Random Notes on Media Studies

  The more I am getting involved in media studies, the more convinced I am that we (as practitioners) essentially convert ourselves through the inspirational media we interact with. I believe that the desire for inspiration is much like food: it is a kind of craving for many people. And the internet is one outlet through which that desire is somehow met, through a multiplicity of different forms.
   I was designing a video project this week for one of my last assignments in the course, and I found myself just enjoying the result--much better than I would if I were not somehow involved in the creative process. Why is that? I guess one cynical take on it is that it is a form of pride of sorts. But I think a deeper clue to it is that creation itself becomes a reflection of one's deepest motivations and values, which often remain hidden in people until there are moments of clarity. Have you ever considered why you tend to imitate some people and not others? I believe that it's because there is just a stronger resonance in some cases than in others. When I am actively creating an object on a spiritual theme, I am articulating what matters to me the most about the spiritual subject, and this has a great impact on my motivation to practice the spiritual teaching itself.
   I also get to realize the opposite, namely that there are aspects of spiritual life which give rise to doubt, discontinuity and even distance. This shouldn't be surprising, considering that all beings are at different spectrum in relation to a spiritual practice. There can never be 100% 'engagement' all the time, and perhaps what a person could aim for is seeing the spiritual practice itself as a means through which they can reflect upon themselves, rather than 'replacing' oneself with the spiritual teaching.

Cheerfulness Embodied

Two days ago, I read the news that jazz musician Al Jarreau had passed away at the age of 76. I was saddened to hear the news of his passing, and am still feeling the impact of it. Prior to studying Buddhism and becoming very busy in life, I think a lot of my spare time was parsed between reading and music. Al Jarreau was certainly one of the 'big three' who inspired me the most in terms of music--the other two being George Benson and Steely Dan. All three have a contemporary jazz feel to them, but I believe that of the three, Al's music cheered me the most. It's no wonder that Al Jarreau's online press release described healing others as being his number one priority (music being the second).
   I am not too sure which of Al's songs touched me the most, but it was his album L for Lover which was most inspiring and impactful for me. I remember hearing the title track from that album in the car on the way to shopping, and it has that very bright, suburban feel to it. I quickly noted his name from the radio announcer and at some point or another, headed for the library, where I managed to find the cassette of the album. I can say that the albums' sound is definitely 1986: sophisticated but most importantly, very uplifting. Some of those songs, including "Golden Girl", talk about having hope in the midst of dark despair, and you can certainly feel Al's religious leanings and traditions in some of the songs. When I was feeling sad or disheartened,  I would listen to a few tracks from Al's 1984 live album, such as "I Will be There for You", "Roof Garden" and "Let's Pretend". Somehow, this very gifted musician was able to address both romance and despair, while using his whole body and voice as a living instrument, both literally and metaphorically. He seemed very deeply attuned to people's heartaches, and set out to write songs which essentially console people and give them hope for love.
    I think I can go on about Al Jarreau, but I believe you would do best to google his name and watch some of his youtube videos to see for yourself. But the point I wanted to make is how powerful and healing music can be. It's amazing how music itself can reach so many people. However, in another sense, the best way we know how to reach others is to know deeply how we feel about things, and touch the loneliness that is part of human existence.  Music seems to be a simple enough medium to transcend words.
  

Learning from Mistakes

 Trying to create a video piece for my media course has been rather taxing. I enjoy the process and at the same time find that it brings out my misgivings about technology. For this video piece, there are certain things which simply don't make sense to me, which relate to the alignment of things. But I am slowly getting the hang of things, and it's just going to take me some time to get used to it.
    Sometimes even these frustrating experiences are opportunities to observe the self and see how its dynamics unfold. For instance, I sense a desire for things to be neatly explained and finished before I really take time to reflect on what could be learned from the missteps and mistakes. Would life be so exciting if everything were just genuinely neat and straight out of the box? Such would hardly make the world interesting. I am learning to rethink moments of frustration, but it will take me time to overcome my fears of it.

A Feeling of Chan in a Room

 During the group sharing this morning, one of the participants mentioned that he quite enjoyed the energy of the center. I have often wondered, where does that energy come from? I think that in a sense, it was coming from his own experience of the place. Quite literally, it is a heart connection that a person makes, partly from their own attentiveness, and partly from the ability of the surroundings to invoke or enhance it in some way.
   I am often surprised in my own experiences to know or discover what qualifies as a 'Chan' or 'Zen' environment. The basement in which we conduct our private Sunday morning gathering is hardly an auspicious place. It is not even set up to be a 'proper' Chan Hall: the floors are carpeted, there is a big drum in the center of the room that has to be relocated to the back, and there are many visual distractions around it, from a nearby children's playroom to an overstocked storage space. Yet, somehow, I have to admit that this place endears me a lot. There is something about the rustic cramped-ness of the room that gives it an authentic Zen/Chan feel. Can I say that, in spite of the cold temperatures in the basement, it is cozy in some way? And I also wonder: what is it about cramped, often cluttered spaces that makes them 'cozy'? Here, I believe that there is an unabasedly human element to the messiness. I even wonder if people deliberately make messes (subconsciously) in order to induce that state of 'someone is here' or 'lived in' feel of the room.
   Sometimes, a place does not need to be particularly well constructed or organized to have a good energy for practice. While there should perhaps be less clutter, there also doesn't have to be so much planning or preparation. Sometimes the space takes care of itself, just as the mind will tend to settle naturally if there are few attachments.
   At the end of the day, a good spirit energy must arise when everyone agrees to practice--and put their whole hearts and minds into it. That energy will tend to linger for a long time, and build itself into the space like a habit.

Weird Dreamy Thoughts

    The retreat went well today, only the funny thing is that I had feedback from other practitioners which reflects my own experiences in a couple of the sittings. That is, I was experiencing, at times, this kind of 'dreamy' experience of seeing thoughts emerge which don't make too much sense. This is perhaps a bit different from the regular kind of scattered thoughts. Unlike with the scattered thoughts one normally experiences, this situation involves seeing thoughts that have little or no connection with anything. And what's worse is that the arrive at a relatively quiescent state of mind.. and  in this relatively quiescent state, it can be quite hard to be able to summon up the energy to bring up the huatou.
  I don't quite know how to deal with these situations, and I was advised by one of the practitioners not to try to fight these situations at all. The more I try to resist, the more tired I will become, and the less I can really practice huatou. So the only thing I can do in those situations is to observe the conditions of my mind and relax into it, without necessarily trying to 'arouse' a motivation to practice.
    This kind of experience does lead me to wonder: to what extent are we truly in control of our motivations to practice? Many Chan and Zen texts I have read exhort practitioners to give rise to determination and diligence of mind, which perhaps suggests that the will to practice is always within a person's individual control. After today's experience on the retreat, I tend to challenge this view. I think that a lot of what we consider to be will power is often the result  of  many conditions working favorably together. I think a lot of this has to do with challenging my ideas about how much meditation is based on will power and how much is about observing things as they are.

Making Vows

 Master Sheng Yen has always stressed the importance of making vows, and I haven't really reflected on it for a while...but certainly one of the most impactful expressions he has made is, "it's better to break a vow than to have no vow to break." Although Master Sheng Yen was addressing this expression in a Buddhist context, I tend to believe that it might just as well apply to any moral perspective. Without a kind of promise to fulfill a value or standard, life can easily devolve into a kind of numbing or filling the void.
     Does this mean, however, that one should feel eternally bad when they break a vow? And another related question is, does breaking a vow mean that a person was not sincere enough to keep the vow? In today's very cynical world, there is a tendency to think that because people break their promises or ideals, then therefore ideals in general are either very fake or very unattainable. In fact, however, it's not difficult to understand why people don't keep vows. For one, it's not always easy to discern where to put one's energies, and thus it can be quite easy to make mistakes when trying to actualize one's values or ideal sense of being. The other reason is that we don't always live in social worlds that welcome the personal values we uphold, and there might even be a tendency to downplay those ideals in favor of more expedient or less mindful ways of being. And finally, there may be so many competing aims within us, that it can become very difficult to discern which parts will win out in the 'battle for the mind.'
    Does all this mean, however , that one should throw in the towel and never make moral vows? No, it doesn't mean that: it simply means that one can learn to distinguish very clearly, from one instant to the next, between the ideal and one's present situation, with all its internal and external demands. When a person is able to clearly hold these two things in dynamic tension (ideals and present reality), one is in a better position to choose wholesome actions.
    If a person tries to stifle their experiences in favour of an unrealized, abstract principle, there always ends up this kind of inner resistance. In a sense, it's like two parts of the brain aren't even talking to each other, and they need to start talking for the whole brain to work. Maybe this requires  a literal conversation: checking in with the parts of me that are not 'with' the ideals I uphold, and seeing exactly why there may be a reluctance or a resistance there. This kind of delicate curiosity might also be the key to doing peace work, but the problem is that I am still making assumptions about what is 'good' and 'not so good' about me, and this could also be due to ideals which have nothing to do with my value as a person.

The Anguish of "Attainment"

I explained to the other facilitator in the group practice tonight how trying to attain something in meditation is always accompanied by a certain kind of anguish. I may not be using the correct word here, but I am thinking about Jean Paul Sartre's use of the term, to describe that sense of having to continually re-build or re-commit oneself even after they have made some kind of inroad in that commitment. It is also something akin to Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mountain. The more I try to encapsulate what a 'good' meditation sitting might happen to be, the more I experience the fear of losing it, as well as the nausea of knowing that it will fade or need to be rebuilt again.
    The thing is, meditation can say an awful lot to us about our desires for neat and perfect narratives, as well as the fears that our narratives will discontinue, for unforeseen circumstances. I have often heard post-retreat sharing in which participants couch their meditation experience in terms of very familiar, grand narratives of loss, struggle, redemption, success, and return. It is as though without these hopeful stories, others could not find any reason to practice. I tend to take the opposite approach, in suggesting that meditation is post-structural: it has the power to subtly deconstruct our narratives, by suggesting that experience outlives the fickleness of narratives. I say 'fickle' because, indeed, although I may be having the time of my life in one meditation sitting, that narrative hardly holds true for future meditation sittings. This is perhaps the anguish that needs to be faced: impermanence, or what Sartre might have regarded as the negation that is at the heart of being.