“Make each day a work of art; make a work of art of time.” McCrea Imbrie spoke those words to me quite casually one day, as we wrestled together, collaborating word by word, phrase by phrase, thought by thought, on our first play together, SOMEONE'S COMIN' HUNGRY, which was produced a year later Off-Broadway.
To discover works of art within ourselves, in words or any medium, and in the reconstruction of my own is-ness, often requires opening myself up to long-buried desires.
Many of us were taught as kids, subtly or violently, to grab desire by the throat and choke it to death, whether it was a playful desire to make a design in a plate of mashed potatoes, or a serious desire to play soldier with a dead branch as a machine-gun, killing the enemy by the dozens, or maybe just a universal primate desire to cling to daddy long after Daddy thinks clinging is appropriate.
I have been learning again and again, for decades, to throw my arms around my desires like grabbing a life-raft in the middle of a raging sea, and when the storm subsides to study how desires may lead me to new sources of fulfillment, so long as I am certain they won’t lead me to hurting myself and others.
Experimenting with Doing--especially when it might be of benefit to others and myself-- is never wasted, because it generates electricity that can light up my life and the lives of those I love.
The English poet William Blake once wrote, “Gratitude is heaven.” That has to be the definition of heaven that delights me more than any other, because the gratitude that sometimes surges through my body in meditation, or at a moment of wordsmithing a movie script or play or poem, is so overwhelmingly and tearfully joyful.
Is there any gratitude greater than a new way to move the human body, discovered by a choreographer—or a line of dialogue that leaps with excitement—or a violently new and thrilling concatenation of musical notes, or a moment of deep, genuine caring that helps another being heal herself.
Teachers, friends and relatives have often, without meanness, but ignorantly, led us to curb our imaginations and our ability to take the artistic and relational detours that grow beauty from our deepest desire. So often it seems that the things that call to our universal human creativity lie beyond our grasp. How can we safely coordinate the wildness of creativity with a practical attitude with practical benefits, and thereby achieve a depth of heavenly gratitude beyond what we thought possible?
You might be 14 or 40 or 80 and have given up your dreams of making movies or dancing or guiding people on horseback up into the Sierra Mountains. Impractical? Impossible? Make the impossible possible! Make the impassible passible!
I recently began a fourth new filmscript, and the title alone gave me a rich burst of enthusiasm: DREAM A NEW YESTERDAY. Writing four new movie scriptspiece at the same time? Will I live to write them? Does it matter? Many people diagnostically inclined might think I am acting out a longstanding A.D.H.D mental illness, working on four new filmscripts, plus two new musical dramas, and occasional poems. Perhaps I am, but I have managed to complete many plays, movie scripts, and poems, and I have managed, with the scrumptious support of my Willowbird Happycake Kissdish wife, to reach our fiftieth year of passionate, joyful wildness together, projects which have given me and us the crazy wisdom of creating that contributes boons of love energy in all our relationships.
Your inner voice can override your inner censor, unearth hidden dreams. Expressing a want actually releases it, and hidden yearnings often give voice to long-lost enthusiasms. Sometimes what releases the joy of art might be. like Matisse, working on 17 paintings in various stages; hopefully he found joy in bringing each of them to completion.
Meditate on your memories, cultivating loveliness, rejoice in existence, invite nature and all your loved ones alive or dead into a pocketful of gratitude in the backyard of your mind, a refuge in the precincts of your consciousness.
Let yourself feel the presence of every flower, every creature you ever loved, every rainbow that ever jumped your soul, the delicious whiteness of ice cream sundae clouds creeping over a hill, the stillness of green leaves growing upon a lakeside sweetgum tree and shimmering mirrored in the water, the world, your body, your mind, totally choiceless, panoramic awareness, including every kiss, every hug, every pair of eyes you have looked into with a smile, no constraints of time and space, with countless chances to celebrate yourself as one in the Oneness of the All Without End.
MONDAY NIGHT MEDITATION WITH NEIL SELDEN 6/14/10: THE GREATNESS IN OTHERS
In my work and in my life, I try to be aware always of the three poisons—greed, ill will, delusion—because any one of the poisons can make it impossible to recognize and realize and use our greatness to create loving kindness and compassion and joy in our art and in our relationships..
Perhaps the most powerful antidote to the three poisons is what the buddha called "loving the world as a mother loves her only child."
Years ago, I worked as a clinician therapist with a charming, but extremely paranoid, substance-abusing, lawbreaking and possibly dangerous individual who had the walls of his apartment lined with empty fishtanks, and who purchased every book he could find about Buddhism, but never read any of his collection. One afternoon, as I was counseling him, he dropped a book into my lap and insisted I look into it, a book he'd never read. Cracking open the pages of the book, my eyes lit upon The Eight Verses of Thought Training, a six or seven hundred years old Buddhist text. The Eight Verses floored me--within a few weeks I had memorized and incorporated them into my daily practice. This is the fourth verse: “Whenever I meet a person of bad nature, who is overwhelmed with negative energy and intense suffering, I will hold such a rare one dear, as if I had found a precious treasure.”
The greatness I had not seen before in that charming, paranoid, possibly dangerous individual had led him to collect books that he never opened, yet proudly showed to many people; one of those books changed my life, and through me, hopefully, the lives of others.
Loving those I find easy to love is a joy, and I learn from it, but learning to love those people most difficult for me to love, the ones I find seemingly impossible to love, has taught me infinitely more about my ability to dive deeper and deeper into the limitless love for myself and all beings that exists within me, a greatness of love that I now believe to exist within all beings.
MONDAY NIGHT MEDITATION WITH NEIL 5/24/10 by Neil Selden
Meditative Nurture for the Heart
Here's a bit of possible meditative nurture for the heart, which, as we learn so slowly, must break and break and break (could be the broken heart of a one year old when Mom takes five minutes to respond to the child's cry of hunger or loneliness) before the limitless love for self and others hidden deep with every heart can pour freely forth.
I don't know if I don't want to die,
I don't know if I do,
How swell to know I do not know,
and go on loving you.
Every morning for many years I have practiced visualizing my own death, always hoping to die in a way that would be a gift to other people. I was inspired by the words spoken to my son Michael by Kim, my wife's half-sister, in her 80's, when she chose to have no medical intervention, and to die at home. He was about twenty, living with Dearing, his wife-to-be (they now have a 17 year-old daughter and a nine year old daughter, both of them strong and delightful). Michael lay his head on Kim's lap and wept, and she tenderly stroked his head, and when he lifted up his eyes to her, she said sweetly, "Michael, I love your beard, it is just right for your face, but if Dearing asks you to shave it off, you will won't you." She paused, then went on, "Give Dearing a kiss for me. You will know how to give it, and she will know how to receive it."
When I visualize my own death, as part of my morning meditation practices, I see myself smiling the fake yoga smile that inevitably, in my experience, jumps my whole body into a genuine, liberating joy. I then see and hear myself dancing inside as I die, and laughing and singing, and I may or may not laugh and sing-- simultaneously-- out loud. (I began laughing artificially and regularly, as a meditation, when my beloved brother-in-law/play collaborator McCrea Imbrie made me promise to laugh every morning by the clock for five minutes, because I was struggling with an unusually persistent depression)
After laughing, I then say "Hello!" to the Love that is my God, and say whatever else arises to say that is self-less. The buddha made it clear that when we speak and act with a self-less thought, joy follows us, as a shadow that never leaves. Of course, joy being a shadow, we have to practice looking behind us to see and feel it.
After speaking to Love, I visualize kissing the feet of whatever persons come into my consciousness, usually my wife Lee first, then my son Michael and his wife Dearing, I kiss their feet with gratitude that we are one in the Oneness, I kiss the top of their heads with love, I lay my palms on their heads and bless them, and I plant a tender healing kiss on their foreheads.
My next enjoyment is to meditate, paying attention to the root of my nose, the so-called third eye, and reciting my mantra, Radhaswami Thank You God, which combines the mantra I learned from Thakur, a Hindu existentialist, via his disciple Ray Hauserman, combined with the sacred phrase my adored sister-in-law Dawn had been saying since she was eight or ten until she died in her eighties.
Following the third eye meditation, I meditate by focusing on my outbreath, as I was persuaded to do by my son Michael, who had been ordained as a buddhist monk, but now considers himself no longer a monk, but a zen practitioner.
After that meditation, I meditate by repeating any one of a number of sacred writings over and over, such as the St. Francis prayer or the Shantideva poem that includes "it is the treasure that lifts us above poverty into the wealth of giving to life...the butter made from the milk of kindness by churning it with the dharma...it is a feast of joy to which all are invited."
My final meditation practise is 'choiceless awareness of body, mind and world', taught by Krishnamurti-- simply watching as a fascinated and often delighted spectator, with panoramic awareness, the most prominent perceptions that appear and disappear in my consciousness.
To top it all off, I breathe in love and breathe out love, I speak silent aspirations for the happiness of all beings, I think of all the ordinary and amazing teachers who loved me, and any of their teachings that may come to mind, such as this by Bob Imbrie: "Make each day a work of art, make a work of art of time... Total acceptance of reality makes life a beautiful fairy-tale...Cherish the wild inside you, let the grass grow through you." And other powerhouse words of Jesus, Thakur, the Baal Shem Tov.
If you wonder where I find the time for all these practices, you are in good company, because I also am amazed that somehow I manage to wander among them every day, often just for a minute or two, but because the universe (and every particle of my being) is probably a hologram, every tiny splinter contains the Oneness of the Without End.
INTRO TO MINDFULNESS-BASED, ASSISTED, SELF STUDY by Neil Selden 5/6/10
“To study the Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” Dogen, zen teacher, 13th Century.
I have known people who lived or are living a life of loving-kindness, compassion, justice, joy and peace—what I consider the molecular structure of happiness-- and have not ever practiced meditation.
Some folks I know and admire have found that meditating put them in touch with too much fear and pain. My wife Lee experienced exactly that, when she began to practice meditation forty years ago, during our sojourn on a Greek island. She did however, much later, find her way into a mantra meditation she finds rewarding. I respect anyone’s decision to forego meditation, temporarily or permanently.
Meditation is clearly not the only way to achieve inner happiness. As a matter of fact, some meditation teachers have said that most mothers do not have to practice meditation, because being a mother IS a meditation. Many mothers, when I tell them that, immediately nod their head in approval.
Meditation may be inappropriate for some people, but for those of us who stick with it in a yogic way (when a few minutes or more of meditation feel good, but then become in any way painful, you stop) meditation can become a joyful liberation from the stressful and seemingly chaotic mind-body-world river of mental images, memories, mental constructions, emotions, physical sensations and societal/earthly happenings. Meditation can become a clear way to inner peace.
In The Newness: a poem by Neil Selden 4/10
Breathing, breathing, breathing,
Leaping, whirling, celebrating
` The happiest hopelessness of hope,
When tears are the rewards of joy,
And tears are the rewards of sorrow.
TWO POEMS BY NEIL SELDEN- 4/10
May we grow in knowing that we are
No more no less than all the kindness
In the Oneness in each other.
May we come to know that we are always home
In every kindness that we yearn to bestow
But cannot find the time to consecrate
For those we love, and we are also home
In every kindness that we can.
And may the pain of longing
For the nearness of the ones we love
And longing for the ones we do not know we love—may such a pain become,
In grass and flowers of my heart,
The dewdrops of glistening gratitude.
FOCUSING
I woke this morning scared,
And often do, and said to fear
As to a friend,“Hello!”
As to a friend, I said to fear,
“I know you are a a message
From the wisdom of my body”
“and can you tell me something
that will help me live my life?”
I waited, listened, fear replied,
“I’m only a feeling, and feelings
come and go.” And somehow
gratitude arrived.
Another morning I awoke
In great despair, and said “Hello!”
As to a friend, I spoke to where
The feeling occupied my gut,
I listened, silent, patient, my despair
Then said, “Your mother loves you,”
And I sobbed myself into a joy.
VISUALIZING LOVE by Neil Selden 4/10
Talk about the power of visualization!
Yearning for the warming and healing presence of all the darlings we know and love, and all the darlings we may never know but wish to love, and so grateful for the yearning...
Here's a recent emanation from my ruminations about how I would do my days if I am ever completely unwanted, homeless, and using my years of so-called spiritual practice to find loving kindness, compassion, joy and peace, as I sit with my meager belongings in a small pack or bag, in some park or train station, do all my meditations, smiling, laughing and singing and dancing inside, sending visualized hugs and kisses and blessings and thanksgiving to everyone I have every known and loved, and those I may never know, but wish to love-- and creating, creating, creating (my beloved collaborator/role model/brother-in-law Bob Imbrie taught me that our mission is to love and create-- ergo, in the park, on a wooden bench, I ask myself, what is the first word of a new poem? Any word may do... 'Beginning' is the word that comes to me, and the rest follows effortlessly:
Beginning nothing,
Every breath a victory.
1 comments:
Neil---you are just the best!
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