… one day! I came back recently from a 10-day Vipassana retreat http://dhamma.org which was an amazing experience, but one that has kept me generally speaking less and trying to be more. I received a nice letter from someone with a Nisargadatta site, so figured I’d send the link to anyone interested: http://nisargadatta.co.cc/
Hope all are well. To leave you with my favorite Nisargadatta quote: “When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. Between these two, my life flows.”
Just had a great weekend with Lauren in town. Wanted to get a few things out that have been happening.
I’m seeing presence more ubiquitously through my experiences. I notice many times a day now where I notice that I’m noticing, where I become aware. It usually lasts for half a second before a thought takes over and fills that void, but it’s a major shift nonetheless. It has made external factors have much less of an ability to affect me in ways I don’t want them to.
I’m noticing my dreams have become more vivid and more memorable upon waking. For the last three days I have awoken with almost complete memory of the dream. I only remember the one from this morning now though, of course:
- This morning I read a tiny bit of ‘I Am That’ by Nisargadatta Maharaj, after dropping Lauren at the airport, and then went back to bed for two hours. I had a vivid dream of going into a small town in India, living there, searching for Nisargadatta, not finding him but staying in a very small town in India and finding peace there. For some reason I remember fixing the sink in the apartment in which I was staying, and seeing a bunch of fruit stands with tons of bananas.
Lastly, I keep noticing that when I get into a higher state of clarity during meditation, this small white or black spot seems to appear in my vision. It doesn’t resolve itself into anything, and if I actively try to think about it it disappears readily, but if I just allow my field of vision to be present with the breath, it seems to evolve.
Just got back from seeing Brad Mehldau in Sanders Theatre in Boston.
I am looking outside a cave, waiting for the next predator to come about, feeling the anxiety of a kill 10,000 years ago from our ancestors; only to realize that he’s covering a neil young song.
I am listening to variations on a theme by Brahms, only to wake up to the fact that the themes are on Nirvana.
been meditating every day for 40 minutes for basically the last 50 days. it’s been pretty great. some ups and downs. haven’t written but many subtle shifts have been happening, and i see it resulting in changes in the rest of my life. what i see when i look in the mirror. what it feels like to take a walk.
tonight i did an evening short meditation, and couldn’t stop from laughing when this thought reached me: you cannot meditate so that something will happen! you have to meditate -just to enjoy the meditation-. by definition if you are training your mind to put all of its awareness on the present moment, you can’t contextualize the entire act by thinking about a future moment! all true progress happens only through relinquishing the need for it to happen.
i see that cropping up in many contexts as well. a great line from nisargadatta maharaj:
“When I realize I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I realize I am everything, that is love. Between the two, my life flows.”
hour a day, weekdays; 30 minutes, weekends for last week
I had one of the most challenging sessions yesterday, after not being able to get into proper position before the ‘oommmmm’s started – I have some knee and back problems and if things aren’t just right, an hour wreaks havoc on my body, and I am unable to concentrate. I noticed myself unable to reach a comfortable position quickly, and did not want to bother others’ concentration, so kept the uncomfortable posture. After a few minutes it became clear that I would not be able to focus at all, off balance and uncomfortable. The funny part was my reaction of resentment towards the situation for ‘putting me in this mess’, not letting me get ready in time.
I have noticed mindfulness creeping into these situations slowly, and so the focus of the hour swerved, from breathing attentiveness to an awareness of this resentment which had grown inside of me. I think a few years ago it would have just stagnated as resentment; i didn’t deserve this, how could they do this, etc. But now my reaction was completely different – noticing my body react to something that was not done with any sense of malice, just an unconsciousness of my current state. Nothing to blame! I put myself through a hell with these uncontrolled thought patterns, and only after focusing all my attention on them and on my body’s reaction to them, was I later able to laugh at myself for taking the whole process that seriously. It’s amazing how fast these events turn into what feel like uncontrollable emotions. And, it’s equally amazing, if not moreso, what the attentive lens does to those patterns. Laughing at ones’ self seems to be a great medicine. We’re all going to die anyway! Lately that has been my internal rallying cry – what might seem nihilistic or pessimistic becomes a freeing device.
Today, maybe in reaction to that, maybe unrelatedly, I had one of the clearest, most joyful meditation sessions I’ve ever had. No real coarse excitations over the hour. Intense focus, more details coming out of the rims of my nostrils. Just. This. Just. This.
The last few weeks have seen a major shift in my discipline and habit. I’ve been meeting with Jay every morning to do roughly an hour of meditation, and this has been from 6-7am. All through high school everyone tried to convince me to get up early and I resisted – it took being unemployed with no enforced structure to get myself up early in the day.
Waking up at 5:45am before the sun is up, meditating, playing music, eating breakfast, and going to the gym, all before turning on the computer (3 hours awake with no computer! when it’s usually ~30 seconds, literally), has been somewhat transformative, even disregarding the meditative experiences itself. My energy feels brighter, cleaner, happier. But the meditations have shifted as well – my focus has been getting noticeably tighter. The walls of my eyelids recede further, upon closing my eyes – if I meditate at night, I notice that they feel a few feet away.
Alan Wallace talks about ‘coarse excitation’ – the type of thought that enters your mind and grabs enough of your attentional focus to divert you completely from your breath. I’ve been doing breath counting until I feel largely rid of coarse excitation, and am slowly seeing it recede. It will be a tougher challenge to face coarse excitations without the aid of breathing to give the mind that simple focusing task. Typically I’ll have one of these coarse excitations like 20 times in an hour session. However, one session last week, I experienced my first 45 minute meditation with a complete lack of coarse excitations. Thoughts floated freely and often, but never to the point of removing me from my object of focus.
Seen from 4 billion miles away; this tiny speck of light seen in the middle of the right band, this pale blue dot, is our planet Earth
in case you haven’t ever read this, or seen it. From Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
About five years ago, I made a sculture called ‘light bulb’ – a wirelessly powered, levitating lightbulb. Check the video for details.
When Gill Pratt came onto Time Warp for us to study electromagnetic induction, an assistant friend of his came by, Adam who works at DEKA. He told me in an offhand comment, ‘you made the lightbulb, right? Oh cool, we made one of those at DEKA for Dean Kamen as a birthday gift.’ Whaa?
So, after communicating back and forth for quite some time about being able to see it, I was able to visit DEKA and check it out; what I saw blew my mind. About 12 of these extremely talented designers and engineers had spent several months building one of these things. The scale is pretty magnificent, as shown below. It’s basically the same concept as mine, but with the added resources they built a custom [no straight edges!] wood frame, better wireless power transmission efficiency [a brighter bulb], and even a cleaner and more stable levitating bulb. Some pictures linked – ridiculous right?
Ridiculous, right?
I am currently in talks with them about continuing development on this project – the goal is still [as it has been for quite some time] to release an open-source kit-able version of this project. People will be able to buy a built version, or an unbuilt version, to learn more about how it works – there are some real engineering challenges however [many parts, high complexity, some high voltages that you need to know what you're doing with, etc] – so it’s slow going. So for now, here’s this!
I want to thank all the folks at DEKA for the honor of having a piece made like this [not that it's for me!] – and here’s to hoping that in the spirit of learning and giving to others we can figure out a way to get these things into the public.
The amazing engineers and designers at DEKA who worked on this.
