Overcoming Fear through a Koan of Dream

Stairwell Lighting at Night by Adolf von Menzel

Buddhist Hermit

"if you see through this world and let go of it...this is wisdom
if you see through this world and but don't let it go...that's just "talking Zen"

here, for you:

[the hermit hands a handwritten koan to the filmmaker]

'ten thousand things
all in this breath
grasping hold of emptiness

there's really nothing to say'

'ten thousand things, all in this breath...' why are people so busy?
just for one breath
they say, 'busy busy, mine mine...
busy a whole lifetime for 'Me'

when this breath is cut off...you let go of the whole universe...why not let go from the start?
'grasping hold of emptiness...' you want to talk about 'real'... show me one thing that is real...there's nothing real from the start

every day morning to night, gathering things...big and small, valuables...money, name and recognition...gathering it up into your lap...like you're holding the golden key...busy your whole life for nothing...acting like a thief...why not put this energy to liberation?

put this mind to the Path"

from the film "Among White Clouds"

__________

I’m in the middle of a desert wilderness outside of a concrete shack which seems to be fortified with wood in various parts. I am with my Dad’s family, specifically I can see my step-sister and my father. They seem very concerned with the time. My father asks us all to be aware of the time, yet he seems very confused and distracted. I ask why would we pay attention to the time, when we are here! I look over my shoulder, and the sun immediately dips down like a perfectly circular satchel of black tea into the boiling water of an endless Sahara horizon. Our surroundings turn to darkness, and suddenly I realize where I am. I can see the Sphynx, with its eyes aglow. Beside the Sphynx are other ruins, unseen in the light of day or at all in the modern ruins around the Great Pyramid. There are faces, of Pharaonic royalty and monuments indescribable. I don’t know how we got here, but I begin to become nervous as I see a local Egyptian, appearing to be a Bedouin trot down a nearby path on a camel. I asked them if they understood where we are and how this place seethes with forbidden territory. They don’t listen and wish to stay permanently, enamored and convinced this is the place they should be.

Together with my wife, we set off. On the road, we find ourselves boarding a mine cart and fleeing swiftly through a desert mountain landscape. As we near insurmountable cliffs, our cart somehow hovers blankly over the cliffs as if their steep inclines were lined with tracks. Upon a deserted hill, we come upon what appears as a Zen dojo or Buddhist shrine of some kind. I enter, leaving my wife behind to wait for me.

Inside the dojo shrine is a hermitage group in the presence of Allen Ginsberg. He is leading a hermitage in exercises of dreaming and fear; that is, how to overcome your fears through dreams. On the walls are psychedelic video art installations. There is an unspoken air of poetic thinking in the room, however subdued by a collective attitude of spiritual practice. When it is finally my chance to endeavor to see out the exercise before me, I am keen to try and overcome my fear through this dream. I am led, to enter myself in the other quarters of the dojo shrine. Its paper walls open at my approach, as I survey the empty quarters. A lightly carpeted staircase leads up to a dark upstairs room. I feel this will be my test. Inside the room, there is a table, upon which my fear resides. Adrenaline rushes. My scalp tingles uncontrollably. I look up, to see an alien figure, hairless and gray-skinned, shriveled and wrinkled, with inflated head. This figure seems relatively docile, however he holds a rope in his hand. Above his left shoulder, a smaller version of the same alien species lies hanged upon a noose. I look into this alien torture victim’s eyes and I see a piercing evil reverberating into every corner of my being with pure driving intensity from the only light in the room, emanating like diamonds from the pupils of the emaciated skull drooping with a deathly gaze, directly at me. I am overcome with fear and immediately exit, having failed at the exercise. I return to the room, the air is a polite majesty of compassion. I leave for my wife outside, who waits patiently.

What was Ginsberg trying to show me or trying to lead me towards; something old, withered with age or neglect, something so inhumane and non-human, yet so eerily resembling our human form, or something hidden deep within me, a part of myself that is all of those things and more, a thing I'm afraid only to confront?

________

Leaving nowhere

loopy adolescent
limping
and boasting

a raucous
and numb
pride
for nowhere
leaving

Tuesday, February 16 2010

3.18pm

Waiting for plane in ugly dim light of celebrity photograph restaurant in Calgary airport. 

Beer and soup.

The New West of Dreams

It occurs to me that the Old West has become mythologized to conceal things about our past that were lost. What did we lose? Who did we pass that loss along to?

Hollow in the snow by Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin

Autumn leaves drape over the ground. The parchment texture moistens in places, as leaf pigments turn to resemble how I would imagine our internal organs. We are staying at a house, where the cool drafts pass through every corner, and the outside smells better than the inside. We are in the wilderness, though I feel close to home with my old friend from school days back in the Northeast. He’s his usual nonchalant self. We all feel the way one feels a few hours after chain-smoking for days on end. We’re moving on out. The trouble is, the only drivable car is with less capacity than can accommodate the five or six of us needing to get some more supplies in town. We hit the road, I leave my friend behind.

We soon arrive at another house in much the same condition as ours after a ride through the tamed highway wilderness. There is still a calling, leading us out into the mushroom pasture beyond the roadside horizon. We enter a house much like ours; it is empty, with cereal boxes punctured by hungry worms and roving mice. We manage to salvage some granola and milk. Some stay behind and begin to smoke comfortably upon upholstery pockmarked with careless fire. There is now room in the car for my friend, who I’m surprised to see. At the same time, I find it somehow predictable that he’s mustered a stealth ability to show up unannounced at any moment in this drably subdued, heaving chest of fresh air and color admired faintly around us. With immediacy, we are isolated from our past and our future. Yet, there are pinholes of awareness, where our perception heightens to envision the crystalline beauty of our surroundings. It usually happens simultaneously with my old time friend. We now both live in the North American West, though so many miles apart in this vast regional territory of our deliberately open, youthful minds.

We arrive in a town resembling Northern California, where many young men and women once moved many years ago and simply kept wheeling “trees” to all the naïve newcomer spirits. There is a winking eye of newcomer and seasoned residence in these parts, separating us only by distances of a few miles at a time. Blonde dreadlocks and glass-blown artistry melt in a haze of fruitful laughter amongst new kinds of friends, whose eyes touch upon the truth that most friendships disintegrate into a stock of fiends. Now, we are unstable, and lack any apparent humanity in this consumptive island of molten bread and wallowing dreams.

The Page Mazeppa by Jean Louis Theodore Gericault

The dry air is crisp and cloudless over a small town in the dead of the Colorado winter. A silence is treasured with each step. The conservative decisiveness of every citizen follows quickly behind me, like a lingering pet surveying one’s every move. I clamber down from a high iron fence. I see two friends in dense black coats. They greet me simply and inexpressively move on further along their frozen sidewalk path.

There is a young local friend of mine. She is a masculine young woman, resembling Jean-Michel Basquiat in some features of her unadorned, spindly matted hair. She is a bold, creative type, yet stifled with destructive emotion and nasty habits. I can see her hiding a needle in the thick folds of her winter sweatshirt. She walks out into the grayscale concrete light, dimming with a vibratory curse, a mathematical fate, to put her underground. So, she thinks, she will take her life into her own hands, and throw the trash out herself. She shoots up, and meets a couple of tall white guys on an outskirts corner near an open field. I see them as I walk past one morning, thinking of how she was killed. The image of her walking away from me endures.

"whose giving breathes iridescent crystalline surety

under a city lain bare as a leafless twig 

in the winter of human occupation

over the frigid glare of our northern memories

fickle, as we approach a secondary wisdom

understood from blind precepts

that erase the open wounds found in deep cleansing

and spiritual promise"

- excerpt from "The Mythic West"

Petronius' Mortal Dreaming...

Illustration for Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon by Norman Lindsay

Encolpius speaks to the wilderness around him, his friend Ascyltus lies dead.

"Where is all your joy now, your arrogance?

Now you're at the mercy...of fishes and wild beasts, you who bragged...of your warlike innocence.

Come now, mortals! Fill your hearts with dreams!

O Gods, how far he lies from his destination!"

From the penultimate scene in "Satyricon,"  by Frederico Fellini.

Four Leaf Clover Medicine Wheel

Lifandi Lif Undir Hamri by Jeroen van Valkenburg

I was doing a solo out in the Ghost River Wilderness area. I was inside a sweat-lodge with the door closed for the majority of the time, so it was like night-time all the time for me on the solo. When I went out I had a mixture of pretty strong emotions - I was excited, anxious, fearful, glad, bold for a new challenge and I also felt a sense of following in the footsteps of my dad and granddad who'd both spent a lot of time alone out in the bush. I've always had a lot of admiration for my dad and grandfather and I'd jump at any chance to be more like them and to make them proud; so I had a strong sense of that going with me as I went out, but I don't know if there's a particular adjective that would describe that particular emotion.

When I was out there I spent the first while getting used to my surroundings, and partly avoiding the difficult and foreign task of deep self-reflection and examination. Finally I got down to it and went into the sweat-lodge and closed the door. It went well for a while until I heard lots of noise outside the lodge - I was filled with gut wrenching fear not knowing what was going on outside. I was so afraid I couldn't move despite my best efforts to unwind my clenching stomach. I was imagining all the worst kind of possibilities that would explain the ruckus all around me - in hind-sight, there were also the most unlikely; bears tusslin over who would eat me first, and how they were gonna get into where I was hiding and the like! 

I couldn't do anything else, so I lay there in fear and starting to feel real sick and I prayed with the little bit of sense that was left in my head - I asked for pity and mercy and I called on my Grandfather to come to me and lend me his strength, courage and sense to make it through whatever was waiting for me. I just lay there and prayed over and over - gradually I started to relax and the noise outside subsided and then disappeared all together. I was still pretty shaky, but I managed to get some sleep - probably out of exhaustion more than a sense of calm and relaxation! When I was asleep I heard my Grandfather's voice and I could almost see him right in the corner of my eye, but when I tried to see him, he slipped to edge of my vision again. He told me that was real proud of me and reassured me that I would be ok in whatever was coming my way - he said it might be tough, but that I would be quite alright. He spoke to me a while more and he told me about things in our family that I had never been told about as a child but had always wondered about - the usual types of hardships that are unspoken in many families like why this and that person don't speak and the cause of what had come between them. Then Granddad said goodbye and wished me well and he walked away. 

I woke up cryin my eyes out. I was so happy to have seen my Granddad again but I felt a really deep and aching sadness that I felt as the loss of him in my life again - my Granddad had passed away when I was 16 and standing beside his coffin I was filled with the deepest sense of loss and regret I've honestly ever felt - because of the things that had come between my Dad and his family, we hardly ever got to see Grandad as kids and being left alone in the house he had built and raised a family in; a family who had all flown far from the nest I think really crushed him and he used to drink a lot, which is probably why we didn't see as much as I would have liked to when I was growing up. I know seeing us made Granddad really happy though, because my only memories of him are him smiling and chatting with us in the shade underneath his house - the stories of his sadness were secondhand to me. 

So when Granddad left me again I was filled with all those same kind of feelings and memories and longing for him in my life again - I don't know if you have ever had a similar feeling, but I felt it physically and emotionally and spiritually through my whole body; and I still feel something of that when I think back to that moment again. 

After I lay there for a while longer I fell asleep again and then I saw very clearly a man walking towards me - he was draped in a long cloth and he had an enormous dark beard that looked like he'd swallowed a bear and left the arse hanging out (to use a Billy Connelly Expression!). When he got near to me he told me that we had the same spirit, that we were in a way the same person - but he was an older me, but I also felt that we were still different, even though we were the same - I can't explain it, it wasn't a reasoned thought, but was a feeling that I just knew that was the case. He explained to me that what I had been learning about from the Blackfoot about the medicine wheel and the four aspects to the universe and our human lives (mental, emotional, physical, spiritual aspects; the four seasons; four stages of life etc) was also part of my old Irish/Gaelic culture and that's what the four leaf clover represents. People say it's "lucky" to find a four leaf clover, but the understanding I took away from that is that I guess in a very essentialised, "dumbed down" way it is lucky - but really, it represents the perfect balance and harmony of the universe and all parts of it - it's a representation of the code or laws by which all things live if they are to exist in their proper way, if they are to exist in that harmony and perpetuate the balance of all existence. Then he showed me how that is drawn in a traditional Gaelic style - it's a knot that has four segements and they all wind into each other with a small segment in the middle. He told me to make my home there, in the middle of the four segments - which I took to me I should live in balance and practice the values of each of the four sections in balance. 

I don't remember the end to that dream, it just sort of faded into me waking up. There was much more to my time on the solo, but that's probably enough for one go! :) 

When I got back I did a lot of follow up research with my family about what Granddad had spoken to me about - without mentioning my dream, as I wasn't sure what people would make of me and my sanity if I told them about that! - and also about what the older me had taught me about that knot. It most certainly is the four leaf-clover representation of harmony and the universal laws of balance and not long after that I ran into a book in the Metaphysical Books and Crystals bookshop in Calgary about the Celtic Spirit Wheel which recounts a Gaelic story from Ireland and how the laws of fours and balance we re-taught to the people of Ireland after they had forgotten them. I could write for pages and pages more about the heightened and deepened awareness I got from reading that book, but it would be purely academic I think. 

The dream I had last night which led me to typing out these words to you no came about after a day feeling pretty lonesome. A good friend the other night had kinda lost her cool with me and let loose all the criticisms she had of my short-comings. She apologised afterwards for having been so unfair, but I still took it to heart and thought about what she said - all I think to a degree, fair criticisms in a sense; but I also felt as though much of what she took me to task over was me acting with the best of all intentions, and in some ways things I have not much control over. So I was feelin pretty sad and a bit lonely out of the whole thing and I went to sleep last night asking for guidance and pity and mercy. In my dream I read a verse from the Bible (which I haven't ever read an awful lot of, just bits and pieces at different times) which brought me a lot of comfort and I woke up this morning feeling much relieved and recovered from my bout of lonesomeness and sadness - the verse that I saw in my dream was 1 Timothy 4:12 "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity".