Summary indication of the below long text: confronting my unstoppable tendency to eat too much and to grow a year by year increasing obesity. Report of what happened.
Hello Isaac etal,
Being the reporter of ones own life is a occupation with many different facets.
At least it includes contemplation, reflection, looking back at and meditating upon what happens in life.
Yet, all this activities itself belong to what happens in life.
This text has turned into another meta mumbling blog.
Your answer to the first one was ‘Meta mumbling indeed.’
That for me had a feel of, how to say, well, to quote myself, ‘that was not a yes’.
Yet, what can we do?
So part two, how come? Well read on:
Wow, that was a feverish week. (first week of August). Fysically I might have had a severe influenza.
(By now it is clear that also a bronchitis devolopped and even a real pneumonia).
The effect was that I went almost completely on my own and inside.
And for me it felt and still feels as a period of transition.
The last months, in fact years, I feel bothered by my overeating and the result of it: overweight.
Will power did not work, up till now, otherwise I would be on my wished weight.
At some point I decided, firmly, to go for the only way that I know of: inner search and writing down, naming, everything that comes up.
The first meditative pondering resulted in something that I wrote already halfway of July.
Then the last week of July I became ill and the first feverish morning, right after waking up, memories of thought and movement in relation to Isaac Shapiro (and his and my overweight) started to come up.
Then I decided that this would be meta mumbling part 2.
It will be a very long one too.
The deep breakthrough that happened to me during the last Venwoude retreat will play a role in this. This breakthrough feels for me, at this moment, as the final chapter in the series Isaac and Hans.
(And is by now online as ‘I see that you waited for this your whole life actually’).
During a feverish week, more and more connections were unravelling. And more and more things came on my path and the meaning of it also started to reveal.
In my head I have deliriously inspired written at least two voluminous books.
Yet, every time when I thought I would start writing, the fever went up instead of the expected down. But as you see, we’re getting closer.
Two things that came on my path were Herakhan Baba and the book Knots by Ronald Laing.
About the knot discovery I made two (one and two) blog pages, yet I give the text fully in here.(I feel a tendency to make this shorter by providing links, yet this will be long anyhow and everything relevant I put in here).
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Good opportunity to give place to a knot.
A knot? Yes, a knot.
Shortly someone mentioned me a booklet by R.D. Laing.
It’s from the seventies and I have missed it then.
(I always came a few years late, was my feeling during that time).
The booklet contains in a abstracted form all kinds of thought patterns.
The second one of the first chapter struck me. This is the summary of my protestant upbringing with all the hidden traps that it contained.
I’m in awe.
In his foreword Laing hopes that we will be able to see the final formal elegance in these webs of maya. :-), the guy has a good sense of humor too.
Here is ‘my’ knot:
They are not having fun.
I can’t have fun if they don’t.
If I get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.
Getting them to have fun, is not fun. It is hard work.
I might get fun out of finding out why they’re not.
I’m not supposed to get fun out of working out why
they’re not.
But there is even some fun in pretending to them I’m not
having fun finding out why they ’re not.
A little girl comes along and says: let’s have fun.
But having fun is a waste of time, because it doesn’t
help to figure out why they’re not having fun.
How dare you have fun when Christ died on the Cross
for you! Was He having fun?
(http://www.oikos.org/knotsen1.htm)
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The other thing that came along was something about Herakhan Baba. Also about this I made a blog page.
And only after I had done so, it dawned on me that this was another person in my life that I kind of have attributed with superhuman qualities. And also he was apparently struggling with overweight. Four years after I visited him he died in the young age of ??
His last years he was physically expanding fast. His followers has stories about him eating the karma of the world. I stick to overeating as the cause. But what do we know?
Well after I wrote spontaneously this page, it dawned on me that the experience that I describe on the mentioned blogpage, (Herakhan Baba turning into the biggest smile I have ever seen), was taken by my mind like this: When those people are right about him, then God has laughed at me!
See, supernatural being, dying of overweight. Time to clean this up in my system.
And then of course you, my dearest Isaac. For at least a decade I have spoken about you as having been my saviour. (“He is the one that cracked my mind”). In the conseptual world of my upbringing, so also in the conceptual world of my nervous system, I implicitly projected superhuman qualities on you.
And you struggle with overweight all the time.
Maybe you remember, once you said in satsang, long ago, that you were totally in peace with your overweight body. To my own shock and surprize I shouted through satsang that I didn’t believe you. You looked at me and said; okay, I’ll take a look.
After a short moment you looked up again and admitted that you found a place in you that was not in peace with it. That made you more human, yet I have to check if there are still superhuman remnants left in my system.
(My ego thinks about this moment as the moment after which you spoke about
yourself as having a eating problem. I also can see that it is more probable that I
awoke to that fact, than that it awoke you to that fact).
What I saw the first morning when I woke up with fever, and after having decided (because the idea came up strongly to do so) to make the switch to fruit fasting in combination with Arise and Shine Herbals, were thoughts around me and you and overweight.
I remembered having had the idea more then once, that it would be great to keep my apres India weight loss intact, so you could see that I had handled that.
(I have seen both the wish of you to be proud of me and the feeling of wanting you to
to be jealous)
All the times before the start of Venwoude I would irresistably be back at my pre India overweight.
Also I have seen thougths in the direction of ‘I should not have this overeating problem down before the master does’.
Having seen this now feels like having left it behind.
Then another overweight person in my life showed up: my mother.
I remember things like being totally ashamed about how fat she was.
I remember that as a child I would eat food even when I didn’t want it, just to prevent her eating it.
(She ate everything, throwing away food was a post war deadly sin, and was quick
with ‘do you know how little we had during the war’ and that kind of stories).
Also those pattern can go now.
Here is a part of what I wrote in draft halfway July when my upset over gaining weight on a daily basis peaked to a ‘now or never’ energy.
I started a draft called Taming the wolverine and made this my focus in mind, body and attention. Soon I found a funny observation. It was as if after this 15 years with you and sitting a lot on my ash, my thoughts had become kind of esotheric.
Notes of July 19 2014.
Thoughts these days have lost size, lost being outstanding, have lost colours, have lost weight. Especially the ones that make me eat too much. Something sneaky has happened during the last decade or so. There is a book to write about the mechanism that I feel has to do with this. In short it is this: although the assertion in satsang is all the time that all is well and that there is no push to move into the direction of good better best, there is of course a underlying expectation in the very motivation to go to satsang to begin with. And during the decade, the discovery was made and has become clearer, that seeing that all and everything is consciousness is instantaneous, yet the integration of that is a process in time. And moreover, the integration has to happen in the body. And the body is at the same time where the resistence against the direct knowing that all is one, is kind of manifested as stored memories. Trauma healing sneeked in into the meetings of truth. And rightfully so. And with the healing of trauma, all and everything relaxed. Even the resisting thoughts became relaxed and easy, yet unresistable, cause almost invisible. This afternoon I suddenly had a fitting image for what has happened to my thoughts. It came up after having decided to start painstakingly precise into words the things that happen in me around gaining wheigt. I see it happen, I feel the discontentment about it. I see all the thoughts happen. I see and feel the wish to not give into the thoughts (and the following actions) and yet I see also that the thoughts are ignored. Yet the ignoring is almost invisible. As almost invisible as the thoughts themselves are. It feels as if there is a invisible ultra thin invisible foil between what is wanted and what is not wanted and yet wanted at the same time and what is done. It is as if there is no distance anymore between thought and consciousness. Yet the difference must be there, cause it is known. But always too late. (Up till now). And the knowing does not stay. So this knowing is also just a thought. The image is that of glass eal in water. The glass eel symbolizing the thoughts and the water the space in which thought moves.
In seach for a good image, I also found a stunning video of a Transparent Juvenile Eel. And stumbled upon the fact that Sigmund Freud started his career dissecting eels: Freud’s drawings show the moment he discovered the psyche.
So, that were the starting notes.
The weeks after having written this, the idea was swimming around in the mind that it would be a good idea to externalize a few things. Like putting up notes in the kitchen. “As less eating in between meals, please” . “Don’t prepare too much food”.
I became aware that there is no switch for me available between eating enough and eating way too much.
There is a switch between eating as I do and juice fasting with Arise and Shine herbs.
This is were I reached for as a crutch to stop the proces at least temporarily and while doing all this inner search.
One thing that became clear to me, is that there is a important difference between for instance stopping with smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol.
Those consumptions can be brought down to zero. As has happened in my life.
With eating this is not an option.
I also have seen that in my eating, and especially in what I eat, there is stil a strong polarity response to happenings in my youth. Once we had to eat burned patatoes, where the black side was scraped off. Ah, I can still smell it.
So, here I am, living on my own, in the middle of Amsterdam City, surrounded by a endless bunch of deli’s. I eat only things that I love.
And that includes a lot of pastries and whipped cream and lots of fine butter.
Let me introduce you to my friend Viennetta Adams. She is a now 76 year old well-connected lady. She has her grandparental roots in the intellectual circles of Vienna, where also Sigmund Freud was busy working his way up. From her vast knowledge and insights in the world of thinking, art and culture, as well as in the worlds of Freud, Jung and the Enneagram, she often gives me feedback on life.
As she happens to be the one that has viewed most of the satsang footage that I have bought over the years (also partly for her, to be honest. It’s my way of showing gratitude and as she does not like to be in groups, it is her way of following you).
Man, does she see different things then I do sometimes.
And she looks all the time at what we call in Holland het toneelbeeld.
(I haven’t found a translation that feels good enough, technically it would be
scenography, toneelbeeld is described as: the overall decoration of the stage performance, décor, furniture, props. I will use from now on Stage setup).
Recently we watched together the footage of my main emotional discharge last time in Venwoude. We watched it from about a quarter of an hour before you adressed me, sitting on the chair opposite you. Just before we meet you leave for the bathroom and after you come back the stage setup changes. Then we have our meeting.
(Great work of you as usual. You see and feel the tip of the iceberg, you stop me by
adressing the whole group, and you prepared especially the newcomers by giving
them a way to be with what was coming, which gave me the chance to say that I was
totally fine. Also you said: ‘I see that you waited for this your whole life actually’.
How true).
The emotional outburst itself gave Viennetta Adams goosebumps.
(I love the alias I made up for her).
But she was kind of upset about the stage setup. It reminded her of an artwork of a friend of her. A woman artist who according to Viennetta goes so deep inside that she basically comes up in her work with archetypes. The one she was reminded of she has send to me. When I asked if I could use it as an illustration here, she had to ask first.
So, with persission of the artist Godelieve Smelt I can show you her work titled “Mother is for me”:
When I told her that I was totally shocked about what you did seconds after we were done, she said that that action reminded her of what male ducks do when they fuck a female in the water: he graps her neck and pulls her under water.
I found a great example on youtube, really great. A piece of music that makes you laugh, you hear the kids and when it gets rough the sound of the audience is put on zero and the fucked one pretends that nothing happened, as I did on stage.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iyP7IH87-M
My direct experience on stage was thus: you took me totally by surprize, while at my most vulnerable ever, pants down, on my knees, just being in my sense of humor to help mine and others energy to settle and what do you do? You ask me to do something that feels as being against my own interest, and you do it in the most velvet way, with a attitude and a smile that says ‘you know that we know that you only can say yes now’ and you make the sangha laugh, so in an instant the sangha is not a sangha anymore but dripping wax in your hands and another example of why I up till now have never trusted the sangha as such. (As I have expressed over and over again during the years). It is only safe when you are safe and at that moment you were not. Not at all. For a moment you were again the best camouflaged authoritarian alpha male that I know. And my survival tool humor and gayety did the rest. It even sugested a irrelevant compromise. In a vain attempt to safe my face. But it felt as if I had been put in place again.
I could go on quite a while about the discussion that lead to my discovery.
You said that it was the first time that you looked into it. It was also clearly new for most of the participants. There was a lot of confusion around. Just the word stop brought up so much in many women, that the stage of just looking for the main meaning (no matter what you tried) was kind of out of reach. Sentences like ‘standing already on the backfoot, when ….’, implied for me that the reactions came from trauma, so to speak.
By the way, on the meaning of meta mumbling this: I was reminded of this when after days of fever there was at a moment a hardly noticeble thought that silently pointed out that there hadn’t been any sexual interest or thought about it during that period.
And that thought just made me aware of that fact.
This thought itself had nothing whatsoever to do with sex itself.
It was a meta mumbling, a neutral statistical observation from the side.
You, my dearest Isaac, are the best meta mumbler that I have ever met.
When I told Viennetta about my discovery that I had called you my Saviour and that that implied in the language of my youth that I projected superhuman traits on you, she said quickly that that was nonsense. According to the same language God is also your father she said, so you two are brothers.
And by the way, she said, that is how I have seen the two of you getting along and growing together.
Over the years the stage setup of both of us sitting opposite each other, reminded Viennetta Adams of a specific sculpture depicitng a biblical meeting between two pregnant women. I could not find that specific image, but found a modern one also based on Luke 1:39-45.
It is a painting by the German artist Anne Worbes titled ‘Marias Besuch bei Elisabeth’
More and more things are coming up.
Over the years I have been in a kind of fighting mode towards you about the importance of information.
I see a similarity between ‘the widest used to narrow you down’ and my constant feeling that when the subject from my side is the importance of (the quality of) information, that you let me run into a blank wall.
It sounds as a bold statement, but it is as if you still have moments where you say to yourself ‘why don’t you go into the Absolute’ as a way to create ease for yourself, or as a way to avoid confrontation.
I have fed you over the years with information about the radiation of cell phones and about the possible dangers of cosmetic products.
And still each and every time when I do my little story about my oversensitivity for those products, you take that as a opportunity to invite me to clean my message up from old emotional load. I have learned an inmmense lot from that. Yet the side effect has also been that my message became something to giggle about.
Reasom why I put up that picture at the beginning of the last retreat.
Let me show it here:
In fact it was also a action against the unspoken idea that when a request is free from old emotional load, it automatically will transform into a 100 % noncommittal question.
As if urgency in the here and now is nonexistent.
Same same with my action about a better use of the microphone.
(See also Meta mumbling 1: can you pull the mike please).
On purpose I made a strong request with a lot of energy in my voice.
This was violating the unspoken sangha law that everything when clean is soft and silky. (The natural state, it was called recently). That’s why I wrote about my action “For sure my action to request improvement of the mike handling was a momentary
bummer for the cosiness in the sangha.
When a voice is raised in the ‘sangha’, also indignation rises.
Even you yourself were last time corrected by a lady from the audience. The lady got a lot of support and you gave in. What I saw happening was that you with your energy were pointing the guy that you spoke to to the fact that he was projecting out.
Maybe you could have done better by naming directly what you saw him do.
Another thing that happened during the last retreat was the strong request of a woman who was convinced that she was oversensitive for electro smog. That is why she asked all of uss to please put our mobile phones on flight mode.
Later the same lady wanted more (based on her uninformedness she thought that she was acting in her own interest). And through the indirect way of asking our organiser to ask on her behalf, we got the next request: if we would be so kind as to switch of our phones completely.
I gave up quite a while ago to come up with quality information, because you avoid this kind of info. I double checked it later: the switched of mode gives of more radiation then the flight mode. (I allow myself to not refind this link, putting links up a blank wall seems so stupid after all those years of trying).
Okay, out of the blue something about the Circle of Presence in Amsterdam.
(circle.of.presence@gmail.com).
I copy the text of an email that I have sent to the organizers of the Circle.
It includes a question to you:
Amsterdam, December 15 2014
Dear Circle of Presence,
All of a sudden here comes the message out that already for quite some time has been prepared in my head.
Fairly long ago Arthur asked me why I do not come to the Circle anymore.
I know why, but did not find that moment fit to tell him about it and then suggested that they can invite me for a gathering and we can talk about it.
He said he would and it did not happen, apparently.
For myself I’ve become quite clear how it is for me.
In the beginning when I came I had the idea that I participated out of some kind of solidarity.
I did not get anything out of it for myself. I thought.
I missed there exactly that which for me is so special about going to Isaac: the constantly being put in words of what is going in and around me, by someone from outside my system.
Quietly watching others without any feedback option?
It brings me little more than sitting on my own. And I do that very often.
What remained was the opportunity to put things into words for others, but rather that was not the intention.
Well, something like that.
I intended to ask Isaac about this, but my participation in the first Google video hangout failed.
The question would be something like: Isaac you are talking most of the time all the time and the Circle of Presence is Organised around not speaking.
Am I the only one who is missing this. Any thoughts?
Greetingz,
hans
There is another scary memory that has to be spoken here.
Recently I met a woman in the Vondelpark, in De Roos, the ‘sangha’-meeting place par exellence. I know her from retreats and the Muiderkerk. Since three years she comes to you. So we exchanged stories and experiences. At a point she mentioned Mooji and if I knew him? I was at his birtday party in Tiruvanamallai i said. What do you think of Mooji, compared to Isaac she asked. And without thinking I said: compared to Mooji, Isaac is a surviving depression.
A few days later this is clear: the description for sure fits me.
And I know that this slowly underground nagging feeling made me eat. (Up till now).
And I also know and that is standing out clearer and clearer: it has to do with running into blank walls. It has to do with the feeling of being narrowed down by a invisible authority. Which gives a chronic feeling of utter helplessness. And my strategy to avoid braking down this walls each and every time because it is an impossible mission also give a chronic feeling of utter helplessness. And all of that triggered again and again just by the also almost invisible inner actions of others. Be it them calling God as his/her witness, or disappearing into the Absolute.
Since I started this adventure my weight went down seven kilos.
Already ten days ago I let go of the crutch of using those Arise and Shine herbs.
And still there is basicly no eating between meals.
About a week ago I went sitting when a strong urge to eat came up and for the first time I could discern details in what was going on energeticaly.
Here is my notes about this sitting:
Sunday, August 10 2014.
When I sat down just before I noticed that the feeling of appetite was floating in space, in front of my belly. In fact I could not trace the feeling inside the body.
So, the apparent feeling of appetite resembled a thought.
A thought can pull you in your head, can pull your attention away from the rest of the body. A feeling of appetite that protrudes from the body seems to do something similar. The name for this that came up was ‘a thought feeling’. A mind constructed fake feeling that takes the attention away from a feeling in the body that is habitually being avoided, so much so that there is no idea even of what it is. Up till now.
It feels as if the code has been broken.
Two clear examples of how important quality information is, are Feldenkrais and Somatic Experiencing. Bringing those disciplines into your retreats has changed both your retreats and your and others’ lifes.
Time to bring this to a conclusion without concluding anything.I look forward to the day that the wolverine will eat out of my hand.
I already can see it happen.
Off to France for another week of bowel and liver cleansing and after that I hope to meet you afresh in Chieming.
hans
