Month: December 2015 Page 3 of 4

What is Not Lost

On December 13, 2015

“If all I’m grasping at will be lost at the moment of death, what might I do with my life that won’t be lost when I die?”
– Toni Bernhard. How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow (p. 129). Wisdom Publications.

To me, two thoughts come in response to this. One is that the traditional answer is that one’s clinging will continue into another life. But, her question deserves better than that. She’s talking about the moment of death, when the personality dissolves. And, that moment can come often, while living, if we live appropriately. That is, living in a way that makes the dissolution of personality more possible. And, the question of what we mean by the word ‘death’ is then more intimately with us, all day.

I sit with Toni’s question. I feel into it. How does my body live this question? And something comes, here: “What carries the big life process forward – that won’t be lost.” Life is carrying itself on, and whatever carries it forward will be what carries forward in physical death.

How does this apply to living a life before physical death? That is, how to apply this to the individual life? Perhaps, whatever carries the whole of life forward now, that which is now cultivates the carrying forward that which will be present at the end-of-life?

For me, it’s not my personal success, or my material accumulation. (“Which is just as well!” I laugh.) And, it’s not my likes and dislikes, or my culture – it’s only the love in the living. How do we release more love, expand, and give more to life? That is never lost.

An absence of longing, questions and doubts dissolved in awareness, and she arrives in the ground of the absence of death – such I call a subtle person.
– The Sutta-Nipata, verse 635. Translated by Christopher J. Ash

Mara in the Mind’s Theatre

By admin

On December 12, 2015

In Body, Mindfulness, Practices, Resisting Death

The Buddha Calling on the Earth as His Witness.

Māra is called the ‘Evil One.’ We can use the English meaning of this word in our understanding of Māra. Māra’s field is evil. Evil actions of body, speech and mind are those which are beyond appropriate bounds. Appropriate to what? Dhamma, or the way things are. An appropriate understanding of life is exactly what Māra lacks. His most fundamental view is that things are ‘there’ in all their ‘thingness’ to be grasped at, for his narcissistic pleasure. Every distortion of his functioning flows from this delusion.

His concept of himself, upon which his grasping is based, is ‘self-as-a-thing’; or; ‘self-as-entity.’ The main mark of such idea of ‘self’ is separateness. Māra thinks there are things, and that they exist on their own side, by their own power. This is, of course, because that’s how he experiences himself.

Māra, too, is karmic action in misalignment with how things are. This might be another phrase for dukkha. That is, dukkha is the feeling of misalignment, and all the sorrow which attends it. Not knowing that ‘This’ is an undivided multiplicity, Māra develops wrong intention – the kind of intention that accompanies wrong view and the feeling of skew-whiff-ness. Māra’s life is out of kilter, and as he develops a life like that, he believes in it, and he wants everyone else to live that way.

What would the Nikāya Buddha mean, to say that Māra gains access to my mind? Say I am grasping at some sense-experience – fixating on some sensory experience; a taste of food, for instance, unconscious that I’m avoiding some inner sense of not-okay-ness – then I am missing something significant. Simply, I’m not seeing that the taste and I are not two. And more profoundly, I am missing the fact that the richness of the experience of the senses is the display of the unborn, the deathless.

If I am mindful and fully comprehending the openness of experience, then there is no ‘me,’ or ‘mine;’ there are no objects to grasp – instead I can relax and appreciate the taste, knowing it to be the display of unbounded wholeness. However, if I challenge the view that sensory pleasures offer some answer to inner impoverishment that comes with separateness, then Māra and his army will come to defend their world. Māra is that which attempts to block the path of such freedom.

Actually, whenever he turns up, you can sense how restless he is. He cannot find peace. It goes with the belief and feeling of separateness that there is a sense of being disconnected fromthe source of basic goodness in oneself. In the case of the taste of my food, if I am fixated on ‘taste’ and ‘experiencer’ then I am disconnected from my appreciative intelligence. I’m acting from, and perpetuating, a sense of inner deficiency – based on the sense of such absolute dualities. These are all Māra’s activities, in the theatre of my mind. They are not my natural in-dwelling.

The Nikāya Buddha calls this a ‘barrenness’ (cetokhila). Here it’s worth pointing out, that one could almost feel sorry for Māra; except that sentimentality would be dangerous, because Māra shouldn’t be underestimated. He goes deep. For instance, an important aspect of Māra is his hatred of the good. In the Nikāyas cetokhila is mentioned in relation to fallowness, or waste of heart or mind, and is usually five-fold. It arises from debilitating doubt in the Buddha, in the nature of things, in the community of practitioners, or in the teachings, or in from anger against one’s fellow students. In other words, one lashes out at the practice.

Even so, we shouldn’t fight or struggle with all of this in ourselves. The kind of energy of will needed is very different to his. We need to know Māra with the support of the earth. On the night of the Nikāya Buddha’s enlightenment, Māra and the Mārasena (Māra’s army) attacked with all their might. At some stage Māra said, “What gives you the right, to awaken?” And the Nikāya Buddha called the earth as his witness. (See the picture above.) In my one-to-one work with people, often Māra in the form of their inner critic comes along to say, “Who do you think you are, to be experiencing freedom?” (Or, joy, or wholeness, or happiness?) Then the person wants to backtrack.

The earth supports steady calmness, compassion, wisdom, strength, and the power of our own love of truth; and then Māra and his army have no power of us. The boundless heart of mindfulness of the body and clear comprehension are our best defence. If we are mindful of the earth element’s power to support us, we can return to our breathing body. “There is this body. There is this breathing in, breathing out.”

But the word most associated with Māra in the Nikāyas is ‘death.’ The word Māra comes from the Sanskrit root mṛ, which (broadly speaking) means ‘death-bringing.’ He is also associated with everything that entangles us in ‘death-dukkha.’ So, what of this? And, what of our Hawk-Killer story?

Should We Invite Old Mara Along?

By admin

On December 11, 2015

In Enquiry, Meditation, Practices

Into those endowed with virtue, dwelling wakefully,
freed by right understanding, Māra does not find an inroad.
– Dhammapada, verse 57. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

Better is victory over oneself than over others.
For someone who is self-possessed, flowing in self-control –
not a god, not a Gandharva, not Mara together with Brahma,
can make the victory of such a person into a defeat.
– Dhammapada, verses 104-105. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

I could be rightly said that my translations don’t dispense with such non-modern and foreign symbols as that of Māra. That would be a fair comment. Yet, my readers do not have the kind of consciousness that gave rise to the image of Māra, which seems to have been a consciousness more prone than ours to seeing demons, devas, and other super-beings. Is he still useful in the self-realisation project, then?

Trevor Ling’s rational approach might have been right, when he said, in his 1962 study of Māra, that Māra was a connecting symbol between the demonology of the historical Buddha’s time and the deeper and more universal principles of ‘things-as-they-is’ (dhamma). I agree (with my hypothetical critic) that a modern person (a person of a culture which considers reason the highest faculty) can develop vast insight (insight with compassion) without the help of Māra.

For me there is this issue, though: If you remove him, will what remains function the same? Remove an organ from your body, and organs which remain intact don’t function the same the same as they did before, naturally. They have to make adjustments. The Pāli Nikāyas, too, have an organic functioning. Remove the mythos, then you don’t have the Pāli imaginaire. It’s a practice, to allow the myth to work its magic on us, and see if that brings a shift. Māra might still function as a connecting link.

If we are using these texts, you will lose something – something of heart – trying to turn them into something which is purely reasonable (by Western standards), or into something in line with contemporary cultural values. In respect of the Nikāya texts, that’s a quixotic project, anyway – just as quixotic as believing naively in them, by adhering to a ‘The Buddha said…” approach.

At this stage, I think the loss of the mythic, would be too great a loss of the power, which the texts have, to evoke ‘things-as-they-is.’ And, imagining that the mythic elements are less true than the reasoning elements which we would like to extract from their context, this is itself an act of only one kind of modern consciousness, anyhow; even if it is the dominant one, presently.

For the ancients, of course, the mythic elements were integrated with such contemplative skills as mindful-awareness and the clear understanding which was supported by the wisdom framework of the times. Something like this can work, for us, also. We can receive them as poetry, as metaphor, as a bodily, heart-centred language of feeling; and, we can integrate that with our own philosophies and psychologies. We can incorporate the Māra myth into our subpersonality work, for instance. Along with our non-conceptual awareness, the myths can work as a language of the deeper layers of the personality.

We needn’t surrender our contemporary culture. We need – for the benefit of all beings; especially for the voiceless – to carry our culture forward.

So, Māra might still function as a connecting symbol, though not, now, by connecting the “popular demonology on the one hand, and the abstract terms of the Dhamma on the other,” as Ling put it; but rather, to connect text and personal experience.

Māra is a way of talking about experiencing, which we can listen to, and be changed by, without adopting the Māra-terminology for ourselves in the way that the ancients used it, nor agreeing with every use he’s put to by the compilers of the Nikāyas. We can get a feel for how Māra functions in these texts. Felt experiencing is the test, here; not static concepts. Approached as poetry, as myth, Māra has a lot of mileage in him, yet.

Then, there is the light-hearted element. One of the things that I have always enjoyed about him, is that you can’t take him too seriously. He’s a foolish figure in the Nikāya stories. He’s not likely to give you the nightmares that Satan can give. Frequently, poor old Māra slinks away crestfallen after an encounter with the Nikāya Buddha, or with some other awakened person who recognises his wiles and rejects him. For instance, in a poem from the Verses of the Female Elders: “Then Māra the evil one – sad and dejected at realising “Vajirā the nun knows me” – vanished immediately.”

And, on the other hand, more seriously, he’s a great symbol for the evil, the demonic and the ruthless in us. Māra hates the truth. If you find the hater of all that’s good and true in you – and it is a universal pattern – then you can know the archetypal value of the Māra symbol. Even then, the Nikāya mythos says, there is a basic goodness in us that is stronger than that darkness.

Anyhow, my project, in case these are my last months to live, is to engage the Nikāyas just as they are, and not shape them in my image; I want them to be themselves, and that I listen authentically to their point of view on death, from who I am in my times.

The Bird-Killer Sutta

By admin

On December 10, 2015

In Death, Mindfulness, Radiant Citta

Sakuṇagghi suttaṃ: The Bird-Killer Sutta
(Samyutta Nikāya 5.3.1.6.372)

Translated by Christopher J. Ash

“Once, long ago, a hawk dived on a quail and seized it. As it was being carried away, the Quail lamented: ‘Oh! Such bad luck, and so little merit, that I wandered into fields not mine, into foreign territory. If I had moved within my own natural field, within my ancestral habitat, the hawk would certainly have a battle to fight.’

“‘What is your own natural field, your ancestral habitat, Quail?’ asked the hawk.

“‘There! A ploughed field with clods of earth.’

“Thereupon, Practitioners, the hawk – not haughty about its own strength, not broadcasting its own strength – let the quail loose, saying, ‘Go on, then, Quail. But even there you will not be free from me.’

“Then, Practitioners, the quail in its own ploughed field with its clods of earth, got up on a big clod of earth, and standing her ground, she said to the hawk: ‘Come and get me now, Hawk. Come on, Hawk.’

“And the hawk – not haughty about its own strength, not broadcasting its own strength – folded both wings to the side of its body and dived upon the quail with all its force. When the quail realised ‘The hawk is coming at me, full speed,’ she slipped down behind the clod. So, right there, Practitioners, the hawk struck its own chest hard. This is how it is for one who wanders out of their natural field, into foreign territory.

“Practitioners, don’t wander out of your natural field, into foreign territory. Māra gains access to a person who wanders outside their natural field, into foreign territory; he gains an object. Now, what is not your field; what is foreign territory? It is the five strands of sensual pleasure. Which five? Forms perceptible to the eye, sounds perceptible to the ear, smells perceptible to the nose, tastes perceptible to the tongue, and objects of touch perceptible to the body – all of which are wished for, desirable, lovable, agreeable, connected with lust, enticing. These are not the natural field, for a practitioner; this is a foreign territory.”

“So, wander, Practitioners, in what is your natural field, you own ancestral habitat. For a person who remains in their natural field, their own ancestral habitat, Māra does not gain access, does not gain an object. And what, for a practitioner, is their ancestral habitat? The four placements of mindfulness. Which four? Here, a practitioner dwells contemplating the body in the body – ardent, comprehending, and mindful, laying aside longing and distress about the world. She [likewise] dwells contemplating feeling-tones in the feeling-tones, mind-states in the mind-states, and the dynamics of experiencing in the dynamics of experiencing – ardent, comprehending, and mindful, laying aside longing and distress about the world. This, for a practitioner, is her natural field, her ancestral habitat.”

Tending One’s Field (Part 1)

By admin

On December 9, 2015

In Death, Memoir, Mindfulness, Radiant Citta

Whoever dwells contemplating the pleasant, sense faculties unguarded,
not understanding food, inactive and making little effort,
they will be overpowered by Māra, like a weak tree in the wind.
– Dhammapada, verse 7. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

I was looking a sutta today with friends. Our group will go into it in more depth, next month. For my part, one central concept in the sutta stood out as needing more appraisal, and I’d like to begin to think it through with you. I sense that it ties in with my as-yet-unexplored blog theme of ‘authenticity.’

To summarise, the Nikāya Buddha says to his students, something like, “Do not wander out of your natural field (gocara). If you do, Māra (the King of Death) will get a toehold in. And what is your natural field? The four placements of mindfulness – body, feeling-tones, mind-states, and the internal dynamics of your experiencing – these are your natural field. Death will not gain access to a person who remains in their natural field.” And, the corresponding situation is stated: “Death will gain access to a person who wanders outside their natural field.” (Gocara, by the way, is literally ‘a cow’s grazing.’ It can be translated as pasture, but ‘field’ or ‘sphere’ are correct, too.)

Thus far, it makes sense, but what interests me is this sentence: “Now, what is not your field; what is outside of your field? It is the five strands of sensual pleasure. Which five? Forms perceptible to the eye, sounds perceptible to the ear, smells perceptible to the nose, tastes perceptible to the tongue, and objects of touch perceptible to the body – all of which are wished for, desirable, lovable, agreeable, connected with lust, and enticing. This is not your field; it is outside of your field.”

What can this mean? Aren’t the senses included in one’s ‘natural field’? I will come back to it. I want to first talk about knowing one’s present-moment experiencing. I think this detour into how we know what we know, might give a clue to the question. Perhaps, we will find some understanding of ‘This,’ the big going-on, through the mediation of the senses?

When I was young, my subjectivity – the experience from the inside, so to speak – was not at all lucid. It was very confused. I couldn’t understand what ‘This’ was – this big going-on which includes me. I have striven, therefore, to make the world of experiencing intelligible.

This couldn’t be done by studying the so-called ‘physical’ world, because that study left me still asking, ‘But what knows this physical world, from in here.” Neither has the study of the brain given me anything but merely ‘physical correlates’ to match up against how I experience it. It still begs the question of what it is to be conscious. Science has no explanatory power when it comes to the raw experience of nowness.

And, Buddhadharma was meant to make the world intelligible; but it has done so by pointing back to my own experience, for its own answers. That’s as it should be. Deep bows to the awakened for pointing. But, I’m thrown back on my own raw, personal experiencing – subjectivity.

The view that I have come to, in striving for an intelligible subjectivity, then, goes like this: Neither ‘inner’ nor ‘outer’ experience can be established as ultimately real, mainly because the only way I can know the inner, or the outer (or the reality of that very inner-outer distinction) is through my own awareness. I can’t get outside my awareness to verify my experience. (Of course, I can talk to you about your experience, and we can make comparisons, but the process is still mediated by consciousness.)

We can say: experiencing is verified by experiencing. The reality of experiencing is dependent on the very sensory and mental organs, and capacities, which give the experiencing in the first place. And so, nothing can be established to exist in the way it is presented. “Things are not as they appear to be.” (Lankavatara Sutra)

However, at the limit of knowledge, I can know that there is a big life process, of which I am; yet, which is not conceivable. I’m going to come back to this, again and again, over the last months of this blog-life – to say it in different ways. I have recently found a new way to talk about that space at the edge of knowledge, a way which I am finding touches my friends and students – so I look forward to sharing it, at some point soon.

But for today, let’s say that I have come to trust that we experience the world (both inner and outer) because the bigger process actually is going on, even though I’m not seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching it directly; and, that the ‘field’ of my experiencing is my body’s take on that inconceivable big life process – the inconceivable going-on. Without it, I would not have things as they appear to be. Our experiencing is a shadow, an echo (remember Echo) of that. And, this echo is not my own. It belongs to the implicit big ‘This’ process. “Things are not as they appear to be; neither are they otherwise.” (Lankavatara Sutra)

It has taken a dispassionate will, to come to this – a ‘hands-off’ approach to experiencing, so that experiencing could just be what it is, free and uncontrived. Only when the person relinquishes ownership of experiencing, can the non-clinging, non-grasping awareness intuit the inconceivable aspect of reality.

Whoever dwells not contemplating the pleasant, sense faculties guarded,
understanding food, confident and diligent,
truly, Mara will not overpower them, like the wind [against] a mountain.

– Dhammapada, verse 8. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

Conversation with Kent about Karma (Part 2)

By admin

On December 8, 2015

In Enquiry, Radiant Citta

Those who imagine the inessential is essential,
and see the essential as inessential,
they dwell in the field of false intention,
and so do not discover the essence.
– Dhammapada, verse 11. Translated by Christopher J. Ash

K: Okay. You’re saying that stuffing the thought of death down is a change process; and all change processes interact with other possible change processes. If I stuff down the thought of death, the process is going to carry something else forward, in its own way – it won’t stop there.

C: Exactly.

K: My idea is to stop the feelings about death, but something else flows from the action.

C: Of course, because this stuffing down is actually a process, a dynamic, stuffing-down energy, which interacts with other processes in the same body (and of course with other processes in the world about it).

(This, by the way, is why karma cannot be a one-to-one thing. The same action by different people is occurring into a different sea of implicit possibilities; and even the same action by the same person at different times, or simply repeated immediately, is occurring into a changing sea of possibilities.)

K: Because the intention is a process which interacts with the reservoir of possibilities already in one?

C: Interesting that you speak of a reservoir, because that’s what the Yogācāra philosophy of later Indian Buddhism came up with – they amplified the Pāli concept of ‘alāya,’ a foundation of egoism, into a ‘storehouse’ of ‘seeds.’

Anyhow, that’s right. And, the intention to stuff the death-thoughts down changes the sea of possibilities, in ways you can’t predict with point-to-point accuracy.

K: So, it backs the modern psychoanalytic principle that repression has to come out somewhere.

C: Yes, this is the principle behind that one. A continuity will happen, but it’s not usually one that resolves the original issue. The disharmony we call ‘dukkha’ is the result.

So, we can ask, does the suppression serve the bodily-felt carrying-forward of life process?

K: Does thwarting the enquiry regarding death serve…?

C: Or, does it interfere with that process; and what will happen to the process, then?

K: So, karma is the body’s process, not some ‘out there’ cosmic force?

C: I think that’s fair to say. It’s mental to the extent that ‘mind’ is an angle on what a body is.

K: Wow! That brings it right home!

C: Let’s look at it from another angle. Suppressing the thought of death creates an ‘object’ out of the thought. Neither the simple thought of death, nor the ‘death-thought fear’ need necessarily be objects.

They can simply be free process, without ownership. Thoughts of whatever kind can be the recognised as the radiance of a conscious interactional process, by which we are changed toward more life. That doesn’t clog the works up with an object.

On the other hand, if we don’t meet it completely – meet it as though its like writing on water – the thought instead creates a split-off object; which is ultimately an illusion, but a powerful one, because it acts as though it were independent of the person.

K: Sounds like sub-personalities, again.

C: Doesn’t it? From the splitting we develop behaviour to cope with, or adapt to, the conflict – and these become sub-personalities.

K: My selves are escapes! And, more than that – they are processes flowing from the original stuffing down.

C: Some theorists think this is how personalities – in the sense of patterns of ego-functioning, actually arise: as resistance to painful situations. Whatever the case, in ‘resisting,’ we get more and more away from authentic living.

K: Dukkha.

C: And, in our instance, the concept of death takes on meanings and proportions that have nothing to do with the actuality of physical death. It becomes a bogey man. While, really, death is not a big deal; when seen in context of the big, timeless interactive life process which we are.

K: So, the whole fear of death thing is a misperception?

C: We fear the cessation of constructed consciousness. You fear what your thoughts are projecting as the likely result of such cessation. Actually, if object-consciousness ceases, your next step in development (and the next step for humankind) arrives.

K: Which is?

C: Seeing what ‘unconditioned’ and ‘unconditioned’ means. Once the deathless element of life is included, you begin to master the ordinary, miraculous experience of life and death; the work truly begins, of living from the heart.

Those who know the essential as essential,
and the inessential as inessential,
they dwell in the field of appropriate intention,
and so they discover the essence.
– Dhammapada, verse 11. Translated by Christopher J. Ash

Conversation with Kent About Karma (Part 1)

By admin

On December 7, 2015

In Enquiry, Resisting Death

Kent: You’ve mentioned karma a few times in this conversation. You seem to be saying that a child has karmic intent.

Christopher: How ‘karma’ works is a good thing to explore, at this point; because what you’re saying is: “It’s bad karma to think about death.” Right? You are saying that the practice will have a bad outcome.

Before we begin, I want to say, if we are talking about karma, we are inviting a conversation about the constructed (Pāli: sankhata) dimension of reality. That’s worth remembering as the background to this conversation. ‘Karma’ is a lens though which we can think of process. And, traditionally karma is not exactly about the outcome; karma is the shaping of experience through intention. I think that’s standard Buddhism.

K: Okay.

C: So, if I have stuffed the thought of death down, with the intention of dealing with it that way, the concept of death is going to be a process that rolls on in with the energy of that intention in it. That is, there will be unintended consequences. (It’s not a one to one thing, though. The action doesn’t automatically produce a facsimile outcome. I’ll explain this after.)

Because I am not meeting the thought fully, and because of my negative intention – to not feel what is already available to be felt – there will be further processes flow from this. The energy-suppressing energy is occurring into my development. That’s one aspect.

Another angle is: the energy that is the thought of death is not allowed to carry forward into insight, and hence other processes will try to compensate, will try to fill the deficiency of the insight which could have happened, and which is still implicit in my organism.

If you meet each moment with one hundred percent of your awareness, you leave nothing over. The intention to put it off until later, means a ‘hole,’ and the process will later turn up more powerfully, because it has gathered a lot of momentum through putting it off, again and again. It remains in one form or another, as a hindered process.

K: I love the thought of meeting each moment fully! Though, that’s big ask.

C: What would that mean, meeting your fear of death fully?

K: That’s what I’m asking you.

C: Okay, maybe we can come back to this. Maybe if we, first, understand more deeply how karma works. I’ve said suppressing the thought of death has unintended consequences. So, let me outline some principles of the bodily processes involved in ‘karma’:

Firstly, the body is an interaction with its environment; and, also, the body is interaction with itself. The body is interaction. (Gendlin, in A Process Model, Ch.I).

K: Hm… maybe that’s what mind is – the body’s interaction with itself.

C: Perhaps. I’d have to give that a little think. However, for now, let’s say that the body is always interactional, always process; it’s not a thing.

K: Self-organising process, as Maturana and Varela said.

C: I think so. I haven’t studied their work well, but their autopoiesis looks helpful.

So, the body functions to take care of its needs, to carry life forward, as best it can for the environment that it is in. I like Gendlin’s sentence (in A Process Model, Ch.I): “The body is a non-representational concretion of (with) its environment.”

K: Explain please.

C: Yes, I will, but I need to say, firstly, that I am not representing Gendlin’s thought in this blog. I’m putting forward an understanding influenced by him, but which might not be said by him. Having said that, how do I understand ‘non-representational concretion’?

Well… it’s like this: the body is not a concept – it’s living process; as an interacting event, it’s a ‘biospheric’ event – even a cosmic event – with all the intelligence which that implies. Your body is – primordially – not an idea, or a concept. It comes before concepts (which are ‘about’ it). So, it’s ‘non-representational.’
And, ‘concretion’ means, as I read it: the fact of how the environment and the body have grown together – that the evolutionary process of each is their inter-development. They grew and go on growing together. They imply each other, in living.

K: Wow! I love that! So, what does this mean for us, in our conversation?

C: Let’s see…. I’m stating this as one principle to help us understand karma. A body is never without interaction. That’s the first thing. And, it carries its processes forward, whatever the skilfulness of the person. When it’s interactions can’t supply it with what it needs, it attempts adaption. If not successful, it dies.

K: I think you’re saying that if I don’t investigate what is the core thrust of my thought of death, the body will find some way of dealing with the feelings about death.

C: Busy-ness, drink and drugs, television, sex – experience-altering in some form.

So, we’re already touching upon the second principle, related to the first. Firstly: Bodies are interactions. Secondly: ever-present bodily interaction always implies the optimising thrust of carrying-forward the life process, in some way. The organism – in this case, the intelligence we call ‘the body’ – functions to carry life forward.

K: I think of child development.

C: Yes, that’s a good instance. You might have wanted to stop growing up, at some stage, but the body had its carrying forward to do. You couldn’t stop it. As I entered teenage years, I dreaded becoming an adult. I was resisting nature.

K: Me, too. I was a Peter Pan, some said.

C: However, bodies change, grow, develop, and evolve, and carry the big life process forward. Here, we can also look at it from the bigger picture, which is that the big life process is carrying the body forward. There’s no separation.

K: That follows.

C: Another way of saying this second principle is: bodily change has implicit continuity which is always an unfolding of life-possibilities.

Becoming a Host for Fear

By admin

On December 6, 2015

In Body, Enquiry, Focusing, Mindfulness, Practices, Resisting Death

I was speaking about how some people are concerned that if they let death into their thoughts, they’ll affect their fate. Their concern is that they might invite a cause of death which is not yet manifesting; they might die sooner; or they may subliminally bring dying on. I’ve met this species of fear in my practice, too – which I think of as a fear of the power of subliminal patterns. Let’ notice first, that this is not really a fear of death. Do you know what death is, really, to be able to fear it? It’s fear of the thought of death; which makes it fear of the mind. To call it ‘fear of thoughts of death,’ would be cumbersome, so let’s call it death-thoughts fear (until I think of something more elegant). When I talk of the children we were, at the end, this phrase works quite well.

The fear of the power of the subliminal patterns in respect of death particularly arises, when someone is doing some experiential exploration of how the thought of death lives in them. For the investigation, I might invite them to let the death-thoughts fear inhabit their body. This is bound to be scary for anyone. Sometimes, this is because the person’s criticising process tells them that they shouldn’t be fearful because that’s not admirable.

However, occasionally I meet someone in whom the criticising process (or a powerless child process) is saying that “If you do that – invite fear of death in- it will be bad karma.” There’s a belief that there is some independent power in the death-thoughts fear – independent of their awareness. It’s being conceived as having its own life, and it is a threat to the person’s well-being. It’s masquerading as a host, with you as its guest.

Before going any further, I want to say, I don’t know you, my reader. And, I respect that you might be an exception to what I say. When you read this blog entry, see if, by the time you get to the end, it calms you at all. Did the thought that this is not exactly fear of death, but the fear of thoughts of death, help your body calm any? Check your body as you go. If it gets too scary, at any point, go away and breathe deeply. Come back if, and when, you are ready; or maybe read it with a friend. Take care of yourself.

In my experience, the most harmful aspect of the death-thoughts fear is our lack of intimacy with it; the fact that it is ‘exiled,’ as they say in Internal Family Systems theory. When death-thoughts fear is unconscious in us, it forms an unexamined part of our ‘I’-making; which naturally rolls forward, conditioning further mind-states. It is this ego-dependence on death-thoughts fear that gives it its power. It is not independent of our awareness and intentions. The irony is that it gains a kind of independence through being disowned.

Let’s look at how intention works in becoming free from death-thoughts fear. Say that I know, upon reflection, that I’m harbouring what appears to me to be a fear of death. And, say that I introduce into my process the wish to be free of death-thoughts fear (because death-thoughts fear is a harmful process on our planet, and because it obscures my luminous presence). And, say that I wish to relate to other people (anyone, because we are all mortal) with a conscious process, rather than just blindly reacting from my fragmented ‘I’-process. Because I wish to relate to others mindfully and in full comprehension of my responses to our mortality, then it would be good if I understood my death-thoughts reactivity thoroughly. These are all healthy intentions.

Hence, with these intentions, I invite the death-thoughts fear to be felt in my body, so as to be intimate with it. I don’t just analyse it, because that only deals with the version presented by thought. And, I don’t just simply oppose it with a criticising process. That’s the old way, and doesn’t end it. I can instead invite it into my body, and feel it, and so become its host. It is my guest.

In this way, I access the meaning-laden way in which the fear lives in me. The death-thoughts fear has many meanings which will liberate. So, with skills derived from various experiential processes (for me it’s Focusing, Voice Dialogue,
and Buddhadharma, in particular), I can delve into this fear, and come to know directly the collection of processes for which ‘fear of death’ (death-thoughts fear) is a term.

I can, by inviting it into my body, feel the vulnerability that is behind it, with other fears, and the out-dated narratives. I can feel in my body – which is a non-dual truth detector – how unfounded these are. As a result, the death-thoughts fear changes – it loses its charge.

Now, the point about the flow of bodily energy which we call ‘the karma of inviting the thought of death’ is that it is necessarily intentional. Karma (which I’ll explore some more in the coming posts) is not some blind mechanism, a something out there in the cosmos inflicting itself on its victims. It is the accumulated thrust of consciousness formed out of our mind states – it is the on-going stream of our intentionality.

Can you sense how this enquiry into death-thoughts fear is itself a conscious process, and that it is supported by wholesome intentions? Wholesome intentions are processes that affect old patterns. So, exploring death-thoughts fear is an instance of awakening that has awakening to life, love, and knowledge as the intention, and what happens is the process of awakening interacts with the process usually called ‘fear of death.’ This is possible because processes in the human are not walled off from each other. They inter-are. So, I’m saying the karma of this conscious exploration is very different to the karma of the death-thoughts fear when it is in mere reactive mode.

So, the results of the unreflective karma of the child is being felt by the adult. Isn’t this what Wordsworth meant when he said (adapting his language), that the child is parent to the adult? (Seems so much less poetic than ‘the child is father of the man.’) How will I liberate the-child-I-was, and transform the death-thoughts fear which once belonged to the child, if I don’t bring it into reflective consciousness, as the adult I am? How will I liberate myself? The-child-I-was is a substratum without which I can’t continue my fear of my death-narratives, today. So, through this experiential delving, I become intimate with the way the child’s patterns of death-thoughts fear live in my experience now, and they dissolve.

This intention – to be fully conscious and free of fear of death (while not giving away one’s power, of course; and not being anyone’s doormat) this is by its nature a greater power, than the power of the fear of death which I call into my body. The host always has more space than the guest. This spaciousness makes it possible to hold the fear of death productively, turning it into the path of awakening. I cannot harm myself by inviting fear of death, when it is in service of goodness, truth and beauty; or, for the welfare of all beings. It may not always be pleasant, but it is always ennobling.

What about if selfish motivations, are in the mix? Like, such that I can call on the universe for abundance, secure more friends and influence people – or, like Milarepa foster power to get revenge, for yourself or others? To be sure, doing this work for those kinds of reasons is karmically fraught, because of their narcissism. However, can we be entirely free of these motivations, at first? No. There’ll be mixed karma in the first place. The delusion of ego-entity has many layers. So, it does help, usually, to have some tutoring in how to titrate the experience; how to ground yourself in the body, and how to invite the host consciousness, and so on – even to help you recognise your allies. Maybe in your case it might take some psychotherapy. I’m not saying that it’s a breeze – only that there is a way, and that the way is based on what is intrinsically available to you.

During the process of exploration, by continuously turning towards the ‘what is’ of death-thoughts fear with a love of truth-finding, the karmic momentum of the pattern is changed; the action of inviting the fear into your body brings it into contact with something greater which hosts it, and so it changes.

No Post Today

By admin

On December 5, 2015

In Administrative

My software failed me tonight. I wrote for two hours, and closed my editor while I had a break. Then, I opened it up again, to finish, but the former text was not there – it had been wiped out by an older copy automatically copied from another computer. Search as I could, I couldn’t find my two hours work. It was unexpected, and irrevocable.

What I had written about – and contemplate it again, tomorrow – was how karma works. If we are at present afraid to think of death, lest we invite physical death, then by understanding how karma works, we can slowly, gently, release our grip on our prohibitive thoughts, taking steps toward allowing the contemplation. A new freedom can be born through an understanding of karma.

The Desire for Non-Existence

By admin

On December 4, 2015

In Death, Enquiry, trance

Some people are afraid that journaling about, and thinking about, death will invite death (in the sense of physical death). This can happen, if one’s love of death is greater than one’s love of life.

That might sound like a funny thing to say, if you haven’t thought of a ‘love of death.’ I think I first heard about it in one of Erik Fromm’s books. He, no doubt, adapted it from Freud’s ‘death-instinct’ and applied his Marxist analysis to it. Fromm believed that the central driving force was the desire to make up for a lack of authentic being and selfhood. He proposed that there is a love of death and destruction, related to this deficiency of Being. He cited Hitler and Stalin as instances of the love of death.

One might think that only very unfortunate people would have a love of death. If the circumstances of one’s childhood were terribly and regularly traumatic, one might be more prone than others to wishing for annihilation, this is true. My painful family life as a child certainly left me with such a legacy.

The contrast between love of life and a wish for death was brought home to me when I befriended a Vietnamese refugee three decades ago. He had been a soldier in the defeated South Vietnamese army. As a result of his ‘re-education’ by the victors he had been forced into slave labour. At night he was locked up in a cell, and was given only one bowl of rice a day. By day he worked in the fields, under guard, and the profit from his labour went to his prison warder. He found an opportunity to escape after a year, and made his way to Australia by boat. The last I saw, this former prisoner and refugee was running his own farm in South Australia.

When I met him (teaching English to migrants) I asked him, “While you were imprisoned, did you ever wish you were dead?” All these years later, I can still see his astonishment at the suggestion. I know now, having become more familiar with my mind, that I was expressing what I was carrying, what was unprocessed in me. To be sure, since childhood I have often confused the longing for a cessation of my torments with the cessation of my life. Slowly the practice of metta, meditation, mindfulness, Buddhist insight practice, and body-oriented therapy healed this.

Buddhism thinks of ego-desire as having three forms: desire for sense pleasures (kāmataṇhā), desire for becoming or existence (bhavataṇhā), and desire for non-existence (vibhavataṇhā). For instance, you are trapped in an uncomfortable social circumstance. You hope for an escape to something better (crave some other existence), you hope that your discomfort will go away (mild form of craving non-existence), or, you eat (crave sense pleasure). You get depressed and go to sleep, as a craving for non-existence. You can imagine the permutations possible.

So, back to taking mindfulness of death as a practice. Clearly, one’s motivation is very important. If I take the project as a means to knowing myself more deeply, for the benefit of all, then, if there are some unwholesome factors in the mix, with the appropriate motivation (especially a love of truth and a wish to benefit all beings), journaling about death will bring to light the ways that the wish for annihilation might be working in the me. It, of course, helps to have a sangha – a community – or to be practising with another positively-oriented person.

Tomorrow: ‘Authentic being and selfhood.’