The Power of Concentration

"Mindfulness brings out the fourth power ... of concentration" says Hanh.  The power of concentration can lead to a breakthrough, to see deeply into the object of your focus. If we are suffering some ill-health, say a back ache, we can concentrate on that pain and perhaps link it to an emotional event that we have brushed aside.  Someone told me once that back ache is a sign of needing support, a lack of support. When I think of those who have suffered back pain I wonder if their active independent personality keeps them from seeking the support they need.

I often get headaches that rob me of my energy.  Would these aches be telling me that my head is resisting the work I plan to do, to concentrate on?  Or are they telling me I should concentrate on the thoughts I am having in regards to the way I  respond to the outer world? Are they telling me to stop living in my head and have some faith in action?

If someone gets angry with me my first response is to move out of ear range and get on with my day, but if I concentrate on what was said, the way it was said, and the body language at the time I can attain some insight perhaps.

Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to concentrate on what we are doing.  If we are having tea, drink tea, don't drink in the worries and the suffering. If we concentrate on what we are doing after tea or after dinner or before breakfast, we gain some nourishment from our rituals and gain some peace and strength.

Seems like a simple idea doesn't it? But throughout our lives we have been told to strive, to improve, to be a better person, and in our striving we may have forgotten to look after ourselves until we are exhausted, worried and spent, then dive into a box of doughnuts or a bottle of whiskey to escape.

Concentrating on the simple care of ourselves really is quite a radical notion.

The Power of Mindfulness

This is the third of the Five Spiritual Powers.  Hanh says "Mindfulness is the energy of being aware of what is happening in the present moment. When we have the energy of mindfulness in us, we are fully present, we are fully alive, and we live deeply every moment of our daily life."

The challenge for me is that I think a lot about what is happening globally in terms of peace and social justice.  I think about the reservist, Trevor Greene, who was severely injured during his term  fighting in Afghanistan and how the government has cut back on services to soldiers who return needing health care.

This is not considered mindfulness or is it?  Reaching out in empathy (and outrage) to someone who puts himself on the front line for his country but who believes he doesn't get the medical care he needs.

The trick is that no matter what discipline I practice there are so many things I have no control over. So is awareness going to make me more powerful in this regard?

Moving further away from the moment and into the thinking place, I return to the notion that what is happening today is because of what happened a thousand years ago.  Each action for control is a problem when the control is not ourselves but others, and how we might have internalized the power of the state with our own sense of power.

So getting back to mindfulness I think about the moment and what I can do in this moment in response to what has happened over the last millenium. "If we lose this power of mindfulness, we lose everything" claims Hanh and the fact that his writing travels all over the world, and that his Plum Village is built on these Buddhist values, is perhaps an indication of his power.

I am working on the premise that mindfulness is more than simply paying attention to the toast I eat for breakfast, and that in practice I hope for further insights.

The Power of Diligence

Hanh says we are capable of going back to our best selves but we must maintain this practice of diligence.

He says there are two kinds of consciousness - the open consciousness (the living room) and store consciousness (the basement).  But the store consciousness is described also as the land where seeds lay underground that we don't pay much attention to until something happens to remind us of those seeds.

In most people's lives, there have been times when we have felt threatened, angry, victimized and in despair - not knowing where to turn next. These feelings are seeds, hidden underground, when we are happy and life is good, but when fears arise we feel those seeds lying there, and must decide whether to water them or let them dry up.

There are four aspects of diligence: first - when negative emotions haven't manifested in your mind, you don't give them a chance to manifest; second - is calming and replacing negative seeds (anger, hate, fear, despair) in your conscious mind; third - is to always invite good seeds to manifest (love, forgiveness, joy, peace, happiness); fourth - is trying to keep a good mental formation such as compassion, joy, peace, by nurturing it.

Last night it took me awhile to get to sleep, so rather than water the seeds of frustration, I lay in bed thinking about how comfortable it was listening to the rain outside.  Focusing on positive emotions I turned on the light and began reading Naomi Beth Wakan's book The Way of Haiku, marvelling at the beautiful language there and the culture that has enabled us to create poetry. Filled with gratitude I eventually went to sleep.

Yes I know that beautiful thoughts and words can't defend us against guns and bombs, but they do inspire us and other people to act on behalf of peace and justice.

The Power of Faith

Thich Nhat Hanh translates the word faith into confidence and trust "because it is something inside you and not directed toward something external".

So I shift into a place of confidence that I am a being of integrity and that I have a right to be here.

Working through the night and the following day with this particular power enabled me to give up anxiety, to second guess and question everything I do and say.  What is that about? And - what was that?

After spending so many years looking to the external world for assessment of what is good and what is troubling, I can see how moving to a place of faith in my ability to create some goodness in a changing and unpredictable world, I can bring my focus back to my own energy.

For a start I told myself that I had faith that I could sleep through the night so that I could get up early the next morning to do what I had promised to do. It worked and I felt less like a creature oppressed by the whims of fate.

During the waking hours it soon occurred that mindfulness was also wedded to the power of faith because I need to be mindful of the tasks to do them satisfactorily.

This also reminded me of a time when I was younger and took confidence for granted, assuming I would always have that strength and ability.  How did I lose my confidence? Perhaps a few mistakes made me feel like a fumbling old lady and I questioned my abilities more and more.

Getting back to that place of comfort with the self is quieter, more peaceful, than the angst and apologies, and the continual self-reprimands grieving over a more youthful confident self.

The Five Spiritual Powers

In Thich Nhat Hanh's book The Art of Power he lays out five spiritual powers he teaches to  ground us in the power from within that many would not associate with power.

They are:

1. The Power of Faith
2. The Power of Diligence
3. The Power of Mindfulness
4. The Power of Concentration
5. The Power of Insight

Over the next few days I plan to write about these individually in the hope that I will learn how to access my own spiritual powers.

Not wanting to simply plagiarize Hanh's work, I feel it necessary to focus on my responses to what he teaches.

If I can’t rule the world I shall destroy it.

Who said that? Was it Hitler or Richard III? Is it the bad guy in any (pick one) action movie? Or the familiar fantasy of every child who can’t get her own way but which is soon forgotten when met with a suitable diversion?

The trouble is there are adults in positions of power, who I suspect operate as though control is a kind of revenge.

When our government eschews the professional knowledge of corrections workers and creates more tension within prisons by cutting programs and demanding prisoners pay more room and board; when they plan to shut down 10 of the 22 Marine Communications and Traffic Services Centres, which provide rescue and emergency services for boats; when they silence thousands of federal science workers for Environment Canada, because their research contradict Federal Government plans for economic growth particularly with shipping bitumen from the oil sands; when Jim Stanford creates a graph that shows "that in the last decade, Canadian petroleum exports grew by close to 2 percentage points of GDP ... but Canada's exports of everything else (manufacturing, services and tourism) declined by several times as much"— doesn’t it give you the impression that our world is ruled by ideologies arrested by rage because no matter how much power you have, it is never enough?

But we can develop a universal conscience and find our own ways to nurture from a place of love, gratitude, thoughtfulness and intention. These are things that raise the power of our lives through reverence and that celebrate the knowledge of those who work for the whole of this world.

Community or Asylum

In Chris Hedges article "Welcome to the asylum" he spells out the ways in which civilizations dissolve into madness.

"The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide."

The Western world who has wholeheartedly embraced unfettered capitalism, without any concern for social consequences, are rushing to follow in this suicidal spiral, and the good citizens question whether they can ever have a conversation with the mad bull-dogs whose jaws are firmly hanging onto any flesh linked to power, no matter how decomposed it might be.

Democracy is supposed to be that conversation that limits the damage done by megalomaniacs. But Lawrence Martin asks if we are still living in a democracy.

"... anyone who scrolls through recent media, conservative media included, might be forgiven for concluding that we have something more closely resembling the opposite. Something more akin to billy-club governance. Think of the ironclad controls, the scorning of accountability, the censorship, the smearing of opponents, the power unto one. The abuses are not just opposition talk. They’re writ large in Auditor-Generals’ reports, in internal documents and journalists’ investigations. Some of the abuses have happened in other governments but have they ever happened on the scale we’ve seen from this crowd?"

You may wonder, how did we get to this point where our elected leaders behave as though they feel contempt for democracy?  Well all you have to do is read a little history or speak to survivors of war to understand that power is based either on contempt for life or a reverence for life.

It will seem outrageously stupid to say that loving kindness or compassion is the only weapon that sustains life, until you visit or listen to some of our First Nations people who have survived the most terrible violence at a time when they were most vulnerable. They have fought every minute of every day of every year since, to mend their broken spirits by re-educating themselves and their children on how to live. The fight is never over as they now are fighting the threat of oil tankers and pipelines, as we all should be.

The tragedy of our age is that, on the one hand we witness the madness of violence and destruction designed by a controlling elite, and dismiss the goodness under our feet as benign.  This is the way power has corrupted our spirit by making us blind with anxiety. 

Anxiety will control and diminish our power as long we fail to stare it in the face, and ask our discomfort to speak to us on a deeper level. What does it mean when our governments have given up on their people and we can no longer hope for jobs, education, health care and a clean environment?

Imperialist nations that thrived on oppressing other nations for their resources are now feeling the violence of the system that fed and controlled them through propaganda and ideology until there was no ideal left uncorrupted, untainted. We live in an age now where we can't escape the immense depth of violence which we once supported through loyalty.

What can each one of us do to re-create new systems?  What do we possess that we can choose to build upon?  What can we believe in?  These are questions to ask ourselves for our answers will be our legacy.

While socialist and capitalist governments have abused power, Pickett and Wilkinson tell us (in an article published in StraightGoods)

"the evidence shows unmistakably that more equal societies — those with smaller income differences between rich and poor — are friendlier and more cohesive: community life is stronger, people trust each other more, and there is less crime and violence. So the deep human intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive is true.

People in more unequal societies have worse health and lower life expectancy; they are more likely to have drug problems and to suffer more mental illness. Measures of child wellbeing are worse and children do less well at school. Rates of teenage births, obesity and violence are all higher, and more people are in prison."

It's time we stopped working for our oppressors by examining the power of institutions and the frames they contain us in, and then by re-creating the world based on social justice, compassion, freedom and responsibility.