Happenness Part 3: WMD's Weapons of Mass Distraction

What i am coming to really understand with this Happen-ness thing is its relationship to the importance of doing nothing. At least for a while till you GET IT.

Doing nothing allows you to simply be. To become unhooked from the normal fixes in life that we look for to change our state.

Happiness is a state of consciousness that you can create sans anything to be happy about.And thats the point really and this is the challenge of being useless & idle.

We are so programed to stock pile WMD's. Weapons of Mass Distraction to fight the boredom in life, an illusory boredom that we have created by doing too much to escape ourselves. The more you 'do' the more you fight the 'not doing' the simplicity of being. 

So, i have been working at simply Being Happy. And this does take some work that i can attest to, at least in the beginning. With every distraction i begin to engage myself in that has the promise of feeling better i simply come back to feeling happy. Which will be the temporary end result of whatever the distraction leads to anyway. As soon as you do this the interesting thing that you will note, is that the importance of the distraction begins to fade, once the feeling of happiness has gained strength. The thought of the thing dissapears along with the promise of a future happiness.The WMD is no longer there. Was it ever? No , just a distraction.

Mostly I have been working with internal unwanted thoughts, worries, anxieties or things my mind throws up that will lead to happiness, or will take me away from it, making room for yet another distraction. 

What you have to do in the beginning is get a good sense of the pure feeling of HAPPINESS itself. Just feel it.If you have forgotten then recall something that brings you happiness, but when you do feel happy shift your focus from the object of happiness and onto the pure feeling of happiness itself.Then magnify it.Fan the flames.

Note that fighting unwanted thoughts with other thoughts in an effort to over ride them or illiminate them, is like putting out a fire with gasoline. This by the way can be undoing of a lot of Postive Thinking methods.

'To an alternative FEELING Go!' 

As master Yoda might say to Anankin Skywalker. Not to other thoughts, but to a Happy feeling. Thoughts maketh more thoughts ,and every distraction begins with a thought. 

Try it, but be sure you are able to access a Happy feeling on demand in times of no distraction.

Once you can just go there, just to the feeling of pure happiness you have to be vigilant, distractions will subvert you.So you have to put some energy into it. Fan the flames, keep happiness alive. 

In a way this is Acting. Acting as if you are happy. The method actor needs to go to a time in their lives when they were really happy and work it up into present time consciousness from there. If that works fine. Or just BE happy don't think at all just feel it.

I find when i am doing this through pure feeling my whole body language will adjust instantly, a faint smile comes to my lips, and i just feel good all over.Physical chemical changes initiated by the change in psychological feeling are obviously taking place, to produce feel good opiates and neurotransmitters that pump the happiness factor. If you feel happy you will for the most part think happy thoughts.

One of the ways i would sujest you start this process is by spending some time each day in abject idleness, be totally useless for while. 

See what that does to your mind. You will probably find your stockpile of WMD's

Pic of 2 teachers; neighbor's dog and tortoise. Going nowhere but Happy.

House Painting

2 paintings i like that are hanging in the house here. Portrait of a Bahamian woman by (i must find out)and an islander by local painter T.Goodwin, who had an opening of his recent water colors in a gallery in Nassau last night. 

I am sure the Caribbean has quite a lively art scene, i must see more. 

New Travel Blog

Agent M's travel missions will now be posted on travelagentm.blogspot.com / see live blog list or links

I am in the process of streamlining this blog a bit, so i thought my travel & culture commentary should have a separate home. I will also be publishing a little book on line that i wrote nearly 10 years ago called The Art of Travel, with new commentary, which tries to unravel my travel musings when i was on the road a decade ago. Nothing like a bit of time travel.

Check it out.

Happenness Part 2: In Praise of Idleness & Uselessness

Lately I have been embracing my life on a new level. Sans achievement or progress of any kind. Just as it is, which is to say at least right now self unemployed, idle and quite useless. The only injunction to myself, is to be happy.

Its another aspect of HAPPENNESS of which i have already written about. While not exactly sucking on a bubbling pipe ( do they bubble?) in an opium den or laying in bed all day.I am not doing anything you might call worthwhile with my time.

I am not making progress, or achieving success, or winning at anything.

I am not retired, or tired, of life. Far from it, being self unemployed i can be my own boss and this boss has only one job to do, or rather to BE, and that is :

BE HAPPY.

I don't know if i am up to it, it is not as easy as it sounds without a lot of the usual 'things' that contribute it . But i am giving it a good shot.

Ahh!!!!! i hear you groan M, there you are in the tropics living the easy life, its easy to BE HAPPY.

Is it ?

Ok lets see where this little experiment gets me. If it gets me anywhere that is....

I will report.
,-)

Sound Waves: A Beach Meditation

There is one particular nature meditation that i really like. Sitting on a beach and listening to the ocean. Specifically the gentle waves of a calm sea breaking on a beach on an island in the tropics.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find out that one of great Bodhisattvas became enlightened doing just that. In Buddhist cosmology a Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who vows to end the suffering of all sentient beings before he exits stage left from the Theatre of the Absurd ie the Realm of Mortals on Planet Earth. Its about the ultimate compassionate act to post phone your release from suffering till everyone else is relieved of theirs. Anyway, Bodhisattvas need to earn their enlightenment like any other sentient being and the beach meditator in question was Avalokiteshvara who's name by the way means 'The one who hears the cries of the world' In the Chinese pantheon taking a female form she is Kwan Yin meaning 'One who hears the sounds of the world'.

Now if you are going to develop a super sense of hearing you are going to hear a lot of human cries out there amidst the more blissful ecstatic music of the spheres. Avaloka (for short) just couldn't ignore the sound of those cries. This was the key to both his Enlightenment and Bodhisattvahood. If thats a word.

Avalokiteshvara at some point on his travels must have ended up on a beach, who knows where, maybe in the Caribbean, and sat on the sand and just listened. Now that is the first step to the Sound Wave Beach Meditation. Just sit on the sand and listen. If you can settle your mind enough from distracting turbulent thoughts you are going to become aware of two things.

1. Sound.

In this case the gentle lapping of the waves breaking on the sand.

and

2. Silence.

What happens in between the sound of the waves breaking on the sand.

It was by focussing on, and becoming absorbed in these 2 states of awareness that Avaloka finally Got It!

What he got of course with his infinate compassion & wisdom, was the profound realisation of the Impermanence of all things, more to the point the impermanence of the 'I' in whom he had identified with as a ME.

He understood that sound (of waves, in this beach meditation method) arises from within silence only to dissapear back into that silence. Conversely the silence dissapeared when waves were heard. With the 2 states being mutually exclusive you have nothing that is permanent to hang onto. All phenomena including who you think YOU are is no different. The reality of any independent 'Thing' being permanent and existing 'Out There' just isn't so. Its pure Theatre. An illusion.

So Avaloka got it big time with the realisation that HE was also impermanent. That being so, there was nothing to hang on to anymore. No 'I- ME- MINE' that bound him to imaginary things. With deep experiential knowledge of this he was able to just let go of his own existential anxiety, his fear of dieing, and let go of his own day to day suffering.

He became Non Attached, rather than attached to something that didn't really exist. Anyway, with that came his ultimate freedom and liberation from the Theatre of the Absurd. And no doubt a subtle Buddha smile lit up his beach tanned face.

,-)

Also what came was compassion for the millions of other sentients in the Universe who remained deluded, who didn't have a smile, or a suntan. And thats when he took the Bodhisattva Vow to end ALL suffering.

So thanks Bro,
next meditation is at Low Tide.

Pirates of the Caribbean

A couple of images i got from downtown Nassau yesterday. A mural on the wall of the Pirate Museum, and those dots on the horizon when they are in port.

Theatre of the Absurd PART 1: The Myth of Sisyphus

Imagine you are condemned to repeating one act over and over. Imagine that this one act is of Herculean proportions. Such as rolling an enormous rock up a steep hill only to reach the top and have it roll back down again. You return to the bottom of the hill and begin again.You have to repeat this one absurd act for all eternity. What if you saw someone performing this madness, what if you were condemned to doing this yourself?

Such a punishment was awarded Sisyphus, a mythic Greek King who was none to popular with the Gods on account of the fact that he messed with their minds with his outrageous flamboyant behaviour. With tricks and pranks such as capturing Hades, God of the Underworld & Death, who had been dispatched by Hades's brother the almighty Zeus to arrest Sis for crimes against the Devine. Sis convinced the God of the Underworld to show him how the handcuffs worked where by the non too bright Hades cuffed himself instead. This lead to unforseen circumstances in the realm of mortals.With no one to claim the dead, soldiers ceased to die on the battle field, which made the whole idea of war a complete farce. It wasn't until the intervention of angry Ares the God of War that Sisyphus released the humbled & humiliated Hades. Then all returned to normal for awhile with Sisyphus finally getting his over due punishment.

Now it is the nature of this particular punishment that we turn to philosophical writer Albert Camus, who has in the tradition of existentialist writers like Kiekegaard, Kafka, Heidegger & Satre el al, tried to understand how one is to deal with the absurdity of life.

An Absurdity because Life has an absurd dimension to it. That is, once you are conscious of it.

For Camus at least, it was the observation that there is a stark contradiction between the Reason of man and the Unreasonable world in which man lives. In his Le Mythe de Sisyphe, (The Myth of Sisyphus) an essay on the absurd, he admits the absurdity of trying to find meaning in a meaningless world.

He argues it is not that the world in and of itself is absurd, or even the act of thinking, but in their juxtaposition. When we try to meet with pure reason unreasonable events that appear to contradict our expectations of the way 'Things' should be, we suffer.

See posting "Happeness" (Dec 4th).

Metaphor & abstraction is often the best we can do in the face of this kind of subversive contradiction. One example for dealing with Absurdity, in this case my own is: by seeing as Shakespeare did that "All the Worlds A Stage" If thats the case then its all a Play, anything can happen (there's the logic of it) that its a tragedy and a comedy both at the same time ( there's the unreasonableness of it) completes the paradox . It is this paradoxical thinking that is the solution, for the mind wishes it be either this or that, not this AND that, and especially not, at the same time.

Back to Sis our Rock & Roller. Here is a man, a sentient being who is performing an absurd act endlessly, how to deal with it? Well Camus supplies possibly the only solution to this abominable predicament other than suicide. He says:

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy"

And here is the brilliant release to life's suffering once you have seen its absurd side. When you have viewed the umpteenth performance of the 'Play' your 'PLAY' from the wings of the theatre and not from the stalls or from the balcony.

BE HAPPY.

JUST THAT.

Even in the face of what ever happens to happen. Over and over again.

Buddha might have said don't look for meaning in 'things' you will only find confusion , contradiction, change and much repetition out there. Rather look within, find peace inside yourself, in the face of what seems to happen out there.

Out there can be scary. We see it all around us, "Shit Happens" is a familiar mantra we use to appease the anxiety of the sudden contradictory event. The Black Swan as it has been called by Economics Philosopher & Epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The impact of the highly improbable, the so called 'random' event is as unsettling as it has always been for mankind to deal with.

But thats another story about the absurdity of this world, lets return to Sis.

He is still there rolling his rock up that hill only to watch it roll back down again.

Now it takes a compassionate intellect of the caliber of a Camus, to be interested in what might have been the thoughts of Sis as he walked back down that hill.

What was he thinking, feeling, saying to himself under his labored breath?

" Man this rock rolling is getting me in shape"

" Been doing this for so long I got Attention Surplus Disorder"

" How does it feel?
How does it feel, to be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown
Just like a rolling stone."

Hey man thats Dylan !!!

Sorry bro .....

Who knows, but our little lives are not that different in many ways to this absurd action. We persist in rolling our rocks up the hill, only to watch them roll down, then we roll them back up again and again. By rolling our rocks i mean believing that this or that particular 'thing' will bring happiness in a world that provides an unlimited number of special things to distract you from real PEACE.

Let me ROCK your world.

And we all wanna be Rock Stars. This is the futility of attainment.

See posting " Wheels of Samsara" (Oct 18th).

What finally pops you out of this Sisyphus suffering, and gets your head above water so's you can see where you are is AWARENESS. Full cognisence of what you ARE doing again and again and again.

It is the red wake up pill of the Matrix.

In a word Consciousness.

We all loose that from time to time, actually a lot of the time, so don't get upset or pissed with yourself when the world rolls you back again. The world didn't DO anything.

It was You who just kept on rollin along.....

And when you do wake up to the charade, to realise what you are doing, and may well continue to do; just at that moment : Be Happy

Be Happy for no reason at all.

Be happy for no little or big rock, how ever far you have rolled it, or have yet to roll it.

Realise everyone else is rolling their precious rocks.

Realise there is a lot of rocks out there. A very lot of rocks.

Realise Rock Rolling is Absurd.

It is not reasonable.

It is not unreasonable.

Its hopeless but not serious.

It is a tragic comedy.

What else can you do,

but imagine Sisyphus & yourself Happy.

{thanks be to LC for reconnecting me with this wonderful Myth
& for ACIM insights}

Ocean Kayak

I went for a long ocean kayak today to one of the deserted islands close to here. Its a good feeling to be on the turquoise crystal clear Caribbean. At one point on the journey i look out to the horizon, nothing but water all around me, from the kayak its a humbling point of view, and i thought of those Polynesian mariners who had navigated vast stretches of the Pacific by the stars in their outrigger canoes carved from tree trunks. The things we do to discover what's over the there, over the horizon. I also realised that they were very fit, it is a great upper body workout.