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notes

Here's another note--one squirrel chases another--: generosity does not mean self denial. They differ the way Joseph emphasizes remorse differs from guilt. And how pity is the "near enemy" of compassion. Self denial like guilt and pity have me written in solid at the center. Self denial posits me, keeps me solid, then removes the stuff being denied. So they are separated. But both me and the stuff are still solid, experienced as dense. Even renunciation can be like that. My doing this retreat took some renunciatory energy, to go against the holiday norms and festivities that I love. Yet even renunciation can function to solidify when we cling to the alternative norms posited. Of course it can also be the ladder we kick away. For me there is absolutely no question it was the right thing to do! Even if if i'd stayed in NYC or gone elsewhere and actually met Zo or Carson or anyone else with whom I equally fell in love, and suppose she or he really was someone with whom I could be intimate, even think of it as marriage if you insist, and of course we most diligently will practice all the positions in your 3d book!!!!! --

;-}

ok, suppose that would have happened had I not done the retreat. Would I trade the retreat for that? -- Nope. Not at this point. -- Now would I like to meet someone tomorrow when I get my car going? Yah, definitely. I'm totally willing to get out of separate clingingness if I can connect so it doesn't compromise freedom. I still think you might oversimplify things but I agree with you in principle that being in love might be compossible. In fact in daily life I'm seeing it happen more and more.

But, Mark: it wouldn't be happening without deep intense solitude! I am sure of this. My programming is too intense. I feel the need for way more of it. Though oddly, I'm not any more insistent upon solitude than I am upon relating. I can go with opportunities that may open up, and things will be fine. The monastic model is not in the cards (I don't think). A traditional type marriage is not in the cards (ditto). What is in the cards? I have no idea in detail. Like the newspaper and Frost said we can't necessarily get it all in one life and would go crazy if we try to do it because it is literally impossible.. The idea of having it all can function as a tool for self-clinging: one could use that idea simply to stay stuck in patterns. So the idea has to become the actual real lived experience of freedom. When we are caught up in the various patterns that define our personalities, it can seem impossible to find any space at all; and yet when we attend to what is going on -- whoop,there it is!!

Still such a surprise to me that this space emerges out of flesh and blood. And compared with you I’m still fumbling so clumsily to express it.

Maybe that's all I needed to get Zoe to say to make her point. Something less dramatic than dying, yes, clumsily, a martyr. And yet I honestly feel that most people I know would benefit so much more from getting Zoe's renunciatory message (her message of renunciation, let us remember, even living a vibrant life, as a successful artist swing dancing in Seattle; yet cultivating renunciation, in the spirit of Gandhi, finding joy in life by losing the lure of life -- not self denial! Rather: slipping into clear mindfulness rather than tolerating self indulgence and selfishness; but again not waging war on selfishness but simply recognizing it, alert for the free space not trapped by it) -- most people i know would benefit more from the message of renunciation than from your "let's integrate intimate sex and marriage too"-message.. I think about this more and more, Mark.. Maybe there really is something to the idea of sustained liberation, not just in theory either. -- I am, of course, not talking only about beliefs and theories. I have so few beliefs about all this. I still find it so odd that the best website on spirituality is called "beliefnet.com" --the name itself already is missing the point. -- Anyway I can keep theory pretty much separate from my practice (like my language for some odd reason --same reason? -- has so few colors in it)..language is something to use, like you say.. not to get too caught up in. E.g. I had this experience (maybe even perhaps jhana 6 or 7??) where I felt this image of myself as a monk sitting on the ground surrounded by people jeering at me, taunting and laughing. I felt a strong and definite sense of identity with this man, who was obligated by certain vows he had taken to eat whatever would be put into his bowl. The jeering people put in something gross. A dead worm or something. I, the monk, am mindfully, calmly, picking it up to eat it. It was intense. It could be a memory, Mark. It was not a dream state. I bet it was the type of experience people have when when they think they are remembering past lives. Yet I flatly do not believe it was a memory; it more likely is vivid imagination. It was like a dream state in its not being self-validating as evidence for anything. I don't necessarily reject its being a memory either. (But I doubt it.)

Anyway my point was that it doesn’t matter: the idea of sustained liberation in real life is becoming more vibrant, and its NOT due to mere theory or belief or hyped ideas. For look around: one certainly can observe various degrees of freedom in people, relative to their own states of minds and bodies. And in oneself, at various times. At times there can be a sense of vast freedom even in the midst of unpleasant sensations or emotions, and in those moments it is clear that this freedom is better even than the most refined exquisite experiences. Why not a condition of complete freedom? Even perhaps in the midst of normal human experience. I mean freedom from ugly states of mind, or rather, more precisely, perhaps, freeedom within such states. Retreats always open up that space.

Of course maybe people are simply different from the beginning relative to freedom, independent of their consciously attending to it? The changes in me, then, being the result of simply getting older.? -- No, that can’t be exactly right: the power of the refined simple mindful attentiveness to what is going on and to my knowing it is something I have learned. There is absolutely no way it was just going to happen; maybe for others though. Maybe having children, mindfully and lovingly raising children can cultivate this state.. ? No! It’s different! Raising a child immersed me in the beautiful chaos of life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything --but like Zoe said: that is different. Life offers more options than we may tend to appreciate.

I learned so much by simply seeing some of Jo’s blindspots in the midst of clarity. How that can happen, does happen all around us and within us all the time, for instance, denial of, masking, our vulnerability. Our heads are literally falling apart, Mark. She should have been able to see that we do not have to settle for a conception of marriage that treats "ownership" as central. She can’t just settle for seeing the outrageous contradiction between Kant’s exalted idea of respect for people as ends in themselves and his treatment of marriage as mutual co-ownership. Of course that is a blunder steeped in density of self: if one has a soul then it wouldn’t be so odd to own another one as well. Like owning cars. From that perspective, mutual co-ownership looks like progress. but seeing how this isn’t progress at all, and see the incoherence arising out of density blindness isn’t enough though. Just as she was so clear that our concept of self can be revised to exclude "density" she should have seen that the concept of marriage can be revised to exclude ownership; and to create forms of non-clinging marriage, loving another as an "other self." --But just as I do not own a "self" I do not love by owning another, in any way, shape, or form. --Loving another with great respect precisely by acknowledging he, like me, is not dense, not the type of thing that could be owned, or that can be held in any way, except right now with this fleeting arm. She was certainly right to see that our practices and institutions need to be creatively revised, with no role for gender whatsoever, and if one isn’t conscious about it one likely will end up a prisoner in the customary forms of relationships that presuppose the ownership model. But in fact many people are addressing this--and I have done it too, at least did for awhile-- and finding in their lives that they can be as creative in their intimate relationships as Zoe was with the concept of self and, indeed, just with her self.

Of course I realize that you know this, and that indeed this is what your book is all about. And I will grant you that I still don’t get some of the most basic points.. This came to mind, for instance, after I had a fight with my brother Joe a few weeks ago before coming up here --abouyt where Mom and Dad should live (as if it were up to us to decide, which it isn’t, in my opinion --which is what the fight was about)-- and I AM ONLY NOW REALIZING the fundamental fact about me and him is that I left home when he was about ten years old and never really looked back! We’d had such fun times toghether and suddenly I disappeared. And never even noticed it myself! Or for that matter, I never even pondered what I might have been like for him, and so now I’ve been feeling a sense of responsibility that is so bittersweet because it does connect with the fun we had, and yet is horrible to see what I neglected. Mark, please, I am not saying this is a moral thing, that is, it is not a window for more guilt and self-condemnation; Rather simply taking responsibility for what I didn’t do as a way of appreciating how rich life can be and seeing the opportunities we have lost and those that remain.

And there are infinitely many ways to do this, every single moment a new opportunity, there is no way it carries over from yesterday, which is why there is never ever ever ever any final state of grace.

And then the Alternative Story, you know, the abstract tools for modern people: yes, its good, its fine how the girl figured out how to make sense of interconnectednes. It ceertainly beats the old myths, including Uncle Fred’s myth of eternal recurrence. But the Alternative Story itslef is still second-hand!! It isn’t a matter of getting the story straight! The thing is moment by moment to be truly oneself, the knower of these thoughts --and do that without abstracting again to some theoretical conception of self in action (as conceived in some theory or other about other lives --or whatever the story may involve).

It is nearer than near, here in this flesh, this head connected to these thighs upon which this laptop rests. Of course the Alternative Story is a good one when there are thoughts about meaning, significance and so forth that may need to be thought, when one needs to act decisively, or when one needs encouragment. We need all the tools we can find to slip into compassion and shared joy with others rather than nihilism and selfishness.-- but it’d certainly be rather artificial to set out to live in terms of the idea that the meaning of life is in the causal interrelatedness. I’m not taking the story back: One’s life is a great tree. I’m just saying that the thoughts themselves are secondhand: the abstractions merely make sense of what we actually do when we are connected to the basic awareness we most are, since that is happiness. Which causes love.

Anyway see, here I go, on and on!! --there still is plenty of Joe in me. Still not getting it maybe. About the real me, though, and about those sexy mandalas, by the way, I’m actually not sure whether or not I really need to get through the mandala doorways or not, --which is to say I still don’t know whether or not to agree with you.

Zoe with her unrecognized anger and yet, all the same, her clarity definitely made vivid and viable a being-alone way of life. When she is refusing to coddle me, whatever that means, she was simply saying love is even more mysterious and surprising than we expected. Just as it is a surprise to see nondensity, it is a surprise to see what odd and amazing resources are available to us as nondense beings because we are aware. Not retreating mindlessly into dreams and movies or into deep concentration, and not getting lost in an abstract image of Self, whether it involves a dense soul or just neat stories of interconnectedness:-- not retreating in those ways 9even after exploring them), but slipping moment by moment into the void, the lucid emptiness of awareness. Or whatever. whatever words you use there.

As you can see, every paragraph here falls into the same pattern. I cannot seem to keep myself from summing it all up.