Month: August 2015 Page 3 of 4

Encountering Vastness

On August 12, 2015

In Enquiry, Mindfulness, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

“These practices will reconnect you to a bigger perspective of space and timelessness, so you can see everything with the eyes of the one who knows life’s vastness and mystery.” – Jack Kornfield, A Lamp in the Darkness.

I’ll share a passage from that life review, about one experience that I had while ‘tripping.’ It had to do with an experience of gazing at the Milky Way. This experience, along with what I was developing in meditation at the time, gave me a sense of the possibility of developing spacious awareness.

One time, I was staying with friends on a country farm, and it was a clear night. The Milky Way was streaming across the vast, pitch-black sky. After taking the LSD, I went out into a paddock. I stood in the open, awed by quiet of the countryside, with the huge, arching expanse of the night sky. I felt my whole experience of happiness at being in that place, in that moment.

Then, as I gazed upward, I noticed the crisp and silent clarity of my awareness of it all. Awareness itself was a part of the experience. It wasn’t stars ‘out there,’ to be grasped by a ‘me in here.’ There was an interaction, which had the qualities of space, and clarity. In this meeting with the night sky, I had momentarily looked backward into the ‘knowing’ itself, and suddenly an enormous sense of boundlessness opened up. Further, the knowing and the space had no locale. It couldn’t be found, if we use the ordinary, knower-known meaning of ‘find.’

When I included my silent awareness in the totality of what I was experiencing, a felt quality of boundless unity arose, unified with that knowing. Remarkably, the non-locateable aspect of awareness wasn’t too disconcerting, this time. It had been on other non-drug, meditative occasions. Instead, it was accompanied by sufficient peace to give me a chance to reflect on the experience while it was happening.

This was a space of clarity and silent awareness that had no inside or outside. It was a sense of unity with, and inside, everything – a sense of spaciousness which included all the marvellous, living natural world. The cricket chirrups were as sharp as the stars, and they too were not in the usual time-space. They were non-locatable.

When I tried to find a concept for my felt sense of the whole experience, the only word that made any sense of what I was experiencing was: ‘One.’ “There is only the ‘One’”, I thought. And that ‘One’ included me. This was awesome, and, at the same time, in came a tiny bit of consternation. At that time, I still hadn’t come to peace with my personality, and much of my activities were (unwittingly) about escaping myself, not about accepting myself; and, certainly not about accepting that I am a natural event, a natural expression of the universe. So, it was natural that I should have some misgivings.

However, in the paddock under the Milky Way, the possibility of an integration with all that is, was, or ever would be, was palpable. It was both disconcerting and, at the same time, a wonderful experience. It was so simple, so natural (while, of course, unnaturally induced). It was natural because it was of awareness.

I was moving, at that stage of my life, into a phase of realising that meditation brings this integration much more wholesomely, stably, and even deeply. Meditation trains a stable, pliable, heart – a mind of love, with a sharp capacity for inquiry in the midst of the experience. Nevertheless, all my years of drug-free spacious mind-states, have only confirmed the essential insights of that precious blessing in the paddock.

I now know from experience that, for many of us, the loss of a locatable self is naturally disconcerting, and moreover – it can feel like one is dying. I also know from practice that we can train ourselves to stay for that ego-death. Bodily death itself will mean dissolution of any locatable self. Location of a self is dependent on constructions centred around a body, and in death, the sense of body dissolves in the early stages. Meditation training titrates the experience, until one can enter it deeply.

After I’d gone completely clean, free of drugs, I was in the company one day of a Tibetan teacher, when someone asked him about drug experiences. He said (something like), “Oh, that has some good effects. It can introduce people to the ‘inside’ life. But, you have to give it up, sooner or later, and find the inside naturally.”

Even later, I was to experiment a lot with Time, Space and Knowledge exercises, which suited me perfectly, because I had become so accustomed to resting into boundless, experiential space. On the other hand, true to human form, I got a bit too spacey, and had to learn to ground myself. I twigged to this one day, when a friend said, “Christopher, you’re in danger of getting attached to formlessness.” Vast space isn’t an escape from relationship – it accommodates, it is a ground for relationship.

“We have limitless possibilities to find fulfilment and satisfaction in our lives and in our relationships with one another. By learning to directly contact the essence of our being, we can discover an unbounded freedom which is not only a freedom from some external restraint, but is itself the dynamic expression of the meaning and value of being human.” – Tarthang Tulku, Time, Space and Knowledge

Introduction to a Story about Space (and LSD)

By admin

On August 11, 2015

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

I have three themes in this and tomorrow’s post: life reviews, experiential space, and the value of an LSD experience. This post is by way of an introduction, and tomorrow I’ll share story about the LSD experience.

A life review can be approached from a number of angles. I’ve done several over the years. At some point, I did a life review examining how experiences of the subject-object division in perception had unfolded throughout my life. In that review I looked at the development (and the distortions) of my sense of what I call ‘experiential space,’ and how that interacted with my sense of ‘self.’

I included in that review the effect of taking LSD in my late teens, which produced a profound union of ‘experiential space,’ expansive experience of clarity, and the presence of blissful well-being.

I took LSD twice in the late sixties; or, as we said then, “dropped acid.” Only twice, because, as I was a greenhorn Buddhist meditator at the time, I was starting to take care of my body (after the alcohol abuse of my mid-to-late teens). I began a life of non-violence, in a society waging a vicious war in Vietnam; and so, I decided that non-violence included non-violence to my brain. (Despite the sweet experiences, LSD isn’t good for brains. I don’t recommend it, for health reasons.)

I basically have no remorse about taking LSD, though. Recently, I mentioned it in social conversation, when offering an instance of something relevant to our conversation, but the mention of LSD as a source of a positive experience threw my host momentarily off-centre. It seemed that my friend was confusing two things: the value of an experience, and the value of the means to the experience. That set me thinking about the value of that experience, and I went back to read the particular life review.

I’m sharing this, also, because it has been, for me, a life-long difficulty, to convey subtle-energy experiences without sounding merely intellectual. ‘Experiential space,’ for instance, isn’t something the average person has named for themselves. So, as a concrete instance of Bliss and Space (the basis of Deva-realms), and Death, I thought this anecdote would be useful.

At the same time, it’s a tale about confirming what the meditation masters have been saying for millennia, that the mind is like space. In fact, the ‘space’ element in the Nikayas is not about external space. It’s about experiential space – about proportion and interaction. (See Sue Hamilton, Early Buddhism: A New Approach)

Sue Hamilton writes: “One needs to bear in mind here that according to the early Buddhist texts, form is understood to range through a wide range of degrees of density and subtlety; it need not be visible.”

Tomorrow: A Story about the Mind as Non-Localised Space

Pleasure, Devas, Death, and the Bliss-Body Part 1

By admin

On August 10, 2015

In Body, Positivity, Radiant Citta

Oh, how we live in well-being, we for whom there is nothing!
We will grow into beings who feast on joy, like the Radiant Gods.

– Dhammapada, Verse 200. Translated: Christopher J. Ash

I will take a few posts to explore the topic of bliss. And, I’ll be asking: “If this is wisdom, and not pathological escapism, then how can that be – bliss from no object?”

The ‘nothing’ in the original is perhaps ambiguous. All the translations which I have seen translate it as ‘have nothing’ (or, ‘have no attachments’). This fits with the ‘don’t acquire anything’ teachings of the Nikāya Buddha. On the other hand, I think it can mean this: “Because there is nothing [anywhere, at all], we are happy.” An emptiness teaching.

In my last post, I spoke of ‘no ownership.’ I have spoken from time to time, too, about the present moment having the quality of ‘no-something’; or, more conventionally, nothingness. These concepts sound so negative, so why would anyone be attracted to a path which promises these features of experience as its goal? (Unless your a French existentialist, or depressed.) How could the contemplatives offer this as ‘the highest happiness’? Good question. It’s obvious that a healthy life includes positivity – and here – with ‘nothingness’ and ‘cessation’ – the positivity is expressed in negative phrases. Elsewhere, the Sutta Nipāta Buddha advises the seeker Upasīva to cross the flood of disharmony (dukkha) by “mindfully seeing the state of nothingness, supported by the attitude ‘nothing exists.” (Sn. 1070. My translation.)

(I’m rendering a conservative translation, there. I think the last phrase could mean that the flood doesn’t exist. That’s a valid observation, though it’s one which needs to be treated with maturity; otherwise, like the snake in the Alagaddumpama Sutta, it could bite you with its spiritual by-passing shadow – that is, using spirituality to by-pass emotional growth. The other more radical reading – also legitimate, and even necessary – is that nothingness does not exist, either. This is the recommended attitude in meditating on the higher meditation states.)

All healthy life needs positive experiences, including pleasant sense experiences. Sensory life is integral to human functioning. Consider our enjoyment of nature, for example. Our bodies have co-evolved, for millions of years, with mountains and plains, deserts, streams, rivers, beaches, trees and birds, other animals, and so on. It’s not a surprise that we gravitate to simple experiences of nature. The scientists may be debating whether there is such a phenomenon as ‘biophilia,’ and be asking themselves how biophilia could be verified (using their field’s agreed means of verification); meanwhile, the majority of people love to have ‘growies‘ in sight. Depressives like me know that having a furry friend, or exercise, or walking in nature can be uplifting. Most people light up at the sight of a baby. And, then, there are the many healthy cultural experiences that we go on in. Such as the arts, architecture, and our language experiences. There are people who thrive because poetry is in their life. It would appear from the Nikāya records that the Buddha and his community of mendicant wanderers regularly enjoyed spontaneous, poetic utterances.

There are experiments that show that smiling has health benefits. A friend and I were recently sharing our observations about how our well-being is enhanced by gazing into the night sky. Or, how gazing into valleys is tranquilising. How the moon, waning, waxing, of full, can bring a feeling of boundary-dissolving bliss. I’m writing this in front of a wood fire, and it brings a sense of peace. Wholesome pleasures are important to well-being (sukkha, the opposite of dukkha.)

However, great as the beauty of the sense world is, it is not enough to give a full life of depth. Regularly I hear from people how their thinking gets in the way of experiencing nature purely. I’ve had that experience, not only with nature, but with music, too. Haven’t you, some time, wanted longing or fear – or some other insistent mind-state – to get out of the way so that you can enjoy an experience purely? The life of the senses only reaches its full potential with the awakening to the invisible – the life within life. That is, with the liberation of the heart-mind (citta).

All experiencing is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with an unethical mind and dukkha follows,
as the wheel of a cart follows the hoof of the ox.

All experiencing is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a radiant mind, and well-being follows
like a shadow which never departs.

– Dhammapada, Verses 1-2. Translated: Christopher J. Ash

In other words, to ensure well-being, we have to look deeply into the nature of our pleasure-seeking, and transform our pleasure into experiences consistent with wisdom. Another way to look at it is this: If you really want to be present for life, you are looking for a blissful, radiant mind. If you really want to be present for dying and the death experience, you need to cultivate spacious, radiant, blissful awareness. This means awakening the boundless, luminous heart-mind. And, such an experience is found by transforming small-minded pleasures into boundless pleasures. This is the rationale in Buddhism for cultivating the four immeasurable, blissful states, which are: kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. These are called the dwelling of the gods (Brahmavihāras). There are many others, of course.

The delicate opening passages of Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto is one thing; the bliss of consciousness at home in unconstructed experience is quite another. This latter will include being filled with Mozart, of course; whereas hearing Mozart needn’t automatically result in the bliss of un-fashioned experience. So, we can see that the ‘household-life’ can accommodate spiritual bliss, and unconstructed experience needn’t only be found cross-legged in an empty hut or a monastery. To Know that consciousness is blissful in itself is a potentiality of human experience, whatever the situation. A purified mind is pure aliveness. It is the nameless dimension which permeates our being, when we arrive home in the heart of things.

Why would you want this, when it might mean sweating the hard stuff? One important reason is to transform dukkha (skewiffness; disharmony) for all beings. To be ready for death, is another. Another is to simply experience the pure miracle of being alive. And, also, to enjoy the miracle of the planet, and other living beings.

Constructing a House

By admin

On August 9, 2015

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

You are seen, House-builder – you won’t build the house again.

All your rafters are broken, the roof beam destroyed.

The mind is unconditioned, craving ended.

– Dhammapada, Verse 154, translated Christopher J. Ash

We have developed a false sense of reality. Buddha means someone who recognises, or is awake, to how things are. A Buddha knows her experiencing as it really is. This understanding how things is is a shift in total experiencing. The core difficulty for the unawakened mind is a distorted perception of our very being, resulting in relating in a selfish manner toward our experience. We relate as though there are solid boundaries, and ownership. However, the basic ground of being has no rigid division, and it is utterly open.

So that there is no misunderstanding of ‘oneness mush’, here, I will call it (using Gendlin’s phrase) an undivided multiplicity. From the Buddhist viewpoint: openness is form, form is openness. No mush.

The personality, with its placement of an ‘I’-position at the centre of experiencing, is bewildered, if I (the person) realise the open ground is here, and that I am it. The personality must maintain its illusion of ownership, and the main way to do that is to play the game of ‘this and that,’ in infinite variations.(Trungpa)

Let’s use another metaphor: Conceit (a word which comes from ‘conceive’) constructs a house. It’s a house-builder. The house is personality. Personality thrives on ‘this and that’ thinking. That is, on duality – which is the multiplicity (the myriad things) without the undivided, open ground, without the wholeness dimension.

The loss of wholeness brings confusion, perplexity. ‘This and that’ thinking now looks like it will save us, and the inner judge insists that you follow the ‘this and that’ of the culture you’re born into. It keeps the rafters and the roof beam in place. Hence, as Almaas says, “It keeps a strict boundary on what you are allowed to experience.” Logic must prevail over the wildness of life, for example.

From the point of view of the whole system – with all its sub-personalities – the important thing is to maintain the house, as though it were really made of stuff, rather than being of the substance of space. (This is the house down in the bottom right section of the classic Wheel of Birth and Death paintings – equated with the six senses.)

So, thought sets up the duality of ‘life and death.’ We have a belief that if we give up our ‘this and that’ thinking, or become conscious that that’s all it is – thinking, not reality – then, we get frightened that we will not be able to survive. The whole house feels like it might come down. This is the importance of the inner judge – to frighten us away from inquiry into what is really going on here; and, to make us feel wrong if we stray from ‘house-building.’

Regarding self-image, it is a conceit (over-conceiving) to think that we can statically image the flux of experiencing, as an ‘I am this.’ It is a conceit to think that we can definitively image our felt sense of the totality of behaviour possibilities in any particular moment. It’s an even greater conceit to think that we own anything of all of this. And, we pay heavily for our conceit. The innumerable species of the planet suffer from our conceit. Can we wake up, understand, realise – become Buddha – for them and us. Can we learn to think with the ground included?

“Don’t concoct illusions, but let them all dissolve into the vast awareness of consciousness itself.”
– Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, quoted in Timothy Freke’s Wisdom of the Tibetan Lamas.

Death is Simply Your Own Thoughts

By admin

On August 8, 2015

In Death, Resisting Death

I’m re-acquainting myself with Chogyam Trungpa’s little book Orderly Chaos. Not an easy read, unless you have some earlier introduction to the topic. It has helped me get a handle on the Nikaya Buddha’s ‘loka’ teaching. Anyhow, early on in the book Trungpa talks about the games of “the ego.” I can’t speak for him, but what I mean, by quoting his comments on ‘ego,’ is the deluded loka – that is, the whole system of false relationship with reality. We misperceive ourselves, and our experiencing becomes organised by our personalities. Trungpa is saying that the core game the deluded self plays, to maintain its illusory world, is the game of ‘this and that’:

“There are infinite variations to the this-and-that game. Ego continuously uses these to maintain itself. Sometimes “this” is projected as overstuffed and hopeless and “that” as a roomy saving grace (as in, “Let’s get out of here!”). The primary example is regarding all of “this” as samsara and opposing it to nirvana, the salvational “that” or somewhere-else. In fear or anger one is so trapped in the solidity of “this” that all of “that” becomes a threat. In fear one seeks to avoid “that,” in anger to destroy it.”

That example tells us how we get attached to the ‘sacred.’

I think it’s important, too, to mention the place of the superego in this deceptive setup of thing-ing. The superego frightens us with the thought of death, opposing it to some limited ‘me-and-mine’ kind of life. We’re supposed to cling to ‘life’ as it sees it. The superego (also called the inner critic, or the inner judge) is crucial to keeping us from realizing our deathless dimension. It keeps a strict boundary on what you are allowed to experience. Here’s a note on this from A.H. Almaas (Work on the Super-Ego, p. 5):

The superego is that part of the person that maintains repression and fights any changes to the status quo. It is one of the main reasons why the ego defences are needed (defending against painful ego states and maintaining ego structures being the others); and hence it is responsible for the presence of prejudices, overt and covert.

So, I’m saying that the superego is responsible for our fear of death and our fear of the deathless. However, I only meant this to be introductory. It’s Trungpa’s next statement which captured my attention. He says:

“From the ultimate point of view of ego, it does not matter how projections of this and that are shaped, weighted, and colored. All that matters is that the illusion of this and that is maintained any way at all.”

This is at the root of the craziness that we bring forth in this world. I have heard the important question, often: “How come? We say we love nature, and yet we destroy our beautiful world. Why’s that?” I think we have to look into how the ego, based in a false estimation of its value in the person, will do anything to maintain its dominion – even kill the person, or the person’s support system. The illusion of ‘this and that’ must be maintained at all cost. I was reading R.D. Liang’s old book, Knots, and the following would be an example of ego’s distorted modes:

“How can she be happy
when the man she loves is unhappy

He feels she is blackmailing him
by making him feel guilty
because she is unhappy that he is unhappy

She feels he is trying to destroy her love for him
by accusing her of being selfish
when the trouble is
that she can’t be so selfish as to be happy
when the man she loves is unhappy”

The ‘this and that’ here is ‘me and him,’ or ‘me and her’; and, ‘happy’ versus ‘unhappy’; and ‘selfish’ versus ‘unselfish.’ When you realise that under such knots in relationship lies the fear of losing ‘this and that’-thinking, then you can look on others’ self-deceptions with more understanding. It’s fear of ego-death that makes us cling to our stances, as in Liang’s example. Our relationship with nature – including with death – is subject to such self-centred distortions. And, there’s a voice inside us that frightens us with the thought that we will die if we don’t maintain our ‘this-and-that’ world (our habitual loka).

What does this mean in the case of the particular event we call bodily death? If death is the ‘this,’ then what is the ‘that’? Which part of your life is the opposite of death? The whole of it, one might think. Well.. maybe so, if you think that you can conceive of the whole. And, we tend to try to live by a conception of ‘life,’ which is somehow meant to represent the whole – true. Then the conception becomes the object of grasping. But, another approach is to consider that, to the untrained and unawakened mind, the self-image is the opposite of death? By affirming my self image, I avoid death. Death affronts my self-image. (It’s ironic, of course, that Narcissus fades away to actual death, for love of his self-image). The antidote is a contemplative approach. Says Rohit Mehta, in The Secret of Transformation:

And meditation is looking at the self-image in the mirror of life, the mirror of relationships, the mirror of daily actions… If we can see ourselves as others see us, much of the self-image would get shattered. But to see the self-image for oneself in the mirror of life is to see its destruction. An exposure of the self-image is its death. Another self-image may come into existence, but there is the interval between the death of the old and the birth of the new. It is this interval which is the moment of meditation.”

It is in the opening up of this gap which reveals the sanity of knowing the deathless.

“Soon you will inevitably die, and nothing will be of any assistance. The experience of death is simply your own thoughts. Don’t concoct illusions, but let them all dissolve into the vast awareness of consciousness itself.” – 17th-century Drukpa Kargyu contemplative Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, quoted in Timothy Freke’s Wisdom of the Tibetan Lamas.

Some Verses

By admin

On August 8, 2015

In Body, Radiant Citta

On Going Home

I haven’t been well, these last few days, so, while my awareness of death has not abated, my writing has. On the other hand, I’ve translated a few verses from the Dhammapada. So, in lieu of a post on the contemplation of death, I thought I’d share today’s verse. It’s verse 218. Given my transition, at present from Christopher McLean to Christopher J. Ash, this verse is encouraging:

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.

The expression in the last line is literally: “one who is streaming upward.” It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to a modern reader, and I reasoned this way: firstly, upstream is a return to the source, and secondly, ever since encountering the nameless I have felt like I’m going home. This is why, when asked recently, “How do you conceive of dying,” I said, “Going home.”

– Dhp 218 (Translation Christopher J. Ash)

One’s Ultimate Body

And, why not share another, translated a few days ago – verse 352. I’ve not understood this verse, until this translation came together. The translations of this verse which I have read, they haven’t made any sense to me, when considered from the point of view of awakening mind and the practice point of view. However, my whole forty-year quest to relate language (speaking and thinking) to experience has led me to consider how we can be mindful while speaking, and the verse makes sense when read from this point of view.

From 1984, when I did a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, I puzzled for close to twenty years over how one can be mindful of speech, while speaking. The problem was this: how could I conduct awareness while in the actual flow of, the action of, speaking. I was, at this stage, conducting time differently, and such an approach to mindfulness brought this into focus. Two things occurred as I explored it. I got a better understanding of present-moment-awareness, and I found the source of meaning in my body.

Notice that I’m not talking about the usual things discussed, in conversations about ‘right speech.’ That usually has to do with gentleness, truthfulness, speaking in a timely manner, being clear, and all such qualities as are present when one is free from wanting and ill-will. That dimension – for present purposes, let’s call it the ethical dimension of speech – is important, but it doesn’t address what puzzled me. I was addressing my confusion, which concerned tracking awareness of sound, body, and meaning-making, while in the flow of normal speech acts. So, here’s the verse:

Free of craving and grasping,
Skilled in language and its use —
Knowing the coming together of sound,
[With] what’s passed and what’s next —
One is said to be
“A great person, of great wisdom,
In one’s ultimate body.”

– Dhp 352 (Translation Christopher J. Ash)

The usual translation of the last line, here, is to do with rebirth: “One’s final body.” I have no problem with someone translating it that way. It’s certainly a possible translation. On the other hand, my translation fits with the kind of body one dwells in when speaking mindfully (in the above sense) – a measureless body. A body that can’t be gone beyond. A body without dualities.

I hope you have enjoyed this offering.

Positivity and Training in Consciousness

By admin

On August 6, 2015

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

Sometimes I see, when I’m reading someone’s description of an extreme experience, that there are lacunae in the standard culture’s knowledge of subtle consciousness. Take for instance, the footballer Michael Lynagh’s experience in the intensive care unit, after his stroke:

“I fell asleep again, but this time I didn’t dream. There was nothing but deep, impenetrable black. The sleep the dead might sleep. But I wasn’t dead.”

This is recognisable, if you’ve had the right training, as a wonderful opportunity to experience some extraordinary qualities of consciousness. There is more than one kind of black consciousness, but there’s a high likelihood that this is Black Space. Most people don’t know that consciousness can be experienced as empty, yet filled with beautiful qualities. In respect of the black space, the peace one can feel – if one doesn’t conceive of it as merely ‘a sleep,’ that is – is an incomparable peace.

Here’s a description from A.H. Almaas’ The Point of Existence. The qualities that he describes here emerge when you have a stable awareness of the Black Space, and have a curious love of truth:

In black space we are aware of the absence of the sense of self; however, we experience it not as a deficiency but rather as freedom and release. There is a sense of newness and coolness, of lightness and light-heartedness, of the absence of burden and suffering, and the presence of purity and peace. It is a nothingness, but it is a nothingness that is rich, that is satisfying precisely because of its emptiness. It is a direct sense of endless stillness, of pure peacefulness, of an infinity of blackness that is so black that it is luminous.

A lot of people associate death with seeing ‘the Light.’ If so, they will discount the possibilities of the Black Space. It, too, is a spiritual consciousness. The meditation on the dissolution of the elements introduces us to Black Space or Consciousness. The last three of the eight stages of dissolution in death are white consciousness, red consciousness and black consciousness. Of the Black, near-attainment consciousness, this tradition says:

“You are now freed from the conceptual mind. Thick darkness like a deep autumn night sky appears. You dissolve into unconsciousness. Out of this nothingness, luminescence arises. You are one with a clear dawn sky free of sunlight, moonlight, and darkness.” (Joan Halifax Roshi’s version.)

If you have an untrained awareness, of course, you will miss the significance of this experience. For instance, of his near-death experience, a media tycoon commented: “I’ve been to the other side, and I can tell you there’s nothing there.” He wasn’t a reliable reporter of the deeper layers, though, simply because his perception was coarse. Almaas, on the other hand, has a subtlety of perception, and a love of truth and a curiosity about life. These qualities make it possible for the intrinsic qualities of the consciousness concerned to come to the fore, when you stay in the Black Space openly.

Another example – not so much of Black Space, but of a unmediated experience of consciousness – comes from Anita Moorjani. She is the author of Dying to be Me. Anita’s near-death experience has some wonderful features. (My description here will leave aside the paranormal powers. I have no problem with them – it’s just that I’m not interested in them compared to the fundamental nature of consciousness.)

In the description of her experience we have: vast spaciousness, a crystalline clarity, joy, freedom, pure unconditional love, unity with the source, and non-local facets of experience (that is, aspects of consciousness not restricted by normal time and space. She writes, “…when we’re not expressing through our bodies, everything occurs simultaneously, whether past, present, or future.”)

My sadness arises from this: that, given her lack of training in states of consciousness, she doesn’t stabilise the state, and so she seems to accept every perception as though it is absolutely true. With such experiences, we have an opportunity to validly distinguish between experiences which are of the very nature of the consciousness we are experiencing and the fleeting come-and-go things, such as visions of dead family members, and superficial thoughts. To me, it appears that she doesn’t question the ‘self’ which is experiencing the state, and so she goes with her experiencer’s view too easily. (That is, she’s unaware of the ‘fashioning tendencies’ at work in this experience.) Given how unprepared she is, it’s natural that her ‘thinking-mind’ is grasping, jumping from experience to experience, despite the vast spacious non-conceptual medium of consciousness. Hence, it’s possible that some of her discoveries are not so much ‘insights’ as they were personal predilections. Indeed, her big ‘insight’ that her cancer was a result of fear is an example of this.

“I also understood that the cancer was not some punishment for anything I’d done wrong, nor was I experiencing negative karma as a result of any of my actions, as I’d previously believed.” Yet, she goes on to believe this: “My many fears and my great power had manifested as this disease.”

I think that her loving actions of body, speech and mind, from her life up to this event, made it possible to for her to see some intrinsic qualities of the particular consciousness that she entered. She certainly had a better time than our poor old tycoon! It’s likely that something similar can be said for Michael Lynagh’s experience.

That is: if he was, before this, a decent human being (which people say of him), if he was a person of integrity, then he has a more positive experience of entering near-death states. His experience of the Black Space was more positive. In his case, it wasn’t that the Black Space itself was a positive, it seems (as with Almaas); but it’s possible that the richness intrinsic to that space had an unconscious effect on him – that it left its mark. (If you are interested in consciousness and experience these things, and you have training in checking in the body for the ‘more’ about an experience, then you can easily verify this, after returning to normal waking experience. Meditator’s have their own empirical methods.)

We will never know, of course, and I’m only conjecturing; but he said that after the Black experience, when he remembered things from the sensory plane, he was noticeably uplifted. I’m reminded of the psychology experiment where people were given either a warm cup to hold in their hands, or a cold one – not knowing that the experiment had begun. If they were in the group that had the warm item to hold, they afterward experienced other things or people more positively. (See Warm Cups, Warm Heart) It’s possible that the Black left an ‘abstract impression’ on Michael Lynagh, which left him prone to positivity.

He writes: “And then, however much later, when I woke up, it was almost as if a switch had been flipped down there in the blackness. I still felt exhausted, cold and in unbearable pain. That hadn’t changed. The physical aspect was the same, and would continue to be for some days yet. But mentally – having been reminded of something from my real life, of something that existed outside the walls of the intensive care unit, of something from the days when I was healthy and happy – I felt a huge rush of positivity.” (My emphasis.)

Long-time meditators are familiar with this effect: the upwelling of joy in ordinary things, after deep experiences of consciousness. I Love it that he made the connection. Just imagine how our culture could expand with more consciousness training, and with regular widespread ‘death training,’ so that we could enter such experiences confidently and steadily. Here’s A.H. Almaas, again, on the Black Space:

“It is a transparent blackness that is radiant because of its purity. This is not the experience of a self, an observer beholding the endlessness of space; rather, it is the experience of the self experiencing itself as the infinity of peaceful space. It is an infinite field of a conscious medium, aware at all points of it. The medium is totally at rest, with a stillness that is the same thing as the awareness of stillness.”
– from The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization.

Dwelling in loving-kindness, a practitioner –
confident in the teachings of the awakened one –
attains the state of peace,
the stilling of fashioning tendencies, and happiness.
– (Verse 368, Dhammapada, translated Christopher J. Ash.)

Vow’s are Avolakitesvara’s Hands and Eyes, Everywhere

By admin

On August 4, 2015

In Enquiry, Practices, trance

A vow is an orientation. The power of a vow is that it turns us in the direction of experiencing. It connects us to a bigger reality, one which we need to take on its terms. To do that, and be free, we have to become bigger ourselves. A vow to be conscious of death is an embrace of life. We become bigger than death, not by considering it an enemy, but by taking it into ourselves. I remember at my maternal grandmother’s funeral, the minister proclaimed ‘Death is an enemy.” I thought he was woefully wrong – that puts death ‘over there.’ Implicitly, in A Year to Live practice, we vow to turn toward death, as an opportunity to expand. Vows, of course, are another form of unconditional love.

And, these days, as a part of my ‘A Year to Live’ practice, I remind myself each day that all the people I meet are manifestations of unconditional love. Couldn’t be otherwise. Taking this up, straight away, I noticed how I go to sleep to my vow! In comes the trance of forgetfulness. How many people did I meet today, whom I forgot to practice my vow with?! Wonderful failure! That’s exactly the power of a vow. You become conscious of what you’re omitting. In the Buddhadharma, forgetting to practice your vow is not the problem – but giving up, that’s a problem.

And, vows are never private, even if no-one else knows you’re living by vows. Vows always imply others. It’s as John Makransky says in his Awakening Through Love: “Unconditional love and wisdom embodied in a person’s life are the most powerful forces for remaking the world we experience together and for holding open the door for others to learn similarly.” That’s a perfect excuse to give you the whole Alison Luterman poem (two lines of which I shared previously). It’s a safe bet that the old man is living by vow:

At the Corner Store

He was a new old man behind the counter, skinny, brown and eager.
He greeted me like a long-lost daughter,
as if we both came from the same world,
someplace warmer and more gracious than this cold city.
I was thirsty and alone. Sick at heart, grief-soiled
and his face lit up as if I were his prodigal daughter returning,
coming back to the freezer bins in front of the register
which were still and always filled
with the same old Cable Car ice cream sandwiches and cheap frozen greens.
Back to the knobs of beef and packages of hotdogs,
these familiar shelves strung with potato chips and corn chips,
Stacked – up beer boxes and immortal Jim Beam.
I lumbered to the case and bought my precious bottled water
and he returned my change, beaming
as if I were the bright new buds on the just-bursting-open cherry trees,
as if I were everything beautiful struggling to grow,
and he was blessing me as he handed me my dime
over the counter and the plastic tub of red licorice whips.
This old man who didn’t speak English
beamed out love to me in the iron week after my mother’s death
so that when I emerged from his store
my whole cock-eyed life –
what a beautiful failure ! –
glowed gold like a sunset after rain.
Frustrated city dogs were yelping in their yards,
mad with passion behind their chain-link fences,
and in the driveway of a peeling-paint house
A woman and a girl danced to contagious reggae.
Praise Allah! Jah! The Buddha! Kwan Yin,
Jesus, Mary, and even jealous old Jehovah!
For eyes, hands, of the divine, everywhere.

Out of Compassion for the Affliction in the World

By admin

On August 3, 2015

In Focusing, Meditation, Mindfulness, Practices

I have encountered a very touching passage this morning, about the awakening of compassion. I was led by the scholar-practitioner in me to read Bhikkhu Anālayo’s latest book Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation. I’m relaxing in a cafe in Balmain, in Sydney, having breakfast, after teaching a workshop for two days, sharing Focusing with nine precious people.

Anālayo’s book is not a beginner’s book; but is valuable for committed meditators (as was his detailed study of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta). And, I’m moved by a passage in which Anālayo quotes the Sakyamuni Buddha of the Chinese Agamas (and he says there is a parallel sutta in the Pāli Anguttara Nikaya. For those of you who love the Pāli Nikayas, it’s at: AN 4.186/AN II 178,27 [translated Bodhi 2012: 555]) The Sakyamuni Buddha is, in this sutta, represented contrasting penetrative wisdom and vast wisdom.

This may not be directly a post about dying. I’ll praise the practice of Focusing and its associated Philosophy of the Implicit, as well as refer to compassion in Buddhist meditation. Focusing and the Philosophy of the Implicit are definitely relevant to any deep exploration of dying and death. And, of course, the qualities of heart fostered in Focusing practice include and result in compassion. So, all this gives some of the context for why I am particularly moved this morning, by the Anālayo passage. The ten of us over the weekend, were exploring being here. We did that for the benefit of each of us there in the workshop, but also for circle upon circle of beings radiating out from our activities. More than one person there spoke of the healing occurring.

It was one of the most satisfying workshop experiences that I have had, from another standpoint, too. I finally – after more than fifteen years of teaching Focusing workshops – I finally taught my own workshop. I’ve been teaching Focusing from a pattern learned from my trainers, which has worked well enough; but this was very different. I think I have absorbed Prof Eugene T. Gendlin’s book A Process Model sufficiently during the last decade, that now I can truly teach Focusing informed by the philosophy that goes with it. It’s curious, how I can teach something developed by another, by Gendlin, and now know I am teaching authentically? How does that work? I can feel the next step would be to invite the love that comes, when I ask that question. However…. that would be another whole post, wouldn’t it? One about authenticity. Worth exploring some day, but now I’m talking about compassion.

I was moved by the courage of my workshop participants, and by their love of what is true and compassionate in this torn world. There was, in us all, a high level of interest in true experiencing and the welfare of the many.

So, now, to the passage that moved me. It mentions ‘dukkha.’ For those of you who don’t know what dukkha means, I suggest that you think of it as ‘skewiffness.’ It’s that quality of human life where you sense that somehow there’s a whole lot of suffering – in everyone’s life – that doesn’t appear to be necessary. It’s not just pain – like, I’m not talking, here, about my disintegrating hip; or, my post-viral chronic illness – but it is, at root, the sense that something in us is out of kilter. If you’ve touched that sense, you’re on track. The feeling is endemic in the species. It’s a form of disharmony that is produced by wrong inner vision. Now, here’s the passage that moved me:

:If … one has heard that “this is dukkha” and through wisdom moreover rightly sees dukkha as it really is; [if] one has heard of “the arising of dukkha”… “the cessation of dukkha”… “the path to the cessation of dukkha”, and with wisdom moreover rightly sees the path to the cessation of dukkha as it really is; then in this way … one is learned with penetrative wisdom …

My understanding of that fourth reality – ‘This is the path leading to cessation – is a little different. I accept this ‘path-to’ translation as useful, but personally, I’ve resolved the Nikaya’s presentation of human freedom a little differently. I propose, instead, that the path and the cessation are not two. I take a ‘path-as’ view. So, for me, there are four ennobling realities, which are:

1) there is disharmony; 2) there is a cause of the disharmony; 3) there is the cessation of the cause of disharmony; and, 4) there is the path which is the cessation of the cause.

So, if one has heard this teaching, and has become involved the tasks that correspond with each of these realities, and has seen the realities rightly, then one is ‘one of penetrative wisdom.’ However, the Agama (Sakyamuni) Buddha goes further, to indicate the possibility of a territory called “vast wisdom”:

If … one does not think of harming oneself, does not think of harming others, does not think of harming both; and instead … one thinks of benefiting oneself and benefiting others, benefiting many people out of compassion for the affliction in the world, seeking what is meaningful and of benefit for devas and humans, seeking their ease and happiness; then in this way … one is bright, intelligent, and with vast wisdom.”

Gendlin’s Focusing (when taught with the Philosophy of the Implicit) is vast wisdom. It is a complete practice of self-knowledge. And it’s a practice of non-harm, and of benefit for all beings. I presented Focusing, over this last weekend, as a full path in its own right, grounded in Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. It has been created and propagated for the benefit of the world. Focusing doesn’t belong to anyone. It doesn’t belong to psychotherapists, artists, school teachers, architects, or peace-makers – all of whom use it. It is human.

By practising Focusing, “one does not think of harming oneself, does not think of harming others, does not think of harming both; and instead … one thinks of benefiting oneself and benefiting others, benefiting many people out of compassion for the affliction in the world, seeking what is meaningful and of benefit for devas and humans, seeking their ease and happiness.” (Here, we can take ‘devas’ to mean any possible or impossible beings.) It is, indeed, a vast wisdom. Deep bows to Gene Gendlin and all his students. I am moved by these two great paths, actualising vast wisdom.

Informing the Dying

By admin

On August 2, 2015

In Death, Positivity, Resisting Death

I was with a very beautiful gathering of courageous people for the last two days, and a few of them said how healing it is to be with people who are telling the truth. We explored, during one part of the weekend, some of the barriers around being open and real – those barriers associated with the ‘inner judge.’ At the end of the workshop, I told a story, which I thought would be helpful to retell, here, in the Practicing a Year to Live context. I’m telling it from memory. It was something I viewed on video during my psychotherapy training, more than fifteen years ago.

The British psychiatrist Dr R.D. Liang told the story of his daughter’s diagnosis with a life-threatening illness. The family were told that she was unlikely to live. It reacted angrily to the suggestion. The doctor was adamant that it was the wrong thing to do. Liang asked him why, and the doctor’s answer was that in his career he had only told one patient that he was going to die, and it that man had gotten very upset. Liang understood that the doctor was saying that his daughter might not receive the news without being ‘upset.’ Nevertheless, he determined to apprise her of the situation, despite their opposition. He let her know that, as far as they knew, no-one who had this diagnosis had every survived. As you are probably anticipating, upset or not, she was very, very grateful.

Now, it’s true that each of the co-conspirators was, with their different understanding, doing their best to take care of the well-being of the young woman. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether such ‘compassion’ isn’t, in fact, actually what some Buddhist’s call a ‘near enemy.’ That is, it looks like, but it isn’t, compassion. There is this meme in the culture: Don’t tell unpleasant news to someone who is vulnerable. This is likely to be fear or pity, not compassion. These folk were seeking an ideal way, which to them might have been: a life (or a death) without upset. The lines of a Rumi poem come to mind. “How will you know the difficulties of being human/If you’re always flying off to blue perfection?” The game of flying off to blue perfection usually leads to stress; and it teaches the wrong lessons, anyhow. Avoiding pain causes unnecessary pain. (I think Liang noted that.)

In the Abhayarājakumāra-sutta (MN58), the Buddha of the Pali Nikayas praises speech that it true, beneficial, and pleasing to others. He says that he will only say what is truthful and beneficial; however, at times he might say what is not pleasing to his hearers. The reason given is that the Buddha might need to say what is displeasing, when compassion moves him to speak. I haven’t found an ‘inner judge’ that has such discernment about truth-telling, though occasionally I meet one that pretends to have such discernment. “I”m only telling you this for your own good,” it says.