A New Year

It’s really awesome how all of us look upon each new year: as if it were something completely new, a diary full of empty pages waiting to get filled up with new events. Is this the case, however ? Unfortunately, not. To tell the truth, each new year is not a tabula rasa, a letter-less blackboard anxious for what we are going to write on it. And this is because we always full upon entering a new year. Full of events and memories, full of opinions, likes, dislikes, wishes and curses… We understand that this is so in due course, when we take a pencil and try to write something on the pages that we believed were empty and realize that they are already written. They have been written with our fears and hopes that come out of our past and determine our present.

We visit, for example, a place. Even if we have never before been to this place, it is possible that it will remind us of something. But even if it doesn’t, we will soon grow anxious to capture it somehow and in this way document our presence there. Thus, between our eyes and the place a lens soon intervenes: the lens of our mobile phone or of our camera. Soon afterwards we fall into indecision about which is the best angle to take the photo. We are already lost into senseless anxieties and thoughts that are connected with memories and form threads of thought which make the feeling that this place ought to leave us with, fleeting, even indifferent.

And if this place reminds us of something, then it should come as no surprise if it triggers memories from parts of ourselves that we thought we had left behind but now come back uninvited, making us realize that the onion we were fiercely peeling off has still got too many peels and that the more we move towards its heart the more these peels are soaked with what we used to be, what we still are.

Can one escape himself? No, not as long as he is himself, as long as he identifies himself with his ego, as long as there is no room inside him for some tranquility and silence. Not really.

A better person

Spirituality is wonderful, as long as it has an impact on this world here. I mean, spirituality should help the individual become a better person and incorporate in his life the spiritual values he aspires in, rather than, say,   let him just enjoy a successful and blissful meditation sitting per se. Spirituality isn't about successful sittings at all, it is about how you can make yourself a better person, useful to those around you, inspiring, truthful and so on and so on.

Magic

In order to perform magic, you need to be enchanted yourself first.

Understanding

What I really want is to understand. To understand what pain means, what death means, why I have the license to hurt someone and, what's more, why do I do it.

I can't give answers to these questions. No one can. This is why we live our lives "as if" we knew what we're doing and we give any answers that we can - and best serve us. "As if" I knew what I was doing, I started a family. I did so because I've never stopped believing in man; it's my faith in God that it's not as solid, because I needed him to be a good old guy who takes care of his children no matter what and has built a world of justice.

Well, this is not a world of justice. And not a single day goes by that I'm not afraid something unexpected might happen and my family will suffer because of it: call it crisis, war, kidnapping, theft, drugs, car accident, unemployment, anything you want.

There are a million things that happen to people unexpectedly and it's really not that they have caused them, in much the same fashion as the sun shines every day for all, irrespective of whether they have earned it or not. These are two seemingly opposite things that I just can't understand. But it's OK if I don't. The moon will still go round the Earth and the leaves will still fall in the autumn, irrespective of whether I have earned it or not.

Deception

"And yet, with this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly."

Luise Glueck

Dancing your way through life

Sometimes we perceive life as a set of backsteps, for which we feel really sorry. Here's an alternative view: you can see it as dancing your way through life, instead of treading it. One step forward, two steps back at times or perhaps three steps forward, one step back; this is life and flow. Every human being dances through and with them; we don't just walk them.

Happiness

Happiness is about you being part of the vast space. It is about being joyful and at peace with this fact. It is about not wanting to be anything else than this simple, humble, yet glorious, part of life in the making.

I follow rivers

Did I write about tragedy in my last post? Please excuse me. In Greece we’ve moved away from tragedy, comedy or even farce. It’s the theatre of the absurd outright.

I’m not at all sure that “we’re still bold and beautiful in Greece” as our communist MP Liana Kanelli put it in the British Channel 4; in fact, I strongly doubt it. After four consecutive years of recession and waves of austerity and more austerity coming constantly our way, I think we feel rather disheartened and raged.

But Kanelli was right in that: Just because our MP suffers from paranoia, just because he is in total confusion, refusing to quit even after he has lost Parliament majority, it doesn’t mean that we, the people, go along. We also don’t go along with Europe’s all-purpose costume that its leaders are trying to wear on any country that finds itself in distress. Don’t they know that best-fit costumes are always tailor-made? Apparently not, but honestly they’ll kill us in the process of making us look smart enough for Europe’s mirrors.

Jesus! I should be preoccupying myself with Adele, who is cancelling all her concerts for the rest of the year because of a problem in her vocal cords. Thank God, I can still feel mesmerized by the opening scene in Lykke Li’s official video of “I follow rivers”, despite everything. I’ve always had an obsession with Northern countries, but I never thought I’d have such a strong urge to move to Lapland or perhaps Alaska to in fact stay there. Of course, there is a strong possibility that not even snow and ice are white enough and not even the almost-constant winter night is dark enough to cleanse the Greek paranoia away from one’s skin.

Beware of Greeks bearing referendums

At least three of the five continents, Europe holding the predominant role, have finally come to understand first hand the tragedy that the Greek people are living the last couple of years. Headed by a PM who just can't keep his word, we were first bedazzled spectators and then protagonists in our very own, home-made modern drama. Revisiting the genre, our PM continues to write one after another various scenes of “The annihilation of modern Greeks”, a play which still hasn't reached its climax, let alone its catharsis. Will there be a Deus ex machina? Scarcely. After all, it was a German that said it: “God is dead”.

So we live in a swirl of uncertainty. Every three or four months our PM or another prominent government official make it to the telly to assure people that there will be no more measures, only to belie themselves in less than a week. Meanwhile the standard of living is deteriorating fast. We are witnessing unimagined phenomena. There are people in Greece nowadays who are searching in the garbage for food, there are children who faint at school because they are starved, pregnant women queuing up for church meals, old folks who can't afford their medicine and houses where heating won't turn on at all this winter. Hospitals are closing down, followed by schools and universities.

And you know what? We could endure the situation, if only there was hope that things will normalise eventually. But there isn't. Either way (default or haircut) we have more to lose. And on top of everything, after our PM's intelligent choices, we will forever be ashamed to say we are Greek. I sincerely wish that no other country will have to see first hand how all this feels.

Look who's back

First, it was the translation of a book. Then, another project: the issue of a literary magazine. Both took up way too much of my scarce spare time – it was a time well spent, however. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would, no matter if it took too many sacrifices; if I spent too many sleepless nights; if I had to put a lot of money from my pocket in times of hardship.

What brought me all the way through was my commitment. If a commitment is strong, it’s fuel enough. Mine was strong: it was the obligation I felt to a friend of mine who died from cancer last October. He was the editor of this literary magazine. I had to see thelast issue, featuring him, through. Now it’s done and I’m (hopefully) back to normal.

I thought I might migrate this blog to Opera, since most of my international friends are already there. But I’m fond of Blogger too. So, in the next couple of days I’ll run an evaluation and we’ll see what comes out. In the meantime, hello, friends, I’m back!

Farewell

Dear friends,

As time passes it is getting harder and harder for me to keep the English part of my blog. I will therefore have to stop it here. Thank you very much for reading it and commenting. Special thanks to Meow, ersi and James for their insightful inputs. It was my honour to receive them.

I wish everyone all the best,
C.

Not our fault

I had to write an article on Lacan for a Greek magazine recently. In the past couple of months that I’ve been reading all related literature, I was impressed by the way Lacan tried to solve the riddle of human psychology. At the root of every want/desire that we feel, he said, there is a primary want which can never be met: the want to re-connect with our mother, like when we were in her womb. Now, this primary want cannot be met, so it changes faces all the time (like with metonymy in language). But, alas: even if some individual wants are eventually met, we can never feel satisfied and fulfilled, as our primary want will never be satisfied…

Besides wants, there are fears too. Our utmost fears are those of pain and death. What has threatened our security, our individuality, our attempts to meet our wants in early childhood is destined to be our companion forever, changing faces all the time, just like our wants do.

Now, both scientists and esotericists agree that the personality of a human being, which is the sum-up of our reaction to what is happening in the present moment, in our endeavour to satisfy our desires and/or avert potential threats, is completed around the 7th year of age. This means that our childhood wants and fears are its key determinants: we shape our personality in just these few years. After that, we are like a CD player, playing the same CD over and over again. Overwriting is possible, but it takes huge amounts of conscious effort.

The catch in this whole mess is that there is really nothing we can do. It’s not our fault. Even under optimum conditions, a child will always find something to be dissatisfied with, to be let down, will undergo a traumatic experience or will feel threatened – if not by anything else, by the comparison of sizes alone (his/her little body compared to the adults’). And all these determine the quality and depth of the fixation: how fearful, how weak, how incapable of loving we will become. It’s just how it is. And it’s not our fault.

Happiness super market

I’ve been into the triptych “love-beauty-enlightenment” since I was 18. I’ve tried many methods, among which: the Emin Way, Reiki, SRT, channeling and divinations of sorts. I’ve read tons of New Age books about spirituality, enlightenment, immortality and so on and so on. I boasted that I knew things that others did not, thought of myself as something extraordinary and waited to be adored by all creation in return. Every day I uttered deliberations to bring prosperity, love and happiness my way. I believed in my co-creator powers. Thus, I engaged heavily in meditation and visualizations – and was very sharp, if not downright rude, if someone had the nerve to interrupt my important engagements. I thought I had become enlightened, you see, that in some sense I was in this world but not of it.

There is no safest way to the rosy clouds. When putting yourself in such a situation, you essentially put it at the center of the world. Everything and everybody else just orbits around you as if of secondary importance. In a way, you become your own sun and get blinded, as a consequence. It’s a little bit like holding a lantern. You allow yourself only a very limited view: your body and just a few inches around it. And then you become so absorbed in what you see that you are convinced there is nothing else. In reality, you are holding a lantern in broad daylight, somehow like the Hermit card in the Tarot pack.

I would have stayed in this trance forever, if it weren’t for a series of hard jolts that brought me back to my senses. They actually forced me to lift my head and look around. And what I saw just made me gasp. Life had eluded me all these years. I thought I was living it to the maximum, but what I was really living was a self-delusion. I had even come to the point of lifting my shoulders in apathy when learning about other people’s hardships: they brought it to themselves, I thought. They are paying for old or new sins; they have no idea how things work.

Well, it turned out that neither did I. I thought of life as a big happiness super market and of world as a place of infinite joy and pleasure. I clang to it like babies cling to their feeding bottle, shut reality out and felt free to criticize everyone and everything. Such a fool that I was! Life was passing me by all these years that I spent in meditation, in contemplation of “beauty and love”, in certitude that I was enlightened.

Well, the world holds many things that are plainly ugly. We humans are so imperfect as a species and so predictable that it is almost alarming. But it’s OK. Even if the world is both ugly and beautiful and me imperfect and transparent, it’s OK. I’m still alive. And, at least now, I have the chance to begin to understand humility…

Test your EQ!

I am going on vacation for a week, but I’ll leave you with a little test which is supposed to measure the EQ:

There is a woman and a man, who love each other but live on two different islands. The man shares his island with a savage. The woman seeks a way to get to the man’s island, because she loves him, and the only way she finds is to go by boat. There is only one boat available and the boatman tells her that he will take her to the other island, if she takes off all her clothes and goes on board naked. The woman is puzzled with the boatman’s request and goes to the wiseman of her island to ask him. The wiseman’s advice to her is: “Follow your heart”. After that, the woman decides to take off her clothes and go on board the boat naked, as the boatman requested. The boatman keeps his end of the agreement and takes her to her beloved’s island. When she arrives at the island, however, the first person she meets is the savage, who immediately rapes her. At that particular time, her beloved arrives and, seeing her with the savage, breaks up with her calling her a whore.

Who do you think is most responsible for this outcome?

You’ll have to wait for the answers until Monday 26 July. Stay well and have a good time till then!

Predisposition

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the soul had something that was called “fora”, meaning direction. In other words, the soul was thought to have taken up, long before the birth of the body it inhabited, the direction of good or evil. Thus, man was considered to be born good or bad.

Quite some time has passed since then. Meanwhile, psychology has sustained that hereditary elements account less than behavioral ones for a person’s conduct. A person turns good or bad, according to the conditioning s/he receives during childhood.

Notwithstanding that, my late grandmother was certain that it's what people are made of that is of importance. No matter how many hardships one runs into in the course of his life, if he has a good soul, he will keep his goodness forever - and vice versa.

If this is so, however, how guilty is someone who commits murder? What if he is (genetically or at soul level) predisposed to do so? Can he be found guilty for his genes or his soul’s predisposition? How can these be his fault?

What do you think?

Is there such a thing as soul?

Much talked about, much used, the concept of soul has nowadays turned into a chewing gum, especially when put in the context of reincarnation. The truth is that the concept of soul has been tackled by both philosophy and religion since antiquity; this should account for the dozens of definitions there are. The soul is also connected to immortality, as it is widely believed that it’s the one and only component that survives physical death. In connection with the body, the latter is seen either as its prison or its shrine.

In terms of etymology, the word soul is linked by some scholars with the word sea, probably reflecting early Germanic peoples’ beliefs that the bottom of the sea was the place where souls originate and return. The corresponding Greek word psyche literally means a “gasp of air blown into”.

Do I believe in soul? Well, I used to. I am not so sure any more that the concept can be of real use; on the contrary, it can be misleading. People talk about the soul and reincarnation, as if it is their personality that will survive; a grave misunderstanding. Soul and personality are not the same. If it exists, the soul is the underlying layer where the ingredients of personality (thoughts, emotions, sentiments) softly fall upon or, by contrast, achingly leave their burning etchings on. It is the sum-up, the end result of a person’s tendencies, virtues, vices, ethics, codes of conduct, etc. It is the “therefore” of one’s life.

If there really is something of the sort, it should be likened to a processor and personality to a piece of software. Thus, “real” love for example should translate into love of the processor rather than the software.

And then there are other questions. Is soul restricted to humans? In other words, is it only humans that have soul? What about animals, plants, minerals? Is the animistic view to be ruled out as total folly?

What do you think?

On koans

The purpose of a koan is for the person who engages in it to realize the difference between the mind (which manifests itself as a flow of thoughts) and consciousness (which is the space that contains the flow of thoughts). Always the issue is to understand that it is identification with our thoughts and feelings which creates the sense of “I” and that there is something broader, namely consciousness, which is common to all and within which our individual “I”s simply happen. Zen masters identify consciousness with life itself.

The paradox surrounding a koan tends to arouse the mind for long, as the mind thinks it over and over trying to “solve” the paradox or simply find an answer, more or less like a dog chasing its tale. With koans, one is given the opportunity to realize the difference between mind and consciousness.

The moment when someone realizes that mind and consciousness are two different things, he can understand that the mind identifies with his personality and consciousness with his essence; this is how the koan’s purpose is fulfilled.

Fulfilling the purpose of a koan has little to do with explaining it. No matter how many explanations a koan receives, its meaning is never exhausted anyway. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that it has one and only, definitive explanation.

Examples of koans:

- Two hands clap and a sound is produced. What is the sound of one hand?

- How can one express the truth without speech and without silence?

- If I truly love myself, I must not love myself. If I want to protect myself, I must not protect myself.

- It’s neither the flag that moves nor the wind; it’s the mind.

A koan

A koan: “There is no time. What is memory?”

If I knock the table with my hand twice, I have to accept that it’s time that separates the two knocks from each other. Therefore, time exists. But it only exists because I have memory of the first knock.

Everything I build within me, I build using memory as cornerstone – and because memory has plenty defects, I cannot but doubt everything I build.

What does this leave me with? With this very moment, right now; nothing more. Even if time exists, it’s not important.

Love (second part)

b. Lowering one’s defenses. This has been discussed over and over in this blog and it is essentially a rephrasing of “allowing one’s heart to break”. In connection to romantic love, we may see it is the more beneficial the more it relates to oneself, meaning that the benefits are reaped at the level of oneself and less at the level of interacting with another, as is the common misconception.

c. The focusing of sexuality. Sexuality too is personal. It is believed to bring people together, but it doesn’t do it on its own, cultural conditioning does it.

We may see then that “love” is primarily an internal process – it comes from and returns to the self. Although it is the object of one’s infatuation allegedly receives our attention, in the end it was us and only us behind the scene all along.

“Real love” in connection to another human being is the point where we accept and allow them to be as they are. It is the point where we can afford such an attitude. It is a point of reconciliation with ourselves, first of all, and of inner strength.

Love

The discussion on communication gave me the impulse to reflect a little on the concept of romantic love between two people. What is this love? Let’s explore.

When we tell someone “I love you”, we are in fact stating that we feel the chemistry between us, which is mutually based on acceptance and admiration. We are also saying that we are lowering our defenses to a great extent, allowing the other person to even hurt us. We mean that our sexuality is focused on and channeled to that other person. At the same time, the tendency to protect and take care of him/her, which is similar to what parents feel for their children, emerges. People also refer to an unexplainable connection with that person at a deep/soul level.

I think that the package is, more or less, this. Let us now explore its components.

a. The (big) issue of chemistry. The chemistry between two people can lead (according to some) or is the result of (according to others) an unexplainable and deep soul connection. That the chemistry leads to the connection is, I think, the natural procedure. That the chemistry is the result of soul connection is, in my view, nothing more than internal projection: we convince ourselves that this is so and that what is happening to us is “destiny” – thus, inevitable.

Darwinists maintain that the chemistry felt when two people meet is nothing but the mutual recognition that the combination of their genes will underpin evolution. Some esotericists talk about karma and the law of reciprocity, others – more serious in my opinion – attribute the fact to an omni-present intelligence which recognises that these two people can “learn” from each other.

That the purpose of such a relationship is to “learn” marks the point from which we are allowed to see that the concept of love is nothing more than a purely internal process that starts from and returns to the “I” – what is handed over to the “you” suddenly becomes secondary.

(to be continued…)