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| Intgration: Counteracting the feeling of being pulled in many directions and getting nowhere! |
Hey you! Welcome back, so kind of you to take the time, I really appreciate it. As you may recall, we are currently exploring the intriguing notion that "A Christmas Carol", first published 170 years ago this week, can be seen as a model of personal and spiritual development. By spiritual, we mean of course that which affects the spirit with which we enter into every day, as well as in the sense of a truth which cannot be expressed verbally. That which makes sunsets so gratifying, or the view atop distant elevations so singularly arresting. On the more every-day level, should we wish to become more receptive to it, we can learn to taste that wordless wonder at the capacity to simply wander about and wonder about wondering, if you catch my drift. The inexpressible joy at the good fortune of others, feeling deeply connected to certain people and places, being free of constraints, authentically us, with all our flaws and virtues. Honest and free, open and alive to life, trying to want what we already have, as opposed to always trying to have what we want. But what is the key to spiritual receptivity? Gratitude in the face of our transient and fleeting nature. Appreciating the miracle of life itself. Feeling overawed and humble in the face of the unspeakable majesty and unfathomable mystery of it all. As Albert Einstein famously said:
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed... In that sense, and in that sense alone, I am a deeply spiritual person."
We can find these subtle undercurrents of awe and rapture in everyday experiences, should we wish to notice it, we just need to become more aware. Awareness is pivotal to integration, and thus revolutionary, as my friend and Buddhist author Vidyamala once said. Those magical moments can happen anywhere; at an art gallery, museum, live music event, cinema or theatre. Equally they can happen on journeys to work, queuing for a drink at a bar or stood at a bus stop. Often I find it happens when staring into a campfire at night. That ethereal moment where time seems to stop, and "you" disappear. There is just the moment, within and without you. You are so much at one with your experience as to be indistinguishable from it... In Buddhist terms, for a short time we transcend ourselves and the subject-object duality, and we expand beyond our own limited boundaries into the infinite... A deep peace wells up, not that "we" are really aware of it. Do you you know the one? Magic stuff! In the language of modern psychology, we temporarily shift from operating on a self- referential, subjective level of consciousness to a higher, more refined objective consciousness. We can grow and evolve ever higher towards higher values, towards the sublime, the ineffable, that which lies outside time and space - the unconditioned, the end of suffering, to use more traditional Buddhist terms again. The Persian poet Rumi captures this sense of wonder and possibility in much of his work, and I adore "The Breeze at Dawn" for that reason:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill,
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
An obvious question at this point: if we choose to stay awake, how do we develop this awareness, this emotional positivity needed to let go of our old habitual patterns of thought and being (or becoming, more accurately)? When we leave a plant in a sunlit room, it will grow in the direction of the light source. In that same way, we may want to consider how we ourselves are positioned in the room of our own life. Do we feel like we have been backed into a corner, and are growing lopsidedly or in an unbalanced way? Do we feel like we are withering in the dark, the curtains having somehow closed over the years without us noticing? Not only that, are we regularly watered? It's it warm enough? Many conditions must be factored in for growth. The timing is essential too. In evolutionary terms, we all want to be on the window sill, don't we. Like the plant, or in Buddhist iconography, the lotus, we all desire the conditions which support our endeavours, allowing us to flourish and bloom. All life does. It's the recognition of this desire of mine in all others that motivates me to write - to pass on the tips and ideas that others much wiser have passed onto me. It's the message that's important, not the messenger.
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| Chosen by the Buddha because it only blossoms in stagnant swamps, the Lotus is a metaphor for the often tangled, murky and swampy nature of the human mind and it's delusions. |
Hopefully by now, motivated to blossom lotus-like anew, and alive to the knowledge that the Currents of Time will inexorably sweep us out into the Riptides of Change one way or another, we can start to see the advantages of crafting a rudder and paddles. We have the power to steer our future to a greater extent than we realise. There is an old Japanese Zen quote I'm reminded of: "If you want to drive your cart South, don't set off North." We can make a decision, right now. It's just a choice. We have a responsibility for our own lives, our own growth, our own happiness. The group can encourage and support us, but the individual must choose to try and fulfil their potential of their own accord - this is course we alone can plot.
If we chose to make the conscious decision to change for the better, if we want to become more of an integrated, less fragmented person, then it makes sense to take stock of where are right now, on this very day, in this present moment. Before we plot our course, we must know from which dock we are to set sail. This is why for Buddhists meditation is such an important part of our practice. We come into a state of calm awareness and raising our level of consciousness, allow whatever arises to be noticed, observed with compassion and allowed to dissipate like a cloud into the clear-blue, vast, sky-like nature of mind itself. Perhaps we are quite prone to depression, or maybe we get irate very easily. Some days we may be fretting about something, and on others we might notice a grey lethargy in body and mind. Alternatively we might be a touch over-excited about something. Whatever we feel, it's ok, it's just where we're at.
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| "In order to develop integrated awareness...We have to retrace our steps - have to undo the harm that we have done, or that has been done to us... If we have once taken that wrong turning...then we have to go back to square one, as it were, and we have to learn, we have to allow ourselves to experience ourselves..." - Sangharakshita |
After meditating, or even just closing our eyes for twenty seconds, we can "tune in" to our emotional radio station, and check the forecast. In the same way as being meteorologically forewarned, if we spot a dark mood or a certain feeling of disconnection or alone-ness arising in us, we can later 'nip it in the bud' by calling a friend, family or (should we consider ourselves Buddhist) a Sangha member, someone on the same path of self-awakening as ourselves. Often though, even if we don't go to a Buddhist centre or haven't ever tried meditation, we still have a notion of our rough edges to tame.
We all have a dark side, an angry, vengeful, greedy and lustful part of us that we are deeply ashamed of. We don't even identify with it. How often do we hear "I'm sorry, my anger got the better of me" as if it was a separate entity external and only loosely related to us, the sociopathic "friend" of a housemate that moved in and we are powerless to disarm or evict. Equally, we are all prone to feelings of anxiety, stress, and paralysing doubt. I believe that in every human there are always nobler aspirations too; to be a loving friend, a loyal and considerate partner perhaps? To make others happy, to do some small measure of good in this world. We all have a creative streak, I'm sure, and on some level we all have a romantic or loving streak, no matter how much we might love to deny it. Sometimes I am a jealous person. Sometimes I am a lousy friend. Sometimes I wonder if I couldn't be doing more. Most of the time I want to be doing less. I crave freedom, but also total security, a partner who idolises me but is not clingy. I adore music, but hate the industry. I try not to eat meat, but very occasionally enjoy an illicit McDonalds breakfast muffin. Thus with greasy fingers and whilst making small cooing and gurgling noises of delight I, like everybody else, am often a mass of contradicting and conflicting energies, thoughts and volitions, trapped in a corpse-to-be. It's the small measure of shame every time as I bin the wrapper that gets to me... Sometimes it can feel as if our conscious mind is like a bus, complete with a multitude of bizarre and differing passengers, all shouting destinations and insist on trying to drive there! As they fight for the wheel and jostle for primacy, we lurch across the roads of our lives and around dangerous precipices at breakneck speeds. Wouldn't it be great if there was only a few drivers, if they got on at least amicably, and if they all wanted to go in the same direction? Or better still, just one driver? Silence. Peace. Momentum. Bliss.
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| Just as a mirror reflects everything in the room, and light will illuminate it's content without bias, we can see how the stillness and soothing imperturbability that Akshobya represents is integral to developing a better understanding of ourselves and that which took us to this point in our lives, should we feel we can do better, or improve in some way. |
It is this stillness and equanimity, so vital to the fist stage of integration, that is personified to the nth degree in the silent figure of Akshobya. He is depicted dark blue in colour, like the midnight skies, blue forever representative across cultures of a cooling of the temper and other unhelpful passions/desires. For this reason, with an innate calmness seen as comparable to a vast, placid blue ocean, his wisdom and objectivity of mind is the antidote to the poisons of of hatred or anger. In some depictions, he is associated with the elephant for it's associations of being a by and large docile, gentle and benign creature, but at the same time vastly powerful. Elephants are also creatures of great wisdom and they don't just charge about. They are patient, methodical creatures, and ones who, like Akshobya, are resolute, determined, and steadfast. Hence Akshobya's name translates as "The Inpeturbable", the unshakeable, and his wisdom, his Jinna is that of a mirror-like quality, a key quality of the Enlightened (or more Enlightened) consciousness. This wisdom sees and portrays things as they truly are, with no residual marks left, no subjective reaction. It is the perfect objectivity of the Enlightened mind, which penetrates, sees, and reflects all things presented to it but is not affected and does not try to grasp at these images. He is like a lofty mountain peak, untroubled by clouds that silently roll by. Importantly, his symbol is the vajra, a sacred symbol of the power of true insight, like an unstoppable diamond tunder-bolt. Diamond is the hardest of all stones, and much light Enlightenment itself, can cut through anything, but nothing cuts it. The vajra then is analogous to a weapon, powerful enough to cut and smash through our own delusions about our past of present experiences. His mudra (or hand gesture) is the earth-touching mudra, commonly associated in the Buddhist tradition with the symbolic attack of Mara as the historical Buddha-to-be sat unmovable under The Bodhi Tree. It is the same kind of egoless, unattached stillness and unobscured, untainted perception which forms the basis for integration and illuminates our past and present experiences, for which the Spirit of Christmas Past is an excellent metaphor.
To make sense of these energies and drives in the present moment, we need to better understand how we got here in the first place. Historically, emotionally and spiritually we need to go back. As we have already discussed, that which we were yesterday dictates who we are today. Integration is something which needs to be all-inclusive, taking into account our well entrenched unskillful habits born of years of conditioning. We can't just cherry pick which memories mould us, they just do. We are the sum of all our experiences, thoughts and actions, nothing more or less. Our memories shape who we are, and that which has for so long indiscriminately spun strands of bitterness or resentment can be put to work in our favour, as we shall see later on. But what is integration. As Sangharakshita himself says:
"Integration means bringing things together; it means making them into a whole, and this does not mean holding them together, as it were, by force, by means of some external bond. It means holding them together, bringing them together, making them into a whole by, as it were, subordinating them to, bringing them into harmony with a common principle, or even grouping them, arranging them, around a common centre of interest. In the present context, which is that of personal development, or meditation, the integration is primarily psychological and what is brought together, what is integrated, are the different aspects and functions of the mind itself."
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| "No fruit without a seed. Desire Has flowered into a star tonight. By subtle alchemies my fire Turns heatless, and shines forth as light." - opening of the poem "Transformation", by Sangharakshita (1953). |
In other words, the process of integration is the process of becoming increasingly aware of and taking full responsibility for our moral and ethical agency, and to better understand the degree to which our conditioning has affected us. What seems to be required therefore is illumination and more panoramic perspective with which to contextualise our past experiences. We need to hold up our differing selves, past and present alike to the light of our compassion. We need to throw some light on our past and our present if we are to make the most of our future. Now, finally, we are ready to meet the Spirit of Christmas Past. A bright light fills Scrooges room. At first glance, we notice that the spirit is unsettling, but utterly benign, as Dickens personifies the function of memory itself. It is described as emanating a blinding flame from its head (be careful, fires can both engender and destroy lives, just like memories), a tender and delicate spirit, with connotations of innocence and purity. Contrastingly, "the arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength", a metaphor for the far-reaching grip our past experiences can still exert over us, even after 20, 40 or 60 years! It carries a metal extinguisher-cap, which in his repression of his past, Scrooge has forced the spirit to wear. "What? Would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow?" the spirit enquires. The inherent danger of an unintegrated past, and in repressing our painful memories is that by shutting up our hearts along with our minds, we are throwing out the baby with the spiritual bathwater.
What really struck me in all of this wasn't so much the obvious need to step back and throw some light on your past experiences, or the dangers of repression/denial, but that in order to start to undo the damage, you need to go back AS YOU ARE TODAY and now. Often, when I cast my mind back to my childhood, I tend to uncomfortably regress into that head-space, like trying to put on a pair of 10-year-old trousers that just don't fit any more. As with the trousers, the end results are usually hilarious to observe but also sometimes painful, and pinch in all the wrong places. There is nothing inherently wrong with digging old trousers out and holding them up to the light. You just don't need to actually put them on to remember where the holes were!
In this story, Dickens shows that to start the ball of Integration rolling, we need to step back, to distance ourselves from the emotional core of past experiences, and observe them fully illuminated for what they are. That is to say, they are just memories, "shadows of the things that have been, they have no consciousness of us". They cannot hurt us now. Before we are ready to engage with our heart and our past, however, we find that we need to ease ourselves in gently, and engaging with our senses, immerse ourselves in our immediate surroundings. So it is with general day-to-day Mindfulness, and with Body Scan meditations, as well as when settling down to meditate generally. As Scrooge is taken back to his childhood, he starts to become aware of all the little things which we tend to at first forget; he becomes
"conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten... the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it."
Through sight, smell, touch, hearing and perception of familiar thoughts arising, Scrooge begins to feel safe and secure, fully present and grounded in his exploration and illumination of his past experiences and actions. Here is where we come to the next pivotal but often overlooked aspect of "A Christmas Carol", the major role conditioning has to play in our perception of events and the way they subsequently play out.
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| "We may have to leave our roots behind, in a sense, but it is a question of growing beyond them, not severing them abruptly by an act of will. I once wrote a poem entitled ‘The Root Speaks’. Sometimes we have to listen to that Root." - Sangharakshita on the process on integration and growth. |
Dickens manages to paint a memorable picture of Scrooge as a psychologically realistic individual (making the eventual transformation even more astounding) by proffering a sound explanation for his later inhuman and cruel ways. Early on in the story, we learn, with no drama, value judgements or embellishment at all, that Scrooge had a really damaging, dysfunctional childhood, oscillating between lonely terms and Christmases at the school house, and occasional home life with a father who was, by inference, cruel, hard, foul tempered, and possibly violent to his children. He is described as "a solitary child, neglected by his friends" and Scrooge "wept to see his poor forgotten self".
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| By developing impartial awareness of our past experiences, through honesty and kindness towards ourselves and others, we will be able to safely reassess to extent to which our conditioning has created conflicting personality traits within us. By opening up to our memories, experiences, by reconnecting to our emotions, we can transcend them all. |
Looking on our past selves with compassion is the key here. Scrooge see's his former self as he truly was, through the eyes of an adult, as an impartial observer, not through his memory of those events, and is deeply moved by it. I genuinely think this is something to ponder, and is an important lesson for us all. Later, we all see a young Ebaneezer fall in love at the Christmas Ball of his old employer, Fezziwig, and again he sees with the eyes of Compassion all the laughter, hope and potential he had to offer the world at that age. He also sees with clarity for the first time the true magic and power of generosity, known as Dana in the Indo-Buddhist tradition. Talking of Fezziwig, Scrooge marvels that:
"he has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune!"
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| In encountering his old employer, Scrooge remembers the joy of practicing "Dana", or spontaneous generosity. "Dana consists not so much in the act of giving as in the feeling of wanting to give, of wanting to share what you have with other people. This feeling of wanting to give or share is often the first manifestation of the spiritual life." - Sangharakshita |
Quite right too! By way of a final detour, and to much protest on Scrooge's part, the spirit of Christmas Past takes us to one last port of call before its time is done; the breakup of Scrooge's relationship with Belle, his first love, and her subsequent marrying to another man. This is heartbreaking for Scrooge, and speaks volumes to me about the idea that we can't just choose to illuminate the parts of our past that we find celebratory, but we need to gaze tenderly upon our defeats and losses too. We must be mindful that we do so with a sense of kindness and warmth, just as Belle looks upon Scrooge and with final, non-judgemental equanimity says:
"I release you, with a full heart, for the love of him you once were. You may have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen."
Here, we see yet more evidence of Scrooges conditioning and Karma starting to bear fruit. By the time he left school, at the dawn of the Age of Reason, he had been tutored into believing solely in the rational of business, in logic. At the point in his life where he separates from Belle, it is clear that this conditioning has resulted in a materialistic, calculating mind, but you sense that he is only trying to do what all of us ever try to do - use our resources to make the best out of what we have in life. What he assumes to be the best way to get ahead in (and subconsciously control) life is through the acquisition of wealth and more importantly to him, Power. Thats why we need to be consciously checking in with ourselves every now and then, asking ourselves "Are my perceptions correct?" He thinks he is doing the right thing for both of them, he's trying to be a good man, a provider. But when his efforts blow up in his face, he misinterprets it as a lesson that in life we have to make a logical choice between love and money. Suddenly misinterpreting them as mutually exclusive, his ego steps in. He is in the right, not her! Since they met he has "grown so much wiser... I was a boy!" (he yells defiantly) and clearly feels that if Love doesn't want to reward him his efforts, then "Humbug" to it all! Money will not let him down, and never again shall the Power to make his own decisions be taken from him. From this point of his life, Scrooge can be seen as switching from what Sangharakshita calls the "love mode" to the "power mode", and it is our job to address this should we notice in ourselves:
"[The love mode] is a self-giving of person to person, even a surrender of person to person – ‘surrender’ here meaning the complete abandonment of any advantage derived from the power mode [an exploitative way of operating and a way of seeing the world]. More and more I see the spiritual life in terms of learning to switch from the power mode to the love mode. If one can do that, everything else will follow..."
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| The four stages of man... Note how the expression changes as he gets older. Our faces tell the story of our lives, of our conditioning just as much as our eyes are the proverbial "window to the soul". |
You really get the sense that in the aftermath of this key juncture in his life, there was only ever going to be one outcome; a complete shutting down of his emotional core, a supercilious resentment towards love born out of his own self-reproaches for ever having being "stupid" enough to fall in love in the first place. Hence his sneering, condescending attitude towards Fred, Bob and any of the other people in his life who embody emotional positivity. Pivotally, it's not just us, the reader, that recognises this chain of events - it's Scrooge himself! This is why illuminated integration is essential to self transformation - life is not about getting it right all the time, but learning how to fail, properly, and with a sense of wanting to better ourselves regardless. Even if we fail appallingly badly, it is never too late to illuminate our past experiences in a more unbiased way and learn from them. By grounding ourselves, observing our past actions from a distance but through the eyes of Compassion, we begin to lift the veil of our own Ignorance and Want from before our eyes. In effect, we start to perceive ourselves and events closer in line with how they truly are, rather than simply reacting to them on the basis of how they make us feel, both then and now. We become more integrated, and less emotional energy is wasted. We feel less drained by life, and things just seem to flow more smoothly as we tend to the green-tipped shoots of emerging positive emotions.
This commenced, with our energies starting to be less frantic and our current differing selves far more amenable and co-operative, we can start to feel a connection and compassion towards our former selves once more, and, by acknowledging and putting aside for a moment the pain and frustration that life affords us all at some point or another, with gratitude we can begin to see through those past negative associations to the actual lesson itself. As The Buddha himself said:
“A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals a secret of hidden treasure.”
Perhaps now is the time to start be that friend to ourselves? We need to make our peace with the multitude of "selves" of which we are all composed, and give them all a sense of common purpose. If we feel we lack a purpose in life, how about honouring the very mechanism which allowed us to be self-aware in the first place; evolution? By doing so, in that way we can be said to become truly human, and a true individual, in the highest possible sense. We can start sharing those positive experience and visions of stillness with others too. It's like looking outside through a rained upon window; whilst we sit too close, all we get are the smears and the droplets obscuring our view. It's only when we move back a little that the image through the glass begins to take shape, and we can get to better know that person stood in the rain on a deeper, calmer, kinder level, whomever and whenever they might be. When we are ready, when with clarity and compassion we can then welcome them back home into the sheltered warmth of our hearts with open arms, and nurture them like the old friend they always were. It is thus to the second stage of Emotional Positivity, embodied by the larger-than-life Spirit of Christmas Present and the golden figure of Ratnasambhava, that we turn to next time.
Yours, with stillness, simplicity and contentment,
The Dharma-Farmer xx
This article is dedicated to my friend Jane Curran - thank you for your unending love, support and patience.
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