zen notes

I’m doing deep breathing exercises and noticing how the air meets resistance when I breathe in. So, I keep going until I feel the air flowing more freely. Now, I hear the swoosh of traffic coming through a small opening in the window ~ splashing water from a recent rain. I hear ringing in my ears ~ tinnitus from years of rock concerts. It doesn’t bother me; I still listen to music at high volume. When I pay attention, I notice how it masks the other sounds in the room. Then I think about how it interferes with voices on television ~ or conversations in a crowded room. I watch this train of thought flow until it vanishes. Next, I hear the sound of my internal editor going around in a crazy loop ..revising words on a paper I’m writing. When I pay closer attention, it gets self-conscious, picks up a notebook computer ..and goes into another room. I’m sitting here wondering what else is going to happen ..not anticipating anything specific.

Homing device

It smells good out here ..like incense. Kind of organic ..like rain-soaked earth. Although there’s an offshore flow, we are sheltered ..so the air is still and I feel warm on the beach. The ocean has a pungent aroma of it’s own ..like a living organism ..like the thousands or other living organisms it hosts. The sun illuminates ..the water evaporates ..and I take a deep breath. Makes me feel connected to everything out here. The sense of smell is the oldest and least understood ..but it has the most connections to other areas of the brain. On days like this it gives me a sense of belonging ..I hear my mother calling me ..the warmth of bread baking in the oven ..my grandmother’s gentle voice ..the one my dad inherited (thank goodness, my grandfather was a baritone) ..I feel enveloped by the elements ..like a cocoon ..like my mother’s womb ..I can see the sight of a smell ..and feel the warmth of it’s partnership with comforting memories of early childhood ..feels like home.

Observation deck

I’m sitting on the deck listening to a song by Small Faces (wicked messenger) ..I hear the distinctive sound of a Harley roaring by on the street below ..otherwise everything is quiet ..the music drowns out the swoosh of regular traffic ..and the voices in my head aren’t so loud ..the music drowns them out too. I take a sip of coffee and it scorches my tongue .. I spit it out in a spray ..followed by a couple mouthfuls of cold water ..and I laugh at myself ..which tells me I must be feeling better ..things aren’t bothering me ..I’m not shouting the usual string of obscenities. I can hear my plants talking; they’re parched and gasping for water ..I feel neglectful and tell them they’re first on my list. Makes me feel better knowing they’re taken care of. I enjoy the sound of a slide guitar. I’m reading ‘The Fountainhead’ by Ayn Rand ..I remember getting only halfway through her other book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ when I was in college ..but, the characters started speaking in sermons that went on for like five or six pages ..and the storytelling broke down ..it didn’t sound like real dialogue anymore. Fountainhead isn’t so bad ..it’s tells a good story ..except the characters don’t seem real ..it’s not the way people behave. I think it says more about the way the author wishes they’d behave ..a mixture of half-truths and schoolgirl fantasies ..where people never contradict themselves ..and follow ideals that never change. It was written in the 1940’s. I suppose life was simpler back then.

Stamp act

The first federal law in the U.S. prohibiting cannabis as an intoxicant was the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It was enacted primarily out of economic fears and immigration worries. During the depression, migrant workers from Mexico were no longer needed or welcome in the south and southwest states. People there were afraid that Mexican immigrants were undercutting American workers for jobs so they were trying to get them to return to Mexico. Since many of these immigrants smoked marijuana, it was thought that banning marijuana would help. So, in 1937 Congress passed The Marijuana Tax Stamp Act. The Act itself did not actually criminalize possession or use of marijuana, but required anyone doing so to pay roughly one dollar to receive the stamp. In the 1930’s, this would have been prohibitively expensive to migrant farm workers, however, it didn’t matter ..the government was only issuing them to doctors and dentists. This created a catch-22 for recreational users ..the penalty for not having the stamp was a fine of up to $2000 and five years’ imprisonment. This put recreational users at great risk, and for the Mexican immigrant, it meant certain deportation. In 1969, the case of Leary v. United States ruled that the Act was unconstitutional because it violated Fifth Amendment rights. Unless you were a doctor or dentist, applying for the tax stamp was an act of self-incrimination. In response, Congress repealed the 1937 marijuana stamp act and replaced it with the Title II of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This made it a felony to cultivate, possess or use marijuana for any reason ..including research. Although California law has lightened up and reduced some penalties to a misdemeanor, law enforcement agencies vigorously pursue cultivation in order to take advantage of property forfeiture and seizure laws.

Buddha road

Buddha’s observations on the nature of the mind come closer to modern-day neuroscience than any other philosophy I’ve read ..and his investigations did not end there ~ they had just begun. He saw how mental activity was mostly noise. A mixture of chatter ..imaginary offenses ..anticipatory dread ..feelings of betrayal and other fabrications. For six years he practiced watching this stream of debris flow by and vanish ..until he realized that there was nothing substantial or permanent about any of it ..and that believing so only created suffering. He continued down this road ..going past the conceptual ..through the neuro-sensory ..and beyond the phenomenal layers of consciousness. The further he went ..the freer he felt ..until he punched a hole through the ceiling and found an ever-expanding universe where all living beings are interconnected ..and he saw, first-hand, how the true nature of existence lay beyond the momentary vicissitudes of thought and feeling. He felt relief .. the fear of separation vanished. He chose to return and help others find the way out. We still hear the echo of his teachings resonating today. I do anyway.

Buddha mind

The properties of the mind that neuroscientists are deciphering today, were prefigured by Buddha over 2,500 years ago. He arrived at them through the practice of meditation. What he experienced was astonishing ..what he taught was revolutionary. The mind, he discovered, is not a reliable record of events ..it’s more like a second-hand storyteller. He saw impressions arriving, already interpreted by the act of observing ..then disappearing so quickly, all he had left was a feeling that something happened. He realized that he never got to see events as they actually occur ..and this was his great insight. The futher he looked ..the more he realized that nature was composed largely of energy ..and all he ever experienced were the fragments that his senses were tuned to receive ..followed by the re-creation his mind was pre-disposed to perform ..before everything got cleared away and a new cycle of impression-formation began. This doesn’t sound much different than the neuroscientist I hear describing the simple act of perception as a process of ‘active construction’ ..or claiming that concept-integration happens so quickly ..we rarely catch an ‘unaltered glimpse’ of reality.

The vedas

India and Indian scholars are bypassing the US in the field of biotechnology. They don’t have a history of division between the religious establishment and the scientific community. Indian religious culture has always been in harmony with scientific inquiry. Ancient Hindu texts (like the Vedas) prefigure modern-day cosmology by almost 3,000 years. Christianity, on the other hand, abhors developments in many fields of science ..especially biotech. The influence of evangelical Christians in this country has set medical science back decades. In the meantime, Indian researchers have developed non-toxic ways of battling cancer (using monoclonal antibodies) ..and safer methods for treating hemophilia (factor IX proteins). I wonder what else can be accomplished in a religious culture more in-tune with enlightenment and compassion ..than with ignorance and fear.

Drug war

While growing up in the sixties ..I regularly bought, sold and used drugs. Mostly marijuana and psychedelics. The experience taught me that drug laws don’t work ..and interdiction is a war that cannot be won. Newspaper reports confirm it daily. The US spends a half-billion dollars a year on anti-drug efforts in Mexico ..while trafficking operations have progressed all the way to the Canadian border. For one thing, laws don’t make a difference to the regular user; they take it or leave it for reasons of their own. Local drug dealers don’t worry much either ..if they’re discreet; they stay mostly below the radar. Trafficking, however, is another story. Trafficking is a high-risk venture, which, in turn, makes it a high-yield enterprise. It is so lucrative that contrabandistas can afford to outfit private militias ..and, using weapons purchased from the US, outgun local law-enforcement agencies. It’s gotten so brutal; twice as many civilians were killed in the crossfire last year than all American service men who have died in Iraq so far. I grieve. I have a friend who lives in Austin Texas and regularly crosses the border at Nuevo Laredo to visit family in Mexico. Nuevo Laredo is considered one of the most dangerous border towns ..second only to Juarez in number of civilian casualties. Now, if anything should happen to her ..I am going to be far more outraged at US lawmakers than Mexican drug cartels. I don’t believe the cartels would exist if their trade weren’t so lucrative. It’s not US demand that’s keeping them in business ..it’s the US war on drugs that’s doing it.

Khat tea

California just enacted a law making Khat tea a criminal offense. Thanks Joel (R-San Diego). I guess one person’s tea is another person’s poison. Kind of like mistaking a rope for a snake. Khat tea does have mild psychoactive properties ..it boosts alertness and feelings of well-being. That’s frightening. But then, so little is understood about the psyche that it’s probably best to keep it under the authority of the state rather than the sovereignty of the individual. Anyone who gets a heightened ‘sense of self’ deserves to be cut down at the knees anyhow.

neuro notes

I think my brain works like a paleontologist ..piecing together the world from tiny fragments of information that have been frozen, chipped away ..then passed through sensory pathways the size of nano-tubes. Not only am I dealing with an extremely small, and highly selective sample ..it doesn’t last that long, only about 125 milliseconds I am told. Then it’s time to refresh the system and let a new bit-stream through. When I consider the tremendous amount of information that’s out there ..I’m convinced that my senses must have relatively narrow bandwidth. The fact that I can recognize anything at all is due to the high-speed integration power of a fairly recent invention called the cerebral cortex. It’s a device that allows me to see the whole elephant ..while rubbing only part of it’s belly. Problem is ..I don’t always construct the docile animal that's there ..sometimes I build a ferocious wildebeast instead.

psych notes

Sometimes I ask myself ..is this what I want to write ..or what I think other people want me to write. Sometimes I feel rebellious and answer myself, shouting: “It’s my blog ..I’ll do what I want.” Either way, I’m struggling with something going on inside my head .. telling me what is and what isn’t appropriate to write about. I flash back to my schoolboy days ..listening to some instructor ask me if I have anything pertinent to say. Since I don’t see an instructor here at the moment ..and no one in particular comes to mind ..I must have created an internal instructor telling me what it thinks everyone else wants to hear. I tell myself that I’ve got to move on ..and not be bound by childhood experience ..I’m an adult for Christ sake. Nobody cares what I write anymore. But it persists ..especially when I’m telling myself to ignore it and move on. So, I see only one way out ..co-habitation. Learn to live with the beast of conditioned-existence. Make friends with it ..serve it tea ..or wine. Maybe then it’ll lower it’s guard and I’ll be able to see what exists on the other side more often.

zen notes

I sometimes refer to the ‘mediation session’ as an ‘observation period’. I think observation is a good English word for meditation. In western psychology they have what is know as the method of ‘naturalistic observation’. It helps researchers see what develops, in a natural setting, with as little interference as possible. I think this is a very good way to understand meditation. Interference, in the form of judgment and interpretation, happens so fast ..we rarely get a glimpse of things as they are. So, I find it helpful to meditate, look inside, and observe my own mental and emotional activity, without judgment or interference, for a few moments each day.

(There, I hope that doesn't sound too much like a Stuart Smalley affirmation)