Everfresh in the Changing

Category: View

Mindfulness of the Body and the Deathless

The Deathless

Translated from the Anguttara Nikaya; from the Book of the Ones, by Christopher J. Ash

“Practitioners, one does not enjoy the deathless who doesn’t enjoy mindfulness directed to the body. One enjoys the deathless who enjoys mindfulness directed to the body. The deathless has been enjoyed, by those who have enjoyed mindfulness directed to the body.

“Practitioners, one has fallen away from the deathless who has fallen away from mindfulness directed to the body. One hasn’t fallen away from the deathless who hasn’t fallen away from mindfulness directed to the body. One has neglected the deathless who has neglected mindfulness directed to the body. One is bent on the deathless who is bent on mindfulness directed to the body.

“Practitioners, one is heedless about the deathless who is heedless about mindfulness directed to the body. One is heedful of the deathless who is heedful of mindfulness directed to the body. One has forgotten the deathless who has forgotten mindfulness directed to the body. One hasn’t forgotten the deathless who hasn’t forgotten mindfulness directed to the body.

“Practitioners, one hasn’t resorted to, developed and seriously taken up the deathless who hasn’t resorted to, developed and seriously taken up mindfulness directed to the body. One has resorted to, developed, and seriously taken up the deathless who has resorted to, developed, and seriously taken up mindfulness directed to the body.

“Practitioners, one hasn’t recognized, fully comprehended, and realised the deathless who hasn’t recognized, fully comprehended, and realised mindfulness directed to the body. One has recognized, fully comprehended, and realised the deathless who has recognized, fully comprehended and realised mindfulness directed to the body.”

Disconnection from Being

Someone this week, with deep feeling, asked me, “How could I have disconnected from Being?” I’d like to use some Western terms, for now. This is one way to think of this territory. I learned these things basically from the work of A.H. Almaas, and have found them to be concepts which are experientially reliable and verifiable.

However, I need to say that I communicate them through my own filters, and would not want to pretend to represent that school. I couldn’t do that accurately. The best book on this – for the specialist and for the brave explorer – is his The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization.

When we are born, we are born with the presence of Being as our support. We are, though, only able to know it intuitively – it’s a felt presence – and we don’t, of course, have language to make that fully conscious. Furthermore, we are not brought up in an environment which is attuned to Being, and it is therefore not attuned to Being in us. That is, our carers very rarely appreciate our radiance as Being manifest.

As we grow, we become entangled in our self-images; the result of a natural development. We express the natural potentials of our species for a conceptually-mediated life. In the process, we more or less fall in love with our self-representations, thinking that’s who we are. (Remember Narcissus?) This infatuation entails one kind – a central kind – of disconnection from Being. Being doesn’t leave us, of course, but identified with our structures, we are no longer able to intuit the presence of Being.

Furthermore, these structures are also energetically charged with the reactivity around our emotional wounds from our treatment in childhood. This is a complex interweaving of nature and nurture, the result of which is that we end up locking ourselves out of our own heart.

So, instead of our connection to Being, we feel that there is a deficiency, an absence, or even a place where we have died, in our centre. The dynamic of the disconnect, and the defences against feeling the deficiency, contribute to our personality. Identified with what is false and defensive – the structures – and disconnected from our aliveness, we can come to feel that life is purposeless, meaningless and pointless. This will mean additional strategies are put in place to deal with this – for example, the pursuit of pleasure, or of illusory kinds of freedom, and so on – but the central deficiency sticks like tar-paper, making itself felt from time to time in our life, just the same. And, ultimately nothing satisfies for long.

In a sense this is a precise pointlessness, because, being locked out of our own heart, by our misconceptions of presence, we are also locked out of knowing of a precise experience – the point-like presence, the point where our existence is experienced as the outward radiance of Being itself. That is, presence, when reclaimed is felt most essentially as a point in the heart. The core problems experienced in the heart chakra arise from disconnection from Being.

We heal, and move into our next stage of development (as individuals and as a species), by: a) developing positive spiritual capacities (for example, altruism, physical care, mindfulness and meditation); and, b) with the support of such capacities, bringing into the light of compassionate, uncontrived awareness the structures which we have come to depend on, those which are obscuring the presence of Being.

‘Reclaiming’ our connection to Being is possible. Though, in a sense, it’s not a reclaiming, because we can’t go back to our pre-reflective state. Ken Wilber talks of ‘pre-reflective,’ ‘reflective,’ and ‘post-reflective.’ Reclaiming our connection to Being happens, then, in the context of a) healing our reflective capacity, and going beyond it into ‘post-reflective’ presence of Being.

Exploring Death and No-Death

“Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation.” ― Thich Nhat Hạnh, No Death, No Fear

I will share one of my basic practices, that has stood me in good stead for more than a decade. (This is the first part of the long post which I lost last week.)

Recently, I was experimenting, exploring two views – those of ‘death,’ and ‘no-death.’ (Remember I lost the post?) I wasn‘t just thinking – not just cogitating about these concepts. Instead, I was using the process which I have developed over the last fifteen years, and which I have a lot of faith in. It combines several practices from East and West.

MODELS OF EXPERIENCING I have available two very useful Buddhists models for speaking about human experience.  The first names five sentient processes, which in their interaction, present us with innumerable states of experiencing. The five are: bodily-form, feeling-tones, perceptions, shaping factors, and consciousness. These can account for all the varieties of experience.

The second model which I use is one that is particularly useful for exploring the intricate inter-weaving of those five sentient processes. It gives us a language for how we end up ‘being born into’ the various sub-personalities that we manifest in different situations, or under different conditions.

So, if I am asking, “What’s my being like, when I invite the statement ‘There is death’?” then I check in, and I will find a very dynamic flow of the sentient processes will arise in response to my invitation. Or, I can ask, “What’s my being like, when I invite the statement ‘There is no death’?” Now, while the five sentient processes can be named the same – bodily-form, feeling-tones, perceptions, shaping factors, and consciousness – nevertheless, their presentation and interaction will give a very different presentation, a different dynamic.

FOCUSING Notice in that description that I am depending on naming my processes accurately. How do I know that I am not fooling myself? From Gendlin’s Focusing I borrow the zig-zag – that is, the zig-zag between fresh experiencing and language. This way the language I use must resonate with a non-conceptual bodily knowing about the whole of the thing I am in relationship with – the feel of ‘all about that. So, in this case, I could just invite the feel of ‘all about how the word ‘death’ lives in me.’

What you’re doing, then, by saying ‘all about’ is inviting more than you currently know. You’re asking the unconscious to offer up more than you presently know. What comes is murky, at first. It’s the ‘felt sense’ of all of that topic/situation/person, etc. There’s a marvellous power in the the felt sense. When your language-ing and the felt sense line up, the bodily state shifts in distinct ways that confirm you’ve found the right words for your experience. And something fresh, something new, emerges.

MINDFULNESS And, a steadfast commitment to present-moment awareness of those very sentient processes and their dynamics – in service of truth, this protects the process.

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