Letter #18: Beauty and Brutality
Sunset time in tropical Thailand!
Dear Friend
This is very much a food for thought Letter, and this week there’s another difference too, as you’ll find out later on in the Letter!
Here’s the first morsel for you to chew on.
Chances are that if you really want something you haven't got, you'll first need to do something you don't want to do.
And that’s when we start chasing magic bullets, a pill, a guru, an expert, a knight in shining armour, a man on a white horse, and so on. We want it quick, we want it now, we don’t want to work hard to get it.
And that’s when we come across charlatans, snake oil salesmen, false prophets, gurus seeking to make you dependent on them, cults, and so on.
My question for you to think on is this: Has this ever applied to you in your own life? What happened? Recall and replay events in your mind, and see if there’s a life lesson in it for you.
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Right now I have a piece of my writing which I want to share with you, and it comes with pre-reading and post-reading tasks to deepen your reading experience.
Pre-reading task
Think of a favourite spot of nature that makes you feel good. Visualise being there, and ask yourself what you can see, hear and smell. Ask yourself how you feel.
There is both a Hitler and a Gandhi in every human being. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why?
I’m calling the passage Beauty and Brutality. What thoughts does this title trigger in you?
Beauty and Brutality
Back in the 1990s, my personal decade of total Heaven for nine glorious years, I balanced living and working in Bangkok with three to four holidays a year down on the incomparable (at the time, not so now) tropical Thai islands.
I would get a spartan, but clean wooden bungalow right beside the stunning tropical beach (the odd person would walk by every hour or so). An essential requirement of the bungalow would be a veranda and hammock. The hammock is the most ergonomic seating/resting arrangement in the world!
Surrounding me would be the resort garden, lots of palms and coconut trees, flowering trees, and a whole variety of animal life going on around me.
There would be giant bumble bees busily buzzing around, butterflies fluttering at great speed, belying their light weight, dragonflies zooming everywhere,, cacophonous cicadas that you could never see,, red-headed green-bodied lizards scurrying around on the sandy floor, plenty of birdsong with various chirpings, including the cheeky mynah birds who seem to love being near humans.
As I swung lazily on my hammock on my veranda, from time to time caressed by a welcome sea breeze, and with this scene of nature playing itself out around me, ahead of me were the mesmerising blues and greens of a flat tropical sea under a deep blue sky. Such huge space, and beauty, with me taking it all in on my trusty hammock, was the bedrock of my holidays. I was totally addicted to this kind of life.
I was doing my ‘alone-time’ and I loved it.
If nature was being agreeable, which was most evenings, I would be treated to stunning sunsets, better than any movie I've ever watched.
I now arrive at the point of my story, with the context and backdrop now painted!
On my hammock I had several activities to do:
read a book (always non-fiction)
write entries into my notebook
concoct up brilliant and amazing new learning activities for my students back in Bangkok when I would be back at work
listen to my reggae music on my Walkman
watch the insect life going on around me, in awe of how much joy they exuded as they went about the business of being alive, and this joy would permeate all 50 trillion of my body's cells
and, perhaps most of all, contemplate on the nature of life, the human mind, the colossal amount of what I viewed as 'unnecessary suffering', how life works, and so on, and the key question I would explore was this: ‘Why are human beings so full of beauty AND brutality?’
How can we be capable of both? What determines if we will be beautiful or brutal beings today, or within our whole life?
The answer to this question is actually not that important, what is important is recognising that within each of us lies the capacity to be stupendously beautiful, or cruelly brutal.
And that by realising and consciously accepting that we ourselves carry both within our being, we are able to ensure we never choose - or vastly limit - the brutal side of our being.
In our world today - as it was back in the 90s when I looked out at it from my hammock - there is a huge amount of brutality going on, and sometimes it seems like the beautiful has been stamped out.
But I feel the reality is that humankind has never been closer to embracing beauty as our default in life, instead of this propensity for dishing out cruelty and brutality.
Awareness of this is the key to taking charge of our own life, so that we focus on seeking out beauty in nature, art, architecture, our fellow human beings, and to then produce beauty of our own for others to feed on, and to be beauty personified and in action.
My mum always said, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. It’s up to us if we see beauty or not! Take a look at the supremely ugly old warthog: it’s so ugly that I see it as a beautiful being! I think this beauty is a connection, a connection between me, my heart, and that in the outside world which my senses are focussed on.
And we can similarly focus on ditching hatred, resentment, anger, guilt, shame, anxiety and all the rest of them.
How?
Eat whole foods that the planet produced, not that shitty crap that food corporations make. They put chemicals—preservatives, colourings, additives and the like—into their foods and drinks, and these chemicals sour our mental mood and emotional wellbeing.
Get yourself into some beautiful nature as regularly as you can, definitely every week if possible, and take time to feel connected to it all from your sensory perception and from the joy and consciousness triggered in your heart.
Find people who can help you learn and who have inspiring stories and who are doing their best to connect with all that is beautiful on this heaven upon which we live.
That is, food for the body, food for the soul, food for the mind. Feed your beauty seeds within, starve your brutality seeds within!
Post-Reading Task
1) Think about something you did once that was a beautiful action, and ask yourself why you acted that way.
Now think about something you did once that, if not exactly brutal, was cruel or nasty towards another person - a loved one, a friend, a stranger. Ask yourself why you acted that way.
2) What do you think gives rise to expressions of cruelty, nastiness, brutality? What actions can we take to starve the brutality seeds?
3) This was the bold bit from the passage:
But I feel the reality is that humankind has never been closer to embracing beauty as our default in life, instead of this propensity for dishing out cruelty and brutality.
Do you agree or disagree with me? Why? If you think longer about it, do you find yourself changing your mind either way?
~~~~~~~
Now for something different!
It’s still task-based, but this time it’s a listening activity. One of my videos to be precise. And it goes nicely with the reading passage above. It’s called:
How to Develop Your Inner Authority with Practical Meditation
Pre-listening task
What is your relationship with meditation? What IS meditation? What is ‘practical meditation’? Why should we incorporate meditation into our life?
During listening task
Within the video there is a task, asking you to pause and think about things, and to then continue watching. Please do this task to tap into and raise your awareness of what you already understand about life.
Here is the link to the video.
Post-listening task
1) In the video I said, “The best thing to put in your life is a regular slot of time and space for you to be alone with your own thoughts and feelings, and observe.”
I’ve written about this in previous Letters, doing regular reflection time on your life, keeping a journal; have you made it part of your life yet?! If not, do you want to consider making it a thing now?
2) Here are the two food for thoughts from my book that you heard in the video:
“The only guru you need is you. Don’t be a Buddhist, be your own Buddha. Others can medicate you, others can mediate for you, but only you can meditate for you. Meditation is your own medication and mediation in life.”
“Ignorance in a land of milk and honey may well be bliss. Ignorance on Planet Earth, at the outset of the third millennium, is far too dangerous to entertain.”
Now that you have had a think on them, and then heard my own experiences and thoughts, think on this:
How can you be more knowledgeable and proactive in creating the life you would like to be living? What tangible things can you implement into your life to become your own buddha?
And with that I bid you a wonderful week ahead!
