On Anger, Others and Where to Mine Mine Mindfully — In the Body
Mens Encounter, Cursing and, With Avidyà Anger, Something Nascent from Gautama Comes
Introduction
I had a recent encounter with a small group of men, a group who came together, via computer from Europe and North America, with foresight and intention to encounter this small group of men. This time our focus of curiosity quickly turned towards anger. I’m not sure exactly what the spark was that took us in that direction. Likely I contributed something towards the firing of our interest because of my own recent experience of my body flushing hot with anger at an old friend’s blind convid related ‘good’ intentioned debasement of me as a jab-free idiot unsafe to be my self following pacemaker surgery in México. She pleaded that I grow up and move past the consequences of having dared to refuse being injected, to come ‘home’ to be forgiven and cared for by my Canadian friends and family and the state medicine that so recently turned their backs on me and millions like me. Why now? Because, now, she wrote, ’Covid is over. No one talks about it now.’ On that encounter with my anger, her denial of the continuation of the convid and more, see:
I Get Triggered and Want to Morally, Humourlessly, Chastise A Friend’s Naïveté
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At the meet I shared this experience and, with curiosity and no agenda, it was into anger that we boldly went. [All names but mine and Yoshiko’s changed.]
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Swearing, I Swear I Was There!
The conversation quickly turned to swearing as maybe the expression of anger. At one point Beckett shared his love and preference for the feel and taste of swearing in Russian — I liked it too! Odd that my father studied Russian with intensity during his mid-life crisis that initiated, in large part, his commencement and mastery of official university studies of Russian history. It seems likely that those studies disabused him of his life-long liberal delusion of communism as a social good. I rarely swear with or without anger. I was gently challenged on being able to swear, and without hesitation confirmed my ability to swear, spontaneously and loudly for Björn while sitting in front of my laptop in a quiet café — my voice echoed off the walls. I surprised the patrons without shocking the Mexicanos because, in México, loud noises are a part of the scene. My expressed swear was dismissed as ‘not really an expression of anger’ in a way similar to Beckett’s description of his play-swear/anger at his chickens. He described how his play-swear/anger appeared to help keep them calm. Perhaps his and my swearing are examples that come from the equanimity of a calm assertive energy.
Björn was incredulous that I didn’t know the most common swear in México, that translates to shitting on (Mary) Mother of God, I think. I haven’t spent enough time with active Spanish speaking swearers, I guess.
For a while I was put into the hot seat by the organiser who wanted for us to do a deep dive into anger using some nuance and extrapolations from my description of my experience. And because of some aspects of my apparent tranquility around it. I found it very stimulating and the exchange prompted me to really look at some things within my self that I hadn’t seen as significant. I was calm and joyful — I didn’t feel attacked. And there was a moment or two when I did feel, however, that tiny pinch of the ego looking for confirmation of my validity. So tiny, and yet a sign that there is something I’m not seeing. Also Ken, with a magical / intuitive leap of imagination pointed to something I hadn’t seen or had enough imagination to see. He asked if there was a connection between the ostensibly disparate experiences of my having angrily vandalised a car when I was a juvenile and my joyful reaction to Yoshiko raging at me with full on physical assaults and a snarling intention to hurt me in some way. (More on that a bit later.) And I was surprised and mostly ambivalent to be described has having an (annoying) Mona Lisa-like smile of impassivity during the exploration. That prompted Björn to ask the group if anyone felt that they had the power or ability to poke me enough or in other ways spark in me genuine anger. Three stated that they felt that they could. They were not asked, nor volunteered, to do so. This time.
As I was moving through this essay looking at my post-anger-meet towards self-discovery using anger as a or the clue, I noticed that I like to keep writing and/or thinking things like ‘I don’t remember the last time I swore to express real body-felt anger’ — like what I felt two weeks ago. With that reaction, for example, I mentally swore ‘Fuck off FrE!’ The swear remained mindfully unvoiced because it didn’t rise up from that preverbal, perhaps primordial amygdala place inside me to be formed, or have its texture energised, by my guts, throat, tongue and lips. I didn’t feel my heart really wishing FrE to be somehow, justifiably, punished with the power of my remote cursing of her existence in that moment of her condescension. Was the anger real and the swearing fake?
As I write this I am looking to somehow re-experience that moment of the swear as it arose into my mind during the short walk to the kitchen dishes, immediately after having read my ‘friend’s triggering email. My intention, now, is to see if I can determine whether or not I am misrepresenting that, as yet another delusional narrative that keeps my self safe, hiding behind a ‘Mona Lisa’ smile and a dark place of shadow-anger within me. I am consciously well aware that I had been well seeded with mostly unvoiced anger as foetus, infant, child and juvenile with my parents’ constant rage that only occasionally exploded as expressed words or as violent actions or assaults on my corporal form. (I’ve explored some of this in my Dear Terry and Dear Claude epistles. They begin here:
Inspired by the Sacredness of the Mexican's Energy for los días de los muertos.
And
Who Were You? Asks One Version of A Chronic Nose-Picking Son).
Doubting Thomases and Yoga as Physical Compensation and Spiritual By-Pass
I, like Björn, am skeptical of my own narrative around anger — that damnable New Age need for denialism still befouling truths and abetting my ego’s need to be perfect in my experience of, and in being seen in, this life! We both share especially angry mothers. So I keep circling around this, thinking that the wanted depth of my equanimity is too ‘good’ to be true, that in reality it is in fact something wanted, and thus absent. That absence being hinted at, perhaps, with that tiny pinch I felt in the hot seat. Or perhaps not. We’ll see what comes up.
When I left home in late 1979 I commenced what became an intense thirty-five year autodidactic study of Self with an extensive focus on, although it was far from being exclusive to, Jung’s analytical psychology — that was initially begun because of dreams. In 2014 that study was complemented and eventually extended as the study of yoga which, in these last ten years, has become increasingly a deep focus on yoga’s critical foundations as very subtle psychological / spiritual investigations and practices that, unexpectedly, beautifully extend Jung’s ideas.
As others have said, and of which I am more appreciative now, yoga practices that focus exclusively on the body are woefully incomplete and are suggestive of that practice being an enabler of yogic spiritual by-passing. (I discuss yoga as an addictive by-pass in the previously noted essay Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' A: Yoga as drug.) And that it being a by-pass points to its physicality as compensation for the overarching societal debasement of the spiritual nature of physical life. Our proper and socially accepted spiritual and psychological and intellectual pursuits all are considered ‘true’ and/or ‘pure’ as distinct from the dirt and impurity of this foul body, which debases our spirit and/or is at best, only useful as that which houses, not creates, the logos of thought and moral beauty.
Thus I see that we compensate for body as base or foul by over adulating official sport or, unofficially, with a kind of subversive act or expressed esoterica in such things as yoga, tattooing and sexual perversion. Adulation of the body as art or as subversion (or both together) may be thought of as forms of grounding unhinged ideology, as a kind of lightning rod to shunt off from the body the pent up energy created by the official morally correct debasement of the body as a foul curse, as a dirty meat suit of the soul or logos, as the source and home of sin. Note that some Christian sects consider yoga to be a form of devil worship. For example, I have a friend who refuses to practice meditation because his official protestant church doctrine teaches that meditation is a devil’s construct even though he appreciates that it is clear from scripture that Christ practiced some form of meditation.
And it just came to me, this thought / question about how this relates to our society’s overwhelming presence of addictive behaviours. Addiction expert and yogi Tommy Rosen has beautifully and powerfully elaborated that addictive behaviours arise from what he calls being unconsciously stuck within ‘the frequency of addiction’. And that that frequency of addiction arises from or is sourced in the omnipresent, thus mostly unseen, feelings of anxiety. Addictions arise when we look to assuage that anxiety and find a something that gives, in the beginning, relief from it. However that something, being external to the source of that anxiety becomes, with time and use, less and less effective and ultimately a self or social destructive addiction. My question is, to what extent is that anxiety the stress of not being grounded in our bodies? The less grounded, the more stress and the higher that frequency of addiction? Tommy Rosen’s answer is 100%, and is the core of his curative to being stuck in the destructive manifestations of living within the personal and societal frequencies of addiction.
It seems to me that we become easily addicted to emotions, especially the strong ones like anger. The lefties are exemplars of uncontrolled anger, with their anger being deliberately stoked to create chaos. The righties are likewise addicted to anger, in my opinion, although their effort is to keep us from chaos by returning us to the perceived order provided by organised Christianity.
To what extent has my continuation to experience my unseen anger, as manifested as the variety of pains in my body, been expressing my high base level of unseen and unacknowledged anxiety? That anxiety being born at the time of my conception because of the environment within which that conception happened?
Going In Circles
And every time I complete the circle-check I feel that I’m not seeing well or fully — mentally I am going in circles of a self delusion I’m not seeing! And yet I find myself unable to see what is false. When I start to write, to look and explore, I get inappropriately sleepy, uncomfortable and/or turn somewhere for distraction. This time, however, I am almost completely free of the nose-picking compulsion! That freedom is suggestive of progress and that this discomfort does not arise from devouring-mother trauma! (See ‘Dear Terry Epistle’, linked above.)
Introducing Avidyà and Vidyà, You Will See A Lot of Them Today
All of which points to the truly ancient human ‘problem’, well captured in the Sanskrit word avidyà: to see as true what is false and to see as false what is true. (‘Vidyà ’, without the ‘a’, means ‘to see’ and is the root of our word ‘video’. The ‘a’ in front negates vidyà.) Although it is often translated as ignorance, my sense of ‘avidyà ’ is that ‘ignorance’ is a poor translation because ignorance is the consequence of not seeing properly. Although it could be argued, perhaps, that from that ignorance avidyà gets emboldened into such things as lefties and righties fighting it out between themselves, each with their own and owned perceived truths and falsities. And yet the deep yoga practices of people like Patañjali and Gautama and Christ all argue that right seeing is that which has the power to clear away ignorance. (‘Apocalypse’ means to see what was once hidden beneath a cover. So, energetically, ‘apocalypse’ is also ‘vidyà ’.) Therefore avidyà and ignorance are not interchangeable nor are they an example of the chicken and egg problem.
Here I elaborate the definition of avidyà to include the simple act of just not seeing. For example, my not seeing something that I feel is around or in me while writing this essay. Or when I didn’t see my obesity. And when people like Jordan Peterson or Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein, clear-eyed experts on political tyranny, who failed to see medical tyranny slip in hidden behind a devouring mother energy dressed in doctor’s garb.
Or my ‘friend’ not seeing her delusion nor the condescension arising from that delusion. This form of avidyà, simply to not see, is likely the bigger of the three forms and has some overlap to the other two as well.
What we don’t see, or what we see falsely, are the motherlode of our shadow projections. With that thought comes the now obvious one — one I didn’t think of until now — that maybe the flush of anger I felt from my old fiend was, in reality, her having mirrored something, a delusion, in me that I am also not seeing. If so, what? What? Seeing really is hard when we question the beliefs we think we are seeing! Something true is often just a belief we have stopped questioning, that we no longer see as optional.
Somehow seeing accurately, vidyà, predates both ‘truthing’ and ‘falsing’ and provides us with the light that will energise and develop our strength because, when we see truly and clearly the events of our lives and our experiences of them as they are, we become the path to our own discovery and success. (My adaptation from hexagram five’ from the I Ching: ‘Waiting (Nourishment)’.)
Furthermore it seems to me that the focus or perhaps the bias of the definitions of avidyà that I’ve read are to create the idea in our minds and psychology that the primary problem being expressed by the concept of avidyà is with how we see the external conditions of our lives. It is the out there that tricks us into errors of perception and therefore ignorance. It is the intangible in here wherein vidyà and truth are to be found. All that glitters is not gold, look within and similar homilies and tropes, for example. The hallowed cure in eastern practices is generally focused on meditation, mantra and pranayama guided by authorities of various sorts. So that the dedicated seeker is best to get a proper guru / enlightened monk or the like and, depending on their mentor, get on with removing the delusion of somatic life. Nothing tangible is real. Nothing to see, here folks. Move inside.
Yoga practices are assisted with various bibles that guide seekers to relax the body, expand the length of pranayama, and expand the bodily and mental stillness of sitting meditation. It is these, we are told, that have the power to bring to us, spontaneously and often unpredictably, the true awareness that all of our external experience is false: the goal is to know the inner unfindable ‘Self’ in such a way that it knows that the tangibility of the outer world is a false perception. We are to embody, mindfully, that the tangible doesn’t actually exist except as a by-product of a deluded imagination filled with narratives that continue to hope for controlling and re-writing as absolute golden truth each of our tiny glittering narratives of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ past and future.
The present is a violation of that self and it is to be avoided, despite all those exhortations to be present in the now: it is our experience of somatic life that is the now! Yet Buddhist practices strive to turn that into delusion at the same time that it directs us towards mind/mindfulness as the singular truth, despite the mind being that part of us that is comprised solely of narratives and, that by being narratives, are necessarily either in the past or the future.
Echos of Post-Modernism?
This really sounds like a deep core element of post-modern relativism. And now I wonder to what extent did post-modernism’s developers steal from — or were ideologically fed via the New Age denialism promoters — this form of the ‘denial-of-life’ idea as a sneaky debasement of everyone and everything into becoming completely equal in quality, value and experience. Without seeing the differentials between the qualities of our various experiences in life, we have effectively removed from our life-experience both quality and value! There is no ‘good’ and no ‘bad’. Learning now becomes meaningless.
… The world is grown so bad That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. Since every Jack became a gentleman, There’s many a gentle person made a Jack. (Richard III, I.iii.71-4. Edward de Vere, aka Shakespeare.)
Thus we live in a time when a stupidity, regardless how big — such as denying the base reality of being male or female — has the same intrinsic value as free speech, freedom of movement, the importance and power of being an autonomous individual, etc. And that makes it almost impossible to argue against, which is demonstrated with the progressive liberal humanists ‘losing’ arguments to the grounded conservative traditionalists and thinking all the while that they are the ‘winners’: they have no conception of what constitutes quality of thought, idea, word, speech because everything is the bland tanned inoffensive musak band. And we see this New Age form of denialism of quality when everyone gets a participation ribbon; the denial of DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — being intrinsically the degradation of quality and character, and the like.
Yesterday I saw this very clearly expressed with Charlie Kirk’s engagement with a university student, someone fully indoctrinated who is surely a poster child of the post modern / New Age denialism.
She is visibly stunned at the thought that it is a good idea, even if possible, to pursue in school the concepts of the ‘good’, the ‘true’ and the ‘beautiful’ — difficult ones, of course! See “Charlie Kirk Educates Rude, Woke College Goth!” Late in this clip Kirk repeats to her and the crowd ‘~20:04 [Kirk:] We’re talking about college as a scam. And you’re a perfect example, like one of the very best…’ [student:] ‘Why thank you.’ [Kirk:] ‘… I’ve ever seen. To show the intellectual drivel that is taught on a college campus.’
The clip is an almost pure example of the devaluation of life, not just so called ‘intellectual’ life with the destruction of thought’s ability to make distinctions of quality. Kirk did his best to help lead her from her moras, and yet while we can lead a horse to water, we are powerless to get it to drink. To see clearly, with vidyà, is difficult and made doubly so when ideology and delusion have been sanctified as truth in our schools. Delusion is without bound, and is always the other person’s problem.
It really does look like post-modernism is ‘simply’ a New Age generated gmo-based philosophical pabulum version of eastern philosophy that was taken out of context from its cultural setting to become nearly tasteless philosophical / spiritual near-food that has only the pretext of nutritional value even while it is starving its student-victims who have turned away from the richness of experiencing the diversity that comprises life in each moment. Kirk’s example also demonstrates how the progressive liberal humanists attack the conservative traditionalists with ungrounded moral justification and virtue-signalling idiocy — New Age post modernism is a toothless structure. So how has it been so destructive? And in turn, Kirk demonstrates very well how the traditionalists confront such virtue-signalling idiocy with grounded authority-based moralism.§
Note that both sides are moralist!
§Shortly before posting this, during my break for lunch after finishing what I thought then was my final edit, I experienced a nice synchronicity: I heard Jamie Wheal say, about the liberal progressive humanists:
Never mind the woke, the social justice folks, they can’t organise themselves out of a goddam paper bag. At this moment, they are not actually a threat. They are a pain in the ass, but they are not a threat.’ (Jamie Wheal ~1:03:08 with Jordan Peterson in ‘The Rebirth of God: Pathology and Promise | Jamie Wheal | EP 485.’)
With Kirk and the traditional conservatives the authorities that ground their arguments are primarily Judeao-Christian theology and classical Greek-Roman philosophy. Often they use social ‘facts’ of history and contemporary studies as authorities as well. The New Age post-modernists cannot cope with that kind of confrontation. Note: I’m not saying, here, that Kirk’s authorities are correct! Or that the pursuit of that which is true, good and beautiful are necessary constituents of a great education. However, these do have the structure to demand of us the discernment to figure out what has qualities that affirm life and those that negate it. Humanity’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with these ideas, and so likely, although not necessarily, they have something to offer we mere mortals. Actually, in a broad and general way, I have come to have great skepticism of the correctness of authoritarian morality as the ultimate touchstone of ‘truth’. The liberals who are challenged by them, however, have nothing with which to argue because their ideologically created ignorance and inability to discern quality is far too vast to enable them to do that effectively.
And Now to Question the Authority of Buddhism. How? By Citing the Authority of Siddhārtha Gautama of Course! Where Will I End Up on this Möbius Strip of Denouncing Authority by Citing An Authority?
In the last fourteen or eighteen months I have come to understand, with perhaps a bit more vidyà, with help from Michael Stone and Stephen Batchelor who have directed my attention towards what Gautama may have actually taught as documented in the Pali Canon, how Gautama’s teachings clearly contradict fundamentally what Buddhism officially teaches. It is actually quite incredible. In the 1980s I dismissed Buddhism because I saw and felt that it denied bodily physical reality with a similar kind of disdain and dismissal of experience that I saw in the Judaeo-Christian tenets and practices. And now I’m slowly nibbling at the edges of the enormous Pali Canon and reading or listening to people who question the blind faith that has been demanded of Buddhist ‘truthers’ the same way the Catholic Church demanded apostolic, blind, faith.
A core difference between Gautama’s teachings and Buddhist practises and tenets is that Buddhism denies the validity of our experience of life except as delusion and the source of suffering. And that is exactly the opposite of what Siddhārtha Gautama taught! And what he re-iterated to Ananda on his death bed: trust your Self, your experience of life. (My paraphrase.)
After Gautama nearly died from and during the last of his increasingly austere pre-enlightenment practices, ones that had been given to him by highly respected gurus of the day, Gautama realised that that path was the denial of bodily reality. And that denial of reality did nothing to alleviate the reality of suffering, neither his nor that of others. Reading between the lines, at this time while I continue my research, I am convinced that Gautama had come to understand that such practices actually increase suffering. Perhaps it was a pre-enlightenment enlightenment, an experience of vidyà through physical touch with which he realised that such austerity practices were not the path to vidyà : his gurus, his authorities, were wrong. Trust your self!
Omg! Can I Trust Gautama’s Advocacy To Trust Myself Without That Being Blind Faith?! To Answer That Question Might Be The Intention Of ‘Real’ Yoga
Gautama realised that to actually perfect the demands of that austerity yoga was, ultimately, to deny the validity of existence. And that to do that successfully can only end in a premature death. A kind of intellectually / religiously appealing, although physically uncomfortable, samadhi suicide, sitting to death. That awakening occurred when he saw, truly, the reality of his emaciated body when he accidentally touched the front of his spine through the remains of his stomach cavity. With that experience of vidyà he left the practices, ate something porridge-like from a friendly maiden and then sat beneath a tree. The tree. The tree that he looked up into and perhaps through its leaves into the sky. Did he see, I wonder, with refreshed eyes of his childhood self when he remembered being with his father as a boy?
Thus he experienced the great epiphany by which we know him: that which is, is what is! (My paraphrase.) Sky, tree with leaves, hard earth, and a physical form to take them all in. In statues of him his right hand is often pointing to the earth because it was with being in life, touching the earth, that he remained equanimous when struggling with the inner mind-armies of Mara who were looking to destabilise his mind and his newfound understanding. His great epiphany would not have happened if he hadn’t dropped the avidyà that had starved him like the anorexic searching for identity-truth in the darkness of a mistaken belief that had been imparted from someone-else’s moral authority-truth and which he had accepted.
Who, Where is the Deluded Intangible Self? Wrapped in the Invisible Invisibility Cloak of Narcissism
Is it not the intangible ‘Self’ that has, by accident or from misguided good intentioned gurus or charismatic manipulative religious leaders, been deluded or directed to be deluded in its dismissal of the all of experience as devoid of any value while, at the same time, putting itself as the centre of the be all and end all? Now, doesn’t that sound like deep narcissism? Gautama realised dependent co-arising, which is that physical life is a wholeness that we express and participate with. Those life-defying austerity practices denied life as valid and even demanded that its only value was as delusion. Funny thought: the ‘gurus’ and monks who have the ability to deny reality, only have that ability because those gurus are dependent on dependent co-arising as the reality of physical existence in the first place!
I’ll Get Back to Anger and the Meet Soon: I’m Either Completely Distracted Away From My Anger, or Finding my Way Deeper into It with Gautama’s Help and My Desire to Move Past Avidyà
Before I get back to anger, I want to look at what Gautama is recorded to have taught. Here is my paraphrase from the Pali Canon: we are born physical creatures into a physical universe. That condition is called life, our life, each of our individual lives. And it is difficult because of how it, life, really is! It is the process of entering with discomfort, oscillating between joy and suffering in countless ways, then dying before or after or with the people around us who we love and respect, and/or who love and respect us. Life is, in this process, suffering. That’s it.
With that, Gautama observed — perhaps his greatest insight — that the level or amount of suffering can be reduced. How? He gave seven directions that reduce suffering while we participate in the physicality of a human form in physical life. To deny life was not one of his instructions! Healing from so-called and mostly misunderstood karma, was not one of his instructions!
His instructions are easy to comprehend and are eminently physical, practical and achievable with two simple changes of mind sets, or in Sanskrit, samskharas: stop talking about god and reincarnation or the ontology of spirit. Change our physical behaviour in a small discrete set of ways. These two practices reduce suffering effortlessly and automatically. And they would not create a religion! Hence their suppression, even if Buddhism was begun with the good intention of spreading Gautama’s good intentioned instructions.
Contrary to activist ideologies, going out to save the world from suffering is to increase the world’s suffering. Today’s emotionally fraught and clearly unstable stable of progressive liberal humanists actively saving us while denying reality are perhaps an epitome of that — and, at the same time, a cautionary tale about the dangers of avidyà: we are rife with good intentioned and malevolent knights, of both sexes, actively undermining our social structure in delusion of what is: everything and everyone who disagrees with those knights are dragons to be slain with pride, virtue and with rhetoric as vacuous and effective as Don Quixote’s rusty sword and armour were at slaying windmills.
Guy’s Revision of Gautama: A Quick Step, 101: I Go From Twelve To Seven
If austere yoga practices aren’t enough to reduce our own suffering or that which is in the world, what are? Here is my take on Gautama’s instructions that do just that:
1) See what is as it is, without any delusion or self deception. Life is difficult and is comprised of suffering. And yet that suffering is not the core of being alive, even though it is an inherent characteristic of being alive. Running away to an ideology that denigrates the experience of life, as it is, increases suffering often with the (ab)use of morality to express disembodied truths.
2) When we see this truth, we discover that we have the ability and power to reduce suffering. Suffering in life is not a choice. The ability to reduce suffering, on the other hand, is a choice.
3) We have the characteristics and power to choose our actions. Life, with suffering, is not complicated. Superficially, with avidyà and moralism, life is made to look complicated and with that false appearance morality arises that makes it impossible to ameliorate suffering. Beyond some superficial aspects of physically, everything is choice.
4) With the practice of vidyà we develop the discernment to distinguish between high quality and low quality choices. We see that low quality choices increase suffering and are accompanied with anger, resentment, frustration, disappointment, inertia, lethargy and a long list of disagreeables. Medium quality choices neither increase nor decrease suffering and feel either ambivalent or indifferent. High quality choices decrease suffering and are accompanied with joy.
I have created these four steps despite them being, ultimately, simply gradations of vidyà, in order to make them smaller pieces, and hence more digestible:
to see what is, without self-deception or illusion;
to see our power to choose, and that choice is our power;
to see that life is simple;
to see the effects that the quality of our choices makes in life and of life.
Now for three instructions somewhat aligned with the ‘official’, authorised, eightfold path.
1) Exercise the quality of our intention to see clearly what is, and with that, to see the results and consequences of our thoughts, speech and actions and to learn from those effects what has increased, reduced, or left unchanged, the amount of suffering in the world.
2) To speak with the integrity and understanding that our words are our initial power to change what is and is that which initially expands, contracts or leaves unchanged, the amount of suffering in the world.
3) To act, to take action, with the integrity and understanding that our actions are creating the world of experience by increasing, decreasing, or leaving unchanged, the amount of suffering in the world. And that that is initially acted in and experienced within our own immediate environments of inner self and form and with the understanding that our environments become the other’s experience of us and of life.
That is sufficient. Beneath them I can, amusingly enough like Gautama did, cite particular exercises or shadow work, various yoga practices or therapies; or things like how we make a living and the kind of heart or intention we bring to those practices that will empower us to be loving and compassionate when we are with ourselves, doing household and work related activities alone or with others, and in our interactions with those around us. And to see in all our social settings that the other is just like us, also wrestling with, to greater or lesser extents in different ways, the reality of their pain and desires to suppress or deny that discomfort, that suffering. The specific practices will change, become more powerful, as exercising the quality of our intention increasingly refines our discernment of what is increasing, decreasing or leaving unchanged, suffering.
Here is a gentle introduction to the vastiness of the Pali Canon.
So, that was my paraphrase of Gautama’s lessons as I’ve taken them from the Pali Canon. And for those who would like to compare with source, here are citations:
Breaking Free
[Dedicated Students], it is through not realising, through not penetrating the Four Noble Truths that this long course of birth and death has been passed through and undergone by me as well as by you. What are these four? They are the noble truth of suffering; the noble truth of the origin of suffering; the noble truth of the cessation of suffering; and the noble truth of the way to the cessation of suffering. But now, [Dedicated Students], that these have been realised and penetrated, cut off is the craving for existence, destroyed is that which leads to renewed becoming, and there is no fresh becoming. (My emphasis. (“Breaking Free” DN 16, The Digha Nikaya, the Collection of Long Discourses.)
And, not the eightfold path, just seven. The ‘eighth’ is the consequence of the previous seven and was tacked on by later ‘Buddhists’.
The “way going to the ending of anguish” therefore consisted of an abiding in concentration, [that is] caused by or accompanied by right view, right purpose, right speech, right action, right mode of livelihood, right endeavour, and right mindfulness (MN III 71, Vol III pg 114; SN V 17, Vol V pg 19. MN refers to ‘Majjhimanikāya—Suttas: the Middle Length Discourses’ and SN to the Samyutta Nikaya: The Grouped Discourses.)
(Not so bad, after all, the Pali Canon!)
One Powerful Exercise Suggestion: You Don’t Have Do It, Nor Should You Do It, Once You Choose To Do It You Won’t Move Backwards into Greater Avidyà or Towards Increased Enervation
I will, at this time, gently suggest a practice. Just one, although it has a couple of parts to it. It is a simple one that immediately opens us to reducing our own suffering and others’, to a very significant degree. It is free.
Exercise: With clear intention (Guy’s Step One) and speech (Guy’s Step Two) remove from your speech the expressed bully and guilt language we have unconsciously adopted to optimise our survival as bully Stockholm Syndrome participants, perpetrators and perpetuators of the authoritarian bully culture we were born into. A mouthful! For full details see:
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Word.
Aha! A Double Epiphany! Only One Klesha, not Five; and Buddhism is Narcissistic
And I just felt a core, body, double aha! Well, small ones, nice ones. The first is that Patañjali’s yogic principles of the five Kleshas are in reality, just one, the first one, which is avidyà. The other four are the mechanisms we use by which we extend avidyà in order to not see what is here, by distracting us to a there that doesn’t exist that we hope will reduce our suffering.
The Five Kleshas
Avidyà: to not see, or to see what is true as false, or what is false as true.
Raga: (attachment) is the desire to repeat pleasurable experiences.
Dvesa (aversion) is to move away, or want to lean away, from what is uncomfortable or unpleasant.
Asmita is to construct and rigidify the stories of "I”, “me”, and “mine”. Asmita refers to the construction of a self, in reality many personas, around which our perceptual world pivots and fluctuates with our surroundings.
Abhinivesa is the fear of losing our identity when asked to let go of the stories of "I, “me”, “mine." The fear of death entails more than the loss of this body, rather it goes to the heart of our deepest attachment: the stories of "me" and the corresponding belief in a substantial and enduring Self.
It was after this dive that I saw that raga, dvesa, asmita and abhnivesa all fall away when we have developed the full discerning power of vidyà. The four, as tools of our distraction, become the means of discovery of poor seeing, the debaser of both discernment and quality. When we see our selves embodying any of the last four kleshas, that becomes our opportunity to clear at least some of those clouds of delusion out of our vision.
The second aha evolved as I dove into the four noble truths and the eightfold path — sudden thought interruption: what to call my concentrated form? ‘Seven Steps Into Becoming Alive in Your Life’? Anyway, the ‘aha’ was when I realised that, as I did with my look at Obedience to Authority and the roots of the Roman Catholic Church — see
The Gospel of Thomas and Blinking Awake From My Personal Dogmatism's Daimon
— that Buddhism’s cure for avidyà is a narcissistic social construct: authorities tell us to deny reality and experience the truth, as directed by those authorities, of the non-existent nature of existence that arises from within or perhaps falls into and is distinct from, our physical bodies. In some ways Buddhism’s mechanism is even more powerfully narcissistic than that of the Catholics / Christians because the locus, like what happened with the convid being dependent on the unseen virus, Buddhist gaslighting power is amplified because the Self is, like a virus, also unseen.
What is interesting to me, too, as I considered this more thoroughly, is that Buddhist insistence on the non-existence of existence also contradicts Gautama’s idea of dependent co-arising. He described how when one really understands that principle, that is enlightenment. Now, I don’t know if I really understand it. And yet, even without that depth of understanding, I can see that that concept goes against the denial of physical existence. Dependent co-arising is to know, by experience, that every physical element of life is interdependent with every other: it, life, therefore is ‘real’. So, the Buddhist looking to convince their students of non-existence creates a rift, a schismogenesis, between our experience of physicality as real, as averred by Gautama as a central or key enlightenment of his teaching, and Buddhism’s denial of that reality.
At Last, Back to Anger. Was All That Just Distraction to Avoid the Vidyà of my Anger?
Lol! And even as I began to explore, so many words ago, my own inability to see something I felt, is it possible that all that investigation after it was just about the most perfect way of distracting myself from seeing what is true? What is true about what? What is true of my being angry, still, in a shadow that the light of my exploring intention simply is not able to see because where my intellect is shining its intention that light blinds me to the shadow over there! That is tough avidyà!
Gautama’s practices do not include the denial of the reality of existence! Unlike how I experienced Buddhism when I was young. And in how I’ve heard or read it between some of the lines of Michael Stones’ writings and talks. Stone’s podcasts are a testimonial to his hope or understanding that a ‘correct’ action of Buddhism and Yoga is to ‘Become Awake In The World,’ which is the name of his podcast. And his posthumous webpage is called: ‘The Here and Now of Everyday Life’.
And eventually I saw my delusion. (Well, One of Them, at Least)
Well, maybe more than one. Perhaps even a gaggle of them collected around my different ways of denying how anger is being manifest in me. The first might have been when I finally remembered that it was in August that Yoshiko managed to goad or poke me into real anger, the anger of my body shaking in rage as I yelled out my frustration at her incessant condemnation of me not properly attending to my heart, pre-pacemaker, because that lead to my selfishly collapsing into near death at her feet. That and all the rest around it had activated in her some kind of trauma response.
The other day I became angry with Yoshiko because of my inability to make myself understood with her. With that anger I scrawled it out in big red letters: “I WAS STUPID BLIND!”
Confessions Of Falling Down Dizzy With Health And Other Ego-Expectations
What I didn’t include in that terse description was that I yelled the words at her as loudly as I could at the same time. And, now with a laugh as I remember that, I am sure that I didn’t swear!
So, with that so recent a memory, and documented on top of that, to slip out of my mind is… well, it means I’m still a work in process, and that anger-avidyà is alive and well. And the pains in my body are confirmation of that tightness that anger brings.
In Spain for the First Time and a Return to Anger
And I’m reminded of when I was walking with my brother-in-law in Spain in 2022. His belly / stomach felt anger coming from me. ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Yes, although I could be wrong.’ That evening I muscle tested that and confirmed that he had detected that which I hadn’t. I was seriously doubly disappointed. The first was that despite my awareness of avidyà, my use of muscle testing and with being in pain, and practicing daily yoga I thought it, that pain, had been extirpated. Nope. Avidyà.
The second was that the particularly intense physical yoga practices of the previous six years, including diet, hadn’t been enough to purged it even as my body had become more flexible and much freer of pain — although not close to being actually pain free! Avidyà.
So, back to the pre-yoga ‘books’. That night I began a ‘serious’ anger journal release exercise modelled after James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, since I like words. Perhaps it would have been better to do as my friend Ryan suggested back in 2019, to take up something wordless and masculine such as some form of pugilism. I haven’t yet and the one time I seriously tried to I crippled my arm at a free gym session doing simple push ups before I saw a punching bag. The pain of that lasted from 2019 to 2024. It is gone, now, although it clicks when I move it the ‘right’ way. Anyway, the angry-text is still in process, and looks like it is time for me to recommence it — again. Here is a short extract:
Anger. Angry. Rage. Rage Rage Rage Rage. What is the rage, the anger that consumes me without my conscious awareness? The body doesn't lie, cannot lie. It, me, I, my body who am I that lies, can only lie, in the present moment and that moment cannot be anything but true. True, true, true blue blue blue. I limp along, sometimes, and almost fall, sometimes. Have fallen, will fall, the past no more, the future not yet, and here I am lying in the present as if it wasn't real. Real reality reeling drunkenly drunkardly into the anger resting in my hip, looking for a way out. Looking? Looking? You fuckin' not are looking for anything you fuckin' piece of shit head headlong hedge fund founded in the fecundity of shit. Shit makes the corn grow, the farmer is outstanding in his field, hips upright and maybe loosey goosey moosey pussy cat pussy cat where are you? Me or the hip? See, I'm hip to the hopping between mind and mindlessness, sold out soul and sole body sweet sweat floundering on the river bank, a sole soul solely sold out out flapping along without water and washed out looking for money in the mud of a bankless bank. Is that possible, to be mindful of mindless swearing and sweating out the sweet siren's song of sorrow and woe?
With a refocused intention to be attentive, I’m keeping my eyes open, my body relaxed enough to be alert to my having anger feeding itself on me and my energy. Then letting it go with the mantra ‘I see you’. I anticipate revisiting the angry Finnegan in me soon.
Hip to the Hip
I mentioned that I was disappointed that my physical practice hadn’t fully cleared my anger in the summer of 2022. And that I hadn’t seen that it hadn’t cleared it. There is another lesson around that, and that attests to the power of avidyà to use the other kleshas to keep me blind. In 2014 on my second ‘real’ yoga class I had the great epiphany that where my body was stiff and painful was where I’d stored fear and anger, about 54 years of it. Even with that body-awareness epiphany, I didn’t listen to my body very well. I was yoga impatient and that compelled me to hurt it, hurt my self, frequently with yoga and in other ways. Bruised ribs and initiation of umbilical hernia in 2014; torn left acl in 2015; snapped ligament and torn muscle in thighs 2016; some kind of compression injury during yoga in right knee 2017; extended gout attack at yoga retreat, 2017; badly pinched, although not torn, right rotator cuff, 2019. And interspersed throughout, bouts of gout and two bursitis flair ups.
Something changed in 2020. In 2020 I developed a super uncomfortable sharp pain in my right hip that moved around within the hip area. It was so painful at times I would fall. And when I rolled it to get in and out of the car, it felt like my leg was being cut off at the hip with a dull knife. And in 2019, as noted above, I damaged my right shoulder extremely badly. I could not move it at all and it was extremely painful. And for no apparent reason my left shoulder began to be in pain in a way that was similar to the hip’s feeling of being cut with a dull knife when I moved it beyond a small range.
Funny that I didn’t think of any of that as manifesting fear and anger in a tangible way to help me more easily clear it away. I saw the false as true that these ‘mishaps’ were a form of not listening by having stepped outside of my body and feeling it from the outside looking inward.
Wow! Avidyà!
At the meet I was asked how that anger was made manifest in my body. I didn’t mention any of those pains! Just the dull red hot nail burning into my right thigh during meditation for about seven years, after which the pain moved to my left thigh. As of 2023, those pains are both gone. And now, as of today, my shoulders are pain free, thighs are pain free, and the right hip just about pain free. And yet, sometimes that hip really grabs me, in a sharp breath-taking cut or stabbing.
In the meet I didn’t mention the feeling in my mid spine of a tormenting pressure that would become the feeling of a tearing apart of the musculature around the vertebrae. And back it would return, in a strange oscillation. That was very uncomfortable, only when I did sitting meditation. As of 2024 that pain has now mostly cleared as well.
Time to Change Something, if I Expect Something to Change
Following the meet, I changed my intention and looked at the hip pain again. Yes, anger. Although directed towards my father this time, which is a great surprise to me. I’ve not considered my being angry at him! And I don’t think that that anger came up in the theta healing sessions of 2015-2018. And with hindsight during this essay, I found it interesting that Becket swore in Russian. My father scrambled to learn Russian as quickly as possible for his study of Russian history. I would see him at his books at 4am when I got up to deliver the morning papers.
And one of those very strange synchronicities, and one that once again provided me with more evidence of my anger-avidyà being alive and well: since around the time of the meet, maybe a bit before or just after — I wasn’t seeing it! — I noticed a small discomfort at the base of my spine, a kind of cyst. I’ve felt this two or maybe three times before. The first and most significant time was when I started university. Which meant that my father and I were both students at the same time at the same institution. Although he was in post graduate history and I was in first year math and physics. At that time the cyst was very large and, one day, while in class, it began to bleed profusely. At the time I learned that my father also suffered from that particular ailment! Today’s is very small and mildly annoying. I see you.
So, more evidence of my still containing within my body the fear and anger I became aware was there in 2014. With so much more there that that yoga at did not bring into awareness. If it had taught me all the pain it had to purge, I might very well have died way back then.
And so, more stuff to de-stuff from this form I call Guy, at least most of the time.
Yoshiko Smashes Me and I Freely Laugh With Joy. I’m Asked, Did the Car I Smashed Laugh Too?
Wow! What a fascinating question, I replied to Ken. Björn was surprised that I found it interesting. I told him that my current understanding of dependent co-arising — subject to change — means that everything is alive and connected. I didn’t say at the meet that that also corresponds with the ‘problem’ of particle entanglement in quantum mechanics. Now the car, and cars in general, likely don’t have consciousness as we humans understand it. And yet… everything is alive and aware, as decades of synchronicity journalling unequivocally confirm. So, last week I did my muscle testing about that, and sure enough, my body responded that the car in fact felt joy at the smashing, of being smashed. And to me that feeling I got from the car was very much like the joy I felt as Yoshiko tried to break my baby fingers, bite my arm or leg or ear, smash my testicles. Now that is crazy! And each time I think of that up pops the mental image of the talking roast beast in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe who joyfully proffered itself by recommending to the customers who were soon to eat it which of his pieces were the tastiest.
The car’s ostensible joy, my feeling of its joy, is very unexpected to me, especially since I’ve done many many many forgiveness and guilt and meditation exercises around my violation of that car and its owner and/or restorer over the years. Hmmmm. Perhaps it is time for us to meet, that car and I, at the restaurant at the end of the universe and share our stories and compare scars. Fascinating. And I will consider the place of avidyà in that: am I just going full on delusion to wash away the guilt I’ve felt since then? More to do. Thank you Ken.
Puzzles and Some Concluding Observations, Thoughts and Questions on Buddhist Narcissism and Near Deaths
This essay began as my interest to explore some of the questions about my anger that a men’s group discussion opened up in and for me. One of them was, why do I keep not seeing my anger? Not seeing is an expressed aspect of the yogic / Buddhist principle of avidyà. Nice. So what, because how did that evolve into my diving into the conflict between Gautama’s teachings and the Buddhist version of them? Why did I dive into the Gautama rabbit hole?
I thought I had finished writing this long essay, without having seen an answer to that question. So, answerless and chalking it up to my writing muse’s perversity — that likes very much these long and verbose forays — I got up from the pc to attend my hunger. I took a nice break. I ate a banana and some pecans and made a cup of great Oaxaca coffee while listening with half an ear to a rightie moralist looking to find common ground with another ungrounded and unhinged leftie moralist.
The question of why did Gautama become a huge part of my anger essay kept moving across my thinking. What was my writing muse’s purpose to guide me in that direction? During the write I questioned the appropriateness of including that stuff, and for this being so long. Keep going, was the direction I was clearly given. And I have found it very helpful and interesting, especially by the ends.
And with some coffee and a comfortable stomach, I had another small, pleasant aha! The ‘big’ story of Gautama’s enlightenment pretty much seems to focus on his big aha under the tree. With the conclusion of this post-coffee essay I realised that my exploration of anger was the investigation within me of improper seeing: avidyà. And that what I had found most interesting with the focus I had on Gautama was also his avidyà, his improper seeing when he put himself into the authorised austerity practice that had starved him to a near death state in body.
It took a near death experience for him to wake up to his having given away to another, someone he trusted, the authority over his own life.
Even for Gautama, waking up to his own responsibility took an extreme event. A near death event! Interesting. And now, I understand more clearly why, on his death bed, Gautama told his companion Ananda, ‘trust your self.’ When we trust another as a superior moral authority, we are energetically deferring the authorship and authenticity of our lives to that person.
And that takes me to a current theme I have been exploring in the last few essays, to a greater or lesser extent: morality. This morning I see more clearly that it is the trusting of another as having the moral authority, collectively, that empowers that other as individual or group, to provide us our morality, our moral compass, our truth-de-jour. And with that guidance, when the morality police demand, we will willingly obey their authority as truth, as our trust in them, or the science™, and do unreasonable things.
Jim Jones was given the moral authority to direct those who had ‘targeted’ him with the conferred responsibility and trust for their lives. And they did. They did.
Our society, to a significant percentage, targeted medical science™ as the moral guardians of our lives, in large part because of an aggressive, extensive, effective and multi-generational propaganda psyop directing us into that behaviour. And when that moral authority narcissistically directed us to walk up and bare our arm for an injection comprised of unknown substances and without having been properly / completely tested, most of us, having already collectively deferred to them our autonomy and trust, lined up to be given a shot — to be shot — without question like what the people did for Jim Jones when he asked them to drink the Kool-Aid.
It is possible that any structure that relies on deference to an authority outside of our collective selves either began narcissistically — as I’ve argued happened with the Roman Catholic Church in
The Gospel of Thomas and Blinking Awake From My Personal Dogmatism's Daimon
Or perhaps, the organisation evolved into it because the mendicants or congregation or seekers, by deferring themselves to that authority structure, energetically manifested or transformed it into a narcissistic entity that created or was filled with narcissists. I wonder, now, if that is what happened with Buddhism? More research!
Narcissistic relationships arise, as I have seen them discussed, when the skilful narcissist targets someone or people in order to create in his/her target(s) a perception of reality that aligns with the narcissist’s aims and/or requirements. Those requirements include total disengagement from the physical world and the body’s sensual awareness of the truth that inheres with the body’s dependent co-arising with somatic experience. The target relies on the narcissist for the interpretation and/or understanding of the experience of life. Does this not define religions?
However, or complementarily, what happens when someone or a group of people who have for various reasons, malevolently planned or otherwise, come to distrust their experiences of life? Such as happens with traumatised people, perhaps especially children, for example. Will their action of turning to another to provide the authority structure to calm the anxiety they feel in being disconnected from life, actually create the narcissistic structure?
Consider: we live in a bully culture and most people, in my opinion, are suffering from bully Stockholm Syndrome. Which means that they require the authority (the moral bully) to provide them with the conditions, morals, ideology, and social structures that when erected help to make them feel safe. This structure will be filled naturally by the narcissist because it is a narcissistic energy-vacuum that is looking to be filled. Created by the seekers of safety and comfort.
When that structure of safety is threatened, or has the appearance of being threatened, the panic of annihilation anxiety can easily kicks in and insanity will follow. Such as in the form of René Girard’s scapegoating or Mattias Desmet’s ‘Mass Formation.’
The convid, and all the machinations and social structural requirements to make it work are, I think, a great example of just that. There is popular rhetoric in the alt-news about how the CDC and/or ostensibly philanthropic organisations and the like are populated by people like Fauci, Bill Gates and George Soros, all who are pretty obvious narcissists who might even be suffering from Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy with their obsession with aggressively reducing the world’s population. What if the reason these narcissists rose to dominance was because our collective psyches needed to be told what is up and down, right and wrong because collectively, we have been taught and bullied to distrust the experiences of our body’s and what our body’s senses perceive?
These ideas are not new!
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor explores these ideas with perspicuity. For example:
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”
I didn’t see these ideas coming out of my writing about anger when I started! I am surprised to have discovered that, much like the Roman Catholic Church, Buddhism is a narcissistic organisation. I wonder if it began with narcissists, or was it the disembodied demands of the congregants who created the narcissistic energy-space that was then filled by narcissists? And this new perception goes a long way to explain why temples to god, yoga studios and other so-called ‘spiritual’ organisations, closed their doors as told to do by the science™ and demanded that their congregations be fully jabbed and masked. This realisation may extend, or perhaps conclude the discussion
![Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' A: Yoga as drug.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3d594d7e-70ac-4e17-9b4f-e39984858dfc_1113x1179.jpeg)
It seems to me, now, that my perception of obedience to authority — and perhaps yours too — was backwards: I give it — my authority — away to the person to whom I have authorised with the moral authority to let me live or who directs me to kill or to be killed. It is not something that the authoritarian has taken. Once the narcissistic authoritarian structure comes into place, consciously or unconsciously, it will strive to perpetuate itself as a living social organisation with the help of the people at all levels in the structure who, with avidyà do not see that they are alive and giving sustenance to the bully Stockholm Syndrome society. Fascinating stuff.
This does seem to put us in the ‘classic’ chicken and egg paradox, though. Although one that, with the application of the principles and actions that Gautama laid out, and that I’ve here recast into contemporary language, dismantles with the simple power-phrases ‘I see you.’ Vidyà. From that arises ‘No, I don’t have to,’ and with it ‘Your moral ‘should’ does not guilt me.’
Vidyà.
Do I have the courage to see that which I don’t want to see? Then to say ‘I see you,’ Perhaps seeing my unexpressed anger is a good step towards being that courage.
Enough for now. I appreciate the time you gave me for this lengthy essay.
Note
I am still looking for financial help following the ‘out of the blue’ pacemaker surgery that was likely a form of deep shadow work, and that cleaned out my bank account. If you are curious about that and/or would like to help me, go to:
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‘Song’ Of The Essay: Dogen — Not a song this time.
This time instead of a song I’ve included a podcast by Michael Stone, a Buddhist, scholar and yoga teacher. I came to ‘The Way Seeking Heart’ by soft synchronicity. In his talk Stone discusses Dogen, one of the most famous Japanese Zen monks, and Dogen’s distress that Buddhist practices of 13th century Japan had degenerated horribly. At one point Dogen went to China and on his return to Japan was disappointed in the quality of the thought and intention of a monastery cook in China. In response Dogen wrote ‘Instructions for the Cook (Tenzo kyôkun)’, about the importance of the quality intention and, my inference, the importance of proper seeing that is concomitant with intention, the intention to be here and to seek the quality of truth as it manifests in the experience of life, monastic or secular. (I just came to it, and so will read this in the near future. Perhaps for a future essay. The synchronicity with it is that last week I was asked to by a cook for help. He is frustrated and resentful to be in a kitchen as a step down from his previous life as a master Muay Thai fighter and teacher due to injury.)
Enjoy Stone here:
Or on Soundcloud:
And here is the link to an on-line translation of Dogen’s 13th Century book, Instructions for the Cook (Tenzo Kyôkun).
All the best with what is changing. Everything changes! With peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
🙏❤️🧘♂️☯️🧘♂️❤️🙏