Problems, Problems Everywhere!

Posted by David on January 19, 2012

An email I received the other day had a jarring effect on my mind. Why was this I wondered?

There was something in the tone, something in the whole feel of the thing that was not quite right. The content itself was not the issue, rather, it reminded me of a whole culture of thinking I had largely avoided for the last 2 or 3 years. And that is the culture of the “educated” rational mind.

The email had highlighted a number of “problems” or potential “problems” with an opportunity I had been enquiring about. Nothing wrong with that you might innocently think. And yet within the innocent reasonableness of this email, lay bare the insidiously destructive nature of the “educated” rational mind.

Was the person who wrote it to blame for this? Far from it, theirs is the all too common approach of educated and intelligent people, whose mantra could well be “I Solve Problems – Therefore I AM”.

We can observe this phenomena more broadly in everyday Western societies: The endless economic, cultural, societal, scientific, medical, environmental (I could go on) list of problems which rather than being “solved” just seem to multiply year on year. E.g The lists of laws get longer every year, the lists of medical diagnosis mutliply, we move from one economic crisis to another etc.

And yet the “elite”, the people at the top of the responsible organisations and involved in these activities, are prize problem solvers. They are usually the ones who have gone through more of education’s hoops than anyone else. They have proven time and time again their prowess as great memorisers and problem solvers.

These “educated, intelligent elite” are a proud product of an “educational” system which trains and rewards people for identifying and solving problems. The by-product of which is an uncanny ability to find more and more problems, and hence they spawn and un-ending cycle of problem creation.

Is there a class of people who do not suffer from this problem solving mind-set? Well yes, several, those fortunate enough to get out of “education” before its too late and, artisans and artists.

Artists and artisans look for opportunites, a chance to create something, something new maybe or maybe something better than before. Not necessarily to only solve a problem, but simply for the fun of it, just because they can. Focusing on problem solving has an inherent backward looking quality about it, creation, in its purest forms, builds on the past whilst leaping into a new future.

So, what to do with this emailer? A problem or an opportunity to be creative?

© David R. Durham
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Sound Scapes

Posted by David on January 6, 2012

Sea rolling, sweeping, flowing, bubbling onto a pebbled beach;
You remind me of my forgotten journeys.

A bright penetrating light moving down a corridor of brick archways;
You remind me of a forgotten life.

Black & white images of faces in a winter’s landscape;
You remind me of long lost loves.

The felt sense of my spinal column in alignment;
You remind me of a forgotten harmony.

My boundaries melt away and all thoughts stops;
You remind me of my forgotten home.

My awakened heart flows and flows;
You remind me that an awakened heart never closes.

Sound Scapes was inspired by Stuart Hampton’s amazing cymbals, drone, Tibetan bowls & gongs concert for the new year’s eve at Gaunts House in Dorset, England.

Time & Space

Posted by David on June 23, 2011

Time and space may well be a given for humans, but we as living consciousness are not bound by the rules of time-space, unless we chose to be. And chosing to be bound by those rules is a part of our decision to become human.

I Am

Posted by David on March 17, 2011

I am no-thing in all of this; I am every-thing.

I am the beginning; The middle; The end.

I am creator; I am victim.

I am washed up on a shore of eternity; I am the eternal.

No words touch me; I am the voice.

I am the silence at the core of our being; I sing in endless joy.

Swift is my pained anger; Sweet the simple smile of understanding.

There is no death which can touch me; I am the continual creation of decay.

I am the dignity of truth; I am the vanity of lust.

My mark touches all that I see; I pass un-noticed in this world.

My love knows no beginning and hence no end; Loveless I fall at the feet of icons.

God whispers in my ear; Men shout to me from the TV ads.

I am contained in this body; My vastness dwarfs this universe.

Words cannot walk; I stride in the mountains of my dreams.

Timeless are the sorrows of men; Eternal is the joy of God.

© David R. Durham

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All in the Bow

Posted by David on February 25, 2011

Its has been reportedly said that “It is all in the bow”.

To bow down before an icon, another being or maybe an ideal can seem a very cultural thing. An act steeped in tradition, a gesture to imagined enlightened ones, to one’s elders or maybe even to God.

Done out of duty, it can be an empty act.

Done with a sense of contrition, it can often be vain.

Done with all our humanity, it is an act of enlightenment.

When you no longer need to bow, it is possible to do so.

As long as you’re working it out, you cannot really do it fluently.

It is all in the bow.

© David R. Durham

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Cycles of Life

Posted by David on February 22, 2011

I often have the feeling that Life is our greatest teacher, that it has an almost infinite number of ways to make a point. And, if necessary, to keep bringing us back to share a lesson again and again if need be.

One of, for me, the unlikeliest learning opportunities I have recently had has come through my work with IT systems. Late last year I worked with a decommissioning of a system I’d been involved with off and on for some 12 years. It seemed a fitting end to a cycle, having been there in the early development of this particular system, and worked with it again during its maturing phase, here I was, now involved in its death; its passing away.

Yet here I am again, working on a new installation of this system. And within that new installation, I am coming face to face with parts of it that I helped to design over 12 years ago, and the memories keep coming back, of the people I worked with at the time, and the sometimes painful process we went through to design certain aspects of this system.

It is, for me, like a rebirth experience. And Life is saying, no, no, you must understand that death is not an end. Life, if Life is anything of substance at all, is full of endless intricate cycles of birth, growing, passing away and rebirth into new cycles of expression.

© David R. Durham

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Consciousness Exploration

Posted by David on January 30, 2011

How many levels of consciousness do we operate through simultaneously?

Classic psychology talks about conscious. sub-conscious and unconscious levels. To this we can then we can add present, past and future time in which we experience life.

I think this concept of levels, whilst tempting, is too broader brush stroke. The concept of a continuum of consciousness, rather like the spectrum of perceptual wave vibrational frequencies, is more appropriate.

And when we add to that personal metal constructs, social mental constructs, space, time and probability factors, we are left with a multi-dimensional model which allows our consciousness (the essence of what we are) to flow seamlessly across many dimensions.

What joy it can be to explore these many expressions of what we have the possibility of being or have been or might be.

© David R. Durham

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Dancing Snowflakes

Posted by David on November 24, 2010

If you imagine for a moment a still, cold winter’s night. A few clouds are in the sky, the frost is just starting to form and there is no breeze. Then, as if by magic, tiny flakes of snow start to float gently in the dark night’s air. Dancing down to the earth.

There is an effortless beauty about them.

Herein lies a perfect metaphor for timeless meditation. There is an effortless beauty about it.

A letting go of technique, a letting go of effort and expectation, an acceptance of all that is arising in our mind, body and whole being.

A letting go of letting go.

Resting in the eternal embrace of our creator, dancing in the ground of our being.

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Circumstances

Posted by David on November 12, 2010

We are all more, in many ways much, much more, than our circumstances.

This problem, of being constrained and over-identified with our circumstances is often seen most clearly in a therapeutic context. People with chronic health conditions can become labelled and defined by their condition. “Hi, I’m Mary and I was abused as a child.”, “Hi, I’m Mike and I have a weak heart.” OK, people don’t literally say these things (well not that often), but it is the sub-plot to how they live their daily lives.

A similar thing can happen with our whole identity: I’m Russian, therefore I think in a certain way. I come from an affluent LA suburb, hence I am this LA life-style. I am a spiritual being, so I’m a vegan.

The labels we can identify with are almost endless, yet all are limiting in some ways, all are derived in some way from our transient historical circumstances, which has helped us to define our selves, our relationship to other people and our world view.

The labels we can identify with are not, in and of themselves, a problem. To function in our human context requires them, it requires these mental constructs which we develop during our early years. It is our failure to recognise the limitations of these identities, to get stuck in them and hence fail to grow beyond them, that can create problems for us. Problems which can be hard to define: it may be a general unease or feeling of emptiness with our current life, or maybe we cannot see the point in it anymore. Unfortunately, these are problems for which our society driven solutions are not always the most healthy or appropriate (e.g. alcohol abuse, drug addition, obesity and other excesses.)

Practices such as Soto Zen meditation and Centering Prayer aim to remind us of, and re-introduce us to, the nothingness of our core being. This ‘no-thing-ness’ is impossible to stick a label on, hence it is ‘unlimited’ by mental concepts, it is the vast potential of life to be all things. It is the as yet unborn, unbecome, unformed, unmanifest.

It is deeply liberating to be reminded of the fact the we are not this label, or that label, or this other label. It gives us space to breathe, space for our being to flow and to grow.

We are all potentially so much more than any of our temporary life-style labels allow us to be.

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Mental Models

Posted by David on November 3, 2010

On a recent flight from Lima to Cusco, I sat next to an American lady who was visiting Peru to do some charity work.

It turned out she was a Physiotherapist, and when our conversation moved onto Cranio-Sacral therapy, she advised me that in the US it is not considered a ‘proper’ therapy. One reason being that someone carried out an ‘experiment’ whereby two therapists tuned into the cranial rhythm of a subject, and they came up with a different rate for the subject’s rhythm. Hence, logic (?) dictates it must be quackery.

Duh!

The cranial rhythm, is just one of tens, and maybe hundreds on rhythms in our bodies. And like most of them, its just an indicator. If two therapists did come up with a different count of a subject’s cranial rhythm, then isn’t this a cause to explore this observation further. I.e. there is a cranial rhythm, why does it appear differently?

The lady went further and said, since therapeutic outcomes of Cranio-Sacral therapy could not be measured and quantified in a consistent way, it was clearly a dubious activity, and not scientifically proven.

Could it simply be that therapists, such as Cranio-Sacral therapists, work with humans and not with chemical machines.

However, what is more disturbing to me, was the mind-set which first of all sets up childish experiments and then uses them to try and prove the falseness of something. This all sounds a bit like the witch trials of the middle-ages. The medical insurance and drug corporations must be getting desperate.

And, further, applying quantitative testing to a non-quantitative situation, and then pretending that this approach is somehow ‘scientific’, is highly misleading. If you were testing for the effectiveness of a drug on patients suffering from a discrete virus, then quantitative testing is highly appropriate and desirable. But, that is not what therapists, such as Cranio-Sacral therapists, are working with. These therapists are working with people’s life experiences, which are often totally unique to them. Hence it is inherently not a situation where quantitative testing has anything to add.

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