I’m away for a couple of weeks on a Vipassana meditation course. I’ll be resuming Dymaxion sleep and journalling here and on youtube when I return, for now I’ll leave you with something I found in the foreword of Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller - “A poet’s advice” by E.E Cummings.
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
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I have been exploring information about meditation and Buddhism for the past 3 weeks. I am particularly interested in the ability to master one’s own emotional states, to the point of eliminating unneccessary ones, or at least to direct them in more positive ways rather than allowing them to flow wherever and making a mess of the whole place. I’ve mentioned earlier the book “Destructive Emotions”, which is a narrative of the 9th (or so) of a series of meetings between the Dalai Lama and a series of eminent scientists about emotions and the mind, and what to do about bad ones.
Noticing feelings on ones body, as instructed in meditation, reminds me of the stage of NLP reframing where one waits for signals from parts for objections.
As a direct example of what I have gained from meditation, even before I began reading about the Buddhism, is how I’ve been tackling a particularly nasty habit I have developed of waking up with a great amount of tension in my jaw and throat that makes my wakings seem almost unsurmountable. I don’t know why this has started lately, but meditation to relax all of the parts participating in the missery has been the only thing to break it. But I find that I haven’t eliminated it, as I still need to continue practice for it, and if I miss and forget, as it subside alot with little practice now, it comes sneaking back again. As I meditate more I find that I am getting very good at this for feelings and body sensations that are not very unpleasant, but interrupt my thinking or best patterns at different times. And more practice also seems to make the morning tensions go away for longer periods at a time. Eventually I will climb this small mountain to find the root cause of it.
It’s interesting that you appear to be on a parallel path for a time.
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