Hello, by the way. I know I haven’t posted anything in a really long time. It’s been a bad year, health-wise, and I’ll say no more than that because I don’t want to get bogged down. There’s more to come, but I think the worst is over. I hope so, anyway.

I don’t really bother too much about New Year’s Eve. I normally do something with friends, usually at someone’s house, nothing more than an evening in, but I think it’s just another day really, that clock ticking over into the morning is just another second of our lives, another second of the year. Big deal. And it’s true. But when it turned midnight, I did feel that sense that it’s a new year, a new start, a new slate. Sort of cliché, but a little inspiring.  It’s all a state of mind though really, isn’t it? It’s not as if anything has changed significantly within that second. It’s just that our view on the world has changed. The world hasn’t really changed.

But the world has changed a little in that second, hasn’t it? Everything is always changing, nothing is permanent. Everything is ever so slightly different – our bodies, the room we’re in, the creases in the sofa we sit on, the dust on the table when we set a drink down, we’ve breathed in oxygen and breathed out carbon dioxide, we’ve blinked so the state of our eyes has even changed. We’ve moved our foot because we were uncomfortable with it in that position. All these tiny things. And it occurred to me today that it’s because the world around us is constantly changing that we need to find consistency within ourselves and keep a clear mind. You know when things are hard sometimes, you look for the one thing that’s always constant, like a friend to talk to or music to listen to or movies to distract us? Well, why can’t we find that consistency within ourselves? Why can’t our minds be the one thing we can rely on when the ride gets a bit rough? I know it sounds like something that’s difficult to achieve, but I think that’s what we should be striving for. I mean, when there’s chaos all around us, we must make it ten times worse for ourselves because our minds are so chaotic and we’re stressed, maybe we’re thinking irrationally and letting things get on top of us. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could make our minds a safe place that’s always calm no matter what’s going on around us? Maybe that’s a good new year’s resolution.

I don’t suppose this is much of a Buddhist post, but I just had to write my thoughts on it.

“

Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit.”

- How much space do you need to store an evil spirit? Say, 80gb? You could probably store two demons in my laptop. I wondered where all my disk space was going.

“Housewives who had never expressed an impure thought were entering  Internet chat rooms and found themselves spewing foul, debasing language they would never use normally…One woman wept as she confessed to me, ‘I feel when I’m on the computer as if someone else or something else just takes over.’”

Well everyone changes on the internet. It’s anonymous and people can truly be themselves, or not be themselves, as they wish. On the internet, there are no ramifications and people do act differently. Perhaps there’s also an element of crowd mentality – if everyone’s acting like that in a chatroom, maybe it’s understandable that this woman would act that way, too. There must be some kind of scientific reference I could throw in here – I do talk a lot of theory and I should start backing up what I’m saying.

Okay, well I had a quick look and I can’t find anything at the moment. I have to go out in a sec so I’ll come back to it. I just wanted to talk about that page for a sec… I just felt like I had to… like something was possessing me and forcing me to write…

Oh yeah, I know why that is. Human nature.

And then maybe I thought it’s the fact that they are so rare that makes them so tasty. Perhaps because we know they aren’t sold all year ’round, we savour them more and make more of a point to enjoy them. Then it’s not the egg that’s different – it’s the same chocolate – but it’s our own minds that make the chocolate more enjoyable. So our own perceptions of food are part of what makes them taste good. Or bad. Maybe mud only tastes disgusting because we know it’s not good for us. I assume it tastes bad, anyway. Maybe we (or I) dislike vegetables because they are good for us, and there is that general feeling that if something is bad for us, it tastes better. Interesting. Of course, there are things such as taste buds and other personal differences to take into consideration, but perhaps this is one factor. I mean, surely the way we think affects absolutely everything, taste being no exception.

http://www.asylum.co.uk/2010/02/05/buddhist-monk-turns-to-rapping/

So if people, objects and places are always changing, how can they be inherently good or bad? And if one person thinks something is good and someone else thinks it is bad, how can it truly be either of these things? So, the state, names and labels of these things are not created by them just being, but because we label them – what they are is dependant on us. (A table is a table because we put things on it… if we sat on it, it would be a chair.) Does that mean that everything is empty? The concept of emptiness meaning that things do not have inherent qualities. And if everything is empty, does that mean that everything is the same? A potato is empty, the television is empty, my jacket is empty. So a potato is the same as a television? Perhaps not, I can’t eat the television. Then again, I can’t very well eat a raw potato either, or at least, I’d rather not. Some people don’t like potatoes at all, and so a potato doesn’t seem edible to them. So in that way, the television is the same as the potato – neither of them are very edible as far as that person is concerned. But then, they do acknowledge that some people eat potatoes. Maybe some people try to eay televisions, too, who knows. It’s tricky.

The theory certainly is easier to apply to humans. We are not inherently bad and good, some people like each other, some people don’t. There is also unrequited love. It is clear that people are different in terms of morality, and what some people consider acceptable is immoral to other people, so the idea of someone being “bad” and someone else definitely being “good” is pretty much out the window. But really, people have the same biological needs, everyone has feelings, and everyone wants to be happy. So everyone is the same, and everyone is empty. (Even though everyone is different in some ways and people are always changing, the basic needs are the same.) I’m not so sure this theory of same-ness can passed to inanimate objects to the same extent.

Why are the feelings of happiness/joy generally only momentarily?

Because everything is always changing – people, places, situations, relationships, etc. Even our perception of happiness changes. Let’s say Suzie buys a puppy. She’s so happy that she finally has a puppy. She feeds it and walks it and plays with it. But over time, the joy that she felt when she bought the puppy begins to fade. Perhaps because she’s gotten used to it (so her mind has adjusted – her own mind has changed), perhaps because she doesn’t have as much time to look after it as she did at first (her circumstances have changed), maybe because the puppy is getting bigger and isn’t quite as cute as it used to be (the puppy has changed). Things just change. And if everything is always changing, including ourselves, how can we possibly expect the same thing to always make us happy?

To anyone who’s reading, I will be back soon to post something new.

Buddhism teaches that everything is essentially all in our heads. Nothing is naturally good or bad, but this is how we perceive things to be, and everyone perceives them differently. Sometimes we think things are great one day and not so good the next – the things are the same, but our state of mind is different. The thing itself, be it an object, an event or a person, might seem to be the same (although rebirth states that everything is changing all the time, these changes are not always obvious), but we might feel completely different about them from day to day. This is because our state of mind is changing.

In the show explaining the lottery prediction, Derren said that his technique might not work with people who actually wanted to win the lottery. How true that is and how much of his explanation was true, I have no idea. Maybe his explanation is true. People have believed crazier things. He also said that the fact that people were driven by fear (in the tricks with the cup with the knife in it and the box with the mouse in it), this fear made them fall into predictable patterns.

When people go to see a psychic’s show, their state of mind affects what happens as well. Maybe the psychic says “does anyone here know a John?” and someone in the audience stands up and says they do, and the psychic builds on John’s story through guesses (I’m talking about a fake psychic here), they might get something a bit wrong, but that person in the audience will want the psychic to be right, and in their mind they will make the information fit with John’s story. If they had a different state of mind, they would think that the psychic is being very vague and actually doesn’t really know anything about John at all.

I think that our state of mind also affected how we felt about Derren’s lottery prediction. I’ve watched several of his shows this past week and I’ve seen him predict what people are going to say, sometimes when they’re not even stood in front of him, sometimes over the phone, and it is the most bizarre and interesting thing to watch. When he’s in front of an audience and a person from the audience thinks of a question to ask him, and he guesses the question and the answer just by the person’s handwriting, what they say, what they look like and how they say it (I guess), nobody says “hey, we want a definite, exact explanation of how you knew all of this stuff that you couldn’t possibly know. ” They just accept it. But when he predicts the lottery numbers, everyone wants to know how he did it. Why? Because they have something to gain. People want to know how he did it so that they can do it themselves, or some similar recreation of it. They didn’t care about how he knew stuff in his shows, they just enjoyed it. Because their state of mind has changed – from simply feeling entertained, to desire and maybe greed.

The main thing that made me think about Derren Brown’s  (acts, tricks, talents?) in relation to Buddhism is an episode of Trick or Treat where he showed a woman four coloured cards – red, blue, green and yellow. He showed her the blue on and said that it might not definitely be blue, there could be a bit of green in there, people might have different opinions. He then asked her what colour the card was, after a bit of convincing, and she said it was green. Continuing in the same way, he convinced her that yellow was really red, and then she seemed to come to the conclusion herself that the red card was black. They then went outside to look at her red car, and she was absolutely certain that someone had painted it black, and, pointing to a big yellow car, she said that her car (before alledgedly being painted) was the same colour as “that red car over there”. Bizarre. I suppose this isn’t just to do with the point I made earlier about people’s state of mind, but more about how different people perceive things differently – a kind of sea colour might indeed look green to one person and blue to another, or maybe even to the same person on a different day. Nothing is definite, there are so many things that depend on people’s emotions, experiences, and in turn their state of mind. It makes me wonder:

Is everything relative?

It was today that I realised that life isn’t about what’s going to happen or what we are going to do. It’s about right now, me locking my hands together behind my back, stacking my knees on top of each other and folding forward. It’s about me writing this now, gently, still feeling the peace that comes after a yoga and meditation session. You reading this now. It’s so easy, especially now, so close to graduation, to get bogged down with difficult decision making – what will I do next, who will i work for, will it be enjoyable? What about right now, focusing on the rhythm of the pen as it scratches the paper, how soft the bed I’m lying on is and how refreshing the cool parts feel against the soles of my feet. That’s how our feet should feel. They’re always walking somewhere, taking us to something, what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? How about right now? How many things do you do during the day that you don’ concentrate on, you just do them automatically, or out of habit? Maybe climbing out of bed,washing your face, putting clothes on, locking the door, talking to a friend. How consciously do you notice every part of these interactions? Next time i find myself feeling worried about the future, I’ll stop and ask myself, what about now? The future is uncertain, because everything is constantly cvhanging. The only thing that is certain is what has already happened, and since we can’t change that, we might as well focus on what we do have control of – this very moment.

So I ate it all up that night. It was very yummy.