A Quiet Watercourse

On my spiritual journey, I’ve been through a few places.  I’ve investigated Paganism, Atheism, Taoism and Buddhism.  Of course, when I started on this journey, I started as an Anglican.

Now, I’ve looked in depth to a lot of places, but not given Anglicanism the same viewing.  When I saw the Anglican Church apologise to Darwin, I felt that said a great deal that they could do that.  On closer inspection, it seems Darwin was Anglican himself and that Anglican community was (on the whole) quite quick to accept evolution.

So I plan to take a closer look at my home team (if you’ll pardon the football/soccer analogy) and see what I can find there.

The Anglican church is on the whole a very liberal one, not fire and brimstone, so I feel much safer doing this exploration there than with a bible thumping literalist organisation.  But as I’m sure my regular readers know, I have no time for scriptural literalness and consider it to be getting lost.  I have a couple of great little metaphors for that which I’ll save for my next post.

I’m also going to try a change in tack.  When I philosophise about something I’ll write an article rather than trying to spread things over multiple shortish posts.

So I have a book on the origin of the Gospels, and it also examines their writing style.  It’s already given me ideas for further reading and material of my own to develop, watch this space!

Well, I had an interesting experience in Secondlife last night, at a sim called “The Buddha Center” they showed a BBC video on the life of the Buddha.  As aide from the odd technical hiccup it was an enjoyable experience and when I found the video on YouTube, I thought I’d share it with everybody!

It’s 50 minutes in length, so be sure you have a cup of Tea when you click play, and the DVD purchase notice will vanish after the first 30 seconds or so. 

Here’s a fun experiment, my friend Peter over at The Buddha Diaries has started a meme on the above subject and is asking his blogger friends to carry it on.  I’m going to very interested to see how far this spreads.

The rules are really quite simple:

1. Answer the questions
2. Link back to the original meme
3. Tag others to participate

So without further ado, let’s get stuck in!

1) How do you sleep at night? Is your sleep affected by the national angst? Do you drop off easily, as you always did? Or does it take a while to get to sleep?

Generally, I sleep soundly, when I eventually get to sleep.  I’m a bit of a martyr to lying awake tossing and turning, depending on what I’ve been doing before I turn in.  I tend to wake quite early as well, then lie there listening for the alarm.

2) What strategies, if needed, do you use to get to sleep? Pills? Sheep? Late night television shows? And/or…?

I’ve used a few over the years, one was a relaxation technique in which you begin at the feet and imagine each part of your body (feet, shins, knees, thighs, etc) to be warm and heavy.  Another is to mentally release my grip on whatever is keeping me awake, then imagine it floating away.  Sometimes, it’s just a quick bathroom trip.

3) Do you wake up in the middle of the night, plagued by obsessive thoughts?

No, once I’m asleep, I rarely wake.  But, lying awake plagued by obsessive thoughts, guilty as charged I’m afraid!

4) What strategies do you have to get back to sleep?

In all honesty, I’d just use the ones from question 2.

5) Are your dreams affected? Are they more anxious than before? Do they wake you up in a sweat? Or are they peaceful, innocent, undisturbed by the general malaise?

Here’s an interesting one.  I rarely remember my dreams, those that I do recall are either terrfiying or just plain surreal.  I’ve often wondered why I only rarely recall them, and at one point in my life, I genuinely believed I didn’t dream at all.

So, in the spirit of the original post, I’d like to impose on the following people:

• abarefootman
• Drops of Water
• Riding The Wind
• Surfing the Tao

I was wandering on my lunch hour and found a post on Drops of Water that made me stop and think ‘how true!”

She writes of a person who has attained the Tao, you can put her in any company, no matter how low. She’ll be touched by it, but unstained. An image she gives is of a lotus growing in mud.

This is an image that resonates with me, my belief is that spirituality must be workman like. Yes, there is spirituality in a lotus or a meditation cushion, but that spirit is just as present in the dirty and profane places. I also feel that this imagery makes the important point, by association, that we should not use the fact that we are spiritual or religious as a reason to cut ourselves off from the world.

I feel that spirituality must start in the mud to be of use, that’s one of the reasons I identify more with Zen, the enlightenment they espouse is something that must survive the rigors of day to day living, not sat aloof in a monastery.

Allow me to refer to the Taiji symbol, I’ve said before that I consider the profane and darker side of the things to be as conducive to spiritual development as the sweet light side of things. I think this, because we all have a dark side and I consider it to be very dangerous to deny this side in our spiritual practice. If we do, how can our spiritual development ever be truly complete?

Thanks to Dragonphoenix over at My 2.2 Cents, I’ve been nominated for a Thinking Blogger award, which I accept humbly and gratefully.

You can find out more about this award at The Thinking Blog. Interesting to read that it cheesed off Technorati, does that make us part of a Counterculture of some sort? It’s an amusing thought isn’t it?

Part of the deal is that I nominate 5 blogs of my own (in no particular order), so here goes:

Drops of Water. Becca’s blog, gentle and deceptively powerful like flowing water.

A Barefootman. Lewis’s blog, inactive now, though I hope he returns to blogging, we are much poorer without him.

Surfing the Tao. Imagine you are Neo, the words “Wake up Neo, the Matrix has you” appear on your screen. Meet the woman doing the typing, Angela’s blog is truly eye and mind opening.

The Buddha Diaries PeteratLarge, evolving from The Bush Diaries, he’s right Buddha is much better company, deeply insightful.

ThinkBuddha.org The wayward blog of Will Buckingham. Decidedly Buddish, and very thought provoking.

Well that’s me done. Time to get some Faithless onto Rhythmbox….

I’ve suffered from a bit of writers block for the last few days.  I finally remembered a quote from Bono in the book “Bono on Bono”; “Why don’t you write about that?”, good question, I thought.  Here we go….

It’s interesting to actually look at writers block, it’s not the first time I’ve suffered it, but it’s the first time I’ve looked at it like this.  It’s a pain in the neck for sure, but I think it’s also a wake up call to go and take a break for a while and recharge, so it’s nature can change a lot depending on how you look at it.

So many things are like this, the veneer we drop on the world according to our tastes and cultural background can blind us to the possibilities and in some cases make things a lot more difficult than they need to be.  If we’re not very careful we can do ourselves in.  The fun starts when you realise it’s optional, and you are the final arbiter and authority of how the world looks, it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Whaddya know?  It worked, kudos to you Bono……

If you cast an eye down the right hand side of the blog, you’ll see a new addition called “I’m doing”. Well, I went and signed up to Twitter, a lot of people seem to rate it, so I thought I’d give it a try for a laugh. You can attach your mobile number or Instant messenger account and I’ve already tried it via text message. I think it should be good for a giggle, which is probably the best reason to do anything.

You can find my Twitter profile here.

I’ve started a process of change to the way things work at Watercourse recently. You can now find Watercourse at the address below. The general plan is to move Watercourse to new hosting as I wanted my own domain and Wordpress make some aspects of that difficult (e.g. email forwarding), also I’d like to host all of my files and writings in one place rather than having them spread out over free hosting and I’d like a little more control of things than I get at Wordpress.com.

The homepage and feeds are at the following addresses, though the old one still work for now:

blog: http://quietwatercourse.co.uk/
Posts: http://quietwatercourse.co.uk/feed
Comments: http://quietwatercourse.co.uk/comments/feed

After some thought I’ve turned on comment moderation on Quiet Watercourse.

This stems from a view of mine that it’s not enough to have Freedom of Speech, you have to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with it. This is what I’ve considered for some time to be just as desirable, “Responsibility of Speech”, Buddhism covers this as part of “Right Speech”.

Why do I consider this important? I’ve seen it in my personal life, someone exercises their “freedom” to speak and causes hurt and pain with absolutely no regard for the consequences, I’ve had to deal with the hurt (not just to others) and I know. So far there have been no problems, I couldn’t be happier, and I certainly won’t be making a habit of deleting comments. But I do consider making a stitch in time to be a good option and I really don’t want Watercourse to be a cause of hurt or pain to someone in the future if I can avoid it.

I was given a heads up to this video on YouTube by its director and I’d like to post it here, as I think it highlights something we all sometimes lose sight of. You can check out the director’s blog here at Podnosh.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TuosrFkNhQ]

Now you could say that in light of the big picture these are small things. But the real point is that politicians can talk, but it takes ordinary local people to put change into action. Without efforts at the grassroot levels, political rhetoric is worthless.

A young man in the first group that the presenter speaks to makes the point that because he can communicate about his fears and problems and people listen to him now he no longer feels the need to cause trouble. This is an important point, we must practice both communication and tolerance, that is the only way we’ll solve our current problems.