Sometimes, when you are a spiritual practitioner, you have to let go of your practice and just live for a while. Just let things be and let nature take care of things. Eventually that is the whole purpose of spiritual practice, right? Becoming our true selves. Paradoxically, sometimes our practice can obstruct us from actually doing so. Sometimes it’s best to just live, take a walk, see your friends, have good food, clean your house. Let the mud sink to the bottom again. Don’t try and change anything yourself but just let change happen by itself. Practice must never become dogmatic and it must always be a personal thing. Because it is eventually about freedom. It’s about life itself.
A typical western thing is fighting against our selves, against our fears. If we only look at all the heroic stories in our myths and fairy tales, it’s always about killing the enemy, conquering evil, slaying the dragon. The difference with Eastern philosophy is beautifully portrayed in the story of Milarepa, one of the greatest early teachers in Tibetan Buddhism. He lived in a cave and meditated for years continuously. One night he returned to his cave after gathering some firewood when he was that the cave was filled with demons. they were sleeping in his bed, cooking his food and reading his books. Although he knew from his Buddhist practice that these demons were just a projection of his own mind and represented all the unwanted parts of himself, he did not know how to get rid of them. So at first, he started teaching them dharma, the Buddhist teachings. He taught about compassion, emptiness and how poison can be medicine. This, however, didn’t do anything; the demons didn’t go away. He then lost his patience, got very angry and ran at them. But they just laughed at him. Finally, out of desperation he gave up, sat down on the floor and said; I am not going away, and seemingly you are not either, so let’s just live here together. After he said that, all of them left, except one. Milarepa recognized him as being the most vicious (representing his biggest fear). He didn’t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked towards the demon and put his head into it’s mouth and said, “Just eat me, if you want to”. At that point, also this demon left. (source: -“Start Where You Are” by Pema Chodron Shambala Publications). Of course this is a pretty spartan way of dealing with your demons, but this story does teach us that as long as we keep fighting against our demons, our achilles heel, we will never lose it. We have to get to know our fears, our dark sides, our most unwanted sides. This does not mean we have to act upon them or get carried away in them, not at all, we become aware of them, in a gentle way. We get to know their textures, their smell, their composition. Not only does this lead us to become more aware of when and how they affect our lives, also we gain more insight in how we ever created them. By accepting all the aspects of ourselves, both good and bad, we can become fully human. And that is, as also Pema Chodron points out, the seed of compassion and the basis of happiness.
Yesterday was the last recording session for the new Joensuu EP, which comprised of doing all the vocals. Beforehand I asked our producer Rene to give me some vocal exercises and he stressed that i should really try to relax the area of my vocal chords as much as possible and basically just let it do it’s work; it was the best vocal session I’ve ever had. Whilst singing I thought of the fact that it’s actually a beautiful analogy to the way we treat our bodies and minds. We tend to put way too much tension on our bodies and minds, hardly giving it any space. In this way we do not only make our bodies ill and our minds stress- and fearful, also we don’t leave room for the great qualities they have to offer. Yesterday, when I relaxed, I noticed that I suddenly had a much broader vocal range than i usually have when I tend to tense up while singing. Our bodies will give back so much more energy and health if we just let it be now and then. The same goes for our mind, if we can more and more let go of the tension of grasping, the mind can just be open, relaxed and joyful. Here’s a beautiful poem by Tsoknyi Rinpoche which basically says it all:
Usually when we fix our attention
We confine this natural cognizance
Instead of doing that, why not simply let experience unfold?
There is some energy in the beauty
In the ugliness,
In whatever situation you’re in.
Just let it unfold, and you’ll know more and more.
There’s no need to fix it or nail it down.
Just be carefree and let things be.
Then every single state within samsara and nirvana
Will only unfold, more and more.
When we are wide awake, anything can take place, can’t it?
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by the year 2020, both Coronary Artery Disease and Depression will be the two major causes of disability, low life expectancy, use of medical care and mortality. Although these might seem like two independent diseases they have a very strong correlating factor; stress. I believe it to be one of the biggest issues in our modern day societies and the cause of many (or even most) physical and mental pathologies such as psoriasis, ulcers, PTSS, panic disorders and even a recently found possible linkage with cancer, not to mention that stress hormones impair the immune system causing a whole variety of illnesses. Many people have lost touch with their homeostasis (stability) and are in a chronic state of allostasis (trying to regain stability) causing the body and the mind to be in a continuous state of fight-or-flight, with all it’s nasty consequences. So how are we gonna solve this? Again, I believe the human ego to be the biggest player in this game. In huge corporations there is usually a lot of top-down pressure, fueled by the people who run these companies, having money on their mind instead of the well being of their employees. But how do you deal with it if you are one of these employees? Of course fighting for better working conditions is important to better the external conditions, but still there maintains an internal problem, namely that we have lost touch with our healthy mind, our homeostasis. I think it’s more important than anything to get to know yourself, your mind and above all; to befriend it. We can take strong roots in our own minds, unwavered by external events, but still be in total heartfelt communication with this world. I believe and I know that there’s is such a thing as a mind in optima forma, unconditioned and open. It’s like a movie screen; we see the film it displays, be it horrific or ecstatic , but the screen itself is white, spotless, flawless. This also applies to the mind; underneath our conditioned blathering lies a mind that is clear, compassionate and wise in full connection with the heart. When we start accepting what is being displayed on the screen, we can more and more see that the movie that is being displayed is not the screen itself, but that which lies underneath is stable and has no beginning and no end. We can start resting in this nature of the mind and become more and more familiar with it. It feels like coming home again and again. As long as we don’t loose touch with it in our daily lives we can start synchronizing our companies, our schools and our societies according to this healthy mind, with the external reflecting the same qualities as the internal. Stress is just a warning signal that we have lost touch with it and we have to go back to it.
Why is it that so many musicians and artists suffer from some sort of mental illness? I believe they do because they have tapped into egolesness. I have heard so many artists say that their work doesn’t necessarily come from themselves, it just comes from nowhere. In Buddhism this would be referred to as egolesness, also the place where all creativity comes from. A state that can reached by slowly letting go of your ego through meditation and contemplation. Some people, however, are born with a natural gap in their ego’s, a gap that provides them with the same spontaneous creativity that long term practitioners often have. The big difference with practitioners (people who have worked with their minds for a long time) is that their practice has been holistic and includes their entire being; artists often have huge parts of their personality which are underdeveloped and child-like selfish. I believe that it is this discrepancy which causes them to often suffer like they do. To a lot of artists their creativity is like a hot ball which they can’t seem to handle really well, often causing them to flee into all kinds of harming forms of relaxation such as drugs. In Buddhism it is said that the wide open space in which the master relaxes, can cause the lay man to go mad. So if we experience such products of egolesness, it also forces us to work on the other aspects of our personalities, If we don’t do so, we can indeed go mad.
I am very delighted about the uprising of mindfulness into western science and culture. It has been too long thought of as a Buddhist, Eastern or even worse; New age thing. Of course, it has it’s offspring in Buddhism, but like Jon Kabat-Zinn points out; mindfulness is very much like gravity, it’s a law of nature. Therefore it does not belong to Buddhism necessarily, but can be practiced by anyone, from all kinds of culture or religion. Because whatever our view upon life is, we all suffer from ego; Christian, Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist. The secular practice of meditation is neutral of any religious content and is purely a practice so that we can get to know our minds and ourselves, so that aggression is being abdicated as the main drive in our lives. Because we all have ego’s and we if we take an honest look at the problems in this world, ego can be held responsible for most of it. So we’ll need clearly defined techniques to tame our aggression instead of suppressing it or indulging in it; we have to get to know our aggression, to be mindful of it. Not only does this clear up the aggression in our interaction with others, it also clears up the aggression in everything we do. And this will show in our arts, in the way we dress, in the way we design our cities and the way we treat each other. The celebration of humanity.
One of the things I like most about Buddhism is that it’s a science, the science of life. Now science usually has a very sec connotation, but in fact we are here talking about the most romantic science there is, where nothing is excluded. Buddha said to never take his words for truth without us discovering it for ourselves and he said so for a reason. There is a saying in Zen Buddhism which says; If you meet the Buddha, kill him. Now this sounds of course rather harsh, but it is not at all meant to provoke aggression, it means that whenever we are trying to find truth outside of ourselves, we are doing something wrong. Instead of attributing the course of our lives to external forces, and creating dogmatic believes around them, we start from the very naked point where we say; what is it exactly we’re dealing with here? Buddha said; life is suffering, but there is an antidote. Life is an enormously complex puzzle for us human beings and Buddhism is nothing less than the science dedicated to solving it, what works and what doesn’t? This way it doesn’t condemn about good and evil, but much more in term of causes and consequences, A causes B, very much like in science. On top of that, this science has been lasting for over 2500 years and has spawned many marvelous teachers who have crystalized the teachings even more. Many Western people started practicing Buddhism because religion din’t work for them, so they tend to go much more to the core of Buddhism without falling for the typical Eastern traps in which Buddhism is created into some sort of religion. It is my believe that this is the way the Buddha wanted his teachings to be practiced, so that we can become fully human with good hearts thriving on our own wisdom. When the Dalai Lama talks about compassion, it’s not because this is written somewhere and we have to follow it blindly, it’s because he knows that it works and he encourages people to find this out for themselves. We find out everything for ourselves, with great teachers along the side line the helping us, but eventually everyone travels his/her own journey.
A great advocate of this pure view on Buddhism is Ven. Robina Courtin. Although her style of teaching might be somewhat unusual (she is not exactly the typical quiet nun), what she says goes very much to the core of the teachings, without any bullshit.