Category: Practices Page 2 of 17

Speaking with the Dead

On May 14, 2017

In Body, Death, Enquiry, Focusing, Practices

Today I will visit a ‘place’ established by my sisters to remember our mother. They placed her ashes there. It’s mothers’ day. I’m glad to be going. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve visited this place, or made space for it.

What is a place, I wonder? What’s the relationship of a ‘place’ to the kind of ‘space’ which is our ‘experiential world’? And, how does memory work?

I read this morning about a white settler whose husband died. She sold the farm and moved away (maybe back to England); but not before she relocated her husband’s grave to a tree somewhere off the farm. I thought that was sensible. She made sure it wasn’t on any one individual’s property. She couldn’t control its future, but she gave it the best chance of carrying on.

The tree was a ‘place’ that held memories for her, because long before, when her husband had arrived penniless in the area, unable to afford board anywhere, he had lived in the trunk of that tree for five years. Rabbi Rudy Brash includes the story in his Permanent Addresses, which is a book about people’s graves. The man went on to create a farm, and have a large family.

Why do we have graves? I wonder. How does memory work? Isn’t the body the memory of what’s been? Isn’t it the carrying forward of what has been? Or do we have these places to remind us of other ‘spaces’? Without the acknowledgment of ‘other’s spaces’ ours would be a narcissistic bubble. We create these places to carry forward our spaces into more of life.

Many people use graves to speak to the dead. With such an interaction, do we take a place into our space (our living), absorbing its fresh meanings (fresh because this is ‘now’) into our being? A lot of healing happens this way. I had a dream a couple of years ago, in which two young aboriginal men told the dream-Christopher: “It is an honour to speak with the dead.”

A spontaneous visit with a friend to the local vihara one day, a couple of years ago, led me to reflect on how I’m treating my parents, who have both died. That’s an odd concept to many, no doubt.

“How are you treating your parents?”
“What do you mean? They’re dead?”
“When you say that, what do you want that word ‘dead’ to mean?”

I think I’ve got some learning to do, here. The Sri Lankan family who provided the lunch meal, were commemorating the death of their collective parents – and they do this every year. I imagine one function of the day is to remind themselves that: I am subject to old age. I am not exempt from old age. I am subject to illness. I am not exempt from illness. I am subject to death. I am not exempt from death. There is alteration in, and parting from, everything that is dear and pleasing to me. I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions. They are my matrix, I am related through them, they are my mediator. I become the heir of whatever actions I do, good or bad.

I got to thinking that, while I do often think about my parents’ deaths – each of which had its own story, its own character – on the other hand, I don’t commemorate their death, in the sense of make a special time of remembrance. I think of each of them, from time to time, and I think about the manner of their deaths, and I think about their inner growth up to and into that moment of death; but nothing ritualised.

I resolved after that dream, and after witnessing the Sri Lankans that day, to explore what more there could be in my relationship with the dead. To be at peace when it’s my turn, I might need to speak with them now more intimately than random musings allow. If I only had a year to live, wouldn’t I follow this thread? “Yes.” Then, okay.

So, thanks to the dream and an unexpected invitation to a meal at the local Vihara on day, I started to explore ritually inviting remembrance, a conscious process. I took the first step: I recorded the dates of my parent’s deaths in my diary.

I’ve noticed that others of my family, and some of my acquaintances, they do this: they go to the cemetery, each year, on the anniversary of the deaths of loved ones. It was by my sisters’ suggestion that we are visiting my mother’s place in the cemetery today, and it felt right.

These dates become an opportunity to be in touch with the ‘more’ of life. I’ll check in ‘with the middle of me,’ today, to see what comes there. I imagine it can be, at the very least, a day of gratitude, and an opportunity to be feel the preciousness of a human life – and maybe it’ll be painful, but… that’s welcome, too. It’s included in all this. There’s space for it.

Some Surprising Inspirations

By admin

On May 11, 2017

In Death, Memoir, Positivity, Practices

Biological life doesn’t stand still. Our bodily health changes through illness and accident. The healthy may easily have a conceit of good health, unaware of how close death can be. I suffered three special corrections to such a trance, all in 2014. Two accidents, then cancer. My long-standing practice of including death in my daily awareness turned these occasions into gifts.

The gift in these occasions was the confirmation of traditional wisdom that peace of mind is our greatest treasure. During this time the forms – such as reminding myself with rituals that this could be my last day – were far less important than actually living in mental ease. I found I was naturally more present in each breath. The formal ‘practice’ came into alignment with my everyday life.

In April of 2014 (four months before the cancer diagnosis), in the dark pre-dawn and in the rain, I fell down the steep stairs at the front of our house. I was alone that weekend, and so I guided my bruised body around without support from my family. It was a lesson in the humanising quality of vulnerability. It turned out that I had broken a rib in the fall – something I didn’t find out until we were doing a bone scan for cancer months later.

Next, in the beginning of June, I am coming back from an ultrasound (checking for the possible cancer), and – bang! – a head-on collision with a ute, on the highway in my hometown. The incident was instructive: it told me how my practice was going. My calm during and after the collision and my kindness toward others were notable.

The car was written off, though, and I could see how, without warning, in a brief and unexpected moment, your life could be finished. One doesn’t know one’s lifespan.

The results of that ultrasound showed that there was a suspicious shadow, so soon after I spent a night in hospital for a biopsy, which gave the unambiguous diagnosis. I am glad that I had been meeting the fact of death via the Third Remembrance for many years. Now, too, all those years of practising Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live (introduced by Stephen in his book of the same name) bore striking fruit.

I was less shocked about the diagnosis than I was of the car crash. (I had much more conceit around my driving!) In relation to the cancer I said, “Of course.” I said, “Biology means vulnerability. Biology means old age, sickness and death – and accident!” There was no, ‘Why me?’ The absence of which makes action much easier and wiser.

And, so, even though my ‘A Year to Live’ practice felt (for the rest of 2014) somewhat less formal, it felt like the most powerful year of practice yet – so much aliveness in the midst of ‘misfortune.’

But, isn’t our condition always one of vulnerability? That is exactly what this ‘A Year to Live’ practice is for – to wake us up, to show the bleeding obvious; that vulnerability is in every moment of human life. And the development of constant mindfulness is at its core.

As Stephen writes: “You have to remember one life, one death – this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, at each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity.”
― Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last, (p. 24)

(Here’s a good interview with Stephen, by the late Michael Toms, called Learning to Die in Order to Live. I recommend you browse the wonderful interviews from the New Dimensions site. Stephen himself died during the year I was writing this project. More of that soon.)

The biggest reason to do this practice, though, comes in health as much as in sickness. It is about meaning. Herbert Guenther writes, in his introduction to Book I, chapter two, of the fourteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Longchenpa Rabjampa’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us:

“…the thought of death is rather a powerful stimulus that brings me back to myself as the unique occasion for the search for the meaning of life, and it makes me recognize the importance of this very moment, as it highlights the real possibilities that are still before me. It is in the light of death that I am prompted to act in such a way that, should death strike, my life may have had some total significance. The thought of death prevents me from losing myself in the fictions with which I tend to surround myself in order to escape from Being…”

In this spirit, for more than fifteen years, I’ve used ‘A Year to Live’ practice to turn toward the certainty of my death, as a means of growth and deepening into life; and especially, as an inspiration to keep in touch with the luminous mind, the mirror of the ground of Being. The practice enhances connection to who we really are.

What ‘practice’ means in actuality changes from year to year (and I will share the kinds of experiments in living which one can do), but in general what the practice means, for me, is: daily reminding myself that this is possibly my last year, living more fully in the present, and practising all kinds of exercises that confront me with the both the certainty of, and the process of, death. In general it means plumbing the depths of aliveness – to be open to, and appreciative of, the inexplicable wonder that anything is going on at all.

Knowing I am alive is the same as knowing that death is present: there’s no difference between living fully in the present, and living in the light of death. You can come at the miracle of existence through either door. However, the doors are the same door. They are both perspectives on reality, which imply each other.

So, a normal healthy life can benefit from this practice. We live differently – more consciously and kindly in the light of death.

Nothing Surpasses the Art of Dying

By admin

On May 10, 2017

In Death, General, Practices

“Already this morning I’ve gone through three deaths.” – Tenzin Gyatso, the XIVth Dalai Lama.

This is maybe leaping in the deep end for some of you, I know; but it might be instructive for you to see what some contemplative folks get up to. These are those who practice the invaluable meditation on the ‘Dissolution of the Elements.’

The ‘elements’ referred to here aren’t (at least, not primarily) the literal elements of earth, water, fire, air and space. They instead point to one’s experiencing processes; that is: the dissolution, at the time of death, of bodily form, of feeling-tones, sense-perceptions, intentionality (the shaping or fashioning tendencies of experience), and of the inner subtle levels called ‘consciousness.’ In this particular meditation, body and ‘mind’ fall away, (as Japanese Zen teacher Dogen said). We can expect that to happen in dying, and during death. It is also subtly happening constantly, while living. So the practice is essentially an introduction to how to live.

A friend of mine who had just finished a retreat with the Dalai Lama (in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney) said that the Dalai Lama had suggested to the retreatants that they should do this practice every day. He does it everyday.

Once, in a 2010 teaching, in Dharamsala in India, he said:
“According to the tantric teachings, at the time of death there’s the eight-stage dissolution of the elements – the grosser levels of the elements of the body dissolve, and then the more subtle levels also dissolve. Tantric practitioners need to include this in their daily meditation. Every day, I meditate on death – in different mandala practices – at least five times, so still I’m alive! Already this morning I’ve gone through three deaths.”

I’ve practised this meditation regularly during my ‘A Year to Live’ practise in the past, and I’m curious as to why I haven’t leapt into it, during this my latest cycle of the ‘A Year to Live.’ Maybe it has to do with post-operative shock, after the removal of my cancer. Maybe it is due to conceit.

Recently, a meditation student asked me (I’m giving you the gist): “Why, when you could be practising the great catalysts of Love, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity, why would you contemplate the Five Remembrances?” (I’ll write about them later, but the third of these is about the certainty of dying.) In response, I checked into the middle of my body, to see what I felt, and the answer that came there was: “Because it pricks my bubble of conceit.”

That’s certainly true. And, practising the Dissolution of the Elements, likewise defuses human conceit – conceits of all kinds. I’ll go more deeply into what I mean by this, later in the project.

The version of this meditation which I practise is given by Joan Halifax on her CD album, Being with Dying. I’ve put it on my iPod, so it’s always easily accessible. You can get her script here (link), if you want to familiarise yourself with it. Indeed, you too may want to familiarise yourself with the process of death – the dissolution of the coming and going aspects of being.

If you’re in the Blue Mountains, and want to talk about this, give me a call. Over a cup of tea we can talk about the art of dying. As George Harrison said, in his song The Art of Dying: ”…nothing in this life that I’ve been trying/Could equal or surpass the art of dying.”

The contemplations that follow explore how this is can be so.

Back Then, Yet to Come, and In-Between

By admin

On February 5, 2017

In Death, Enquiry, Practices, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

Since ‘once upon a time,’ time has interested me. I had a vision which depressed me as a teenager. I thought: Having been born, there is the time before I was born; and there will be a time after my death. These two times are endless, and they’re also out of reach of present ‘me.’ They are are kind of silence, either side of the noisy present.

My childhood vision saw the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ as not telling me anything about the meaning of the time I am in NOW. Yet, it feels as though the time that I am in now is over-shadowed by those other times; and is meaningless, without their inclusion. As it stands, I am in this no-person’s zone of time between birth and death. Some philosophers think that the idea that time will continue after us, gives us meaning. I have noticed that unconscious narrative, myself; but I think it is a false support.

The way I thought of it, back then, I didn’t exist in the time before, just as I will not exist in the time that follows my death. (Notice the blind belief in ‘existence and non-existence?) In other words, the time before ‘me’ and the time after ‘me’ are both without me. Sound familiar? There’s a nothing before, and a nothing after,from the point of view of my identity. The thinker imagines that there was something there, but ‘I’ wasn’t, and also, ‘I’ wont be.

Later in my life, I knew that time concepts were useful, but, still, when I investigated – as a meditator can – when I investigated what ‘time’ was, I couldn’t find it in this default way that I had imagined it to be.
This experience – my bleak childhood vision of time – is not new, of course. Some people see these dilemmas and decide that time doesn’t exist, except as some kind of social agreement. They say, “Time is just a concept.” Yet others continue to believe that time and space are independent realities, but they don’t explain how that could be – and where exactly time and space could be located. (See that? What space and time would you put space and time in? What would found them?)

Of course, if time and space are the very fabric of being, then you and I are time-space. But, what kind of time is that? As Einstein showed us, it can’t be clock-time. And, anyhow, who lives in line with that? Time’s dynamics are rarely said to be satisfying to people. Time is usually said to be some kind of commodity: in short supply at one time, and too much of it at other times.

And, time is always in danger of running out. See! Mr. Death carries an hour-glass. This is the biggest problem with our intimacy with time – if time is closer to me than my breath, I can’t control it. No unrefined ego-system is happy with this. How will I make peace with the experience of time?

Despite the difficulties this last approach presents, I do look for time in my experiencing, though – and not in the concepts derived from experiencing. So, what aspects of accessible experiencing are we pointing toward, with our ‘time’ phrases?

So, is the answer to the tensions of time a kind of hedonist ‘seize the day’ approach, as some suggest? To these people the time ‘in the middle’ is all that is important. It is all that we can grasp, and grasp it we must, in our own way. Such a vision has the danger of strengthening narcissism, though. The middle time – my life between birth and death – is unconsciously identified as identical to my mentality. The objective vision of ‘time and space’ being ‘somewhere’ out there, slips over into solipsism. And, here, the ego feels also continues to feel alone.

So, this egoic ‘seize the day’ vision – a compensatory and imaginary one, notice – brings conflict. I need the vision of ‘my now,’ and yet it is never at rest with itself. Furthermore, the world as I experience it doesn’t co-operate in affirming the centrality of my ego’s seize-the-now project.

However, no matter how interesting, even engrossing, the three-separate-times version of ‘time’ is to us, explored interminably in our thoughts, it is simply a made-up story with no unmediated, experiential evidence for it. What do we have evidence for? This ‘whole life process’ that is going on without mediation of concepts. Our concepts point back to the holistic flow of all that is, to the holomovement. (Bohm)

I say this, realising that I must speak tentatively and provisionally about ‘life’ and ‘going on,’ and ‘flow.’ If not used in zig-zag with the non-conceptual, these ideas can become the horns of the bull which gores us. But, I can – on the basis of the flowing practice of mindfulness of the body – let these phrases point back to the intimacy of my Suchness. They gesture toward the immeasurable aliveness of being-at-all.

Then, will I find evidence for the usual kind of ‘time,’ anywhere? The time-space duo is an assumption brought in to explain this beginningless, ‘evolving’ life. A useful convention, which we avoid getting snagged by. If we let words mean what they do in us, we can ask, ‘How does the word ‘time’ work, when held up against our immediate ‘alive-ing’ (experiencing). Then, the narratives, the stories, the imaginings, and so on, are themselves all included in the holomovement of this going-on life, aren’t they? And a fresh meaning of the term ‘time’ can come in its use in situations, mysterious and related to the immeasurable life we are.

Why mysterious? Because time’s root is in the ‘Ing-ing’ (Gendlin), which is the movement of a stillness. And you and I, when we live this, are beings who are Such (beyond conception).
Well, I’ll never! And I thought a body was just a bit of skin and meat on bones. But, I thought that back when I lived in the no-person’s now, between ‘birth and death.’

Use of Ritual

By admin

On January 18, 2017

In Body, Meditation, Practices

Each morning, the first thing I do is: I step out of bed, put my hands together in a ritual gesture before a statue of Kuan Yin, and I say this gatha:
“These twenty-four brand new hours, may be my last.
I vow – together with all beings – to live them fully,
and look on others with eyes of compassion.”

I am speak this from my body, with awareness in my body, so that I’m not simply mouthing empty words. As the Buddha suggested, in the Mindfulness Sutta, I am knowing the body in the body.
Remember, the meaning of words (and the meaning of our rituals) is what they do in us, how they shift our state of being. I check inwardly, after saying my little verse (which I adapted, if not took, from Thich Nhat Hanh), to see how the ritual has changed my body. Has it brought me home to the greater field in which I have my being, or what is it doing? I am waking up to more than the simple fact of the day: I’m inviting myself, first thing, to acknowledge the primordial quality of Being. Being is my ground. And, ‘together with all beings’ invites the bodily knowledge that this ground is the ground of everyone.

(I’m reminded, as I write this, of the marvellous words of English mystic Thomas Traherne (1636/1637 – 1674):
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.)

My wife Joyce suggested an addition to my ritual, using a small glass bowl of water. Joyce shared with our local Year to Live group, that Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings, offers us a daily ritual that comes from Tibetan culture. Remen writes:
As the bowl fills, you reflect on the particulars of your life, whatever they are. The people with whom you share your time, your state of health, whatever problems you face, what skills and strengths you have, your disappointments and successes, your worries, your personal gifts, your personal limitations, your home, all your possessions, your losses, your history as a human being. As the bowl fills, you receive your life open-heartedly and unconditionally as your portion.

So, each morning I empty a small bowl into my plants, and I attentively refill it to the brim with water, reminding myself of Naomi Remen’s words. I also say a gatha of my own:
This water – from high in the sky, deep under the earth,
high in the mountains, deep under the sea –
this water runs through all beings, this water runs through me.
May I completely realise the Tathāgata’s true meaning.

The Tathāgata’s ‘true meaning’ refers to the core meaning that the Nikāya Buddha was pointing to, which is none other than this very life: breathing, pouring the water, saying the gatha, beginning the day; committing to awakening to true nature, endlessly.

I haven’t always seen the wisdom in ritual. But in the late nineties, my relationship to ritual took a powerful turn, after I read David Michael Levin’s wonderful philosophical book,The Body’s Recollection of Being (1985). In it, he conveyed that the purpose of ritual is to put our body into a a felt gesture that invites the felt sense of Being. So, for me, the ‘object’ is never ‘over there’; the statue to which I bow, for example, is in me and in the between. I’m activating interactive awareness. I am bowing to this big Being which we all participate in, to retrieve my connection to it, via the being of my bowing body. This body participates in Being. Human being can be a verb, not a noun phrase.

In the case of this particular ritual, too – with “These twenty-four brand new hours, may be my last” – I am retrieving the true life of death. Where else does death have any reaity, than in my body – on my bowing body, saying my gatha? I am putting myself in the gesture of being “100% for life and death” (as the late Robert Aitken Roshi put it), an inward orientation which I take into my day in all its activities.

Here’s one sentence from Levin’s book – written, of course, in a philosopher’s diction. I start it off, by saying something firstly in my own language, which is: By the gift of com-bodiment,* ancient seeds in our bodies respond to the ritual gestures, sprouting spontaneously:
“from the body’s primordial participation in the wholeness of the field of Being, bearing within them the symbolic power to help us retrieve, from the depth of our own embodiment, the existential meaning of an authentic ontological understanding.”
He means that, as beings, we can dwell in an understanding of our belonging in/to/as Being. Anyhow, it’s a good way to arrive back from the bardo of dreams, into the bardo of waking awareness. May I, upon my waking into any bardo, whenever, be 100% with and for all beings.
____________________
* “The primordial participation in the wholeness of the field of Being,” I think, deserves a better word than ’embody.’ ”To ’em-body’ is to put something into a body. ‘Com-‘ says that something is ‘with’ the body. It’s there to be revealed. You might want to read Akira Ikemi’s Responsive Combodiment paper on this, stored at the Focusing Institute.

“The darkness around us is deep.”

By admin

On November 10, 2016

In Enquiry, Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices

I didn’t meet the poet William Stafford, but of all the wonderful poets the United States has produced, his voice is closest to my heart. I’ve been thinking during the night that I’m glad that Bill didn’t live to see what happened this day, in his land – how a majority of his fellow citizens failed humanity (yet again) by electing an empty shell of a man, a man that (as Little Tree’s grandma would say) has “a soul the size of a pea.” In electing as their leader, not really a man but, a machine, the citizens of the United States followed the wrong gods home.

With all of us who care about human qualities nobler than self-serving dishonesty, vengeance, lust for power, material greed, misogyny, and war on nature – who regard Donald Trump’s election as an instance of mass delusion – I join my voice, in encouraging peace-loving activists to see the coming years of darkness as an opportunity to get clear about deep and true values; and, to ensure that our actions are in alignment with those values.

Mass delusions such as this, and such as we regularly witness on our small blue planet, can only happen because people don’t know themselves. The values which Socrates called forth in those who could hear – of self-knowledge, goodness, truth and beauty – can’t be lost, though they can be lost sight of. We know this happens, but we don’t always or readily recognize it happening in ourselves, as well as in others. We need to commit to waking up to the ways of delusion.

We mustn’t forget, too, a virtue praised by the Buddha: fellowship with the good; specifically, community with those who are awake and awakening – the ‘noble’ community. While developing and nurturing our personal integrity, we need to seek such people out and reach out to them; to grow, thrive and to act in noble company.

May you be safe and well, in these dark times.

∞

A Ritual to Read to One Another

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider –
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe –
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

The Mind of Freedom

By admin

On July 30, 2016

In Body, Death, Enquiry, Meditation, Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices, Radiant Citta

You are a lay follower in the time of Buddha, and you’re dying. You have a terrible illness, which has gotten worse in the last day. The splitting head, the gut pains. It’s clear which way it’s going.

During this week, a group of friends regularly gathers at your home. Some weeks ago, your peripatetic teacher, arrived from up north, from Kapilavatthu. He was happy to find your years of practice are serving you well. You talked about how you’re working with the pain of parting; how this deepens your inner work. He stays in your household, frequently joining your friends in their enquiries.

You understand that everything which you call the ‘world’ is of just such a nature that it breaks up – continuously; and, of course, that our bodies are always prone to change. Bodies are nature, and so they are vulnerable. Indeed, just last year, the great ascetic himself died, at age eighty – when his digestive system fell apart. You have no quarrel with nature.

With your friends, you’ve reflected during the week, on the teachings of the flourishing one. Together you recalled the time that he advised the arahant Girimananda. It was thought that Girimananda would die, but he didn’t; though he was perilously ill.

The founding teacher recommended that Girimananda be mindful of ten perceptions, and these included remembering how natural it is to be ill and die, because bodies are by their nature vulnerable.

You have done what you can medically, as your wisdom in the form of love would do. You’ve already made the effort to see that those you are responsible for – family and servants – will be cared for. You’ve reviewed your life, and are satisfied that you’ve completed what needs completing. You’ve ‘atoned.’ (That is, you are ‘at one.’) This way, you don’t wish for some other world, at all; either one to come, or one that could have been.

You company concurs that by remaining with what is actually present, rather than wishing for various kinds of ‘world,’ just in this way the deathless is near. Wishing for a world of any kind resists what is. It warms you to think of your friends’ love of the great way.

In the ten insights which were shared with Girimananda, you note to your friends, there is a lot of emphasis on how things are ever-changing. You look into form, vedanā, perceptions, fashioning tendencies, and consciousness, only to find an insubstantial play of experiences. Just as Anathapindika saw as he lay dying. That meditation – Anathapindika’s meditation, you call it – you feel joy to have such support.

You’re aware of breathing with your whole body, from top to toe, as you engage with them. And sometimes when the pains are intense, you breathe more particularly into the painful places, returning to your ‘whole-body’ breathing, when you can. Daily you and your friends meditate on emptiness, in the way taught by Sariputta to dying Anathapindika.

Each morning, as you meditate with them, you delight in the marvellous freedom of: ‘What is arising, is ceasing.’

Afterwards, someone asks about Girimananda’s perception of the ‘unattractive,’ and you reply, “When I see that all is transient, with no substance or own-nature, then I see that there is nothing of the six senses that can brings completeness. That’s the perception of unattractiveness. But, when that’s seen, neither does the functioning of senses obstruct anything. There is nothing to be added to the ‘now,’ nor could be taken away from ‘now.”

Indeed, what is this ‘now.’ These observations lead to a lively conversation about bhikkhu Arittha’s views on desire. He said that desire is not an obstruction. While normally you’d love to go into this, today you ask that they might finish this one later, at someone else’s home.

You are ill, your pains increasing, and you muster all the energy you can to be consciously present for the reality of your condition. Oh, yes, sometimes, your heart has some longing for abatement. But, still you mean it, when your closest friend, in a quiet moment, the two of you alone, asks, “If you died today, how’s that for you?” “I’m content,” you say. “I’ve done what had to be done.”

Fresh Language-ing

By admin

On July 25, 2016

In Enquiry, Practices, Time, Space, & Knowledge

We live inside the childhood belief that things exist on their side, by themselves, ‘over there.’ And we believe this is so, whether the ‘thing’ is a table, a tree, a person, or a thought. To the observer-self, they are all at the ‘other end’ of a subject-object polarity.

This separation underlies the categories that we have built up, and that we use to know what ‘kind’ of something we are encountering. The ‘subject’ end of the polarity (the observer-self) positions itself in relation to situations this way. As adults, our word-use continues based on these childhood foundations.

We apply pre-given labels to the objects in the world, and so tend to see the old categories in place of each fresh occurring. We usually don’t pause to learn how to language our situations freshly.

Let’s take another angle on the role which the ‘observing self’ plays in this. There’s a special angle on this ‘positioning’ process, which is called, by Tarthang Tulku, the ‘by-stander self.’ It’s an interesting term, because it brings in the fact that this false way of experiencing our sentient processes (false ego) treats itself as though it is outside the stream of experience; falsely timeless or eternal.

(I can’t go into the implications of this right now, but they are profound. For instance, this view helps us understand why people, before they act, can’t feel into the consequences that will flow from their actions; and why they don’t accept responsibility, once those consequences become obvious after they’ve acted.)

The ‘by-standing self’ applies all kinds of categories in its ‘kind-making,’ according to its history and conditioning. We are insulated from self-awareness of this deluding process by a belief about language, which the by-stander self applies; that is, that we use words to communicate between the subject and the object, and about the subject and object.

This communication theory is based on the idea that we are separate, and that words do something about the gap between the subject and the object. But, this supposed function of language is based on the false or dualistic ‘separation’ viewpoint.

There is a defence, which helps to keep the system stable and unexamined, and that is: When we do come to think about subject-object trance (perhaps prompted by teachings), we then blame the trance on language itself – as though the dualism is inherent in speaking and thinking.

Humans have an odd way of blaming the ‘other’ in all kinds of circumstances. In this seemingly innocuous case of blaming the ‘other,’ I hear even dharma teachers say (along with philosophers, linguists and psychologists) that: “Language brings the subject-object division.” Or, “Language gives a sense of ‘thing-ness.” As if language acted on its own. As though this misuse is intrinsic to language. Maybe the servant (language) has taken over the master (the person)?

Maybe that’s why we produce so many zombie movies, and robot movies? Because we’ve given our power over to concepts; and, in particular to the idea that there is a ‘me’ outside the flow of experience, which observes the flow without being in it? And that we are at the mercy of language?

Blaming language is possibly also a smoke screen. Why would we do this? Well, one reason is that the game has gone so far, now, that it is very scary to realise that we may be playing such a game. We’ve become so entranced – in exactly the way Narcissus did – with the dream of ‘observing, self-existing, by-standing, timeless self,’ that it looks like giving that up would be akin to suicide.

I’m going to be charitable, here, and suggest that this is because we lack insight into language use. Whatever the motivation, the real situation is the opposite: our trance has bestowed a false meaning on the word ‘death,’ so while we are in the by-stander trance, we are as if dead.

The real nature of timelessness (what is truly akālika), then, becomes lost to our perception, and a false version of timelessness holds its unconscious sway.

Those who go by names and concepts,
who abide in names and concepts,
by not discerning the naming-process,
they are under the yoke of death.
Having fully understood the naming-process,
one doesn’t conceive of one who names.
For, there is nothing (findable)
whereof one would say that ‘she’ or ‘he’ exists.
– Samiddhi Sutta in the Samyutta Nikāya

– Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

Do I go by names and concepts? Let me see…. Do I ‘abide, dwell in’ names and concepts?

Imagine that I live inside my naming and conceptualising. What’s that like, to live inside my naming? Hm…

Am I conscious of my naming activities – continuously mindful of how I ‘kind’ situations and events?

What happens if, feeling in the middle of my body, where feelings happen… what happens if I say, ironically: ‘Naming has nothing to do with death, does it?” What happens in my body, in response?

And, am I okay with not depending on the naming for a sense of being here? If I don’t conceive of the subject pole of experiencing, but just leave experiencing freely open in the present moment? What fears come about this way of being?

If I don’t depend on naming for establishing existence, might not I, then, go beyond existence and non-existence, and therefore beyond death?

How else could we use language then?

We could think of language as gesture; as something new we do freshly in each situation, to carry these interactional situations forward. We can use the word ‘gesture’ to mean something very, very broad, here – and very alive, very present. Mindfulness of speaking can bring this about.

For my purposes, right here, as I write, I say that this gesture of speech, which I give you now, is a manner of carrying my life forward, in a holistic way. How else would I want to live, if these were my last months?

Clear as the Sky

By admin

On July 19, 2016

In Body, Death, Enquiry, Mindfulness, Poetry, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

“Fully knowing the arising and fading of the five sentient processes,
one finds happiness and joy. For those who are discerning, this is the deathless.”
– The Dhammapda, verse 374. Translated by Christopher J. Ash

The usual understanding of death and rebirth misses the point, so grossly. Rebirth theory is related to the experience of a constructed ‘self’ (atta) and, hence, to intentions (karma). Both of these are concepts for which we can find experience-near meanings. If we can be mindful and directly experience how karma moves, then we can understand the issues of death and rebirth at a more everyday, realistic level.

I wrote about the ‘pause’ as a part of the mindfulness attitude; the slowing down of experience, so that we can sense more of what is actually going on in and around us. The more we appreciate the present, then the more it responds by revealing its intricacy.

One afternoon, I was sitting on the veranda of my home, in a reverie of appreciation for the textures of the forest – mostly of the eucalypts and the ti-tree. And, there was a currawong sitting on a branch, close by. I wasn’t exactly watching the bird. I gazed, I suppose; which is a mode of vision that includes much more, by not naming.

This pause in the default human mode of ‘mind’ led to including in my ‘gaze’ (or awareness) my sensations, my thoughts, and the felt presence of my whole situation. Including all of these in what I was aware of, at that moment, without losing my relationship to the currawong, gave rise to holistic sense of space – a kind of space that is throughout the field of experience, not just outside the skin.

It’s a fact that by including the observer in the observing, one loosens the hold and even dissolves the sense of separation to all things. So, the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘world,’ in that state, were distinctions not needed at that moment. The still, silent quality of knowing didn’t support the kind of space where I would create any ‘thing’ (a ‘me’) to be separate, or to be separate from.

“The mind is always thinking of things in the past and of what it is going to do in the future. It rarely settles in the moment. If it did, it would become quiet. When you settle into the moment, you realize that there is not much happening—a few things here and there. The primary awareness is of the immediacy of the moment. This is because presence—being in the now—is characterized by beingness, simply being here now. In contrast, our familiar self is based on doing, going, making things happen.” The Unfolding Now, p. 160

The bird and I were together in every particle of being. To reflect on language, here: if I was to say ‘currawong,’ in that situation, I would be to point (with this linguistic gesture) to this living, dynamic relationship; a relationship which far exceeds, in its implicit intricacy, what the word ‘currawong’ can say. The public or dictionary meaning of that word is nothing. It’s certainly laughable in that moment to think that ‘currawong’ means a ‘something’ – an isolated, permanent, independent object in space-time. Poetry says it best:

Snow in withered field, nothing to touch.
Sparrow’s head clear as sky
– From the poem ‘Sparrow in Withered Field.’ In Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi. (Translated by Lucien Stryk).

Granted, this is not a perception readily accessible to some people, because we are mostly unfamiliar with experiential space and the ungraspability of the ground reality. But, familiarity grows with the practice of mindfulness. Then, it is possible to name a ‘groundless ground’; which the Nikāya Buddha indicates by referring to the ‘un-’ nature: unborn, undying, unailing; and ‘unmanifest consciousness,’ for instance. The odd thing is that moments like this occur all day, but we don’t notice them, until mindfulness reveals them. My spiritual grandfather Buddhadasa called them ‘little nirvanas.’

In default, trance mode of consciousness, if we notice such an empty moment – empty of ‘thing’-ing and constructing – we are afraid of its silence, its formlessness, and the unnameable quality of everything. Why do we fear? Primarily because our constructed ‘me’ has dropped away. There’s now no locatable someone behind the eyes doing the knowing. Yet, right there is the end of birth and death; and, ironically, right here is freedom and independence as individuals.

Until we train ourselves to pause, slow down, and stay for such moments of ‘empty contact’ –through the contemplative disciplines – then, we don’t appreciate the luminous wonder of the world and other people. We are in a pure land with radiant beings, and don’t see it.

the night’s downpour;
in this alley,
this half-eaten peach.

– Christopher Ash.

Single-Minded For Freedom

By admin

On July 15, 2016

In Body, Death, Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices, Radiant Citta

What is the Nikāya Buddha’s focus, when he speaks of ‘death and dying’?

I think he gives two answers, each according to the maturity of the people to whom he is speaking. If people are ready for it, or asking for it, he goes straight to the core matter of development of the awareness of vast openness. He uses different terms, at different times – such as voidness, suchness, the deathless, the unborn, and nibbāna.

To the Nikāya Buddha, to be mindful is to live free from death. Mindfulness culminates in knowing what he called ‘the deathless element.’

Awareness is the place of the deathless;
Unawareness is the place of death.
The aware do not die;
The unaware are as though dead already.
– Dhammapada, verse 21. Translated by Valerie Roebuck.

If they aren’t ready for the subtle teaching, he advises them to develop in character, because that brings less suffering and an opportune rebirth.

Realisation of the core truth takes a fierce commitment. In the Anguttara Nikāya there are two suttas together, each called the Mindfulness of Death Sutta (Maranassatisutta, 1 and 2), which reflect the intensity of the commitment, and the extent of the bravery needed.

In the first one, the Nikāya Buddha powerfully says:
“(W)hoever develops mindfulness of death, thinking, ‘O, that I might live for the interval that it takes to swallow having chewed up one morsel of food… for the interval that it takes to breathe out after breathing in, or to breathe in after breathing out, that I might attend to the Blessed One’s instructions. I would have accomplished a great deal’ — they are said to dwell heedfully. They develop mindfulness of death acutely for the sake of ending the effluents.” (Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu).

That is, the practice which aims at realisation of the unborn, the un-ailing, the undying, the deathless has the character of a continuous presence.

“For the interval that it takes to breathe out after breathing in…“

Awareness can be present in the tiniest gap. The gap between the breaths is a powerful, still point – and that tiny fraction of a second, someone can realise the deathless.

If I can develop mindfulness in each breathing instant, I am dwelling in the world with heed for what most deeply matters. When a person fully awakens in the Nikāyas there is usually a line which says, “And she (or he) had done what had to be done.” This accomplishment means a life fulfilled, having come home to the core of one’s being.

In the other Mindfulness of Death Sutta in the Anguttara Nikāya he says, further of this commitment: “Further, there is the case where a monk, as night departs and day returns, reflects: ‘Many are the [possible] causes of my death. A snake might bite me, a scorpion might sting me, a centipede might bite me. That would be how my death would come about. That would be an obstruction for me. Stumbling, I might fall; my food, digested, might trouble me; my bile might be provoked, my phlegm… piercing wind forces [in the body] might be provoked. That would be how my death would come about. That would be an obstruction for me.’” (Thanissaro)

Not, “Oh, crap! I might be bitten, and that would be rotten luck”; but, “I might be bitten, and that would obstruct my realisation of truth.” That’s loving truth!

In this sutta, he also gives a striking image of a practitioner with their heart set on liberation: “Just as when a person whose turban or head was on fire would put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavour, undivided mindfulness, & alertness to put out the fire on his turban or head, in the same way the monk should put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavour, undivided mindfulness, & alertness…”

Mindfulness makes it possible to feel and accept our greatest fear: voidness; that is, when supported by the other six qualities of the awakened mind – joy, grounded inquiry, perseverance, calm, contemplative presence, and equanimity.

If we meet voidness with mindfulness, confidence follows; confidence in groundlessness, because we don’t conceive or interpret voidness as having existence of its own. We don’t project onto it. We know it directly, and when the mist of ignorance dissolves, this very voidness is the source of all true value in life.