Welcome to my blog which wants, for once, to genuinely uplift its thinking.
Today (Monday) I applied some Avatar to my thoughts beginning by noticing both
my (over) seriousness and my discouragements. The question was; What do you
want to change? And the answer was, I want to change the feelings I have about
the success of the day of the dead. The next question is ‘what beliefs do you
have to have to have that feeling?’ For me the beliefs were, ‘no-one has bought
tickets, no-one has contacted me as a result of the website or my articles, and
there’s too much competition.’ These, to me, were entirely rational and provable
beliefs. However, on reflection I saw that the
conclusions I was reaching were premature. I then tried, ‘I’m amazed by the
interest already shown,’ which quite quickly was true because a lot of interest
has been shown by people I wouldn’t normally make contact with.
BELIEF COMES BEFORE EXPERIENCE.
That is the key to Avatar, one that I forget on a daily basis. Only
this morning I remembered that I wanted to apply this to death as well. What
are my beliefs about death? What beliefs would I create? But before death, the
day of the dead; tomorrow I must revisit this subject and deliberately create
the beliefs I want to have.
Apart from thinking about my thinking, what else did I do today? Well I
started with meditation and chi kung, both of which I have been neglected.
Straightaway I felt better in myself. I then visited a friend, Marie, who was
ranting about the ingratitude of her 18 year old daughter who has left home and
all but dropped out of college. I told her she was being harsh and flailing her
daughter with her opinions wasn’t really going to get her anywhere. ‘Don’t take
it personally,’ I advised, ‘She’s talking to an imaginary you.’ Of course I
added my usual rider about don’t listen to me what should I know.
What I didn’t do was postering. There is something I need to change my
thoughts about. ‘through postering I make surprising discoveries and useful
contacts.’ Or…no, better stop there.
Saturday
Suddenly it is Saturday morning. For the past few days my mood, bar one
grumpy morning, has been generally good although how much work I’ve actually
done, I don’t know. (The postering has remained slack.) Yesterday I met the
local ‘carers’ ambassador’, as dynamic a woman as I’d ever want to come across.
She was full of ideas for the future (which I’m not so keen on at this moment)
and in the meantime will drag me on to the local radio with her a couple of
days before the event.
After seeing her I met an artist
who was, with difficulty, conducting a free mask-making workshop. She had lots
of tips and advice for our own workshop – including suggesting that we found a
different way of doing it.
On Thursday I went to Bridgewater to attend a meeting of the Mendip
Forum. There I managed to pin down a couple of people to talk about the Day of
the Dead. This showed me that, should I ever do this again, I really would have
to get off my arse and ring people rather than send out the endless emails.
Financially I’m struggling. I owe someone £2000 and he’s on the phone
hassling. I’m behind on my bills and have sold no tickets I’m aware of. This bit is hard to be positive about. I’m
awaiting a miracle.
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This week I read ‘Sea of Poppies’ by Amitav Ghosh. I began reading it
four years ago but couldn’t get past the first chapter, a) because it is about
boats and b) much of the language is arcane or in dialect. Every now and then I
have begun again and still not got far. I’ve read other books by Ghosh, ‘The
Hungry Tide’ and ‘The Glass Palace,’ which were excellent, so this time I stuck
with it and found it very readable. Nevertheless, having whipped through the
450 pages, I was disappointed to discover that it came to no end and was to be
the first part of an intended trilogy.
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This is the reply I received to the letter about my brother’s illness.
With regards to your brother’s condition however, I think it
would help if, before commenting, you could first tell me a little bit more
about the onset, history, nature and severity of his symptoms, any medical
diagnosis or important elements of his medical history (in particular any use
of prescription drugs) and also something about his life history, current life
circumstances and previous communicative environment (not least his own
age).
Different people not only inhabit different linguistic
worlds, communities and environments they may also have a different inner
relation to language. Then again, as emphasised in my new book The Illness is
the Cure – an introduction to Life Medicine and Life Doctoring (see also
www.lifedoctoring.org.uk ) there is often a close relationship between the
onset of symptoms, preceding events in a person’s life, not to mention their
underlying feelings and bearing towards life in this world.
As far as any general comments I can make at this stage are
concerned, I can only say that for me the most primordial level of ‘speech’ is
awareness as such – for the nature, mood, tone and quality of an individual’s
awareness of themselves communicates in and of itself, both directly and
through their bodily comportment and demeanour. As for the divine awareness,
that speaks through the languages of the body, the senses and all that we
experience directly as sensual qualities and phenomena - even and above all without putting a word
or name to them (this not perceiving things ‘as’ this or that being also what
makes possible the wonderful experience of ‘Samadhi’ as a highly sensual form
of ‘awareness bliss’ or chitananda).
Partly for such reasons, I also think also that severe
dementia in old age is often misinterpreted. You wrote of ‘dying before dying’.
And indeed, as I understand it, death is not a point in time but a process –
one which for some may involve different degrees and stages – more or less
extreme – of withdrawal from the realm of language; in the case of Alzheimer’s
disease for example, a type of free-flowing awareness across time that cannot
be encapsulated in words, and that is more akin to the nature of time as
experienced in the afterlife.
That said, naturally the most important question is how much
your brother is suffering or feels depressed or isolated through his language
loss. If he does, there are aware ways of being with those who can’t speak that
can serve in a most powerful way to overcome this sense of inner isolation.
Indeed some such ways of silently ‘being with’
another can allow depths of wordless inner contact and communication to
be experienced that most people rarely experience in this life - and that
verbal communication is itself but a pale echo and expression of. It is also
such modes of wordless, silently embodied communication that form the basis of
what I call ‘tantric pair meditation’ and the forms of initiation conducted
through it.
On a practical level, do free to write again. I would also
suggest looking at the section of my book and site on life doctoring entitled
‘What most doctors don’t ask’. If perhaps you could write answers with your
brother, or on your brother’s behalf, to some of the questions listed there,
this might also prove useful.
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