MINDFULNESS-BASED, ASSISTED, SELF STUDY

            “To study the Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”   Dogen, zen teacher, 13^th Century.

           

            To be enlightened by all things may be one of the most powerful way to allow the flow of creative ideas that will enliven our stories, paintings, plays, movies, dances, music.   What did Dogen advise for the study of the self: meditation?

            Perhaps Dogen was telling us something about the mystery of creativity in this poem of his:“Windless, waveless, in the dark water a swamped boat scatters moonlight.”   Meditation has the power to scatter sparks of beauty found in the darkness of our Ultimate Mystery, when the ordinary mind, swamped with thoughts, becomes completely calm, untroubled by the winds and waves of egoistic living.

I have known people who lived or are living a life of loving-kindness, compassion, justice, joy and peace—what I consider the molecular structure of happiness-- and have not ever practiced meditation.

Some folks I know and admire have found that meditating put them in touch with too much fear and pain.   My wife Lee experienced exactly that, when she began to practice meditation forty years ago, during our sojourn on a Greek island.   She did however, much later, find her way into a mantra meditation she finds rewarding.   I respect anyone’s decision to forego meditation, temporarily or permanently.

            Meditation is clearly not the only way to achieve inner happiness.   As a matter of fact, some meditation teachers have said that most mothers do not have to practice meditation, because being a mother IS a meditation.   Many mothers, when I tell them that, immediately nod their head in approval.

            Meditation may be inappropriate for some people, but for those of us who stick with it in a yogic way (when a few minutes of meditation feel good, but then become in any way painful, you stop) meditation can become a joyful liberation from the stressful and seemingly chaotic mind-body-world river of mental images, memories, mental constructions, emotions, physical sensations and societal/earthly happenings.

            Most artists have often experienced that untroubled divine emptiness from which spring ideas and images that scatter the beauty of meditative moonlight out of our darkness.

                                            VISUALIZATION FOR THE ACT OF CREATION

Talk about the power of visualization!   A power that can jump-start anyone’s creativity, from within the blood and the body and the mind and all the stuff of our inner-outer being, while yearning for the warm, healing presence of all the darlings we know and love, and all the darlings we may never know but wish to love, and so grateful for the yearning...   Ergo:

    Here's a recent emanation from a meditative rumination of mine about how I would do my days if I am ever completely unwanted, homeless, and using my years of so-called spiritual practice to find loving kindness, compassion, joy and peace, as I sit with my meager belongings in a small pack or bag, in some park or train station, do all my meditations, smiling, laughing and singing and dancing inside, sending visualized hugs and kisses and blessings and thanksgiving to everyone I have ever known and loved, and those I may never know, but wish to love--  and creating, creating, creating.   My beloved collaborator/role model/brother-in-law Bob Imbrie—we wrote plays together for twenty years, including SOMEONE’S COMIN’ HUNGRY, which appeared Off-Broadway, and CAR, which was presented at the Berlin Festival-- taught me that our mission in life is to love and create-- ergo, homeless, alone and unwanted, in the park, on a wooden bench, I ask myself, what is the first word of a new poem?  Any word may do...Any world may do… 'Beginning' is  the word-world that comes to me, and the rest follows effortlessly:

                                                Beginning nothing,

                                                Ending nothing,

                                                 Every breath a victory.

THE GIFT OF REMEMBERING: HOW MEMORIES CAN ENRICH MY LOVING AND CREATING Tunnel vision can lead to stuckness in relationships and will inevitably strangle the thrill of creating movies, plays, poems, songs, paintings, sculpture, dances that are alive with the powerful surprises that immediately seem inevitable. What causes tunnel vision more than the narrowness of unhappiness? Thakur, a Hindu existentialist saint, once wrote: “Contraction is dejection, expansion is delight.” As my vision expands, so do the innumerable possibilities multiply in any creative undertaking. The mind of a child is a beginner’s mind, empty of limiting concepts. Picasso once wrote that it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like child. Have a look at “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, by Shunryu Suzuki. A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which that person’s heart first opened. Albert Camus “You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.” Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov “One happy memory from childhood can save us.” These words are spoken to a group of boys who are suffering the death of a companion they had treated brutally, spoken by Alyosha, the youngest and most spiritual brother in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, a novel considered by some to be the greatest ever written. “One happy memory from childhood can save us.” How can a happy memory save us? And is it only happy memories that can save us? How can a memory save us, and save us from what? Deborah Kerr, speaking to Cary Grant, in the movie An Affair to Remember, remarks wistfully, “Winter must be hard for those who have no memories to keep them warm.” Probably the most ancient method for finding happiness through our memories is the practice of meditation, which can enable each of us to become a so-called “spectator of one’s own spectacle”, able to witness our own destiny, moment by moment, day by day, with impartial calmness and complete tranquillity. Peace, love, joy and gratitude are the gifts of becoming spectator of one’s own spectacle, discovering gratitude and joy in the happy, sad, sweet and often painful memories that arise from the unconscious when we allow it to reveal effortlessly pieces of the innumerable images stored deep within us. For many years now I have given a few minutes of my morning meditation to the unfolding of whatever memories my unconscious bestows, first from the present moment backward to the past, then from whatever earliest childhood memory arises and forward in leaps and bounds toward the Now. Like someone sitting on the bank of a river and watching the fragments of memory, broken branches and bits of wreckage, I try to watch what flows past the mirror of my mind, neither resisting nor clinging to whatever memories and feelings are carried into and out of my awareness. Imagine sitting in a theatre or movie house and watching all kinds of beautiful and terrible stories unfold, feeling deeply with the characters, yet grateful for the power of the entertainment to remove us from our anxieties. Part of our enjoyment arises from being unburdened; during those hours, the burden of thoughts we have learned to think, the shoulds, the mustn’ts, the regrets, the fears of what tomorrow may bring, the always, the never, the beliefs and all manner of distorted cognitions—the shlep bag of words unspoken, actions not taken—for those hours of being a spectator we are liberated. Memories can help us immeasurably to experience the same liberation, to be, whenever we find it serves our existence and the existence of others-- a spectator of our own spectacle. It’s easy to understand how positive memories can create good feelings, because the nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a real experience and a vividly visualized experience. Yesterday’s delicious kiss on the lips by a lover can bring a rush of joy or gratitude. But how can the painful experiences that the unconscious may upsurge bring gratitude? It may take years of practice for most of us, but the more we watch the passage of happy or painful memories, without trying to escape them or grapple with them intellectually or bind them to our heart, the more profoundly grateful we can become for the aliveness, the vulnerability, the child-ness we haven’t lost and can never lose. Those terrible moments when we have been helpless, trapped and vulnerable can, over time, transform that vulnerability, that aliveness, into compassionate action that relieves the suffering of others. All this became a lived reality for me only after many years of daily meditation, a practice aimed at attaining concentration and oneness to serve all beings. Memories of suffering—both in childhood and in my adult life-- have become painful but grateful reminders of the openhearted little boy I am learning to allow myself to be, again and again, when it is safe and I am with compassionate people, especially my beloved partner Lee, and when life is not asking me to work for others as a benevolent emptiness, living in dynamic quietude, ready to help rich and poor, good and bad, enemy as well as friend. You may be a selfish, womanizing sonofabitch and be able to use the other part of yourself to create works of power and beauty that are gifts to all beings. Dylan Thomas, a sometimes sleazy alcoholic, wrote what I consider to be his greatest poem out of a place of profound compassion in himself, A Refusal To Mourn The Death Of A Child By Fire. And Dostoevsky himself, an anti-semite, an addict, hurtful in his personal relationships, surely no paragon of love and compassion, created The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps the most spiritual novel ever written, because he knew how to use childhood memories to free himself—at least in the act of creation—of what the Buddhists call the three poisons: ill-will, greed, delusions. If you wish your creative juices to flow from a source of everyday happiness,.free of addictions, alive with the fruits of giving and receiving love, then practice the thoughts, speech and actions that make love blossom, practice, practice, practice! If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. However innumerable created beings are, I vow to emancipate them all. However inexhaustible delusions are, I vow to extinguish them all. However immeasurable Dharma Teachings are, I vow to master than all. However endless the Buddha’s Way is, I vow to follow it. There is no need for temples, No need for complicated philosophies. Our own heart is our temple; The philosophy is kindness. Dalai Lama << MORE >>

Entry One:
            It is hard to believe we are so in love, approaching our 49th wedding anniversary, and yet so quick to get upset with each other in these past forty months of intense and intimate collaboration on our first feature film, “Final Gifts”.  At the same time, we are quietly proud of what we have accomplished: 99 minutes of a film experience that a woman poet in Copenhagen has called “brutally beautiful, leaving us filled with hope and love”, a Rutgers University counselor called “life-changing”, and a woman Reformed Church minister wrote: “This film shows both the unthinkable torment of war and the undying power of love.”

While collaborating on every aspect of the production of  “Final Gifts”, Lee and I discovered, sometimes uncomfortably, but always gratefully, that the skills needed to create a lifetime of passionate friendship with an intimate partner are the very same skills required for peaceful and skillful mutual decision-making in the writing, producing, casting, directing and editing of a micro-budget mom and pop feature film.

But I needed something to brighten my mental landscape when Final Gifts-- three and a half years of loving and challenging labor—was rejected by Sundance Film Festival (they receive 9000 plus submissions), and then rejected by the International Film Festival at Vail, Colorado.  

Although I’ve had a play produced Off-Broadway, numerous plays produced Off-Off Broadway,  books published, and a movie made from one of my young adult novels, all with Lee’s assistance, nevertheless rejections often kick up in me painful thoughts and downhearted feelings. Not so for my darling Lee. She  seems rejection-proof.  

“How do you stay so calm?!

“I don’t really know.”

“How the hell am I going to live through fifty or a hundred and fifty rejections over the next two years?”
             “What would Bob say?”   Her half-brother Bob, the happiness role model for both Lee and me. A prince of a man, showed us by his example how to celebrate failure as well as success, and to make each day a work of art.

“He’d say celebrate every damn rejection. Have a great dinner out and drink a toast to the rejection.” 

So there I am, seated opposite Lee in Charlie Brown’s, hours after the Vail and Sundance rejections, clinking our wine glasses:  “Here’s to the joy of rejection!”   And Lee adds:  “Here’s to the joy of the people whose films were accepted.”   I respond with a half-hearted grin:  “I don’t think I’m that spiritually advanced yet.”

Then Lo and behold!  Jumpin’ Jehosophat!   We arrive home after our first rejection celebration at Charlie Brown’s, and discover near midnight that we have received an e-mail from the Garden State Film Festival: Congratulations, your film "Final Gifts" has been accepted for screening as part of our festival.   We are dancing together in the kitchen at one o’clock in the morning, joyously chanting a chant we learned in India, ecstatic, two lovers in their seventies, surprised by how the shocking childlike delight of an acceptance jumps our hearts, Lee usually serene, a quietly cheerful soul, singing and flinging in spite of the torn meniscus in her right knee.

Neil: “Now I won’t give a damn if we get rejected by a thousand other festivals!”

Lee: “Yeah, well, to me it means that someone has seen the value of what we’ve done.   And, hey, we’ll have a lot of fun to boot.”

“Dear what’s-her-name,” we e-mail back to the founder/executive director, “we are more than grateful for all the work you and your staff do to create an event that helps the heroic women in a no-budget movie like ours reach people’s hearts.” That night we go to bed with smiles of delight.

A day later we receive an e-mail from what’s-her-name, the founder/executive director: “Dear Lee and Neil, I didn’t find your film on our acceptance list. Please send me your I.D. Tracking Number.”   We laugh: “Wouldn’t it be funny if our acceptance was a mistake?” Then began the waiting for her reply.

Her reply came a long day later:  “I am mortified. The intern who sent out acceptances mistakenly reversed two of the numbers in your Tracking Number.”

Mortified?  OUCH!  OY!  HURTING.  Embarrassed to feel so wounded by this turn of events, at our age, it seems terribly adolescent.  So off we go to Charlie Brown’s, where we occupy a small booth and once again drink a toast to our long-deceased brother Bob, his practice of celebrating rejection. But this time, I can’t maintain even half a heart of a grin:  “It’s a lot harder to celebrate when the door was opened a crack, a little success comes streaming in, and then the door slams shut on our fingertips.”

Lee:  “We know how it feels to get accepted, right?”

“We sure as hell do.”

“Think about the filmmakers who received a rejection notice, and then just today found out the rejection was a mistake, their film has been accepted--  Wow! Remember us dancing in the kitchen?   Those people must be jumping for joy.”

By helping me focus on the people who were rejected and then accepted, Lee turns my depression upside down, doing what the Buddha advised 2600 years ago: See the joy of others as one’s own, and rejoice in their rejoicing,   One of the most healing gifts a lover can offer to her suffering partner is a way to change the darkness of painful, destructive thoughts into images of the happiness of others, and rejoice in that happiness.