PSYCHOLOGICAL MEDITATIONS

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SUMMER 2001

Flowers dancing in the light of blueberry moonlight revolving around the mind of an old sage who just appeared on the horizon of unconscious thought as it bubbled up in the brain devoid of any other thoughts, so there we were, embraced again, bodies dancing in sex yet again, liberated from our minds, we look at the world and all is not the same nor different anymore, it is in a different place but still only you and me know that it is what it was.

The language enveloped in words, as it flows inseparably from anything else and I remember tracks of a tram in an old German town where she, my grandma, took me to visit downtown, yet there was magic in sparks flowing in cascades with each old train taking a turn on this narrow street of the German town, the sky was blue, no, it was black, with sot from coal mines, people's faces, sculptured in broad deep cuts from which nothing but soul lurked, people's faces were soul itself, as were their hands, strong, dirtied but clean, smudged with coal, tired and strong, branches of old tree, people were silent, words were superfluous, words took you away from yourself and themselves, took you in the open, unknown and dangerous, dangerous and forbidden, the words which came from elsewhere, not mine, not yours, unspoken, they came from the past or maybe from different countries that invaded this one, so people were already tired, tired of not having their lives, or lives being overtaken by others, pummeled into obedience by a victorious culture, forced to slave labor, and now only shame and wrath still flew in their veins as they all were returning home on the old tram as it weaved its way through yet another turn of a small street in the German town my grandma took me to when I was a child.

Karma, Freedom, Liberation & Free Will

Karma constructs Reality out of formless emptiness. The Universe and the Mind mutually reveal each other. Individual selves appear. Once there is a self there is the self’s free will, freedom to choose, to self-determine. The self needs external freedom to exercise its free will. It needs a free society, a society of individuals free to exercise their free wills.

Yet in Buddhism we seek liberation from the confines of the self, from the shackles of the “I” or “Me”. Personal freedom is obviously different from personal liberation. Freedom is about a society of free individuals. Liberation is about transcending the self. There is no “picking and choosing” in liberation, even if we still choose and pick in freely.

There has to be a self to exercise one’s free will. Yet a self manifests the absence of liberation. One is back in shackles of the “I”, but one is free to exercise one’s free will. This going back and forth between liberation and freedom continues endlessly, moment after moment.

Freedom of individual free will is necessary to initiate a search for personal liberation, yet, if not transcended, it becomes a hindrance

Is it freedom to exercise one’s free will, or is it freedom FROM “me”, from the "self", the "I" which exercise free will?

What is TRUE freedom that goes BEYOND being a free individual, in a free society, free to exercise one's “selfish” free will? What is that true freedom that goes BEYOND the "I" and the "Me"? Isn't it liberation from and transcendence of the "self" and its "free will"?

Maybe there is no free will in liberation? Or maybe true liberation lies beyond the question of free will and personal freedom?

But just knowing it does not liberate. It is not knowing it that is a mark of true liberation .

Re-visiting Eastern Europe

It was a tortured land, a land where the Germans, the Poles and the Russians slaughtered themselves for centuries, killing millions, the land where the Christians fought the Moslems, the land of Jews and the Holocaust, the land of kings and intrigues, of myths, the Central Europe before the Serbs, the land of the tribal wars, the land of beer and sauerkraut, blintzes and knish, the land of German and Polish sausages, of Yiddish, of Freud, of confusing, polyglot, multinational, fragmented, postmodern before modern, where the communists rewrote the truth for over 50 years, the land of Orwell, of the Big Brother, of lies and deceptions, unspeakable suffering and cruelty, the land where he was, not far from Berlin, yet not in Germany, in the town of Grun Berg, built by the Germans but then returned to Poland, a part of the Ziemie Odzyskane, the Recaptured Land.

Two young parents, mother from a radically poor Ukrainian family with no past, or whatever past there was it was dark, diseased, violent, soaked in alcohol, ignorance, crashed close to the ground, shoveled into squalor of Lvov’s poorest neighborhood, often without enough food, most of the time just worst off that others, there were talks on that side of his family of some tragic illness claiming children, or maybe it was typhus, he was told that Grandma locked herself in a basement to die alone but God did not let her, and she came out weeks later, weak but cured, the same body which then lived to be almost a hundred. Father was the only child of a well off blue collar Silesian family, industrious, proud, principled, even if Grandpa cheated and drank too much, they were dignified, smoked French cigars, and always had more money than others around them, which in a relative way as everything else, made them be, or maybe just made them feel better than their neighbors, so the father carried a sense of unlimited possibility, entrepreneurial zeal, which later, killed him in his best years.

And the land was wild, abundant, covered with lakes and forests, wilderness, clear water, unspoiled, even if the war just rolled over, leaving German and Russian trenches everywhere, they would find ammunition in the nearby forests where they played, sometimes little kids were blown up, he heard but never saw, but there were these very dark bunkers, dug deep, deep into the ground, often several stories deep, with half flooded elevator shafts leading to some mysterious darkness of the war ‘s arsenal, nobody ever knew what was in those bunkers, they did have some important strategic role because there were arranged along canals and lakes, meant to be used to flood the entire area as the Soviets approached, and maybe they did, or maybe there was not enough time, and they had to run, run from the Red Army, so cruel, so merciless, that the Germans just ran West to surrender to the Allies. And there were post-German houses, the houses slowly inhabited by new settlers, arriving shyly, in disbelief that all that was left behind, completely empty furnished mansions, factories stopped in half production, silverware tossed in panic, the end of war happened so quickly there was no time to hide, no time to carry things, it was all about saving lives, so the newcomers just trickled in, the communist government encouraged it, they needed new people to inhabit the land, to be, there, to work, to raise children and his was one of those families that moved there.