{"id":30,"date":"2009-05-06T15:18:28","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T15:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/05\/from-the-desk-ofminimofositting-on.html"},"modified":"2009-05-06T15:18:28","modified_gmt":"2009-05-06T15:18:28","slug":"from-the-desk-ofminimofositting-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/05\/from-the-desk-ofminimofositting-on.html","title":{"rendered":"I Buried Paul: From the Desk of Minimofo"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

From the desk of:<\/p>\n

MiniMoFo<\/p>\n

Re: volution<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sitting on his cushion at 6:12AM, thoughts began flooding in.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>“Need to call Barry”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>“Need to pay storage bill.” “Need to write post for IDP.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>“Should start running again.” Don’t attach; don’t push away; observe.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>He started observing his thoughts; “Oh look at me thinking about how I should start running again.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Wait, that’s not it, he thought.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Observe the thought; don’t attach to thoughts about observing the thought.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>For one brief moment he felt that he was observing the thinker, but then thought “Wait, am I Buddhist or schizophrenic?”\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Back to the breath, focus on the sensation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>More than ten minutes go by.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Bow, rise, coffee, laptop. Only way to write. Except for when there’s no electricity.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

No
\nelectricity. Hah. Except this Friday he knew he was leaving for a two week
\nperiod of exactly that. It was time for a two week retreat with his father,
\nrafting the entire length of the Grand Canyon, sleeping outside and existing
\nwithout electricity, phones or computers.\u00a0
\n<\/span>Like Thoreau on Walden, if Thoreau had guides and rapids.\u00a0 <\/span>Except even Thoreau wasn’t Thoreau, he
\nthought, thinking back to breakfast yesterday with his friend Graham from
\nTreehugger.com, a man with a \u00a0<\/span>full-blown
\ncase of environmentalism who’d remarked over a Soy Latte “I’ve never read
\nThoreau. But \u00a0<\/span>I’m finally reading Walden.
\nOn my Kindle.”\u00a0 <\/span>And as those who\u00a0 <\/span>really know Thoreau are aware, even Thoreau
\nwasn’t Thoreau – he was a loner living on the edge of town so he could spend
\nhis days observing, rather than participating, in society.\u00a0 <\/span>Observing without participating; now that
\nsounded familiar to this budding Boddhisatva.\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span>Yet in the case of Thoreau, it sounds impossible; how can you observe
\nsociety and write about it, without participating in language, culture, and
\ncommerce? Then he thought of Werner Heisenberg, and his principle of
\nuncertainty, stating that the more precisely you know the momentum of a
\nparticle the less precisely you know its location, and vice-versa.\u00a0 <\/span>Also known (and more easily understood) as
\n“the observer effect”, Werner was basically saying that the act of making an
\nobservation of speed or momentum influences the position of a particle; and the
\nact of interfering to observe position effects momentum.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this
\nwas feeling strangely relevant to him as he sipped his coffee, \u00a0<\/span>thinking about what to write for the One City
\nBlog on Beliefnet.com.\u00a0 <\/span>Kindles, Thoreau,
\nand what about Supreme Court Justice Souter?\u00a0
\n<\/span>Perhaps the highest ranking public official who doesn’t have email or a
\ncomputer, Souter is known to write with a fountain pen, live in a cabin on the
\nedge of town and owns no mobile phone.\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span>It is highly unlikely that Justice Souter would read Walden on a Kindle;
\nyet he is as much a part of society’s fabric as a Kindle toting eco-hipster.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He sipped
\nhis coffee, thought about how much work he had to do before he left on his
\ntrip, and began to consider how he could observe his thoughts without
\ninfluencing them.\u00a0 <\/span>That was after all the
\ncore of the Buddhist teaching; not the “thought negating” that he had once
\nignorantly assumed Buddhism was about (an idea that gets way too much ink: http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/05\/if-youre-going-to-slam-buddhism-get-your-facts-straight.html<\/a>)\u00a0 <\/span>but the ability to discern thought patterns
\nand habits so that you could begin to align your actions with a more accurate
\nview of reality, one in which you don’t think of yourself as an isolated unit
\nfending off the savagery of a hostile universe until you die.\u00a0 <\/span>Ah – then there would be no observer to
\ninfluence position or momentum – that’s it, he thought, but then just as
\nquickly he thought about action, and changing the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is
\npossible to engage in “mindful activism”, moving the ball forward towards a
\nmore compassionate world for everyone.\u00a0
\n<\/span>Revolutions come and go but the core meaning of mindfulness is ever the
\nsame, he thought, lending credence to the abiding of Buddhist teachings throughout
\nhistory.\u00a0 <\/span>The sixties were a myth –
\nnothing more than a handful of media images representing a tiny portion of the
\npopulation dropping out to take drugs to experience a few moments of fleeting
\n“other-consciousness”, a few of them embarking on exploring those inner states through
\nthe more reliable method of meditation. Yet those fleeting moments, the tiny
\npercentage of the population that engaged in mind experiments and civil rights
\nstruggles, though their efforts may have been co-opted just as quickly as today
\ninto fashion statements, copycat behavior, and lip service – they DID move the
\nball forward ever so slightly.\u00a0 <\/span>The
\nemergence of contemporary Buddhism, integral activism, a black president – even
\nthough the sixties generation may have themselves retreated into a more
\nmaterialistic society than the one they themselves rebelled against, the seeds
\nthey planted have begun to blossom.\u00a0 <\/span>Meditation
\noffers a far more profound, accessible, and lasting alteration from “straight
\nthinking” (thanks Dr. Weil – The Natural Mind) than do drugs, but drugs at best
\ncan offer a fine first tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible.\u00a0 <\/span>At worst they become an easy and superficial substitute
\nfor the kind of truly mind\/world altering work we learn about at the IDP.\u00a0 <\/span>The sixties may have been more drug
\nrevolution than consciousness revolution, the (in retrospect) inevitable period
\nat the end of the sentence begun by the Beats in the 50’s.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a
\nfact, he thought, that by the time you read about a revolution in the New York
\nTimes, it’s already over.\u00a0 <\/span>But who the
\nhell reads the New York Times?\u00a0 <\/span>Witness
\nthe hipsters, rejecting “Disney movies and malls” as Namenorg put it so well
\nthe other night, escaping to New York to be with like-minded others in a total
\nrejection of the McDonald’s culture they were forcefed in Akron.\u00a0 <\/span>The sixties begat the backlash that begat
\ndisco. Mudd Club (punk\u00a0 <\/span>+ disco) begat
\nNew Wave.\u00a0 <\/span>New Wave begat grunge. Grunge
\nbegat the rebirth of electro and guitar bands.\u00a0
\n<\/span>The “scene” moved from the Lower East Side to Midtown to the East
\nVillage to Williamsburg and now Bushwick?\u00a0
\n<\/span>Maybe Berlin? Maybe a million sock-strewn poster-laden teenage bedrooms
\nall over the world? Who is redefining the edge of how we tell stories and
\nexpress ourselves? Who is living on the edge of town, observing without participating,\u00a0 <\/span>asking questions about who we are and who we
\nwant to become?\u00a0 <\/span>Who is just totally
\nbatshit crazy? A few come to mind (thanks Namenorg\u00a0 <\/span>for some of these resources)\u00a0 <\/span>http:\/\/maximumsorrow.com\/<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>http:\/\/www.hawksandsparrows.org\/<\/a>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>http:\/\/www.lucidcommunication.com\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It’s
\nimpossible to criticize the culture you are in without criticizing yourself;
\nthat’s like looking in a mirror and asking your own reflection to go away. But
\nthere’s nothing wrong with that. Likewise it’s impossible to observe the
\neffects of the momentum of\u00a0 <\/span>your
\nrevolution while you are positioned in the middle of it – Werner said so. Put
\nmore simply, Anderson Cooper cannot simultaneously report on a developing story
\nand participate in it.\u00a0 <\/span>Even more to the
\npoint, his reporting on the story has an effect on how the participants
\nexperience the story.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I sit on
\nthe meditation cushion each day, trying to observe my thoughts without
\nreporting on them.\u00a0 <\/span>I try to take this
\nexperience off the cushion into my world, trying not to fall out of the present
\nmoment and into the baggage of every familiar emotion and canned response I lug
\naround with me.\u00a0 <\/span>I try not to lapse out
\nof “he-centered”stories into “I-centered” stories, a project which apparently
\nis as doomed to failure as my attempts to maintain an observational eye on my
\nown mental activity.\u00a0 <\/span>But like all
\nprojects worth doing, growth happens from failure; practice won’t necessarily
\nmake perfect but it will make well-practiced. And then he\/I remembers Walden,
\nand Souter, and how personal revolutions are old news by the time you realize
\nthem just like societal revolutions are. And he thinks about movement,
\nmomentum, and position, and how we practice on our cushion in stillness,
\nsacrificing observing position in favor of observing mental momentum.\u00a0 <\/span>And he thinks about the irony of reading
\nWalden on a Kindle, and wonders if that’s only ironic because he wants it to be
\nso?\u00a0 <\/span>And he thinks of Hunter S. writing
\nin 1971 in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:<\/span><\/p>\n

““You could strike sparks
\nanywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
\nright, that we were winning…<\/span><\/span>
\nAnd that, I think, was the handle — that sense of
\ninevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military
\nsense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point
\nin fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding
\nthe crest of a high and beautiful wave…<\/span>
\nSo now, less than five years later, you can go up
\non a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you
\ncan almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke
\nand rolled back.”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And he thinks once again of momentum, and position, and how these
\naffect particles and people and thoughts equally, and how disruption by
\nobservation is not a bad or good thing, it just IS –\u00a0 <\/span>and he thinks of the power that comes from
\nnot needing to know that you are right, only that you are doing good.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the desk of: MiniMoFo Re: volution Sitting on his cushion at 6:12AM, thoughts began flooding in.\u00a0\u00a0“Need to call Barry”.\u00a0\u00a0“Need to pay storage bill.” “Need to write post for IDP.”\u00a0\u00a0“Should start running again.” Don’t attach; don’t push away; observe.\u00a0\u00a0He started observing his thoughts; “Oh look at me thinking about how I should start running again.”\u00a0\u00a0Wait,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism","category-interdependent-activism-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nI Buried Paul: From the Desk of Minimofo - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/05\/from-the-desk-ofminimofositting-on.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Buried Paul: From the Desk of Minimofo - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the desk of: MiniMoFo Re: volution Sitting on his cushion at 6:12AM, thoughts began flooding in.\u00a0\u00a0“Need to call Barry”.\u00a0\u00a0“Need to pay storage bill.” “Need to write post for IDP.”\u00a0\u00a0“Should start running again.” Don’t attach; 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