Tempest in a Teapot

I've gotten back in my groove this year, with meditation becoming daily. I'm not up to two hours a day of walking/sitting, but I'm getting in a good 45 - 60 minutes. It's like anything you practice and then cut back on. The "muscle" memory is still there and it becomes easy to get back into the routine. Unlike other routines, this one is for me personally very rewarding.

I still swing trade and the last couple of months, I've made good money on my picks. Friday was a +$1,600 day and I'm positioned to do pretty okay this upcoming week. I think. November and December brought in around +$14,500. My biggest error of late has been bailing when I'm up one or two grand; this has caused me to miss profits big time. CREV went on a tear and I cashed out with $2k when, if I had just waited, I would've made another 6-8. RR same story. 2024 was my first year doing active trading, so I don't beat myself too much about it.

Friday, I jumped on MBOT and by the end of after hours session, was up $2K. I resisted the urge to sell because I expect good news next week that will drive the price further north.

This to say I'm already doing much better balancing my need to have a decent retirement with dedication to Buddhist practice. Laymen have a challenge in avoiding getting lost in the stream of activity, plans, material and other needs at a time when things are going to pot.

Each new year brings a deeper sense of trepidation and concern. This year, I'm working on welcoming these and other challenges as they arise. In Buddhism, to welcome fear, anxiety and to witness them as temporary things that they will fade as everything does is very Aryan.

I'm currently working on another long post about the anti-Christ. It's probably going to need to be several posts and there's nothing original in it if you are someone who reads alternative media. This whole blog is for me to work through ideas via writing as it is satisfying to have a conversation even if it's only with myself.

The title for this blog post references the 1981-ish arcade game Tempest. Tonight while sitting, I had gotten really settled and things were pretty quiet and calm. Earlier in the day, I had been reflecting on sitting as this oasis where the arising and ceasing attendant to normal life kind of gets put aside. In a good session, you achieve a serene state of open, concentrated awareness and this is sometimes when things pop up. Stillness is found and it's a state of being that, once you taste it, everything else in life gets measured by it. Another quality to be found here is contentment, but this is not exactly the word. Everything else in life involves seeking/avoiding or being parked in neutral. Neutral is not the same thing as concentrated awareness and contentment.

In my case, video game images pop up every once in a while. I know, very spiritual and if you're not familiar with meditation, you'll not understand that in Buddhism, this is not something without total meaning. Tonight, it was Tempest. A vivid image popped up at the end of the session, around the point where I usually stop, of a tube and spider-like thing sitting on the edge of the tube moving to and fro in an effort to block the pieces from moving up the sides.

In 1981, graphics were pretty simple. This was the era of 8-bit computer programs and there were probably 16 or 32 colors available in total. What impressed me though was that I had not thought of this arcade game in decades. Why would I? There were more memorable arcade games that I played in the 1980s as a kid, like Defender, Pac-Man, Joust and Frogger. And they just looked better too, such that in the 90s and later, GenXers were building emulators for them.

I've played a lot of video games over decades and even in my middle age, I still play them, but not very often. I go through a period where I won't touch my console for eight months and then one day, I will just sit and play for hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Video games are bad though and I've generally avoided overdoing it with them because they become addictive, adding a new layer of simulated reality to what is already an impersonal, fragmentary and transient stream of life. When I was weaning myself off alcohol and cigarettes, I didn't have anything or anyone to turn to and video games were there to keep me from going to the bottle shop to buy wine after work. Meditation was not part of my life and I had no clue what a dhamma talk was. In some sense, playing Battlefield and Assassins Creed helped me break the kind of non-thinking habit that goes with alcohol abuse by giving me something that was more wholesome and engaging to do. Much of physical addiction is just repetition of little rituals. It's all habit, a thick crust of previous choices which have petrified on the mind.

Then again, our lives are habits. I still perform rituals every day before going to work and it never changes.

The name of the game didn't come to mind, just the image, so I had to describe the scene to ChatGPT. The AI of course nailed it by suggesting that Tempest was the source of my recollection. After a Google search, I was like, "Yup, that's it!"

I decided to confer further with ChatGPT about meditation and the recall of 40+ year old memories. It provided a neurological account of the phenomenon, showing that it was "aware" of such things through its training. One particular point it made struck me as odd: certain emotional or "charged" experiences have a way of getting enmeshed in the deepest parts of our brain and when the mind gets into a certain state, these can resurface spontaneously. Overall, the account it gave was pretty solid.

However, Tempest was not especially important to me as a kid and this is why I say ChatGPT's observation seemed odd. As I mentioned, I had lots of other arcade games that I enjoyed much more. These experiences are not the point of meditation at all and they are not parlor tricks you can do to yourself in order to sound "spiritual." IRL, I would never relate this story to another person because it has no point except to me. Stories like this open yourself up to criticism of being some faker who chases novelties like this.

In a retreat setting, I'm guessing the director would give some advice about not getting tangled up. I know with certain phenomena like sounds or pretty lights (mine were violet), it's possible to become fascinated with them instead of doing what experience practitioners do – ignore them while remaining neutral.

Again, meditation is not about the ability to recall lives but it does happen. I've heard of instances of people recalling a lot or a little of previous lives during or right after a sit. Like NDEs, OBEs and so on, there is no way to confirm or deny what is a highly subjective experience nor should there be. The benefit is for the practitioner, to confirm or teach. What? I don't know for certain, although one can say that, from an empirical vantage point, there is no annihilation at death, that there is karma and its operations can be seen. It would confirm that there is a something which propels a being from life to life and that is craving, even people don't witness craving in their recollections.

I won't describe here other recollections I've had because they are personal, but will say they didn't involve video games.

The Buddha became enlightened at night and in the first watch, he attained recall of past lives. Imagine for a moment that you are middle aged and you recall a vivid image from 40+ years ago. Why can't I go even further back and recall eating chocolate pudding on a hot summer evening as a toddler with my family? After my own experiences, I would say nothing. I played Tempest a few times when I was like 10.

But how far does the stream go back? If you are a Westerner, you will say it goes back to possibly to the womb since there are some people who claim a recollection of their time in the joint (so to speak). Ajahn Martin, following in the tradition of Ajahn Maha Bua, encourages meditators who reach samadhi to use the opportunity to inquire into their own childhoods. What was being a baby like? What was being a child like? In other words, from a secure, stable mental position which doesn't come naturally, can you begin seeing the unfolding of your life and the role of the kilesas in it? Can you see the impermanence, the dukkha that has followed you at every moment? No doubt, meditators whether lay or ordained have probably tapped into some pretty interesting material from the archive.

(Impermanence is so core to understanding existence, yet it's dukkha that seems to be permanent within samsara. Is samsara permanent? Some think so. So is dukkha linked to Nibbana in some mysterious way?)

It's possible I suppose for someone to have recollections that are so impressive, so detailed as to become a distraction from the aim of practice. This is a spiritual risk, but generally these only come up (at least in my limited experience) when practicing concentration using breath as the focus of the meditation. Concentration – which sounds like someone sitting hunched over gasping and straining to recall some obscure name from a phone conversation in 1993 – is instead a relaxed but energetic state of presence brought about through breath.