Posts in the “personal” category

I recently took an online “assessment” test with a company named SHL. In general it was good and interesting, but after thinking about it, one thing it really lacked was a concept of “context.”

For instance, one question was something like, “Are you comfortable talking to strangers?” Well, that depends on the context of the situation. In the context of being at a grocery store I generally have my earbuds in and leave strangers alone until I talk to the cashier, but in the context of work, I pretty much talk to everyone. Two different contexts, two totally different answers.

So as I’m answering the questions I keep asking myself, “What’s the context?” Unfortunately I didn’t share this at the end of the SHL test when they give you a little room to comment, so I thought I’d share that here in hopes someone there might see this.

Mostly because of Ram Dass books, and also more recently because of the book I Am That, I have been digging deeper than ever into the spiritual concept of “The Witness.” By that I mean both in terms of how we use the witness as a mindfulness and meditation technique, and also what that really means.

To that end I have started collecting Ram Dass quotes about the witness and the process of witnessing as a form of mindfulness, and the following are the Ram Dass quotes about the witness that I’ve found so far.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story

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.

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

~ Emily Bronte

(This is a recounting of a long dream from October 1, 2016.)

We were playing at our camp when my older brother — who was standing on higher ground than I — saw something in the distance. He stood upright, then perfectly still. After a few moments he turned to me in a look of panic I had never seen before, pointed in a direction opposite from where he was looking, and screamed, “Run! Run!” I was startled at his behavior but I knew that something was very wrong, so I ran. And I ran.

I ran as fast as I could, weaving through the brush and constantly changing my course as I was chased by a white man on a dark horse. I thought I might be close to safety when I darted through some bushes, but I ran right into a creek that was too wide to jump across. As I paused for a moment to decide how to continue, the white man shot me in the back.

In intense pain and sudden shock, I stumbled forward into the creek, bent over with one hand in the creek. As I attempted to stand up and regain my balance, I was shot in the back again. This time my body flew forward towards the opposite side of the creek. I tried to control my fall but could not, and my torso slammed against the land. The right side of my face was pressed against the ground, my eyes still open. My right arm was trapped under my body, my left arm was somewhere down my left side. My legs lay in the creek’s water.

Lindsey: Don’t tell me you’re seeing inside them again. (long pause) What are people like, on the inside?

Jeremy: Inside most people there’s a feeling of being separate, separated from everything.

Lindsey: And?

Jeremy: And they’re not. They’re part of absolutely everyone, and everything.

Lindsey: Everything? I’m part of this tree? Part of my dog barking over fences? You’re telling me that I’m part of some fisherman in Italy, on some ocean I’ve never even heard of? There’s some guy, sitting on death row, I’m part of him, too?

Jeremy: You don’t believe me.

Lindsey: It’s hard to believe that. All of that.

Jeremy: That’s because you have this spot that you can’t see past. (Putting his finger on her forehead.) My grams and gramps had it, a spot where they were taught they were disconnected from everything.

Lindsey: So that’s what they’d see if they could? That they’re connected?

Jeremy: And how beautiful they really are. And that there’s no need to hide, or lie. And that it’s possible to talk to someone without any lies, with no sarcasms, no deceptions, no exaggerations or any of the things that people use to confuse the truth.

~ a conversation from the movie Powder

“Goddamnit!”

Every so often a woman in a lucid dream this morning yelled out like that, so after the fourth or fifth time I had to ask her about it. “Why do you keep saying that?,” I asked.

“Gets your attention, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“There you have it.”

“There I have what?”

“Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

~ from the movie, Top Gun

If you’re ever interested in meditation, I promise that if you work hard enough, you can achieve this kind of intensity, where you feel like Eleven in Stranger Things. 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.’”

Dear diary,

Annihilation of the ego continues to make progress, at least during sleeping hours. In recent nights I’ve gained awareness during the dream state to find “myself” as animals, women, and other men.

Last night I gained awareness as an older black man, talking to other black men about some of the discrimination and injustices we’ve gone through in our lives. We can laugh a little amongst ourselves about them now, but I could feel that under the laughter there’s also a deep sadness and pain.

Lately each nightly occurrence ends the same way: Eventually there’s a realization that “I” am supposed to be “Al,” and that realization startles me, pulls me from the scene, and wakes me.

Yours truly,
The Hopefully-Disappearing Self

P.S. — I don’t know if it’s more correct to say “black man,” “African-American,” or something else. To be clear, if it wasn’t important to the story I would not mention it at all.

One thing you learn when you really become dedicated to mindfulness practice is that every moment you aren’t being mindful, you’re feeding your ego. Any thought about the past or future solidifies this “ego-cage” you have built up in your mind.

(Note: I saw the term ego-cage in a book, but I don’t remember which one.)

I rarely listen to music from this century, but in late 2020 I became a fan of Let Me Love You Like a Woman, by Lana Del Rey.

Really, I don’t think I liked a new song from 2013 to 2020, and then in December, 2020, I had my radio on an “alternative music” station, and this song came on and it was like time just stopped.

The tv series Becker was one of my favorites back in the day, and I always wondered why it wasn’t available on DVD. I just looked, and it’s now available at Amazon, just released in 2018.

A favorite episode that helped me snap out of a personal funk was when Becker finally got to be with his long-lost love — a woman he pined for for many years. When he finally had a chance to reunite with her it turned out she was out-of-control-wild, crazy, ran up his credit card bill, and then took off.

In its own way, that episode helped me get over someone I had felt the same way about. It was like seeing a comedic version of your own life that turned out to be a great “slap in the face” moment for me.

(Some time after I wrote that last paragraph, I was able to spend more time with the woman I had those feelings for, and while it wasn’t quite that comedic, our time together helped me realize that this woman wasn’t the perfect human being I thought she was. She was still great, but with human flaws, just like the rest of us.)

“I am in the world, but not concerned with the world. I am going through the marketplace, but not as a purchaser.”

~ Ram Dass, quoting Maharaji, quoting Kabir, in Miracle of Love, one of his best books

“You got the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something ... your next life, maybe.”

~ The Matrix

A very long time ago when my wife and I were going through a difficult patch, I met a woman who I fell deeply in love with, and Next Time I Fall In Love, by Peter Cetera and Amy Grant became a bit of a theme song.

“I’m tired, boss ... Mostly I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand?”

~ John Coffey, The Green Mile

I really like the following quotes about keeping your mind on God all the time, from the book, The Gospel of Shri Anandamayi Ma.”

In particular, one thing I like about her approach as compared to something like Zen is that she spells out exactly how one should practice, so there is no guesswork about how to keep your mind during the day. (Zen people tend to tell you something once, and then leave you on your own.)

Anandamayi Ma quotes on service

Here are some of her quotes from the first one-third of her book that I really like:

“While performing a service, think that whatever you are doing is for God only. You are not serving a man or a creature, but God himself.”

It’s cool to see that Virginia Schick (Ginny) is/was such a great teacher, in Colorado. And an artist. She was very nice in high school, while I was more of a jerk myself.

(I wasn’t a jerk intentionally. In retrospect it all had a lot to do with my family situation, and wanting to get out of Illinois as fast as possible. I also did not communicate well with anyone, and I regret that as well.)

A funny thing is that I lived in the Boulder, Broomfield, and Longmont, Colorado area for almost 15 years myself.

Across the street was a beautiful, old church. I wanted to see what it looked like inside, so I crossed the street, but as I approached the church there was a commotion to my left, so I walked over to see what was happening.

Some people needed some assistance, and I thought it would be an easy TK thing to do, so I started to help them. But it was much, much harder to do than I expected, so I started to put all of my effort into it. I couldn’t do what I wanted, but instead of giving up, I kept pushing harder and harder. As I did this, the song, Sanctify Yourself, by Simple Minds, began playing.

As I tried harder, a man’s voice began talking in my left ear. He was whispering some of the lyrics from this song, and the harder I tried, the louder he spoke. I kept trying harder and harder until I eventually became like Eleven in the last episode of Stranger Things, putting my entire being into the effort. In the end, there was no “me,” only the desire to help:

A unique feature of this story is that I didn’t know what the word sanctify meant until I woke up and looked it up...