Paul Garrigan's Blog

I hardly met the man. Yet, forty years later, and I’m still thinking about him.

He would have been around my age now . Back then older people were about as interesting to me as furniture; just things that existed in the background. It was girls that had my attention. Closely followed by lads to go drinking flagons of cider with. And yet, this old man stood out like a beacon.

I can’t remember how we ended up in his house. I was with my dad, so it must have been one of his friends. I do remember there being singing with everyone expected to have a go. The Pogues had just released their first album so diddly-diddly music was back in style. I still had dreams of joining the next U2, so I didn’t mind giving a shaky rendition of ‘The Rare Old Times”.

So why did that old fella have such a huge impact? It wasn’t anything he said. We may not have even exchanged any words. But, the whole sitting room appeared to orbit around him. Like a tree in the forest, he belonged in that room. Out of nowhere, his teenage daughter leaned in to give him a kiss on the cheek. It was clear that she and the rest of the family adored him, and so did the neighbours. And yet, he was just ordinary

For a few years, alcohol seemed to almost provide me with that ease. But it turned out to be a sham. Countless times in desperation my mind offered a tantalizing other possibility with this memory. After all, the one thing I do remember hearing that night was how he had once been the village drunk.

Now, I could have been wrong about him. Maybe he was nowhere near as at ease as I imagined. And yet, it doesn’t matter. That memory worked like a lighthouse guiding me to safety. I hardly met the man, yet he changed everything.

The post I Hardly Met the Man first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

The session ends with a sense of frustration. This is the one where I talk specifically about trust, intimacy, and wonder. It seems that the closer I get to things I want to say, the more my words fail me. I am all too aware of the confused and sometimes even bored faces as I strain to get my points across.

All my life I’ve struggled to communicate. My earliest memories of interactions with adults include a lot of “what’s he bloody saying”. I mumbled and spoke too fast. I felt ashamed of my words, and just wanted to fling them out into the world as fast as possible.

Then there is Thai. I have devoted thousands of hours to this language, and while I’m at ease listening and reading Thai, I can still struggle in conversation. If I am going to give a talk in Thai, I pretty much have to memorize it word for word.

I had hoped that my deepening experience of trust, intimacy, and wonder would make it easier to talk about it, but the opposite has happened. All my words sound shallow and weak when it comes to describing this thing that has so absolutely changed my life in ways I could never have imagined when I was younger. Back then, listening to this talk of trust, intimacy, and wonder would likely have left me feeling confused and bored too.

And yet, rather than my frustration with words being a problem, I now understand it as my motivation to create. This frustration is my gift. It is the burning desire to share something so important to me that keeps me writing and talking.

I know that what I’m trying to say can’t be adequately captured in words. This is why I prefer communicating in stories about my life because this can point to something beyond words. Stories can trigger listeners to imagine what I’m saying rather than simply listening.

All my life I’ve struggled to communicate. It seems that the closer I get to things I want to say, the more my words fail me. And yet, rather than my frustration with words being a problem, I now understand it as my motivation to create. This frustration is my gift.

The post My Struggle to Communicate first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that getting into conversations with strangers in bars could end badly. I tended to get more insulting and argumentative after a few beers. So, I usually preferred to just drink alone. I’d have a book with me in the bar, but I’d spend much of the time just daydreaming. One of the things that attracted me to alcohol was how it seemed to free my imagination. I could fall into a drunken fantasy about my future success, and this could go on for hours.

A common fear about quitting alcohol and other drugs is that it might somehow inhibit imagination. This can be a particular worry for creative people. I found the opposite was true. My imagination while drinking was similar to pulp fiction or chewing gum. I would dream of being successful and people liking me – I’ll show them. I would dream of having a lot of money or becoming famous. I had the imagination of someone who was dying of thirst. Alcohol seemed to make me more creative, so I’d try to write, but everything I wrote while drunk felt self-indulgent and as depressing as a hormonal teenager’s diary. I’d always end up ripping it up when sober.

I remember reading how the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified two types of imagination. One involved frozen images (he calls this “fancy”), and the other is real imagination. The former is a desperate attempt to escape the prison of normal living while the latter provides the possibility of liberation within it. Frozen images are disembodied while real imagination is embodied.

Giving up alcohol didn’t weaken my imagination, it set it free. Mindfulness gave me the ability to come back to the body, to be with things like emotions and moods, and it is these that became the fuel for real imagination. An imagination that could now move beyond my preconceived ideas about myself, other people, and the world. I followed the advice of William Blake and escaped the imprisoned mind by cleaning the doors of perception.

The post From Barstool Dreams to Real Imagination first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

A few years ago, I was back visiting Ireland. I was walking through a park near where I grew up. I was wearing this old jacket that was a bit too big for me. Out of nowhere, I experienced the sensation of being watched. I imagined how other people might see me in that park. A middle-aged anonymous bald guy who looked a bit scruffy .

This image of how other people saw me was so different from the image of how I saw myself. Which one was correct? Was I the main character in my own drama, or was I just some anonymous bald guy? Rather than that less flattering image disturbing me, it brought a sense of joy and relief. It is like my own self-image and this other image cancelled each other out. I could see clearly that I am not an image.

My self-image involved a perfection that I could never attain. This led to an almost constant state of seeking. The image created by the other was of just some random guy, not very interesting, one among billions. This certainly brought a sobering reflection on any grandiose ideas I might have.

And yet, it was so obvious that neither of these images captured what I was. My life is a process that could never be captured in any image. This is what is meant in Buddhism by no-self. A self is when we see ourselves as an image, it is when we see ourselves as an object, but we are not an object. We could never be captured in any image, we are an ever-changing process.

The post Disappearing in an Irish Park first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

Moving statues of the Virgin Mary were all the rage in Ireland in the mid-1980s. I got to visit one, even though I wasn’t a believer. And yet, I couldn’t help but be caught up in the magical atmosphere. After about an hour of staring at the thing, it moved. There was a loud gasp of wonder and astonishment from the crowd. For a moment, the world became enchanted.

There was no denying the magic in that moment, but it didn’t bring me back to my childhood faith. It wasn’t that my rational mind objected. I didn’t just put it down to mass hysteria or optical illusions from staring too long. It was more that the experience deepened my doubts about everything. What is this thing we call reality? How can we know if we are being fooled? How can we be sure of anything? I could see that moment of enchantment was as real as it gets. But how it happened was a matter of belief. I realized that wonder is a way of being rather than a way of thinking. 

Here is a short comic-strip video I made for this text

The post Moving Statues in Ireland Trigger Enchantment first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

My favorite poem is Patrick Kavanagh’s The Hospital where he describes falling in love with his surroundings. He was admitted to St James’ Hospital in Dublin on a Chest Ward to have a lung removed due to cancer. You might expect this to be just a stressful and frightening event, but some of his greatest poems were written around this time, and the main focus is a love for life or the passionate transitory as he calls it.

How could anyone fall in love with a ward in a chest hospital? It sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it? Especially given the seriousness of his situation. But, I completely get it. The love we have for something is always about recognizing how precious it is. I suspect for Patrick, it was waking up to the preciousness of life as a result of his brush with death. Love and wonder are not something we do, it is more like something we recognize. Or as Patrick puts it in his poem, when we record love’s mystery without claptrap.

When I read the Hospital, it always brings me back to being a 7 year old and my own falling in love with the children’s ward in Dun Laoghaire Hospital. I had been knocked down by a car, and I ended up spending a couple of weeks in there. I loved it. Maybe for a different reason than Patrick though. At the time, I was still an only child, and I just loved having friends around me. I loved people coming it to see me, making a fuss of me, and bringing me sweets, comics, and Lucozade. The TV needed to be fed coins for it to work, but there was something so luxurious about being able to watch it all day in bed with my new friends.  I felt cared for. It felt like an adventure. The only thing that I remember scaring me was the long brown rubber hose they used for given enemas.

There is something crucial that links my experience with Patrick Kavanagh’s that isn’t limited to staying in hospital. It might be easy to dismiss my experience of love and wonder as due to the naivety of childhood, and Patrick’s as a result of his fear of losing the things he had taken for granted. I think the real point is that this enchanted relationship with life is available to anyone. All it takes is to follow the instructions in the poem to record love’s mystery without claptrap.

What is claptrap? Apparently, it refers to the way theatres in the nineteenth century would use cheap gimmicks to get people to clap. Kind of like bullshit. So, the reason why it can be so hard to recognize this enchanted world, to experience love and wonder, is our lives are too caught up in bullshit. I am not dismissing the difficulties we encounter in life, but ask yourself this, if you had only moments left to live, how serious would those problems appear to you? Patrick’s cancer diagnosis put things into perspective for him, and the claptrap fell away so he could recognize the stunning beauty within the ordinary.

People argue that it is not possible for an adult to experience the wonder of a child. Patrick Kavanagh demonstrates the gaping flaw in this view. Yes we can because the world we experienced as children still exists. It is only our way of relating to life that has changed. If we can set aside our own claptrap, the enchanted world is there ready and waiting for us. Why wait for something terrible to happen when we could wake up right now to the passionate transitory.

Here is a video where I go to all of this in more detail

The post Patrick Kavanagh’s Teaching on the Passionate Transitory first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

There is a way of experiencing life where we are immersed in trust, intimacy, and wonder. I call this the non-ordinary world. It is a world where we break free of concerns as the enormity of this magical and absurd thing called life hits us. The non-ordinary world is a move away from conceptual knowing towards the recognition of the limits of our knowing. Not so much a destruction of concepts, but a liberation from the tendency to take them literally.

The terms ordinary world and non-ordinary world are of course concepts in themselves. But, what I’m trying to suggest that the problem isn’t so much the concepts themselves, it is taking them to be literal. This creates a kind of conceptual prison. I am not claiming there literally is an ordinary world and non-ordinary world, but that this way of looking at things can be helpful if it leads us to trust, intimacy, and wonder. Sometimes, we can use a thorn to remove a thorn.

We tend to live in what we might call the ordinary world. This is a world comprised of concepts and the assumptions we are making about life. It is not so much that this world is less real than the non-ordinary world, but more that it so easily creates a conflict. In fact, when it comes to what is real, perhaps the best approach is humble admission of not knowing. Maybe, the best approach is to move the conversation away from what is real towards how we can reduce suffering and increase satisfaction in life.

It is a crude analogy, but we might compare this to somebody taking a recreational drug. What this does is alter the person’s experience in a way that can, at least in the beginning, lead to a much improved experience. This change doesn’t depend on beliefs or conceptions, yet it is something that is undeniable. We might say that the state people take when they use these substances is self-evident. It doesn’t require any proof.

Of course, recreational drugs are a flawed path to follow because of where it can lead. It is also only offers a temporary change that isn’t that reliable and becomes harder to achieve as people develop tolerance to the drug. But, we can still think of a move from the ordinary world to the non-ordinary world in these terms. It doesn’t require new beliefs or new opinions, but simply a change in how we relate to life.

This could all sound like another form of escapism or even a type of spiritual bypassing. But all we are doing is admitting something that is kind of obvious. Our concepts may be useful, but do we really know with absolute certainty that they are true. The problem is that without realizing it, we often treat our concepts as if they were absolutely true. So, when the thought “other people don’t like me” pops into our head, we can easily treat this as if it were undeniably true.

The ordinary world is created through our concepts. These concepts can be useful. We might even argue that the success of the human race has depended on our ability to create concepts. But, these concepts can create unnecessary suffering and remove all of the wonder from life. When we think we know, this tends to dampen our curiosity and access to wonder. It also creates a tension as our knowing will depend on assumptions that can be challenged. If I know that I’m a good person, it can bring me into conflict with the richness and complexity of what I am. If I know what should be happening, it creates the misery of expectations being crushed. If I know how other people should behave, they can become a constant source of disappointment.

To help us better understand the distinction between the ordinary world and the non-ordinary world, it might be useful to look at an idea from the German philosopher Fichte. He suggested that there was a division in our perception between the “I” and the “non-I”. The I needs to distinguish itself from the non-I by being different, but this creates an ongoing tension between the non-I and the I. So, if I see myself as successful, I can start to see the world in terms of all of the forces operating against my success. We could think of ordinary world as living with this I/not I tension while the non-ordinary world is what becomes increasingly apparent as this tension is eased.

The non-ordinary world isn’t separate from the ordinary world. It reveals itself to the extent that we are able to put aside our concepts. It is what remains when we stop believing what this is. There is a reluctance to claim it as more real than the ordinary world because this can potentially an unhelpful concept. But, it certainly feels more real, more reliable, and liberating. It also feels like home as our resistance to life subsides and we can relax into what is happening. This relaxation doesn’t mean avoiding the real challenges in our life, but facing them without our usual “shoulds” which so often cause resistance.

The Buddha advised that we must not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. Here I am attempting to point at something that you can experience for yourself. Practices like mindfulness can loosen the grip that concepts have on us, so we can begin to notice this non-ordinary world for ourselves.

The post A Modest Proposal – A Path to a Better Way of Experiencing Life first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

“In the end it took me a dictionary to find out the meaning of unrequited”

Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy

My heart was broken at seventeen by a girl who refused to fit in with my plans. We started going out a few months before her debs ball. Looking back, I suspect her desire to have somebody to take to this event was a big part of her motivation in dating me. I had big ideas for our future together, but we were moving in opposite directions. She was about to go to university. I had been kicked out of school at fifteen and my main hobby was getting drunk.

Her rejection the day after the debs ball felt devastating. It was like my world had imploded, and for a few weeks I was inconsolable. How could she be so cruel? How could the world be so cruel?

The philosopher Fichte talks about a division in perception between the “I” and the “not-I”. The “I” in this case was busy planning a future with this girl, while the “not I” was getting ready for an exciting life at university. The conflict was between what I thought should be happening, and what appeared to be going on.

Of course, there is no fixed “what should be happening”. There is only the “I” trying to impose itself onto reality.  The problem is our sense of “I” can only exist by being in opposition to the “Not I”. Without this division, there is only what is. In my case, I identified with being rejected because my “I” was centered around belief that we should be together.

I say what “appeared to be going on” because I was interpreting this based on my ideas about what should be happening. My feelings of being rejected weren’t due to her actions, but due to the my (the I) failure to make the world fit my plans.

It is kind of absurd when I think back to how devastated I felt. How huge it all felt. All the drama it created. Now, I can’t even remember what she looked like.

The post My Teenage Heartbreak and the Illusion of Should first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

Ordinary perception is divided into two. The German philosopher Fichte describes this division as between the Ich (I) and Nicht-Ich (not I). This “I” part of the perception includes all of our ideas about who we are, who other people are, and how the world is supposed to be. The “not I” is perceived as the outside world which tends to be seen as in opposition. In fact, the sense of “I” can only exist by differentiating itself from the “not I”  There is a conflict inherent in this way of perceiving as the I tries to dominate, escape, or resist the not-I. Liberation from this conflict arises by recognizing that the division in perception is a delusion.

The post The Conflict Within Perception first appeared on paulgarrigan.com.

The somewhat gloomy German philosopher Schopenhauer suggested it is “will” (a blind tyrannical force compelling us to be always striving) that makes life an ongoing struggle. This will is frustrated by obstacles and at war with itself due to competing agendas. As Schopenhauer points out, while we may be free to follow our desires, we have no control over what these desires are. Our freedom is that of a slave obeying a master.  Facing such oppressive forces, the obvious conclusion is that we are powerless.

Hold on though, what if, the problem isn’t what we are calling “the will”, but more the way we relate to these forces? Take anxiety for example, we feel anxious and this triggers fearful thoughts about not wanting to feel this way. This is a lack of integrity because we now feel at odds with ourselves, powerless because the body isn’t doing what we want it to do. But, why are we identifying more with the thoughts here than what is happening in the body? Is it this favoring of one part of the experience over the rest that is the source of powerlessness?

I used to be crippled by anxiety. When working full-time as a writer, there would be times when work would dry up and fear would overwhelm me. More times than not, I’d take to my bed paralyzed by worry. This continued until I recognized my “anxiety” as a  powerful energetic state where I could get shit done. This shift in perspective turned it from an enemy to an ally.

The poet W.H. Auden observed how “we are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” We lack integrity when we favor some of these forces over others. But what if these forces are ultimately trying to achieve the same thing? What if they are like a team, each with something unique and valid to offer. By identifying with some while rejecting others, there is no opportunity for cooperation. Instead, there is an internal war which no side can win. Would it be crazy to suggest that ending this war would reveal our true power?

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