A Year to Live

Everfresh in the Changing

Month: August 2015 Page 2 of 4

Process Never Arises, Never Ceases. The Deathless Never Stops Arising.

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On August 21, 2015

In Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

Whenever one thoroughly knows the birth and death of the five sentient processes
one finds joy and happiness.  For those who know this, that is deathlessness.  (374)

– Dhammapada, verse 374. Translated Christopher J. Ash

avolakitesvaraThe five sentient processes, with which one becomes thoroughly familiar, in Buddhist meditation, are: form, feeling-tones, perceptions (or, recognitions), states of the psyche (or, attitudes), and consciousness (in the sense of basic awareness). Skilfully conducting these time-space-knowledge processes is the heart of the fourth placement of mindfulness, in the Mindfulness Sutta (the Satipaṭṭhānasutta). This is often named ‘mindfulness of mind-objects,’ but I prefer to think of this as mindfulness of the dynamics of phenomena. This is the territory that the Nikāya Buddha and Sakka were talking about, in our previous posts. In the Mindfulness Sutta the Nikāya Buddha points to the importance of comprehending the moment to moment birth and death of these five sentient processes.

They are not things, at all. And with development of subtle discernment, they are not found separately, at all, when freed of conceptualising. The root matter, then – the liberating matter, the redeeming matter – is the pure and total openness of the processes. Joy and happiness arise, and support one to stay appreciatively there in the openness; making it possible to intuit the profound quality of intelligence, which is greater than sentience, and yet not apart from the multiplicity. This is the Nameless, a source of big heart, and the recognition of the perfect harmony of this big life process.

One in whom a desire for the nameless has arisen – who would permeate his mind with the nameless,
whose heart is not bound to sense pleasure – is called: “One going home.

– Dhammapada, verse 218. Translated Christopher J. Ash

The trick, though, is not to make a blankness out of the recognition of the deathlessness quality. It’s an undivided multiplicity. We usually swing back and forth between oneness or the ten thousand things; however, sentience itself is the nameless, and also the nameless is sentience. The many are the one, and the one is many. Hence Suzuki Roshi’s suggestion that we know ‘things as they is.’

“Anyway, it is rather difficult to see “things as it is,” because seeing “things as it is” is not just the activity of our sight or eyes. This is why we put emphasis on practice. To do something without thinking is the most important point in understanding ourselves.” – Suzuki Roshi, talk Friday, September 8, 1967.

So, pure sentience is not the same as the five separated processes. The separation into five is conceptually created. True sentience is not other than unselfconsciously raising a fork to your mouth; or, stepping over your child’s playthings, while making it to the fridge.

One day, the Tang Dynasty Ch’an Buddhist monk Yunyan Tansheng addressed his fellow monk Daowu about this quality of living.

Yunyan: How does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many eyes and hands?”Daowu: It’s as if someone at night reached behind him, trying to find his pillow.”Yunyan: I understand.Daowu:  How do you mean?Yunyan: The body is eyes and hands all over.Daowu: This says a lot, but only 8/10 of what there is to say.Yunyan: What do you say, older brother?Daowu: The whole body is eyes and hands.

Sakka’s Questions II

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On August 20, 2015

In Death, Radiant Citta, Resisting Death, Time, Space, & Knowledge

A short post today. I walked into a half open door in the night, and got a nasty whack on my eye socket. I’ve been a bit dazed since, but I feel a bit better after a visit to my acupuncturist, today. Should be okay in a couple of days. You just don’t know what’s next. – Christopher.

A river of longing flows, and beings are pleased.
Seeking happiness they attach to pleasure, but get birth and decline.

– Dhammapada, verse 341. Translated Christopher J. Ash

Our wishes, wants, hopes, longings, hungers, and so on, themselves bring pleasure. We are pleased to long. However, the kind of pleasure we are talking about, in answer to Sakka, is the self-defeating kind of pleasure. At root it involves rejection of things as they are, and selfishness – which not only bring conflict, they are conflict.

The teacher says to Sakka that this wilfulness goes with erroneous reflections (vitakka) on self and on life processes. We can see, then that it is here – with concepts – that one’s ego-stances and defences are established. And, it’s here that the holes in consciousness arise. They exist because one depends on erroneous views about consciousness. So, when someone says they feel like there’s an empty, black hole in the middle of their body, I don’t merely take that as poetic talk. It’s very real to the person, and it comes with unconscious feelings and concepts. The experience of a hole; the person’s unexamined thinking; the hidden pleasure, and the longings – these all inter-are. The hole arises as a dynamic complex. If they truly want to end the suffering, they need to become familiar with the dependently-arisen nature of the black hole.

And, next, the Buddha says to Sakka that the underlying support for such erroneous concepts, he says, is the mis-perception of life’s multiplicity (papañca-saññā-saṅkha) – that is, dualistic perception. How to transform dualistic perception, which is the root of distorting desire, is, then, the whole point of the Buddhist work. Until this level is reached, we are without a revolution in consciousness, and our contentment will depend on tinkering with the patterns. One teacher told me once that this was like a person in a movie theatre, up there at the screen with cans of paint and brushes, trying to capture the images onto the screen. The person is not only engaged in a fruitless, messy, conceptual exercise, but they miss the movie.

People encircled by thirst run about like captured hares.
Confined by the bonds of their clinging, they suffer, again and again, for a long time.

– Dhammapada, verse 342. Translated Christopher J. Ash

This dualistic perception makes manifold what is not manifold; that is, via concepts it takes the differentiations (the sentient processes of perceiving differences) as establishing things which are really absolutely, separate. Boundaries are established as really existing, rather than as conceptual. As a result, we lose and misuse the very real power of concepts. This means experiencing without the big-life context – without the wholeness. We miss, for example, the simple fact that what is ‘over there’ depends for its presentation on a consciousness. When we begin our projects of understanding from a reality devoid of the big wholeness dimension, we can only repeat old patterns. We run around in circles. That’s called samsāra.

There is a way out of the violence. Sakka is delighted to hear that there is a dynamic which can be understood, and mastered. This kind of delight is a redirection of the flow of freedom. Thank you, Sakka.

Sakka’s Questions

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On August 19, 2015

In Death, Radiant Citta, Resisting Death, Time, Space, & Knowledge

A ‘me-self’ at the imagined centre of the person is crucial to separation-mind. Today, we’re going through this in a little more detail. But first, let me remind you why I’m doing this.

Death is something that we rarely examine. When it comes to bodily death, conventionally we accept that we can only know it from the outside of it – at least, until our time has come. Having our acquaintance with death limited to this mode of thinking (3rd-person, object mode) means that we: a) remain unprepared for death, b) don’t access the subtle dimensions of experience, and can’t recognise the dimension of life called ‘the deathless.’ That is a great loss of riches in life and death, on all levels of human experience. It means we have images of happiness that are unrealistic, unachievable. It also means the violence goes on, because it is based in ignorance of the deeper layers of consciousness. So, yesterday, I mentioned ‘rejection and selfishness’ as causes of conflict. I could say, too, that selfish happiness can’t bring happiness.

‘Rejection,’ or false separation, is an normal part of ego development, it would seem. If you want an instance, just think of the phenomenon of the ‘terrible twos,’ the phase that some developmental theorists call the ‘rapproachement.’

“The rapprochement subphase of ego development in childhood begins when the child becomes conceptually aware of his separateness from his mother. This coincides with the deflation of his grandeur and omnipotence. He becomes actually aware of his vulnerability and dependence. One possible recourse for him is to defend against the perception of vulnerability and dependency by continuing to believe in his omnipotence. In this case he develops a self that is based on this defensive sense of grandiosity, an inflated sense of self that covers up emptiness and deficiency.”
– A.H. Almaas. Pearl Beyond Price, p. 286  

However, I’ll give the Buddhist language for these deeper layers. The newcomer can still get the gist of what follows, though, if they just skip the Pāli words, which are in brackets. I’m putting in the Pāli words, this time, for those who have more extensive Buddhist background.

So, I was saying: Sakka the God-king asks the Nikāya Buddha about the cause of violence. The answer is ‘rejection and selfishness’ (issā-macchariya). I think of this as: self-bias. So, Sakka then asks further questions, to unfold more deeply the inter-related mind-events which give rise to conflict. The teacher explains that this combination is related to another kind of common experience: ‘being pleased or displeased (piyappiyā).’ Say, for example, that I am mindlessly thinking of buying some delicious (fictional) Ken & Mary’s ice-cream. The thought pleases me. It may even obsess me. The thought becomes a kind of ear-worm.

If I am unreflectively pleased by the thought of Ken & Mary’s, mindlessly delighting in it, I will go into grasping and defending mode of personality. Let’s say, on top of this, I have a cancer diagnosis and my doctor has asked me to reduce sugar, and reduce my weight, and… I have good reason to abandon the thought of Ken & Mary’s, right? But the thought of tasting Ben & Mary’s is pleasing to me, and, next, I refuse abandon it.

Actually, speaking personally, as your guide, here: When I was a young meditator, I figured that musical ear-worms were just the brain’s habit, and that you just had to suffer them. Later, when my familiarity with the subtle dimensions of desire was stronger, I saw that there is a subtle delight in the thought-music which keeps them going.

Of course, the delight which we’re examining, here, can be a more subtle delight. I can pick a fight with my spouse, for example, because while arguing I feel less lonely, less isolated, more solid, strong (with false strength, but…), and so on. In other words, arguing with my loved one might please my need to feel like I’m a separate someone, or a special person. It might demonstrate to me that I’m smart, or righteous, or something.

Next, the teacher tells Sakka, that a necessary condition for being pleased or displeased is ‘desire’ (chanda); that is, some kind of seeking – a hungry desire or wilfulness. This is where i refuse to abandon the thought of Ken & Mary’s.

It’s worth my saying, here, in the context of the continued indulgence in what is not good for us, that the desires we are speaking about here – unwholesome desire – usually has to do with underlying deficiency in the personality (as Almaas mentions, above). Freud called these holes, ‘lacunae.’ These don’t get extensive treatment in the Nikāyas; however, there is the concept of a ‘barren heart-mind’ (or, cetokhila, see MN16). The ‘barren heart’ seems, to me, to be an early reference to lacunae. On the subtle level they are not just theoretical elements. They can be felt as very tangible experiences of absence.

Enough for today. Let me summarize: Conflict needs ‘rejection and self-bias.’ These need some kind of being pleased or displeased. Being pleased depends on kinds of desire: your wishes, wants, longings, hungers, and so on. We can add to the conversation between Sakka and the Nikaya Buddha, that there are ‘holes’ in consciousness (cetokhila), related to these desires.

I’ll be back with the second half of the conversation tomorrow. If you want to read the very long sutta, yourself, Thanissaro’s translation is here. Remember, all this fuels a misperception about the nature of the big life process, and your individual flow in that flow.

When desire flows,
        Pleasure arises
Attached to happiness, seeking enjoyment,
        People are subject to birth and death.

– Dammapada, verse 341. Translated Gil Fronsdal.

The Dynamics of Living Beings

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On August 18, 2015

In Enquiry, Mindfulness, Positivity, Time, Space, & Knowledge

“It is perception, consciousness, that is the source of all the basic obstacles [to peace]”
– the Buddha of the Sutta-Nipāta. Translated by Saddhatissa.

Today’s post looks at the finer detail of how the angry ape plays such tricks as would make the angels weep. (Measure for Measure, II.ii) He could be driving a car next to you, today. She could be you, at the office. It could be your sister, brother, mother or father, your cousin, or best friend, who dumps on you today. The ape is anyone in conflict with reality.

Here’s the general breakdown of processes involved. Conflict situations depend on selfishness – that is, on identifications involving involving ‘me and mine.’ They depend on rejection of ‘what is.’  One clings to one’s own strongly held view. Naturally, then, being displeased with things-as-they-is (sic) is present.  This has a feel like: “It has to be my way.” Or, “I hate it when….” Or, “Why me?” Under this clinging is the will to exist in accordance with how I think – not with how isness is; but with how isness should be, for me. “This shouldn’t be happening to me!” Though, of course, it is actually happening, irrespective of my preferences. But, my rule is that things like this are not to happen to me!

So, in a conflict with someone, when angry or enraged, our less conscious views include that we are boundaried selves (located objects) in a surrounding environment. The environment is a hostile or dangerous not-self ‘out there.’ There’ll be a lot implied, here, depending on one’s innate character style, and one’s life-experiences. One’s very existence can even feel, on the basis of this ego-system, threatened by an off-hand comment or the toot of a horn! However, all this is not something irreversible, because the reaction, however strong, is merely dependent on habit-energy. It goes deep, of course, and it is warrior’s work to turn toward your own ‘stuff,’ and to approach it with a learner’s mind.

Though one conquers in battle
a thousand times a thousand men,
one is the greatest war-hero
who conquers just one’s self.

– Dhammapada, verse 103. Translated Christopher J. Ash

The most profound learning is engaged in, when one encounters the field of the fundamental habitual splits, created by grasping and naming. The split is in the holistic ground of primordial experiencing. The split can be summed up this way: a separate ‘perceiver’ is imagined to exist ‘in here,’ over and against the ‘perceived’ there. The good news is: because this is about experiencing, then this can be understood in our own experience, and we can establish contact with wholeness.

“Anger, confusion and dishonesty arise when things are set in pairs as opposites. The person with perplexity must train himself in the path of knowledge. The recluse has declared the Truth after realization.’

– Sutta-nipāta, verse 868. Translation, Saddhatissa.

‘Experiencer and experienced’ is a fundamental dualism, which gives rise to many kinds of ‘this and that.’ ‘I/not-I,’ ‘exist/not-exist,’ ‘here/there,’ ‘this way’/‘that way,’ ‘inside/outside,’ and so on – all arise.

When angry, look for the sense of a bystander perceiver in ‘here,’ with a perceived problem-one over there. The other is an object, at this point. That is, something ‘thrown’ (-ject) over there (ob-); which is also something ‘fallen out’ from the primordial ground. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word object means literally a thing thrown before or presented to the mind or thought. This is what rejection and selfishness do to interactional life of undivided multiplicity – they split it up.

It happens incredibly quickly, and only mind-training gets to the root of this. It can be done, though. To that end we train ourselves in calm and inquiry (samatha-vipassanā), opening up new ways of experiencing. The world is usually experienced as a world of bits dispersed all over the place, with our intentions seeming to be the only factor of coherence. This kind of world has to be devalorised through insight into its actuality – how it actually works – which leads (if skilfully done) to developing inner powers of compassion and wisdom; and, realising the power of the wisdom beyond wisdom. This profound inner guidance takes over as we deepen into the way of discovery.

Swans travel through the sky –
the leaders direct their course with inner power.
The wise are guided from the world,
having conquered Māra and his army.

– Dhammapada, verse 175. Translated Christopher J. Ash

Regarding the dynamics of personality-formation and its maintenance (paṭiccasamuppāda), there are many texts showing this in the Buddhist Nikāyas. There are several perspectives given of this dynamic. For instance, in The Sakka Panha Sutta, the Nikāya Buddha (teacher of gods), is questioned by the powerful god, Sakka. He asks the Buddha about the causes of conflict everywhere. ‘Why there is there all this violence? People want to live good lives, but they end up in all kinds of conflict.’ The Buddha’s answer is: “It’s due to rejection and selfishness.” Sakka then continues the enquiry, going deeper step by step, until the root cause is found. I’ll summarise the points made in this particular sutta, with a little commentary, tomorrow.

Apologies

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On August 17, 2015

In Administrative

Dear Friends,

I’ve been told, and I’ve verified, that the comments function isn’t working. I’ve not been able to track down what the problem is, and so we don’t have any way of having a conversation at present. I’ll keep looking into it.

Warmly,
Christopher.

The Angry Ape Takes a Quarter-Turn

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On August 17, 2015

In Body, Mindfulness, Positivity, Radiant Citta

Just as a massive rock is unmoved in the wind,
so praise and blame don’t shake the wise.
– Dhammapada, verse 81. Translated Christopher J. Ash

So, why this unusual effort? Why not just curse the other, vent, discharge, and indulge oneself a little? It turns out that the results of not feeding my ill-will, and the other forms of my egotism, are so positive that the ancient ideal of a flourishing life reveals itself as actually realisable. Who’d believe flourishing would come by forgetting my self-image, and turning a quarter-turn to this very-present, breathing, insubstantial body?  (My Zen teacher used this phrase, ‘a quarter-turn,’ which she got from her teacher. It means that true freedom is so close to you, at any time.) And, as regards my death, of course, the death of the false self is the best preparation for that little door.

And, if I cease breathing today, I don’t want to be dragging along with me, into that sacred space of dying – the space of sacrament – the resentments of the little, false self. That would be too much distraction from the light and the space, and the freedom, of the unconstructed awareness.

Forgiveness practice is one thing to do to help the transformation. Here’s a link to Stephen Levine’s forgiveness meditation. And, gratitude is another thing we can do.

There is some good advice on the net, and in book and tapes, about gratitude practice. So, I want here to point out, instead, a very unusual source of gratitude: that is, gratitude can arise from the thought or presence of those who hurt, attack, and abuse us. We can – in our innermost heart-space – see the angry person as a source of growth; and even as unconditional love, showing us where we can grow. We can drop the ape act.

As an illustration, I remember a partner of mine abusing me, once decades back. I had been giving back as good as I was getting, when suddenly an authentic, open, caring thought came to mind: “Why are we suffering so much? Why this?” I asked it for both of us, for all of us. I was free in an instant. It was one version of the quarter-turn. I stopped returning fire.

(Again, I can’t say it enough that this doesn’t mean being a doormat, or denying your need for protection. Don’t live with physical, emotional, verbal, or psychic violence. This is only saying: don’t get caught by ill-will in return. Defend yourself wisely.)

I’ve found that people who are initially challenged by the idea of being grateful to someone who is shaming, blaming, judging or criticising them are, nevertheless, surprised at the depth of presence and freedom they discover, when they are able to step out of their usual reactivity. It may take a long time, of course, but little steps do get you there. Think: the 2013 film Railway Man. If we live in hate, we live in chains. I do understand, though, this takes a long time, because I’m still working on forgiving others for things they did to me when I was ten! I’m not peddling pie in the sky, here. It’s doable, but takes patience and courage.

During my years as a Zen student, I was deeply affected by a chant, which we did regularly, called Torei Zenji’s Bodhisattva Vow. It’s 17th-Century Japanese. In this chant, we find these words (which someone amusingly referred to as “a road rage abatement program”). A ‘tathāgata,’ mentioned in these lines, is someone when they’re trackless, whose mind is like space or the sky. A ‘tathāgata’ is someone when they are coming or going in suchness. (Or, at least that’s how I read it, from the texts of the earliest schools of Buddhism. Here, in Torei Zenji’s tradition, it refers to a most sublime quality of unconditioned reality.)

“When I regard the true nature of the many dharmas,
I find them all to be sacred forms of the Tathāgata’s never-failing essence…
…we can be especially sympathetic and affectionate with foolish people,
particularly with someone who becomes a sworn enemy and persecutes us with abusive language.
That very abuse conveys the Buddha’s boundless loving-kindness.
It is a compassionate device to liberate us entirely from the mean-spirited delusions we have built up with our wrongful conduct from the beginningless past.
With our open response to such abuse we completely relinquish ourselves, and the most profound and pure faith arises.
At the peak of each thought a lotus flower opens, and on each flower there is revealed a Buddha.”

Experiment with this. If you’re relatively new to this, try it out on the little angers, the little hurts. And, don’t lay a trip on yourself, like: “I should be grateful, like Torei Zenji.” I haven’t met a person who didn’t, at some stage in their life, hate in return for abuse. And, further, it’s not unusual to, at some stage, blame oneself for hating others. The inner judge is adept at pointing out where you fail. That’s practically its job description! So, notice that, and disengage from self-criticism. Then, you will find beginner’s mind.

Such gratitude doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not: instant forgiveness, and then you find yourself in Torei Zenji-mind.’ However, it does happen, if you persist with the small steps. It’s more usual that you try for the total big freedom, and you experience a little shift. And, that’s great, because those shifts change your body; that is, your unconscious (or, to say it differently: they store up hidden power).

And, then, sometimes that shift is the quarter-turn which reveals your boundless, luminous mind. Occasionally you have a big shift – it certainly does happen. Imagine if Narcissus had made just a quarter-turn, and became less fixated on his self-image. He might have popped out of his trance, he might have seen past his surface reflection, and looked into the still, pure pool of his true mind.

“He insulted me, attacked me, limited me, deprived me.”
For those bearing enmity like this, hatred doesn’t cease.

“He insulted me, attacked me, limited me, deprived me.”
For those not bearing enmity like this, hatred ceases.

Hatred never ceases through hatred.
This is a timeless reality: through love alone hatred ceases.

Many do not realise that we here are dying.
For those who understand, their quarrels end.

– Dhammapada, verses 3-6. Translated Christopher J. Ash

Not The Angry Ape Driving

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On August 16, 2015

In Body, Enquiry, Memoir, Mindfulness, Positivity, Radiant Citta, Resisting Death

Irrigators channel water,
fletchers fashion arrows,
and carpenters shape wood.
Skilled practitioners tame the self. (145)

– Dhammapada, verse 145. (All today’s Dhammapada translations are mine).

I was driving home from Sydney, and, coming off the freeway, I ascended the hill near Lapstone. I stayed in my lane, but didn’t pull back my speed very much. As I drove up alongside a truck, I noticed that he was starting to pull over into my lane. He must have caught sight of me, because he suddenly swerved back into his lane. As I went on past him, he blasted me with his horn. That could only have been – given that the danger had passed – a protest. I immediately got angry. Seeing this, I brought attention to my breath, and restrained the impulse to any outwardly-directed reaction. It was clear to me that I had quickly disconnected from the peace of an open heart. If, in that frame of mind, I focused on his wrong-doing, I’d be fanning flames of a habitual, ‘me and mine’ style of interaction. No freedom in that, and plenty of road-rage.

If one focuses on other’s
deficiencies, always complaining,
one’s own toxic impulses grow;
one is far from their ending.

– Dhammapada, verse 253.

After recognising that I needed to calm my body – and knowing that to give free reign to my inner judge wouldn’t support my authenticity, even a tiny bit – I came to my breath.

I was sharing with friends in our poetry group recently that I’ve followed my breath in daily activities, unwearyingly, since the mid nineties. I blush to say that before that – despite reading book after book by Thich Nhat Hanh for the preceding decade – I thought that tracking the breath was too basic for me. All I had to do, I conceitedly thought, was rest in the nature of mind.

However, I’ve learned: the body is always in the present. If I’m aware that I’m breathing, then I have a sure connection to the present. I remember that around that time, my Zen teacher Subhana said to me, in interview, “You know what it is to be present.” I thought to myself, “I’m not sure I do.” It turned out that I was often living a dissociated state and thinking that it was wholesome – spacey, not spacious. So, now I make it a practice to be aware of my breathing all the time. (Except, obviously, in my dreams). I carry mala beads, so that when I’m under pressure, stressed, or I’m ill, or giving a public talk, I can use one bead for each out-breath. The great thing about this is that it helps me stay in touch with, and live from, my felt sense of situations, too.

It’s easy to mind the faults of others,
yet hard to grasp one’s own.
One sifts the faults of others in fine detail,
but one conceals one’s own,
as a crafty cheat conceals bad luck.

– Dhammapada, verse 252.

Next, I said “Hello” to the feelings. I use sub-personality work to dis-identify with fashioning-tendecies (sankharas). This fits super-well with the Buddhist theory of identity creation (‘the twelve nidānas’.) It enables me, too, to have mindfulness of the body in a broader sense than mere mindfulness of breathing. However, that’s not all it does. it allows me to release aspect of the luminous heart-mind, which are particular to situations. (I’ll write separately on this another time). I’ve found that one can focus in too close to the breath, losing the wider field of dynamics of consciousness (loka), and blocking the opportunity to discover aspects of the wisdom-mind particular to the needs of the moment.

The process of calming that rage on my part took me another half an hour. “What?” you say. As I said, I didn’t just want to calm it, and contact spacious mind again. I wanted to understand what kind of personality beliefs were under it, and what kind of wisdom-energy was concealed within the rage. On the way down deep, I was able to acknowledge that I had contributed to the traffic situation – namely, by travelling too fast.

I have ways of ‘delving’ (as the Nikāya Buddha calls it), derived from the sub-personality work which I’ve learned from various sources, and by using Focusing. I won’t go into the details of what I found in my psychology, but the exploration was worth it, because it came down to the root conceit: ‘I am my separateness.’ Underneath all the self-justifications was a threat to a fiction, and the fear of voidness.

I’ve seen this in myself and others, many times, that: in relationship situations (which even this incident was), the personality’s fear is that if one dwells in voidness – instead of in anger, lust, or some other kind of reactive state – then one won’t have what one needs to meet one’s situations. I am so grateful for my years in the Diamond Essence work for showing me that this isn’t the case. One has much more intelligence available, when it’s not squandered in reactivity –  including strength, power, compassion, fearlessness, personal love, and many other dwelling-places of the gods.

As I stayed with the layers of feeling, every layer of discovery brought more space, more calm, more love, and eventually – by the time I got to Lawson – I had a spontaneous uprising of compassion for the truck driver. “It’s a habit,” I thought. He was just reacting in the normal way that people deal with their feelings. There’s no point in my giving away my treasure, by meeting him in kind. As the Nikāya Buddha says to a lay-follower:

This is of old, Atula, not just nowadays:
They disparage one who remains silent,
They disparage one who speaks a lot,
and they disparage one who speaks in measure.
There is no one not blamed.

– Dhammapada, verse 227.

I understood that he must have got a fright, and needed to gather his ‘separating resources’ together. Blaming me seemed a good way to go, no doubt, to keep him from humiliation or some other uncomfortable feelings. That’s a huge loss to him, packaged as a necessary life choice.

“In fact, most of the time people are really expressing their egos and superegos  [inner judges] through their gait, their posture, their words, their emotions, their work, etc. Even the inhibition of certain emotions is an expression of the superego. Most people live and die expressing their egos and super egos, and rarely does the real person get expressed.”
– A.H. Almaas, Work on the Super-Ego, p. 16. [My parenthetic comment.]

(That’s a whole other story: the role that the superego – or, the inner judge, the inner critic – plays in fabricating our usual sense of separateness, our rejection of inter-being; and, therefore, our resistance to death).

For now, I share this story to give a little indication of how we can work with situations so that they transform into unfabricated qualities. By the time I got home, I was peaceful again, and didn’t bring any bad feeling home to my beloved partner. I may die, any moment. I wouldn’t want to drag along into the sacred space of death – a sacramental space – the resentments of the little, constructed self.

There’s no path in space;
there’s no contemplative outside [of space].
People indulge in separation.
There is no separation for
those who come and go in suchness.

– Dhammapada, verse 254.

Next time, I’ll talk about Torei Zenji’s Bodhisattva vow, which someone amusingly referred to as a “road rage abatement program.”

The Angry Ape Dynamic

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On August 15, 2015

In Enquiry, Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices, Radiant Citta

If this were my last year to live (and who knows, but it may be, and I may have passed the day and month, already), I would want to live this time with unconditional love as my light. I know that sounds too big an ask. Remember, though, this is about living and dying well, so that the King of Death doesn’t find me – whether living or dying. It’s not small stakes; so, that’s how it has to be, this year, and beyond.

Aware of this foam-like body,
Awake to its insubstantial  nature,
cutting the flowered spikes of Māra,
go where the Kind of Death can’t see.

– Dhammapada, verse 46. Translated Christopher J. Ash

Māra is not only the King of Death, but he is the King of Narcissism, the food of which is: rejecting-energy. The more rejecting we do in life, the more we rush into death’s arms. In love there is no death. As a six in the Enneagram, I think I’ve been a kind of rejection – sceptical of everything, opposing by habit, at every turn. However, the way of insight with compassion is liberating, and compassionate insight into the dynamics of rejecting-energy is freeing. Knowing the light and knowing the shadow, both.

In the Honeyball Sutta, a text in the Majjhima Nikāya, a practitioner asks the Buddha (the flourishing one), “Can you say more, Sir, about the kind of teaching where perceptions no longer obsess a noble person, and where one doesn’t conflict with anyone in this world?” The flourishing one gave a short statement: “Mendicant,” he said, “regarding the way perceptions and notions about multiplicity beset us: if nothing is found there, there will be nothing to delight in, nothing to welcome and hold to. This is the end of the underlying unwholesome tendencies – to lust, aversion, views, doubt, conceit, and so on. This is the end of the underlying tendency to desire ‘being’ and the end of our tendency to ignorance. That, then, is the end of the taking up of bars and blades, and of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, and false speech. That’s where these evil, unwholesome things cease completely.” (My translation).

I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes, from Isabella in Shakespeare’s  Measure for Measure (II.ii):

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d;
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.

The Buddhist version would be less poetic, but could run like this: 

Conceited humankind,
with its oh-so-brief life-span –
most ignorant of what is ever-present in them,
the luminous boundless heart –
acts more like an angry ape,
deceiving self and others into the ego-view,
and tearing at the fabric of this miracle,
the big life process.

I want to run that Honeyball sequence backwards: Conflict ends, with the ending of ignorance and the desire to be someone or some thing. These end with the relinquishment of lust and aversion, which goes with conceit and the view: ‘I am my personality.’ All this fades as we don’t grasp at, or feed on, experiences. (They can be freed into spaciousness, instead). That happens if we see through the delight and longing we have in things and situations which confirm our underlying wish to be nameable and with form. Then nothing will be found to be as it appears to our unclarified perception. Distorted perception no longer besets us. This is the end of conflict on all levels. All human conflict arises because of misperception. This is why the Nikāya Buddha says, in that sutta:

“The kind of doctrine, friend, where one does not keep arguing with everyone in this world with its devas, its Maras and Brahma, its contemplatives and priests, its royalty and common folk. I teach the sort of doctrine where perceptions no longer obsess the noble person who remains aloof from sensual pleasures, free from confusion, his uncertainty removed, who remains without any craving for becoming or not becoming. This is my doctrine, That is what I preach.”

Imagine that someone attacks you. The accusation itself is coming, of course, from a part in the other person which considers they are superior in their knowledge, their view of things, right? However, they are talking from their inner TV. Given all that presently-unconscious process that the Nikāya Buddha is talking about, they can’t actually see you in your brief, mysterious life. On the other hand, what the other person says can be helpful. I can’t imagine how many people throughout my life have delivered gratuitous assessments of my egoic functioning. Sometimes these views weren’t lovingly delivered, sure, but most of them proved useful, even if it was after some reflection on my part. After all, if I didn’t have some narcissistic inclinations, I wouldn’t be human – so there was bound to be some truth somewhere in their attack. This kind of thing is inevitable as we walk the path of transforming our false understanding of self into the presence of authenticity. To learn from our difficulties – that’s possible, with mindful awareness.

Develop a non-reactive mind. Praise and blame is the way of the world.*
So, guard against ill-will. Go about [learning] calmed, without conceit. 

– Verse 702, Sutta-Nipāta.  Translated by Christopher J. Ash

__________________

* Literally, “in the village.”

Radical Acceptance

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On August 15, 2015

In Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices

My theme lately is the importance of positive attitudes in attuning oneself to this “phenomenon which is a world in the world” (Samyutta Nikaya III.139). Particularly important is an attitude of radically accepting our experience, with all that it implies. A related theme is that there are positive qualities inherent in one’s own bodily being – your being, which reveal themselves with patient acceptance of present-moment experience. A refuge prayer from the Bon Dzogchen tradition reflects this, when it says:

The center of the victorious mandala, one’s own body,
The source of all positive qualities without exception,
Is the expanse within the three channels and the five chakras.
I take refuge in this body of emptiness.
– Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy

The source of all positive qualities. This includes our capacity to dwell inwardly steady in the face of everything that life presents, including the certainty of one’s death, and including the dying process itself. I wrote about my time in hospital, to illustrate how the practice can work. Whatever our circumstances, we can make the small steps necessary to re-orient ourselves.

For some of us, when pain arises, it might be a positive step of saying hello to the aversion, just for as long as is bearable. For others, who have worked with the aversion some, it might be a matter of experimenting with ‘coming up the inside of the pain.’ Training in using the spaciousness of experience helps, here. For others, it might mean learning exactly which curious questions open the pain up, this time, so that it reveals the pristine energy at its root. My theme, then, is that all your experience has medicine in it. We have attune, sensitise ourselves, inquire, and – ironically – be willing to trust not knowing, if we are to know what the particular medicine in any particular experience may be.

When there’s discomfort, come up the inside of the discomfort – know it completely, with nothing left over. You’ll see a change in yourself – maybe a big change, maybe small; but, you’ll know in your body that it’s in the right direction. As poet Jane Hirshfield said, alluding to the bodily feel of what is right: “The body of a starving horse cannot forget the size it was born to.”

Of course, I’m not talking about idiot practice, here. If you can look after your pain some way, do so. Seek medical help, and so on. It’s the aversion – the suppression of experience – which I am talking about. Its the ore of our so-called “toxic impulses” that we are seeking to mine for their gold. It’s the sentient beings in your own mind that you can save.

To clarify this, I’ll share an idea that I’ve found helpful.  Say I’m cold. I pick up a blanket and cover my legs. I accept the cold legs. I accept the remedy. If there’s no remedy, I can still accept the cold legs. There’s responsiveness, because there’s acceptance of what is. The acceptance which we are speaking of here is that of accepting the totality of one’s situation, which always exceeds anything that one can think about it – and therefore, which always has ways forward implicit in it.

Does that mean I accept that there is child slavery in the world? Yes, in the absolute sense that it is true that there is child slavery. Then you won’t be in denial. Does this mean acceptance, where I do nothing about it? No, that’s suppression – idiot acceptance is a form of reactivity – whereas radical acceptance makes compassionate engagement possible. 

A metaphor that the teachers use is that of a cyclone. In the centre there is stillness, and on the periphery there is movement. Questions of action, of choice, of the proper forms of resistance are of the periphery. You must act, when it’s the periphery. But the stillness in the cave of the heart, that is pure and total acceptance.  When that is known, then there is wisdom in the becoming, in the interaction. (In reality these are not two, but they present to our discerning faculty as two. So, like most analogies, the comparison shouldn’t be taken too far, or too literally.)

The inner acceptance works entirely on the ‘being-ness’ dimension. But from the perspective of becoming, responsiveness is inherent to the interactive nature. I cannot be still, on the becoming level of experience, because I am movement, there. For me to move wisely, though, I need to have stillness at the heart of me.

Let’s return to the cancer, which I discovered was doing its thing in my body, in 2014. I was faced with the question of how to approach it. On the one hand I need to accept its presence and not fight it – because it was really here. Not resisting its existence was sane. And, on the other I needed to see if and how I could get to be cancer-free. Total love, even of my cancer; and, the wisdom to find how it could leave my body. There simply wasn’t any hate toward it. 

Yunmen, teaching his community, said, “Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole earth is medicine. Where do you find yourself?”

Nectar with Brahma

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On August 13, 2015

In Body, Memoir, Mindfulness, Positivity, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

Those who thoroughly engage
in mindfulness of the body,
who don’t practice what shouldn’t be done,
and regularly practice what should be done,
conscious and clearly comprehending,
their toxic impulses fade away.

– Dhammapada, Verse 293. Translated Christopher J. Ash

I practised inviting space continuously during my stay in hospital for the removal of my cancer, last year. When I returned home, a friend asked me how I practised mindfulness during my stay. I listed all kinds of upaya (skilful means), which I’ve learnt over decades. After talking with my friend, I reflected to myself that all of them awakened space. I had used every means possible to be in loving, spacious awareness.

Most of the time, mindfulness of the body was in union with resting in voidness. Each supported the other. To be conscious of what I was experiencing – whether it was needles entering my skin, sending love and gratitude to my condemned prostate (for its years of functioning), being wheeled on the gurney, receiving the anæsthetic gas, waking up in the recovery room, swallowing pills, making painful trips to the toilet with my catheter, or receiving the care of the attentive nurses – to be conscious and clearly comprehend the quality of my attitude, to dwell in a positive heart: all I needed to do was be present without any desire. It was space aware of space. It felt, most of the time, like a blessing, to be so present, and clear that I was present. And so peaceful. There was nothing for me to do, but to be there.

Until I wrote that – clear that I was present – I haven’t thought of the combination (mindful and clearly comprehending, satānaṃ sampajānānaṃ) as meaning quite that; but it feels right. That is, one can be mindful of, and clearly comprehend, your experiencing, your pasture: the body, the feeling-tones (pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral), the states of mind or attitudes, and the dynamics of your whole felt world (loka). Comprehension can be, for example, about your being in the situation, and what there is to learn about the functioning of your mind in the situation, and so on. This is the field of your responsibility.

And, sometimes – and this is, for me, the most precious experience – sometimes you are just present, and you comprehend presence for the miracle it is. That is, mindful in the sense of awake without effort or purpose; and, intimate with wakefulness itself. You are completely resting in a pure, total, warm presence whose light leaves nothing in life out. Conscious and clearly comprehending from inside the conscious awareness. It’s like drinking this nectar with Brahma.

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