Book of Mercy #25-26

[mat james]

It may or may not be the intention of Cohen, but these words take my mind to other texts.

"Be still and know that I Am"
Perhaps onto T.S Eliot"s four quartets, and, "There the dance is!" ("At the still point of the turning world" which is a reference to the ideas of the Neo platonist, Plotinus.) and onto.... even further back:
The dance of Shiva.

At this still point,( A-brahamic/Brahmic) the dancer(s) become "The Dancer and the Dance".

Matj

[Manna]

this comes at a time when I am sort of interested in taking a detached look at things.

[mat james]

a detached look at things

(manna)

answer/response ? ??



..silence

[Manna]

It was the beginning of a response. hee! My mind started wandering, and I didn't know how to say what I was thinking. I was considering that the guy in the chair is the one who is imagined.

[lazariuk]

It was the beginning of a response. hee! My mind started wandering, and I didn't know how to say what I was thinking. I was considering that the guy in the chair is the one who is imagined.

me too

[mat james]

reading anything
always places us in "that chair"

where else do we start the journey
of someone else's story?

so "me too", Manna and Jack.

[Steven]

And closer to the religiously themed Leonard Cohen writing, placements of people
into "that chair," have, for centuries, also been accomplished via religious icons
(statues, paintings, relics, etc.) -- by contemplating attributes symbolized by the
icons.

[~greg]

I.26 is about meditation.

Look up "relaxation response" "Herbert Benson"

1.
Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
2.
Close your eyes.
3.
Deeply relax all your muscles,
beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face.
Keep them relaxed.
...{etc}
- http://www.relaxationresponse.org/steps/

Or look up "Progressive Muscle Relaxation" "Edmund Jacobson"

Sit in a comfortable chair – reclining arm chairs are ideal. Bed is okay too.
Get as comfortable as possible – no tight clothes or shoes
and don't cross your legs.
Take a deep breath; let it out slowly. Again.
What you'll be doing is alternately tensing and relaxing specific groups of muscles.
After tension, a muscle will be more relaxed than prior to the tensing.
Concentrate on the feel of the muscles, specifically the contrast between
tension and relaxation. In time, you will recognize tension in any specific muscle
and be able to reduce that tension.
...{etc}
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson%2 ... Relaxation

Or look up "transcendental meditation".

Or any kind of "meditation".

All these things, and everything else like them,
have as their main objective, or as an indirect consequence
of their objectives, the reduction of excessive muscle tone caused by stress.
And they all do it, effectively, in exactly the same way.
By simply making us aware of it.

...Tensing and releasing various muscle groups throughout the body
produces a deep state of relaxation,
...
In his original book, 'Progressive Relaxation' , Dr. Jacobson
developed a series of 200 different muscle relaxation exercises and a
training program that took months to complete. More recently the system
has been abbreviated to 15-20 basic exercises, which have been found
to be just as effective,
http://www.hypnos.co.uk/hypnomag/jacobson.htm

TM is still the simplest.
And it' is sometimes helpful to start out a TM meditation by directing
the attention, sequentially, to every part of the body. Then, as soon
as any tensions are noticed, they tend to dissolve spontaneously.
But forcibly directing the attention this way is counter to the TM principle
- the one thing it's got going for it - its simplicity.
And it isn't necessary. As the mind clears during meditation,
all kinds of distractions inevitably invade it. And the technique
is to simply gently brush them all aside, without prejudice,
and return to the mantra (-and, eventually, to nothing).
It just so happens that among the distractions that will naturally
pop into the mind are all the little bodily discomforts, and tensions,
that had been prevented from reaching consciousness before
the meditation began. And, once again, by simply becoming aware of them,
they tend to dissolve. (The most common instance of this is when you
suddenly become aware that you have been sitting in an extremely
uncomfortable position. Then you spontaneously sit more upright,
and more comfortably.)


~~

A dancer is in constant motion.

(- not excepting the cases in ballet when the motion comes to a complete stop.
In these cases the energy hasn't dissipated. It's just become
potential instead of kinetic.)

So, "dancer" is the ideal metaphor for the totality of
all the hustle and bustle and harry and hassle
of day to day living.

And, therefore, during meditation, you may easily hallucinate
that each little release of muscle tension is a step in sending
your personal dancer away from your chair
-- body part by body part, --until he has completely
disentangled himself from you, and just leaves.
Leaving you in peace.

~~

"Muscle tone" is when opposing flexor and tensor muscle pairs
are both in contraction, resulting in zero motion.
And it's absolutely necessary, or we'd collapse like jelly fish.
And it protects against injury (- the point in "warming up".)

When we anticipate that we will have to act,
then our muscle tone increases. And when we anticipate
a "fight-or-flight" situation, it sky-rockets. Even simply
watching sports on tv raises it.

The problem is, of course, that too few people know how
to stop it from increasing. So it just accretes all day long.
Causing head aches, and high blood pressure, etc etc.

When he fails, send him again from your chair.

That is to say, when your day-to-day (ie, your dancer)
winds you up too much, and makes you start to stumble,
then it's time to meditate again and send the dancer away,
for 15 or 20 minutes.

By such an exercise, even a bitter man can praise Creation,
even a heavy man can swoon, and a man of high responsibility
soften his heart.

That's neophyte talk.

Check out the claims they used to make (and still do)
that transcendental meditation would save the world.
It was only slightly more plausible back when I learnt it,
since it didn't cost anything back then, unless you happened
to feel like donating 10 or 50 dollars. But to buy exactly the same
TM party line today will cost over 100 times that, and not optionally.
So, unfortunately, TM today is a pure scam.

("But that don't make it junk." Just over priced and over hyped.)

[Manna]

Is that the meditation talk? Do you meditate nowadays, Greg?

[mat james]

that fits well ~greg.

Years ago I read a book, "The third Eye" by Lobsang Rampa. I followed the meditation ideas expounded in it and had some wonderful success. Astral projection, mental telepathy, psychic encounters of the strange kind (UFO's of the mind!),even a little psychic archaeology. I loved it: All of it.
I read many other books by Rampa and enjoyed most of them. There was, of course, doubts about his (the author) integrity.
I don't care. It worked for me.
These books of Rampa encouraged me to believe in myself, so I did.
I got to know a lot about myself in the process, I think.
That author, whoever he was or wasn't, assisted me enormously in "breaking out", into a healthier view of "That Thou Art". The processes of meditation, reflection and an innate natural ability to contemplate, literally "blew me away"; into the Mystic.
Great fun. Great journey.

As you can see, I enjoyed your perspective on this verse of BOM very much ~greg.
It caused me to remember, to reflect, to meditate and to contemplate the Beauty of my journey.

"...and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee" ("O Solitude!", by an 18 year old John Keats )

I was 18 when I read of Lobasang and his "Third Eye", and Keats.

Matj

http://www.online-literature.com/keats/476/

[lazariuk]

me too

I think I might elaborate.

One morning at the break of day I awoke with the realization that I had no adequate proof that I was the same person who went to sleep the night before. There was the body, there were the memories yet somehow I seemed to be a detatched witness.

I decided to accept the situation and to the best of my ability I tried to remain detatched. I got out of bed and surveyed the situation. I looked around at the state of affairs. Walked from room to room like I was seeing it for the first time. Looked in the drawers, looked in the cupboards, looked to see what the person who had been living there had been doing lately. Looked in the computer, the emails, the newsgroups.

I took a pair of shoes that were there and placed them in the center of the living room, got comfortable in a chair and while looking at the shoes thought about the person who wore them and considered many of the memories of what he had been through.

I have never bought into the idea that you can love yourself but that day I did come to experience that what one can do is appreciate oneself.

Now to tell you why I think this relates to this thread in this group while discussing this poem.

Earlier in the thread Lizzy pointed to something that Leonard said about how the teachings received on the mountain contains preparation also for life off of the mountain. Those kind of teachings interest me because I too spend some times a considerable amount of time sitting and the sitting and breathing in meditation is great but then I quickly make a big mess of things when away from where I sit. So, when I came across a teaching from the meditation tradition to address this issue I was interested. The teaching involves being able to accept that one can take on a certain amount of detatchment and the experience I wrote about earlier makes me think "Hey I can do that". There is also something about the way it is unfolding for me that gives me personal signifience to leonard's use of a dancer and made me think that maybe this is something that I should share. Well we'll see, maybe it can make sense to someone else.

The teaching of how the meditator prepares for the real world:
I heard this from Jack Kornfield.

I have no way of knowing if the tradition that leonard participates in uses a variation of the same teaching. It would not surprise me if it is so.

It is a guided meditation. Sit comfortably and with the use of your breath become centered and relaxed. Now use your imagination and imagine the most problematic situation you can be in that is part of your current landscape. imagine the place and all the people who might be involved. Then imagine yourself right in the heart of the problematic situation. Take your time, really do it. Get right to the point where it is as bad as it ever gets.

Then Imagine that wherever you are all of a sudden you hear a knock on the door. Tell whoever you are with "I'm sorry, please excuse me I need to go see who is knocking at the door" Be polite. Then imagine that when you open the door that you are greeted by the most staggering being of compassion and wisdom. The examples given include Mother Mary, Buddah, Jesus, the goddess of Infinite Compassion , Soloman and such. This being of compassion and wisdom says to you " Having a hard day?" and you say "Yeah, kind of"

Then they say: "Lets try a little experiment. For a short period of time let me use your body and you remain invisible, as a witness, and let me go into the situation and you can watch how I handle it. You agree and you watch as this person goes back to the situation. You see what they say what they do and also importantly how they feel in your body.

This happens for a short period of time and then the being politely excuses themselves from the situation and you both go back to the door and you are given your body back.
You talk with this being for a while and before they leave this being of infinite compassion and wisdom takes out from their robes a gift for you and hands it to you. Whatever it is, it is for you a cymbal of just what you need to handle situations like the ones your have problems with. You take the gift and look at it closely, hold it to the light if you need to. Also before they leave they touch you in the most healing way in the place where you most need healing and they whisper in your ear some words of advice for you to remember.

In the teaching it is highly stressed that it can be repeated and to let it repeat as many times as is necessary till it has the desired effect.

Now I am currently trying to learn to do this meditation right and there is a lot about it to consider. I could probably talk for days on all the implications of what is being taught and what I have heard of what people have experienced but there is one thing that is kind of specific to what might interest this group.

In considering who is the being that appears at the door I considered all the examples given and had the problem that they all appeared as beings that seemed stationary. I thought about that for a while and came to think that I would like someone who moved in a way that I liked. I want my being of infinite compassion and wisdom to be a dancer. As a matter of fact I took a look at the following picture that leonard made and thought "Yes I think that she will do"
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/dearroshi.html

I have a special reason for this interest in a dancer. I have some very big problems with my feet, having fallen 21 feet to a concrete floor a few years back. I tend to just try to ignor my feet until the pain is excruciating and then I cry, or take a pill or just get pissed off at everything. A dancer probably would pay closer attention to their feet. Twice a week I go for physical therapy and where I go many ballet dancers go and from where I sit i can watch through the window into the gym and I have begun watching these dancers closely with the mentioned meditation in mind and i wonder and I begin to get a sense of how they would treat my body if they were in it. Especially if they were a being of infinite compassion and wisdom.

Being still is not the goal. You are still so that you can see a way back to boogie street.

I like that. I might quote it someday.

jack

[Steven]

Hi Greg,

"Neophyte talk," respectfully no. Not at all. Theravada meditation practices, for e.g., include
some very advanced visualization practices. Some wouldn't be dissimilar to the one
the poem suggests.

[~greg]

Hi Greg,
"Neophyte talk," respectfully no. Not at all. Theravada meditation practices,
for e.g., include some very advanced visualization practices. Some wouldn't
be dissimilar to the one the poem suggests.

Steven, respectfully, you misread what I wrote.

What I called "neophyte talk" was clearly this - - -

By such an exercise, even a bitter man can praise Creation,
even a heavy man can swoon, and a man of high responsibility
soften his heart.

Obviously I didn't mean the whole poem.
I only meant the exaggerated claims about the benefits of meditation,
that neophytes tend to repeat, and sometimes to believe.

(The claims themselves are due to the usual cast of clowns,
- gurus, charlatans, confidence men, spielers, swindlers, mountebanks,
shamen, prestidigitators, etc etc.)

Nor did I say anything about the type of meditation that I think
the poem is about.

If it even is about meditation.

But if it is about meditation, then it's probably some kind of Zen meditation.
And Zen derives from Mahayana, not Theravada Buddhism.

But in any case I read -

....and from your silence the throat that makes a sound,
and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves

- as suggesting that Cohen was using an aural mantra, not a visual mandala.
And that the image of the dancer is not a part of the technique
(if that's what you're suggesting.)

Sending the dancer away is simply a cool way to describe, phenomeologically,
how progressive relaxation actually feels.

Or that anyway is what I was suggesting.

And then I went on to say

Check out the claims they used to make (and still do)
that transcendental meditation would save the world.

Which was a bit of a non sequitur.

Which is something I sometimes do.

~~

Is that the meditation talk? Do you meditate nowadays, Greg?

- No.
- Sometimes.

{I'll get get back to this
in my next post ...}

~~~~~~~~~~

...Years ago I read a book, "The third Eye" by Lobsang Rampa....

I don't think I've heard of it before.
But checking it out at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Rampa

it seems that the Rampa "controversy" was a lot like a British predecessor
to the American Carlos Castaneda "controversy".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda

I knew a lot of people who were into Castaneda.
And I read his first few books.

Of course I didn't buy the flying bit, but I did think
that the psychology in it was perfectly reasonable
1) because I happened to be doing a lot of mescaline at the time, and
2) because of Clever Hans, the horse, and the way
he did arithmetic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Hans of course didn't actually do arithmetic.
What he did was closely observed his human observers
and notice when they reacted in subtle ways at the moments
he pawed the right answers.

So I believed that human beings are always giving out
these kinds of subtle signals, and that the only reason
we don't pick up on them is because of some kind of
social-blindness or politeness. Most of us do not
really want to know all we could know by observing others.

I was also keenly interested in the idea of the "seat of power",
(-as I think it was called.) - because of the hundreds of times
that I'd entered a room with a lot of people in it and felt
the lines of power, like walking through an enormous
spider web. When I was the object of attention when
I entered the room, then I'd seek my seat of power.
But when I wasn't noticed when I entered, then I'd
seek my seat of hiding, were I could observe, unobserved
(until blind drunk.) Castaneda seemed to confirm my natural
suspicions about all this.

But my interest in it quickly turned into a brief interest
in Japanese rock gardening. And then into a general
interest in the psychology of art ("Art and Visual Perception
- Ruldolf Arnheim, in particular.)

[Steven]

Hi Greg,

I wasn't discounting that Leonard Cohen may very well be familiar with practices
outside of Zen. You are correct about Zen, though, as having more Mahayana
connection. There are many "charlatans" (and their ilk marketing meditation).
There are also some very good teachers that teach practices that are valuable
to students. And often students of such teachers, when the students pass beyond
a neophyte stage (lots of time and commitment), reap transformative benefit.
(I have never recommended TM to anyone, btw.)

Your interpretation could be correct, in terms of what Leonard was driving at
(with regards to the dancer). It may be, though, that he was attempting to
evoke a state of dance like flow, that a dancer could also represent regarding
the matters at hand. Your pointing to the aural aspect is interesting. But,
Leonard is a highly auditory person (that's a dominant representational modality for him)
and that is where he would most likely "lead" from (though it wouldn't necessarily exclude other aspects in a cross contextualized context for him). Greg, very interesting observation, by you, i.m.o., with regards to the "aural" stuff.

[mat james]

I enjoyed reading "A separate reality" at about the same time I read "The Third Eye".
The quote I remember favorably from Casteneda's don Juan was something like this:

"Life is folly. But the wise man, chooses his folly !"

Great concept!. I love it.

The benefit of writers like these two (to a questioning mind) is that they say things that, deep down, "ring true". They encourage the seeker to break free of the shackles imposed by their upbringing, they encourage an open mind.
Pick your folly, is good advice.

I have never met a wise man yet (or woman) and I am in no hurry to meet one any more either.
Wisdom seems "ineffable". And I suspect that this is a "good thing".
It is down to the individual to step out into that zone, alone and be "caught in the grip of an undertow".

"I set out one night
when" the tide was low
...ditched on the beach"

Ah! I love a fresh sea breeze.

Matj