December 10, 2021:
I was sitting there meditating in the pitch dark this morning, enjoying a peaceful, easy feeling, when I heard a woman say, “Alvin.” It wasn’t like “Alvin, are you there?”, but more like, “Alvin, pay attention, I’m about to say something to you.”
But for some reason that was as disconcerting as any experience I’ve ever had, and I popped out of the meditative state and opened my eyes.
I only learned about Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in 2024, but his teaching have made a huge impression on me. To that end, here are some of my favorite quotes related to his famous saying, “I am not the body,” from the book, Consciousness and the Absolute: The Final Talks of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj:
There are many more great quotes in that book, but these are the ones that really strike me today (December, 2024).
I was sleeping on the couch this morning when X (a black and white husky) jumped up on me. I was laying on my right side, facing the back of the couch, so my back was to her. When she jumped up, her front legs were on my left hip, so I assumed she was standing on her back legs.
This woke me up and without moving much, I said, “Do you have to go out? That’s a good girl for letting me know.”
So I moved around and got up, but there was no dog there. X was asleep on her bed in the hallway.
(This was the third time a dog has gotten in bed with me while I was laying down, only to not be there after I moved around.)
~ December 7, 2022
[From time to time I write little stories that have nothing to do with programming or technology; this is one of those stories. So, if you’re only here for the technology stuff, you’ll want to skip this one.]
I’m standing in the kitchen of a friend’s house at a Christmas party, making myself a drink while talking to a friend named Angie. This was nothing unusual; she and I were always talking about something. We became friends during our last year in high school, and we’ve been talking ever since.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that I have feelings for her, but I guess you could say that I didn’t appreciate her back then. After high school, my ambition took me away to college, and then to a series of jobs in different states. By the time I decided to move back home, she was married and had two young children.
While we talked all the time, this kitchen conversation was unusual. I don’t remember how it started, but Angie did ask me about something I rarely talk about: my parents getting divorced in high school.
A friend was in Talkeetna recently, and sent me a picture of what this cabin looks like these days. Skipping over that, this is what it looked like in mid-September when I lived there.
Some great lyrics from Dan Fogelberg:
I have these moments all steady and strong
I’m feeling so holy and humble
The next thing I know, I’m all worried and weak
And I feel myself starting to crumble
The meanings get lost, and the teachings get tossed
And you don’t know what you’re gonna do next
You wait for the sun but it never quite comes
Some kind of message comes through to you
Some kind of message comes through
And it says to you
Love when you can
Cry when you have to
Be who you must
That’s a part of the plan
Await your arrival
With simple survival and
One day, we’ll all understand
A favorite quote:
“She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I wrote in Different meditation/mindfulness practices, different cultures, and they all talk about witnessing/noting, mindfulness and meditation masters (teachers) from different cultures, countries, and styles of practice often teach the same thing in different ways: a style of mindfulness meditation known as witnessing or noting.
To me, a simple way to think about this is that as your body goes along with its daily life, all you have to do is simply narrate what your body is doing at all times, in the present moment.
If you like, you can think of yourself as being the witness/soul, watching the body, and noting what it’s doing, like a birdwatcher does when they note what birds are doing in a forest. It’s that simple.
I’ve mentioned before that at the Providence Zen Center, when you meditate, you are told to constantly ask yourself, “What am I?” And when you’re doing some action, such as driving a car, you ask yourself, “Who is driving?”
I’ve also mentioned that these days the most popular mindfulness practice is to “note” what you’re doing, moment by moment. So when you’re eating you say, “eating,” and when you’re washing your hands you say, “washing,” and so on.
Tonight I was re-reading Ram Dass’s first book, Be Here Now, and found a section where he talks about developing the “witness” in yourself by narrating your life: “Oh, he’s heading to the refrigerator now. It looks like he’s going to get some ice cream. Yes, he’s picked up the ice cream container...”
The thing about these techniques is that (a) they come from three different types of spiritual practice, but (b) although their words are different, their intent is the same: They try to get your attention/awareness aligned with what your body is doing in the present moment.
If you’re ever interested in meditation, I promise that if you work hard enough, you can achieve this kind of intensity. I’m fortunate that it happens to me from time to time now.
As Ramana Maharshi said, “Proper meditation is so intense it doesn’t even allow thinking, ‘I am meditating.’”
As a brief note today, here is a short list of spiritual teachers I am aware of who have expressed the idea “I am not the body.” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj made this the most obvious to me by writing a book titled, “I Am Not The Body,” but when you think about it, many spiritual teachers have said the exact same thing in different ways.
Well, if you’re going to ask for someone’s DNA, this is a nice way to do it, play to my ego. :)
I got this in an email back in the day when I first learned that I have mast cell disease.
“Ten things fab leaders do,” a nice graphic from Helen Bevan.
I came across two quotes recently that seem related ... and not necessarily just in a spiritual/religious way:
“The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.”
AND:
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
Lately I’ve been thinking about how some people get to a certain point and then never mature any more. It’s like maybe they get everything they ever wanted, and they stop there. They become comfortable or complacent, and in doing so, they create their own prison.
“Never be a prisoner of your past. It was a lesson, not a life sentence.”
~ possibly from Anna Grace Taylor
“All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude.”
~ Richard Rohr
Hate-speech people on X: “Bluesky is an echo chamber!”
Our Reply: “Echo chamber? Nah, we prefer to call it ‘surround sound for facts.’”
A great quote from this Bluesky post.
As I noted before, IMHO, Twitter/X and its “algorithm” has become a place that makes racism, sexism, homophobics, and hate speech a welcome place, and I have absolutely zero interest in being anywhere near that toxic swamp.
Conversely, this comic from this Bluesky page explains what makes Bluesky different, and better.
As I became lucid in a dream this morning, I ran into Ram Dass. He was wearing a long-white outfit that I have seen in pictures of him, he was healthy again, with a big beard, and was much taller than I expected — significantly taller than me. (I later looked this up to find out he was 6’3”.)
He was standing next to a doorway and gathering people together for a seminar that he was giving, and asked if I wanted to attend. I said yes, and he said I was welcome if I could be like “The Lamb of God.”
I thought I knew what he meant by that, but just to be sure I asked him what he meant.
In case this might help anyone else, I thought I’d share this information. I was having a weird problem where some mornings when I woke up my blood pressure would be really high, so long story short, I did an at-home sleep study a few weeks ago, and went over the results with a doctor this morning. I’ll include the doctor’s notes with each image.
In the first image, “A+H” is the main metric they use. It measures the average number of apnea events that occur per hour while you’re sleeping.
In my case, a 19.4 overall average means, “Yes, you have apnea.” The 36.8 value means, “you have really bad apnea on your back, don't sleep there.” Interestingly, 0.7 means “you have no apnea when sleeping on your left side, so sleep there as much as possible.” I’ve known for years that I sleep better on the left side, so the doctor encouraged me to sleep on that side as much as possible.
