First Satori of 46

What a nice birthday weekend. It was really the best one I've had in a long time. Thanks to everyone who came over and/or otherwise helped me celebrate. I feel very lucky to have so many kind and interesting friends.

The week leading up to Friday was kind of cranky in general, so birthday fun at the end was especially appreciated. I'd been feeling a little alienated and overwhelmed at work, plus wondering why I forced myself to invite people over when I generally hate parties and hadn't had time to properly prepare the house for guests.

But then, on the way to work Friday morning, I was hit with this spiritual insight out of the blue that made life seem a whole lot easier and more fun. The sun was shining on my face, the air was a little warmer than it had been recently, and out of nowhere the thought occurred to me: You are neither the inside nor the outside, but the window between the two.

Usually we think of ourselves as a soul inhabiting a body from the inside and having to deal with an outside world that limits the options of that soul but has only partial access to it. Avoiding the limits and allowing the access both take work. Plus, we know that it is morally correct to empathize with other souls, so we try to imagine ourselves as the world outside our body at the same time, which also requires a lot of will and energy. Mostly all this hard work makes us angry and resentful.

But if I'm only the window, I can suddenly drop all that. The inside and the outside will continue to do what they are designed to do, and all I have to worry about is keeping my particular window as clean as possible. This character I've created on the inside doesn't need my protection, and this world I've separated myself from doesn't need my judgment. All they really want is to see each other clearly, and that's my whole job in this life. What a huge load off if you can really feel that way, because clear perception and genuine self-expression are the most pleasant things you can do, once the striving is taken out of them.

So far, this existential stance has persisted into this week, I'm happy to report. We'll see how long it lasts before my author starts identifying too strongly with his characters again. But, for now, I'm just really enjoying the break.

Amber sent me this birthday poem tonight that happens to capture what I'm talking about poignantly and beautifully:

Soul
What am I doing inside this old man's body?

I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster,
All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic
Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,
And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,
God knows, vague memories of friends, and what
They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself,
From here inside myself, my waving claws
Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers
Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing
Troubling sensitivity to threat;
And I'm aware of and embarrassed by my ways
Of getting around, and my protective shell.
Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as
This cold sea water's washing over my back?

- David Ferry

Special Message from Pippi

Made It through Another Year

Now gimme some cake!

New Dog Day Album!

Yes! It's coming out really soon! I can't wait! And Psychic Fair will be opening for their release show at the Marquee on December 7! Double yes! Here's a preview video for the album.



Also, Amber better dump that military guy on Parenthood, or she's going to wind up like every other lame-o white-bread family member on the show...

More Yoko

Wow, Yoko Ono is really everywhere right now. I've been working on a piece about her for the March issue, as I mentioned the other day, and suddenly she keeps popping up all over the place. I guess she just turned 80, is partly why. (My mom says 80 is the new 50, and it looks like she may be right.)

I've started reading a book about her by the author of the upcoming piece, Lisa Carver, called Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono. Rod, one of the editors at work, loaned it to me. So far, it's just the author finding different ways to say how fabulous her heroine is, yet it's managing to hold my interest somehow.

Rod also directed me to a current Spin magazine interview with Yoko today. Pretty admirable stuff. I found this last passage especially inspirational:

Each time I create a work, I get so much energy and awareness I grow rapidly. People think it is the other way around — that I have energy and therefore things get created with that energy. No. I create, and therefore, I get the energy. I want to address this to artists who are feeling a bit low. Just start creating something, without consulting your critical eyes, ears, and brain. Keep creating even if you are laughed at. Good luck and I love you with all my heart!

And then there's this new video, mentioned by reminiscethis in the comments a few posts ago:



Hilarious and sweet. I just might have to buy her new album, though it could never be as good as this:

Hey, If You're Not Doing Anything...

All Our Blogloo readers welcome.

A Cautionary Tale

When I was visiting my family a couple of weekends ago, my sister got me into this silly game you play on your phone. It's called Candy Crush Saga. Have you heard of it?

Yeah, well, I hadn't. It's a Tetris-type game where you have to make objects disappear by maneuvering them into rows, only to have more drop down from above. "Watch out," she told me. "It's super addictive."

I tried it out and thought, "Oh yeah, that's a cute little bit of fun. Whatever." But then I made the mistake of trying it out a few more times at home during bits of downtime, and pretty soon I found out what she meant.

Once the levels started getting more complicated, I found myself obsessively needing to complete them. Failing to do so started making me more and more frustrated. I got in an argument with Amber because I hadn't been listening to her instructions while I played it over at her place and ended up ruining a pomegranate. I started looking up tricks to cheat the game into giving me more lives and watching online videos offering tips for specific levels. (The number one tip on one of the many Candy Crush Saga advice websites, by the way, is stop playing Candy Crush Saga.) Playing while eating lunch in a coffee shop one day, I accidentally yelled "No!" so loud that everyone else stopped talking and looked over.

Then, a few nights ago, I went to bed at 10:00, hoping to get a nice long sleep. I decided to try one more time to get through Level 35 before turning out the light. Level 35 is really hard. I had been trying to conquer it for a couple of days, always having between one and three "jellies" left when I ran out of moves.

I guess you can figure out what happened. At 1:30, I plugged in my dead phone and did my best to stop muttering and fuming so I could get some sleep. The next day at work I was exhausted and angry all day long.

That night, I swore I would beat Level 35 or die trying. And then quit the game for good. And that's what I did. It's now deleted from my phone, replaced with an app that determines your sleep cycles and wakes you up when you'll feel most refreshed. Thanks, Erika!

Oh Yoko!

I'm working on a piece about Yoko Ono for the March issue of the magazine. The focus is on her life and work as a visual and conceptual artist. There are lots of great images of her with her artwork I could try to get for the opening page, but most of them are either not very colourful or actually black & white.

Then I had this idea of using a bunch of her Instagram photos. She posts pictures almost every day of herself — usually from the back — in whatever surroundings she happens to be in. She's so iconic that I think readers wouldn't actually need to see her face, which might be kind of interesting. And this way I could get a bunch of colour onto the page while giving a sense of what it's like to be Yoko.

I don't know whether folks here will go for this idea or even whether I'd be able to get the rights to use these images. But right now, I'm leaning sharply in this direction:

Although, honestly, if I could do whatever I wanted, I'd totally create something like this:

Put a Bird on It

Found this old tire ad today on my favourite animal-themed image blog, Animalarium. Isn't it lovely? It's from 1923, by Polish graphic artist Tadeusz Gronowski. Do you think it was the inspiration for some of the cards in Mille Bornes, the excellent and beautiful French driving-themed card game designed by Arthur/Edmond Dujardin in 1960?

Or do I just wish everything looked like Mille Bornes? Oh, when is Mad Men going to come back?

Another One about Religious Belief

I really enjoy working for a Buddhist publication. Everyone is so kind and thoughtful, and they all practice a certain methodical awareness that I find makes for a very healthy workplace atmosphere. Plus, they encourage genuine self-expression, which makes me feel welcome and appreciated.

But I also like my job a lot because it helps to remind me of the reasons why I'm not a Buddhist. Mostly, it seems to come down to the problem of organized religion always equating spiritual truths with belief systems. There is so much talk around the office about the beliefs espoused by different strains of Buddhism, or by the religion as a whole, that it sometimes gets, well, unbelievable.

I'm all for contemplative, meditative practice of any kind, or any other personal method people may discover for becoming more aware of their own (unconscious, culturally constructed, insane) mental processes and coming to see reality more clearly. And that direct perception can get pretty weird and even supernatural-seeming relative to our usual (unconscious, culturally constructed, insane) worldview; I'm fine with that. But regular readers will know (from many previous posts) that I also see beliefs as one subset of the problematic mental processes such practices seek to uncover — a subset that is particularly good at preventing us from the clear perception that is their aim.

To accept beliefs about the nature of reality based on someone else's spiritual experience is, to my mind, misguided. Even if the person handing them down seems to have reached a state of extraordinary perception, to take on their beliefs as a way of augmenting your own spiritual progress is to put the cart in a dangerously pre-horse position.

Of course, the party line is that there is no belief required in Buddhism, which distinguishes it from other religions. But believe me (or at least maintain a skeptical attitude toward my naysayers), there's plenty of stuff snuck in there that you're expected to take on faith first, and then find a way of perceiving directly.

Karma is a good example. It may be that seeing a complex moral cause-and-effect system at work in our universe is beneficial to one's sense of belonging and equanimity. It could even be a stage on the way to experiencing oneself as an expression of that entire universe, through which it can observe itself, i.e. a perfectly integrated, compassionate being, aware and accepting of all truth.

But believing in it because someone says it's so is not going to get you to the state where you might perceive things that way. If anything, observing the relative world of time and causation through that belief lens is going to prevent you from experiencing the timelessness that is the only reality from which such a mystical stance makes sense.

Maybe that's too abstract. Here's a better example. My boss marches into my office today and announces that he has thought about it, and there is no difference between death and enlightenment. He's not trying to describe a new way of experiencing the world he's suddenly discovered phenomenologically, mind you. He has THOUGHT ABOUT IT, and this is the conclusion he's reached.

Well, that's just crazy, on the face of it. His point is that to become enlightened, our self as we know it must be surrendered each moment, i.e. it must die. Therefore, once you have become truly enlightened, to the point that your self has been given up entirely, never to return, you are exactly the same as physically dead.

"If you become enlightened," I say by way of testing the waters, "I could still talk to you." This is a particularly important distinction right now, because a very greatly loved young woman from the Halifax Buddhist community was killed by a drunk driver last week. Many people wish they could still talk to her. There was a funeral yesterday for her, widely attended by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. But mostly by Buddhists, all of whom are still grieving their tragic loss, and some of whom work in the very offices where this ridiculous discussion was taking place.

His answer to my apparently airtight rebuttal is that I wouldn't actually be talking to him in that case, but to the forces of the universe finding a way of expressing themselves. I just stare after him as he walks smugly out the door.

If I wanted to get into a real argument with him about it, I'd point out that those universal forces were what he was all along, and that enlightenment would merely be the recognition of that fact by the forces themselves, as expressed through him. Inasmuch as you can be said to exist in the first place, you will presumably still exist after attaining enlightenment.

And I'd probably then observe that if he really believes what he's claiming to believe, he should be locked up in a nice cell where he can't hurt anybody. Because if enlightenment = death, then death = enlightenment. And anyone who thinks he'd be doing his fellow human beings a religious favour by killing them is no less dangerous than the craziest of suicide-cult leaders.

But really, the root problem here is that he just shouldn't be making any claims about enlightenment, not being enlightened himself. How could he possibly know anything about what the experience is like? From reading what enlightened people have said about it? Those writings are just attempts at describing ways of being that we have no direct access to until we are able to experience them ourselves. The descriptions may encourage us to keep observing ourselves and our own experiences as carefully and open-mindedly as we can, knowing that other angles are possible. But taken as expressions of truth, they will necessarily be misunderstood by those who are not apprehending those truths directly.

Of course, this is all just my opinion based on my own experiences. I happily preach to the choir, and all others should feel free to walk out on the sermon. Please don't quote my words to unbelievers. Amen.

Happy Birthday, Erika

I've just spent the weekend visiting my family in Ontario. It was a surprise visit for my sister Erika's 40th birthday. Her husband, Mike, flew me up. Thanks, Mike, for such a nice present. I felt like it was my birthday too.

Got to see everyone, including my grandmother, in what was a bit of a whirlwind but also just a really fun couple of days. There was a large gathering of family and friends at a pub last night and a family-only dinner tonight at a local restaurant. Here are some Instagram pictures of weekend moments. Mike looks super tired in the last one because he was. Poor guy deserves a long rest after so much planning, spending, and herding.

 

Now I'm hanging out in the Air Canada "Maple Leaf Lounge" at the Toronto airport, waiting for my flight back to Halifax. It's very nice — free coffee, food, and booze, with comfortable seating and WiFi. Best of all, there are no loud announcements every 30 seconds about planes boarding. This place is meant for the hoity toity special folks who spend a lot of money for all the first-class features, but I got in here with a guest pass, again courtesy of Mike. A million thanks, buddy!

The Joy of Performance

Psychic Fair played a Gus' show on Wednesday night, opening for an Edmonton two-piece called The Famines. I'd like to tell you they were great, but I was too tired to stick around, running home as soon as we were finished for an "early" 1 a.m. bedtime. I'm sure they actually were good, though — I checked out some of their songs online the next day, having been impressed by Raymond Biesinger, their gregarious guitarist. He's also a really great illustrator/designer, it turns out.

Anyway, the show went really well, as had the Reference Desk one the week before. Late weeknights are not a lot of laughs for an old man like me, but it almost seems worth it when I get to have such a fun time playing music for appreciative kids. At least, I'm glad my streak of dreading playing live seems to be over.

I really think having decent equipment has a lot to do with it. As bourgeois a concept as that seems, it makes a huge difference to a musician's performance if he can actually hear what he's playing. I got to use really nice amps at both these last shows. They were loud and clear, so the performance became less a matter of gauging how many mistakes were being made and more about playing around with the rich sounds I was hearing myself make. That's a much better scenario for both the band and the audience.

When I was younger I didn't care nearly so much about what the music sounded like on stage. Loud, quiet, clear, muddy… it all sounded good to me. Maybe as I've matured as a musician, my sonic judgment has become more refined, requiring extra clarity to be satisfied. Or maybe my hearing is just slowly disappearing as I get closer to the scrap heap at the end of life's conveyor belt. I'm gonna take it easy on myself and assume that it's a bit of both.