Day 1 of Many

Day 1 Morning Meditation:

Day 1 is always interesting, unless it's day 1 of being in a coma. At 7:30AM I was wide-awake, though my alarm was set for 8:45AM. I decided to wait for it to ring, and got another hour of fitful sleep in exchange for the return of drowsiness. I washed up and went downstairs. There, Gene was already running around with an incense stick, muttering like a monk in a movie. Ellen was tucked in under eight blankets on the couch, with a blissfully sleepy expression. We got down to business.

Note: I've meditated before, for an hour at the longest, but never regularly. Nevertheless, I've already tried the exercises/techniques described.

An important idea that I've read about concerning meditating is to avoid judgment calls. Saying things like "this meditation sucked," or "this meditation rocked," or "it was soooo hard," or "that was much easier than usual" works against you. Instead, you describe it factually and without a rating/review. Something like "I meditated." So here's how it went:

Lots of thoughts. Perhaps a total of 15 minutes of the hour was spent in conscious meditation. The rest divided up between several modes of thinking. But first about the 15:

I spent part of the time being humble and reverent to a higher power. Today it was Buddha because he's one of the milder Gods. In reverence, I tried to surrender various parts of myself to his omnivorous diet. Lust, possessiveness, laziness, inertia, pessimism, attachment, self-love, self-doubt, self-image, etc. each with its own personal array of associations. Depending on the level of suffering each one associated with, the difference in feeling after I offered it up to Buddha for chomping was more or less tangible. It's an interesting exercise, especially because it is its own remedy for disbelief. Disbelief emerged every once in a while, and when I caught it early, I tried to surrender it. Sometimes though I fell into disbelief and lounged there for a while. Disbelief sure has some quality couches for lounging.

I also spent some time trying to simply be conscious. Simply in the sense of simply-free-your-mind-Neo-and-jump-off-the-building. I watched my thoughts from a distance, only getting possessed by one every two or three seconds, and for no longer than 5 minutes at a time. I also tried to monitor my breathing. When I count breaths, I get distracted by thoughts a lot less, but I feel like that's cheating. When I don't, I end up remembering 5 minutes later that I haven't been monitoring for the last 5 minutes.

And now the distractions:

1. Narrating - my inner writer literally describes everything in complete sentences out loud in my head. He's pretty much writing a blog entry about the meditation, during the meditation.
2. Getting distracted by swarming thoughts - I may be saying in my meditation: "and now, dearest Buddha, I surrender my love for couch-warming," and suddenly I'll be daydreaming about warming couches somewhere in sunny Northern NJ. I'll wake up from the reverie eventually, but that's precisely it - eventually.
3. Thinking about what I'll write about in my writing hour - getting good ideas for writing is the strongest distraction. I start thinking the plot through, the dialogues, etc., and discipline is floating somewhere very far away, or knocking and waving at me through an opaque sound-proof window of the wrong house.

No grades. Just the facts: 2/3 days down.

We watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona yesterday. In every scene, Gene insisted on unveiling the Woody Allen in every character. Scarlett Johansson would whine about something pseudo-intellectualy sexual and Gene would yell: "That's Woody Allen!" then reach into my computer screen and rip off her mask. People would be sexually frustrated and unhappy and Gene would yell "They're Woody Allens!" and they would instantly all drop pretenses and put on an additional 60 years of whining experience. It was a mess. I don't think I heard a single word said in the movie for all of the yelling and flying masks and pretenses.

More compliments in my direction arrived yesterday:

Madelyn: yeah, you just found i was funny
Madelyn: your good at noticing obvious stuff

I tripped

Today Chun sent me some mind-blowing stuff. And also this cool optical illusion:

Blow My Mind

I spent the next half an hour staring at that woman, trying to place what movie I'd seen her in, and then another half an hour trying to get her to spin the way I wanted. Needless to say, this was very frustrating. I'm used to women unquestioningly doing what I tell them. But practice paid off.

Good news: 50% of the time, she does my bidding 100% of the time. I say the magic word and she switches direction.
Bad news: the other 50% of the time, she does the exact opposite.
More Good news: Chun says she will be learning this optical illusion move in her next dance class.

I sent this to Gene and he's now torturing all of his co-workers. If they're half as excited about it as he is, by nighttime I'll probably be receiving an IM from my friend in Shanghai: "Dude, friend send me link. You should to see this, it make crazy to brain."

And, changing the subject...1...2...3...

Gene has a severe case of spiritual ADD. Every month or so, he tells me about the latest greatest get-enlightened-quick scheme. By that moment, he's bursting at the seams with enthusiasm, and lives and breathes the new idea if not in life, then on AIM or the telephone.

Anyway, his newest philosophy is roughly this: "You can't do anything to get rid of your own ego. The best you can do is surrender every occuring thought to Buddha/Christ/Insert Other Messiah, and let it be taken away from you."

Necessary background: ego is THE obstacle to enlightenment.

Anyway, in terms of practice, this means: you think about your grandma in the shower - you surrender it to Buddha, you think about my grandma in the shower - you damn well surrender it to Buddha, you think about how depressed you are - you surrender it to Buddha, you memorize Pi to 2,000 places - you surrender your elitist ass to Buddha, you think about how good you are at this surrendering business - you surrender that too. To Buddha.

But since it's Gene, he's so enthusiastic that he's willing not only to surrender his own ideas, but other people's ideas and other people themselves.

Mark: i'm impressed they made this image (see above)
Gene: i am impressed more than u
Gene: because i surrendered your impression
Mark: haha
Mark: too funny
Gene: not too funny for me - i surrendered it too
...
Gene: mom surrendered it to me
Mark: ya'll are a bunch of cowards
...
Gene: your thought is false
Mark: not as false as urs!
Mark: surrender urs immediately
Gene: i surrender u
Mark: oh shit
Gene: and shit too
...
Mark: u sure love being an ass
Gene: why not - i surrendered my shit
Gene: this morning for an hour
Mark: you just surrendered this conversation to my next blog entry
...
I'm afraid the rest is unprintable.