Memory: The Cult of Remembrance

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Memory

[Exploring Life] How many misleading or false beliefs and assumptions do we preserve in our memories? And how many of these false beliefs and assumptions have been assimilated as a result of cultural conditioning? It would be immensely difficult to conduct a statistical inventory of our memories in order to quantify the exact number of beliefs and assumptions we hold on to that are confining and perhaps even virulent. We cannot describe or locate the precise nature of a memory. Memory is an elusive phenomenon that remains hidden and mysterious to us. The contents of memory, the specific thoughts and beliefs that give rise to remembrance cannot be itemized and put on display. Our awareness of the memories that animate our actions is incomplete; we are not always aware of what we remember and how those remembrances influence the choices and behaviours.

In Against the Memory Industry, Christopher Szabia asks, “Is the cult of remembrance holding us back?” The idea of a cult of remembrance is compelling and immediately places us on a trajectory to explore the shadowy confluence of psychological assimilation, personal identity, and lifestyle. The idea of a cult often retrieves the negative imagery associated with abhorrent forms of devotion to a set of beliefs that are all too often unfounded if not deranged. The task of any cult is to infiltrate, capture, and confine memory within a prison of imposed belief. A cult infects memory with subservience, making us pliable, feeble and numb. Our memory is hijacked, and the deception is often so complete that we view those that hijack us as our benefactors who are caring for our best interests.
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Dark Night of the Soul – 5

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Dark Night of the Soul

[Exploring Life] A dark night of the soul is an invitation to our own renaissance. The curse of seemingly inescapable psychological and spiritual burdens is a threshold that immerses us in a dark unrelenting entanglement with our own spiritual-renewal. It is deep within the midst of our most intense struggles in life that we are provided with the opportunity to cultivate resilience, self-reliance, and the recovery of our intimate and inexorable bond with nature. Escaping the shackles of habitual and conditioned responses in life leads to the recovery of our innate creativity, which allows us to offer ourselves more imaginatively to the world. When the source of our creativity is natural, the expression of our presence flows effortlessly into the world around us. It is not, unfortunately, possible to insulate ourselves from pain and suffering and attempting to do so will only serve to intensify our quiet agony, but we can choose to meet that which threatens us the most with imagination.

The intense psychological and spiritual burden imposed on our sensibilities in a dark night of the soul is immense and threatening. Life can take on the appearance of seemingly endless anxieties and dilemmas exacerbated by a painful unrelenting absence of simplicity, comprehension, and clarity. Perhaps the most profound and painful aspect of a dark night is the realization that we are completely and irrevocably alone in our journey. No one can travel with us downward into the roots of our own identity. We can read about the journey of others into the dark night, but ultimately we must escape from our entrenched habits, addictions, patterns and routines that have silently reduced any remaining creativity we might within our soul have to mere cultural fodder. Our primary resource in the midst of a dark night is a vibrant and expansive form of learning that lies in wait within each of us. It is now time to author our own unique narrative. This is the essence of the invitation and the essential creative endeavour shrouded within the mercurial depths of a dark night of the soul.
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Aging: An Unexpected Life

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Aging

[Exploring Life] Life expectancy embraces a statistical assumption about how long, on average, we will live. We might also think about is a projection of when, on average, we can expect to die. For example, newborn Canadians will on average live to approximately age eighty-one. A sixty-five year-old Canadian can expect to live into their mid-eighties. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume each of us will live, on average, to age eighty-five. By subtracting our current age from the expected age we arrive at the number of years left, on average that we have in life. When we are forty-two and a half years-old we pass the chronological half-way point in life, that is to say, as we continue to age we become closer death. A fifty year-old Canadian can expect to live another thirty-five years on average. Our date of birth has always been known fact; our date of death is a statistical probability, that is, until it happens.

Surrounding these statistical assumptions about life expectancy are myriad influences that can effortlessly render our assumptions irrelevant. Most of these influences are the kind that lower or life expectancy, and cause our projected date of death to be quite a bit closer than we had wished. Or perhaps our date of death suddenly appears without warning. Statistical assumptions about life expectancy are fragile. Though we seek comfort in mentally projecting our date of death as far into the future as possible we are in no way entitled to live a statistically probable length of time. We simply do not know with any degree of certainty whether or not we will die this evening, tomorrow, next week, in a few months, or several years into the future. Death is an inevitable in life that can stimulate fear and angst deep within our being. However, embracing senescence creatively and imaginatively can inspire and animate our lives in the here and now. To live a life of fulfilment is to live an unexpected life.
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Aging: Creating A Foundation for Fulfilment

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Aging

[Exploring Life] November mornings somehow inspire reflection. It’s strange to wake-up while it is still dark and this seems to be something that I never quite adjust to. Our natural internal rhythms somehow feel more forced as the amount of available light during the day decreases during the fall and winter months. On this November morning I found myself reflecting on the rhythms of aging; each morning I am one day older in biological terms. In my youth, however, the rhythms of aging were quite soft and often peripheral to my experiences. Today, somewhere in what we sometimes refer to as mid-life, I find that the rhythms of aging are becoming more immediate. There is no sense of sadness or regret in these words, no sense of time lost; to equate sadness and regret with the organic and natural process of growing old is self-destructive.

Aging, the gradual process of growing old, is the fundamental pulse of our creativity and imagination. Our bodies travel through this life by slowing and almost imperceptibly growing old. To fully embrace senescence (the natural organic process of growing older and the effects of increasing age) is to reach into the essence of living a life imbued with meaning, intention, and purpose. There is a deep mystery in aging; we do not know how long we will live. How many more Novembers are in my future? As I sit here on this dark November morning, I realize that this new internal rhythm I sense is an invitation to approach time in a more imaginative way, and to move differently in mind, body and spirit. It is important to approach aging with care, and to openly embrace the process of growing old with creativity and imagination. This is not always an easy or desirable path to explore since growing older serves as a constant reminder of the quiet approach of our own mortality. Perhaps it is precisely when the waters of life become troubled by the fears, doubts, and anxiety inspired by the relentless progression of aging that creativity and imagination become our most precious resource.
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Spiritual Qualities: Equanimity

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Spiritual Qualities

We find ourselves today in the midst of an economic storm born in the shadowy underworld of corporate greed, want, superficiality, and narcissism that threatens the sustainability of our immediate lifestyle. And we stand together in the midst of an approaching environmental tsunami in which our attempts to own and commoditize the natural world will inevitably turn against us and threaten our very survival. Intensifying our sense of confrontation with the world around us are fundamentalist and extremist movements that embrace lunacy under the guise of religion. Economic, environmental, and religious virulence immerses each of us in a global confluence of angst, anxiety, and fear disguised as progress and development. The debt crisis is not limited to the realm of economics. The real debt crisis lies deep within the camouflaged and well protected realm of our own narcissism.

The description above is a vast and fragile generality. Not all of people suffer from these various forms of indebtedness. It is to say, however, that the general presence of these crises is real and each of us walks among them every day. For an empathetic spirit, the walk can become infectious and the vast surround of angst and fear can work its way into the presence of the sensitive person. An affective person is not a weak person; an affective person is an individual that feels and communicates their surroundings with emotional vibrancy and intuitive sensibilities. Equanimity, or the ability to remain physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritual “equal” or “balanced” in all circumstance is a fundamental spiritual quality. What does being “equal” or “balanced” really mean?
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Nourishment: Eating Healthy to Alleviate Anxiety Disorder

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Nourishment

Ryan Rivera is the publisher and founder of the Calm Clinic, a website designed to help people find valuable information about anxiety disorders. Ryan speaks directly from personal experience. After spending seven years suffering from panic attacks, severe anxiety, agoraphobia, social anxiety, unbearable physical symptoms, headaches, neck pains, constant tension, diarrhea, palpitations, pounding heart, Ryan reached a tipping point and found a way to embrace a movement toward the elimination of anxiety from his life. Ryan found Exploring Life through the article, Emotional Terrain: Anxiety – Fear in Search of a Cause, and has kindly offered to contribute an article.

Anxiety affects all of us to one degree or another. No one is immune from its influence. In my own experience, I have found that a great deal of what I become anxious about is in fact a complete fiction constructed by an over-active imagination. When we choose to go inside our anxiety to reveal its source, I felt a sense of irony in realizing that often my own periods of anxiety were self-induced. However, modern society seems to have a morbid obsession with anxiety and the media all too often seem to obsessively and foolishly fan its flames. Anxiety can also take the form of a weapon of deception, manipulation, control and submission that imposed upon us by an external agent. In other words, anxiety can force itself upon from the outside. Regardless of its source, anxiety simultaneously affects body, mind and spirit, and therefore changes our very perception and appreciation of life. In this article, Ryan focuses on the inexorable link between food and anxiety.
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Dark Night of the Soul – 4

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Dark Night of the Soul

[Exploring Life] When we receive an education we are placed into a system of prerequisites that have been determined by an amorphous agency. By definition, education is an experience that is predetermined, imposed, rigidly structured, and bound to a self-reinforcing system of evaluation. The essence of the education system originates in automation, mechanization, generalization, and abstraction. Education uniformly prepares us to successfully participate in the static cultural assumptions of the status quo. We gain familiarity with other people’s thoughts, ideas, theories, and stories, which we seem to adopt as if they were our own. This is, however, exactly what education needs to be since it is far better to be part of the machine than it is to be exiled and be forced to survive on the fringes of society. In this sense, education is cultural survival.

Life, as we know, is fluid, emergent, immediate, and mysterious. We are all faced with these things called the inevitable in life including death, aging, the unexpected, and the unknown. Even though we may possess cultural security and safety in the form of a career and family, life is a far more powerful and numinous force than culture can ever hope to be. A dark night of the soul is a numinous force of life that initially shatters our cultural assumptions leaving us adrift in the foreboding tempestuous currents of not knowing, failing to understand, and debilitated awareness. We may stand on the pinnacle of cultural success, only to face the harsh reality that it is ultimately a house of cards. A dark night is a different form of education that is imposed from a mysterious source but in no way embraces prerequisites, automation, generalization, and abstraction. The reason for this is quite clear, when we enter into a dark night of the soul, we do not know where we are, why we are here, or how to proceed. That is to say, we are forced into the deepest mysteries of our being.
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Spiritual Qualities: Authenticity

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Spiritual Qualities

[Exploring Life] We live in an age of instantaneous global communication. We also live in an age of mass somniloquence. Each of us secretly desires the intimacy and art of a deeper more compelling conversation that authentically explores the alluring mystery of being alive. When we engage in authentic conversation we explore and exchange our thoughts, feelings and attitudes about the nature of our lives. The various masks we wear and various roles we play within culture and society have no place in authentic conversation. Hidden within the wonderful inventiveness of our new technologies are the seeds of isolation, dislocation, and superficiality. Even though we communicate with each other more and more, we seem to have less and less to say.

The speed and quantity of communication technology is steadily increasing in both speed and magnitude; we can say more and more at greater rates of speed to an increasingly larger audience. The endless drone of the news media have embraced this modern advancement and in doing so clearly reveal that “reporting the news” is about dressing up banal and superficial content in fashionable yet misleading language. All news is old news. More and more people are going weary of the endless tirade of cultural fodder ever more invading our lives through digital infiltration. The Internet, an environment for sharing, has been hijacked by our cultural addiction to materialism, consumption, commodification, ownership, species superiority, and of course environmental degradation. We are in many ways a suicidal species for a cause that is at best delusional and neurotic. It is this very addiction that has made our conversations shallow and dislocating; it is this very addiction that will destroy the earth unless we heal our presence within nature. Unless we embrace authenticity in living, we may become our own demise.
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Mental Habitats: Five Afflictions of Mind

This entry is part 7 of 10 in the series Mental Habitats

[Exploring Life] Mental Afflictions- The Origin of Discontent: The purpose of yoga is to provide a pathway out of suffering. All suffering originates in the mind. The mind and body are intimately interconnected, meaning that the intentions of our thoughts manifest themselves throughout the physical structure of our body. An acute painful thought creates a temporary uncomfortable presence in the body; a chronic painful thought creates a lasting painful physical presence in the body. Mental anguish seems to effortlessly transform into physical anguish and take residence in our body. Pantanjali recognized that to move through our afflictions and discontent in life, we must learn to change the quality and character of our mind. The heart of yoga is an investigation into the nature of our own discontent in order to find a pathway to a higher state of mind. More simply, we need to understand the cause and source of our discontent before we can begin to heal it.

Pantanjali’s insights into the nature of the human mind remain relevant and valuable today. Under the pressure of impressive technological innovation, we live in the midst of an environment that places unique challenges on our thought processes. There is great benefit in our modern technologies, however, our minds also feel the strain of the increased speed and intensity of information and communication. Distraction and mental fatigue are significant and growing problems today. We subscribe to delusional and harmful notions such as multitasking. One of Pantanjali’s most important contributions was identifying problematic qualities of mind that lie at the root of our fear, anxiety, and insecurity. He describes five mental afflictions, or “klesas,” that he proposed to be the root cause of our suffering. In restraining, or learning to control, the five afflictions we free ourselves from the suffering they impose upon our lives.
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Mental Habitats: Five Sources of Torment

This entry is part 8 of 10 in the series Mental Habitats

[Exploring Life] The Five States of Mind: Pantanjali (2nd century B.C.) is a pioneer of the mind. The uncharted terrain he ventured into was the inner landscape of the mind. His method was the direct observation of his own mind. In this sense, Pantanjali was both scientist and artist of the inner realm of existence. The very essence of yoga lies is the contemplation of the nature of our mind. One of his main concerns in the Yoga Sutras was to clearly identify and describe problems that occur in the mind.

A mental problem is innately linked to the nature of thought being produced in the mind. Our thinking is not neutral with respect to its effects on our individual feelings and sense of well being. Thoughts carry with them an energy that permeates our body; thought determines how we choose to interpret our experiences. In this sense, the mind permeates the entire body in what Candace Pert refers to as the bodymind. Though we might think of the mind as an emergent property of the brain, the word “mind” is used to here refer to the entire sphere of intelligence throughout the entire body. A problem that occurs in the mind affects our entire experience of living, and understanding the problems that can occur provides a foundation for the improvement and development. Pantanjali describes five basic mental states, from problematic through to ideal states of mind.
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