered by reluctant and somewhat embarrassed father, worked themselves into the mix over the years.
Yes, I believe that every single episode of successful klepto-fingers was discovered, except the very last, and the very largest.
In retrospect, this was a semi-terrible decade, replete with hidden deeds and an ailing conscience.
Going klepto was wrong turn number one.
::
My maternal grandmother, Mommi, was a devout—bordering on crazy—Christian. She did her best to steep me in Biblehood. Had we lived in the same village permanently, she might have succeeded to drive me into the pen and shut the gate behind me, but we didn’t, we only visited over the summers, a circumstance I think I have to thank for a less-than hard-core Christian life.
During one of these summer visits, I decided to repay her ongoing efforts by being saved. Accordingly, I attended a tent revival meeting where the pastor, who (fascinatingly, to me) had spent many years in India converting heathens, invited anyone who felt ready to step forward and kneel before Christ to do just that.
Two or three people did and then, after some deliberation and looking around me, I did too, sort of vaguely aware of my legs transporting me in the forward direction, and then of them kneeling.
The pastor smiled at me and put his hand upon my head and yelled something about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and told one and all that I had now been saved.
Officially.
Everyone (knowing well that I was Mommi’s grandson) congratulated me, some even cried.
When I came back home to Mommi I told her the good news, and she cried too.
Later that night, I realized with a rapidly sinking feeling that this had been a terrible mistake.
Wrong turn number two—reversed the following morning when I fessed up to Mommi that the saving hadn’t really “taken” all that well.
::
Number three grew out of my father’s refusal to give me one of his spare slide rules. He had tons of them, well, four to be more precise. He never used three of them.
His favorite joke was for someone to ask him what seven times three is. And when someone did (mostly Mom just to make him shut up about it) he’d whip out the one slide rule he did use, move the slider about a bit and then say, “Twenty-One. Approximately.”
“You have so many.”
“I know.”
“So, why can’t I have one of them?”
“You can’t.” No elaboration.
Well, fuck you, I thought, though the Swedish translation to that is nowhere near literal. Even so, not something to say aloud. Not to Fatherhood and his slide rules.
At this time I had not given engineering much thought. I was in eighth grade and very good at math and physics, but I was equally “gifted” in Swedish composition, which was my favorite subject, truly. I guess you could say that even then I loved writing.
Discussing future school choices with my best friend one day, he told me that he was definitely going to apply to Technical Gymnasium. He wanted to become an engineer.
“Do they teach you slide rules in Technical Gymanisum?” I wondered.
“Sure. Yes, they do.”
“Well, then that’s what I’ll apply to as well.”
We both applied. We were both accepted.
On the sunny day of my junior high graduation, my Swedish Composition teacher asked me what line I had applied to for my next educational step.
“Technical Gymnasium,” I told him.
“Oh. That’s a mistake,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “Look at my grades.” And I had very, very high marks in math, physics, chemistry and such.
“But you love reading and writing,” he said.
Since that was true enough, I suddenly had an inkling of where he was going with this. “Sure. Yes,” I said.
“Do you love math?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said, being honest.
“Or physics or chemistry?”
“No, not really,” prevailingly honest.
“So, why?”
I almost said Slide Rules but didn’t. What I said instead was, “My dad’s an engineer and it seems like a good idea to stay in the family business so to speak. And you’re guaranteed to find a good job if you’re a good engineer. That’s what they say.
“All very good if you love engineering,” he said.
I had no answer to that.
So, come fall, I enrolled in Technical Gymnasium. By January the following year, I had dropped out.
Yes, that was wrong turn number three.
::
Based on my junior high grades I soon find myself gainfully employed as a mainframe computer operator in Stockholm. The year is 1966 and the make of the ferrite core RAM monster was Bull/General Electric 301. I was very, very good at this job, my math talent coming in handily.
Ah, and I had also discovered cannabis by now. The sweet gateway was kif, a Moroccan version of pot which was/is so much better than pot that anyone who hasn’t tried it doesn’t have a clue what’s going missing.
This (as soon as my American friend/supplier ran out of stock) led to hashish of various and many kinds: Red Lebanese, Black Afghan, Opium-tinged Nepal, and others. A steady diet of this through 66, 67, and into 68, all the while holding down this computer job, and well at that.
Which is when I decide to become a poet. To quit my job, move to France, buy a small cottage north of Niece (with what money? one would be forgiven for asking, for I had none), and like Baudelaire and Rimbaud pour my life into brilliant and moving and everlasting poems—presumably in French, a language I did not know very well. Let’s rephrase, a language I did not know at all.
So, late spring 1968, I quit my rather well-paid computer job. Bought a single ticket for Paris and awaited the departure date, during which awaiting the Paris students decided to revolt which made the bus company cancel the trip and refund the ticket, Paris now considered too dangerous for innocent Swedes like me.
Refund in hand, and jobless, now what?
Wrong turn number four.
::
Summer 1968. My fiancé, yes, I had proposed and been accepted and everything, was off in London being unfaithful.
I remained in Sweden, down south now looking for computer jobs (on my particular Bull/GE 301 specialty) of which there were none, and now also being unfaithful.
Unfaithful with someone who was so much more my soulmate than my cheating London girl. So I wrote London to inform her pretty much of that.
This brought her back to Sweden in a hurry, and she came down to see me. During this seeing me, I decided to go back to her.
Wrong turn number five.
::
September 1968 saw a fantastic revelation. I was light, light, light, and only light. I was, said a friend of mine, a Buddha.
That shoe fit, and I looked to Buddhism to sort out what on earth had happened to me.
While now living with my cheating London fiancé up north and sorting and sorting and sorting things out as best I could I stayed in touch with my calling-me-Buddha friend who had just returned from England with some fantastic news, he said.
So much better than Buddhism. So much Twentieth Century. So perfect for him, and (he guessed) for me.
Explain.
Come see me, he said.
I did and he explained why this cult was the perfect answer for aspiring Buddhas and I believed him.
Wrong turn number six.
::
This detour was enormous and involved two marriages and precisely that many divorces. It involved children and it involved money (cults can never have enough of the stuff).
In 1974 I decided to ask her to marry me. She said yes.
Wrong turn number seven.
::
In 1979—recently divorced—I asked a second her to marry me. She said yes.
Wrong turn number eight.
::
Twenty years later—and recently re-divorced—I moved aboard my 36-foot Catalina sailboat.
Right turn number one.
::
Some years later I sold the boat. This, of course, brings to mind that old joke: The happiest two days of a boat owner’s life: When he buys the boat and when he sells it.
Sold the boat and moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Right turn number two.
::
Far away from the madding crowd and back among snowy winters (the first winter there saw eleven feet of the wonderful stuff), I finally severed my many strings to my long-term cult.
Right turn number three.
::
In the peaceful setting of forest and river and lake and not very nosey neighbors I turned toward Buddhism again.
Right turn number four.
::
In 2014 I found a snug little cabin that I could afford to buy in Crescent City, California, a ten-minute walk from the wide and blue Pacific ocean, and settled there.
Right turn number five.
::
Years later, and still settled near the Pacific, I live an inexpensive and simple life that sees me rise and meditate before dawn every morning and sees me settle to meditate every evening and as I approach—distantly perhaps, but even so—what feels like true awakening, every morning I take a new right turn.
::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Infatuation -- Musing 303
No matter   what you   might think love is a poor   substitute for freedom
Yes, undeniably it can be wonderful. I’m not contesting that. Walking on clouds, sleepless bliss. The world finally making sense. Yet, so fragile.
Turn it over after a while and it can smell like jealousy, and jealousy is the vilest of afflictions, diseases, devastations, sufferings ever to infect our planet earth—at least according to the sufferers. Harrowing.
Let me say this though about suffering: it is relative and very much depends on point of view.
What is pleasurable for a man, say sex (or love), is suffering to an angel.
Or take crossing an ocean on a 40-foot cutter-rigged sailboat, wind in your sails and hair. Blue (white-capped here and there) ocean at 360 degrees as far as the eye can see (just under three miles to the nearest horizon at it happens). Life could not be better.
As an alien hovering in a spacecraft ten miles up, considering that little boat on that vast ocean and feeling sorry for it: so shackled to the earth by gravity, so lumbering across the water, so, yes, imprisoned. Painful.
Yes, point of view.
Yet, when you are in love, and especially in the early (yet fatal) stages of infatuation, life could not be better. Your body is flushed with just the right hormones in just the right mix and all you can see, feel, hear, think about is him or her. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. It’s all too good. For a while.
If lucky, this cloud-walking lasts, say, a month or two, if unlucky, it only lasts until this relationship is consummated, as it were, after which your partner becomes just another sex-craving, lust-infected human being. This, however, usually only dawns on one of the partners, the other, still high on hormones, will soon have reason to become quite jealous, and if there is a hell on earth, as I implied above, it is carved out by jealousy.
According to the Vinaya, the code of conduct that regulates Buddhist monastic life, celibacy is mandatory. Masturbation is an expellable offense. Even wet dreams are viewed with suspicion and the wetly dreamer, if found out, will have some serious explaining to do before his elders.
The Buddha, nothing but incredibly practical, knew the havoc reaped by sex and saw no other way around it than simply outlawing, forbidding the practice and any of its many disguises.
True, many—far too many—Buddhists these days are, in my view, far too relaxed on the subject, Zen abbots for one, can marry and lead a “normal” sexual life. My take is that any faction of Buddhism that allows or looks kindly on copulation has not understood the Founder’s (many refer to him as the Conqueror) intent: if you want to make it out of here, ditch sex.
And that means ditch love as humans normally view it—usually one form or another of infatuation, or need to propagate the race.
Freedom, on the other hand—the blissful silence that rests where sex used to scream and rage its must, must, must—is so far superior to what it has replaced as to seem like another galaxy altogether.
Those who have transcended love as lust, those who have let go of sex in all its shapes, are some of the happiest people on the planet. Though very concerned—they are like some with eyes wide open walking among millions of blind, hormone-controlled meat puppets.
Yes, I know, love can feel like heaven—I’ve been there a time or two or three—but when seen from an enlightened perspective, it’s poison.
Pure poison.
::
P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Samsara -- Musing 302
I am not trying   to build a life— I am trying   to exit one
Even the sweetest   touch of Samsara is nothing but a   Nightmare
Samsara is variously defined as the world of illusion, as the world of suffering, and perhaps, these days, as the world of fake news?
The Buddha held, rightly I firmly believe, that life is Dukkha.
This word, Dukkha, is Pali for, what is the most common translation, “suffering”. Now, these days it is probably politically incorrect, or religiously incorrect, or something-or-otherly incorrect to just come out and say that “Life is Suffering,” but I don’t think that the Buddha much cared (or cares, if he still looks down on us from the Tusita heaven) to avoid hurting feelings.
I think that for the Buddha, “suffering” would be a mild, almost wimpy, rendering of what he actually meant.
Yes, I believe that Gotama Buddha did mean suffering, that he meant painful, deep, lasting agony, anguish, distress, misery, torment, torture, pick your synonym of choice.
He saw life for what it actually was/is and he called a spade a spade.
Not so these days for suffering, torment doesn’t go so well with the mellower view that life isn’t all that bad, not really, there is much good to be had here, and hadn’t we better tone the Buddha down a notch or two? Perhaps, “life can be, at times, not entirely satisfactory,” or, as one guru keeps insisting, “life can be stressful”.
I’d say.
It really depends on from what layer of understanding you view this Earthly, human (and nonhuman alike, for animals are not spared: it’s all eat or be eaten around here—a zero-sum game if I ever saw one) life. From the Buddha’s enlightened view, and he was firm, life is suffering, torment, agony, no need to pussyfoot around that fact.
Yes, while there are pleasant, some will say pleasurable, sensations and emotions here and there, even those (if you take a good look) are suffering. Even such highly rated and sought-after sensations as sexual orgasms or, for that matter, the ethereal flight of a beautiful piece of classical music, are nothing but prison wall decorations, and if you buy them (which humans, as a rule, do, you’re also buying the wall and with that also the prison itself, i.e., life as we know it here on planet Earth.
Obviously, this is an unpopular view: dark, defeatist, pessimistic, fatalistic, what have you. But this only if you cannot see beyond the prison wall and the prison itself.
Another angle: Peter Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War”. This amazingly well-researched and, yes, very intimate (told from the view of twenty or so individuals who lived, and died, this war) story, lays life out in front of you, and it is not pretty.
This, the “Great War”, has nothing great about it. It was a four-year abomination, an actual hell. No two ways about that. Buy the book and take a look for yourself.
Then, there’s the sequel, with the Holocaust along with Hiroshima, and yes this is what humanity is capable of. The only tangible improvement of the Second World War over its predecessor was that people died a little quicker—better weapons. And probably better medics; they knew how to stuff the drooping intestines back into the shot-asunder soldiers as they screamed for more painkillers or even death itself.
We’ve been busy brushing this under the carpet ever since, even to the insane degree of making heroes out of the best killers and then creating an avalanche of hi-res video games where killing is the best thing on earth; much like we’re brushing under the same carpet the current right-wing insanities and terrifying wars while admiring (applauding) the prison wall decorations.
It does irk me that too many Buddhist teachers and gurus do pussyfoot around the plain misery that is this life—at least on this planet.
Yes, this planet. Sometimes I seriously think that planet earth is an experiment gone drastically wrong and I think the Buddha saw that and tried to wake people up to that fact—he still is.
Just saying.
::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Kaleidoscope -- Musing 301
I am a kaleidoscope   of brightly colored   broken memories 
shaken this way   one day— that way the next
Remember those amazing paper or plastic tubes with angled mirrors and pieces of colored paper or glass in the bottom, and how these colorful, amazing patterns appeared as if by magic and changed with each shake of this miracle toy? Kept me out of trouble for hours.
Today, looking back over the long years, my days could/would change as drastically, if not as beautifully. One morning, my world would be warm and brilliantly sunny as my little room’s large window faced east and had no problem letting the sun in to fill my day. And growing up in northern Sweden, in the summer this would happen at three or so in the morning.
But you get used to this and you get good at going back to sleep to resurface in a few hours.
Brightly colored, youthful kaleidoscope pieces.
Other mornings, rainy ones perhaps, clean-cool water drip-drip-dripping from the trees outside my open window, the air cool and moist and very fragrant. Easier now to turn over and head back to sleep unless your mother bangs on the door again, time to rise and shine apparently, school day and all.
Rainy, still youthful kaleidoscope pieces.
One morning, the one after my first kiss (and I can still taste it) and the kaleidoscope had gone crazy blissed. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the world—well, one thing: she was not here, for we were young and there was no sex yet or sleeping over involved. She had left shortly after that miraculous revelation of what a kiss could be, leaving me starved for more and more and more.
Later I wrote a long song called “Time” where one section reminisced about this wonder of a kiss and reads like this:
Gingerly the lips collide
the honey of the tongue
melts to form a glow
a rush, a river
 Love's forever rising tide
now innocent and young
surges in a slowly
mounting quiver
 This moment is sweet to touch
sweet to feel
 Harboring such
ever surreal
pleasure
 Still, time is so hard to catch
hard to hold
 When dreams all hatch
awed by your old
mythical treasure
 I still think of her now and then, although she has to be in her seventies by now just like I am. Then, she was a wisp of a girl who for some amazing reason knew how to kiss.
Glorious kaleidoscope colors and patterns called love.
But when it comes to shaking up the kaleidoscope, truly and fully, nothing holds a candle to dreams. Nothing shakes and mixes up the pieces quite like they do.
Weirdly, I often dream of my old jobs, in various configurations, and about parking my car in places or on streets where I can never find it again.
Once I dreamed about a mountain with a wide clearing down its wooded slope and suddenly the most beautiful melody rang out from speakers the size of houses along the tree-filled sides. The melody was so beautiful that it woke me up, and with it still in mind I found a recorder and hummed the melody into it before I returned to sleep.
I have since learned how to play this melody on my flute, and I play it often.
Another melody surfaced about a month later, and ditto. I hummed it into my recorder before going back to sleep and I can play it, too, on my flute.
No dream melodies since then, though.
So many bits and so many pieces and so many colors and so many combinations. Dreams.
And then there are the images that arise now and then when I meditate. Out of nowhere, into nowhere. Like little, or not-so-little fish swimming past the aquarium window and then out the side of it, into invisibility, strangely.
Sometimes (happily) my mind manages to organize the colored flecks into poems and then they rise, unsolicited and spontaneously. This can happen at any time though mostly during my walks along the Pacific (and mostly not so pacific) shoreline (Yes, I am blessed).
Writing, too—like writing this right now—brings a host of different shakes of the kaleidoscope and sometimes, a little astounded, I read on my laptop screen what my fingers hammer out on the keyboard, seemingly on their own. Then again I am a descent touch-typist so my fingers type what I think as I think it, it’s just that I’m sometimes surprised at what I think (i.e., read on the screen).
I love writing.
I love kaleidoscopes.
::
P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Opinions -- Musing 300
Truth subdued   and splintered by opinions, opinions   more opinions
We’ve devolved over the last ten years. A lot. We now have “fake news” when the news refuses to flatter. We now have “alternative facts” when facts refuse to cooperate. We now have opinions masquerading as facts.
True, opinions have been masquerading as facts for some time. As Montaigne put it some 500 years ago: “Opinions are not certainties. Most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.”
He also said: “We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own.”
While today’s chaotic social media seems to be the primary source of news and certainties, just as in war, truth is the first casualty.
Are there, I wonder, any standing-on-its-own-two-feet truth left out there now in what was once lovingly (and with much hope) referred to as the Internet or the Worldwide Web (capitalized, no less). It held such promise, such a utopian torch of true information democracy. Who had foreseen that this freedom would be used for evil and not for good?
The most valuable online (and offline) currency is ego. Anything that bolsters it is valuable, anything that hampers or harms it is valueless if not outright harmful.
These days, we live on a planet where all things are not necessarily going well, and we could certainly do with some honest-to-God truths, but these—whenever they threaten the ego or profit—are, should they dare surface, quickly shut (or shouted) down.
Truth, who cares about truth: Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
The saddest thing, I believe, is that most of the purveyors of perverted truths for profit know that they are lying. They know that truth is long lost. But they are so far off course that they no longer care—they cannot even see care from where they are, basking in fake sun.
Instead, truth, they claim, is a partisan phenomenon. There are no two sides to truth, you’re either for it (ours, as stated) or against it. And if you’re against it, you deserve to die (or some such).
I like to read old books. I like to read stories where life is paced at a more comfortable clip, where words like honor, loyalty, truth and such still hold water. Today, it seems, you read anything (especially online) at your own peril, taking away, at best, ego-stoked confusion.
I think the happiest people these days are those living off the grid. Way.
 ::
P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Silense -- Musing 299
These days, I find   my silence to be far more eloquent   than my words
Shirdi Sai Baba voiced what I consider one of the most insightful truths ever spoken: “Before you speak, think. Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?”
Will it improve on the silence? What a question. Asked by someone who appreciates silence.
I have, all too often, come across people who cannot stand silence, who must fill it with something, no matter how inane. And usually loud.
Which does bring to mind Blaise Pascal’s equally great observation: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
I read somewhere, don’t remember where now, that some people after ten or so minutes in a sensory deprivation tank opt for the optional electric shock (a mild one to be sure, but by no means painless)—anything to break the utter stillness of the dark and quiet tank. Talk about proving Pascal right.
George Saunders, who I am sure agrees with the above two statements, observes in his brilliant essay “The Braindead Megaphone” (which I highly recommend you find and read, by the way) the following about our media influence: “A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.”
This is the opposite of improving on the silence. It is raping it. It is kidnapping silence and holding it hostage for profit.
The interesting (aka very scary) thing about this Saunders quote is that he wrote “The Braindead Megaphone” in 2007, and things, as I am sure you are aware, have not improved since then. The loudest, most inaccurate, most divisive, most grotesque voice is the one most listened to.
That is scary.
I live in a small town. I am, by pretty much any standard, a recluse.
I read a lot. I write a lot. I meditate a lot. In other words, I am happily married to Solitude, and I am forever in love with Silence (Solitude’s other name or sister, take your pick).
I prefer reading to watching (say, a documentary). I prefer writing to speaking. I prefer silence to almost any human sound (birds and ocean waves are just fine, of course).
Very few things I say, or write, improve upon the silence.
 ::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Happy Families -- Musing 298
Tolstoy was wrong— Happy families are   all unlike Sad ones alike
In my experience, one dysfunctional family is much like the next. Happy families, on the other hand, differ one from the other in endless ways, for happiness is not a static, shapeless, uniform shroud as Leo Tolstoy seems to believe and make out.
To wit: the first sentence of his novel Anna Karenina reads: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
A Cornell University paper attempts to clarify this, “Here Tolstoy means that for a family to be happy, several key aspects must be given (such as good health of all family members, acceptable financial security, and mutual affection).”
The paper then goes on to say, “If there is a deficiency in any one or more of these key aspects, the family will be unhappy.”
But in its own unique way? I ask.
The way I see it, all unhappy families are alike: miserable for whatever reason, the miasma-like misery is of the same gray, apathetic flavor.
Happy families are all happy for various different reasons—be that love, great future prospects, clever children, yes, by all means, good health, creative genius or at least talent, generosity, worthwhile purpose, nice weather, the joy of singing in the rain, and so on.
All these happy factors, however, are different and of different strengths and mixtures from one happy family to another. Tolstoy, living in gray Russia in gray times, with gray hair and mind, had perhaps not seen too many happy families but a sea of unhappy ones, all infused with the same miserableness, albeit with different faces and complaints.
Okay, yes, the mix of miserable factors does differ, I’m sure, family to family (and that is probably what Tolstoy perceived and then pressed into service as a great opening line), but that miasma of unhappiness always seems, feels, smells the same while the clear, blue skies of happiness all seem, feel, smell differently.
I can think of a thousand happinesses. The first that bubbles to mind is the Chinese emperor whose sick daughter could only be cured by smelling the shirt of a truly happy man. None of the soon proffered shirts held water, however, and the daughter remained ill.
Leading to: “Bring me the shirt of a truly happy man,” roared the emperor to his assembled messengers. And do not return without one.
Dozens of messengers scoured the land, but none could find a truly happy man, and so, no shirt to return to cure the princess with.
The emperor’s mood worsened along with his daughter’s health.
Finally: the last messenger returned with the good news that he had indeed found a truly happy man, living on his own in a remote village.
“Good. Good,” said the emperor. “Give me the shirt.”
“He didn’t have a shirt,” said the messenger.
::
Then there is the deep but mystical happiness. Ramana Maharshi, a truly happy man, tells us this story:
“I was sitting alone in a room on the first floor of my uncle’s house. I was rarely ill, and on that day was feeling fine, but of a sudden violent fear of death overtook me.
“I just felt ‘I am going to die’ and began thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a doctor or my elders or friends; I felt that I had to solve the problem myself, there and then.
“The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself, without actually framing the words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.’ And I at once dramatized the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the inquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape so that neither the word ‘I’ nor any other word could be uttered. ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body ‘I’?
“While the body remained silent and inert I felt the full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it. ‘So,’ I thought, ‘I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’
“All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought. ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centered on that ‘I’.
“From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on. Other thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music, but the ‘I’ continued like the fundamental note that underlies and blends with all the other notes.”
Ramana Maharshi lived the rest of his Southern India life in saintly bliss and spent his days guiding others toward the same true happiness.
::
Another true happiness is the girl, boy, man, or woman who, after some deliberation decides to do (or not do) something, be what it may, and then proceeds to do (or not do) precisely as intended. There is a spiritual, ethical gladness rising from managing to be true to your decisions, each happiness a little different, of course, depending on each decision; but knowing that you can trust yourself gives rise to true happiness nonetheless.
Then there is the true happiness of generosity. Mother Theresa comes to mind. She, I would guess, spent very few sleepless nights plagued by remorse.
The same goes for the Dalai Lama.
As for the Bodhisattva: “Whatever teaching of the Dharma I give for the benefit of the world is all that is required for my own happiness.”
Helping a hurt animal, following your innate goodness, is happiness true and deep.
For me, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, always invites a clear and humming happiness: a spirit talking to another spirit (Beethoven to me). What could be more wonderful?
Enter a room of gloomy, sad people and suffocate in miasma.
Enter a room of truly happy people, and the sky is even bluer.
Methinks.
::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Perspectives -- Musing 297
The human take on   protons, electrons: How can something be so small?
The Universe’s take on   us humans: How can something   be so small?
It is all a question of perspective, isn’t it? Astro-scientists tell us that the physical universe these days measures roughly 92 billion lightyears in diameter (yes, billion). This, of course, is a virtually inconceivable distance.
Lightyears.
Light, that makes it from our sun to our planet in eight minutes; light that can circle our Earth—at the equator—seven-and-change times in a single second. This selfsame light would take 92 billion (yes, again, billion) years to cross the universe. That is roughly twenty times the age of our planet. It is, in other words, a very, very, very (ad infinitum) long time.
Still, it all fits inside this one little word: distance. And it certainly can be relative: for a being the size of the universe, heck, it’s no size at all. It’s simply here and now. Hand to outstretched hand. End of story.
To a cell, the human body is inconceivably large.
To a water molecule—and there is a bunch of them sloshing about in us—the enormity of the body must approach the enormity of the universe as seen by us.
Still, it remains a question of perspectives. A lot of very smart people have pondered these questions and some of them have shared their musings.
Erwin Schrodinger, for one, in his book “What is Life?” pondered this size relationship between atoms and our physical bodies.
“To begin with,” he writes, “they [molecules] are very small indeed. Every little piece of matter handled in everyday life contains an enormous number of them.
“Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water [say, paint them yellow]; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas [and its various depths]; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean [yes, at any depth], you would find in it about a hundred of your marked [yellow] molecules.”
Oh, man. I knew they were small, but that small?
He goes on to explain, “The actual sizes of atoms lie between about 1/5000 and 1/2000 of the wavelength of yellow light. The comparison is significant because the wavelength roughly indicates the dimensions of the smallest grain still recognizable in the microscope. Thus it will be seen that such a grain [say, of sand] still contains thousands of millions of atoms.”
Schrodinger then goes on to ask not why atoms are so small, but why are we so big. Good point, no? His discussion takes off from there, but that’s a matter for another musing.
As we go about our daily lives, we don’t worry too much about these various sizes, neither the immensity of the universe nor the minisculeness of the atom, but I think we’re well served to reflect on this now and again, if for no other reason than to face the wonder, the miracle of the world now and again.
Perspectives.
 ::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Relief -- Musing 296
The joy I find in   still sitting feels more like relief   than happiness
In my still sitting (aka meditation), the happiness I sense, taste, and softly sample now and then is not particularly boisterous. It is a quiet bliss tasting more of relief than of anything else.
It is a diaphanous joy that slowly rises and kisses you when you relieve yourself of spiritual burdens, when you glimpse a truth you recognize as truth even if at a far-off distance.
It is the welling up of trust, a warm certainty that the path you are on is in fact the right one for you, and you can take a deep breath and trim your sails and feel the boat ease over slightly to starboard as the wind finds new purchase and the boat surges forward.
There’s nothing like it. I should know. I lived on and sailed a Catalina 36 for a while and still hold sailing second only to meditation.
Meditation manuals often describe the joy of concentration as bliss, as happiness, joy, pleasure, delight—pick your own synonym—sometimes so strong that you’ll hum or shiver with delight. I have found that, for me, the feeling (though it is a happy one, of course) is not quite so drastic. It is sweet relief.
The bliss I experienced during my fortuitous 1968 stumble toward what I thought of as Nirvana then, was like an orgasmic rush of light, surging from feet through legs and body and invading my head like a welcome conqueror. I have not experienced anything like it since, but I have read many accounts of those who have and they all ascribe it to meditation and concentration.
Yes, I have in many ways strived to re-experience that almost (by comparison) violent bliss of 1968, but I am equally pleased to have found a shade of relief that brings as much certainty—possibly more—as that youthful eruption.
The Buddhists talk of two strands of meditation—though the jury is still out on whether the Buddha himself talked about two strands or not:
Samatha and Vipassana.
Samatha is about tranquility and concentration. Vipassana is about insight; the word itself literally means “see in”.
Samatha, with its spacious, peaceful, focused stillness paves the way for Vipassana to illuminate all that needs to be seen, discerned, and let go.
Samatha removes all distractions to let the spirit look, really look, at what now percolates into view from who knows precisely where. And shining the light of clear seeing, the spirit can now see, confront, discern, and once fully discerned, let go, and to now replace the seen with wisdom.
When this, on delightful occasions, happens, is there any wonder that the feeling is glorious relief?
Relief from darkness.
Relief from ignorance.
Relief from, yes, prison.
::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Poisonous Opinions -- Musing 295
Mahayana— Hinayana—   Opinions   Opinions   Opinions
Most opinions are fine, of course (it’s kind of a human birthright), as long as they are labeled opinions; as long as they don’t come masquerading as “alternate facts” and proceed to hold forth on spiritually important issues such as path, liberation, Nirvana, and such, and then—if challenged—double down on being right (the only one that is right, in fact) while you (stupid thing) are (obviously) wrong.
The authors of the notorious Lotus Sutra are often (in many instances deservedly and correctly so in my view) accused of writing a very long polemic tract vilifying those fellow Buddhists who do not concur, in other words, all those of the Theravada persuasion. The Lotus Sutra refers to Theravada, The Buddha's original teachings, as Hinayana—the lesser and often incorrect, even dangerous path so much lesser than the correct and so much greater and beautiful and correct path known as (our) Mahayana.
There are places in the Lotus Sutra that accuse the original disciples of the Buddha to be not only selfish but to be promulgating dangerous teachings. Attaining Nirvana, holds the Lotus Sutra, is a purely selfish act. The original teachings of the Buddha were only for people with little minds. Mahayana is for big minds.
Oh, well. Perhaps I’m drawing too simple (and somewhat biased) a picture here but it is not too far off the mark, I think you’ll find.
Now, as a neophyte seeker coming across this spiritual mudslinging, what is one supposed to conclude? I tell you what I would conclude, if I didn’t (by experience, by now) know better: They are both crazy, so let me steer as clear as possible of Buddhism altogether. Wide birth. And that would be my loss.
Very much so.
And it would be the very lamentable outcome of pigheaded opinions masquerading as fact and insisting on being right.
And here I’m talking two-thousand-year-old mudslinging. Fast forward to today’s insane me-me-me porridge of brainless opinions, and forgive me for shaking my head in overwhelmed disbelief.
These days, there seem to be as many gurus as grains of sand along the Ganges. And they are ALL right. And they often, too often conflict with each other.
What is a novice seeker to think?
I think some spiritual police (forgive the expression) should round them all up and lock them in a very large room (why not a roofed-over football stadium?) and make it very clear that they will not be let out, not a single one of them, until they AGREE. Work it out and agree on the path. Not my path, or our path, but THE PATH. Signed by all.
Now the novice seeker has something to rely on.
Sheer fantasy, of course.
As it stands, and will most likely continue to stand, the seeking can be hit and miss. I know that from experience.
At twenty I joined a religious persuasion that claimed, in no uncertain terms and very loudly, that it was the ONLY, repeat the ONLY path that led all the way to spiritual freedom. Other paths were laughably mistaken, so very misguided, only we saw the truth, only we knew the way out. There is a terrible addiction involved in buying into such a thing, and I stayed addicted for years.
Came to discover, the path did not, as advertised, lead out. Still, there are many that even today subscribe wholeheartedly to this movement and remain convinced that they, and only they, are on the right path. Hold the ultimate key.
Once I saw the light (or the darkness) it still took me years to fully shed these notions of superiority, of rightness, of us against the world of stupids.
Eventually, I found Buddhism and breathed a huge sigh of relief only to soon enough discover similar mindsets, i.e., Lotus Sutra versus Theravada. Why? Why? Why? It’s not helping anyone.
Yes, I have reconciled things by now. I have developed a very good nose for truth and can sift the chaff from the grain as I study.
Today, I would, if asked, call myself a Theravada Buddhist. I would also be the first to point out that there are many amazing insights and practices in the Mahayana tradition, including, of course, Zen.
Now, I don’t care whether Mary and Beth Instagram-disagree on some fish recipe, or Bob and Dan are Twitter-fighting about the best running shoe. I mean, who really cares?
But when supposedly learned and “senior” religious teachers and gurus disagree about the path and practices, that has a very detrimental impact on the world.
Perhaps it’s not so strange that religious disagreements often lead to bloodshed—the Crusades, the Islam invasion of India and other countries that were converted at sword-point, the Christian rape of South America in the trail of Columbus—the list does indeed go on.
Nothing is more important than the true spiritual way out of Samsara and the more agreement we can find, the better.
This I have discovered: the true sages, the saints, the mystics, all do agree.
::
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ulfwolf · 1 year
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Viewpoints -- Musing 294
Down there:   There is you, me,   them, others Up here:   There is only up here
I remember walking alongside this large late-summer lawn, staying on the path (as not very politely requested by little metal signs here and there) and musing about Brahman versus Atman. I was reading a Swedish translation of the Upanishads at the time and the more I mused the more the shoe fit, so to speak.
I had arrived at the conclusion that there really was no Brahman versus Atman. That he-she-it-we-they-I were one and the same. This was gut-speak. Visceral voice. Yes, I believed this. How could I not? It rang so true. Size had nothing to do with it, I saw; size was only confusing the issue for Brahman was as sizeless as Atman and Atman was as sizeless as Brahman.
Earlier that week I had read a passage from Bertrand Russell’s “Wisdom of the West” where he convinced me that God, as I had grown up to know him—long white hair and beard and quite stern and unforgiving, especially when it came to young boys who stole things, mea very culpa—this God did not exist. He was just an invention. As I read along with Russell’s logic I had nodded sagely: had always suspected that. Yes.
With the last remnants of my childhood God safely out of the way, I was free to draw other conclusions. And I did.
And as I looked out I saw Brahman and as I looked in I saw Atman and knew that what little meat and blood and bone stood between us was no barrier to truth; for I, Atman, stood in, lived in, was Brahman, and Brahman stood in, lived in, was Atman. Sense was made, thoroughgoing and eternal.
I was nineteen.
Shortly, I will embark upon my seventy-fifth spin around the sun and the image—as vivid memory—of the younger me looking up and out into the Brahman sky remains as real as anything. It made visceral sense then, it makes more than that sense now.
I have been deeply taken by the Upanishads since then and read more of them. And again. One year, I even wrote a novel based on the Katha Upanishad (“Yama’s Visitor”) where I transposed and translated the entire story, almost word for word (in Easwaran’s translation), into a modern setting. (Should anyone be interested, feel free to read a sample at the link below):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N7T8YLW
Of course, Gotama Buddha offered his very firm take on this: There is no such thing as “Atman”, he said, there is no such thing as “Self”. The nineteen-year-old me begged to differ and as for my current me, the jury has in some sense yet to arrive back in the courtroom.
What I believe the Buddha meant to convey with his firm self-denial is that there is no such thing as a separate Atman, no such thing as a separate, unchanging, eternal Self. And there I certainly agree.
So does the jury.
By saying that there is no self, I believe the Buddha said that the ego is an artificial, not ultimately true, phenomenon, and to get hung up on and in it is not only a waste of time but unhealthy, not to say pernicious, as well. However, rather than reasoning this out with his disciples, he took the sure to be unsure and categorically proclaimed that there is no such thing as a Self. Period.
Some historians also point out that Gotama Buddha was, and I don’t like to put something holy so crassly, in competition with other Indian gurus, other movements, both Jain and Hindu, and had to differ just to make a mark, to stand out as it were. I feel that there is some truth to that.
His no-self-at-all certainly stood out.
Oh, how I would love to have been an Indian fly on those walls.
About a millennium after Gotama’s death, Adi Shankara (718-740), Advita’s founder (who was accused by his contemporary critics to be a “Closet Buddhist”) and a joy to read, put it this way:
“Even after the Truth has been realized, there remains that strong, obstinate impression that one is still an ego—the agent and experiencer. This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme non-dual Self. Full Awakening is the eventual ceasing of all the mental impressions of being an ego.”
The “supreme non-dual Self”. That, in short, is another word for Brahman. And Shankara, to me, expresses the truth better (and less uncompromisingly, less severely) than Gotama Buddha. And this is how I see things.
Shankara goes on to say:
“To be free from bondage the wise person must practice discrimination between One-Self and the ego-self. By that alone you will become full of joy, recognizing Self as Pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss.”
Again, Gotama Buddha could have (should have) said that. And perhaps it wasn’t so strange that his contemporaries saw Shankara as a “Closet Buddhist”, they seem very much cut from the same spiritual cloth.
One thing I hold as absolute: There cannot be two Ultimate Truths. That’s the one thing there’s only the one of (for were there “two ultimate truths”, then the one ultimate truth is that there are two of them, and so we’re back to one). Gotama Buddha and Shankara obviously (to my mind) knew and spoke of the same thing. Different words, perhaps. Different political settings, perhaps. Different audiences, too. But the same Truth.
I am a practicing Buddhist. I also study Advaita. I also study Zen. As well as Taoism. Different voices. Different viewpoints. Same Truth.
And up here there is only up here.
 ::
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ulfwolf · 2 years
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Chumbawamba -- Musing 293
We’re all right as long as   our gettings-back-up equal our fallings-down
This, of course, assumes that you’re upstanding to start with. But given that, if you match every fall with a rising again, you’re still good, and most likely (or quite definitely) tenacious.
I can think of only one excuse to stay horizontally put as it were; that is when Death comes a-hollerin’. Don’t antagonize him. Stay down, it’ll soon be over.
That said, we admire those who refuse to stay down, no matter what, though that can (as all things can) be taken to ridiculous extremes, as in when you’re supposed to stay down (as I said, when Death finally comes a-calling). A hilarious example of this is Peter Sellers’ stick-to-itiveness in the opening sequence of “The Party”. If you haven’t seen it, check the YouTube link below, it’s well worth watching.
Sellers link: https://youtu.be/kGi2AlMhraQ
But Sellers’ antics aside, I have always thought highly of those that, no matter the odds, no matter how steep the incline or height of the mountain side before you still keep going, if for no other reason than that they had decided to do it—being true to oneself always held to be sacrosanct.
Heroes.
I started smoking cigarettes at sixteen. I had just turned twenty the first time I decided to quit the things.
Of course, by now I had a nicotine dependency and even though I had yet to hear that nicotine was as hard, if not harder, to quit than heroin, I got to experience this insidious nicotine grip firsthand (not that I’ve ever tried heroin, so I cannot personally compare).
I had promised not only myself but a friend that I could and would stop smoking cold turkey. Nothing to it. Watch me. At the time I smoked about a pack a day.
After two days I just could not take it anymore. I felt like a benumbed wooden post, nothing was quite real and all I could think about, all I could dream of was cigarettes. Over the next day I had a lengthy discussion with myself and the craver way outdebated the ceaser. Day four saw me lighting up again, to tremendous relief and to a very disappointed friend who really had thought my word was enough—he had believed me, no longer though. He actually never quite forgave me.
But lesson learned. Cigarettes are not easily quittable. Not even vaguely. Accordingly, I knew better than to attempt another cold-turkey stunt like that.
At twenty-three I tried again. Having forgotten the pains of the futile cold-turkey approach I went down the same road again. For three days. Same thing, wooden, numbed, craving, craving, craving. Still had not heard that heroin possibly was easier to quit, but still experienced the impossibility of shedding nicotine. I simply could not do it. Not for anything.
Yes, I had promised myself again, and sincerely this time. Really, really, this time for sure.
Not.
Over the next few years, and I’m into my thirties now, I made feeble gestures in the quitting direction now and then, each time surrendering within days, sometimes within hours, and each time having to convince myself that I was not useless, that trying to quit in the first place was just plain ol’ stupid, and so on, to make me feel better about having been bested, again, and again, and again by tobacco.
In 1984, we bought a house, a house that, even though only ten years old, needed some internal repairs and repaint. We were to take possession the coming Monday. I had taken a week off work to do the repair and paint job myself and here comes intuition charging to catch my attention. If, said intuition, if I were to quit smoking now during a week where I would be busy day and night with physical work, perhaps this was the perfect time to do it, to actually, yes, actually do it. New house and all. Good road marker. It had my attention. I listened and agreed. I would do it this time. Perfect.
I clearly remember the Sunday night before. I was smoking Winstons then and had for years. I was sitting in the living room of our rented house looking out the den window, keeping an eye on my watch. It was now eleven thirty at night. I had decided to quit smoking at midnight, sharp.
I lit another Winston.
And a little later, about ten till midnight, another—the last—which I smoked slowly, thoroughly, all the way down to the filter and up to a minute before midnight, at which time I took my final drag and stumped the butt out in the blue glass ashtray.
Went to bed.
The following morning, around ten o’clock, I am knee-deep in painting a bedroom wall when the need to smoke not only snuck up on me but staged a full-scale assault. I almost reeled off the ladder. I was in trouble.
Intuition to the rescue again: I asked my wife for a sandwich and a beer which I sat down and consumed on the spot, trying to out-crowd the tobacco craving by satisfying another. Then another beer and then back to the painting.
Chew, rinse, repeat—many times.
Bottom line: by the end of that week I had drunk a lot of beer and eaten a lot of food, but I had not smoked another cigarette.
Over the next month, I still used beer (in the evenings) to chase tobacco away, and at the end of that first month, I was still, yes, tobacco-free.
Two months. Still tobacco-free.
Three months. Ditto.
HOW-ever, I dreamed about smoking. Almost nightly. Dreaming that I had given in and actually lit up, crushing myself in the dream, cursing myself in the dream for giving up, and then: waking up, jubilant: Wow: Just a dream, it was just a dream, I was still tobacco-free.
Over the next year, I dreamed that same dream often. Giving in, lighting up, cursing myself, and then, gloriously waking up to a hero’s welcome.
That was going on forty years ago. I still have not smoked tobacco, and these days I never (well, perhaps once a year) dream about smoking. I can, finally, say that I beat tobacco. And yes, by this time I have heard that nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin.
This from American Heart Association News:
The science behind why it's so difficult to quit smoking is crystal clear: Nicotine is addictive—reportedly as addictive as cocaine or heroin. Yet any adult can stroll into a drug store and buy a pack of cigarettes, no questions asked.
“From a scientific standpoint, nicotine is just as hard, or harder, to quit than heroin, but people don't recognize that," said Dr. Neil Benowitz, a nicotine researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
Well, I second that and rest my case.
And my gettings-back-up did indeed match my fallings-down.
Now, to apply the same math to ignoring the clamoring of witless tastebuds.
::
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ulfwolf · 2 years
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After Tsongkhapa -- Musing 292
Those who chase   pleasures are insufficiently   disillusioned with them
While I strongly disagree with Je Tsongkhapa (1357-1419)—who ridiculed anyone so dumb as to believe that all you had to do to bail out of here (for Nirvana) is to stop thinking, to master your thoughts, something I quite firmly believe will in fact bail you out—this selfsame man made a beautiful point about pleasures (illusion) and their disillusion.
If you still chase the pleasures of your senses, he said, you are as yet insufficiently disillusioned with them, inferring, of course, that the sensual pleasures you chase are indeed, ultimately, pure, misleading illusion.
In this rather tranquil autumn of my life, I am happy to report that I have indeed grown sufficiently disillusioned with many of those illusory pleasures that anchor you in Samsara, both for the now and for the many tomorrows.
For I have stopped chasing them.
To wit, although physical age has definitely lent me a much-appreciated hand with this, I have finally managed to elude the sticky clutches of sex.
Also, it has been years since I as much as tasted alcohol and I haven’t smoked tobacco since the mid-1980s.
As for clothes and such finery, my motto is and forever shall be “comfort before style” as evidenced by a wardrobe filled with  small pack of one-size-too-large sweatsuits. All both warm and comfortable. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Car-wise, I have no desire to “upgrade” or “newgrade”, I am staying true to my 2008 Toyota Yaris (which I still think of as “new”). These days, though, she is little more than a glorified shopping cart but seems happy in that role. No complaints.
My drug of choice over the years has been “approval”, something I would go to some lengths to acquire. All to stroke and self-confirm my precious (though fragile, of course) ego.
Moving up to and settling in my current little California town just south of the Oregon border and now living the life of a hermit has worked like a very efficient approval-rehab and I’m finally over worrying about that “they” are thinking about me. In fact, I no longer even care what I think about me. Cool shades of equanimity, that.
There were times in my life when music (just like for the wood elves in Tolkien’s tales) was as important to me as food. Though music is still important to me, I am no longer obsessed with it. Again, to a degree, I have physical age to thank for this since my hearing is slowly but quite definitely fading, taking with it some of the finer/higher frequency pleasures of both classical and popular music.
One curious thing about the down-shifting frequency response of my aging ears is that I now discover basslines in some songs that I never heard before—since in the past they were out-muscled by, say, the lead guitar or the organ or the strings whose higher frequencies have now toned down a bit letting the basslines step up front and center. Lamentable? Yes, to a degree. Interesting though. Very much so.
I read a lot. Mostly for illumination (Buddhism in the main) but also for pleasure at times. Twenty years ago most of what I read was indeed for pleasure. These days, even though I have access to thousands of mystery and drama titles via electronic library lending (Kindle books) I find myself disillusioned indeed by those writers I clung to and swore by in the past. I’m thinking Stephen King, Frederick Forsyth, John Grisham, et al., whose words and works now strike me as shallow, of insufficient depth. Instead, I have turned to those who manage to combine a great tale with spiritual exploration—Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy” comes to mind, as do Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings. And those of the enigmatic Cormac McCarthy.
Still, I tend to buy more (Kindle) books than I will ever have time to read (given that time is indeed running out), feeling that by owning them I am on some strange level fulfilled, even if I don’t get around to the reading part. I’m thinking Thomas Pynchon, Gene Wolfe, Paul Auster, and his brilliant wife Siri Hustvedt. Obviously, I am insufficiently disillusioned by the need to possess books. Working on that.
Then there is food. Genetically speaking (i.e., DNA-wise) I come from a family whose conversations rarely make it beyond sentence number four without mentioning food in some form or another, and my body seems to be all too well aware of this.
To combat this (I could see myself ballooning just like some of my close relatives if I didn’t watch myself) I turned vegan in the mid-1980s and I have worked out a good daily food regimen that supplies all nutrients I need and which comes in under budget. I normally stick to this, religiously.
But. But. But. When it comes to food I love to cheat. Still insufficiently disillusioned by taste and such things as the mellow sugar-rush of, say, ice cream, or the spicey allure of cheese-flavored popcorn, or the yellow cheesy heaven of Cheatoes (yes, that’s how you spell it). I am still doing monthly (sometimes weekly) battle with my genes, sometimes winning and (less and less often) sometimes losing. If there is one pleasure I need to cease chasing it is this flavory one, an illusion I need to disillusion myself about, and for real (as they say).
And it is still a battle for my flavory “lettings go” are only partial, and therefore not very convincing, for I don’t believe myself and my decisions and I find my gullet an amazing debater. Outdebating me at times, not at others.
Work in progress.
But in the main, I live by the rule “Simplify, simplify, simplify” and I am the very much happier for it.
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