Notes 3

March 23, 2009. [Cabeza virtually finished.] Went into that bit of hell “dream state” just dozing off [descent into hell] for five times in the last year (perhaps not before). Slightly less devastated by it. I feel I am living out that hell in my daily sitting.

Trouble sleeping, napping. Christ didn’t sleep his last night either.

Hell in sitting, piano . . . but then . . . an opening. A Thusness. One must continue regardless.

Do more confident people have bigger egos driving them to fulfill their potential and compete. Less competent avoid competition? [Who wants to lose?]

Is spirituality at least partly proportional to IQ? Is music the most spiritual art because it requires the highest IQ? I.e., there are more spiritual composers than artists and writers?

June 6, 2009. The hell of piano. The hell of no sleep. The hell of sitting. The only choice is suicide . . . or allowing the mind to descend into hell.

If I want to sleep I have no choice but to open up in sitting. Have to let go if I want to sleep.

An analogy to the evolution of the human brain. Computers: unimaginably complex to the average person but we can easily chart their evolution, every step which conferred an advantage on humans: metalworking, copper, iron, steel, insulation, electricity, diodes, transistors, etc. and all the progress seen understanding of the laws of nature, electricity, quantum mechanics, etc.

Lang Lang conquers the world with his Transformers [which he imagined doing playing the piano starting at age 22 months] but he will still “end up like that.”

July 14, 2009. Book mailed to printer. Cannot nap. Start to cry. Maybe God will let me catch up on sleep when I’m dead. I hope so.

Get used to it: this work is desperately difficult every instant of the day. It is not for “you,” rather, God the Cosmos. IT requires “your” assistance. Does one dare decline?

September 21, 2009. “I” am an insignificant pawn in the Great Game IT is playing. Whatever “I” get out of Cabeza is of zero significance. All I need to do is work the best I’m able to bring it to people’s attention.

Zen at War: Buddhists in Japan had to conform to the society’s and government’s aims. In the United States religion has to conform to “Helping Others.”

All my self-hatred — for saying, doing the wrong thing; playing the wrong notes— due to the unfree will. Only choice: abandon that and allow IT to take over. Julian of Norwich: “Left to myself I became so disgusted with myself that I could hardly bear to live.”

Van Gogh: overwhelming “sadness” of Wheatfield and Crows (1890). Sadness, depression, despair, at the insignificance of the self. Couldn’t stand it so he killed himself.

Religion as a means to reproductive success. The Pope bewails  that people (Africans) are becoming materialistic — but they see it works better for reproductive success (or at least S-cubed).

Without an understanding of evolution, explanations of human nature are like Ptolemaic astronomy and its epicycles.

Zen: never deals with the emotions of wanting and fearing which motivate the unfree will. Tries to keep under control the Uncontrollable. The root of our separation is unchanged. But perhaps some may, utterly on their own, understand something.

No “master” that I know of (with the very partial, limited exception of Toni who said of retreat, “everything comes up”) says anything about allowing up wanting and fearing, especially Fear . . . because they have never done that themselves. Rather, that they have assiduously avoided. [IfToni did it, it was only to the most minimal extent.]

October 18, 2009. Last few days: never felt so depressed. Can hardly run or bike. Attempting to be with The Art of the Fugue, but infinite resistance like mass approaching lightspeed. But still — despite thoughts of suicide — clear that it’s just the will that is the mass. It needs to . . . evaporate, disperse . . . . . . then no problem.

Depression: the mind is being directed toward sitting. Nothing else matters. 

Physicist Adam Frank: “There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics.” Interpretation: an attempt to fit the Great Mystery of Quantum Mechanics into our evolutionarily designed worldviews. Silly attempts to make the unfathomable indeterminacy of quantum mechanics fit our preconceptions. [Or, rather, conceptions “formulated” by the drive for reproductive success.]

Depression: Sensing there is Something more, sensing how separated we are from IT.

November 18, 2009. Can one “focus” not on the one being crucified, rather, the ONE BEING THE CRUCIFIER?

Rational mystery (Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, by Louis K. Dupre.): epileptic man — vision of being one with the Creator — is asked if he believes in God. He replies, “But what else is there?”

Western civilization only exists because Christianity defended Europe from Islam (especially by means of the Crusades). Now Christianity is dead in Europe.

January 4, 2010. Profound depression after Adirondacks Mount Marcy attempt. Fear of death. Have to go into that over and over to find freedom from that fear. Two weeks later went into it over and over. Now depression gone, but great resistance. Tension at piano.

After Adirondacks, listening to NPR on the way back, Smithsonian zookeepers spoke of the “pure” relationship with their (caged) animals. Unlike their “impure” relationship with uncaged humans. Pine Martin had just stolen my tea and was attempting to run off with my first aid kit. 

Kay Redfield Jamison’s Nothing Was the Same [after her husband died]. Her next book: How Bubbles (new dog) Saved Me. [I write facetiously, but she implies as much. Actually, she remarried.]

Manic-depressives win wars. Their rage results in “courage.” Nicholas Wade, in The Faith Instinct, equates war dances with Springsteen concerts

Feel in a perpetual crisis state. “The mind’s canker in its savage mood.” Going off the deep end — suicide — unless I give into IT. Then and only then some calm. Makes me realize how fundamentally manic-depressive I am. I survived only due to my tension.

Dream: Someone told me they’d read it took 30 years to be able to do 15 minutes of real sitting. I said I didn’t care about 15 minutes. I only cared about the five minutes before I died. We both thought that was terribly funny. [Awake, dictating this, I think it’s terribly funny, too.]

Isaac Newton, by James Gleick: Newton was attacked for inventing a mysterious force that could reach out and pull in. But his law worked so was accepted. And now considered science. But is just as mysterious. Einstein’s bending of space by mass (general relativity) is even more so.

Karen Armstrong: in her attempts at relationships with men she felt they were always trying to dominate her. She couldn’t stand it. Now she’s an apologist for Islam . . . because she is so angry at the Establishment.

March 17, 2010. When sitting is at its most unendurable — that is when it is most essential to continue regardless of how it feels. The next sitting things may — or may not — open up.

Dozing into hell — so familiar. “What is it?” I kept saying. Crying.

The marketing of sex and birth control yields to a society that craves sex and avoids the children that may hinder it. (Also, career women don’t need men for support.) Thus fundamentalist religions — which make plenty of babies — take over.

Reconciliation between religions is as likely as between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox (sports being one current substitute for religion). Their raison d’être is to battle. To be number one.

Mind aflame, banged chair on the floor in a rage. No reason except for trying to approach the sun. And several phone calls disturbing me during piano.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: “And all shall be well . . . When the tongues of flame are infolded.” How does that happen? [T.S. Eliot himself gave up. Found “love” instead.] When one finally — and don’t think I’m there yet — understands to the very depths of ones being . . . that there is no choice but to allow it to happen. But my current misery — mind aflame — may be bringing me closer to that point.

May 6, 2010. The night back from Death Valley. Sitting: a taste of True Life of Being, but then resistance. I must undergo the Great Death I so abhor.

Sheer hell sitting hour after hour, getting worse and worse, total resistance — but then lying down on my back at 7:20 AM . . . a Beingness starts to come in my heart . . . and stays. For now.

If this consciousness were able to enter a state of perpetual Being, that might sell the book. Not for my sake, but for ITs sake.

“Doubt is uncomfortable but certainty is absurd”— Voltaire.

Descent into hell while running. Could have fainted.

Profound depression during nap. Slept some and lay there for two and a half hours. Couldn’t move. Dying, death. But clear it was necessary to happen. Some calm after.

Letting go of tension and abdomen sitting, and arm piano — allows the most intense emotions up. Manic: just giving directions to someone at Rattlesnake to Valley Ponds. Manic because I reacted. Intense feeling at piano but reacting to panic attacks. Manic-depressives have higher IQ (according more or less to Jamison). With higher IQ it could be a net plus. With lower IQ a net minus. [My sister Sue?]

Almost normal today. Letting go of tension in abdomen while sitting. Angry while painting truck but not too bad. Then woke from nap being tortured. Now sitting — not too bad.

SAVAGE mood coming up sitting. From sleep loss? Going into the root of my tension. What Beethoven and Byron and others went through.

I play the piano for myself. To reach my own soul. To teach my own soul the Truth. This is what the process is.

A dream of IT, a glimpse of ITs purpose, ITs ends, and why that is so terrifying to us. How IT is using us. And waking — a bit of calm at having seen the ONLY thing that matters. Not the shadowboxing here on earth.

It is time — after getting upset about glasses[at Walmart Vision Center] — to apply the unfree will to oneself and the world. It is the imagining that we and others have free will that multiplies the necessary pain untold times. No free will, no blame: just awareness. [And suffering of the finite being.]

Except: this leads straight to the death of the self – that’s why we resist. The last thing we want is to feel the Fire of our own primordial Nature.

The Left: These are profoundly enlightened times, and everyone who doesn’t agree should be burned at the stake. [Because we are programmed to be angry; helped us in our hunter-gatherer bands. We crave something, anything to be angry at, to blame for our own inner misery.] 

When I feel extremely bad I blame mostly myself and also others — I am angry with self- and other- hatred. For men this helps their reproductive success: they fight other males. Women usually don’t fight so it serves their reproductive success more to be depressed.

I yearn to know the IT: by means of allowing the IT to express IT-self through my fingers. But I must die for that to happen.

October 1, 2010. Some letting go since trip to the Wind Rivers. Interacting with people (especially regarding the book): “So disgusted with myself I could hardly bear to live.” (Julian of Norwich.) Dealing with backpacking. Sublime beauty. Allowing myself to be “part of the Whole.” No free will the way I am. If that is acknowledged, an immense burden lifts and genuine freedom prevails.

But this means not defending the separate self from all the pain and necessary purifying suffering.

Helping others is today’s religion. It is unquestioned. [Raises ones status SO much.]

It’s not that it’s necessary to allow oneself to be devastated by the wanting and fearing. Rather, to allow them to be — as Mind IT-self remains unmoved. A gale that uproots trees does not disturb a mighty mountain. If one chooses to cling to the trees . . . but to abstain from that choice through free won’t. . . .

Like wild animals driven through a narrows to slaughter, suffering is what guides us to spirituality — the slaughter of the self by a thousand, a million, a trillion cuts.

Autobiography of John Denver. Spirituality is really about fulfillment of emotions. Manic-depressives have more intense emotions. Yet he has some sense of genuine spirituality: “Now he walks alone in solitude . . .” which maybe never did. [From the song, “Rocky Mountain High.”]

December 25, 2010. But rarely do I come to the point where it’s one hundred percent clear — to the depths of my being — that there is nothing to do but die. These are the moments I live for. All else is vanity.

A few days ago at piano: got up to turn up heat, returned focusing on letting go . . . and had one of my “descent into hell” experiences. Almost fainted. Indescribable, something so familiar, and so devastating to the “me.” But was more attuned to letting go — NO choice anyway; will know it at death. I am less reacting with fear. Perhaps this is St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul.” I almost long for it to come again. [Almost? The finite beings says: No, no, NO!]

Dream of Nell: She looked so beautiful. I hugged her but she didn’t respond. Then she went off, disappeared.

Toni of the Zen center: “Oh, they sit and sit and sit.” Maybe it is of no value without letting go of the fear. John Denver wanted the serenity of a clear blue Mountain Lake. But did not, was afraid, to see the Whole.

Because the speed of light is constant there is no separate entity as time. Only the space-time continuum.

January 14, 2011. “Beginningless time and the present moment are the same.” Huang Po. Home after all night hike in the winter Adirondacks. (I banged my boot on a tree to knock the snow off before putting it in the bivy sack . . . and all the snow on that tree fell — into the bivy. [I gave up and came back.]

I am so furious about my will, my ego, my wanting/fearing being in my way in everything. Yet they are not in Toni’s way. And this severely limits her.

We are tense . . . because we don’t want to suffer.

We are anxious . . . because we don’t want to suffer.

We build ourselves up . . . because we don’t want to suffer.

We’ll do anything . . . just not to suffer.

But it is suffering alone . . . that brings purification.

And it is suffering alone . . . that brings knowledge.

And it is suffering alone . . . that brings wisdom.

And it is suffering alone . . . that allows love.

That is why Christ said to Julian of Norwich: “If I could suffer more for you, I would.”

When I begin to let go of my controlling, tension producing will, and allow the abdomen to relax — chaos. Just as Beethoven said: “This chaos reminds us of our despair.” [The original words of the tenor in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, “The Ode to Joy.” Referring to the first three movements, which shows he was not always in the profound state that created them. The final words were, “O friends, not these tones. Rather something more pleasing and joyful.”]

I cannot control this process. I must give up to the “hell” of it.

Einstein’s “embrace all living things and nature in its beauty. . . .” This most definitely includes one’s very own being including all one’s fears.

The purpose of tension is to defend against suffering. And death [of the finite being].

We become angry when we reject suffering as necessary and omnipresent in the world.

March 8, 2011. I like to be at Springwater Center [started going there for short self-directed retreats]

Cause there’s nothing to do but be.

I hate to be at Springwater Center

Cause there’s nothing to do but be.

So maybe I have to be at Springwater sometimes

But it’s got nothing to do with me.

The piano: Allowing the IT to play IT-self . . . for IT-self. “The eternal harmony conversing within itself.”[What Goethe wrote regarding hearing Bach’s music performed.]

Beethoven regarding the Ninth: 1. Despair. 2. Farce 3. Excessively tender. [By farce I think he means that everything else is a farce compared with this. The first movement is totally devastating to the finite being. By excessively tender I think he means he has closed himself off to infinite love and compassion, what I call in Cabeza, The Heart of Creation — due to fear.]

Depression and mania: defenses against suffering and death of the self.

Reprogram the mind so, like deLancey Kapleau and St. John of the Cross, you “embrace” the fear. [But I showed in Cabeza how the former was still trying to prop up her finite being (no gray hair into her ninth decade); most likely the same with the latter.]

Written down in Beethoven’s diary from Indian sources in 1816: “For God, time absolutely does not exist.”

Fear annihilates the self, if the self does not react.

March 29, 2011. Dream: Hanging onto the top of a cliff, a waterfall to my right, and immense drop onto rocks below. Somehow I knew I was supposed to let go. But I wouldn’t. Hanging on to ME.

EVERYONE is programmed by evolution to fear death. To fear failure of reproductive success. Everyone tries to conceal these fears — even, especially, from themselves — so as not to expose weakness to others. We “Whistle a happy tune, so no one will ever know . . .” we’re afraid. . . .

Fear: We do not want to admit it, especially to others, just as running from a predator triggers the attack instinct — people will attack us. Partly not to reveal their own fear. [My first wife didn’t want to know about my fear. She didn’t like it.]

My little retreats at Springwater: Like facing a firing squad . . . except I’m still too adept at dodging bullets. But, who knows, maybe one day I’ll catch a “lucky” shot. Or maybe it just takes time for the “bullets” to do their work . . . if so allowed.

Anne: “Van Gogh’s last paintings seem alive.”

Almost off the deep end due to sleep loss, constant [robo] phone calls, dentist appointments, and especially bad “new” hearing aid cords. If I weren’t sitting I would be a raving maniac. Sleep loss makes me suicidal and/or filled with rage. [This is typical for manic-depressives.]

Despair, despair, despair. All for naught! You moan. You just don’t get it yet. You are here for ITs sake. NOT vice versa. There is nothing you can do.

IT has no anxiety about how things will turn out (book, piano, sitting). IT is 100% intent and relentless towards ITs ENDS alone. Can one give in to that?

After three days at Springwater: sitting, the crucifixion of the self. No sorrow greater than this . . . no joy so profound.

Don’t worry about relaxing. Don’t worry about letting go. Just do nothing . . . let IT in.

The Castle: Kafka doesn’t know it but K. is trying to deal with the inscrutable rules of evolution. Could be a metaphor for any seemingly hopeless endeavor. Thus its appeal. The impossibility of getting what we want. Also, the IT driving us to become fully conscious despite and because of our evolutionary heritage.

June 21, 2011. If you weren’t totally disgusted with yourself and everything in this life, how could you ever relinquish yourself to the IT?

Descent into hell while sitting: lost consciousness and banged head on table.

Fred [my brother-in-law] is still in good humor despite botched knee replacements and mental decline — proves personality is in the genes. [He suffered cognitive decline soon afterwards and died — due to Lewy body disorder.]

Allowing awareness to be with going into the fear—allowing it but aloof, i.e. not devastated, from it.

Allow the awareness that is not your own. That is — beyond the self.

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical.

It is the sower of all true science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,

manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our

dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms

– this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.” — Albert Einstein “The Merging of Spirit and Science”

Days at piano before lunch, seeing if it’s possible to let go of right arm tension, but seemingly not. Then going outside to sit. Despair about piano, but letting go of that. Effortlessly my mind took in the extraordinary beauty of the meadow.

“Indescribable mental anguish . . .” (Vincent van Gogh: “These last three months do seem so strange to me. Sometimes moods of indescribable mental anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and the fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.”). Necessary or we’d never forsake our opposition to That Which Is.

Later that day: infinite resistance.

The cause of self-hatred is that one acts in ways that cause one pain (including hurting S-cubed). And there is self-hatred even when one’s self is not the cause of the pain. So the cause is the resistance to pain. But pain is inevitable. It’s part of life. This is perhaps combined with seeing the self as a “stinking, putrid lump.”[Beethoven: “Man cannot avoid suffering . . . he must endure without complaining, and then again achieve his perfection, that perfection which will be bestowed upon him by the Almighty.” If there’s no free will — and the fact is there’s only unfree will conditioned by the genes — then there is no one to blame. There is just the suffering of the finite being — but there’s no one anywhere to blame. Neither ourselves nor others. Suffer without complaining, suffer without blaming.]

We absolutely don’t want to be where we are: in sitting, the piano, etc. But we are where we are until we ARE where we are.

The Fear is not a story, but the reaction to it is. How we react creates our persona. [This is in response to being told at a discussion period at the Springwater Center that what I said about fear was “story.”]

Do not TRY to go into it, or TRY to let go. That creates the resistance: right shoulder is higher than the left due to tension in abdomen.

Mu! [The Zen koan; literally means no or not having. A monk asked the master, “Does the dog have the Buddha nature?” The reply: “Mu!”] Means no to intellectualization. But what Zen doesn’t tell you — wonder why — is that it’s fear that drives the intellectualization.

David, Toni, Krishnamurti all say it’s our conditioning — it’s mommy’s fault, daddy’s fault, society’s fault. But it’s really our programming’s fault. The genes’ fault. The finite being’s fault. That we devote all our resources to perpetuate.

William Styron in Darkness Visible: Self-loathing — for good reason. Suicidal — surprised to realize he had portrayed the suicidal mind accurately decades earlier in Sophie’s Choice, etc. Had been unaware it was in him. Depression started when he stopped alcohol, which had kept the anxiety and dread down.

October 30, 2011. Trustees meeting at Springwater. Toni had “adverse” reaction to group dialogues. High blood pressure (according to Susan). She is seeing old friends but grimaces when she hears someone she doesn’t want to see wants to come. [This is when she has stopped teaching and is bedridden due to spinal stenosis and in considerable pain.]

Did van Gogh’s painting take him into the Fear, just as sitting does for me? [Yes.] Sensitivity to colors deepened thatgreatly, also — as for me and music.

Unbearable resistance in sitting and piano, but then slept. Upon awakening entered into a sort of Beingness with that resistance. Obviously it’s what needs, what has, to be done.

A buck: his antlers give him no choice but to do battle. Same with humans, especially males. Battle of sword or wits or both.

All it takes is a crucifixion (after three-day sitting).

Are my descents into hell experiences like van Gogh’s “seizures?” Almost lost consciousness. [Some believe he had what’s called temporal lobe epilepsy, which causes extreme moods as well as seizures.]

Insomnia: fear of falling into hell.

God put me on this earth to do a certain number of things. It wouldn’t be so bad, if only He didn’t keep adding to the list. (I saw the first line at a forum which was combined with: “and I’m so far behind that I will never die.”)

Anne: manic on work days. Primed for battle.

Every time things go well — there is a letting go – the next time the self takes over and tries to make it happen. This has to be lived through over and over.

February 7, 2012. We are all the same consciousness, caught in our own limitations due to nature and nurture. The “radio” signal comes from the same, the only, Source.

Tension sitting just like tension at piano: defense against the Fear.

The corollary to not wanting to look at oneself is to blame others. This allows innumerable “sins” to be perpetuated. Gives us license.

Toni’s “loving openness.” Not wrong, but she hasn’t done it much herself since she doesn’t mention the fear it allows up. [If she can love everyone enough, then they won’t hurt her. As I wrote in Cabeza: if one is loved enough, by enough, reproductive success is assured.]

We constantly try to avoid situations that cause us anxiety — which has endless ramifications, compounding our misery. If we suffer without complaining we are always ready to die. No anxiety.

Woke at 3:30 AM being tortured like The Woman of the Lightning. In sitting before had been approaching a state of no resistance/just being. [Happening almost every night now and even during naps— after one hour of sleep the torture begins.]

Any method of meditation is a denial — a narrowing — of awareness. To keep out the Fear.

I presume I am entering the hell I’ve only tasted dozing the last two or three years. Perhaps sensing the necessity of it is all that prevents my suicide. Feel sort of like the last song of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, The Organ Grinder. Interesting that the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau said that these songs had such appeal, despite being “chilling.” For my mother, for example : too bad I never discussed it with her.

Sheer torture of tension at piano. But if I weren’t tortured I would never let go. So was Zen “right?” No — they are striving.

Why do people like van Gogh’s last painting Wheatfield and Crows (1890)? The terror it aroused in him led to his suicide. Same as Winterreise? Deep down they know what they need to go through?

Just as with exercise to increase one’s strength and endurance one must continue to the point of feeling tired or even exhausted, spiritually one must get to the point of indescribable mental anguish. This anguish is the death throes of the self. It must be allowed to happen.

Van Gogh: “extreme loneliness” of Wheatfield and Crows— lonely for IT? [He means devastation of the finite being?] Myself: I experience it as profound depression and despair as the thunderstorm of IT approaches on the horizon. The road leads directly through the flock of crows, the bird of death. No thing can help.

Piano tension forces me to find Lovingness . . . or give up. Perhaps I am being tormented “deliberately?”

The Woman of the Lightning: “To suffer is to learn.” First song of Winterreise, Good Night?

June 6, 2012. I keep forgetting the whole purpose of human life is to suffer as much as possible so God can turn.

Lady Julian of Norwich: the fiend is the self. It only has whatever power we relinquish to it. If free won’t operates, it has no enduring substance.

The only way to avoid indescribable mental anguish is to resign — give up. The self resigns its position; it recognizes its utter incompetence for the role.

Springwater annual meeting: Toni gets an emotional boost from checks for $200 from Robert Watson (according to Susan) I asked if she was worried about money. Bob said it was an emotional boost. This is why Robert sent her the money directly for her expenses and not to the center.

Imagine dissolving into IT. Like sex — why sex has its power. But we are imagining the other is wonderful like IT, but really they’re just the same as us: the same old foul putrid lump of self. So we fight or cool off. [Not sure what I mean by cool off.]

Composing music is imagining. But — this led Beethoven to the first two movements of the Ninth, and then the third. Fourth movement imagining joy. The joy the fugue #11 of The Art of the Fugue — no self.

Art is equivalent to mathematics. Solving a multiple variable equation.

Hitler blaming the Jews is equivalent to “spiritual” people blaming society.

Toni’s “attention” is a doing — and prevents fear from coming up. My own “allowing” lets it all up.

In a state of resistance/fear that drove van Gogh and Blakelock mad. But imagining, letting go, suffering without complaining through it.

August 4, 2012. Imagining dissolving into Lovingness. Is this the purpose of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony — to overcome our and Beethoven’s fear? Equivalent to suffering without complaining.

On the edge of the abyss of FEAR two days ago. Understand why Blakelock and van Gogh went mad. I didn’t due to imagining dissolving into Lovingness. 

August 5, 2012. Good afternoon nap, then sitting with abdomen relaxed in a way I have not known. But now tension during sitting, then unbearable buildup during piano. Had to stop 20 minutes early. Read, took nap — awoke totally enervated, devastated. . . . Can’t imagine how anyone goes through this. Now sitting, suffering without complaining.

But imagining leads to a realm so devastating to the self that “imagining” is an irrelevant extra. Here last night and at the center last time, etc. But maybe the “pathway” stays open.

Imagining requires letting go of wanting and fearing of self-concern; requires vulnerability to dying.

My reminding Nell of what she already knew — that she didn’t need to run from the fear — changed the pathway — until shock treatment destroyed it.

Do not blame IT for how bad we feel, i.e. with anger at anything. Suffer without complaining. Kyrie eleison.

Sick of self, totally tired of it. All of life an offering of self.

“Joyful, like a hero marching towards victory.” [From “The Ode to Joy.” This is likely what Beethoven hoped to inspire in us. The hero who will likely die — as all finite beings will — on the “battlefield.” Which allows the Infinite Spirit to know joy.]

When I first came to the Zen Center in 1969 someone had put a New Yorker cartoon on the bulletin board. It showed someone with the most mournful look on their face, seemingly in jail — clutching onto two vertical bars in front of them — but it wasn’t a jail. There was a vast, unlimited landscape behind them. I write in my notes now that all we need do is let go and turn around. But FEAR keeps us grasping to those bars — the only security the finite being has. The “prisoner” wants so much what — he thinks — is on the other side of the bars: what is “promised” by his evolutionary programming. But always unattainable.

I see myself attacking out of fear of being attacked (Eastman Dental Center hadn’t given me the senior discount). Toni says to see it, but if we aren’t free of the underlying fear — it’s not possible.

To “practice” dissolving means embracing, allowing, death. [But best not to practice anything — just to allow free won’t to work on its own. All that’s needed is persistence, five or 10 decades worth. Whatever it takes.]

Evolution makes us think the other is the most wonderful, wonderful thing in the world — for the sake of getting our genes copied. Then we discover they are but a stinking, putrid lump of self as we ourselves are.

The endeavor is going “well” only when we feel hopeless. “Wait without hope . . . for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.)

My job is to get others to see the necessity of sitting. And suffering. Not an easy job.

Moths circling a flame — like humans mindlessly driven by emotion.

Schubert to his friends, after singing through the entire Winterreise for them — they had been “utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone” (Joseph von Spaun) which made the songs totally unappealing — “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.” This shows he knew we crave deep down “The Dark Night of the Soul.”[This was less than a year before his death, and syphilis was taking its toll.]

Breasts are covered for the same reasons monogamy is more or less enforced (in our society, at least): for stability of society. Otherwise men would be stealing wives. But women push the envelope.

Thoughts of “reproductive success” (problems with the truck’s air conditioning) — so I want to stop sitting.

“If you would spend all of your time . . .” (Huang Po) — letting go, allowing free won’t, suffering without complaining . . . this is the first priority. The only priority.

We only suffer because we identify with the body, reproductive success, through unfree willing. Thus exercise is  suffering because the body doesn’t want it or like it, despite our mind “knowing” it is good for us. Thus allowing one’s self to suffer through exercise is spiritual.

Life is much simpler when you realize you are the only ONE. No one to fear, no one to impress, no one to battle. [“I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, that shall be.”]

Huang Po: “If you could but restrain each single thought from arising . . .” then you would become enlightened. Toni: “Infinite love and compassion are always available when the little me is not there.” Both are pie-in-the-sky because they ignore the wanting/fearing, the drives for S-cubed, that motivate thought and the “me.”[Toni is also implying that she is able to do what we are not — able to be free of the little me. I.e., “I did it. You can’t. I’m better than you.”] I actually believed that for far too long. What is wrong with me, I’d ask myself when I just needed to turn the question around to, “What is wrong with her?”]

Depression: all one’s energy is used to keep the fear down. Mania: the fear comes out to battle the world. Anne depressed after shopping. Always manic before. Tension: keeping fear down.

Allowing an inner stillness to be in the midst of activity. Piano, etc. Timeless now, but not trying to be one with the moment.

Fourth movement Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Equivalent to dissolving into Something all embracing, all loving (Cabeza, The Unfree Will, page 139.) [The soprano at the end of the quartet just before the end, sliding down the scale— “flugel weilt” — exemplifies this dissolving. See the performance I’ve posted online with von Karajan soloists.]

Suffering is necessary but we all hate it. I only sit because I suffer more if I don’t. Because a dry barren life without spirituality is unbearable.

December 3, 2012. Not an offering of self in order to get something. Rather a real offering. [“Costing not less than everything.”]

Self is devastated by IT. The only “hope” is to allow the Mind of IT — the “Glow” — to take over. To continue disregarding all inner terror knowing that the Glow is there, somewhere, everywhere.

Embrace your horrible right arm tension because the cause of that is the understanding you have of the music that others lack.

Teresa of Ávila blames the devil for thoughts, has a manic-depressive temperament. (Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul, by Cathleen Medwick.) 

In the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven shows us how to open to the unbearable first three movements: Joy, ecstasy culminating in the soprano soaring high, “Where thy (joy’s) gentle wing abides.”

Toni’s loving attention is a focusing which implies an act of will. Attention on something.

J. stopped fulfilling her craving for junk food and went against her programming by exercising — so as not to be fat. This shows we can stop trying to fulfill emotion (but in this case it’s a done to fulfill another emotion: wanting to be loved.) [To stop fulfilling all emotions — through free won’t — just a “little bit” harder. Like infinitely.]

Allowing the Glow, the Lovingness to dissipate the fear, which it can only do when the fear is allowed up. No resistance to anything — feels like annihilation. Of the self.

When there is Glow, one acts in accordance with IT.

Extreme depression at the center last week. Could hardly exercise. Lasted two days. Obviously “descent into hell.” Seeing if it’s possible not to fight it.

January 14, 2013. To be a vehicle for the IT without the reaction to the emotions caused by the genes in the way. This is freedom from wanting and fearing.

Attentiveness is an effect, not a cause of free won’t. [And allowing the self to suffer . . . to the nth.]

The spiritual endeavor is like climbing a mountain: If it’s not hard work . . . then you’re not going “up.”

The spiritual endeavor is like climbing a mountain: You just keep at it whether you feel like it or not.

Still, sometimes you need a break. But then you go back to the seemingly endlessly long slog. Besides, if you start goofing off too long, the “mosquitoes” start closing in.

One can always abstain at some level from the cycle of reactions. E.g., sitting. Complete abstention is complete and unexcelled enlightenment.

Civil War: Humans need someone to hate and fight. Sports less omnipresent then. Why not let them secede? Same with the revolutionary war: colonists didn’t want to pay for the French and Indian war. [Cabeza, page 198:                  “Lafayette wrote back to France during the Revolution that the Americans seemed to hate each other more than they hated King George III.”]

Regarding “others” who “oppose” us as a tree that’s fallen across the trail: It may be a big hassle to get around, but there’s no reason to blame the tree. [The others are just blindly following their conditioning.]

February 19, 2013. Letting the self be devastated and thus sink into Being.

[For the previous two years I had been going to the Center for self-directed two-day retreats. Problems with plantar fasciitis, which I was trying to solve by sitting with the soles of my feet in a stretched position (which I could do at home but not in the truck), led me to stop. Eventually solved the plantar fasciitis with the exercises at my website page: Exercise, Spiritual Necessity. Stretching on its own never helped.]

March 10, 2013. Letting go of the knot in the abdomen leads to, during the night, being put through The Wringer. Feels like death. Deep depression. Have to let myself sink into it. Like the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata 32, and the end of the Fantasia of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Complete giving up of the finite being. As Hans von Bülow wrote of the two movements of Sonata 32, “Resistance . . . resignation. Or better still, samsara . . . Nirvana.” When the finite being fully resigns — because it sees how fully incapable it is; feels its worthlessness — then and only then can the Infinite Spirit arise. [See Cabeza, the chapter Me and the Moon.]

If everything seems impossible it is because you are trying to do something. This is how the mind learns free won’t. Living through the impossibility over and over and over . . . a few trillion times. Or more.

Ninth Symphony: First movement is like a thunderstorm. From a distance we think, oh wow, that’s neat. But when caught inside. . . . My favorite part, since I first began appreciating it at age 16, is the very end with its infinitely ominous descending and ascending scales. [Beethoven wrote “Despair!” on early draft of the first movement. He also knew he needed to go through it.]

Piano hopeless. Sitting hopeless. My resistance seems infinite and eternal. Almost suicidal, longing for the end of this life. Devil’s chord. [See Cabeza, The Final Fugue chapters.]Then reminding myself the goal of every note is not to play well but to let go— and the next day was better. The Final Fugue and Musical Offering staying in my mind. . . .

“History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” — Mark Twain

To live every instant letting go as is necessary at piano. [Still working at this as I dictate it seven years later.]

You are here only to be of service to the IT. [Because there is only the IT. IT is what we really are.]

When one gives into the IT, one is not in opposition to anything.

April 5, 2013. Letting go of tension at piano at 1 PM . . . led to extreme depression at 7 PM. Three days ago letting go and abdomen led to freedom, purity, no opposition — then all locked up again.

Devastated by piano. I will not be with the music. Crucifixion.

“It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” “When going through hell, just keep going.”— Winston Churchill.

I complain about being crucified at the piano, but that’s precisely what needs to happen. And in life, too.

George Frederick Handel, when, after the first performance of the Messiah, a member of the nobility thanked him for providing everyone with a fine evening of entertainment: “I should be sorry if I only entertained them, my Lord. I wished to make them better.” At the end of the manuscript Handel wrote the initials, “SDG” meaning, “To God alone the glory.”

June 15, 2013. Two wringer nights. Can hardly move when I get up. Wish to sleep forever — if only I could sleep. I think I have to allow myself to feel the pain of the Bach Violin Chaconne in D minor — but I resist to the nth — time to resign? Maybe with my dying breath. This is the source of my fear? [Brahms said that to have composed the chaconne would have driven him mad. Bach composed it after the death of his first wife. See Cabeza, chapter Final Fugue II.]

Just like at the piano, you don’t want to know how far you have to go; you won’t be with what you are now; you want to rush ahead — all of which just keeps you stuck here. But the reason of course is that NOW is so devastating to the self.

Insomnia: fear of being put through the Wringer. Four Wringer nights in a row. This is what relaxation of tension does. Depression: fighting the Wringer— takes all your energy. [Editing this in August 2020, although I still have resistance to the nth, I’m sleeping well without the Wringer nights.]

July 10, 2013. Times of Being: profound calm, The Heart of Perfect Wisdom being revealed. Then Wringer nights and days. Letting it wring out the self. Thoughts are running from the Wringer. [To keep it under control, bound; we pretend to ourselves that we are on top — until we know are going to die and we say, “I never thought I’d end up like that.”]

David at the center told me he now does one hour of “quality” meditation instead of four hours. This is wanting your cake and eat it too. Wanting the bliss of freedom of self without giving up the self. This self will co-opt everything if given half a chance. A 100th of a chance. [And how does one “do” “quality” meditation? By an act of will. By trying to get out of the trap one digs the trap even deeper.]

Phil’s Notebook: The Struggles of a Soul Searching for That Which Is. Seeing if it can Be That Which Is. Seeing if it can know it is That Which Is.

Surrender to the devastating devil’s chords. Ring in the Wringer. Wring out the self.

Forcing myself to stay with piano — then sheer hell, fury, “The mind’s canker in its savage mood” (Byron). Truck air conditioning problems, calling hospital regarding cataract surgery for Anne, computer has yellow triangles saying something’s wrong, etc.

Knife in belly, each note twisted deeper if I stay with it. Next day some letting go — tortured to let the self die.

Embrace being devastated, embrace the Wringer — sitting, piano, sleep, everything. Suffer without complaining.

August 3, 2013. The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part II, G# minor Prelude and Fugue: The fugue— great grief of being separate from what we ARE. Prelude: start, desperate separateness. Longing, searching. Helps us feel what is in us all. [See my rendition on YouTube.]

Thought I would faint from torture at piano. Times of Being, nature inexpressibly beautiful: trees, sky, ferns, flowers, etc. Being with knot in abdomen sitting — it relaxes but leads to a deeper devastation. Necessary process.

Fear of going into freefall. Kapleau: “You can’t fall out of the universe.” Obviously never allowed himself to feel the fear. No understanding of fear’s profound evolutionary roots. We can be killed at any moment by another band. 

Everything comes down to wanting your cake and eat it, too. Wanting genuine spirituality . . . and clinging to self.

The abdomen being allowed to relax to let go its defense of self. Entering into Being — a necessity if the C Major Prelude is to be allowed to play itself. [Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, C Major Prelude and Fugue. See my rendition at YouTube.]

Yesterday devastated at piano, felt I was close to a nuclear explosion. Wanting not to go into hell. Dreams of nuclear war: Rockets taking off; waiting for the explosions. Devastated when waking but — a bit of peace in my “heart.” Imagine life is jumping off a cliff: We have 80 years before we hit the ground. We fight like crazy to deny that knowledge.

Overwhelming reaction of the mind to MIND. Little mind wants nothing to do with that THAT. Hate sitting despite a few moments of Being. Just want to sleep, escape. As if mind were approaching the speed of light but is intrinsically incapable due to its mass. The resistance grows and grows, its mass increases and increases. But how can the organism choose its own death? [It doesn’t. IT does.]

After nap: Some opening, being drawn like a magnet to Being . . . but that devastates the self . . . You keep forgetting there is nothing to do. You are the IT. But that includes defending the self. The whole process is necessary . . . to help God “turn.” [See ., Final Fugue I.]

Two nights in a row sitting entering into Being a tiny bit. Then Wringer night. Sitting is equivalent to death.

September 1, 2013. depression, despair, Wringer night. Piano meaningless and hopeless. To reject anything — internal or external (like appeal to Medicare which rejected nonsensically a payment) — is to reinforce the separate hell. To confirm one’s belief in it. The only choice is to allow the process to operate. The other is not a choice but a reaction, blind and programmed by our drive for reproductive success.

I keep forgetting the essence of sitting is non-doing. Not trying to open up. Just being. All trying is the unfree will.

Imagine a woman terribly sexually abused that she’s terrified of sex. Then she meets a very loving, compassionate man. They make love but it’s very hard for her to open up. He has to give her all the space and time she needs. “He” is equivalent to MIND or Infinite Spirit. “She” is the organism. The finite being. This is the expression of infinite love and compassion: No demands . . . but—persistence.

G# minor fugue: The mind longs unremittingly and inconsolably for reunion with MIND. The purity of its longing — as opposed to anger at its rejection expressed elsewhere — is what led to The Art of the Fugue. Not demanding like the Kyrie Eleison of the B minor mass? [In the mass, there is hope. In the G sharp minor fugue — no hope. T.S. Eliot: “Wait without hope . . .”]

The work is to open to the pain of that longing — not close ourselves off to it with tension, escape, etc. — the pain that purifies, that devastates finite being. That allows Knowledge and Love to prevail. [The Woman of the Lightning: “Knowledge and love are one, and the measure is suffering.”]

Imagining lovingness caressing the self to death. But this can be just another form of trying. Next morning “punished” for opening up? Thrown into a deep dark dungeon, no hope. Extreme “pressure” on the entire body mind. Approaching the speed of light? Tension — presumably from fear — defending the self from extinction.

Better after exercise, long morning nap, and exercise.

Piano: a few seconds free of tension, and the fingers move the way they’re supposed to — on their own. But then infinite fear rises up — devastating. Choice of devastating fear or devastating tension. Hard to believe others have gone through this. Van Gogh? It drove him crazy and to suicide. Blakelock? Bach. Julian of Norwich. Beethoven. Schubert. Monteverdi. Brahms refused — he said it would drive him mad.

One doesn’t learn to abstain by trying to abstain. Rather, by the self being devastated over and over. All one can do is put oneself where there is the opportunity to be devastated. Sitting. Piano. Backpacking. Suffering without complaining.

Every sitting pretend you are stuck with your mind for eternity. Which you are. No exit.

September 15, 2013. Anne admits in a note that her self is angry at having to do anything (preparation for trip to the Wind Rivers in this case). I had almost reacted to her earlier — fortunately I kept my mouth shut and gave her the space to see it for herself. Possibly Bach learned this with Bernhard . . . too late for Bernhard, though. [See Cabeza.]

Returned from trip to the Wind Rivers: Devastating tension at piano. Will the I, the will, ever just give up and resign, and die? Die . . . or else . . . MIND waits for the organism to go through its death throes.

Trip cured Anne’s depression (from cataract surgery). For myself, just an interlude.

Worst Wringer night ever. Can barely move. Have to die to survive. To survive I have no choice but to die.

In perpetual Wringer mode, day and night. Trying not to fight it. Hard to even move, exercise. Piano excruciating after one and a half hours. But perhaps more expression comes through. . . . Going through the Wringer is the price of Being. Being calls, but the self digs in its heels — thus The Wringer.

It’s not that this work is hard. It’s effort-less. Rather, we drag an immense burden and the self around with us all the time. That’s the hard part. But we are so obsessed with it, think we will die without it (well we might, physically; but we will die regardless). The hard part is also being convinced to just leave that self behind, by the side of the road as it were, as utterly useless baggage.

Glenn Gould uses his technique to separate himself — to defend himself — from the music. As do other performers.

Though it still seems all too rock-solid, perhaps there are a few hairline cracks in the grand edifice of the “I.” Some letting go of tension at piano, though the playing is thereby devastated. At least it’s not sheer torture. Playing longer, abdomen relaxing somewhat. But the tension still builds and builds the whole time.

The “I am doing something wrong” in sitting — can it be ignored? Just awareness of the whole screwed up mess? [But it’s only screwed up from the point of view of the “I.” From the point of the Infinite Spirit . . .? Can there be anything wrong? One could call it a phase transition: from rock-solid ice, to slushy mix, to water, to beginning to bubble with steam, and finally vaporizing. Is there any stage at which the Infinite Spirit is absent?]

Every method is just a defense. Even the above.

Every bit of self-concern is the unfree will. Despair is the only “Way.”[“Feel our worthlessness.”]

Striving for awareness without dropping self-concern is putting the cart before the horse. When self-concern is dropped, awareness arises on its own. It’s always there — just blocked, misdirected, etc.

Susan Sonntag: “dying is impossible unless you can get beyond the me.” (In book by her son.) That’s what sitting is: dying. For it not to be unbearable the only choice/way is to stop feeding the me.

Bach’s Musical Offering (by Neville Mariner; see my own rendition at YouTube of the two greatest fugues — the rest by Mariner is at YouTube also): Pulling at my heart, my soul, my being. “Leave the self behind . . . and come Home,” it calls . . . and calls. “Time to come Home.”

Not reacting to the extreme tension at piano — suffering without complaining. That mental state (of not reacting) carries over when not playing.

After a day of Mind’s Canker and excruciating piano tension, at 2 AM a softening of the shell of self. A letting in. An opening. To the Whole — followed by big Wringer night. The more opening the sitting, the bigger the Wringer. The Wringer is the pain coming up [in the finite being resisting].

October 29, 2013. Descent into hell. Every sitting could/should be a Wringer, too. Letting up the pain is so threatening. G-sharp minor Prelude and Fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier. We need to feel the pain of our own self-imprisonment.

My most open sitting yet at 2-3 AM. Self starvation. Piano had gone “well.” Then my “worst” Wringer yet. Now short on sleep.

Sitting on one’s deathbed. Twilight Zone episode: A young, perhaps 12 years old, boy have the power to see the future. Every week he would go on TV and foretell some event — a volcano, a stock market crash, etc. — and he was always right. Then one week he was extremely troubled. But he went on TV regardless, saying that the most wonderful event in the history of humanity was going to occur, affecting absolutely everyone. The most wonderful, joyful event possible, but he couldn’t reveal what it was. Afterwards he was still extremely troubled and his mother asked, what was this extraordinary event about to occur? What could it be? The sun was about to go nova, he replied, and extinguish all life on earth. This is just what sitting is: the necessary death of the self leading to the infinite joy of the IT.

Three days later: 7 PM sitting was open, but 2 AM full of resistance. Lying down, Wringer came up. Hard to sleep, then a dream of being with a group trying to survive the end of civilization. Fear of other groups finding us. Waking it was clear that Wringer is the terror of extinction. Just let the terror be there, then eventually slept again. The Woman of the Lightning’s “Dark Truths.” [See Cabeza, chapter Final Fugue I.]

2 AM. Resignation of the I. Allowing Mind to Be. No Wringer but reflux after three hours of sleep.

Bad headache — first since Wind Rivers six weeks ago, from sleep loss and piano tension. Self torture last two nights (which may have also caused reflux).

Torture tension at piano. Quit after one and one half hours. Necessary to be as Julian of Norwich said: “. . . so disgusted with myself I could hardly bear to live.” How else could/would one relinquish the self?

Kafka sees writing is an escape, and the necessity of suffering to make one self-aware. But he needed sitting.

November 13, 2013. Afternoon nap — descent into hell deeper than before. Then I immediately forgot what I saw. Devastating . . . but so what. What else is new.

Note to Anne: “The key to happiness is . . . (see other side) . . . to suffer without complaining. The more, the better.” Made me laugh during piano. [Makes me laugh now.]

Kafka’s short story The Burrow: This is the self, the persona. The faint threatening noise he hears is the same everywhere. For Kafka it was his tubercular breathing intimating his approaching death (died six months later). For everyone it’s our approaching deaths. [Quotes from Wikipedia: “I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.”

“. . .[T]he most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over. For the time being, however, the silence is with me.”]

The misery of sitting, why we resist it so much, is precisely what is necessary for freedom from self: The self in its death throes wants anything, desperately, anything else than this. But somehow we must allow the process to continue.

The purpose of sitting is to feel miserable — without instinctively reacting. [“Feel our worthlessness.”]

In a way, the most despairing music is not reacting to the misery just being with it. The Bach violin chaconne. This is what Brahms thought would drive him mad — being with the misery. 

November 21, 2013. Yesterday’s openness is gone, mind locked up in tension. Immolation of the self the only way.

Constant monitoring: how am I doing? Necessary to give that up. Suffer without complaining.

Letting go of tension and knot in abdomen at piano allows devastating fear up. Almost impossible to play.

Allowing the knot to untangle, the self to dissolve — then resistance again.

Thought I was over the hump. Ha! Piano after the above: sheer torture tension after one and a quarter hours. Stopped. Even exercise — the weights were so heavy. Next morning extreme physical depression — the self protesting its impending demise. Ignoring it to the extent possible. Impossible to ignore, but one still continues — sitting.

10 AM: Better — no choice but to give oneself over to the process.

1 AM. Still extremely depressed. Right arm tension unbearable. Stopped piano early. Hate any exercise. Sleeping more.

Deeply depressed. Tension a defense against it and despair, which are necessary for the extinction of the self. Sink into depression. It’s the only way out of the burning house. [See Cabeza chapter Me and the Moon.]

My physical depression: like having an ominous, crushing weight on me. This is the IT crushing the self. But now back to tension, resistance.

You are the IT attempting to manifest IT-self in this world. The extreme, virtually infinite difficulty is irrelevant and concerns only the unfree will. The IT will continue working as long as body/mind are able. . . . Infinite piano torture tonight . . . started opening with the C Major Prelude and Fugue. Then the Fear builds.

Schubert: “I am here only to compose.” Myself: “I am here only for the IT.” Better get used to it. [Sure thing.]

Went from Wringer sitting to Wringer lying down – only slept the last hour. Stopped piano early: torture tension.

Huge Wringer night after some letting go, especially at piano in the afternoon.

A Wringer day. Image of wolves tearing a moose apart. Eben [person at Springwater Center]died [of ulcerative colitis]. Wouldn’t go through this. Wouldn’t sit, wouldn’t exercise. Fear killed him.

Piano torture in the extreme. Right calf cramp. Infinitely depressed, hardly sat. Some exercise before bed — better. 

When you have ants in your house it is supposedly futile to kill individual ants. Same with thoughts. The source must be dealt with.

Entering into Being yields to . . . letting go of abdomen tension yields to . . . Wringer . . . yields to . . . backlash and thoughts to defend self.

2:20 AM. Piano sheer torture: tension worse and worse. How can I ever record? [By cheating and having a wonderful virtual piano which allows me to fix everything in the computer.] Depression sitting, total resistance, just want to sleep. 7 AM. Feel horrible but sat through to the bell. At the very end some opening.

January 5, 2015. All too clear the necessity of the little self being tortured to death. Contralto to Beethoven regarding the unsingable parts (by all four soloists; but they are sung today) of the Ninth Symphony, which he refused to alter: “Well, then we must all go on torturing ourselves for the sake of God.” Exactly so. 

Devastating depression and despair at 7 AM, but after staying — more or less — with it for one hour, maybe not so bad as one fears. The only way to the other side of the “descent into hell.”

Normal for resistance to build during sitting, piano. Approaching the speed of light. Self threatened more and more.

Real sitting is like exercise. You know every instant how much the little self rebels.

Last night working on letting go at piano, sitting. Then Wringer night. Devastating. The more I don’t fight it, the more devastating. Don’t want to move. Can hardly move. But no choice but to continue, let it happen. Three quarters of the way up a mountain you don’t stop because it’s hard. Noon: pure piano tension torture. Evening sitting: in full retreat from what brought on Wringer. Just want cookies.

All suffering arises from the little self. To resist, complain in any way — this is the little self’s way of perpetuating itself. No resistance and it withthaters on its own. Suffering without complaining IS the dying of the self — the only way that can happen. Sitting is the best means of allowing this. Then piano.

Resistance at 2 AM sitting, then Wringer night. The purification of the self.

Wringer started during piano at 10 PM . . . just want to sleep.

When no thoughts, sitting is equivalent to suffering. Just like exercise. The Woman of the Lightning: “The eternal necessity of suffering.” “To suffer is to learn.” Myself: “The purpose of sitting is to suffer.”

Toni’s “seeing” is really a way not to feel the devastation, the “worthlessness,” in Beethoven’s words.

Letting go of abdomen tension yields to suffering. The choice of hell . . . or crucifixion. Resurrection?

Note to Anne: If you had observed me at piano tonight you would think I was writhing on the cross. Which I am. [I later showed her a video I made of myself playing. She didn’t want to see more — it would give her nightmares. And later my playing was even more crucifying. Finally stopped playing in summer 2019 after I had recorded all the most important pieces.]

Two notes for myself: Letting go with every note. But. That leads straight to the cross. “Free” will: either the knot in the abdomen or . . . the Cross. (Sarcasm intended.)

Three levels: 1. Knot/tension 2. Extreme “depression,” which maybe hint at 3.The pure emotion of Beethoven late quartets (such as the “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” — Adagio of #15, Cavatina of #13). Not fighting 2 . . . yields to 3.

That resistance builds during sitting and piano must be recognize and accept it as part of the process. For so long I thought I was doing something wrong. Rather, it was a right — going deeper.

The knot holding down an infinitude of grief. The grief of separation.

February 4, 2014. 6:30 PM nap: Descent into hell.

Sitting: As if on your deathbed. No exit.

The Sports Gene, by Brian Epstein: Anxiety is the worst part of pain. For the Infinite Spirit there is no fear — it can just feel the misery (see the last page of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). The finite being is threatened by all pain and suffering. If no reaction then, as Beethoven wrote, “the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.”

Allow the devastating moment of eternity to wring out the self.

Generally lately immense lethargy sitting at 2 AM. A few nights sensed that IT was seeing through me and that was all that mattered. To allow that being to express IT-self through this vehicle. [Beethoven: “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals, and by means of that contact spread the rays of the Godhead throughout the human race.”]

Love yourself to death. The G# minor Prelude and Fugue bringing me in touch with my grief.

Dack’s rampage at his death could be called psychotic. Had been “normal” up until then. Shows that that Fear is there in all of us, just buried in one way or another. Do manic-depressive have a higher IQ than schizophrenics? It’s the same fear. [An online search indicates yes.] 

Because I can’t drop my tension to be “one with the moment” I think I am bad. But it is just the Universe doing its best. [I also think — rather, thought for a long time — something’s wrong with me because it seems all spiritual teachers more or less pretend to know more than you, to keep their status above you, to keep their jobs.]

Sylvia Franklin (the subject of Is There No Place on Earth for Me, by Susan Sheehan): was acting psychotic, hospitalized, then did not want to go and acted perfectly normal — so doctors wouldn’t admit her. We all have the potential not to react to the internal “hell.” Interestingly we subconsciously know this by the use of the word “act.” Leo Tolstoy, in Sevastopol Sketches, described how a Russian soldier whose leg had been amputated above the knee coped with the agonizing pain. “The chief thing, your honor, is not to think,” Tolstoy’s amputee remarked. “If you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.” I’m sure he means the chief thing is not to react to it, thought being a secondary reaction to wanting/fearing. [There’s also the thought of how he will cope in the future with being an amputee. At that time it probably meant begging on the streets.]

2 AM. State of Being — briefly. Need to return, but it means death.

Allowing the devastation of self is the same as exercise: you know it’s good for you even if you hate it.

More intense memories of the “disgusting” finite being. Wringer night, Wringer sitting. [The only thing that consoles me, when I remember all the “disgusting” things I’ve done— my finite being has done — in my life that make me cringe, is to pledge myself ever more deeply to allowing the Infinite Spirit to take over. This is one of the great virtues of sitting, and why people hate it so much. They think of things they don’t like about themselves. But that dislike, disgust, is necessary suffering.]

To continue with fear, imagining Being — but perhaps this is just trying to have one’s cake and eat it, too. Dodging the bullets of the firing squad. The finite self determined to survive.

Beethoven, regarding the Missa Solemnis : “My chief aim was to awaken and permanently instill genuine religious feeling in not just the performers but also the audience.” Mine also, in myself and others. Which costs “not less than everything.” [What Beethoven went through to compose his greatest works can be seen in his face in his last portrait; see my renditions of the last three sonatas, 30-32, on YouTube.]

April 8, 2014. Tortured to death at piano. Afterwards, finally?!? giving in to IT. Being with IT NOW (a little). A little less resistance, but it still builds over one hour of sitting.

Sitting: a mental prostration, feeling our worthlessness, “God is the only one who acts (Julian of Norwich),” and “again achieve our perfection,” and “joy through pain . . .” (Beethoven.)

Being with oneself: a little like just holding a child who’s had a nightmare.

Time to die, long past time for the worthless finite being to wither away. Giving in to the present.

Always defending the self from the necessary purification of suffering. This is my tension.

Sitting: Doing nothing except to allow the finite being to suffer and to wither away on its own. To die away.

Nightmare: our truck was stolen while staying at Mount Hope (the Springwater Center’s original location) and no one cared; I tried to call Anne. Kafkaesque. Desperate. I had been thinking of the orange trail tape that had been taken down by the Pike Road people (just thrown on the ground, deliberately destroying our trail markings on state land) — an act of violence against us. Economist Ian Morris wrote in Why the West Rules for Now (or, War: What Is It Good for) regarding the facetious statement people often make: “We’re from the government and we are here to help you.” Morris’s version is: “There is no government, and we are here to kill you.” If EMP (an electromagnetic pulse— from the sun, or a nuclear explosion — that destroys the power grid for possibly years, likely ending civilization as we know it), then. . . . Incredibly powerful fears were aroused by the dream. Seems I am wired for CRISIS response.

The supernova solution [referring to the Twilight Zone episode mentioned earlier]. Advanced form of turning the other cheek. Feeling worthless yields to perfection. Expectant openness for joy, dissolving in Love’s embrace. Beethoven Ninth fourth movement.

Like a massive rock at the edge of the sea, if the waves have the chance they will in time wear it away. But not if we keep maintaining our own “seawall” — like Kafka and the burrow he identifies with. It’s scary to the nth to be defenseless. We feel safe trapped in the trap of our own burrow. Unless we listen closely — through sitting — and hear the sounds of something — our death — trying to get in and get us.

Unbearable torture tension at piano. Back to the complete simplicity of self-devastation.

Sitting time goes fast when one is obsessed with thought — driven by fear.

Beaten into submission by sitting, piano, big printer hell [my expensive printer that makes wonderful enlargements – when it’s working right]. Everything. Wanting is equivalent to what is “worthless” about us. Endure without complaining, just being with it all.

Sitting: call it a Miserere (Miserere — full title: Miserere mei, Deus, Latin for “Have mercy on me, O God”—is a setting of Psalm 51 by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri; see Music of Cabeza page of www.meaningofwilderness.com for links to performance at YouTube). The finite being is worthless, can do nothing spiritual. We “wait without hope,” “yet there is faith” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets).

Incredible heaviness of mind . . . because of trying to go lightspeed? This is dying. For Mind to flow through the fingers, the finite being must die. Must it be? It must be. [This refers to words written over the last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet, #16. “Must it be? — Infinitely sorrowful. “It must be” — full of joy and freedom. It took him a lifetime to get there. For us . . .?]

The rule of The Law: Thou must suffer. [For the sake of the eternal IT. That is That Which Is. That is All That Is.]

“Everyone wants to get into heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

May 17, 2014. Anne: a sense of doom when not distracted or reading.

When you just can’t stand sitting anymore — this is the most propitious time. Just continue. Just keep sitting. When the finite being is devastated by Being. [As the saying goes, talk, i.e. words, is cheap . . . we do what we can. Or, as Churchill says, “what is required.”]

Incredible lethargy after evening nap. Just want to sleep forever. Like death? Even worse later.

I start licking and smacking my lips it piano like tardive dyskinesia. Incredible emotion after playing. Buried for 66 years. [Tardive dyskinesia is caused by long-term use of neuroleptic drugs, which are used to treat psychiatric conditions.

Tardive dyskinesia causes repetitive, involuntary movements, such as grimacing and eye blinking.]

Some sort of a glimpse of devastating Reality at beginning of a nap.

Sitting like piano: trying to play hard, loose, and slow. Allowing the fear to come up without reaction.

The Woman of the Lightning: “To suffer is to learn.” Myself: “To sit is to suffer is to learn.” IF we let it and don’t react. IF we don’t try to have our cake and eat it too. IF we don’t try to have the Infinite Spirit without the death of the finite being. Sitting IS the death of the finite being.

We must let our “selves” — the finite beings — be tortured to death.

Always remember that the purpose of life is to suffer (this is how life evolved in the first place; reproductive failure IS suffering) — and everything will be easy. [Sure thing.]

Closer to Being in sitting, yet the knot in abdomen seems Eternal. Excruciating tension at piano. Piano HELL makes clear what is necessary in sitting. Giving up the finite.

Sitting — as if on your deathbed — you hate it. But, like exercise, you do it anyway. And you know you’ll be the “better” for it.

Tortured — tension, extreme lethargy — to the point of total despair. Then and only then does — maybe — part of the finite being give up. Like the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata 32. Maybe. Eventually. Someday. [Even though Beethoven knew the bliss of the second movement, the third movement of the Ninth, much of the late quartets, it was clear he still hadn’t given up the entire finite being even on his deathbed. But he did the best he could.]

Descent into Hell. Several lately.

Quantum tunneling allows protons to get close enough to fuse into helium in the sun. Otherwise no fusion, no stars (Before the Big Bang, by Brian Clegg). 

1:30 AM. Infinite lethargy. Sat in chair leaning back [I almost always don’t lean back; at this time I was usually kneeling on a bench, but now I find it easier to let go of the tension in my abdomen by sitting in a chair but mostly not leaning back].  Finite being devastated . . . but some opening in the morning.

Devastated, no choice, so. . . . June 27, 2014. I relinquish myself to the music, to Bach, to That Which Is, to the Dark Energy. [There Is a Buddhist practice where one recites: “I relinquish myself to Amitaba Buddha (the Buddha of light and life).”]

If no time, then nothing to do, just Be. But this feels like falling into the void.

Great music is equivalent to Being. The mind longs for that Being.

To truly give oneself over to the present moment is, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “a lifetime’s death in love . . . the occupation of a saint . . . costing not less than everything.”

Giving up, relinquishing at piano but still devastated: over one and a half hours of HELL. Every thing “you” TRY to do is doomed to failure. But somehow, over time, EXTENDED time, Mind may be allowed to manifest IT-self.

If someone is training for a marathon, they don’t expect it to be easy. They know the body will resist their efforts. Likewise sitting: One must know and accept resistance will come up, perhaps seemingly infinite resistance. But somehow one knows one must continue regardless. [But, it’s the finite being that trains for a marathon almost certainly because it wants status. This is the motivation (possibly also “runners’ high” which I’ve never experienced; various chemicals are released into the brain). For physical well-being that much exercise is not required, and in fact may even be detrimental. Better to spend the time training on sitting, also. In sitting there is no motivation for the finite being to cling to.]

Forcing myself to keep playing led to painful crackdown of tension that I still have the next morning. [I call this lockdown tension. I had this first — as I recall — on my tenth LSD trip when I felt I was being crucified against the wall . . . before later opening to the last three Beethoven sonatas. Had it equivalently at my first Zen retreat with no opening. And most retreats after that. This began happening frequently the last four or five years at the piano.]

Genuine prayer is just letting go of the finite being. It is not “good.” Rather, it is necessary.

Totally enervated at 7 PM. But then Being — infinitely important — during sitting. Then resistance to it.

July 27, 2014. For all my lifelong self-hatred there is only one solution: The ONE and only Solution.

Can the will go to sleep while we are awake? What we really are? [In Bach’s St. Matthew Passion Christ berates his disciples for not being able to “watch one hour” with him during the long night before he is betrayed by Judas. At this time Christ prays to God, “If it be possible, may this cup pass from me. But not as I will, rather as You will.” At this point in the Passion there is a chorale, the words of which may even have been written by Bach himself: “I will with my Jesus watch . . . and so all our sins will go to sleep.” It would seem Bach understood the essence of my kind of meditation intuitively. This is one of my favorite parts of the St. Matthew.]

Extreme depression. Quit piano early — unwilling to give into IT. Means total destruction of “me.”

Three devastating nights of tossing and turning. Devastating to the finite being — due to opening, letting go of the abdomen.

Schubert understood the necessity of being devastated in all his greatest works.

Cramp in the neck that has been building over several years: unbearable all the time. [About a year after stopping playing the cramp is gone, possibly because of sleeping on my left side which may gently stretch the cramp during sleep.] No choice but to give in to it. To IT. To allow IT to devastate the finite being.

Climbing a mountain to obtain one’s goal of the view from the top entails much hardship. Best not to fight the difficulty; rather relax and enjoy the journey as best one can. Thus so the spiritual “climb.” [Enjoy? Sure thing.  Yet still the “summit” beckons.]

The only way the piano can be right is to drop resistance to the NOW — in every moment.

Neck pain excruciating. No choice but to relinquish the finite being into the refiner’s fire. [Messiah: “For He is like a refiner’s fire. And He shall purify. . . .”]

“I came to see clearly my own Mind was no other than the mountains, the rivers, the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars”— from a Buddhist Sutra or Zen Master Dōgen. This understanding informs all my best photos. Directs me to take them. And everyone who response to them deep down knows this.

Last night (also earlier running) a bit of freedom, joy, and purity. Thanks to being crucified by my neck and forced to drop the finite being (a tiny bit). To allow the refiner’s fire to immolate it. Now back to the endless “climb.” Knowing all of life could be like that to the nth degree. Monteverdi understood it in the 1610 Vespers.

Tossing and turning — after one hour of sleep — most of the night. Resistance to the Refiner’sand in Fire. I need to resign myself to my fate: death of the finite being.

Rebound from my opening. 100% resistance. Had been letting go in abdomen. Now the last thing I want to do.

Diamond Sutra, Etc.: “Make no arbitrary distinctions, conceptions . . .” i.e. thought is bad. But it’s not thought, it’s our programming, our drive for reproductive success, our wanting/fearing.

When one does not react to the wanting and fearing, then one is, ipso facto, effortlessly, in the present moment and full of compassion for all. Because ONE is ALL.

August 18, 2014. Sitting IS suffering, like backpacking. We just have to accept, embrace, and not fight that.

Last night some just Being. Harder this morning.

Huang Po: “Do not allow the least movements of your own minds to disturb you.” But he says nothing about how devastating this is — totally devastating — to the finite being. Did he go through that?? Same, even worse, with other Zen Masters.

For myself: a knot in abdomen. For others: a straitjacket?

Compassion: Not wanting someone to be any different from the way they are, since that wanting derives from our own drive for reproductive success. If we aren’t wanting/fearing, then it is possible to just BE with that person in an inestimably profound way. [Perhaps to incline them towards the Infinite Spirit.]

Devastating last two hours of sleep: tossing and turning. Nobody talks about that. Devastated until you allow yourself to be who you really are.

To give up all trying — and the devastation leaves one no choice — yet continue sitting, piano, everything. Then Mind IS. Timeless. No trying, no time. No time. No trying.

Allow devastation when exercising and piano. Tension keeps it down.

Focusing on letting go — relaxing more; less tensing of neck which has been excruciating — at piano yields to new level of devastation. . . .Yields to escapism . . . yields to long nap . . . yields to being totally enervated. UNWILLING to go into IT. HATE sitting.

Don’t try to DO anything. Let IT take ITS course. “You” are just an observer along for the ride. A way for IT to know IT-self. Is this a “dark truth” . . . or “The Heart of Perfect Wisdom?” Piano, same: just be an observer letting the music — IT-self the Perfect Wisdom at Heart (great music, that is) — play IT-self.

Hit by extreme heaviness, 6:30 PM. Piano impossible. 2:30 AM sitting is like backpacking — necessitates suffering — to get to fine, pure places.

Sitting into Being, 2 AM. Prelude and Fugue in C Major almost right. Someday: “Phil is not here anymore. He realized he was not up to the job. He got out of the way, he resigned, he abdicated. What “he” — the finite being — seemed to be never had any enduring substance anyway. He stopped resisting — eventually! It took long enough! —because he wasn’t really given much choice in the matter.

September 1, 2014. 2 AM. Total resistance. NO WAY will I let go. That means Death. Then: Wringer night. Then: Wringer nap. Wringer sit. Wringer piano, Wringer sit. . . . . . . . . .

AGAIN, the finite being is not who you are. It does not matter if it feels tortured to death.

Just accept that you are on your deathbed. Nowhere to go. No more escapes.

Evening piano extreme depression. Quit early, escaped reading, eating corn chips. 2 AM sitting . . . into Being. Could/should have sat longer.

A sense, at 3 AM before sleep, of the profundity you could be. Kuan Yin. Then total resistance the next day, piano and sitting.

Unbelievable piano torture. Every note — at the end — excruciating. Couldn’t finish the Final Fugue. Sitting: just want to sleep, but it will probably be Wringer. 

The price of not less than everything . . . keeps going up. Devastating 24 hours: sleep loss then Wringer night. Entering some into Being in sitting, but at piano could hardly play a note — total terror.

You have to feel the suffering. Let it penetrate to the core of the finite being. If you don’t feel it, doing nothing about it — you are reacting to it, thus perpetuating the neural connections and creating noise that drowns out the Infinite Spirit.

Some opening sitting, then devastating piano — infinite resistance. Ate corn chips. Sitting not too bad but huge Wringer night. The next morning sitting: the last thing I want to do. But Mind cares not. IT persists, ruthlessly, relentlessly, perpetually, regardless of the finite being’s feelings.

Wringer nights, Wringer naps — the Refiner’s Fire shall purify. So it is written. Shall crucify. And IT shall crucify. [Rephrasing of the Messiah’s: “And He shall purify . . .”.]

Dogen: “Mind and body sloughed off” in sudden great awakening. But only after his master approved it, “Then I rested easy.” Shikan taza means just/only sitting.

Joyous free opening yesterday. Piano: pillow practice (doing finger exercises on a pillow) two times letting go seemed to help. Maybe can do the same with breathing. [Don’t count on it!]

Feel one’s worthlessness: feeling, enduring without complaining all the resistances, the knots, of the finite being which limit it so. Feeling, enduring without complaining, and thus entering Being. Allowing the entering of the Infinite Spirit. With every note, with every breath, with every timeless moment. Allowing this knot in the space-time continuum to loosen on its own, which it will if we aren’t always pulling it tighter.

BIG WRINGER night after this. Total resistance in sitting — backlash to yesterday’s opening.

October 6, 2014. Anne having panic during chores. Letting go of her depression allows the Fear up this is the resistance to sitting, to the NOW, to What Is. Fear of ITS “terrifying dreadfullness.” [Rainier Maria Rilke]

Profound depression overnight, today manic — mind screaming, bursting. Entering, approaching, the wilderness no one dares traverse? Go back! Go BACK! Before it’s too late! Thus the finite beings screams.

Smoking (I smoked for about a year when I was 20; half pack a day): a tiny bit of anxiety comes up, the tiniest tip of the immense iceberg . . . so we light up. The same with thought. The trick is to be with that anxiety, as it swells to awesome proportions, without reacting. Ignoring the screams of the finite being.

Being the one that breathes, dissolving into the Whole.

Several extreme Wringer nights. Notes today to Anne apologizing for impatience: “My mind is on fire,” “In an unbelievable state,” “I must be the most manic-depressive person who didn’t commit suicide.” But 2 AM some calm sitting, riding the storm, rather, not fighting the storm of terror within.

Mind screaming, screaming, screaming. But the mind that complains is the mind that must be wiped out. One way or another.

A Christ is one who gives over the finite being to the Infinite Spirit.

All our reactions are a defense against What Is — which devastates us. Huang Po doesn’t mention this when he says to make only the minimal response to everything, as if we were “too ill to bother.” WONDER WHY?!

Allowing oneself to be seduced by the most perfect lover in the Universe. But we play — pardon the extreme understatement — hard to get.

There’s no getting around it — the finite being must be devastated. But if we “turn ourselves in” and “confess” our “crimes,” the “Court” will go easier on us. We won’t be tortured (quite as much). But we still must die.

And if we show genuine “remorse,” the path is cleared for our “rehabilitation.” If not, the “Law” will show no mercy. Like Kafka’s Trial.

Dreamt I was supposed to commit suicide. A few days earlier I was going to die in a nuclear explosion but didn’t — I was glad.

October 19, 2014. Big Wringer night. Didn’t sleep the last two hours. Tossing and turning. Devastation — except I resist, then, and now sitting.

1 AM. Descent into hell. 

8 AM. Repeat a million times: The PURPOSE of sitting is to SUFFER. The purpose of life — a spiritual life; but why else is there any life — is to suffer. Without complaining, i.e., reacting. Thus Julian wanted to experience Christ’s suffering. Irritable bowel syndrome, knot in abdomen, due to reaction to suffering.

In a painfully tense mind state all day, like in the old days when I tried too hard at sitting [I call this “lockdown tension”]. Don’t know how it happened. But the finite being is determined to fight to the end. Sitting seems hopeless in this state, just like at countless retreats. But still I sit. [Can’t eat corn chips forever (they were Anne’s, left over from a trip, to munch on to stay awake while driving.]

Feel our worthlessness – but that too can become a practice, a defense. Sat late to 3:20 AM — opening, allowing of Mind. But tight closing like before during sleep. The price of not less than everything keeps going up.

No striving whatsoever. No concern. Just allowing the process to play itself out. . . .

Sat extra at 2 AM, allowing Mind. Then Wringer night of sorts. Now 8 AM complete resistance.

Because we (my generation) didn’t have the Germans to hate, the Depression to struggle through, we hated the USA itself. Partly due to Vietnam. Have to have something to fight. 

On the cross at 7 PM, devastation at piano. 2 AM on the cross, then opening into Being, then on the cross again. 7:30 AM: Wringer night but less resistance to sitting and Being. IT shall purify. . . .

Letting oneself sink into the present without trying to concentrate. Letting the knot untie itself . . . and then there will be . . . NO knot.

November 4, 2014. Big Wringer night, then couldn’t nap. Feel miserable, but WHO cares? WHO? 7 PM: reaction from Wringer? Can’t stand sitting. Just want to lie on the couch and read and eat junk.

The price of Everything is shooting up and up. Piano devastated by Fear. Don’t want to play or sit. Just lie on the couch and eat cookies and read. But that’s so boring. . . . Everything boring but Being.

Anne: The 10 ox herding pictures in The Three Pillars of Zen — trying to quantify enlightenment. Trying to hold onto something.

Instead of frantically struggling on the surface, just accept that you’re going to drown eventually anyway, so just relax and let yourself sink . . . all the way to the bottom.

2 AM. If you don’t fight the process, there’s no problem but fighting the process is part of the process. Crucifixion takes time. 7 AM. Just give into the process. “Nothing to do. Nothing to be. Just Being.” [From Cabeza, chapter Me and the Moon.]

Body/mind tense/tight last three days. Defending. Trying to get out of the trap. To have my cake and eat it too. To get to heaven without dying.

Excruciating tension lying down at 3 AM. Long time awake. Give in to the process. But the finite being will fight to the bitter end. (Think of medieval torture devices described by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Natures. Wasn’t fun. Dying of cancer is not fun either. Life is not fun.]

“Give in” is an act of will. Rather, allow, if possible, the process. Let it happen. Allow Mind to Be.

2 AM. Feel totally separate, worthless, hopeless, hate sitting, piano hell, ETC.! Lockdown tension! WHY?! This absurd reality is caused by forcing myself to play piano too long. Blasted Tuesday through Saturday. Restarted Sunday night.

7 AM. Lockdown tension. (This is why I gave up retreats.) Seems so hopeless. But the only thing that matters is to do the best one can for Mind.

Just give in to everything: every note, every step, every breath. Then no problem. Theoretically. But even “giving in” becomes an act of unfree will.

“Wait without hope” (T.S. Eliot). But when the Refiner’s Fire starts to flare.…

Big Wringer night, then short morning nap. Anne: Great FEAR of Unraveling. What will become of me? For her, Wringer is Fear during the night. Not my tossing and turning that seems like purification.

Played piano “too long” — lockdown tension again. Big Wringer night, then finally slept.

November 22, 2014. Lockdown tension again. Recognized it and stopped playing early, but not soon enough. Had been — in sitting — opening to the devastation. Was too much. Now “So disgusted with myself I can hardly bear to live (Julian of Norwich).” But this is how most live.

Lockdown piano — worst yet. Could hardly sleep due to it; sat in chair at 6 AM. Give up. Resign. But even that is doing.

Desperate day. Listened to Beethoven’s Sonata 32 and Ninth Symphony. Lockdown gone — so flooded with emotion, almost impossible to play. What IT expects of me — or else! Is unconscionable! “We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire” [T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets].

. . . Let it flow through . . .

Just sit as if listening to music. Open to what is. Expecting nothing. Trying nothing. Just there, aware. Just LIVE as if listening.

Allow the emotion to flow through.

Unbelievable tension last night at piano. No choice but to die — or else — in the face of lockdown tension.

Next three days: Lockdown Hell — will the finite being ever give up?

Relax in to the present, at piano, at everything.

Less tension, closer to the raw FEAR, the last thing I want to know about. And the WHAT that is so terrifying.

Give in to the present moment. Abstain from fighting it. Allow it to be. Allow your mind, by not reacting, to be with IT. Don’t TRY to be “one with IT.” “Playing” the C Major Prelude and Fugue in every moment.

Sitting: opening, being . . . then devastating piano. Fear to the nth degree (but not lockdown). Just want to sleep.

Huge Wringer night. Worst yet. Could hardly move. But sitting, entering into Being. The finite’s resistance diminished.

December 6, 2014. 8 AM. Lockdown tension from piano previous night. Do nothing, nothing, nothing. This has to be learned. Don’t try to relax, don’t try to be aware. Nothing. Just Mind, just Being. All of one’s doing is to avoid suffering. The suffering that is a necessary adjunct to the purification of the finite.

New website disaster — feel threatened to the core — like Beethoven after the second performance of the Ninth Symphony when receipts were pitiful. Just give in. The purpose of life is to suffer.

Wringer night, cannot move, sitting but want to lie down. Couldn’t stand the chair last night. Yesterday lockdown tension. Wringer sitting now — just want to lie down — but more Wringer then?

2:30 AM. Despite and because of devastation of the finite — Wringer day (website, piano) — calm, profound calm, a glimmering of Truth.

Last night realized how far the last page of The Art of the Fugue goes (of the Final Fugue, C. 14). So beyond the finite. Unbearably far. All the finite’s concerns are zero.

2:30 AM that night. Lockdown tension. Not your fault. We are all, as representatives of the IT, doing the best we can. All of us. But perhaps we can help each other do a little bit better. Without trying. There are no separate sentient beings.

8 AM a day later. Sheer lockdown hell. Like first sesshin at Zen Center. 7 PM. Descent into Hell.

Was opening to lockdown last night at 3 AM. Should have kept sitting. Now resistance rising again. Angry, but who/what is angry? The finite being. “We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire . . .” (T.S. Eliot).

To undermine the unfree will it is necessary to experience directly the misery it causes. This IS the necessity of suffering. I don’t like — i.e., I fear — my lockdown. But I need to feel it fully. “Feel our worthlessness.” Piano: be with it totally regardless of how slowly you play or the anxiety that comes up.

The utter necessity of giving in to IT every instant. Not trying. This is Being.

To allow Wringer sittings. This is a challenge. NOT FUN. But otherwise, piano TORTURE. Your choice. Pay the price now . . . or later. I look at my watch. 15 minutes to go. SO LONG. I, the finite, can’t stand it.

New Yorker cartoon: Man to psychiatrist, “I had to stop watching the news because it made my own problems seem insignificant.”

Learning suffering without complaining like Beethoven Quartet 14, first movement. But now the finite is co-opting it. 

January 1, 2015. 3 AM. Wringer sittings now (not nights for a while). Twisting and turning, writhing with the Wringer.

Not Zen Master, but Zen Martyr. Sacrificing myself for a noble cause. 7 AM. Wringer sitting — allowing the knot to untie itself . . . then resistance.

3 AM. Devastating day to the nth. Morning sitting resistance, then piano hell. Then website hell. In a. Even at 7 PM sitting. Then I thought the new computer was bad, nothing happened. I’d forgotten the screen was plugged into the old computer! Ruined Word. Some calm after midnight nap but sitting going back into the devastation that is independent of events.

Tortured at piano into submission, resignation, Being. Because there is no choice. But then the will starts to come back. . . . Furious over various online problems. Totally “irrational” but I must feel threatened to the core. Like Beethoven. Vulnerable. But then calm sitting — except a sense of further devastation underlying that. Don’t want to go there.

Wringer sittings, becoming emotionally raw. Piano more expressive — every note can be alive.

Last few days opening to a vulnerability, awash with emotion. Problems with Anne, but seeing if the emotions can just be there, doing nothing about them. The purpose of the knot is to keep them down. Driving home from Rochester, a sense of Mind and the glowing sky — sun behind the clouds — drawing me in. Raw vulnerable openness necessary for that.

Feel like Rilke’s last poem (when he was dying of cancer) sitting. “Climbing the stake of suffering” is what I’ve been defending against all my life.

No Wringer nights for a while. Just Wringer days, Wringer sitting, etc. Mind in flames but maybe that is the essence of Mind, of the infinite; it must burn off the finite, and purify. It’s only the finite that suffers. Sitting is climbing the stake of suffering.

Was opening in yesterday’s sitting, but today lockdown tension. Opening later after editing The Prelude and Fugue in C Major. Letting go. . . .

Wringer sitting at 2 AM. Big Wringer night. Worst yet. But some calm at 8 AM despite continued Wringer.

Open abdomen surgery, with no anesthesia. Suffer without complaining.

Terror over the hard drive going bad and reauthorizing my music editing program. Just trying to stay with that without reacting. Being devastated.

Opening . . . then lockdown tension at 2 AM. Piano hopeless. My playing “worthless.”

12:30 AM. Nap — descent into hell. 7 PM opening. 2 AM lockdown.

The work is NOT to do anything. Rather to stop, abstain from defending the finite, allowing it to wither away on its own.

February 2, 2015. 8 AM. Lockdown tension. Feel one’s worthlessness. But trying to feel one’s worthlessness is trying NOT to feel it. Trying is looking for a way out. There is no way out.

Continuous lockdown tension. Hell.

There needs to be an opening to, and then a complete outpouring of, the lifelong buried grief — multiple times, like I’ve experienced in a few situations (see Cabeza) [not sure this is true; there may just be a gradual wearing away of the finite being]. This is what the lockdown is defending against. Opening to a tiny bit last night but — before piano — rejecting it. Then lockdown at piano. Allow up the pain, as Bach did while composing the chaconne following his first wife’s death. The pain that Brahms said would’ve driven him mad.

“The wounded surgeon plies the steel” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets). We have to let ourselves be operated upon.

Trying to get out of lockdown.

All my aversion to homework due to the torture of being in the moment — like piano? Others do it because less torture, and the drive for status?

It’s clear that the finite being is opening to the Infinite Spirit — but it’s torture, sheer torture every step of the way. Because I am in the way. T.S. Eliot: “. . . to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” And worse, and worse and worse. He understood, but he himself couldn’t go all the way.

Giving in to the present. On my deathbed.

Lockdown . . . yields to opening . . . yields to lockdown . . . yields to opening. The Art of the Fugue C. 11 always there waiting to wipe out the finite. Opening lets it in . . . in the finite locks down.

Death throes? Descent into hell while sitting possibly? Necessary? [Not sure if I experienced descent into hell while sitting or I am wondering if that may happen.]

No method. Just free won’t. All methods defend against the Infinite C. 11.

Until then: “We finite beings who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit . . .” — the Infinite Spirit is utterly intent and relentless in breaking out of its cage.

March 10, 2015. 7 PM. Descent into hell.

Not effortless, but letting go of effort. Is JUST sitting there — hour after hour, day after day, year after year, decade after decade — observing how one is clinging to that branch above the abyss with white knuckled fingers . . . until, maybe, one finally begins to let go . . . . Is this an effort?

Very depressed, but this is the death throes of the finite being. [Only a decade or four to go.]

Discontinuing, relinquishing all care for the finite, all wanting and fearing. Not because I am good. Not because I am a saint. Because there is no choice. Feels at times like profound depression — which it is to the finite. Into the heart of that depression.

Endless layers to this knot of resistance. So slow — glacial — the process of letting go. Yet there is some opening.

Our internal sea of anxiety makes us create our magnificent sand castle edifice of self. How much energy we invest in that. So soon to be swept away by the tide.

Woody Allen: “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not trying to kill me.” But the fact is almost everyone and everything is trying to kill us all the time. Go outside without bug repellent and the mosquitoes will take all your blood and give you malaria or yellow fever, etc. Don’t protect your money and everyone will try to take it. Online shopping, your wallet, your bank information. And you will die of starvation. Etc., etc. We have to somehow simultaneously keep our guard up . . . and let it down. This is a REAL Zen koan. Who has mastered it?

Devastated, devastated, devastated — what will arise from the ashes of self?

The Great Wall of Self slowly being worn down by the “elements” — sitting and piano and exercise? Still there, but the foundation beginning to crack and crumble?

Embrace the suffering as necessary — the purification of Mind, freeing it from the finite body/mind. Writhing on the cross. Let the process happen. [But “embrace” can be, may be, a trying.]

May 4, 2015. 2 AM. Devastating morning piano torture, then unbelievably depressed. Couldn’t play in evening. Read three or four hours. Now some opening in sitting, but clear how much dying still needs to be done. Will it ever be done? Doesn’t matter. Not for “me,” but for IT. Something inestimably Important. T.S. Eliot: “Wait without hope. . . .”

2:30 AM. Right back where I was at the 10 AM sitting: crucifixion of the finite . . . with more understanding?

Compassion is in the relevant concept of the finite. But to be qualified to say that one must be in different to one’s own sufferings. In Truth there is only the IT “struggling” to know itself, to (the woman of the lightning’s words) “turn.”

Sitting/piano now descent into hell: equivalent to death . . . of the finite. Everything is only for the IT.

The only reason for having emotions — everything covered by wanting/fearing; does not include what I will call “spiritual sensitivities” of the IT — is to be able to override them through free won’t — giving the organism flexibility. Otherwise, being an automaton would be more efficient.

Even naps are now sheer torture. I sleep some then torture. Descent into a black hole: the finite torn apart by tidal forces, into a realm beyond time and space.

All one’s life circling that blackhole, terrified of being drawn in, fighting like crazy not to be — it always drawn, always knowing Truth is There, and There only. Sitting just allows — can allow — “gravity” to take over. This is Beethoven’s “new gravitational force” which he intended to create in his Tenth Symphony. [He was only able to make a few sketches of it before he died.]

Feeling almost through, into the realm of freedom and infinite profundity — only — to find a new layer of self needing crucifixion. A new layer of self that would fight, fight, fight . . . to the death.

May 16, 2015. Descent into hell. 12:20 AM, May 22, 2015. Tossed hither and thither on stormy sea, tormented till one ceases to care — all necessary to have no choice but to surrender to the IT. Drawn — by the black hole — through the eye of the needle. The finite doesn’t fit. In a fury over installing headphone jack in truck (for Anne to hear music better). Like Beethoven, with less than a year to live, upset over a boy’s ball accidentally directed at him. Hated my piano, hated my playing, hated the music. Everything unbearable. 

The knot is just resistance to the black hole, the eye of the needle, the purification that needs to happen, that has to happen.

Furious finishing installation of headphone jack in truck. Nap waking into torture/purification? Torn apart by tidal forces. This is what I resist when fully awake, or react with anger.

Big descent into hell. Everything else is irrelevant. Because there is nothing else.

Sitting is like abstaining from overeating to lose weight. We overeat to cover up unpleasant emotions: to feel “better.” Is it “work” not to overeat? Maybe not, but it is suffering.

Reacting to emotion is the “default” in everyone. But we have the potential through free won’t to make a nonreactive observation of the default. This totally goes against the grain, entailing much “suffering.” But it is possible. Evolution, the finite being, determined through much trial and error the default. But the Infinite Spirit can overrule — by abstaining from— that.

June 4, 2015. 2 AM. Totally enervated — but overall less resistance today.

A few days later: piano infinite resistance. Now total enervation after nap. A few days ago close to “lover and beloved are one.” [Sufi saying.]

Had a day of Beloved and Lover Are One. Now infinite torture. Piano, sleep, piano earlier — not forcing, i.e. not running from, myself to be with the music. Slow.

2 AM: Being, no resistance — then one hour of sleep, then three hours drawn and quartered, ripped apart.

Opening. Being with piano a little. Leading to freedom . . . and torture.

Other innervation after two-hour nap. Still sat with it. Wringer night coming? Yes, medium.

Wringer nap, 7 PM. Devastating piano 2 AM devastating enervation. Then Wringer night. 8 AM devastated.

This infinite lovingness really just non-separation [yes]? Feel so good when we stop our striving.

July 11, 2015. Sometimes – especially at piano — of extreme torture. But more times of Being. Often sitting extra at 2-3 AM.

Not, as Huang Po said, “That which is before you is it. . . .” Rather, That which is YOU is it. Your Being.

Descent into hell 5:30 PM. Allow writhing on the mat.

Last week felt over the hump. Now feel off the deep end. Tortured to death. “. . . The fever sings in mental wires/to be warmed then I must freeze/and quake in frigid purgatorial fires . . .” Four Quartets.

Allowing the pain, the suffering, to flow through, to flow out.

Deeper into Being at 7 PM, but resistance builds. Piano — worked at letting go . . . then sheer utter total hell. Hated piano. Stopped early. 2 AM — sitting total resistance.

Wholeness calling, but it costs not less than everything.

Hellish several days (piano, sitting, rust proofing the truck), then 2 AM — Being. Wholeness (a little).

Mind-boggling computer hell. [With my recording software.] Finite being threatened to the core. Time to let go of it.

One day opening when it seemed sitting — everything — could be “supreme spiritual pleasure” (Julian of Norwich). Then piano hell and torture sitting — torture for three days. Have to remind myself that dying of cancer won’t be fun either. Have to “practice” for it. Be prepared.

Always trying to do something in sitting, e.g., repeating “offering of self.” Just a way of defending the finite. Doing nothing is the real offering of self.

Opening at 7 PM, then total resistance at piano. After nap infinite lethargy. Devastating night.

Profound stillness sitting relating to The Art of the Fugue C. 5, which I’ve been working on, but sitting went then  into deeper levels of resistance. Despite infinite resistance, given no choice but to ever so slowly allow Being NOW.

September 1, 2015. Gradually given no choice but to let go. IT stomping on my fingers— at piano, sitting — to make me let go.

Exercise: give in and suffer, like piano. All activity, and non-activity.

Turn the other cheek, i.e., welcome all the suffering of this world. Invite it home for dinner.

Sitting is impossible unless you can get past the “I.” (Susan Sonntag: “Dying is impossible unless you can get past the I.”)

Lockdown tension — knot in abdomen — from working too hard on The Art of the Fugue C. 6 — driving myself to get it right before the trip.

6:30 PM (after trip to the Wind Rivers): descent into hell.

Hints of Being, but two nights of total torture. Crave rest. I DON’T want to go through this. But IT cares not. Will it ever be over? Resistance solely being beaten out of me. Against my will. The resistance is my will.

Totally disgusted with, hateful of, piano, sitting, everything genuinely spiritual. I ONLY continue because there’s NOTHING else to do.

Suffering without complaining through piano and sitting — then filled with anger after going to bed. Like Schubert’s anger in the B-Flat Sonata, first movement, at the finite being soon to be snuffed out.

Only when the finite beings stops its interminable self-obsession can the Infinite Spirit have space to manifest IT-self.

Welcome suffering, invite it in, embrace it with open arms. Like a miracle medicine for a hitherto incurable disease. Let it do its work.

The only alternative to being reactive, driven blindly by the unfree will — is to allow suffering.

October 1, 2015. Freedom from the finite requires perpetual wide-awake attention — but not trying to be attentive — to allow the letting go to proceed. The finite hates awareness — it wants only to fulfill its emotional drives. [Even to say “it wants” implies a consciousness that is absent: the finite being IS only a blind drive.]

Self-hatred: The finite berating the finite for being unable to fulfill its insatiable, often contradictory, demands.

On our deathbed: The Art of the Fugue C. 7 forcing me into the present.

Sink into the present moment . . . sounds nice but very quickly the finite being will start gasping for air and struggle mightily to get back to the surface. The work is just allowing the finite being to drown in the Infinite Spirit. Very simple. [Doesn’t take more than five or 10 decades.]

Complaining is silly if one understands that one IS the Infinite Spirit — the Infinite Spirit trying to know itself through the finite being. The process is long, hard, and full of suffering — but there’s no one, no thing, to complain about. Complaint implies a responsible party. If no such exists, no cause for complaint. Complaint just gets in the way, and prolongs the suffering of the finite being.

Working at letting go with every note at piano. This is my spiritual “practice” — but resistance builds to the nth over two hours [at this time I was playing two two-hour periods at piano]. No choice but to continue. Can be carried over to everything but the first care must be for the letting go, not the music, or whatever one is doing. Sitting can be just this letting go every breath — not following the breath, not trying in any way, but allowing the finite being to be devastated. Dissolved into the Infinite Spirit.

As long as a finite being is in the way, sitting and piano are torture. Sheer torture. But if not. . . . The finite being cannot travel at light speed. It gains near infinite mass and length.

In an especially open state after two hours in the periodontist’s chair for surgery for implant. And I was resisting, too! Should remember that for sitting. Just had to give myself over to it. [This often is my experience after long dental procedures. Should get more implants!] Listened to the first three movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before surgery. Can what I call “The Heart of Creation” in Cabeza  (The Supernatural Saguaro, chapter) enter the heart of the finite being and help it let go of all its wanting and fearing? If we have that Heart in our hearts, as Julian of Norwich said, nothing can hurt us.

When we approach inner stillness in the moment, then the Refiner’s Fire of the Infinite Spirit penetrates the finite being — which reacts with tension most excruciating. My LSD trips, retreats, sitting, piano. Crucifying the finite being.

Mind on fire like a live wire. Opening Pandora’s box. If I hadn’t closed down at an early age. . . .

When resistance seems infinite . . . being the breathing.

Was feeling almost suicidal — like I didn’t care what happened to me. Cancer: so what. The sooner the better. But, then, an opening. Piano, sitting, not as impossible. Closer to Being.

Breathing in sitting like piano? Letting go, giving in. But maybe had been trying, which led to lockdown.

Up to today really felt I was opening — now lockdown tension. HATE IT! The Infinite Spirit cares not for the sufferings of the finite being. Six billion, six trillion over the ages, tortured to death for the sake of understanding in one. Fine, no problem, no big deal. That’s what we’re all here for, what everything is here for.

November 13, 2015. The PURPOSE of sitting is for the finite being to suffer and die. The PURPOSE of sitting is to suffer. Repeat five million times. Allow the suffering to flow through . . . and purify. Suffer every second, every instant, of the day. Schubert’s Ninth Symphony: He understands the eternal necessity of suffering. His Ninth fourth movement is his Ode to Joy.

If there is any emotion behind a belief — such as anger at perceived “oppression” — this is the reaction of the finite being.

If no time, then: “I AM THAT I AM.” (God to Moses.)

Torture piano and sitting. But during nap — a glowing Being filling the heart. That which is.

Sitting, being with the knot, is unpleasant. Just like mountain climbing.

3 AM. Being with the knot — then Wringer night. 7 AM, same. Thought two days ago I was almost through. Ha!

All you have to do is give yourself, your being, over totally to serving the Infinite Spirit. Then there is no problem. . . . Giving over is a doing of the finite being. Rather: A condition of COMPLETE simplicity . . . costing not less than EVERYTHING.

Incredible WRINGER night. Total torture. Because I ran earlier and didn’t do the 10 minutes of exercise after piano as usual — only did three minutes. Exercise breaks down the tension. “I am that I am.” Whether we like it or not.

2 AM. Immense resistance. Sat in chair leaning back. Able to be with the knot in abdomen more [now I sit in the chair all the time, rarely leaning back, to be with the knot].

Opening to Heart [what I began calling trill in the heart] the last two Wednesdays during my 7 PM nap then closing again by Friday.

But the finite beings sink into the Great Sea of Being. Let Being permeate being. Let IT direct your life. [Cabeza: “Allowing mind to know Mind. Being to permeate being.”]

Allowing the mind to be drawn through the tunnel of death and despair, into the Great Black Hole beyond time — from which there is no return.

December 19, 2015. Devastating night . . . and day. Refiner’s Fire immolating the finite being.

2 AM. Seemingly infinite fear — of fear that would drive most mad or just suicide — coming up. Printer blurry piano hell. Can’t figure out computer stuff.. Mouse in the back wall. No choice but to not react. It’s only in emotion.

Knot tight in abdomen. Had been opening . . . which allowed up the fear.

Mouse (caught) in a bucket. Equivalent to a finite being on a sitting bench.

A little Heart of Creation after a.m. nap. Everything boring but Being.

2 AM. The knot is slowly loosening — if I let it. But it’s torture. Refiner’s Fire purifying the mind of the finite being. The finite being has to die— not fun.

Writhing on the mat as the knot loosens.

The suffering of sitting: Tolstoy’s soldiers: . . . nothing much if you don’t think about it. . . .” Can the mind gently rest there. Let it happen? [But the soldiers were probably divergent by playing cards, alcohol, etc.]

Descent into hell leads to Heart of Creation. Mind clenches up overnight (and during the day): Why morning sitting is essential.

Letting go because too much trouble to keep holding on. Have to die sometime. If the finite being is not nourished EVENTUALLY . . . it will give up the ghost. [Theoretically, that is.]

But . . . the finite being is still writhing in its death throes.

The gut clenching is so entrenched, so automatic.