Open Mind

It’s hard to avoid bumping up against closed-mindedness. I’m closed minded sometimes, but aspire to be open. If I catch myself closing down, I try to open up.
People do make judgments, saying something is good, bad, weird, boring, positive, negative, and so on. Often the judgments are hastily made, without reflection and without the person being properly informed about the matter. Gustave Flaubert wrote an imbecile’s dictionary, The Dictionary of Received Ideas, a collection of common opinions, predictable, ignorant and downright stupid pronouncements on various topics.
This could be quite amusing, except that one has to deal with such ill-informed people just about every day in a variety of situations. If you question the person, he or she might get emotional, intimidating you into keeping quiet. He might even bully you into playing along with his or her ignorance.
I learned over the years what happens when you try to have a discussion with someone who is not open to discussion. I’ve been punched in the face, spat on and lectured into silence and submission. One time a man literally followed me home from the café, attacking me with an endless monologue. He really wanted to set me straight. I literally had to walk into my house and slam the door in his face. He wouldn’t allow me to interrupt his monologue long enough to say goodbye. It’s amazing to meet people who are so self-assured and who feel they know what is right me and for the universe, a kind of megalomania. Name a topic and he or she has the answer.
Anyway, the question I’m raising: why is it so difficult to be open-minded? Why is it so difficult to examine one’s assumptions and beliefs? Are there certain concepts you hold sacred that you would never be able to question?
The other day I listened to the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. The album was quite interesting and unconventional when it appeared. A response one gets when mentioning the album: yeah, the Beatles were on LSD when they did those songs. So that’s all there is to it. End of discussion.
Strawberry Fields, I Am the Walrus, Blue Jay Way and similar songs don’t fit the pop song mold. They stretch the genre of popular music, maybe even making some listeners uncomfortable or perplexed. However, the Beatles were sufficiently popular, so people accepted their experimental songs and they too became popular.
It never entered the discussion that one does not have to be on LSD to write something that pushes the boundaries. One merely needs to be open-minded enough to allow the imagination to play, to give oneself permission to explore. Exploration is generally discouraged or curtailed with snide remarks, like: that’s weird, twisted, warped. One might even accuse the artist of deliberately trying to piss off the listener. Some people thought Picasso was deliberately leading people by the nose and laughing as he broke the conventions of painting. They say: that’s not art. I don’t understand it, etc.
Basically such refusal to understand, and such dogmatic statements are based on uptightness and closed-mindedness, in other words, a refusal to be open to what is there, an unwillingness to even give it a chance.
John Lennon appreciated culture. He mentioned the influence of James Joyce, who pushed language, pun and word play to the limit, in a way that John Lennon enjoyed and tried to emulate in some of his song writing. Creativity does not depend on drugs; it depends on having an open mind and giving oneself permission to explore what lies beyond the limit of habit or belief.
It’s amazing what you can do when you give yourself permission to explore, when you’re awake and brave enough to set aside what you’ve been taught, or what you habitually accepted as being the last word on reality.

Getting Old

Getting old is like ending up at a garden party on a freshly cut lawn, the smell of damp grass and earth, a few mosquitoes, a little shade and bright light. As the body becomes weak, the mind could be porous, open, more holes in the tissue of lies, after losing illusions and dropping expectation.

Accept and experience the pain, without sinking into dullness. There’s nothing to prove, no prize. You score death.

Graduation ceremony is the funeral. There’s nothing to obtain, nobody to impress. Might as well keep going. Cheer up. Don’t sink into self-pity. Don't be afraid. Deal with whatever is happening. Forget about going somewhere or doing something. There’s no progress. The pilgrim gave up. He went into a hotel, ordered something to drink and talked and listened to whoever was there.

My mind gets working overtime. Find a sheet of paper. Make some pictures. Write a story. Pretend to be a Sasquatch, all hairy, and with giant feet.

A man on a side street spoke in the shadows into a cell phone: “The relationship is over. We’re really sorry about the threats. Let’s forget the past. Let’s just call it quits. The relationship is over.”

Vulture Nest Dweller says death is a scary experience. You thought life was scary; wait until you encounter death.

Ok, maybe this is a fancy way of saying, I got laid off. My contract will end June 30 and then it's unemployment. The worst thing about getting laid off was the bullshit story the organization invented as a reason for termination.

spring break

Halleluja, brothers and sisters of the dreaming universe, a long overdue spring break happened for teachers of Nunavik. After reaching burnout, I boarded an Air Inuit Dash 8 for Kuujjuaq and then transfered to a jet plane to Montreal.

On board the plane was party time, people looking forward to unwinding after the stress of work, a breather in the south, visit friends, restaurants, whatever you like. I didn't sleep for the first few days. The change from northern to southern world is a shock to the system. Sometimes I feel like an outsider, watching the world through a window, unable to connect to what's happening.

But there is a way to connect. Go to a crowded cafe; sit there and drink coffee. After a while it starts to soak in, people sitting around talking, reading, laughing, hanging out. Watch people line up along the platform as the subway train pulls up to the metro station. Some cafes no longer torture customers with background music. Natural sound is soothing, the melody of voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing, buzz of coffee machines, cash register. I remember the old days, back in the sixties, when it was normal to be in a public space without the bombardment of background music. Background music forces a person to talk louder. It puts my nerves on edge and nine times out of ten, it's not my taste in music.

Some cafes have four or five TVs featuring sports, weather, news, whatever. I sit back and watch the people, for example, a man in a faded brown leather jacket, cracks in the leather, iguana skin, elephant ass jacket and faded tight jeans, tall leather boots, long white hair, unshaven jaw. Circulation of people, in and out. Grizzled man, maybe forty, with eastern import bride, maybe twenty, pretty face, thin and small. He's happy when she leans over the table and gives him a kiss.

Soccer fans, eyes glued to TVs, glued eyes. Laughter, cheering, shouting, sports chatter, coffee cup commentators, woman laughing at every silly comment from her beau. Pseudo-mystical dread-lock man, channel aggression through eastern guru swami wise man trip. It's all in the hair, bandana, poncho and jeans, in the threads, a cartoon costume. The man ready to speak in a far away deep hollow voice at the Feast of the Last Soccer Game in Social Club. Another man with beard, scruffy silk scarf, offers himself to whoever will listen. I go pee and get dizzy from looking at psychedelic, chemical eyes, like grandmother's eyes in the mirror. The cowboy man looks small from a distance but big up close. He fades into light of the doorway, skeleton shadow, a man risen up like a snake from the dust.

Unplug the phone. There’s nothing worse than the expectation that at any minute the phone could ring and someone will talk about work.
It gets oppressive after a while. I’m high strung and require a lot of space and silence. That’s one reason I love the north so much. One could go home on a Friday after work and talk to nobody until Monday morning. It’s amazing to spend a weekend alone, without distraction, to relax and pay attention to sight and sound, or to look at the behavior of mind, the games, scenarios, emotional drama, bitterness, resentment, loneliness and boredom. It’s better than going to the movies. Instead of watching TV, I watch my mind. I’m also a sociable man and go over to Steve’s every Saturday night to watch hockey night in Canada and enjoy talking to friends. But lately, things have been getting on my nerves. It’s time to relax.
First, unplug the phone. The sound of a ringing phone can grate on the nerves like the clanging of an alarm clock in the morning. I wake up usually, just before the alarm rings and turn it off, in order to not hear that brain-destroying sound. Having the phone plugged in, being at the mercy of whoever decides to bring bad news puts my nerves on edge. Usually I don’t get too many calls, but I do have a history, post-traumatic stress. I received many abusive phone calls in the past. I don’t even want to think about it. Phone calls announced the death of my parents and then the suicide of a close friend. The phone has taken on negative connotations. Bad news can wait.
Put on some nice music and for a few hours, it almost feels like being on vacation. Enjoy the protection of being in a village in the Arctic, far away from the city. Of course, I can’t force my mind not to think about work. That would only make thoughts of work stronger.
One of the things that make work unpleasant is to constantly receive unpleasant messages or criticism. First thing every morning, as I walk into work, I’m greeted by the complaining, discouraging speech melody of colleagues as they chatter like water dripping endlessly about how other workers aren’t doing their job, or something wasn’t done properly or how people aren’t the way one would like them to be. It’s helpful to limit exposure to discouraging talk, the continual gloom and doom of how reality doesn’t fulfill one’s egocentric expectations.
I avoid the staff room in the morning. I see gestures from a distance and can tell right away what sort of thing they’re talking about. You can see the facial expression of someone who thinks she or he knows better and can’t understand why people don’t agree. After the initial discouraging and negative chatter in the staff room, workers trail off in couples, or little alliances, to their rooms, where they can continue to back stab and come up with strategies to attack those who disagree.
In the best of all possible worlds, one would not have to work. One would return to Eden, or the garden of earthy delights. At work, one is forced to deal with people one would otherwise never encounter. Work brings together people from a variety of worlds. If everyone could respect diversity, it would be paradise. Trouble starts when one person feels he or she knows better and then acts on this sense of superiority. Such a person, hungry for power, tries to manipulate the situation to increase his or her power. This immediately creates resentment and conflict. The fight begins. One keeps a diary to note everything that happens, in case one is forced to hire a lawyer to resolve a conflict that gets out of hand. The only way to deal with power hungry colleagues who bully their way through the system is to avoid them and when necessary, to assert boundaries and provide warnings, that if the person steps over the line, there will be legal consequences. Then the person generally backs down and leaves you alone and contents him or herself with fuming and saying bad things about you behind your back.
After a confrontation, if one successfully forces an aggressive colleague to back off, things return to the normal, hellish everyday balance of being polite on the surface but fuming and full of misery underneath. My policy is to avoid conflict. Don’t lock horns with hell beings. Make a show of going along with them, of deferring to their insatiable appetite for power and then go to your room or office and lock the door. Anyone who feels they will find happiness through conflict, manipulation and power games is doomed to unhappiness.
After work, go home, unplug the phone and relax. Of course, whatever you try to exclude is automatically included, by the fact that the situation you choose happens against the backdrop of what you did not choose. The act of trying to not think about work brings work to mind. You can’t win. Might as well let go of the whole thing and not worry about it, or enjoy it as entertainment.

Not Obscure

To be not obscure, without attachment to ego, a not obscured mind has the ability to rest in awareness, to let go of thought, to be calm and clear, regardless of what is happening. A person with a not obscured mind would probably be able to sleep every night like a baby, without anxiety about what is going to happen tomorrow, or regret about what happened today. A not obscured person doesn't dwell on how somebody insulted him or her and doesn't waste time planning revenge. A not obscured person would be happy to live alone and happy to live with somebody. Desire, anger, confusion, and various emotions are not a problem. They're like air currents in the space of mind, or waves. Waves happen and then they don't. A not obscured mind recognizes the nature of mind and is therefore not led astray by the delusion of concepts, naive views about reality or strong emotions.

To be not obscured is my aspiration. However, like most people, my mind is obscured. I toss and turn at night sometimes, react to situations and become a burned out, discouraged, nervous wreck, obscured with negative thoughts and emotions.

We're born into confusion. My parents were confused. I understand now that I'm a parent, how it's difficult to be a parent. There are so many challenges. You want your child to grow up to be happy and wholesome. I appreciate the love and concern of my parents.

It's not easy to let go. Negative thoughts and emotions keep happening. That's fine. Let them come and go. The main thing is to have a sense of direction or aspiration. My aspiration is to let go of ego and to relax in the calm and clear nature of mind, rather than being blown about like a feather in the wind of hope and fear.

Nervous Energy

Two week holiday in winter, I'm sitting in a room in Barnet, Vermont, light rain, snow melting. Relax, recover from the madness of work. A lot of nervous energy from the job goes into the nervous system; competitiveness, nasty gossip, back-stabbing, insults and discouragement. It takes time to recover and feel human again. For the first time in weeks, I'm able to sleep through the night. For weeks, the stress of work invaded my dreams, woke me in a sweat, caused me to toss and turn.

Everybody's gotta work. You'll meet the same characters, no matter where you go. They're archetypes, the one who craves power and tries to get people to conform to his or her opinions, the one who sides with the boss as a way of attacking colleagues, the one who can barely conceal his or her negative opinion of you, the one who feels that he has to be rude and aggressive, otherwise people will screw him over, the evangelist who wants you to join his or her cause, because he or she knows what is best for everyone. It's exhausting to stand up to these archetypes every day.

Of course, the less I'm attached to ego, the easier it would be. Ego responds to a situation with a whole bunch of thoughts and feelings. Nervous energy builds. It goes into the muscles and bones. There's a feeling of being attacked. Nothing is secure. An unpleasant surprise could wipe out security.

Work is part of the human condition. Don't be upset by the senseless squabbling. Drop the whole ball of thought and relate to whatever is happening. That's my aspiration, to see ego for what it is and then to let go. Without ego, what would happen to the nervous energy? That kind of energy can only happen when one hangs on tight to opinion, belief, hope and fear. I aspire to let go, to step outside the mental prison and stop clinging to ego-games, self-deception, hypocrisy, aggression, greed, insatiable hunger.

To Sin

The human urge to judge and place limits on the unknown, I find mysterious, even though I sometimes do it myself. A young man was asking all sorts of questions about my past.
I'm living in an Inuit village of five hundred people. They're as curious about me as I am about them. I moved here after becoming severely disillusioned with society. Moving to a village in the Arctic, literally on the tundra, on the edge of an endless water system, gave me energy to keep going at a time when I didn't think I could go on.
Nature came to the rescue and offered consolation, comfort, inspiration. To be in a village far from the familiar set up had a powerful effect on a mind tormented with worry, regret, guilt and shame. It's amazing to live alone, in another culture, where people speak a different language. In some ways, it's like being a space alien, arriving on another planet. It takes some time to understand the ways of a different society. Respect, or the patience and willingness to understand what lies beyond the boundaries of one's conditioning or personal opinions, is key to understanding.
The other day a man asked me all sorts of personal questions and in response to one of my answers said: “That's a sin. You sinned.”
And I thought, wow, there are still people on the planet who believe what a group of men wrote long ago in a book and then inflicted on western society for the next two thousand years. It's quite ironic to leave western society in order to live with aboriginal people and then to be confronted with such a loaded statement as sin. Sin, wow. The guy obviously never read Nietszche or listened to Einstein. Of course, simple minded ideas of right and wrong exist all over the world. A friend phoned me from Arkansas to tell me how in her town, where she was hired to teach at a university, people hate you if you're not Christian and if you're an immigrant who speaks English with a foreign accent. And of course, racism flourishes, even though a black president was elected.
The man respected me and didn't mean his comment as an insult. The fact that I married twice and got divorced each time means I'm a sinner. I need to beg Jesus Christ for forgiveness and then be saved. I watched people being saved during healing sessions, led by evangelists invited from the south to provide a little old time religion. Afterwards, I met some of the men from the healing session in the bar in Kuujjuaq. Some of those men and women got drunk and wild, beat each other up, harmed themselves and the children, but they could always go back to church and be saved, which would make everything all right, as long as they don't commit a sin. It's a sad situation, involving a lot of confusion. It blows my mind.
After living for several years in the north plateau region of Montreal, a region populated by artists, musicians, dancers, writers, actors, intellectuals, eccentrics, slackers, bohemians, professors, a region rich in culture and free thinking, I forgot what it was like to be confronted by old time religion. I grew up choking on the stuff. As son of a preacher man, I read the Bible, cover to cover and attended church for twenty years. It was an oppressive, suffocating experience. Going to art school helped free me from a lot of the restrictions imposed by the religious milieu. I experienced first hand how people could project authority on to objects, such as a book, and to ideas and then become fanatical and aggressive. They had no hesitation about telling me when I sinned or went too far. It was like growing up in a cage, or being tethered to a rope. Religious dogma put walls around my world. I was forbidden to go beyond the limits prescribed by god and my father. That meant, if questions arose in my mind, I should stop asking and turn to Jesus and then everything would be all right.
But it wasn't all right. In spite of Jesus Christ, Bush sent troops into Iraq, unleashing horror on innocent men, women and children. Bush apparently read the Bible and prayed every day. Was there nothing in the Bible that could tell him to slow down and reflect before undertaking a crime against humanity? Bush recently said he was sorry that weapons of mass destruction were not found. But God was on his side. Unspeakable human suffering is the result, not to mention the fact that the Bush administration ruined the American economy, driving the country deeply into debt. Imagine if the trillions of dollars wasted on war had been spent to help Iraq and areas of the world tormented by famine, poverty and natural disaster. After all, Jesus did preach generosity, love, kindness and compassion.
Religion, intolerance, hatred and war have a long history. It starts on the local, everyday level. Stop and ask yourself: how do you feel when someone disagrees with your ideas, opinions or beliefs? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you angry? Or are you able to respect the person's right to disagree? Of course, I can't agree with ideas that condone harm. If a gangster tried to harm my family, I would phone the police and ask them to do whatever necessary to stop the thugs. Sometimes force is necessary.
I hate talking platitudes.
I was just trying to describe the strange feelings that happened when, out of the blue, a kid told me I had sinned. At first, I thought it was some kind of a joke; but then I realized, the boy was serious. Older people also told me it's a sin not to believe in Jesus and that if I don't believe, I will go to hell and burn in the lake of eternal fire, after death. I do believe that Jesus is still a powerful force to be reckoned with and that untold harm has been done in the name of Jesus and hopefully some good as well.
Of course, maybe it's not the fault of religion. Maybe it's an expression of confusion and some tendency in the psyche to close down and become aggressive when confronted by the unknown and to become puffy and arrogant when things are familiar. Which came first, confusion or religion? Maybe I'm all wrong. Jesus, forgive me; Lord have mercy! If you see Buddha on the road, kill him.
Even among agnostics, simple-minded ideas of morality persist. I've met fanatics who believe strongly in opinions and have no hesitation about expressing approval or disapproval for something they don't even understand. The non-critical, non-reflective reactionary approach of stimulus/response still prevails. I think, therefore it's true. If it makes me feel good, it must be all right. If it makes me uncomfortable, then for sure it's bad. Science can back up my feelings of discomfort. You have to be this way, otherwise that will happen. There's scientific evidence to prove that blah blah blah. Experts say blah blah blah. Therefore, it's true. You better act within the company mandate and clear your ideas through the proper channels. A committee will be formed to look into the possibility of forming a committee to deal with the committee formed to deal with vaguely stated and open to interpretation obtusly written policies, and actually quite clear, government mandates. You better be responsible and do what you're told, otherwise you could turn into an anarchist, or free thinker, out to wreck civilization. Leaving early for lunch or not filling out the proper forms could lead a person into a downward spiral. You could end up becoming a communist (wait, that was the fifties, now days we have different fears and bogey men).