More good food for thought. I do wonder though about the limits of "just observe". It can also be a way to dissociate and fuel confirmation bias, as described in this recent podcast about people who experienced distress on Goenka Vipassana courses (the final episode shows the resistance in the organisation to making any changes to their approach, in which participants exhibiting symptoms were urged to observe them): https://www.ft.com/content/0b1e26b4-f6ae-44eb-b3f4-ca66fcba2371
There's also the danger of spiritually bypassing worldly problems, which can sometimes be framed as distractions from meditative bliss, or as solvable simply by meditating (as in some of the claims made by TM™ over the years...). Not that any of this is the book's message - clearly meditating needn't be an obstacle to activism, as emphasised in the conclusion re: "inactivist puritans". And transcending one's own problematic tendencies might make it more effective.
So perhaps it's a mixture of non-resistance to things as they are (on the psychological and spiritual level) while nonetheless suggesting that change might be needed and working towards it (on the social and political)? If so, might that still mean resisting in some ways, if not in others?
Thanks, Daniel. The awakening of the West to meditation is a seismic shift and there are bound to be costs and casualties when cultures meet and collide on this scale. We certainly need to be aware of the problems, take them seriously and learn from them. But the costs of meditating – we all pay the price, in small ways, early on (and later!), in headaches, irritation, sleeplessness and stress – are miniscule compared to the cost of not experimenting with meditation. We need to keep in mind that the ‘nightmare of history’, with all its unimaginable horrors and suffering, is the product of the unobserved mind. I’ve never favoured the Buddhist bootcamp approach to meditation myself. A lot of people love it, but it’s strong medicine, especially for beginners. I’ve always preferred to dip my toe in, grope and stumble my way around in the dark and work things out gently, progressively.
I guess it’s obvious from my work with Media Lens that I have a strong urge to resist war, inaction on climate collapse and so on. I find the non-resistance of meditation – watching my suffering, including the suffering that arises out of my activism (the agony of Gaza, for example) - helps keep me sane and able to carry on. As I say in the cogitation, I think the world would be a much saner place if we all accessed the love and bliss hidden behind thought and brought those qualities to our activism. David E
Thanks, David - I agree meditation is powerful, which means there are risks. Although they need to be taken seriously, I wouldn't want to deter anyone. Unfortunately, most media tend to sensationalise - it didn't sound like the FT reporter had been on retreat for a first-hand perspective. Your reference to "bootcamp" seems a good summary of those 10-day courses, but most who attend seem to get something positive from them, as the organisation argued when it was challenged.
I recently interviewed Michael Holden, who contributed to the FT podcast having written an article about his experiences. He told me: "That piece does draw people. They come and find me. And sometimes it's people trying to recruit me into a critique of Vipassana specifically and its methods. And I don't really feel particularly critical of it per se, because I'm not sure there's a better way to try and get large groups of people to have a collective sustained meditative experience, and not charge them any money for it, which is a pretty singular way of going about it. There are a lot of people who will take a lot of money off you to touch on experiences like that. And so I think there's a real nobility to what they're doing. But there is, of course, a danger to it, and that needs to be talked about too." https://ancientfutures.substack.com/p/michael-holden
Considering what he went through, that seemed pretty balanced. Like you, I'd rather take things more gently these days, but there was a time when I found it helpful to take the strong medicine... Anyhow, I enjoyed the cogitation and would like to read the book. If you'd be up for discussing it some time on a podcast, do let me know - I think we'd have a good chat.
Hi David, Thank you for your lovely thesis. It brought up a lot of ideas and responses in my mind so I thought I'd reply (first ever on Substack). I may be odd but I cannot meditate. Still, I can relate to the idea of being love, bliss, watching that star from a distance. The idea of love in itself, not being relative to an object (of love), I think can also apply to liberty or freedom. When I was younger, I really needed to be free from a person who was damaging me and who I couldn’t get away from. Eventually I found a way. At first the freedom, as exhilarating as it felt, was definitively tied to that person: being "free from". After some time it became freedom in itself, liberty that didn't always refer back to the ancient chains. That way of being was very different. It sounds abstract but it was one of the brightest moments of my whole existence.
I have been thinking a lot about sadness these days. I don't really understand how to separate myself from it and watch it. So there's tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings. Yes. For a long time I was struggling with the recognition of the sadness in me. I felt bad that it was there, as though somehow it was a betrayal of those who suffered and for whom I felt that sadness. I came to understand that resisting my feelings was creating stress, and everything was muddy and confusing. Through acceptance of the sadness things became clear. I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world. This acceptance is like coming home. I really feel that I am at one with all the terrible things and at one with those who suffered. It is a kind of becoming sadness. And I guess the thought of becoming separate from the sadness is jarring. Maybe I don't know how to respond to life but I think I need to become the thing or just go mad.
Thanks for sending such a tremendously thoughtful and honest email; I really appreciate it. You write: ‘I may be odd but I cannot meditate.’
For a long time, I thought I couldn’t meditate.
Can you take a moment just to let your hands rest in your lap? Can you feel any sensations in your hands? If you close your eyes, how do you know you have hands? It’s because of the sensations, of course. Can you feel them tingling? Can you feel the tension, the energy pulsing? If you can feel these sensations, you can meditate because that’s meditation. You can do the same with your feet – do they feel tense, warm, cold? Can you feel the energy pulsing through them?
Spending five minutes feeling your left hand, your right hand, your left foot and your right foot can have such an impact that you fall asleep. In fact, when I wake up in the night and can’t sleep, that’s my meditation – I go from one hand and foot to another in a circle, feeling the sensations. If you do five minutes at both ends of the day, you’ll build up a habit that makes it much easier to detect the sensations. You could then try noticing when you feel sadness or anxiety in your chest for five minutes. The mind is so relentless – this endlessly spinning, grinding torture machine – that even five minutes spent directing attention to the body can be tremendously relaxing. You write:
‘I don't really understand how to separate myself from it [the sadness] and watch it. So there's tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings.’
Often, we’re feeling sad without real awareness – we have a dim recognition that we feel terrible, but we’re mostly focused on the mind machine generating endless thoughts about the sadness: ‘I miss him/her... This time last year, she was here... I should have... I shouldn’t have... They should have...’
The thing is to separate from that relentless thought process generating sadness – we turn from focusing on thoughts about sadness to feeling the sadness in our chests and bellies. I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle:
‘There are many pseudo escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression, and so on — but they don’t free you from the [emotional] pain. Suffering does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious… So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it…
‘So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labelling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is.’
You write:
‘I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world.’
Me, too. Gaza, Syria, Libya, Iraq, climate collapse... it all constantly generates sadness and grief. Again, we can take a break from thinking about these things - from the hellish flood of images and footage on X, for example - and focus on feeling the sadness, which alchemises into peace, love and bliss. We don’t get overwhelmed by the sadness; we get overwhelmed by our minds thinking about the sadness. So, we’re ‘separating from’ overthinking about the sadness but actually joining with the sadness through feeling; going deeply into it. If we push it away, it remains and intensifies. I’ve chatted about these issues more here:
Hi David, Thanks for your reply and your cogitations. You are very encouraging. I'm going to read them three times to let them sink in. It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.) The signal is faint but, yeah, I got some tingles.
If you look at the photo on the cover of Norman Finkelstein's book on Gaza you might see an image of "beyond sadness". That's not a cynical "moving on from sadness" type of beyond, but a kind of beyond that takes your words away... because it's too much. Beyond, that place where we find ourselves in sadness that is so deep and it goes so far, you think maybe it doesn't have an end. I don't know what to do, what to think, or even what to feel, when the father in Gaza, who lately lost his children through traumatic death from a bomb, said that he was happy because now his children won't starve to death. He wasn't able to provide for them when they told him they were hungry.
I'm going to try to follow your advice. I don't know if I can do it. The sadness, I think, is too much. So from my personal history and from what is happening now to the children, mothers, fathers who have become targets..there's this great big surge in my belly and chest that is bigger than me. It's like a bloody tsunami. I don't have the words to express what I sense. I think it's too much. This morning I sat down on a bench in the park and just slumped. That felt like all I could do. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks, again. I responded at length to your heartfelt messages because I think you captured perfectly how many of us have been suffering through the Gaza genocide. Would it be okay for me to take our exchanges here, add them to a couple of exchanges I’ve had with other readers and send them as a follow-up cogitation? If you don’t want the additional attention, I could omit your name and not link to Substack.
Hi David, Thank you for your meaningful replies and cogitations.
Sure, absolutely.
You described yourself as 'a miniscule speck in an immense ocean...' Still your words flow into others, around and through their minds and then into the minds of others and others. That is the immeasurability of the miniscule speck.
I would say the immeasurability is intrinsic to the immensity of the ocean. The simple conclusion is, then, you and your contributions are immeasurably immense.
(I haven't gotten any further but will still give you an update when I make some progress.)
'I would say the immeasurability is intrinsic to the immensity of the ocean. The simple conclusion is, then, you and your contributions are immeasurably immense.'
Beautifully put - thank you. :o) Good luck with your experiments and do let us know how you're getting on.
‘It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.)’
Well done, that will improve with practice. You can also search for short, guided ‘body scan’ meditations online – find one with a voice that doesn’t sound too irritating. :o) That really helps if you’re struggling with motivation or focus.
The initial difficulty you had made me think you’re doing a tremendous amount of intellectual work, because it does have that numbing effect on our ability to feel sensations. Then you mentioned Gaza and Norm Finkelstein - a brilliant, very intense analyst - and I’m sure you’re immersed in a huge amount of other analysis, too. For the last quarter of a century co-editing Media Lens, it’s been my self-appointed task to immerse myself in these horrors every day, so I’ve experienced similar symptoms. I’ve written about the problems suffered by Charles Darwin:
‘My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years … Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry … I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ...’
He added:
‘If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week … The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.’
A journalist and activist wrote to me last year:
‘But reading your book, things I had sensed but not addressed came sharply into focus. I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children... I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts. I build in leisure time. I play badminton a lot. I’m fit. I do yoga. I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. I go to events where I live. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness. Darwin and Maugham’s warnings were powerful for me.’
‘But the love is gone’. Fantastically honest, but how sad. Not *that* sad, though, because the love is only buried beneath intellectual activity, not gone. Actually, peace, love and bliss are hidden just out of sight; it only needs a bit of meditation - we just need to experiment, grope around in the dark a bit, and we’ll get there. We are never a lost cause.
In the early years of Media Lens, I felt similar symptoms from time to time. Then, I was overwhelmed by the suffering in Iraq, where 500,000 children under five were killed by US-UK sanctions. The deaths of children in Gaza have been horrendous, but in Iraq from 1990-2003, child deaths were measured in the 100,000s. I met and talked to John Pilger and Denis Halliday about it, which made it even more real and personal for me. It felt almost unbearable. Then, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and occupation, at least one million more Iraqis died – Western politicians and journalists were completely oblivious. Staggering death tolls. When the US attacked the third city, Fallujah, in November 2004, they destroyed 75% of the buildings. We were spared the mobile phone footage tormenting everyone now from Gaza, but we knew conditions in Iraq were catastrophic. Other horrors have hit me even harder over even more years – particularly the very real prospect of human extinction from climate collapse. In this case, we’re not talking tens of thousands, or millions of deaths, but billions of deaths. You can’t get more catastrophic, bleaker than that! How to deal with the sadness of that? We have to find a way, and we can.
None of this is intended to diminish the horror of the genocide in Gaza, but it’s so good for our mental health to put it in perspective – similar horrors, on an even greater scale, have been erupting for decades and centuries. I found great sanity in the thoughts of a mystic who said: ‘The world is in a mess, it has always been in a mess, and it always will be in a mess.’ It is not that there are a few terrible issues we need to resolve; violence, injustice and cruelty are deeply embedded in human societies. Why does that help? Because it does provide perspective – we do what we can to the best of our ability, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be overwhelmed by this basic fact of existence. We have to care for ourselves as well as others. That's my feeling, now.
The compassion I have felt for people suffering under US-UK violence is real. But reading Osho and Tolle alerted me to the fact that my ego had a subtle investment in my suffering. I *liked* the idea that I was battling against an historic injustice. It gave my life a sense of purpose, meaning; it made me one of the Good Guys in a grand drama of great significance. It made my contribution seem crucial. And hopefully the work I’ve done does matter, but the truth is I am a tiny drop, a miniscule speck in an immense ocean of human thought and action stretching over years, centuries and millennia. It helps me to keep my own significance, and the significance of the efforts I make, in perspective. We should do our best but not get consumed, heartbroken by the suffering of the world. In an age of iPhones and social media, we can all too easily keep at it all day until we're exhausted. It’s vital to take solid breaks and do all the things the anonymous journalist I mentioned used to do and does no longer.
The “mystic” Eckhart Tolle hasn’t said a word about Israel’s extermination campaign in Palestine. Mindfulness and Zen meditation certainly can make you feel better, less anxious and fixated, less reactive and angry, more tolerant of pain and discomfort, and so on. But it also creates a hierarchy as in I’m enlightened or I’ve had “insight” or kensho and you haven’t! I don’t see much evidence that meditation and “the mindfulness revolution” in the West has cut through the effects of state power and propaganda on moral development or moral outlook. I sat through a Goenka retreat almost 20 years ago. It was basically Buddha boot camp and it was awful.
Thanks, Timmy. Enlightened masters aside, meditators of course still have egos, which means they create hierarchies in everything they do, like everyone else. It’s inevitable. That’s just part of the nonsense we have to be aware of. It’s all about catching our egos playing these mind games; meditative mind games are no different. It’s very early days and I’m not sure how we might judge the impact of mindfulness on Western morality. I can judge the impact on me, as described in the cogitation. Clearly, the Buddhist bootcamp wasn’t for you. Next time you feel anxious, sad, resentful, just try to locate the feelings in your chest and belly, and watch them for 10 minutes, 20, 30. That might suit you much better. The results can be really extraordinary. David E
More good food for thought. I do wonder though about the limits of "just observe". It can also be a way to dissociate and fuel confirmation bias, as described in this recent podcast about people who experienced distress on Goenka Vipassana courses (the final episode shows the resistance in the organisation to making any changes to their approach, in which participants exhibiting symptoms were urged to observe them): https://www.ft.com/content/0b1e26b4-f6ae-44eb-b3f4-ca66fcba2371
There's also the danger of spiritually bypassing worldly problems, which can sometimes be framed as distractions from meditative bliss, or as solvable simply by meditating (as in some of the claims made by TM™ over the years...). Not that any of this is the book's message - clearly meditating needn't be an obstacle to activism, as emphasised in the conclusion re: "inactivist puritans". And transcending one's own problematic tendencies might make it more effective.
So perhaps it's a mixture of non-resistance to things as they are (on the psychological and spiritual level) while nonetheless suggesting that change might be needed and working towards it (on the social and political)? If so, might that still mean resisting in some ways, if not in others?
Thanks, Daniel. The awakening of the West to meditation is a seismic shift and there are bound to be costs and casualties when cultures meet and collide on this scale. We certainly need to be aware of the problems, take them seriously and learn from them. But the costs of meditating – we all pay the price, in small ways, early on (and later!), in headaches, irritation, sleeplessness and stress – are miniscule compared to the cost of not experimenting with meditation. We need to keep in mind that the ‘nightmare of history’, with all its unimaginable horrors and suffering, is the product of the unobserved mind. I’ve never favoured the Buddhist bootcamp approach to meditation myself. A lot of people love it, but it’s strong medicine, especially for beginners. I’ve always preferred to dip my toe in, grope and stumble my way around in the dark and work things out gently, progressively.
I guess it’s obvious from my work with Media Lens that I have a strong urge to resist war, inaction on climate collapse and so on. I find the non-resistance of meditation – watching my suffering, including the suffering that arises out of my activism (the agony of Gaza, for example) - helps keep me sane and able to carry on. As I say in the cogitation, I think the world would be a much saner place if we all accessed the love and bliss hidden behind thought and brought those qualities to our activism. David E
Thanks, David - I agree meditation is powerful, which means there are risks. Although they need to be taken seriously, I wouldn't want to deter anyone. Unfortunately, most media tend to sensationalise - it didn't sound like the FT reporter had been on retreat for a first-hand perspective. Your reference to "bootcamp" seems a good summary of those 10-day courses, but most who attend seem to get something positive from them, as the organisation argued when it was challenged.
I recently interviewed Michael Holden, who contributed to the FT podcast having written an article about his experiences. He told me: "That piece does draw people. They come and find me. And sometimes it's people trying to recruit me into a critique of Vipassana specifically and its methods. And I don't really feel particularly critical of it per se, because I'm not sure there's a better way to try and get large groups of people to have a collective sustained meditative experience, and not charge them any money for it, which is a pretty singular way of going about it. There are a lot of people who will take a lot of money off you to touch on experiences like that. And so I think there's a real nobility to what they're doing. But there is, of course, a danger to it, and that needs to be talked about too." https://ancientfutures.substack.com/p/michael-holden
Considering what he went through, that seemed pretty balanced. Like you, I'd rather take things more gently these days, but there was a time when I found it helpful to take the strong medicine... Anyhow, I enjoyed the cogitation and would like to read the book. If you'd be up for discussing it some time on a podcast, do let me know - I think we'd have a good chat.
Best wishes,
Daniel
Hi David, Thank you for your lovely thesis. It brought up a lot of ideas and responses in my mind so I thought I'd reply (first ever on Substack). I may be odd but I cannot meditate. Still, I can relate to the idea of being love, bliss, watching that star from a distance. The idea of love in itself, not being relative to an object (of love), I think can also apply to liberty or freedom. When I was younger, I really needed to be free from a person who was damaging me and who I couldn’t get away from. Eventually I found a way. At first the freedom, as exhilarating as it felt, was definitively tied to that person: being "free from". After some time it became freedom in itself, liberty that didn't always refer back to the ancient chains. That way of being was very different. It sounds abstract but it was one of the brightest moments of my whole existence.
I have been thinking a lot about sadness these days. I don't really understand how to separate myself from it and watch it. So there's tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings. Yes. For a long time I was struggling with the recognition of the sadness in me. I felt bad that it was there, as though somehow it was a betrayal of those who suffered and for whom I felt that sadness. I came to understand that resisting my feelings was creating stress, and everything was muddy and confusing. Through acceptance of the sadness things became clear. I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world. This acceptance is like coming home. I really feel that I am at one with all the terrible things and at one with those who suffered. It is a kind of becoming sadness. And I guess the thought of becoming separate from the sadness is jarring. Maybe I don't know how to respond to life but I think I need to become the thing or just go mad.
Hi Julia
Thanks for sending such a tremendously thoughtful and honest email; I really appreciate it. You write: ‘I may be odd but I cannot meditate.’
For a long time, I thought I couldn’t meditate.
Can you take a moment just to let your hands rest in your lap? Can you feel any sensations in your hands? If you close your eyes, how do you know you have hands? It’s because of the sensations, of course. Can you feel them tingling? Can you feel the tension, the energy pulsing? If you can feel these sensations, you can meditate because that’s meditation. You can do the same with your feet – do they feel tense, warm, cold? Can you feel the energy pulsing through them?
Spending five minutes feeling your left hand, your right hand, your left foot and your right foot can have such an impact that you fall asleep. In fact, when I wake up in the night and can’t sleep, that’s my meditation – I go from one hand and foot to another in a circle, feeling the sensations. If you do five minutes at both ends of the day, you’ll build up a habit that makes it much easier to detect the sensations. You could then try noticing when you feel sadness or anxiety in your chest for five minutes. The mind is so relentless – this endlessly spinning, grinding torture machine – that even five minutes spent directing attention to the body can be tremendously relaxing. You write:
‘I don't really understand how to separate myself from it [the sadness] and watch it. So there's tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings.’
Often, we’re feeling sad without real awareness – we have a dim recognition that we feel terrible, but we’re mostly focused on the mind machine generating endless thoughts about the sadness: ‘I miss him/her... This time last year, she was here... I should have... I shouldn’t have... They should have...’
The thing is to separate from that relentless thought process generating sadness – we turn from focusing on thoughts about sadness to feeling the sadness in our chests and bellies. I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle:
‘There are many pseudo escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression, and so on — but they don’t free you from the [emotional] pain. Suffering does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious… So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it…
‘So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labelling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is.’
You write:
‘I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world.’
Me, too. Gaza, Syria, Libya, Iraq, climate collapse... it all constantly generates sadness and grief. Again, we can take a break from thinking about these things - from the hellish flood of images and footage on X, for example - and focus on feeling the sadness, which alchemises into peace, love and bliss. We don’t get overwhelmed by the sadness; we get overwhelmed by our minds thinking about the sadness. So, we’re ‘separating from’ overthinking about the sadness but actually joining with the sadness through feeling; going deeply into it. If we push it away, it remains and intensifies. I’ve chatted about these issues more here:
https://www.medialens.org/2022/burning-among-stars-in-the-night-pain-as-a-portal/
and
https://www.medialens.org/2020/cogitation-meditation-in-an-age-of-cataclysms/
All best wishes
David E
Hi David, Thanks for your reply and your cogitations. You are very encouraging. I'm going to read them three times to let them sink in. It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.) The signal is faint but, yeah, I got some tingles.
If you look at the photo on the cover of Norman Finkelstein's book on Gaza you might see an image of "beyond sadness". That's not a cynical "moving on from sadness" type of beyond, but a kind of beyond that takes your words away... because it's too much. Beyond, that place where we find ourselves in sadness that is so deep and it goes so far, you think maybe it doesn't have an end. I don't know what to do, what to think, or even what to feel, when the father in Gaza, who lately lost his children through traumatic death from a bomb, said that he was happy because now his children won't starve to death. He wasn't able to provide for them when they told him they were hungry.
I'm going to try to follow your advice. I don't know if I can do it. The sadness, I think, is too much. So from my personal history and from what is happening now to the children, mothers, fathers who have become targets..there's this great big surge in my belly and chest that is bigger than me. It's like a bloody tsunami. I don't have the words to express what I sense. I think it's too much. This morning I sat down on a bench in the park and just slumped. That felt like all I could do. I'll let you know how it goes.
All the best,
J
Hi Julia
Thanks, again. I responded at length to your heartfelt messages because I think you captured perfectly how many of us have been suffering through the Gaza genocide. Would it be okay for me to take our exchanges here, add them to a couple of exchanges I’ve had with other readers and send them as a follow-up cogitation? If you don’t want the additional attention, I could omit your name and not link to Substack.
Best wishes
David E
Hi David, Thank you for your meaningful replies and cogitations.
Sure, absolutely.
You described yourself as 'a miniscule speck in an immense ocean...' Still your words flow into others, around and through their minds and then into the minds of others and others. That is the immeasurability of the miniscule speck.
I would say the immeasurability is intrinsic to the immensity of the ocean. The simple conclusion is, then, you and your contributions are immeasurably immense.
(I haven't gotten any further but will still give you an update when I make some progress.)
All the best,
Julia
'I would say the immeasurability is intrinsic to the immensity of the ocean. The simple conclusion is, then, you and your contributions are immeasurably immense.'
Beautifully put - thank you. :o) Good luck with your experiments and do let us know how you're getting on.
All best
David E
Thanks, Julia.
‘It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.)’
Well done, that will improve with practice. You can also search for short, guided ‘body scan’ meditations online – find one with a voice that doesn’t sound too irritating. :o) That really helps if you’re struggling with motivation or focus.
The initial difficulty you had made me think you’re doing a tremendous amount of intellectual work, because it does have that numbing effect on our ability to feel sensations. Then you mentioned Gaza and Norm Finkelstein - a brilliant, very intense analyst - and I’m sure you’re immersed in a huge amount of other analysis, too. For the last quarter of a century co-editing Media Lens, it’s been my self-appointed task to immerse myself in these horrors every day, so I’ve experienced similar symptoms. I’ve written about the problems suffered by Charles Darwin:
‘My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years … Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry … I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ...’
He added:
‘If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week … The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.’
A journalist and activist wrote to me last year:
‘But reading your book, things I had sensed but not addressed came sharply into focus. I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children... I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts. I build in leisure time. I play badminton a lot. I’m fit. I do yoga. I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. I go to events where I live. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness. Darwin and Maugham’s warnings were powerful for me.’
‘But the love is gone’. Fantastically honest, but how sad. Not *that* sad, though, because the love is only buried beneath intellectual activity, not gone. Actually, peace, love and bliss are hidden just out of sight; it only needs a bit of meditation - we just need to experiment, grope around in the dark a bit, and we’ll get there. We are never a lost cause.
In the early years of Media Lens, I felt similar symptoms from time to time. Then, I was overwhelmed by the suffering in Iraq, where 500,000 children under five were killed by US-UK sanctions. The deaths of children in Gaza have been horrendous, but in Iraq from 1990-2003, child deaths were measured in the 100,000s. I met and talked to John Pilger and Denis Halliday about it, which made it even more real and personal for me. It felt almost unbearable. Then, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and occupation, at least one million more Iraqis died – Western politicians and journalists were completely oblivious. Staggering death tolls. When the US attacked the third city, Fallujah, in November 2004, they destroyed 75% of the buildings. We were spared the mobile phone footage tormenting everyone now from Gaza, but we knew conditions in Iraq were catastrophic. Other horrors have hit me even harder over even more years – particularly the very real prospect of human extinction from climate collapse. In this case, we’re not talking tens of thousands, or millions of deaths, but billions of deaths. You can’t get more catastrophic, bleaker than that! How to deal with the sadness of that? We have to find a way, and we can.
None of this is intended to diminish the horror of the genocide in Gaza, but it’s so good for our mental health to put it in perspective – similar horrors, on an even greater scale, have been erupting for decades and centuries. I found great sanity in the thoughts of a mystic who said: ‘The world is in a mess, it has always been in a mess, and it always will be in a mess.’ It is not that there are a few terrible issues we need to resolve; violence, injustice and cruelty are deeply embedded in human societies. Why does that help? Because it does provide perspective – we do what we can to the best of our ability, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be overwhelmed by this basic fact of existence. We have to care for ourselves as well as others. That's my feeling, now.
The compassion I have felt for people suffering under US-UK violence is real. But reading Osho and Tolle alerted me to the fact that my ego had a subtle investment in my suffering. I *liked* the idea that I was battling against an historic injustice. It gave my life a sense of purpose, meaning; it made me one of the Good Guys in a grand drama of great significance. It made my contribution seem crucial. And hopefully the work I’ve done does matter, but the truth is I am a tiny drop, a miniscule speck in an immense ocean of human thought and action stretching over years, centuries and millennia. It helps me to keep my own significance, and the significance of the efforts I make, in perspective. We should do our best but not get consumed, heartbroken by the suffering of the world. In an age of iPhones and social media, we can all too easily keep at it all day until we're exhausted. It’s vital to take solid breaks and do all the things the anonymous journalist I mentioned used to do and does no longer.
All best wishes
David E
The “mystic” Eckhart Tolle hasn’t said a word about Israel’s extermination campaign in Palestine. Mindfulness and Zen meditation certainly can make you feel better, less anxious and fixated, less reactive and angry, more tolerant of pain and discomfort, and so on. But it also creates a hierarchy as in I’m enlightened or I’ve had “insight” or kensho and you haven’t! I don’t see much evidence that meditation and “the mindfulness revolution” in the West has cut through the effects of state power and propaganda on moral development or moral outlook. I sat through a Goenka retreat almost 20 years ago. It was basically Buddha boot camp and it was awful.
Thanks, Timmy. Enlightened masters aside, meditators of course still have egos, which means they create hierarchies in everything they do, like everyone else. It’s inevitable. That’s just part of the nonsense we have to be aware of. It’s all about catching our egos playing these mind games; meditative mind games are no different. It’s very early days and I’m not sure how we might judge the impact of mindfulness on Western morality. I can judge the impact on me, as described in the cogitation. Clearly, the Buddhist bootcamp wasn’t for you. Next time you feel anxious, sad, resentful, just try to locate the feelings in your chest and belly, and watch them for 10 minutes, 20, 30. That might suit you much better. The results can be really extraordinary. David E