Tag: Guenther

The Matrix of Mystery

On May 18, 2017

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

“(T)he thought of death is… 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.” – Herbert Guenther.

I want to share some of the gift that contemplating death brings. Here’s how I experience something that seems to resonate with what Guenther wrote, in this passage.

I can be sitting at a my computer, I can be in a cafe, I can be driving my car, or talking to my partner – and a pristine, all-encompassing space opens. The thought of death can bring this opening. The certainty of my death, or the uncertainty about ‘when, where or how’ I will die – or, likewise, the thought of the certainty of the death of my loved ones – these contemplations can bring such openings. These ideas are one kind of “powerful stimulus.”

With the opening of that ‘space,’ my positioned (and positioning) ‘self’ dies, just like that. Dissolves. If I rest into the ‘gap,’ it is another dimension of being. A knowing is purely present, without any seeking or orienting. Acquisitions have ceased. I’m simply aware of the quality of openness itself, with its measureless ‘ing-ing’ (Gendlin’s expression). And, if I don’t scramble – that is, if I don’t make boundlessness a problem – if I relax and trust it, sigh into this unknowing knowing, then there is a meaningfulness that exceeds any of the phrases about it.

(We’ll look later at the designations in this. The ‘self’ dissolves’; so who is resting into the gap? What do ‘I,’ ‘self,’ ‘person,’ and so on, mean? It’s about the process of designation and it’s relationship to experiencing. Well explore it, later.)

Now, Guenther’s “…brings me back to myself as the unique occasion for…” is sweet, because the boundless, empty, still (paradoxical) presence is full of the magic of living. It’s called ‘ordinary mind.’ And this magic unfolds. Hence: “…the importance of this very moment…”

With this invisible matrix informing them, concepts can return, or function, to be a part of the unfolding, a servant of the bigger life, which is full of meaningfulness. This is a matter of ‘not two.’ It’s not about something on one side called the conceptual present which is different from the still, luminous, non-conceptual openness\on the other side. Not at all. The stillness doesn’t reject concepts, and concepts can serve the still field of possibilities.

This won’t make sense right now, but we’ll explore later: how the unfolding happenings (’time’) are never outside (or, never leave) the implicit, the invisible (timeless) womb of reality. (They never fully form, either, into ‘somethings’. In a sense we are experiencing virtual reality, already.) This will make sense of the Buddhist idea of ‘the Deathless’.

But, I’m getting ahead of our content. Returning to Guenther:

“…the real possibilities that are still before me.” So, this moment, purely present as it is, is full of possibilities, unfolding, “out of” this implicate matrix. It’s a poor metaphor, given what I’ve said about ‘not two,’ but refer back to your present, undivided momentary experience, and you’ll get a ‘feel’ for this. This ‘matrix’ concept is difficult to experience directly at first. Just get a holistic feel of it, be experiential about it, and in time it’ll gel. It will be integral to understanding how the Nikāya Buddha can say, “The attentive do not die.”

This no-inside/outside, always-happening unfolding includes the person who is aware, who is “the unique occasion” for the bigger life’s unfolding possibilities. What magic is that! I’m sometimes drunk on the wonder of it. It makes me laugh, and it calls Rumi to mind: “I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.” (Coleman Barks trans.)

The Thought of Death

By admin

On April 17, 2016

In Death, Enquiry, Positivity

“It would be quite wrong to try to evade and to suppress the thought of death, and it would be quite morbid to brood over this inescapable fact. Death is not the end of Being; it may the end of some sort of being. Being remains unaffected by death; only that which is fictitious, sham, is continuously dying. Hence 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.” – Herbert V. Guenther, in his translation of Longchenpa’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Vol. 1

Life is evanescent. As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said: “The sun is new again, all day” (fragment 32); and, also: “The river where you set your foot just now is gone— those waters giving way to this, now this.” (Fragment 41). – Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by Brooks Haxton.

It seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it, then, to find more life through being in touch with the certainty of death? However, that’s how it works. By practising A Year to Live – renewing it yearly – over more than a decade, I have increased my commitment to life. My energy has turned to more meaningful activities, and I have relinquished energy-draining pursuits, and I’ve become more loving – and all this through the seeming irony of including daily practices which remind me of the certainty of death.

I have been inspired all along, in my contemplation of death, by Guenther’s statement, above: “…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…”

What kind if meaning of life is there to find in the face of death? Is life meaningful, in itself – without constructing belief systems? That’s a question I will address experientially in this project; but, the short answer is that after years of mindful-awareness practice, and contemplating life intimately, I find that it is good. All manner of things are well.

Certainly, as a severely abused child, by the time of my late teens, I tended toward the conclusion that there was no meaning to life. And, I often wished for death. Then, via the Beatles’ encounter with Eastern meditative practice – which came at the very same time in which I discovered Socrates – I discovered the possibility of a more wholesome line of cultivation.

Was there an uncharted sea, I wondered, in my own life, which could bring meaningfulness from within – not through the meaningless activities of my outer world, with its industrial values, its cut-throat competition, its genocides and its wars, but – through contemplation of life as it is in itself? I was inspired by Socrates’ courage in the face of death, and his commitment to selfless values.

Then through my encounter with Zen Buddhism in my early twenties, I learnt that a conscious practice of facing death is far from a wish for death, but an affirmation of a reality greater than death. The Zen Buddhists speak of ‘the great matter,’ which is this presence of ‘birth and death.’ Skilfully conducted, facing death is an attunement to the whole of life, and so, in the process, it entails the discovery of one’s own wholeness.

This is not to be found in some ideal dream of a heaven after death. This is right here in this very difficult life of sickness, old age and death. The poet Japanese haiku poet Issa Kobayashi (1763 – 1828) observed that this is a “dewdrop world.” Probably he was referring to the Mahayana Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra, the famous last verse of which is:

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence:
Like a dewdrop, a bubble; Like a flash of lightning,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

But, Issa was bringing the great matter of life and death home to the ever-so-human facts of love and relationship; for it was on the occasion of his daughter’s death that he wrote:

this world of dew
is, yes, a world of dew.
And yet…

Can we be fully intimate with this dewdrop world, and yet affirm it and our love of life, genuinely, whole-heartedly? It seems to me that, even in the face of her death, Issa affirms his daughter’s life as – to use Mary Oliver’s phrase – “one wild and precious life.”

During one year of my A Year to Live practices I decided that this matter of being one hundred percent for death in life, while being one hundred percent for the life in death, was something worth unpacking slowly, and worth unpacking with others. So, I began a blog to share the enquiry into the irony that life is ephemeral, and meaningful.

We die. So, can we live creatively – not in defiance of death – but with open-hearted inclusion of death. This body of work which you are now reading is an edited version of that sharing.

It morphed along the way, to become a dialogue with the earliest Buddhist teachings on death; those presented in the Buddhist Nikāyas. These texts are as close as we can get (when augmented by similar texts in Chinese, called the Agamas) to the original teachings of the historical Buddha. I approached them asking: What did the Nikāya Buddha teach about death and dying? Was it of any interest to him, to live with full consciousness of death? And, as well – but, only incidentally – I asked: What of the rebirth issue, which causes controversy in modern Western Buddhism?