Chuang and earlier Zen living

When I was about ten the local Catholic priest started taking me to Celtic football games, and the occasional international featuring Scotland, at the national stadium, Hampden Park. During Scotland games against England the fans would chant "If you hate the fucking English, clap your hands." All the Scottish fans sang it, and all clapped. and "We hate Jimmy Hill, he's a poof, he's a poof." (Jimmy Hill was one of the foremost football pundits at the tine, and English.) At Celtic games the fans sang "Fuck the Queen and the UDA" Later in my life one of my best friend's brother was a Rangers season ticket holder, but sometimes because of his work he would be away when a home match was on. He'd give his other ticket to my friend. One time my friend asked if I wanted to go, so we went together. This was in the late 1980s or early 90s. I don't remember who Rangers were playing. What I do remember is at one point the fans started singing ...

I have decided to stop promoting my poetry, as poor use of my limited time alive. A major part of that decision is therefore to stop publishing any books or pamphlets of my poetry. I will still write it and post it on my poetry blog, and also in my notebooks, whatever is most handy when I feel the need to write poetry. If poetry was ever to have been a healthy financial earner for me I'd continue to promote and publish it, as I quite enjoy that side of it. But on its own, without the financial incentive, it's just not the best thing I can be doing with my time. I have two collaborations going on, one long-standing with John Guzlowski, the other agreed but not started, with Tim Heerdink, and I'll keep these going but will not promote them. They are fun and good use of time. If they choose to promote and publish I'll happily agree to it but play no part.

The way to be happy, sane, and mentally well is not to become unhappy, insane, or mentally unwell in the first place. But given that no one manages to do this, the next best thing is to look for things that work to bring you to greater happiness, sanity, and mental wellbeing, then do those things. The practices of Zen, including mindfulness, achieve these goals, but you have to actually do them, and do them often enough and rigorously enough for the cumulative effect of your efforts to result in what you want to feel - namely, happy, sane, and well. It is simply a matter of committing to the task.

So now we move from theory to practice. In order to achieve peace of mind we have to manage and control our automatic mind. That's the medium through which our wants and desires emerge. This fourth truth was originally made up of eight areas of our life that we have to develop and improve. It states that, if we develop these eight areas we will become the master of our wants and desires, start to see ourselves as part of the wider forms of life around us, and through these two developments, become happy and content instead of dissatisfied. The eight areas are arranged around three wider themes: Life philosophy, Management of the Mind, Work, and Self-Discipline. Philosophy The first area we have to develop is how we see life. The right way to see life is what was explained in the first three truths, namely that we are programmed to be dissatisfied, that the dissatisfaction emerges from our constant wants not being met and our narrow view of our self, but that we can overcome these i...

So we now know that we are dissatisfied in our lives, and that this is caused by our constant wants, wishes, and desires, both positive and negative. These in turn are caused by our narrow sense of what we are. We see ourselves as separate from everything else, whereas, viewed more deeply, we are in fact connected to and dependent on, everything around us. The third transforming truth is simply put: we can overcome our natural tendency to see ourselves as independent and rid ourselves of most of our self-centred wishes. In their place we can become a much happier, less grasping and fraught person, and feel more connected to everything. In orther words we find deep inner peace and happiness at being alive.

 So the first truth in the sequence of four that leads us to a radically different life was the recognition that we are innately dissatisfied, rarely if ever at peaceful within ourselves. The second truth concerns what causes this unhappy state of restlessness. There are two parts to this. The first is that we constantly want things. By things I don't mean just physical things we can buy at a shop or take out of the cupboard. In addition to these things I also mean more mental things, like love, recognition, appreciation, praise, success (however we define this). Also we want things to be different from how they are when we are not happy with certain things. Examples include a cold, wet, windy day; being stuck in the traffic at rush hour; someone turning up very late for a meeting with you; you turning up very late for a meeting with someone. Most of our negative moods and feelings are the result of the absence of things that we want, or the presence of things that we don't wan...

In the West the term is "The First Noble Truth" but apparently that's a typically bad translation from the 19th century. The literal meaning is the first of the truths that ennoble you. But I don't like the word ennoble, as it too sounds archaic. Buddhism is, if anything, about transforming our lives from unsatisfactory to happy, so I think my choice of the word "transforms" fits the teaching of the Buddha. This first truth concerns human dissatisfaction. Put another way it is about humans' inability to feel mentally settled, at peace, stable. We are easily upset, annoyed, irritated, frustrated, and very often over trivial things. The phrase "the straw that breaks the camel's back" is such a good one. A series of tiny little things that annoy us seems to build up inside us until we emotionally explode or implode. Yet each thing on its own probably wasn't worth even of a negative response at all. Of course there are much worse things tha...