I’ve revisited the idea of slowness recently and touched again on Wu-Wei when I thought about accepting our limitations. I saw this article in the New York Times a week or two ago and remembered it as tying in with the things I was talking about quite nicely. The article makes the case very well that Yoga is not as safe as we’d all like to believe. My opinion is that this is true of anything; which is why, in my SitQuietly instructions, I give a warning to consult your medical practitioner before taking up a meditation practise. But this article makes specific mention of people who seem to be treating Yoga as if it were a performance sport, specifically one man who threw himself into a spine twist and had three ribs give way.

The article says a lot of things that ring true for me, that echo my own gym and Tai Chi experiences. I realised a long time ago that it was up to me to make things easy on myself, that I had to do this by realising and respecting my limits. Apply Wu-Wei, don’t do things at an inappropriate speed, don’t force yourself into exercises that are inappropriate for your body type or mental state. When growth in our abilities occurs it should be unforced and as a result of the “70 percent rule”, which I’ve talked about before. This says that you work to 70 percent of your potential, with the other 30 percent held back for growth and improvement. Eventually, your 70 percent is equal to what used to be your 100 percent, and you’re still only giving 70 percent!

My other observation is that practises like Yoga, meditation and Tai Chi are not performance sports. The wisdom of Wu-Wei and the Slow Movement comes back again to the fore, these things are healing arts without a doubt; but only when used appropriately and at the right pace! They can heal your body and mind, but will do so in their own time, to try to hurry things seems to me to be a mistake. One that can only end badly as well. We in the West seem to be bringing our own neurotic hurried flavour to these things, but in doing so I worry that we lose a lot of their essence and bring ourselves further pain.

I had an interesting moment the other day, interesting and somewhat unsettling.  I realised that the way I was being seen by someone wasn’t the way I’d thought.  This lead me to a train of thought.

We all put a lot of effort into how we come across, we care how we’re seen by others.  This goes to various degrees, depending on the situation and the individual.  But at what point does this behaviour become unethical?  Is it, in spite of our best efforts, ultimately futile?

No matter how carefully we craft our public faces, how carefully we choose our words, they will be seen through someone else’s lens.  The persons you and I are, are the result of our lifelong Karma; choice after choice, event after event.  This is as true of the person you project to the world as it is of the person I am, as I watch your actions and hear your words.  We see each other through the lenses of our Karma.

Ultimately I cannot control how you see me, too much depends on the lens through which you view me.  For me to try and try, ultimately results in me taking (or trying to take) too much control over your perceptions.  Thus taking what is not freely given and violating a precept.

For example, I support and have written Free Software.  I do this because I wish have more control of the software that runs my computer; I wrote SitQuietly for the Linux platform because I wanted to give something back to the community, however small, for all the good their software had done me.

But, through someone else’s eyes, am I the enemy?  No matter how compassionate my motives and aims?  Think not? Look again….

When using open source makes you an enemy of the state.

Should Open Source Be An Enemy Of The State?

My entire Karma led me to this point, if you are an intellectual property lobbyist or an advocate of certain proprietary software companies then you will quite possibly see me as the enemy.  Whether I want you to or not.  But drawing on my point above, for me to go too far in trying to change your mind isn’t just unethical, it’s unskilful.  At what point does it cause suffering for us both?  I’ll also wager the attempt will fail.  So it would seem easier for me to present myself as you find me, and simply allow you the room to make your mind up then live and let live.  No, not just better, more ethical, more skilful.

Interesting train of thought, isn’t it?

I invested in an Amazon Kindle a few weeks ago, it’s certainly been a good choice and I have rediscovered the pleasure of reading through it.  It allows me to carry a large library of books with me, and the screen is every bit as good as they claim it to be.  I can recommend the Free Software ebook manager called “Calibre” for use with it, as it allows easy conversion of ebooks between all sorts of formats.  It also allows the downloading of RSS feeds and will collate these feeds into a book for you.  I consider this to be a killer feature, absolutely brilliant!

I’ve started reading my feeds on the Kindle and have discovered that it makes reading them much easier than on a computer screen.  I pondered why, aside from the better Kindle screen, this should be.  Then I realised that it’s the fact that the Kindle does one thing, and one thing only, it reads books.  As someone who owns a smartphone with various communications options on it and has numerous little programs that can chime in and demand attention on his PC, I have been finding it very difficult to focus.  Not only to read but to write and to create.

This chimed in with something that the tutor said at the Buddhist Vihara last week; the necessity of withdrawal, of shutting out the world and getting some time and space to focus.  We withdraw to create a place that is sacred and spiritual and that is peaceful, that is not of the everyday world.  Yet, what is the place we go when we read; when we really engage with a good book, is that place entirely of this world?  I realised that this is why Kindle makes it easier to read, there are no interruptions and no possibility of such things.  If I read on my phone, I can be texted, IMed, Facebook messaged, emailed, or (looks shocked) …. phoned!  Throw in all the little toy apps that you can get and what chance is there of any peace?

It seems to me that these things take the control of our time away from us, it seems that we are interrupted at a whim and a response is demanded there and then.  But where is the control in that?  There are our devices, our tools, yet we seem to jump to their tune.  This makes time away even more vital than it ever has been and it it makes me question whether all of the advances in our communications abilities are necessarily for the better.

As a self confessed geek, this is a strange place to be it seems.  Am I taking an anti technology stance here?  No.  I am advocating a measure of moderation and also a realization that we don’t need to be plugged in all the time.  I started reading my news and my blogs on a daily ebook rather than as they come in, and if anything it improved matters.  By taking these things and making a specific time and place for them, it seems to unchoke everything else.

After Tai Chi tonight I was driving home mulling on things.  Once again that feeling of sort of “forgetting the self” had come very very briefly and it seemed to work.  Last time I trained I must’ve been having a bad week as nothing went right for me, but this week it seemed to work.

I was considering the habit of Procrastination in light of my Tai Chi practise.  You don’t think about the things in Tai Chi, you just let them happen, so why doesn’t this happen outside the class so much?  I am wondering if the trick is to realise that the Tai Chi form never in fact stops, when we’re walking down the street or washing our hands, we’re still doing Tai Chi!

I’m thinking of how it feels to do the form and the best analogy I can think of is that it’s like a railway journey.  At first, each position in the form is like a station, the train stops at each one and changes onto a new section of track.  Later on, as you practise more, the position changes become more like signal boxes.  What I mean by this is, they’re still there but you don’t stop for them, the train shifts fluidly onto its new track.

So what I’m driving at, is the idea of bringing that feeling from Tai Chi into everyday use.  We procrastinate when we stop at the station, maybe it would be better to realise that they’re only signal boxes.  We don’t in fact stop, we just flow from place to place, from event to event, from task to task.  Perhaps, I wonder, when we come to forget the self would it be true that the separation of tasks and events is only in our minds?

Am I making sense?

I’m away this weekend, and for a change I got the train.  I’m writing this on my phone while waiting for trains and while travelling, so if it seems a little disjointed then I apologise as I’m unused to writing on this device.

I love driving my car and the freedom it brings and would normally use it for a journey like this.  I decided to use the train as I think that this is the way things will go in terms of long distance travel, with walkable cities and metro services among the local options.  Besides, it’s different and trying something new is good.  I’d like to muse further on this as the English countryside whizzes by.

I was thinking of my visit to the Buddhist temple in Birmingham the other week and between that and this, plus an encounter with a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses earlier this week, it started me mulling faith and the way we live.

We tend, in my opinion, to live and believe in the groove of our habits.  These habits don’t change much and we will defend them vigorously.  For an example, consider the future of the car.  Everything that can be done to assure the future of happy motoring is being done.  For my part, I think that in the long term there is nothing else to do but prepare for a carless future, but we will see.  There are always unexpected surprises.

So it is with our mental habits, not just of faith but of thought and behavior.  We defend these habits from the things that would change them without considering that the change might be just what’s needed!  Unless we allow our habits of thought and behavior to change and to evolve, then we will be defending them to their stagnation and the death of our hopes for future personal growth.

Some nights it’s good to take a night out to break up your schedule, I do it deliberately and randomly to shake up my routine.  I tend to be busy on evenings after work and tonight should have been Tai Chi night, but I took a rest night.

So, I was planning to hack on a little Python code.  I’m dusting down my SitQuietly Linux desktop meditation timer and eyeing Canonical’s Launchpad system.  It’ll be good, I have plans and I’m going to peck away at them till they’re done.  But earlier today, I discovered Tumblr and signed up from my phone.

So, my programming time vanished in a haze of unexpected social networking, hmm, not so good.  Or was it?  I realised that I could fight it, or I could use my Tai Chi, but mentally.  I turned mentally and merged my energies, my momentum, with the flow of events, and rolled with it.

So, I’ve done blog comments, set up Tumblr to feed from this site (hello if you’re reading this on Tumblr) and realised I could type the whole shebang up and make a short blog post out of it.

Cheeky, but it seems to have worked out.  Gotta love that Wu Wei….

On Sunday I paid a local Theravada temple in Birmingham a visit.  My practise has been done virtually till now and I felt it was time to take the next step.  The lady I was talking to was cheerful, energetic and happy and helpful and was at pains to explain impermanence and the view that Buddhism is psychology.  As a trained psychiatric nurse, she could get right behind this and I hope I get the chance to talk to her in more depth about it.

I listened and took this chance to reboot my understanding, it’s so good to come to things with a beginners mind again.  We get so wrapped up in knowing this and that, with how much we know and understand, we wrap our understanding round us like armour.  No wonder we get upset when it’s challenged.

It’s this sort of thing that moved me away from the local skeptical community, I was all ready to start going to meetings, but on closer inspection and reading of blogs it all started to taste a bit sour.  I started to get the distinct feeling that the point is to be seen to be right, I felt that I saw a lot of ego and little desire to understand.  There was no empathy.  One day I’ll expand on this in more depth, but not right now.

So, I had a nice afternoon and also got to try a Tibetan Prayer Wheel for the first time.  Let’s see where this new chapter leads…..

It’s been a bit of a bad day.  This morning I suffered what I can only describe as an anxiety attack, I’ve been doing too much.  So I returned to Tai Chi after a long hiatus, the class wasn’t on but a few other rogue students were there and we conversed and ran through the form.  I can recommend the practise of Taijiquan, especially if you’re studying Taoist writings.

Earlier today I was mulling things over on my lunch break.  With a little help from a friend, I decided part of the problem was not just that I was trying to do too much.  It’s that I was straight jacketed by my structures and methods.

My mind wandered into a few of the lessons I learned from Taoism and Tai Chi and I realised that the the lesson was there.  I was in the garden of a cafe and looking at a flower I remembered the Taoist teaching that things are self organising.

So, I thought, what does that mean for me?  Well, I think that the wise course is to organise to a point, but not be stifled by it.  Guidelines not rules, light sketches not heavy ink.  You get the picture.

But most of all, lots of room to manoeuvre to change and to flow.  Most of this will arise from the situation the moment, and like the flower in the cafe garden it will take a structure all its own.

If I use the Taijiquan principle of 4 ounces of force, and also simply yield to the moment, it will organise without needing organising.

I like that.  Maybe not such a bad day after all?

I found this video the other day and though it was so valuable I had to share it.  In it, John Cleese gives his views on creativity and it seems he agrees that there are two components to the mind!

I was reading an article on a web page that came to my attention courtesy of the Birmingham Humanists blog a few days ago. In it the author covered a few things, mainly related to Humanism and differences among some sub groups.  But while doing that, he mentioned the fact that we usually focus more on our differences than the things that we have in common.

What piqued my interest further was the mention of ‘pushing away’ as a process.  The idea was that the author had defined himself during his formative years as a Humanist by pushing away from elements of religion and superstition.  He then pointed out that we tend to carry this process over to people.

The author described his own growth into Humanism in these terms, he talked of the things he was pushing away from.  He then observed that many Humanists still do this, which helps to cause much fracturing in the community.  The whole thing put me in mind of “The Judean Peoples Front” and the “Peoples Front of Judea” in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

In my view the author was describing a Taoist style process of definition by negation.  In other words that’s when you define a thing by what it’s not.  The Tao itself tends to be defined in these terms, and as you’re tend to be thinking in terms of emptiness it’s a natural way to do it.

Defining a stance by negation might seem like allowing others to take the initiative, that Humanism can only be defined by it’s opposition to much of religious thought, but it isn’t necessarily the case.  Of course, the danger for Humanism in this is that we risk losing sight of the positive expression of our stance.  We know what we’re against, but what how well do we put across what we’re for?  Do Humanists risk becoming better known for haranguing believers than offering a better alternative to religious indoctrination?

My comment here is that definition by negation does not have to be seen as reactionary and negative.  I could say that I’m “against indoctrination” or I could say that I’m “for free thought”.  This goes deeper than spin, as expressing these things positively will build habits of thought that I feel will prove very beneficial and much more attractive.