The Interior Life and It's Limits

Yesterday I was riding the bus to work and I noticed a woman get on, who I know suffers from some sort of psychiatric disorder. She is an older woman who once taught at the university and is of that generation of academic women who at the same time appear very prim and proper in a 1950s sort of way, yet who hold quite radical feminist notions.

As we rode down the road, I could see that she was getting slightly more agitated and eventually, she stood up and curtsied.  She sat down again for a few moments, then she eventually got up and curtsied again. Again, a shorter wait, and she curtsied again.  Eventually she could no longer sit down and got off at the next stop---even though I saw her get a transfer and suspect she had intended to remain on the bus until my destination, where other buses also stop and transfers take place.

What struck me at the time, was that I was in the midst of a bit of a "mind storm" myself in that I had some ideas rattling around in my brain that I simply couldn't stop saying over and over again to myself.  At this time, they were "I wish my wife lived with me" and "I wish my wife wasn't sick."  (She is currently in the midst of a psychotic episode, which happens about once a year or so and she lives a thousand miles away to take care of her invalid mother.)

Mystics talk about something called "the interior life", which is a life spent thinking about and contemplating the nature of human consciousness.  Meditation, "Holding onto the One", "Sitting and Forgetting", Internal Alchemy, etc, are all things that someone does who spends her time thinking about herself and the universe.  One of the things that happens when you do this, however, is that you find that within your mind there are voices and thoughts that need to be controlled or else they will eat you alive.

I suspect that the woman on the bus is someone who periodically loses her battles and that is why she stands up and curtsies.  (I wonder if this was something that she had pounded into her head when she was a little girl and it has become the symbol of her upper class background that fights against her radical feminism---making her consciousness a permanent battleground?  Stupid speculation with too little information, but that is the permanent battleground in my mind!)

A large part of my spiritual practice consists of learning how to control my consciousness.  For example, I will become more and more agitated if I do not work at calming it down on a regular basis.  I've learned, for example, that I need to read, write and do taijiquan at least a little most days or else I become progressively more "scattered" and drained of energy.  I don't know if the process was left long enough I might end up like the woman on the bus, but I fear that it might be a possibility.  I do know that if I stop the taijiquan my body starts to fall apart, though.  I get pain in my feet, knees, and shoulders.  And I start to get migraine headaches.

Last Sunday I had some friends together to try to form an organization to create a co-op retirement community.  Most of us are people who have just finished dealing with the deaths of our parents and don't have any children of our own.  This experience has "riveted out attention" to the question of what we are going to do when we are no longer able to live totally independent lives but have no children to help out. The result was a meeting where we all admitted that we should probably do something and agreed to work together to see if there is something that we can do.

The meeting went well, but I couldn't help noticing something about myself that I found annoying.  I am totally useless at small talk.  I ramble.  I fixate on my own personal problems (not everyone wants to hear about my tendonitis or the fact that my wife is sick) and tell "amusing anecdotes" that are in terrible taste.  The problem is that when we indulge in small talk the flow has to come naturally or else it doesn't come at all.  When I was younger, I didn't even try.  In social settings I would just head off to the bar, get hammered and leave early.  Luckily, while small talk is important, if you are someone who actually has other worthwhile features, good people will eventually realize that you are a bit of a "diamond in the rough" and cut you slack---like my friends at this meeting.  But I still gross myself out with my terrible inability to do the "chit chat" thing.

Last Saturday I went to a party that the city held for an old friend of mine, who has been mayor for many years and recently lost an election and is finally back in private life.  It was odd hearing her talked about by "important" people (a Chief of Police mc'd the event), but one thing was kinda funny.  A Liberal Party apparatchik talked about meeting this friend of mine and realizing that she is basically a shy person (or at least was when she started out.)  The speaker said how surprised she was by this, as most politicians aren't shy people.

This is the great thing about her worship.  She has had an interior life of some great value.  She is very smart, and, she really understands a lot of things that I suspect she will never tell most of the "important" folks she met.  That is a form of discipline I can never begin to understand.  But it is something that I can respect.  Luckily, I suspect that she understands the road I have followed in life has taken me in a different, but equally valuable direction.  The solitude that I follow allows me to work out new thoughts to their ultimate direction.  It also allows me to be frank and honest about things in a way that no politician could ever do.  (Writing a blog post like this one would be political suicide.)  It is this mutual respect that has allowed us to be friends over the years, and I treasure it.

The lives we lead have enormous impact on the way our minds work.  So choose wisely!

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One last point, only somewhat related to the above.  In comments to a past post a commentator said that he was surprised that a Blog titled "Diary of a Daoist Hermit" would be written by someone who isn't a "hermit" or even a "Daoist".  I think I have covered these issues in the past, but my wife suggested that I should explain them again.  She didn't understand the terms either until I explained them.

First of all, a "hermit" is not the same thing as a "recluse".  A recluse is someone who has decided to separate themselves from human society.  A hermit, on the other hand, is someone who has isolated himself from an ecclesiastic organization.  Monks are part of a community.  Priests are part of a church.  But a hermit is someone who has to find a way of supporting himself and gets to make his own decisions about his faith.  You will not find this definition in secular dictionaries, but they usually have only the vaguest understanding of spiritual matters.  And religious texts like the Catholic Encyclopedia always twist definitions in a way to exclude anything that might undermine orthodoxy.  But this definition is the way it was explained to me by a Catholic hermit that I met with for years.  Using this specific, technical definition, I am a hermit because I have severed my ties with orthodox religious Daoism.

Secondly, what is or isn't "Daoism" has consumed a great many academic pages, and I am loathe to raise the issue one more time.  But here goes.  The Daoist school of Chinese philosophy arose at roughly the same time as the other schools of "Legalism", "Confucianism", and, "Mozi".  The original authors were as near as I can tell, an oral tradition that resulted in the works of the Dao De Jing, the Nei-Yeh, Zhuangzi and Liezi.  Most scholars believe that these people had absolutely nothing to do with what later became known as religious Daoism.  That is a later development and was created in reaction to Buddhism, and adopted much of its ritual formalism and melded it to native Chinese shamanism, "traditional Chinese religion", and, the teachings of the early Daoists.  I make no bones about not being an orthodox religious Daoist.  But I do try to follow the early philosophy.

Incidentally, I have adopted the religious name of "Cloudwalking Owl" for a very specific reason.  My last name is old Welsh for "member of the Owl Clan".  This is not only something that I read in a book, it is also an old family tradition.  Secondly, in religious Daoism an initiated member of a Daoist Temple sometimes decided to seek wisdom by wandering the countryside and visiting other Temples, hermits and so on, in order to gather wisdom.  Since I have been very ecclectic in my practise and have studied with Buddhist Monks, the Jesuits, studied Philosophy at University, etc, I am very clearly someone who follows the path of "cloudwalking".

Finally, I actually am someone who was initiated into a religious Daoist lineage.  I was invited into the lineage by a recognized priest, offered the three sticks of incense and kowtowed before the altar of the ancestors.  The fact is that there is a very strong argument that I am a "Daoist hermit", who has a legitimate name of "the Cloudwalking Owl".  

Daoist Diet and FODMAP

I've recently started to put a bit of emphasis on my diet.  Primarily, this has come about because my wife was concerned about the way certain foods affect me.  I have suffered from what would probably be called "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" for most of my life.  I sometimes get terrible gas, horrible diarrhea, and cramps that will go on for days at a time.  I'd just basically given up caring about this problem, and just accepted it as part of life---just like my horribly flat feet. 

But since my dearly beloved is new to all of this, she insisted that I try to do something about it, so she insisted I try a gluten free diet, even though I thought that it was all just a lot of poppycock. I was complaining about this with a friend, but he sent me a link to an essay from the website, "science-based medicine" that suggested that while people might not be helped by cutting gluten out of their diet, a type of sugar that is associated with foods high in gluten might be causing them problems.  Reading this article, then got me interested in a specific diet the "FODMAP" that helps people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).  Basically, this diet tries to reduce some very subtle elements of our diet that seem to cause problems with some people's digestive system.  Studies at Monash University in Australian seem to indicate that this is the only treatment that has ever been found to work with everyone who has IBS. 

This is pretty interesting stuff to anyone who's suffered this disease.  I mentioned it to my MD during my last check-up and he'd heard of it.  His exact words were "Gluten free diets are a silly fad designed to get people to waste money on over-processed foods.  But the FODMAP is legitimate medicine, I recommend it to my patients."  

The diet is pretty involved, but I have tried to follow it to the best of my abilities.  A couple of interesting wrinkles are involved.  For one, it recommends a real reduction in the amount of foods one eats that are high in gluten---except for sour dough wheat bread that has been allowed to slowly rise over a long period of time. The theory is that the digestion process allows the wild yeasts to pre-digest those elements of wheat flour that I have problems with.  As a result, I've begun to make my own sour dough bread.  

And here's a video that discusses this point :  

I also came across this press release from the university where I work that suggests that sour dough bread is good for your blood sugar levels.   

What has this got to do with Daoism?  

Well, what we eat has always been an issue with regard to what the Daoists call "waidan" or "external alchemy".  This is the old school of Daoism that suggested that people should do crazy things like eat mercury in order to become an accomplished man.  This eventually died out and was replaced by "neidan" or "internal alchemy", which was the idea that people should cultivate themselves through meditation and yoga, such as "sitting and forgetting" and taijiquan, respectively.  Modern Daoists still are interested in the effects that come from specific types of diet, however.  Quanhzen Daoists, for example, are supposed to be vegetarians and not eat garlic or onions, for example.  

I've always been very wary of these dietary restrictions because I constantly got conflicting statements about what I should or shouldn't eat.  For example, the school of Daoism I was initiated into is supposed to be vegetarian, but the teacher who ran the school was adamant that everyone should eat meat in order to be healthy.  In fact, if he found out someone was not eating meat, he would sit next to him at meals and take meat off the platter with his chopsticks and put it in the guy's bowl and make him eat it!  

Anyway, when I was at my wife's house over the Winter Solstice, she was adamant that everyone would eat only FODMAP, except for the feast.  She printed off a list of foods, both acceptable and forbidden off this site, and we ate accordingly.  I have to say that the results were quite remarkable.  I haven't felt this good in a long time.  And when I do stray from the rules, I notice problems right away.  I've been trying to figure out where traditional Daoist rules fit into the FODMAP and there doesn't seem to be much correlation at all.  They both are adamantly opposed to garlic and onions, but FODMAP is also opposed to mushrooms, which are something that my Daoist teacher recommended as being very beneficial. Both FODMAP and my teacher are in favour of meat, but Quanzhen Daoism is vegetarian.  

So, go figure.  But the one thing that his has done has got me thinking about diet as a mechanism for pursuing Daoism, which I suppose is something new.  There are a myriad of Daos to pursue in our brief lives!