Negotiating the Soul Commons

terms in play: Body Commons, Soul Commons, Spirit Commons, psychic contentment, path of comfort, path of ease

In the Soul Commons I always maneuver for a position of comfort and ease. Comfort and ease create a space of psychic contentment where I’m not inconvenienced by the uncertainties of the world. Ironically, striving for psychic contentment suffers the inconvenience of always having to avoid being inconvenienced. In a world of constant change, being inconvenienced is inevitable, and so I have to make compromises to feel some kind of comfort and ease. These two terms, comfort and ease, can easily be idealized as having to put forth no effort and being trouble free, but it’s much more complicated than that.

At the heart of seeking comfort and ease is the sense of "I", the experiencer of comfort and ease. In our attempt to find ourselves, we all “pursue” the experiencer, “I”, through the Soul Commons, right down the two paths of comfort and ease simultaneously. But in a chase, anything can happen.

For instance, chasing “I” down the path of comfort often transforms "I" into an objectified "me", dropping my focus more into the pleasures of the body. One of the cheers on the path of comfort might be, “Bring it to me! Bring it to me! Bring it to me!” The “it” is any kind of sensory input. For example, I indulge in “comfort food” when feeling stressed out, lonely, or depressed. Entertaining my five senses to achieve psychic contentment means engaging the world of matter and form as a relationship, becoming the object of its “affections.” I make the material world my lover. In this way I drop into the the Body Commons.

Often frustrated in my pursuit of psychic contentment in the Soul Commons, I easily get diverted into the Body Commons, the world of the senses. Finding psychic contentment in the Body Commons is much easier than dealing with the unpredictability of the Other in the Soul Commons.

In contrast to the path of comfort, on the path of ease we simply stop chasing the “I” and rest in our “I-ness.” Resting in our “I-ness,” we become a follower of the Way.

"Which way is that?” you might ask. Or might not, for which in either case, I for some reason feel compelled to continue with my narrative, following my own way, as if I was Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It My Way,” which brings up an interesting point.

I’m not Frank Sinatra! I’m “me” seeking satisfaction in the arrangement of words on this page which will relieve the tension I feel between having nothing to say and something meaningful to say, thereby achieving psychic contentment.

Obviously, besides the pleasures of the senses, I seek psychic contentment in the pleasures of mind and heart, the Soul Commons. Either way involves chasing the “I” right into “me,” into the “me” that will receive the rewards of my efforts, psychic contentment.

The difference between seeking psychic contentment in the pleasures of the mind and heart as opposed to seeking it in the pleasures of the senses is this. Romping around in the Body Commons (five senses) can become an habitual pattern to avoid the existential separation from the Other. An absent minded focus on feeding the five senses, whether it’s an Ipod plugged into the ears, hours sitting in a movie theater, snacking all day, or self-pleasuring into the night, is always an escape from “me” ‘s ultimate aloneness, feeling of separateness.

That existential separation, “me” ‘s ultimate aloneness, is experienced in infinite ways, from a very subtle anxiety to a depressing despair. When singing my song in the Soul Commons, that flowering field of hearts and minds, feeling alienated from the Other is not so easily avoided. I am confronted with it over and over again. Someone misunderstands my words, intentions, or actions. The Other’s perspective completely offends me. In a moment of carelessness and cavalier behavior toward someone, I say something that alienates them from me. I demean the value of someone in my mind because I judge them to be...(usually something within me that I am unconscious of and unwittingly despise in myself).

All these obstacles, diversions, and distractions on the path of comfort leave little time to notice my co-evolving journey on the path of ease. Witness the small amount of space I have in this post dedicated to “following the Way.” Following the Way on the path of ease lacks the drama of the path of comfort. That drama is like a strange attractor in the chaos of life. I feel more alive as an experiencing “self”.

Besides the Taoist designator, the Way, for the path of ease, we could explore gnosis; Christ Consciousness; Buddha Mind; the “I” of Vedanta; or the Self of Kashmir Shaivism. In atheistic or agnostic perspectives, principles of morality and ethics would apply. They all point to a realization, an awareness, that transcends and includes psychic contentment. The teachings and practices of these various approaches to reality and their influence on culture and society constitutes the Spirit Commons.

I have very briefly and of course by no means completely delineated the Body Commons, the Soul Commons, and the Spirit Commons, which I base mostly on my reading of the three kayas in Buddhism, nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya, and dharmakaya. My intention in this blog is to continue the exploration of these three Commons as they relate to the individual body, mind, and spirit. In this respect my effort is inspired by and mirrors Wilber’s agenda as summarized by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens (2008). “In fact Wilber’s whole integral agenda can be summed up as the integration of body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature.”

Here the Spirit Commons relates to self, the Soul Commons relates to culture, and the Body Commons relates to nature. In expanding our concerns for Body, Mind, and Spirit into a corresponding concern for the Body Commons, the Soul Commons, and the Spirit Commons we can integrate our personal development with the development of the human collective. I hope the terms I have introduced have some sticky quality about them that will make them useful in the many efforts at creating an integral praxis.

References
Esbjorn-Hargens (2008), Intersubjective Musings: A Response to Christian de Quincey’s “The Promise of Integralism”, Part One: Shake the Rug, section: The Ontology of Emotions, 2nd paragraph.

Bibliography
Aboufafia, Mitchell (1986) The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975) Truth and Method
Hardin, Garrett (1968) Tragedy of the Commons

The Soul Commons

Every morning, waking to infinite space above me
with finite earth below me, I begin another day.
But the end of infinity I cannot grasp,
and solid ground I cannot enter.

Living in this “in between” world
Spirit and matter are shadow companions
as I look to others for understanding,
and still others look to me.

This looking, searching, probing,
wanting for something meaningful
betwixt and between each other,
walking this hard rock earth
under infinite sky is the Soul Commons.

The sun shines down,
flowers blossom,
streams flow,
birds sing,
and our hearts stir.

Murder, rape, wars, genocide,
greed, hatred, and ignorance
afflict us.
and our hearts stir.

Compassion only finds a home
in the Soul Commons.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr....An Act of God...and Three Days without a Bowel Movement

Really!...three days, and here is where the mind really needs to loosen up, because I was up until 4:30 am trying to figure out how to get my email subscription widget to work among other bells and whistles for this blog, carried away by the passion of my vision for what I might make of this blogging adventure that will, stated with just the slightest hyperbole, absolutely no hubris, and in all humility attract, hundreds of thousands if not millions of readers, not stopping for a second to ask myself if translating my ephemeral vision of personally differentiating Body, Mind, and Spirit into a mass social reintegration of them and world wide movement is realistic, because "realistic" is an ephemeral target in itself, and there's no time to waste in creating a vision that will save the world from becoming a devastated, global-climate-changing, uninhabitable, solar heat sink or chilly ice chink of a planet, twenty-first century humanity destined to either be the failure of all civilizations or the "go to" species that will turn our runaway biosphere around, and so yes, no time to waste, even when a personal container of waste such as myself has recently been so backed up, due to a failed back and lying in bed for three days, after writhing on the floor of my apartment last Thursday evening in intense pain from muscle spasms that spread across the width of my back from the sacrum up to mid-back, from a combination of that late night email widget quest and two days later having bodywork that concentrated on releasing tension from, and thus weakening, the anterior (front) of my body to the complete ignoring of my back side, which gradually as the evening wore on discovered its greater superiority in strength and began taking advantage, at first in little twinges of pain getting up or down from a chair, and eventually surmounting a full blitzkrieg, dropping me to the floor in excruciating pain and once down, mobilizing wave after wave of spasms as I tried to make it to the bathroom to pee, not able to even pull myself up onto the toilet seat, emptying the small waste paper basket of its contents onto the bathroom floor so I could finally relieve my bladder into it, my bladder extremely thankful, but not so much that it would aid me in lifting, without alarming pain, my makeshift pee bucket up high enough to empty into the toilet, so compassionately placing my wayward pee in its makeshift bucket next to the sewer transit platform (toilet) for a future visitor to send on its way, and worming my way toward the bedroom, writhing in more painful spasms after having tried to pull myself up to a standing position in the bathroom door frame, on the floor my right calf raising objections to my back, countering its blitzkrieg with excruciating cramps, then rolling, folding, squirming, cramping and spasming through the narrow hallway toward the bedroom and gripping the sheets to pull myself into bed, where I finally find relief and quickly fall off to sleep and remain for three days in a kind of semi-delirious, bedside-radio-political-news-blaring-"dream-world"- mixing-with-"real-world" passing of time that I recall as follows, with friends bringing me food, my immobility quickly agreed to by my bowels in sympathy, knowing the bed was no place to make their deposit, an agreement that mortgaged my three, pain free days in bed with their accumulating shitty interest backing up in those very bowels, like a troubled mortgage-backed security, unregulated by the Senate Banking Committee, a situation in the words of The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, that "'continues to be very unpredictable, and very worrisome,' and that inaction could lead to a recession.", his words being so on target, as I had to cancel three part-time gigs at Oakland schools, representing a tutoring vendor, lost income of about $180, but as "Senator Dodd called the crisis 'entirely foreseeable and preventable, not an act of God,'" he won my vote of confidence for hinting at the cause of the problem, over extending myself, staying up until 4:30 a.m. on the computer, negligence on my part for not maintaining infrastructure, a negligence that is ultimately the result of an uninformed, illinformed, disinformed, and quite inactive Body politic, Mind maneuvering for position, and Spirit bleeding ambition, a system out of balance, not as Treasury Secretary Paulson described it, "an outdated regulatory system," to which in my delirious state I shouted into the radio, "bullshit! I am generally very regular, and my thyroid recently checked out in the middle of the normal range," asserting that my Body is governed by its own rules, as is the Body Politic, laws broken, ignored, and skirted at all levels of society in the universal triangulation of Body, Mind, and Spirit, or more abstractly, matter, idea, and meaning, evidenced here in my mind willing itself onto this material page in a tumble of words to advance its agenda in this sphere of language and thought, but also aquiesing to my lying in bed with an ice pack to mend and make amends to my body for my mind's overzealous blogging ambition to reveal Spirit, whose universal presence is in my mind's awareness, my body's bones, tissues, sweat, smell, and shit in a play of Consciousness that witnessed me finally paying off my three day mortgage with much straining and groaning to the sound of a small plop, a big plop, a tiny plop, and a grand finale, very large, toilet echoing plop, I in complete awe of my body's production and thankful at last for some small movements without pain, which I made slipping down to the floor onto my knees, and then turned to observe up close just how big a production it was, one big colossal turd, I, Spirit manifest, witnessing Spirit manifest, reflecting the manifesto that Secretary Henry M Paulson Jr. sent for viewing by congress, which stated in section 8 of his bailout package, "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency," to which I ask, " How constipated is that?"

Please rate this post in the black box below.

My sources: The Huffington Post
"Buyout Plan for Wall Street Is a Hard Sell on Capitol Hill" by Mark Landler and Steven Lee Myers, Published: Sept. 23, 2008
"Dirty Secret of the Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter" by Jason Links, Sept. 22, 2008

"Spirit Bleeding Blabber" from Sarah Palin Has Me Thinking

Not to pick on Sarah Palin, but since she put herself out there as capable of being one cancer away from the nuclear trigger, we really, really, really need to ask ourselves if we want a Spirit bleeder in that position, a Spirit bleeder referring to the term Spirit bleeding which I came up with in my last post and got me to thinking how we might understand it, from both the personal and collective perspective, first letting Spirit have a wide range of meanings that have one central intersecting meaning that refers to the capacity for and energy of love/ compassion, a love that uplifts one's spirits, expands one's sense of wellbeing, and continuously creates the opportunities for a consciousness expanding understanding of life and one's own being, all of this giving us a definition of Spirit, which depending on one's identification as religious, irreligious, nonreligious, atheist, agnostic or politician, shouldn't offend, as each person can add what they want to in terms of a Kosmos, a first cause, God, Absolute, Big Bang or for those less imaginatively endowed, little bang, but the point being for a blog that aims at being all-inclusive, I am attempting to give a malleable texture to these posts, and in this particular word, Spirit, something that the reader can hold as a content of the imagination, an aspect or quality of mind and body, as a soul, self, atman or whatever more expansive or boundaryless understanding one wants and turning to that other word, bleeding, combined with Spirit to indicate a lessening of Spirit, an absence of love, an injury to one's sense of wellbeing, inhibiting consciousness expanding understanding, leaving us with two two-word combinations, Spirit bleeding, as a qualifier and Spirit Bleeder, a person who bleeds the Spirit from others, and finally, recognizing that we all have the capacity to and sometimes act as Spirit bleeders, this post is to begin the differentiation of body, mind, and Spirit with the intention of "sitting" in each through meditations to come in future posts, with the idea of gaining some awareness of how they affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions, thus providing a foundation for integrating them into a greater sense of self awareness and presence in the now.

Is this going to fly?

Please share your thoughts on this by clicking on the "comment" link below.

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Sarah Palin DENIES BLINKING!

ABC New's Charlie Gibson put some challenging questions to Sarah Palin about possibly becoming our next vice president, asking Sarah Palin if she had asked herself, "Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I - will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?" - all questions about the contents of her mind, what knowledge and experience she possesses, being possibly only one cancer away from being leader of the "free world," and her answer, like many of her answers, shifted away from the subject matter of the question, the contents of her mind, to the behavior of her body, "I didn't hesitate...knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on...victory in war, you can't blink...So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate," and she returned to this theme of a non-blinking persona toward the end of the interview, after Charlie Gibson asked her if she agreed with the Bush doctrine, and she asked, "In what respect, Charlie?" and Charlie Gibson replies, "The Bush - well, what do you - what do you interpret it to be?" and without blinking, Sara Palin answers, "His world view," to which Charlie Gibson corrects her with, "No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war," to which Sarah Palin rambles on without blinking about President Bush's attempts to "rid the world of Islamic extremism" (because she unwittingly thinks al qaeda is an Islamic organization), and finally Charlie Gibson gives it away, "The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?" and Sarah Palin without blinking rambles on, and Charlie Gibson comes back with the same question worded more specifically, "Do we have the right to anticipatory self-defense?..." and Sarah Palin rambles, and Charlie Gibson comes back again with even more specificity, "Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?" and Sarah Palin without blinking rambles on, but Charlie Gibson persists, "But Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government," and Sarah Palin rambles on with, "in order to stop Islamic extremists (please substitute al qaeda here)...we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target," indicating a body resolved to a mission to not blink in the absence of sufficient contents of the mind to know what is being asked of her, a mind on the blink, for which she offers as a substitute, a wide-eyed non-blinking face, not unlike a deer in the headlights kind of face, in her conflicted triangulation of body, mind, and Spirit, attempting to fill the space of Spirit with her god of retribution, hinted at with Charlie Gibson's comment and question, "You said recently, in your old church, 'Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task from God.' Are we fighting a holy war?", to which Sarah Palin's mind blinks, "You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote," to which Charlie Gibson replies, "Exact words," and Sarah Palin rambles, with her BODY 's eyes blank, her MIND on the blink, and her SPIRIT bleeding blabber.

Note 1: My statement, "MIND on the blink" is meant to be funny, but it is also ridiculing. The two questions it brings up for me is, "Does ridicule have a place in public discourse? And if so, is it justified as countering a kind of "idiot compassion," a term coined by Chogyam Trungpa? Or is this just the quandries of a tortued soul who hasn't found the proper expression for his anger and frustration concerning the state of the world. Please share your thoughts on this by clicking on the "comment" link below.

LINKS: Idiot Compassion 1 Idiot Compassion 2

Note 2: If you enjoyed the read, please click on the envelope icon below to send a link to a friend.

sitting

Dear Teacher, I sit by the window, at a table in The House of Curry restaurant on College Avenue in Berkeley, one of several “offices” here at which I spend much time, sometimes late into the evening, like tonight, chugging chai, now looking at the time on my cell phone display, which reads 9:11, a rather ominous number in our collective psyche, somehow fitting though, given the nature of this sentence, a jetliner of words streaming out of nowhere from this prodigal terrorist of a student, full of explosive notions that he flies into the friendly skies of dharmakaya “I am-ness” with an angry derisive “my ass-ness!”, angry at those two words that he always resists, first the “I” and then the “am” that foil him every time from grocking the much touted witness consciousness, the “I” immediately separating him from the “am” which he can never blend fast enough with the “I”, wondering now if it’s a failure of the English translation, but not really caring, knowing that it will never do it for his own it-ness, not that static and dichotic “I am” peeping Tom on reality do-nothing in itself “I am”, not in this world of constant flow and change, where I am wanting always for a more tantric transformative becoming through anti-grammatical first person to second person to third person shifts, slips, and slides ripping language to shreds, that self-limiting medium of supposed communication that is eternally bound to fail us, even in our attempts to deliver meditation with words like “I just sit,” refusing to acknowledge the brutal simple reality that sit happens.