My prescription is confusion. We should all feel more confused. Confusion and frightened reactions to confusion are different things, that’s the key. Confusion is cognition’s momentous humility; it is the resting of articulation in the face of reality which is too complicated to apprehend, which is inherently not fully knowable, even if you account for “good enough” understanding. Frightened reactions to confusion are the rigidification or striking-out that we do in response to confusion. These reactions hide from us the experience of confusion, because the feeling of confusion quickly gives way to the blindedness of rigidity, or the passion of striking-out. Confusion is not inherently scary. I would say it’s more inherently soft than scary. So if you feel scared of confusion, just know that’s a reaction to confusion. Confusion creates pause. We might say that certainty leads to the action impulse; confusion as its opposite leads to the waiting, stillness impulse. That’s why it’s my prescription. Confusion cools us down; certainty heats us up. We have too much heat. We ought to cool down a bit. Eventually we act anyways, even though we’re always indelibly confused. But we act with less attachment, more nimbleness, if we’ve done our time with the confusion. Think of confusion as a practice. Practice being confused. And also practice acting from confusion. I would say this essay is me acting from confusion.
Light and Matter
Here: some iPhone captures of light-matter systems whose patterns I found beautiful. It’s cool how subtle variations between photos/videos of a pattern can make a world of difference, in form and in feeling — I included some duplicates so you can check that out for yourself. Also, some ideas for how to look at the patterns, and some other perceptual considerations, inspired by my own engagement with them. Hope you enjoy. :)
1.
House in Portland, Maine. Sunlight streams through dirty door-top window. Passing through gap in a curtain, it illuminates a spider web, the wall, and the floor. Middle photo uses flash.
Suggestion: Muse about which details of the light pattern are formed by the spider web, and which by the dirt on the window.
2.
Brick wall at restaurant in Portland, Maine. Pink LEGO, pink light.
Suggestion: Take in the different configurations of pink light as you flip through the images. Notice how the configurations elicit subtly different feelings. As investigations of the body sensations that emerge as responses to the images, try flipping through the images quickly vs. slowly, and linearly vs. back-and-forth.
3.
Bathtub in Amsterdam. Lit by window (slats, to the right) and overhead light.
Suggestion: In the second video, maintain focus on the water that pools on the rim of the tub to the right of the spout. In the third video, maintain focus on the full system of water on the floor of the tub
4.
Escalator in Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Metal warping distorts reflection.
Suggestion: Pay attention to the apparent vertical bands formed by the distortion.
5.
Co-working space in Amsterdam. Staircase reflects on plastic square. I move back and forth.
Suggestion: Maintain tight eye focus on the plaque.
p.s. –
6.
Harbor in Chania, a Cretan town. Lampposts and building lights make wavy vertical patterns in the water.
Suggestion: See the light strips as time-series signals. Normally, these signals are presented horizontally, with time on the horizontal axis, and the measurement on the vertical axis. Here, it is rotated by 90˚.
Love on the Streets
I just had the most amazing Uber ride. A car came at us head-on, in the wrong lane, 50mph. The drag-racing purr of a souped-up engine and the boldness of trauma, sociopathy, or both. I took out my headphones to say, “What the hell?” “I was ready to just close my eyes and let him hit us,” the driver said. He was in his 50s, accented, nicely combed hair and short beard, soothing silver. I asked him where he’s from. Kabul. Came over in the 80s, when he was 14. Before leaving he’d spent time in “holes” because they had no basement to hide in when the bombs were dropping. One night he huddled there for six hours, in the middle of winter, holding his two younger siblings under his shirt. When adults came for them, the kids had frost on their faces. He’s been in America long enough to feel like it’s home; he loves Thanksgiving, it’s a big family affair. So his wife, last night, kept telling him: be careful driving tomorrow. Careful on the bridges, on the streets. The head-on driver must have been why. We get to talking about the Middle East, by way of bombs in Kabul, by way of his dad, who was killed, his siblings, who were killed. I say, I’m incredibly lucky to not have lived an on-the-ground war experience. Hope it stays that way. But what’s different, I think, when you live that, is that the horror of it – and the loving desire for it to stop – become the frame on the world. Not geopolitics. Compassion, because you know. He was agonized about the people of Israel; about the people of Gaza; the people of Kabul; the people of Ukraine. He had compassion; he knew. He said that last night he got together with his Israeli friend and they held each other and cried for a long time. He was crying now in the car, heart-felt. We’d arrived at my destination, and we were still talking – though now it was even between words and tears – and I was still in the back seat. I joined him up front. He was sobbing. So much pain. All the children, the children split in half, the bloodied woman dragged into a car, the young people at a music festival. All the pain. Pray to the God of Moses, pray to Jesus, pray to the God of Mohammad – he prayed to all of them, there, in the car – asking for peace, love, deliverance from the evil. He said, I know You’re there, please, please help. We’re helpless. We held hands, we squeezed shoulders, we traded well-wishes. He said when he sits there looking at me, he sees his son, who’s a few years younger than me. He said he said to his son, a recent college graduate: find an Israeli, find a Jewish person, hug them, hold them, cry with them. We’re all children. I told him I grew up Jewish. The Abrahamic God isn’t my view now, but Love is. I kept wanting to say, live as an expression of love! That was the way. I did. I said, it’s an act of love to have a heart as sensitive as yours. I felt it. I felt his love. People feel the responsiveness, the receptivity. I repeated the Buddhist phrase: may you be happy and free from suffering. May your family be happy and free from suffering. May all your loved ones be happy and free from suffering. May all beings be happy and free from suffering. He had to go pick up another rider. When he rolled away and I was there in the sun, I cried a bit. Heart a little numb today. I walked upstairs to my apartment and imagined him there, a kid, in Kabul, in a hole in the ground, with frost on his face, and I leaned against the wall and cried some more. I saw a text about a movie night. I’ve been asked how I feel about all this. This is how I feel. Live from the heart, live right where you are, because love is on the streets.
Twelve Things At The Park
Twelve things:
The first is a confession about poor posture. I’ve been meditating on park benches. They are the rolling wooden type, a valley for your butt and a hill for your thighs. Each one is slightly misshapen – unique. To sit upright means your sitz bones push against a wooden outburst and it’s painful. So I sit with poor posture when I meditate on park benches, and I’m self-critical about this because I know that posture does, in fact, impact the outcome. I meditate in the park a lot. Have you heard of that litmus test for self-criticism where you consider whether you would criticize anyone else for the same thing you’re criticizing yourself for? This does not pass the litmus test.
The second is that at the park’s entrance I look around at the benches, trying to find a feeling of being drawn to one particular bench, or of being averse to others. If I can find such a feeling, I do what it says. Intuition training. Different benches prevail at different times. Sun and shade, who’s sitting where, what I would watch. Averse, always, to one bench with a conspicuous gap between two of its planks.
The third is that there is a new experience recently, a warm sensation in the chest both bounding forward and staying put. It feels like “the urge to think, coming from a place of love”.
The fourth is that I’ve been reading Rumi. Well, reading oversells it; I’ve been listening to an audiobook. And “listening” is a verb whose binary nature (you’re doing the verb or you’re not) elides the reality that the act it describes has degrees — like “bounding”. The act of “staying” is binary.
The fifth is that I listened (cf. #4) to a podcast with a spiritual man who, breaking up with nonduality after ten years, says true nature has many faces, not one. Good thing Brooklyn is non-monogamous, now.
The sixth is that after digging around my ribcage with a foam roller, I was light on my feet in a conversation. I stumbled into such lightness for the first time recently, and I’ve been trying to become light again through mind methods for several weeks, without much success. A little foam rolling did it. The conversation in question happened at the park, sitting at a table (usually not in the running for meditating).
The seventh is that I found out about an eye trick for open awareness meditation. When I tried it I felt like I’d been sipping a laced drink. Scene of the crime was – you guessed it – the park. Mind is tied intimately to body; eyes, posture, fascia. The winds carry the thoughts. Yet the same traditions that teach about mind and body contend that mind persists beyond body in some form. Hmm! (There’s more to learn.)
The eighth is that my forearm, wrist, and hand tendons are acting up, I think from holding dumbbells too often. Previously I could do this trick where I would trace the tension (probably) through fascia to other parts of my body, then physically or mentally release the tension in the remote location. Unfortunately, I’m out of practice.
The ninth is that many people around me are on emotional journeys. Letting sample bias be what it may be, is this a phenomenon of the mid 20s/30s (age) or a phenomenon of the early 20s (era)?
The tenth is a new categorization of motivations. I’ve defined them by somatic feeling and accompanying mental posture or activity.
(1) Felt in the heart – love.
(2) Felt brightly in the head – intellectual curiosity or conceptual configuring.
(3) Felt as a clutching in the body and the face, like a cousin of holding my breath – attachment of some kind, social craving, “cool”.
(4) Felt like Pixar light spilling out giddily from my belly, my heart, my eyes – play.
(5) Felt like the synesthetic expansion of soil – being an animal.
Which bench should I sit at? Should I meditate with proper posture? Remember, foam roll! Body controls mind, but mind goes beyond body? Why the park? Why the “Why the park?”
The eleventh is that I used to mistake (1)-(3) being present together as beauty. And, I’m not sure yet how to square #3 (heart-thought) with #10 (heart-love, head-thought).
The twelfth is that I’ve recently started learning about biofeedback. The basic setup of biofeedback is that a real-time measurement of some aspect of your biology is used to control something you can detect with your senses. For example, your brain’s electrical activity could control the size of something on a screen, like a circle. The programmer programs the circle to get bigger if your brain activity does something “good”, and then you – the user – are asked to make the circle get bigger. In order to do this, you will need to figure out how to do that “good” thing with your brain and keep doing it. You might use this to help you meditate, for example.
Twelfth, cont’d. Armchair philosophy, though not from the chest (see #3 above) says: to get people to adopt a new activity en masse, you need some behavioral continuity between the new activity and something else people are already used to doing. When the desired new behavior is familiar, people will be more likely to do it because the learning curve is comparatively less steep and it’s already socially acceptable. Consider FaceTiming: it was new to video chat from a phone, but familiar to chat with audio from a phone, and to chat with video from a computer. Biofeedback systems do not meet this criteria because with biofeedback, you’re imploring the user to do something (“control the size of this circle by relaxing”) that doesn’t have a behavioral analog. There’s also the related issue of needing a new physical object, like an EEG. I want to say biofeedback is aesthetically inelegant and call it a day. Too many pieces cobbled together in strange ways. Unfortunately, biofeedback works…
Twelfth cont’d, cont’d. To illustrate how biofeedback can be implemented in a way that’s familiar and doesn’t need a new physical object, consider partner dance and sex. There’s a quality of mind and body referred to as “easfulness”, which looks and feels like being easeful (...duh). It’s something you can sense in others (through sight, touch, moving with them, listening to them), and feel in yourself. As an empirical fact of human interaction, as you become more easeful, your counterpart does too (and vice versa, via a mutual feedback loop). Therefore, if you pay attention to the easefulness of your partner and intend to do what you gotta do for their actions to become more easeful, partner dance and sex can both become biofeedback activities. Your partner is both the sensor (like an EEG) and the sensory stimulus for feedback (like the circle whose size is controlled by the EEG). At this point the mechanic has transitioned from something technological to a somatic exercise, a dance instruction, an advice column in Cosmopolitan. Same conceptual framework, different packaging. (3) or #3?
Visual Presence
Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) protocol is a technique in which you visualize yourself as a young child, say between the ages of 1-5 years old, interacting with “ideal parent figures”. Ideal parent figures are imagined people, or entities, who are your ideal parents. (Note: they are not your real parents, and the imaginal creation of these ideal parents need not imply anything about your real parents.) That is to say, they’re utterly perfect, relative to your needs. They respond to you exactly how you need to be responded to. In the imaginal world of your visualization, they regulate you; you feel a sense of safety, curiosity, joy, wonder, and they delight in this. Around them you feel implicitly innocent. IPF is practiced as a visualization meditation. I do it 1-2x per week. It can be used to gradually adjust one’s attachment conditioning by forming a set of new memories which change your orientation in the world. There’s a heavy-duty technical book about it which situates Ideal Parent Figure within a broader psychotherapeutic strategy for working on attachment conditioning. (I haven’t read the book.) In general, I measure the effectiveness of a psychological intervention in terms of a) noticeable changes in my experience, b) noticeable changes in my behavior, and c) frequency/duration/durability of these changes. For me, boxes (a), (b), and (c) are all checked by IPF. Recently I did a session that was peculiar because due to its subject and its effects. I’ve had an eye problem since I was a small child where my eyes bounce back and forth involuntarily. It’s called nystagmus. It mostly hasn’t been a big deal, aside from making it hard to read the whiteboard in school and preventing me from driving (my vision is technically good enough and I passed a driver’s test when I was 18, but for now I’ve decided not to drive). Yet recently I’ve been wondering if maybe the eye shaking has had more of a consequence than I’ve hitherto appreciated. Eye movement is connected to cognitive processes; it’s common wisdom in open-eye meditation tradition that a) still eyes beget a still mind, and b) the angle of the eyes matters (for example, pointing the eyes downwards is helpful for concentration meditation). My internal experience bounces around; I’m always hopping between thoughts, feelings, sensations, sensory information, etc. Maybe not more than the average person, but I suspect so. Stilling the bounce is a proximate goal of my meditative journey. I’ve been wondering if perhaps the eye shaking is related to this cognitive/affective dynamic. There’s another phenomenon of my internal experience I’ve noticed, which is that I do this thing where I go fuzzy. My inner experience “blurs out”, and when this happens my visual field blurs, too. This shows up when I’m walking down the street, when I’m talking to people, when I'm working out – in most settings. It feels subtly tense. I’d been thinking about both these things, and developed an intuitive hunch that I should explore this eye-shaking in IPF in relationship to the fuzziness. (I’ve had intuitive hunches about IPF subjects several other times, each to notable effect compared to the average IPF session.) So, I gave it a try. To begin, I closed my eyes and visualized that I was three or four years old, standing in the family room of my childhood home. My ideal father figure was there. I had the feeling that there was some physical danger, that something was wrong. My ideal father figure scooped me up and, kneeling on the ground, held me to his chest with one hand over my eyes. Slowly the feeling of physical danger receded. We then went outside to the deck and I sat with him in a chair, still held to his chest. The rest… I can’t remember very well. That’s typical for these kinds of visualizations. [Footnote: Though I often wonder whether the ability to subsequently remember one of these sessions correlates with the effect of the session on the mind/body. I wonder whether recording the session (when it’s spoken out loud with an IPF guide) and listening back later would fortify the efficacy of the visualization. Practically, much of the experience isn’t spoken out loud, but I think what is spoken out loud may be sufficient to re-invoke the visualization, and/or the felt experience. I will experiment.] At another point in the session, I relaxed out of the fear/aversion to the way my visual field shakes when my eyes bounce – and connected this fear/aversion to the fuzzing out I mentioned above. Separately, as this child self, I encountered anger at being made to feel like there was some inadequacy with me because of my eyes. And, I felt anger that my anger wasn’t seen/understood. Having worked through a) the resistance to attending to my visual field, and b) some of the emotion around my eyes, after the session I started exploring what would happen if I relaxed when I noticed myself fuzzing out. It basically went like this: notice fuzz-out, release whatever tension seems like it’s maintaining the fuzz-out, see what happens. Concretely, noticing the fuzz-out might entail, for example, having my eyes pointed at a particular part of my computer screen and realizing I’m not actually focusing my eyes at the right focal plane, nor am I paying attention to the contents of the screen. What happens when I do release is fascinating! There’s a sense of unadulterated presence with the thing I’m looking at. The feeling of “soaking it in”, “being there”, and – pulling in another thing I’d been exploring the last couple weeks – “being open to it”, which feels like a releasing sensation in my chest and sometimes abdomen, sort of like what you might feel if you’re foam-rolling your legs and get a good stretch of the torso in, and suddenly you feel this “releasing” feeling in your torso. If I try to do this intentionally, which doesn’t always succeed, there’s generally an order of operations. First, I try to “open my heart”, i.e. relax tension in my chest in such a way that, subjectively, it feels as though I’m more “open” to whatever I’m paying attention to, more willing to be impacted by it. Then I notice that my eyes are somewhat unfocused relative to what’s that’s directly in their line of sight. I then “let go” of the non-focus and allow my eyes to focus on whatever object is directly in their line. When this happens, there’s a releasing sensation in the middle of the forehead. The prominent feature is that there’s a “knowingness” or “presence” that suddenly emerges about the object I’m looking at. In other words, I suddenly feel like I’m really seeing the object. I’ve been playing with this while walking down the street, among other situations. It’s sort of like… having a beam of focus to point at objects, for example hopping from person to person to person as they walk by. When eyes rest, they go to “infinity focus” – the muscles that usually contract them relax, and they don’t converge to a single point (which they ordinarily would if they were focused on an object at a particular distance). What’s interesting is that during this phenomenon I encountered, it actually feels like there’s a release when the eyes focus on what’s in front of them – counterintuitive, because you would think that focusing takes more effort. Yet upon transitioning from fuzz-out to focus, I feel a noticeable sense of release in the muscles of my eyes, forehead, nose, face and neck. I also have a release feeling in my belly and my chest as well. Given that the expected result would be more muscular tension rather than less, I have a pet theory that there are two competing psychomotor processes, one “natural” one in which my eyes “want” to see what’s in front of them and in which my mind “wants” to process that visual information; and a second competing process which doesn’t “want” me to be present, doesn't “want” me to process that stimulus, and so inhibits the first process, “locking” the eyes and sensory processing into infinity focus. Perhaps the feeling of muscular release is what results from the abatement of this second inhibitory process.