Mindfulness: increase Presence, facilitate Change

It's Sunday night, March 8th, New York City, the Cort Theatre: Will Ferrell, as "W," is shifting from foot to foot in a Cro-Magnon swagger, trying to re-enter his act as a woman somewhere in the audience is caught in a giggle-loop of hysterically infectious laughter. As the rest of the house echoes the woman's roller-coasting, belly-busting laughter at a 10 second phase delay for what seems to be the fourth round, the show has effectively stopped. Ferrell, either unable or unwilling to interfere with the very natural force that he himself had just triggered, half-turns away from the audience and cracks up himself. As his head pivots back to face the audience, it becomes obvious he is now too caught in the self-referencing circularity of laughter. He is no longer "W." He is momentarily outside of the role, part of the audience of his own act, dabbing off the tears of laughter with the sleeve of his shirt.

And, in the beautiful serendipity of the improv, it becomes suddenly so clear that it is this very phenomenon - this moment of self-reflection - this ability to laugh at ourselves, that "W" so painfully lacks. As the woman in the audience, the rest of the audience, and the actor himself chase each other in a comical circularity of self-awareness, it crystallizes that laughing at yourself isn't just funny - it is an achievement of Self-Awareness. And the absence of this self-awareness effectively explains the rest of "W": the defensiveness in response to questions and feedback, the self-serving nick-naming externalizations of one's own incompetence, the context-incongruent folksiness...

This is the second "W" I've seen. The first - by Oliver Stone - struck me as too psychodynamically poetic, too perfectly Oedipal. This one - by Will Ferrell - is an unexpected revelation that Ferrell has been, consciously or unconsciously, showcasing his "W" all along. The self-aggrandizing feedback-immunity of the Anchorman, Ron Burgundy; the kitschy Christianity of the baby-Jesus-praying Ricky Bobby of Talledega Nights; the grotesque frat-boyishness of Frank the Tank in Old School; the unbridled tunnel vision of managerial tenacity in Semi-Pro - all these and Ferrell's other comedic achievements seem to gel into a cohesive portrait of a righteous presidential dunce who's contemplating his historical significance through the syrupy lens of self-serving reminiscence.

What can I say? I can't quite say "it'd be funny if it wasn't so true" - because it is true and it is funny. I could fire off a Will Ferrell-style non sequitur: "Diego Luna!" Or I can simply say this: in Will Ferrell's portrayal of "W", the Cort Theatre has finally met its historical Jester.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) eatingthemoment.com
Copyright 2009

Willingness to forgive is dependent on our explanatory or attributional style, on why we think people do what they do. People are scientists by nature: when we observe an event, we attempt to make sense of it. Making sense of the world is adaptive, necessary for survival. The more we understand about the world, the safer we feel. Say we just had a meeting with a co-worker, and after the meeting is over, we observe the co-worker forcefully shut the door as she enters her office. Without a moment's delay, almost automatically, we search for an explanation. And in doing so, we are limited to essentially two types of explanations for things that happen: we can either attribute the event to a force within the person (personal attribution), or to a force outside of the person (contextual attribution). Thus, personal attribution is an explanation that holds a person accountable for a given event ("the co-worker slammed the door"). And contextual attribution is an explanation that takes the context (the situational/environmental factors) into account ("there must be a strong draft that caused the door to slam shut").

Implications of Explanations for Relationships

How we explain what happens makes all the difference. If we attribute the event to personal factors, we are, by definition, more likely to "take it personally." In other words, if we believe the door was "slammed shut" by the person, we are likely to make another leap of logic and conclude that it had something to do with the meeting we just had. If, on the other hand, we speculate that it was the draft (the context), not the person, who led the door to be noisily shut, we would most likely disregard the event as unimportant and not take it "personally."

Explanatory Style & Fundamental Attribution Error

Social Psychology has a substantial amount of research that points to the fact that people tend to make personal attributions more often than contextual attributions. It is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error: the "fundamental" part of the term refers to the fact that this type of error is wide-spread, and is, in essence, normal; the "attribution error" part of this term suggests that we are often incorrect in understanding our environment.

What this means is that we are not very good scientists, we tend to take things "personally" - and it's normal! Our explanatory style is paranoid by default: we tend to err on the side of paranoid caution rather than nonchalance, because it is safer that way. Nature, with its emphasis on survival, is conservative like that. But the safety of this slightly paranoid, personalizing explanatory style comes at a cost of conflict...

Habitual Explanatory Styles

While we all make attributional/explanatory mistakes, some of us are more personalizing (paranoid) than others. The world has changed and the Darwinian "fittest (both physically and psychologically high-strung, i.e. paranoid and aggressive) survive" is up for long-needed revision. Given the research on the cardiac health of the so-called Type A personality and the hostile, conflict-prone individuals, the Darwinian slogan should be amended as "the laid-back and psychologically relaxed survive."

Changing Explanatory Style

Changing the explanatory style is both a conflict prevention tool and a strategy of compassion. It involves questioning of your hypotheses and generating alternative hypotheses about what causes events around you - doing that would be good (interpersonal) science! Here's how you can change your explanatory style and prevent conflict: when your co-worker or supervisor says or does something that makes you initially uncomfortable, remind yourself that there is a good chance that "it is contextual, not personal," that it has to do with them moreso than with you.

The Art of Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

"Giving someone the benefit of the doubt" is a cliché we have all heard time and again. But like most clichés this suggestion is rather ambiguous and sheds little, if any light, on how to actually do it. Entertaining a contextual attribution is the process of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt. By considering the possibility that someone's actions might be influenced by the power of the circumstance (environment, context, situation), we, in fact, doubt whether the person means/intends to act this way towards us. As a result, the other person benefits from our non-personalizing view of the situation, and! - as a result, we benefit from sparing ourselves an experience of a conflict.

The Benefit of the Doubt Formula

The following formula captures the essence of giving another person the benefit of your doubt.
To give benefit of the doubt, think: "It's context, not person." In doing so, you are doubting your own initial, knee-jerk, defensive, personalized attribution that what happened was directed at you personally. Instead of concluding that your initial interpretation is the only right one, you are holding off the ultimate judgment, you are remaining tentative, you are reminding yourself of this human propensity to err on the side of being paranoid - and by remaining open to contextual explanations you are giving the other person the benefit of doubt (the benefit of your doubt about your initial take on the situation). In essence, you are acknowledging to yourself that perhaps this wasn't about me after all. This allows you to spare yourself the possibly premature judgment of the other person's behavior. Forgiving is fore-giving - a giving of a benefit of the doubt be-fore all the facts are in. Forgiving is an advance of compassion.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D, author of "EATING THE MOMENT: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) eatingthemoment.com
Copyright, 2009

In my teens (when I was still living in the USSR) I had a neighbor who was blind. He seemed imperturbable, monolithic, settled yet spontaneous and relaxed. I never knew anyone like that until I started reading about Zen masters with their notorious mix of non-threatening confidence and spontaneity. I had a chance to pick his brain a bit. The only thing I remember him saying about "how it is, to be blind" is this: "When you walk, it's very simple: things are either in your way or not. If they are, you walk around."

In traveling blind, this kid was blind to the infinity of the irrelevant distinctions that we constantly make as we describe and narrate everything we encounter. Not having the visual data to burden his mind, he was merely interested in getting from point A to point B. In his pursuit of wellbeing, in his daily journeys from A to B, he did not have to judge what he encountered. Obstacles were neither good nor bad. They were either in the way of his well-being or not. This was the only distinction that he made... and it was entirely enough for the purposes of navigating through life. As a result, his mind seemed much less cluttered than mine, and thus more open.

Curious about what it's like, I several times experimented with having someone lead me around the hustle and bustle of Moscow, while I had my eyes closed. It was both hard and amazing. Once I'd get past the initial anxiety of having entrusted my life to someone else, my mind would begin to open up to new sounds, new smells, new vibrations. All of a sudden the very same streets that I had walked hundreds of times felt new. Blind, I could see what my eyes had previously foreclosed on. Being at the mercy of someone else's pace, I had to surrender my intention to navigate. In retrospect, the experience felt somewhat like a flow inside a river of sensory stimulation, with frequent mini-surprises.

In our quest for certainty and answers the very questions we pose limit what we stand to learn. The mind's patterns connect unrelated dots to piece together a picture of familiarity. Even when traveling with our eyes open, we are still blind to what is. As a result, we re-act rather than act, re-enacting old behaviors in response to entirely new stimuli, lacking in creativity and denying ourselves an opportunity to re-create our minds, and, thus, never seeing the opportunity in a crisis.

So, close your eyes to open your mind! And try the following exercise with someone you trust. Get a blindfold and a twenty foot rope and drive out to a large leveled field somewhere in the country. Get into the middle of the field. Have you partner serve as an "anchor" by holding one end of the rope and positioning him or herself in the middle of the field. Put on a blindfold and, while holding the other end of the rope, allow yourself to wonder around, gradually increasing the radius of your mind. This exercise might help prepare you to navigate through any future times of uncertainty.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) eatingthemoment.com
Copyright 2009

The Fall-Winter of 2008-2009 in American history will be remembered for three things: who won the presidential election, who won the Super Bowl and... what the hell is going on with Joaquin Phoenix?!

Dostoyevsky, the 19th century Russian novelist who mercilessly plumbed the depths and shallows of the human psyche, once wrote: "Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled." Dostoyevsky's statement sounds like a mandate of sadistic curiosity that seems to define the media's attitude to the mysterious unraveling of Joaquin Phoenix.

I have to admit - and I am pretty sure I am in good professional company - that, as a psychologist, I've been scratching my head in search of a differential diagnosis. But don't worry: I am not going to go all clinical on Joaquin and repeat the "he's-gone-bonkers" (psychotic break) hypothesis. A) it's been already forwarded by better minds than mine; and B) I don't know the guy to engage in this kind of clinical assassination. But I'll step out on the proverbial limb and toss a few hypotheses into the ring...

Joaquin the Publicity Stuntman: The "publicity" hypothesis is an obvious cynical default interpretation that has been un-creatively over-massaged by both media and the general public alike. There is not much to add here other than to say that the obvious tends to be the most likely.

Joaquin the Gambler: This movie-star-gone-rapper switcheroo could be nothing more than a lost bet. Faustian in its mischievousness, this scenario is totally plausible. When you have everything that you want and money is nothing, what more thrilling poker bet can there be than to denounce your movie career, announce an unlikely career as a rapper and then hit the talk show circuit for half a year while keeping a poker face and rolling the tape of a future mockumentary.

Joaquin the Rascal Sage: Joaquin is the new Zarathustra, come down from the Olympus of the rich and famous to awaken the cultural zombie to the falsity of the material idols we so myopically worship. Joaquin is the "re-incarnated" Diogenes (that mad Greek from Sinope that lived in 412-323 BC), the new Cynic who forces us to re-evaluate our priorities. Perhaps, like Diogenes, by abnegating what so many of us desire (fame, riches, recognition, social acceptance), Joaquin is prompting us to examine our values. Or, perhaps, Joaquin, in the Gurdjieff-style "Rascal Sage" manner, is engaged in a civic project of Pattern Interruption with the goal of exploding the cultural expectations of the linear progression of success. And by confusing us, he is trying to enlighten us.

Joaquin the Method Actor: Joaquin, an obviously phenomenal actor, is engaged in a post-modern, Stanyslavsky-esque method-acting project... acting the role of an actor who no longer wants to be an actor.

Joaquin the Authenticity Agent: in watching the interviews on "You Tube" and reading the coverage of Joaquin's laconic media confessions, I am in awe of the fresh breeze of authenticity that he brought to the media scene. He doesn't seem eager to over-indulge in details. Like an all-too-familiar curmudgeon type, he grunts out succinct "no-s" not bothering a damn to elaborate, and, on occasion, snipes (!) back at his interviewers with no-punches-pulled feedback about their invalidation of his rapping efforts. This, I have to say, very neatly lines up with Barrack Obama's "I screwed up" courageous transparence. Perhaps, Joaquin is being an agent of change in promoting a real Reality TV.

Take the evening with Letterman, for example. Throughout the years I've seen many a comic self-deprecate when their jokes seem to fall flat. And while these moments of personal transparence seem personal, I don't think they really are. When a comedian is making a joke and sees that his or her "content" fails to launch, my guess is that the comedian defaults to plan B - a moment of "process" with the audience in which the comedian makes a joke of himself. This is pseudo-authenticity. There is nothing personal there. But look at what transpired between Letterman and Phoenix. At some point, seemingly frustrated with Joaquin's lethargy, Letterman seems to make a rather personal stab at his guest - something to the effect that you don't act like this (meaning being an uninteresting, disengaged guest) when you come to my house (or something to that effect). I don't think that I've ever seen Letterman authentically offended. As one of the kings of comedy, Letterman is bullet proof - but Joaquin, without doing a whole lot, managed to get past Letterman's defenses. Now, that's reality TV.

Joaquin the Rapper: Allow me to posit the following: what we are witnessing is no publicity hustle but, perhaps, nothing other than one man's discovery of his Flow. Why not take the man's motives at face value? If he is unraveling clinically, that would be therapeutic. If he is testing an artistic hypothesis, let him. After all, rap - as a genre - at its best is a kind of mantra-like American Zen which entrains a mind in a groove like a good set of prayer beads; a kind of phonetico-semantic sleuth of rhymes with an occasional pro-civic pattern interruption messages. Sure, we've come to expect our rappers to drip with gold and ink and have a six-pack under their wife-beater tees... And here's Joaquin: disheveled, a bit pudgy, falling off the stage instead of boogying like the best of 'em. So what?! Maybe Joaquin is trying to redefine rap, away from its stereotyped Form-Focus to its roots in the Essence of Flow. Who knows?!

Which, in closing, brings me to this: regardless of why Joaquin is doing what he's doing, perhaps his social valence is to be...

Joaquin the Koan: a Koan is a riddle question used in Zen training to help the seeker transcend seeking. A Koan cannot be answered logically - as a Question, a Koan is a Quest that has to be lived. Perhaps, just perhaps, Joaquin - knowingly or unknowingly - is positioned as a cultural Koan, as a sobering opportunity to learn to tolerate the ambiguity and the uncertainty of life. Perhaps, Joaquin is a reminder to us to put our anxious need to know aside and to allow the mystery to unravel on its own, at its own pace.

Maybe, the question that Joaquin poses is as simple as this: can we compassionately accept our own not knowing?

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008), eatingthemoment.com
Copyright, 2009

"Never underestimate the power of psychology in the economy" cautions John Steele Gordon, a business historian. Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor, said something to the same effect recently (on 1/23/09) in a lecture to the Commonwealth Club. Talk to any shrewd used car salesperson or an Amway trainer and you'll hear pretty much the same idea: "it's all about psychology."

It takes psychology to make money and it takes psychology to help people deal with the loss thereof.

Yes, it used to be "the economy, stupid!" But now: "it's the psychology, stupid!"

Thus my Sunday morning sentiment: we need a Psychologist General. I can't tell you how many times I found this professionally self-centered idea in my mouth. Any time I hear the quotation of FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" I think to myself: "wow, here's a great President offering the advice of meta-cognitive anxiety management to a panicked nation."

So as I read (New York Times, Feb. 1, 09) that FDR "was a genius at using those fireside chats to calm the national mood and restore confidence" (J. S. Gordon), I keep wondering if perhaps Dr. Sanjay Gupta should also get a Ph.D. in Counseling or Clinical Psych... Or better yet: if President Obama should perhaps consider getting a Shrink General.

And by the way I recommend Martin Seligman, Ph.D., a world renowned authority on positive psychology and learned optimism, a former president of American Psychological Association (elected for the 1998 term by the widest majority of APA members in the organization's history).

So there I said it.

P.S.
Go Steelers!

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. lives in Pittsburgh and is the author of Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time.
eatingthemoment.com

Philosophically, my problem with math is that… there is nothing to count.

“The nature of the phenomena is nondual” is the first verse of the Dzogchen Six Vajra Verses… If the nature of phenomena is nondual, i.e. singular, there is no “phenomena” in plural.  All is one.  There is no such thing as “two”!

Nor is there a zero… After all, emptiness – as the absence of matter – doesn’t exist.  Absence or Emptiness or Void has no proto-material substrate to physically manifest so as to qualify for existence.

If there is no zero, if all is one, there can be no separation, discreteness or heterogeneity. The separation we see is the artifact of our sensorium and of our discursive, dualistic mind. The mind divides the continuous homogeneity of all that exists into “this” and “that.” Even this semantic connective tissue of the word “and” that we insert between “this-and-that" is too in the quotation marks of subjectivity. In the objective oneness of it all there is no “and” that would punctuate the oneness of what exists with the Swiss-cheese holes of emptiness.

So, since there is no nothingness or separateness or discreteness, and since everything that exists is seamlessly interconnected, there are no multiples.

What is there for math to count?!

 

pavel somov/copyright, 2008

CNN reported that a 74 year old German billionaire Adolf Merckle, once a # 44 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, committed a suicide by apparently jumping in front of a train, as his fortunes declined from $12.8 billion to $9.2 billion in 2008, placing him # 94 on the Forbes list...

CNN further reported (per Merckle familynews release):"The financial troubles of his companies, induced by the international financial crisis and the uncertainty and powerlessness to act independently which the financial problems brought about, broke the passionate family business man, and he took his own life."

A casualty of economy or of perfectionism?!

If $9.2 billion can't buy happiness, i don't know what can...

Two prehistoric apes stand in the tall grass. One points a finger in a certain direction to alert the other to a crouching tiger that is about to prey on them, as if to say: “Watch out! Tiger!”

Language developed from the behavior of finger-pointing. Each word is an attempt to point to and to point out. The finger was the first “this” (if pointing something out) and the first “there” (if pointing to something). The finger was the first tongue. The finger was the first attempt to pivot somebody’s field of awareness to a focal point, to manipulate another’s vector of attention, to coordinate and share a point of view. Thus, communication was born.

But, as Buddhists say, the finger pointing to the moon isn’t the moon. The entire mind is a drop-down menu of verbal gestures that self-select – associatively, compulsively, reflexively, reactively, mechanically, robotically, and mostly unconsciously – in a jaw-dropping stimulus-response automaticity – in an attempt to name the Nameless. But no matter how many fingers we point at Reality, no matter how many words we use to describe it, a finger point at the moon isn’t the moon, a description isn’t that which is being described, and the word isn’t its referent.

No “this” ever equals that which it points to.

In essence, every word that exists, every category, every conception is just another “this” – another finger-point. Yes: each word – at its core – is a synonym of the word “this.” That’s why we can say, without any hint of contradiction, that “this is a car” (this = car) and “this is a truck” (this = truck) although “a car isn’t a truck” (car =/= truck); or that “this is a man” (this = man) and “this is a woman” (this = woman) although “a man isn’t a woman” (man =/= woman). This “this” is a semantic stem-cell that equals everything and nothing at the same time.

What is this “this?” As the pre- and post-historic apes turn their heads in the tall grass and over the suburban hedges, what turns, what pivots?

It seems as though we all stand amidst Self-centered fields of awareness, at a perpetual radius of Self-Other duality.

Any “this” – it seems – means “not me/not I.” Awareness is always other-directed and it is always a duality, a distinction between Self and Other. To be “aware of” we have to be “separate from.” After all, how can a center look at itself?! Indeed, any time we point a finger, we direct it away, from our Selves, towards not-our-Selves, to point to Something that we aren’t. Thus, any “this” (or any word for that matter) – at its core – means “not me/not I.”

Even the pronoun-word “I.”

So, as we stand in the tall-grass of first person perspectives, amidst these self-growth-hungry bamboo shoots of “I”, in the Self-centered fields of Other-directed-awareness, let us allow a possibility that what we fear is nothing more than a pack of paper tigers – nothing more and nothing less than the finger-pointing-gesture-dance of our own mental narratives…

All fear is based on Self-Other distinctions. And all we fear is the distinctions that we make…

 

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Copyright, 2008

 

Buddhism - as a psychology - is the search for the Middle Path, away from the categorical and oversimplifying extremes of all or nothing judgements, out of the cognitively inflexible rut of the conditioned black and white (dichotomous) thinking.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Moderation.

As a psychology, Buddhism aims to restore the "flow" of the mind, by unanchoring it from what was (but no longer is) and from what will be (but isn't yet), by refocusing the mind on the present, on what still is.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Presence, the Psychology of Existence.

Buddhist psychology aims to help you return to a point of balance, to that proverbial center, to that dialectical pivot of "what is" - out of the categorical extremes of interpretation and judgement of others and self.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Compassion.

Buddhist psychology aims to de-automatize the conditioned mind - to wake up the zombie from his or her conditioned stimulus-response algorithms; to wake up the robot from his or her reflexive, conditioned, unconscious, mechanical, schematic, impulsive, compulsive automaticity; to override the default presets of our reactions withthe freedom of conscious choice; i.e. to re-humanize the mind.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Habit Modification and Conscious Choice and Freedom. and as such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Existential Rehabilitation.

Buddhist psychology doesn't just aim to wake up the brain, it tries to change it - permanently. Through consciousness-training know-how of mindfulness, the Buddhist psychology tries to override the knee-jerk limbic mind-jerks with the brakes of frontal lobe activity.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Neural Plasticity.

Buddhist psychology aims to increase mindfulness to facilitate change of what can be changedand to facilitate the wisdom of letting what cannot be changed just be as it is.

As such, Buddhist psychology is the Psychology of Acceptance, of Dialectical Wisdom, not of passivity.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Copyright, 2008

Sitting in the plush I-Joy massage chair (a guilty pleasure from a while back) with my Grado Labs headphones on (an awkward gift from my brother whose idea of self-transcendence seems to have been sublimated through hi-fi), I hit “play” on the remote to hear the hypnotically circular “merry blues” of Manu Chao…

“Attento! This station – dull, boring, dull! This station – dull, boring, dull! This station – dull, boring, dull! This station – dull, boring, dull! Hey… Hey… Hey… Hey… Hey… So many nights with your shadow in my bed, yeah… So many nights, baby, you whisper in my head, yeah… So many nights I sing along the merry blues… So many nights… I told you once, I told you twice, the merry blues… I told you once, I told you twice, the merry blues, the merry blues… I cannot sleep haunted by your pretty body… I cannot sleep, I wanna set the world on fire… So many nights, can’t keep from going down loose… I told you once, I told you twice, the merry blues… The merry blues… The merry blues… ”

I pick up the remote and click the “repeat” to put this Latin American hip-hop fusion lullaby on a loop. Once lifted, the remote control, a serendipitous paperweight slash bookmark on Edward De Bono’s paperback (“I am right, you are Wrong: from Rock Logic to Water Logic”), releases the memory of the book’s binding and the pages, as if flipped by an invisible hand, flip back, on their own, to page 128.

I reread the sentence I had marked a few days ago:

“Circularity is a very basic function of any self-organizing patterning system. <…> It may be that what we regard as a ‘thought’ is always a circularity of this sort – or a thought may be a temporary stability in the flow of activity from one active area to the next.”

Bopping my head to the slow beat of Manu Chao, I ponder this merry blues of existential repetition, this convincing eddy of self-presence in the stream of consciousness…

So much of my mind has flown by since I first encountered this hypothesis of self as an illusion. Behaviorists’ black box theory of the mind… Buddhists’ Sunyata doctrine of no self… Hofstadter’s strange loop… To name a few… This omnipresent meme of nothingness…

So many nights, going to sleep I wondered: how is this different from dying… So many mornings, waking up I wondered: how is this different from being born…

This sleep-wake circadian cycle of reincarnation, this merry blues of existential circularity…

“So many nights with your shadow in my bed…” goes on and on Manu Chao. How is it that – as afraid as most of us are of non-existence – we so piously dress-rehears it every night as we voluntarily close our eyes?

“So many nights, baby, you whisper in my head…” confesses Manu Chao. Who is this that’s whispering in real time the narrative of my existence? I am told – by other minds who profess that they themselves are nothing but ghostly cognitive loops – that this whisper in my head is just mind, a circularity of a self-organizing patterning system… I am almost convinced: maybe that’s why I cannot sleep. No, it’s no longer a fear of not waking up – after all, if this self is an illusion, what’s there to fear?! No, it’s not fear – it’s residual bewilderment, a sense of all-too-familiar awe…

“This station – dull, boring, dull! This station – dull, boring, dull! This station – dull, boring, dull!” intones Manu Chao.

“I cannot sleep, I am haunted by your pretty body… I cannot sleep, I wanna set the world on fire… So many nights…” I know I am not alone in this global bedroom, in this incubation chamber of illusions – there’s my woman, there is my dog, there’s my world… With most of us asleep (day and night) and those of us who aren’t, confusing the relief of angst with enlightenment…

“So many nights… I told you once, I told you twice…” So many nights I thought to myself once, I thought to myself twice that if this sense of self is nothing but a cognitive eddy in the stream of consciousness, a pattern of temporary stability in the flow of the mind, then, in the words of Manu Chao, this life-station is dull, boring, dull; and, in application to this moment, this moment, this blog is dull, boring, dull… Dull, boring, dull… If this self is but another dream, then what do awaken to? Nothingness, of course, goes the doctrine. If this “self” only exists in quotation marks, then this blog too is but the silt of “self” awareness swept up in the hypnotic lyrics of Manu Chao’s mind… Nothing but a dance of two ghosts on “re-play.” Dull, boring, dull… But hey… But hey… Now that Manu Chao’s words are in my mind, on replay, I can sing along this merry blues without the quotation marks… So many nights I told you once, I told you twice… The merry blues… The merry blues…

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Copyright, 2008