Life, meditation, jelly and fruit

At a certain point you might notice that life occurs within meditation. Or, to phrase it differently, our daily concerns occur within the fabric of a larger system - the laws of the universe. Perhaps you can guess where I am going with this - we might like to imagine our lives as the fruit and the wider awareness of those lives as the jelly that suspends the fruit. You might like to tell yourself:

- I am the fruit, awareness is the jelly

You can move your focus of attention from the fruit to the jelly. This shift of perspective can be quite useful when you find your mind locked into some difficulty or obsession.

We can go even deeper with this once we get familiar with it. Awareness is a fabrication of the mind, a kind of magic trick. Jelly is not really jelly - it is fruit syrup, water and some jelly making substance. Fruit is not really fruit - it is water, fibre, sugars and other stuff. There's an underlying fabric of reality to everything and if we turn our minds towards it we go quietly insane. Only joking, we go somewhere beyond everyday thinking. It is tantalising, it threatens to derail our whole sense of who we are. And yet, we know it is there in every moment of everyday. It is what underpins our desire to be free.

The meaning of life in three simple words

Handling reactivity with the MuWu mind

This will probably be my last post with MuWu in it for a while - I think I'll put together a mini book instead.

Reactivity is a big deal. Something happens, we react to it. If we have chronic fatigue (or other issues) this reactivity can wipe us out completely - especially if the reactivity is to the fatigue itself. I've spent years watching it happen time after time after time.

Reactivity is so deeply embedded in us that we have to go very, very deep to observe it and figure out how to cope with its effects. In Buddhism (if you want to find out more), there is the teaching of the two arrows - the first arrow is the thing that happens, the second arrow is our reaction to it. Interestingly, the reaction causes more trouble for us than the thing itself. Catching the chain of events from initial onset to reactivity is one of the deeper Buddhist teachings that we can explore.

So then, how to use this MuWu mind. Firstly, we have cultivate enough awareness to know that:

a) something has happened
b) we are reacting to it
c) this reaction is entirely within our own minds
d) we are almost powerless against this reaction, i.e. we can't just make ourselves turn it off or make it go away

Then, once we have seen these things, we are in a position to move our minds into a different frame set - the so called MuWu mind. What does this look like? It's fairly simple - we just use the four questions in the last post as a starting point:

1. Is my body tense or relaxed? If there is tension, can I relax it?
2. Can I let go of the thoughts? If not, can I see the thoughts? Do I know what the consequences of going down this line of thinking will be? e.g. resentment only really harms me. Can I get some space around these thoughts?
3. Am I balanced in my activity? Am I suddenly vacuuming the house at 2am or venting useless words? Am I able to do something calming? Do I have a normal pattern of activity I can fall back on?
4. Am I suddenly eating a packet of biscuits and a tub of ice cream? Is it beneficial? Will it help calm my body?

By tuning into this areas as starting points we create an area of investigation in the mind or body that is outside the reactive pattern we are stuck in. This 'other' place is the key thing we learn. We do not have to continue down the usual track, we can go somewhere else instead - the beneficial circle of body and mind awareness. And that's how it basically works - awareness, body, mind, investigation, wisdom.

The MuWu process

Here it is in a nutshell:

Body - is it tense or relaxed?
Mind - can I let go of my habitual patterns?
External - are we balanced?
Internal - is it beneficial?

There are vast worlds of exploration beneath these four things so don't take them lightly or think of them as trivial. Use them as starting points for deeper enquiry.

The MuWu self healing system

I've spent the last seven years studying the methods used in self healing, and I have now reached the point where I understand what it is from a rational perspective. Surprisingly (to my old gnarly point of view) it has a great deal of merit and, given certain exceptions, it works. That's the good news, the bad news is me trying to explain it so I've come up with the "MuWu self healing system". Look at the above diagram - this lays out the territory - it is what is known as a meta system.

To summarise, we have four bases to work with:

- the body
- the mind
- what we do
- what we take in

We can pick any of them as a starting point but they all eventually lead to each other. We can even use any type of method within each of the bases; that is not what is important. The key to it all rests in:

- the lived experience of any method
- putting the work in
- awareness of the process
- and the learned wisdom
- then understanding the bigger picture

This might all sound a bit abstract but I will attempt to take you through the whole system in various stages so you can see how it works. It's very down to earth and practical, but covers everything you might have ever heard of. Plus I will keep it nice and simple.

The origin of you

Imagine this: a machine that creates a label for everything. You feed it information and it automatically creates a name for it. There's no way to turn it off. Sensory information creates patterns of activity, these patterns of activity are automatically given a label. If no satisfactory label can be found then the mind will keep churning until it gets one. We think we are in control of this process but, if we look closely, we see that it happens all by itself - a self sustaining cycle of labelling.

What purpose does it have? Labelling closes a loop so that the rest of the machine does not have to deal with it explicitly anymore. It can move on. This may seem unremarkable until you realise the machine has started labelling itself and this label has created a sense of consciousness, of self. This might seem a bit far fetched but if you look closely you will see it for yourself. The labels have created a life of their own - they have run away with the show. They have made something solid out of nothing. They have created us.

An exploration of thoughts

We all have them and they won't go away, however we can learn to work with them and find a greater space of freedom. Here are some of my explorations:

1. We learn that we have thoughts.

2. We learn that no-one else can hear them, that they are just what goes on in our head.

3. We recognize familiar patterns - anxiety, wanting, planning, reviewing, disliking, judging, aversion, impatience, plus some more.

4. We notice that as we think the muscles in our body tense up.

5. If we relax our bodies, our thoughts kind of ease up - the type of thinking is different.

6. If relax a lot, sink into our bodies, we recognize the difference between awareness and thinking. We can know sensations but we do not need to analyse them.

7. Now, we begin to notice that there is more to our minds than the compulsive thinking and doing. There are other ways of being in the world.

8. We learn more about relaxation and the different mental components that come with it - delight, rapture, contentment, peace, tranquillity. These words become felt sensations, not just concepts.

9. We recognize causal chains in our thinking - one thing leads to another. We explore these causal chains for relaxation.

10. Now we have a contrast to work with - relaxation and doing. We recognise what happens in our body when we are in these different states and we see that our view of the world is shaped by these states - relaxation makes things seem nice, agitation not so nice.

11. We recognise the arising of thoughts and mind states - they come and go.

12. From stillness, we notice the urge to think. We see the causal chain of something happening and our reaction to it.

13. We begin to learn that thoughts are always with us but they are not who we are.

14. We notice that we can cultivate positive mind states by working with the latent nature of the mind and body. By cultivating friendliness, relaxing the body, abandoning difficult mind states when they arise, we are able to create a container of contentment within ourselves.

15. By practising contentment, we begin to replace our automatic reacative mind states - slowly but surely.

16. We notice that every little thing affects the quality of thoughts that arise - speech, what we see/hear/read, our environment, what we eat, who we talk to. All these things resonate with latent pathways in the mind.

17. We see why the content of thoughts are the way they are.

18. We see all these things in ourselves and other people.