The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Basic Buddhism

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India, Long Ago: Gautama Siddhartha sat beneath the Bo tree, and stubbornly refused to rise until he’d reached enlightenment. (He’d tried many other things in that past.) One day, he reached enlightenment.

The enlightenment he attained permitted him to express the basic problem of living–which is how a person can gain freedom from suffering–and his realization is summarized in four points, which are called “The Four Noble Truths” …

  1.  Our experience of living often consists of suffering. For example, we experience suffering from losses, illness, hunger, and death. The suffering comes from our insistent mental reaction against the “bad” thing. That is, we insistently desire to have a thing that was lost, and so we experience suffering. (As an example, you throw away a piece of paper and it is lost but you do not suffer. But you lose the deed to your home and you insistently desire that the situation be different, and you suffer. But if you give away the deed to your home to your child, then you do not suffer.)
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  2.  The suffering comes from the “grasping desire” for the thing lost. It is demanding that “what is” be different, and then suffering because it is not different.
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  3.  And the answer? To eliminate your suffering, eliminate the grasping desire.
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  4.  To eliminate the grasping desire, follow eight important rules. In these rules (called the Eight-fold Path) are proscriptions against the things that often result in unhappiness (such as killing other folks), and prescriptions to engage in practices such as meditation, to learn to still the mind (and thus still grasping desire).

Want to Stop Suffering? Here’s How …

What this means in more modern language is that suffering comes from RESISTANCE to what is. For example, mentally *grasping* after something that you do not have right now. Or mentally *resisting* something that you don’t like. When you compulsively resist, you create–in your mind and in your experience of life–the thing we call suffering.

If you can relearn the mental habit of resisting what is, grasping after what you don’t have, and resisting things you dislike … the suffering in your life and mind fades away. Often immediately.

And remember, those troublesome mental habits are only habits, and habits can be changed. Presuming that (a) you *want* to change the habit, and (b) you’re willing to put in a little bit of practice.

Now, in truth, sometimes you can simply *decide* to let go and cease resistance.

But for most of us, years or decades of bad habits require us to put in a little effort, to *practice* the new way.

Even Shorter:

Want to stop suffering? If yes, then (a) adopt the basis (grasping causes suffering) as a working theory, (b) make an ongoing attempt to increase your skill at “letting go,” and (c) it helps if you learn how to allow your mind to go still, which helps a lot, and which we usually call “meditation.” The Buddhists describe your new understanding and your attempt at relearning as having “Right Mindfulness,” and it’s one item in the Eightfold Path mentioned above.

If you understand the cause and the cure (given here) … if you will attempt to change the grasping … then your suffering will fade away.

And it feels really, really good.

Get it? (Got it.) Good!

 

 

This Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time

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Changing the Time of Day?Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean’s apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, complete with over-sized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

Paul the Bellman was a portly fellow, balding and gabby. He made big tips because he knew about health food and horoscopes. This was years before such things were popular. His most popular health food remedy was honey and vinegar; he’d recommend it for almost anything.

On the way to the elevators with the guests, he’d ask about their birth-date and provide predictions and prescriptions all the way to the room. Then I suppose it just seemed wrong, to the guest, to tip miserly to the fellow who’d taken such an interest in their fortunes and their health.

Paul the Bellman was very opinionated, and also had an annoying habit of slapping his hand down on the bellman’s marble-topped desk when he was about to speak. This made a loud pop. I think it was his version of banging the Judge’s gavel before pronouncing sentence.

So, while we were all discussing this radical new change, Daylight Savings Time, and how we would set our clocks before we went to bed, Paul returned to the bell desk.

Slap! went his open palm on the marble desk. “Well,” he said, “I know what I’m going to do.” We all stopped talking. He continued. “I’m going to set my clock for one a.m., and then I’m going to wake up, and set it ahead to two a.m.”

We all stared in incomprehension. “Why, Paul?” I asked.

“That way,” he crowed, “I won’t lose an hour’s sleep!”

I grinned. “But Paul,” I said, “If you’re awake when you move it forward, won’t you lose an hour’s wake?”

He pondered this. “Naw,” he said, “You can’t lose an hour’s wake.” We all nodded.

Slap! went his palm on the desk. He scowled. “But those guys better watch out,” he said.

We looked at each other. He went on.

“Because when they’re changing the time, they’re messing with the sun,” he said. “And they’d better not go messing with the sun!”

Thus came Daylight Savings Time to Texas.

The Apartment From Hell

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North Beach, San Francisco, 1974: I’d found this neato apartment and thought myself lucky. The I Ching had said “Supreme Success!”

Little did I know how much the Chinese Gods of Divination love a good joke.

It was a success, for there I found Rosie the Cat, and took her away and lived happily ever after. Other than that, it was a disaster so stupid you can’t help but laugh.

In North Beach, on the corner of Grant and Green, in the picture you see a bar, but back then it was a Hawaiian Bar, and just above that Hawaiian Bar, behind the large bay window you see on the right, along with mice and cockroaches and loud Hawaiian music on the jukebox of the bar downstairs, that’s where I lived.

Living Over a Hawaiian Bar

Strange and bizarre … all night long, loud lyrics like: “Hooka lakka shooka lakka, wikki wikky ogaloo!” Over and over again. The guys downstairs had the consolation of alcohol to take the edge off these songs; I had nothing.

However, I worked an odd shift at the Westbury Hotel at this time, from seven in the evening until three am. This saved me from several hours of Shooka Lakka Hooka Lakka, for which I was grateful.

Strange Chinese Vegetables!

It was also interesting, leaving work at three in the morning. The busses run infrequently that late, and taxis were expensive, so I’d walk through the Stockton Street tunnel and through a deserted Chinatown at three. All the shop’s trashcans pungent with strange chinese vegetables and worse, but these barricades didn’t stop me.

Home at Last, at 3 a.m.

At home at last. But two doors up at Wumpers Bar, they had after-hours entertainment with Perry and the Pumpers. I’ll give the Pumpers one thing: they were plenty energetic. So, to the strains of pumping rock and roll, it was time to hit the hay.

The bars and shops on Grant have lots of garbage, and trashcans filled with empty bottles. So much that the trash companies come every night, sometimes three times during the night. The growling trucks and the crashing din of the bottles leant an exotic ambiance to the late hours on North Beach.

Luckily, the mornings are pretty quiet

Except one day, I’m awakened by a loud, repeating banging. A voice is chanting “Goddamned Phonebooth! Goddamned Phonebooth! Goddamned Phonebooth!”

Rising to peer blearily from my window at the sunny morning, below my window, a stringy unkempt fellow is kicking the back wall of the phonebooth below. A burly fellow across the street calls out “Hey!”, meaning Stop, or maybe What the hell are you doing?

Stringy guy sticks his head outside the phonebooth door, and screams, “It took my dime!” The guy across the street, a big guy, makes a fist and yells to knock it off. Stringy guy, glaring, makes off down the street.

I go back to bed.

And then …

I’m awakened by a loud, repeated banging. A voice is chanting. I rise and peer from the window. Stringy is back.

Now, the mailbox has been tipped over and lies flat on the sidewalk. Stringy guy is kicking the mailbox over and over again.

“Goddamned Mailbox!” he screams, “Goddamned Mailbox! Goddamned Mailbox! Goddamned Mailbox!”

Ah, life in North Beach.

 

At 3304 Geary Boulevard

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San Francisco, 1980: We’d outgrown my studio apartment on Third Avenue. Network Answering Service, the operators who answered the phones, the Thumbtack Bugle, plus the bookkeeper, and me. Time to move.

I searched Arguello. I searched Clement, and Balboa. I searched California Street. I found a second-story flat on Geary Boulevard, on the corner of Parker across from the Post Office. I walked the wooden floors in the empty rooms; it was a vast space, cheery with sunlight, and smelling of new varnish.

On the street below, the phone company was digging up the concrete in the middle of the street, so they could run our phonelines. I watched through the sunny windows. Never before had anybody dug up a street for me. This must be the big time!

For three weeks straight, I built shelving and set up our new workspace. Rosie the Cat kept me company. I got new lamps and large plants.

London, Paris, Tokyo.

In the foyer at the top of the stairs, I installed four KitKat clocks, with wagging eyes and tails. On the wall, all in a row, I had three black ones, with signs saying London, Paris, Tokyo. Then a pink one with rhinestones labeled San Francisco. Oh, we had arrived.

As it turned out, the foyer lacked light for the plants, and the operators wore out my rugs. The KitKat clocks gave out over time, and heating was a problem, as the thermostat was in one room and the heater in another; adjustment was, to say the least, tricky. Operators solved it by running the heater at full blast, while opening windows to let in the cool air. In this way they made themselves comfortable.

I explained that we would not be able to heat up Geary Boulevard. This made no impression.

I tore up some twenty dollar bills and tossed the pieces out the window, just as an example. That made an impression, of a sort, but little difference.

The cats, Rosie and Cosmo, liked the new digs.Then operator Anita found Morgan, just a tiny kitten abandoned in a paper bag, to join our crew. At first I lived in the large, dark-paneled room at the rear. There it was that I asked Lori to marry me. She said yes, we got married, we moved to an apartment at the corner of Carl and Cole streets.

I set up a development lab, and began designing the Line Seizer, an electronic device that talked with the telephone company’s central office as they sent calls to our answering service, identifying for our operators which client’s phone was ringing in to us. I took to wearing overalls like I’d seen real computer guys do.

There were excitements and triumphs, troubles and despairs, dramas and traumas. The actors came and went. Along the way, Lori and I estranged ourselves, and she ran the answering service while I took a job which carried me to Newport Beach, then Texas, then back to San Francisco, where we then sold the answering service. A manager was found for the voicemail business, I became a private investigator. Rooms were rented out.

One day, a notice from the city. Zoning problem. Time to move.

On the last day, walking around the wooden floors in empty rooms, I remembered that first day so many years earlier. The empty rooms now seemed worn and friendly. We’d traveled together; we hated to part.

Focus and Consciousness and the ‘Unconscious’ Mind

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[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, March 28, 2010]

In another article (‘What is the Unconscious Mind?‘), I described how the so-called Unconscious Mind consists entirely of things learned by habit or happenstance, and which then sunk below what we call consciousness, so as to operate automatically to promote our survival.

There are many things which our culture believes are automatic and unknowing processes — such as regulating our blood pressure, remembering to breathe, regulating the salinity of our blood and the acidity of our stomach acid — and that these processes are built into the body, are automatic, and cannot be controlled.

Yet we know by observation that there are yogis who have in fact taken control of many of these processes, and so we know it can be done. But why don’t you and me have awareness of these things?

[Read more…]

How to Gain More Power in this World

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[reprinted from Shyguy’s How To Get A Girlfriend Blog, March 28, 2009]

All too often, in our lives we find ourselves being manipulated or influenced by other men, by women, and sometimes even by the damned television.

Of course, as a kid against a schoolyard bully, perhaps the only options are the Charles Atlas course, karate classes, or a tactful withdrawal. But in later life usually we’re not influenced by physical threat.

HOW DO ‘THEY’ MANIPULATE US?

It’s done with worths, with images, and with social pressure.

If you’re being influenced this way … what that tells you is that you DO NOT actually understand how it’s happening. Oh, you may have theories and opinions about those bad people.

But if you’re still being manipulated, either “having” to go along, or even resisting but feeling upset or angry about it .. then you DO NOT fully understand how it works.

But here’s how to change that …

[Read more…]

Mental Health Made Easy

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[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, August 17, 2008]

What is it about taking a shower that causes new ideas to pop into your head?

Is it the invigorating ions that are caused by splitting water droplets?

Or is it a simple as Murphy’s law triggered because you will never have pencil and paper in the shower?

I don’t know the answer to this time-proven rule, but as of this morning’s shower, I do know a super-simple way to look at mental health, a simple way to be happier and more productive.

It’s simply this —

[Read more…]

How to Talk with your Unconscious Mind

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[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, May 1, 2007]

The ‘Non-Conscious’ mind can regulate your body in a thousand ways (all normally below your consciousness), and the ‘Non-Conscious’ mind can automatically serve up learned actions like a tennis-serve or automatically serve up your opinion of the President or automatically make you feel anxious on a date. Some of this is swell, and some of this is occasionally awful, but the Non-Conscious mind is looking out for you as best it can, and everything it does is automatic.

Think of the President. There’s your opinion … automatically.

Go out on a date. There’s your usual feeling … automatically.

Decide to tie your shoe. There go your hands … automatically tying your shoe.

But what if you’d like to do something … different … for a change?

[Read more…]

 
 

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