December 15, 2011

On this, the one year anniversary of "Sri Hippie Speedball Speaks," we will now applaud with the sound of one hand clapping...ah, sweet. But now it's time to say goodnight.

"In the abandonment of the quest, of all questing, the questor disappears--and where there is no thing to be found, and no one to seek, 'is-ness' is.  That is why the only possible practice is total absence of practice, the absence of non-practice, since in total absence of practice there is no practicer--and identity is no more." - WWW

Adieu, Monsieur Wei

December 14, 2011

"...and neither cause nor effect can touch us or reach this-which-we-are." - Wei Wu Wei

Yes, but that-which-we-ain't can be touched very deeply. - Sri Hippie Speedball 

December 13, 2011

"I look at you all
See the love there
That's sleeping...
Haven't I told you
How to unfold your
Love?" - George Harrison

I will pay my daughter's wedding the highest compliment.  It was reminiscent of a good Grateful Dead concert, everything just splendid as can be, and then some new gear kicks in and sheer joy just sweeps everybody into a frenzy of celebration.  Hell, even my 80-year-old mother and aunt got down on the dance floor! 

December 8, 2011

The Wie man terms destiny and chance a little differently, perhaps, calling them "causality" and "indeterminacy," and then he further guts their meaning, their concepts, as just more conjurings we come up with to explain stuff:

"Statistical probability or inexorable cause-effect?  Neither has factual experience other than as an enunciation of a supposed 'law' apparently governing an apparent (phenomenal) world evolving by extension in 'space' and duration in 'time.'"

Ah, Wie.  Take a break and go see a movie or something. Movies may fool us in the deepest sense with their dreamstuff dramas, but right now I am in Ft Lauderdale for the wedding of my daughter, and the movie has turned fairy tale wonderful.  On with the show.   

December 2, 2011

"For no 'you' is present when mind is 'fasting.'  In a fasting mind no I-concept arises.  And there is no inferential entity to assume that it is unfree." - Wei Wu Wei

Meditation is fasting of the mind, starving the thought-beast, and at its purest should not be confused with concentration or contemplation techniques.  They have their place, but they still feed the beast, even if only a single morsel such as a mantra.  I used to fast my body periodically on weekends, Friday night until Monday morning, for the usual reasons: clearing toxins, losing a few pounds, justifying ice cream gluttony, etc., and I also understood it to be vaguely propitious for spiritual "progress." Mebbe so, mebbe not so.  Asceticism is for ascetics and I am not inclined to be one.  Not until I came upon the self-inquiry of Ramana Maharshi did I begin to benefit from genuine fasting, the kind that roots out toxins and addictive tendencies of mind.  Resting in "I am" creates a kind of self-conflagration that burns these things up the moment they come into view.  It does not suppress or obfuscate anything, just eviscerates thoughts into sparks and ash as they arise in consciousness and then drift away from the heat.  Fasting adds nothing and consumes and clears everything.  Eventually even the fuel of "I am" burns itself out and the ember of "inferential entity" dies into pure freedom, unbound and never bound.  Clarity.

November 30, 2011

I recently read of a man who became exceedingly rich and spent a fortune on the yacht of his wet dreams, initially somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars.  Once at sea, however, he became very cognizant of piracy--they operate off the coast of Florida as well as Somali, after all--so he had his ride retrofitted with many millions more in offensive and defensive technologies.  At first the additional gear allayed some of these fears, but even as he tried to party away his anxieties he still found himself keeping a wary eye on the horizon.  This led to several more upgrades, all of which he never failed to boast, and to this day he awaits the inevitable attack on his "stuff."  Well, I'm right there with you my brother!  With the economy down there has been a recent uptick in burglaries in my neighborhood, so I have dug deep into my resources and got myself a shelter dog--collie/St Bernard/indiscriminate other--and I upgrade him every week with a fresh bag of puppy chow.  We are prepared to pry away the cold, dead fingers of any fool who comes for my flatscreen!

Greed is one of the more poisonous manifestations of fear.  From what I read in the paper today I'm guessing the U.S. is one of the most fearful countries on the planet.  At present we are dead last among developed democracies in many key areas of quality of life, and I attribute this to fear and greed. We have the highest incidences of mental illness, of drug use, of infant mortality, of obesity, of teenage pregnancy, of homicide, of imprisonment.  We are near bottom in upward social mobility, in national income spent on foreign aid, on well-being of children, on math and literacy of 15-year-olds.  Hell, we're even dead last in life expectancy--dead last in death!  Yeah, I read the paper too much.  Yeah, I watched that 60 Minutes segment on homelessness this week (especially kids in Florida) and I cried--I'm a friggin' bleeding heart, no doubt about it.  But jeez' people, 10% of the country has 90% of the wealth?  For God's sake, how much is enough?  What touched off this incipient, corrosive, insatiable fear that is taking us all down? "Duck and cover" for my generation?  Can you say "shibboleth?"

November 26, 2011

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  Jesus was enlightened. He knew that in reality there is no doership, no volition, even no other.  So what did this man who addressed his audience "for those with ears to hear" really mean?  He spoke as a Bodhisattva, as one who returns from awakening to awaken those left behind in delusion.  To "do unto others" is to attune our presentation of Absolute Reality to the receptivity of the listener.  Thus: the Kingdom of God.

I'm free.
I'm free,
And I'm waiting for you
To follow me. - the Who

November 25, 2011

"Who am I?" holds the key to awakening.  Ramana Maharshi had his first taste of enlightenment by way of it and is revered for refining his experience into a blueprint for the rest of us to follow.  The story goes that  in his teens Ramana was one day gripped by an overwhelming fear of death so debilitating that he retired to bed to confront and solve it for once and all.  He asked himself the ultimate question, "Who am I?," and responded in the "neti, neti" (not this, not this) fashion of Jnana yoga with each answer.  One by one he shut down his senses: "Who am I?  Am I this seeing, this hearing, this touching, etc.?"  And to each he answered "no" and asked again "Who am I? Am I this body, this flesh, bone, blood, these bodily functions?"  With every "no" he delved deeper and unwound layers of conditioning.  He became rigid in his bed, simulating what he thought to be death.  Bit by bit he annihilated everything we confuse and fabricate as a "self," until he arrived at mind and asked again "Who am I?  Am I these memories and assumptions and expectations, this ceaseless fountain of thoughts?  No."  He opened into a kind of transcendental sense that, as Wei Wu Wei describes it, "can only be apprehended non-cognitionally, realized non-conceptually, not in thought which is knowledge, but in non-thought or absolute thought which is not thinking but pre-thinking--or spontaneous awareness that is unaware of awareness."  Although he had broken through the shell, Ramana spent many years thereafter in meditation to stabilize within spontaneous awareness.  Then he spent the remainder of his life reassuring us that we all  have "it" or are "it," so to speak, and that when we finally awaken for good to its preeminence and abide there first and foremost, wearing the material, illusory world only as a loose garment, then we are enlightened.

November 23, 2011

"What we are...is total absence cognitionally which, uncognized, necessarily subsists as total presence." - WWW

What we are is prior to everything: prior to entanglements of the senses, prior to data-crunching in the brain, prior to the first inkling of inkling.  This is felt or apprehended as unassailable presence in crystal clarity.  It is our undefiled true nature, and it is a far cry from the cacophony of the body-mind.  It is peace "utterly" beyond understanding.

Wei Wu Wei describes us as "mirrorness."  Personally, I consider myself a hall of mirrorness.

November 22, 2011

We mistakenly believe each of ourselves a separate source, when in fact we share a Source in common.  And so the deep, sad irony of war or any conflict among ourselves is that it amounts to self-flagellation, nature's last desperate gasp in driving us toward revelation.  However, there exists an easier, softer way for those with ears to hear:

"...impersonal, universal mind or consciousness is our true nature, our only nature, all, absolutely all, that we are, and it is completely devoid of I-ness...devoid of any objective quality, and so cannot be visualized, conceptualized, or in any way referred to...the unmanifested source of manifestation...antecedent to subject and object...To profoundly understand this is Awakening to what is called "enlightenment."

Now this is about where most of us are likely to stop, fat and happy with enlightenment, but Wei Wu Wei knows better and continues stripping away every last vestige of conceptualization:

"All objectivization is conceptual, all conceptuality is inference, and all inference is as empty of truth as a vacuum is empty of air.  Moreover, there is no truth, never has been and never could be; there is no thusness, suchness, is-ness, nor anything positive or negative whatever.  There is just absence of the cognizable, which is absolute presence of the unthinkable and the unknowable--which neither is nor is not.  Inferentially this is said to be an immense and radiant splendor untrammeled by notions of time and space, and utterly beyond the dim, reflected sentience of temporal and finite imagination." - WWW

And that, beautiful dreamer, is That.  The operative word is "utterly."  It's all downhill from there.

November 21, 2011

In the absence of body-mind apperception, there is not nullity, per say, but rather inchoate fecundity, otherwise called "death."  Let us celebrate, therefore, for our body-minds are nothing more than meat-implanted turkey thermometers with Thanksgiving fast approaching.

"Spiritual cultivation cannot be cultivated." - Fung Yu-lan

"...ripeness is all." - Shakespeare

November 18, 2011

"...because voidness is perceiving perceiving itself..." - WWW

"...its functioning is imperceptible, undisturbed by any object..." - Bodhidharma

These two sages, a millennium apart, finish each other's thought.  Their words swarm like bees around a nest dripping tupelo honey. 

November 17, 2011

Playing bass, particularly as poorly as I do, is a great lesson in the movement from cessation of automatic objectivization to direct non-volitional apperception, which is actually a movement from ignorance to enlightenment.  As a novice I am bound to objectify what I play as "song," sequences of notes, fingering of strings--thoughts precipitating actions--and to stamp them into muscle memory for future replication.  In a broader sense, this is how we navigate our lives, lost in thought, absorbing survival tactics, ever novices plodding through endless sequences of success and failure and ceaseless conditioning until eventually the machine gives up the ghost.  But now and then I catch a glimpse of real bass-playin.'  The song dies but melody and rhythm linger and something plays on, not me, but something using these fingers and these strings effortlessly and precisely as if  plucking the tune out of the ether.  Athletes refer to something like this as "being in the zone."  I call it samadhi in action.  Word geeks like WWW might call it direct non-volitional apperceiving.  Any way you put it, it is "always on" for those who would step out of the way: "That is why only the action of non-action, the practice of non-practice, unmotivated non-volitional functioning, can lead to that recognition of awakening, and why any kind of action, practice or intentional procedure is an insurmountable barrier to such awakening." (WWW)  If this were taught as a basic life skill in schools throughout the world, humanity would be saved.  Does this mean I should quit practicing bass?  Hell no, no more than I have quit meditation.  Nowadays, beautifully, meditation arises in walking, driving, working, whatever, and this is certainly residue of time spent in practice.  Nowadays it's snowballing, and the snowman is definitely softening in the sun of awareness.

The Cartesian tenet, "I think, therefore I am," casts the silhouette of a shadow as reality.  Some day a Copernicus of spirit will disavow this nonsense as just another earth-centric notion born of human narcissism

When asked, "what is Buddhamind?" Bodhidharma put it like this: "It is your (only) mind.  When you apperceive it subjectively it can be called Suchness.  When you apperceive its immutability it can be called Dharmakaya.  It is not any thing, so it may be called Liberation.  Its functioning is imperceptible, undisturbed by any object, so it may be called pure Tao.  Never born, it can never die, so it may be equated with Nirvana."

And that's the way it is, but because of ignorance it needs a messenger for every age.  I would say that of late Eckhart Tolle dumbs it down enough for many of us, and for me Nisargadatta Maharaj is the most enjoyable, although some grounding in eastern philosophy can help with him, and then there is Wei Wu Wei: as direct a presentation as nails on a chalkboard.

November 16, 2011

Well, I most grudgingly must accept and confirm the following mad stream of syllables as absolutely so:

"This subjective assumption [noumenality] involves a displacement of center which results immediately in the bodhisattvic or prajnaic vision, whose essential characteristic is the cessation of automatic objectivization, and the substitution of direct non-volitional apperceiving." - Wei Wu Wei

Yeah, like he said.  Or could it be said more clearly?  Mebbe so, mebbe not so.  Me?  I'm going into the house and play some bass, just low, slow notes without the metaphysical arpeggio's.  

November 15, 2011

Truly, if we can skirt mind or see it properly as just a small cog in a much greater machine, as an earth born of the senses within a Cosmos never born and infinite, then all boundaries evaporate, time and space are subsumed, and all those "you's" and "I's" populating our little dramas return to stardust.  We know each of us to be Entirety, and this Entirety obliterates all into One and the same.  Time is presence only.  Space is completely engorged emptiness.  As Dogen said, "Each point of time includes every being and every world."  He said this knowing that "points" or qualification of any kind are mere pointers for the rest of us.  We are the continuum, itself, not a point or place along its way.

November 14, 2011

I walk the dog the same four mile route each night, night after night.  Rather than boring, the walk is blissfully, perfectly identical each time.  This is not the bliss we confuse with happiness.  Happiness has an object, bliss none.  Happiness is quantifiable, bliss constant.  Happiness is noticed in its absence, whether with boredom or sadness, while bliss is omnipresent and ever radiant regardless of our body-mind experience.  This is the bliss of Being-Knowledge-Bliss.  Being is usually under the radar, as is our bliss, until we precipitate its disclosure through conscious awareness, whereupon our personal selves dissolve and reconstitute as unified and illuminated Being-Consciousness-Bliss.  And so I walk the dog wide open, empty and receptive, accepting all, abiding in "I am" until the bottom drops out and "am" becomes a vacuum and the vacuum serves as conduit of the Sublime.  Very refreshing.

November 12, 2011

The hara of Zen, the ajna chakra between the eyes and the crown chakra atop the head in Raja yoga, even the Hridaya of Ramana on the right side of the heart, these centers of Spirit are as arbitrary as an untethered buoy drifting across an ocean.  No matter where the Master points or the buoy drifts, it touches everything.  Each of these points on my physical body has at one time or another proven a wormhole to another dimension.  Now they are unnecessary and discarded.  Lightning has yielded to rolling thunder.  I am there all the time.

These thoughts,
Wind through leaves,
Presage the dead calm.
Sails and wings,
Flaps and flutters,
Shudder to a halt.
Mother help me.
Mother leave me
Alone and unborn,
Out of the storm,
Out of the storm,
Ever unborn.

"Going not knowing one goes, sitting not knowing one sits--this is true samadhi in Zen.  Unless the ego is banished to this extent there cannot be total regeneration." - Harada-roshi

I am warned to be vigilant of any attachment to or pride in coming to recognize Existence-Knowledge-Bliss, as if I had attained a skill or something.  Far from it.  Ripening is not attaining.  It is being.  Yes, in samadhi I am simply atmosphere in which going occurs like wind.  In day to day living the breath of this body-mind is just fog on the cold, clear pane of reality.  I do know that I am a fortunate man.  I have lived a full and wild life--blissed, bored, burned, blasted from pole to pole--and now this...ah!  OK, it's attachment. Ripening begins with streaks and saturates slowly.  I'll just enjoy the ride.    

November 11, 2011

Relax and receive,
Acknowledge and accept,
Give up and give in.
Every pup and kitten
Is as mu as you or me,
Immortal in the moment,
Fully equipped
Automatic transmissions
Of the Buddha nature
Purring. 

November 8, 2011

Roiling sensations, muddying emotions, discursive thinking, all of these prop up the illusion of samsara and the delusion of a separate self.

"I can now affirm that so long as we are conscious of enlightenment it is not true enlightenment....Those who have only kensho do not know this state of unlimited freedom and profound peace of mind." - Yaeko Iwasaki

"...enlightenment is capable of endless enlargement." - Harada-roshi

November 4, 2011

By their fruits they are known: depth of awakening is evinced in the freedoms it illumines.  Physical boundaries disappear like shadows under a mid-day sun, thought loses sway, reason no longer serves a purpose, the emotional pinions of our personality collapse as ego caves in--and then we simply move on minus the props.

November 3, 2011

Bassui, the great 14th century Zen monk, wrote several letters to ardent students who were unable to physically attend his sesshins.  They are full of brilliant pointers and a sense of urgency about practice.  Most telling of all was a common thread he left in closing: "I am afraid I have written too much...;" "I have written as you have asked me but reluctantly.  Once you have read this letter, burn it....;" "I dislike writing you in such detail...;" "After you have read it, drop it in the fire."  Why his reticence?  Because Bassui knew that every word he put to paper would be a magnet for his student's intellect, that his very effort to kill conceptualization could become a seed of a bed of conceptual weeds that would instead invigorate ego and intellect to one last stand.  This is the central paradox of the pathless path: the map itself proves the final obstruction and must be burned.

November 1, 2011

"If your mind remains attached to any form or feeling whatsoever, or is affected by logical reasoning or conceptual thinking, you are as far from true realization as heaven is from earth." - Bassui

"...though your mind becomes bright and empty like the sky and you have awareness of neither inner nor outer and all the ten quarters seem clear and luminous, to take this for realization is to mistake a mirage for reality." - Bassui

To take or mistake anything means that you are still operating as "you."  Enlightenment has no perspective, no point of reference, no compass, no poles.  Without "you" to navigate, the cruise ship of awareness floats on a sea of consciousness with no direction known, just one hell of a leak destined to sink it come three score and ten or thereabouts.

October 31, 2011

I find resonance in Bassui's initial experience of kensho as a direct realization "that the substratum of all things is a viable emptiness, and that there is in essence nothing which can be called a soul, a body, or a mind" (The Three Pillars of Zen, p.164).  I, too, sense emptiness as viable and all-pervading essence.  But this did not satisfy Bassui. He continued with a stone in his shoe seeking masters for additional guidance, until the day came when his mind completely seized up over the koan "Mu."  This experience satisfied his quest for the deepest realization.  Me?  I am content to just rest here.  If something unfolds, so be it, but this abiding is already clear of self, so I suspect the heavy lifting is over.  Effort and seeking just stir up the dust.

"It" is not it.  Rather, "it" is omnipresent "-ing."

Look around with the eyes of a thousand-year-old being and you will realize impermanence.  Turn to the seer and realize eternity in the present moment.

"When you persistently try to understand what is beyond the domain of the intellect, you are bound to reach a dead end, completely baffled.  But push on." - Bassui  

October 29, 2011

"Kensho is the direct awareness that you are more than this puny body or limited mind...this I is not indigenous to our True-nature, being merely an illusion produced by the six senses.  But because this illusory I-ego has been treated as a real entity throughout this existence..it has come to occupy the deepest level of the subconscious mind." - YR

And root it out we will.  Our complete identification with the body-mind blocks the View like a camera focused exclusively on the foreground.  With meditation practice the lens slowly opens--globally--until foreground and background merge into a unity we now recognize as preexistent but for our ignorance.  A blizzard of mind-stuff and sensory impressions has so preoccupied us we have forgotten the sun altogether.  We have become snowmen.  Earnest meditation practice melts the snowman, the foreground, the background, until all become one wet Ground of Being.

"Your practice ought to be like rain gently dropping from the sky and seeping into the earth."- YR

Gravity is effortless and constant.  Absorption is our very nature.  Sitting as the expression of these brings us to the very brink of the cliff.  And then there is a koan where in reply to the question "what is the Buddha?" the master answers: "The tall bamboo is tall, the short bamboo is short."  An effortless, consistent response has nothing to do with discriminating tall and short, and everything to do with the spontaneous recognition of "what is." 

October 28, 2011

"The fundamental purity and clarity of the mind is obscured by the ceaseless waves of thought which pitch and toss about in it; consequently we falsely see ourselves as individual existences confronted by a universe of multiplicities." - Yasutani Roshi

And so we must learn to take our foot off the accelerator and bring the thought machine down to idle speed.  This is the purpose of counting breaths, focusing on chakras, etc.  Once idling we have a chance to enjoy the View, which has been there all along for the enjoyment.  The machine still sputters away, but we pay it no heed as we awaken to this mountain road winding through thinning air and snow-capped peaks.  We can disengage the clutch and coast from here...

October 27, 2011

Picking up the diction is half the fun on this trip.  One of the great ironies of Advaita or Buddhism or any other brush with spiritual metaphysics is in how their words contort and splatter upon the ineffable, unthinkable Reality:

self-realization; our true nature; absolute, undifferentiated reality; kensho; the selfless I; nirvana; satori; enlightenment; awakening; liberation; non-being regarding itself; prajna paramita; pure is-ness; the uncompounded nature; the primordial ground of the nature of mind; the ground luminosity; the view; rigpa; the clear light; reality; one without a second; no-mind; I-i; big mind; universal mind; non-dual self; the real; the impersonal and unqualified center of being; clothed in space, beyond all appearance, the Naked One, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the Real, vibrantly alive peace, the I Am that is deeper than name and form; the primary; the unborn; the ancient source of all that is; the Absolute; Unity; the eternal, changeless Reality-Consciousness-Love within and beyond all appearances; pure awareness; timeless, spaceless, causeless, choiceless awareness; pure awareness of being, without being this or that; the Supreme Reality; the void beyond being and non-being; colorless and limitless, unconditioned consciousness; love without object; the Kingdom of God; pervading and transcending reality, pure Being-Awareness-Bliss; our very essence, nameless, formless,silent and yet absolutely real; powerful, effective, impersonally personal pure being; beyond space and time, beyond duality and unity, beyond understanding and description, our true nature, the Supreme Reality beyond the world and its creator, beyond consciousness and its witness, beyond all assertions and denials, the Infinite Reality, embracing all, transcending all, immutable beyond attributes, the great peace, the deep silence, the hidden beauty of reality; that which cannot change; formless attention; Pure Being, all pervading and all containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable, empty of all content; wakeful sleep; independent, uncreated, timeless and changeless, and yet ever new and fresh, the blind sense of Being...

Incredible, like light of a thousand colors emerging from a prism of a thousand facets.  

October 26, 2011

I love "Occupy Wall Street."  I hope you folks; storm the Bastille and kick out the jams--just don't mess with my Social Security, Medicare-in-waiting, or damage my life savings which, unfortunately, are in the hands of the pigs at the trough.  Other than that, draw-and-quarter every motherfucker who just can't get enough, will you?  The other night I thought I'd check out the FOX coverage/propaganda of it, and what a treat!  The great bag-o-wind, himself, Geraldo Rivera held court on-site, camera crew in tow.  The demonstrators had a few well spoken members, but then El Mustachio put the mic in front of a couple of time bombs.  The first got off a "we've been fucked--" before the G-Man pulled it back, and then he settled the mic in front of a longhair with a tattooed forehead and the bemused smile (shit-eating grin) of someone who could only be tripping.  "What do you think of all this?" said G.  Dude was dead silent for a long second, smile detached and schizophrenic, and then he spouts, "This is preposterous!"  Big grin.  "It's preposterous!"  G-Man whips away like a snake has struck and moves to other folks, but during each successive interview the goof inserts his leering maw into the background, wordless, unhinged, living in the chemical moment. He is the polar opposite of the hedge fund manager up the street, whose heart and soul have withered into a financial dowser's wand.

"This world [of the substance of Buddha-nature]--unfixed, devoid of mass, beyond individuality or personality--is outside the realm of imagination."  - Roshi Philip Kapleau

That is, it is apprehended by something other than mind or the five senses.  This new sense, if it could be called such, does not bind or qualify or discriminate in any way.  It illuminates.  It informs.  It is infinitely empty and adaptable.

Of even the furthest celestial body,
I am farther.
Of the tiniest quark or photon,
I am of it.
Without hub, without axle I am
Spokes of fire
Spinning like a cat's eye marble
Across a floor of Spanish tile.

Mumon's comment on the koan "Mu" sums up my writing plight: "You will be like a mute who has had a dream [and is unable to speak about it]."

In samadhi I abide (there is abiding) prior to any trace of discrimination through mind or senses.  This abiding has a winnowing effect on thought.  Thoughts and sensory stimuli do continue, but now absent the mental echo chamber they appear and disappear without friction, free of ego, pure and unstained.  Samadhi is sensing without a sense organ, knowing without thinking, living in presence free of space and time.  It is intuition fulfilled, ceaselessly and blissfully.

Attention must turn from the objective (the body-mind and all its products) to the subjective.  Attention to the personal subjective (I am) then dissolves into the boundless impersonal Subject (am).  This in turn falls away, leaving...emptiness filled to brimming!  The snake, which is really a rope, swallows its own tail and excretes the world.

October 25, 2011

Letting go is not quite right.  This is more akin to yielding and receptivity, without the doership of "I."  The process is ever unfolding grace, unstained by intention or expectation if genuine.

I am the chameleon of the Cosmos,
The salamander of salvation!

"...through kensho, one now sees differences in and through the aspect of sameness." - Roshi Philip Kapleau

That is, I precede differentiation and I am ever aware of an inchoate confirmation of our essential, common emptiness.

I agree wholeheartedly with the "identical attainment" promise of Zen.  Religions of faith fail us with their gods and idols.  For me the appeal of Zen and the yoga's was their assurance that I, too, would see and feel exactly as Masters of old: with the complete conviction of someone who has confirmed a science experiment.  Now my task is to integrate this open global sense into something of primacy in my ordinary life.  

October 24, 2011

Things exist.  I won't deny it.  But they only exist as illusion whose illusory source is my body-mind.  We are only an apparent flickering of radiance without end.

So, why is this consummate feeling of mine no big deal?  Because it is filled to brimming with everything just-as-it-is, and because this has always been so.

So, what about good and evil?  What about the starving babies, the innocents slaughtered by disease?  Mine is a philosophy of calloused determinism if I account for such horrors as the inevitable consequences of innumerable causes, although this is so.  But that is only a partial vision of a totality in which there is no "I."  Whether regarded as real or illusory, there is certainly suffering, just as there is compassion, altruism, and effort to end suffering--all wrapped up together in our conditioned plane of existence.  Compassion and altruism are divine instincts in a realm of "I" and "you" separate from the cosmos.  But if we really want to end suffering for once and all, effort must be directed against the root delusion of a separate self with its demon spawn of desire and fear.  Should humanity awaken to this truth, good and evil would be subsumed by a reality beyond both.

"...but this does not mean that we all can experience kensho to the same degree, for in the clarity, the depth, and the completeness of the experience there are great differences..." - Roshi Philip Kapleau

I believe I am experiencing early stage kensho.  Without doubt I have (apparently) punched through some kind of veil--the bottom has dropped out and I have an all-encompassing, all-pervading, very real sense of emptiness and one-ness with all-that-is (apparently).  I sense a common essence of everything and everybody.  On the other hand, the pull of deep conditioning remains strong and I foresee greater depths ahead as I further relinquish self to Self, the "divine abandonment" of de Caussade.  I must let go.

October 22, 2011

"The drive toward enlightenment is powered on the one hand by a painfully felt inner bondage--a frustration with life, a fear of death, or both--and on the other by a conviction that through awakening one can gain liberation." - Roshi Philip Kapleau

I know how you feel: nobody gets out alive and nobody with half a heart escapes the frustration inherent in human life.  And whether you are aware of it or not, you already have hope in liberation, too.  You possess an inner guide ever nudging you, consciously or unconsciously, towards truth.  When you follow your bliss, listen to the "still, small voice," you are in synch with this guide.  Follow the world and you bind yourself to the wheel of frustration and annihilation.  We have the choice to turn mere hope in liberation into conviction.  I swear to you from my heart: there is liberation and you are liberated this very minute, only unawares.  Find a path and take it, the sooner the better.  This is really our sole purpose in life. 

October 21, 2011

I had the kitten on my lap out here yesterday.  She was very nervous until she caught sight of birds flitting through the hedge, then her instincts took over.  She transformed from a passive victim of overloaded stimuli to focused concentration--the bird mantra effect.  I left her there following her bliss still when I checked back an hour later.  Her ears seemed to chase each sound reflexively, moving this way and that like two satellite dishes whipped around in a windstorm.  We humans operate the same way with all of our senses, chasing after stimuli like baying bloodhounds, then crunching them into concepts and judgments in the thought machine between our ears.  Noticing all this, mindfulness, is the first step in freeing ourselves.  Once mindful of its content, we begin to recognize consciousness as the ocean in which these fish swarm, and more, that consciousness is both source and substance, ubiquitous, omnipresent, all-pervading.  I abide in it and of it, and this body-mind is apparently consciousness concretized.  Emptiness lapsed into form.  However, throwing nouns at it does it no more justice than a cat's ear in a flock of birds.  What I feel is an immediate and vacant sense of being, bereft of body-mind, of subject and object, of identification with anything perceived or conceived.  It feels pure and true, without center and without edge, and it precedes and pervades everything.     

October 20, 2011

I am emptiness swallowing the world.  That I can see this, or feel this with an in-seeing, is greater still.  And seeing that and then that makes me an endless hall of mirrors, mercury under the thumb of the Absolute.

"...we are required to cognise...as such in the total absence of an objective cogniser and of any object cognised. So doing, we are not, which is what we are..." - WWW

"There is no other freedom, and it is liberation from all that is not joy." - WWW

"...until the habitual mechanism of seeking to objectify every perception, to turn every percept into an objective concept, is abandoned,...the essential understanding cannot begin to develop." - WWW

October 19, 2011

When I pay attention, I dissolve, empty; body and mind and all apparent objective reality lose sway over a "me" who has imploded into pure consciousness.  Everything still "is," so to speak, but a complete shift of perspective has taken place, as when we observe the drawing of a cube that appears pointed in one direction at first, and then upon closer scrutiny shifts in the opposite direction, and henceforth we see it both ways at once.  There is no turning back: the cucumber has become a pickle, the snake a rope forever more, the world empty and full at once.  Nothing has really changed except for the "seeing."  The seer, formerly me, and the seen are recognized as appearance only.  If we want to assign some sort of value to such awakening, it lies in absence: absence of clinging, grasping, craving, mental disturbance, fear, discontent, restlessness, judging, expecting, anxiety--all the stuff our conditioned minds plague us with.  This new freedom has long been described in spiritual literature as "peace beyond understanding."  And how did I get here (apparently)?  I suppose I am what those who have assiduously followed masters, or supposed masters, and rigorous, often ascetic traditions scornfully call a "book yogi."  Truly, my path has followed hundreds of books, thousands of hours of meditation, many false starts and back roads (apparently).  Somewhere in all that, something kick-started the process of awakening, which despite any efforts on my part continued on like a software program running in the background.  Instinct and intuition are at play in this, but being a book yogi is also being a loose cannon of the spirit, firing and firing until per chance striking the mark, then tethering the cannon in the right direction.  My earnestness/desperation has been rewarded despite the books.  I'm fortunate.  As WWW warns, for those of us "who have no Masters but books, [the message is] expressed as it is, intentionally or otherwise, in objective terminology which turns the mind away from the message that shines from the Heart."  What he is saying here is that awakening through books is like learning to fish in the desert.  Nevertheless, with patience and practice we eventually realize the desert has been a mirage all along. 

October 18, 2011

I am not disparaging raja or kundalini or any of the other more exotic trappings of the yogi's path.  They are like beautiful flowers and attract many to what otherwise might appear dry or fruitless.  But eventually the flower withers and dies, or worse, entrances the body-mind into worshiping itself.  A true path, says WWW, has these characteristics or effects:

"...to turn people away from their ceaseless objectivising, from their conditioned conceptualising, and, above all, from the illusory volition by means of which they imagine that they live and act, so that, by turning their backs on what they are not, they may suddenly become aware of the immensity of what they are."

The yogas of meditation are helpful in delineating and raising the profile of the incessant mind-stuff we tend to overlook or passively accept as status quo.  But too often we attach goals to our meditation or physical asanas, for example, "raising kundalini," which take volition to a feverish new level that in the end is simply obsession with self.

Well, I have a St. Bernard/collie pup at my feet and a Siamese/something kitten on my lap--went to a vegetarian festival downtown and got sweet-talked by my knowing wife into checking out the animal shelter booths.  She knew what would happen, as did I.  The only questions now are how big "Thor" will grow and whether "Karma" is good or bad.  So far she's better than good--purrs like a slant six.  As for Thor, he seems to be expanding before our eyes.  I'd say the raccoon's and armadillo's around this house are in for a real shock in about six months.

October 13, 2011

One of the most baffling tenets of realization regards objective phenomena as non-existent in themselves and existent only as "seeing."  There is a logic to this, however.  We do indeed sculpt objective reality from the single slab of the unmanifest.  That tree over there would not exist were I not equipped with vision and a brain to discern it.  That's hard to wrap your head around, but it's true.  Then we go to the "seer" side of the "seeing," and as soon as I call myself a seer, I have objectified everything on both sides of this "seeing"--and what did we say about objective phenomena?  This body-mind, too, is non-existent in itself but for the seeing of it.  The snake has swallowed its own tail and digested itself...not to mention it was a rope all along.

Raja yoga, with its rich and varied strain of meditation, was very appealing to me for a number of years.  I see it now as a necessary evil, just as an alcoholic views his lost years of drunkenness, necessary to exhaust all hope of  finding enlightenment in doership.  

October 12, 2011

"When insight evaporates in words,
Only resonance survives." - Wei Wu Wei

Words serve us well when we use them according to so-called logic, pragmatism, conditioned learning and knowledge.  They illuminate and convey what we consider rational thought.  They represent what we consider objective reality.  However, words fail miserably to convey awakening or even a path to it.  And why not, when a sage like WWW describes enlightenment as "the state of non-being and of non-identity"?  On its surface, his statement flies in the face of everything we have been taught as possible, of the evidence of our own lives, of reason, itself.  However, there is a new order of logic awakened in the enlightened, or perhaps a "re-ordering" is more apt.  It begins with a revision of very basic assumptions about very basic things such as "being" and 'identity."  In a manner of speaking, these terms have been hijacked by the body-mind.  For most of us, being and identity begin and end with the body-mind.  But the truth is, a puddle is no more an ocean than we are the sentient bag of guts to which we have become identified.  We are, in fact, neither "we" nor "I" nor "you," not even "it."  What we are is non-conceptual, non-objective, non-anything": just "neti, neti."  We are mistaken in our conditioned assumptions.  Each of us is like a black hole, endlessly sucking an infinitude of matter into our maw, and we identify ourselves with each thing just as it crosses the event horizon and then disappears.  We are not these things--we are everything but these things!  So how does a realized sage get this across to someone convinced otherwise, especially using the handicap of words?  We must understand these words as limited vehicles, mere pointers.  They take us just so far, or perhaps prevent us from veering off-course, but at some point we have to step out of the vehicle sans our usual traveling accouterments: logic and reason.   We must ignore objective phenomena, including thoughts, which are but mental objects.  Then we find ourselves in the realm of what WWW calls "resonance."  Then only the flavor of the sage's words carries us forward to the brink of something altogether new, beyond reason, beyond intuition, where we stand naked and receptive in a state of grace.  And then it is out of our hands.  Something happens akin to what Proust felt when he bit into that cookie, something like a recovered memory, only this is no temporary recollection.  It is the final truth and it pervades our consciousness from that moment on.

October 11, 2011

"...upstream of conceptual interpretation, I thus perceive directly..." - WWW

"...like a fire in the sun..." - Dylan

Mind cuts us off from ourselves like a layer of clouds blocks the sun.  The sun shines just as brightly up there, but our days are spent beneath threatening nimbus, or staid cumulus, or maybe joyfully in crystal clarity with just a hint of cirrus to keep us grounded.

That this path to freedom requires such apparently twisted logic, that it seems to deny the evidence of our own eyes, that it exists at all proves to me the power of our innate struggle against bondage.  Jnana is an immune system response to ignorance.

October 10, 2011

Is consciousness a product of our brains, or is it rather pre-existent, a kind of dynamic emptiness to which our brains tune in?  My experience is the latter, although I would not use a noun to denote it.  Whatever consciousness is, it is transitive, not objective.  It is the broth from which the primal soup is born, a broth without flavor or consistency until we sentient beings pop up to taste it.  Ironically, we are actually just another ingredient in the soup.  My senses carve out apparent objectivity and my mind classifies and qualifies it--but the whole thing is just an already dripping ice sculpture (including the sculptor and his ice pick) destined to resolve back from whence it came.  I am of the soup, of the ice, and just as ephemeral and insubstantial.  My conditioned body-mind tells me that I am a coalescing morass of perceptions and conceptions, but that "I" is every bit as illusory as the objects it creates.  The real "I" is just a naked "am" without subject or object.  The true I is its absence, the great wide open unfettered and never fettered, unadulterated freedom and bliss.  Words fail me here, as they must fail in any attempt to convey the ineffable.  I can only point, and even then the pointing is just another veil.  Your going to have to trust me on this until you open to it yourself. 

October 8, 2011

Reality is prior to all of the perceptions and conceptions churned up by our senses and mind.  When I alight there and rest in moments of clarity, both cognizer and cognized, subject and object, resolve back into their source and  I recognize all else as nothing but ephemeral, fabricated phenomena.  That includes myself, of course, or what in ignorance I take myself to be.  This does not require any great spiritual breakthrough or bout of faith, just contemplation and a readiness to discard that soft spongy thing between our ears for what it is: an ephemeral, fabricated phenomenon built to generate endless ephemeral, fabricated phenomena. 

October 7, 2011

"All forms of practice are learning to kill dragons." - Wei Wu Wei

Or windmills, or delusions, or whatever you want to call the false reality separating (only apparently)  ourselves from our true Self.  WWW is not saying that practice is unnecessary or a waste of time.  Sure, there are mystic savants who "get it" intuitively and completely in one fell swoop, but most of us are ignorant grunts who will muddle on through jungles of our own creation unless something or someone intervenes with a promise of release.  This pearl of truth is buried so deeply within the mire of our conditioning that it requires a practice--an earnest, diligent, relentless practice--to dig us out one shovel-full at a time.  Mindfullness, jnana, self-inquiry, any and all can play a valuable role in the gradual awakening many seekers experience.  Practice separates the wheat from the chaff.  It slowly draws back the curtain of manufactured illusion on the empty stage of "what is."

October 6, 2011

WWW uses the term "apperceiving" to describe awakened perception or true seeing--the way an enlightened being navigates.  This is a very nuanced choice of words.  It implies that this fresh "seeing" is prior to and free of objectivization, that it is empty yet at the same time full of what WWW calls "the immensity which is our noumenal non-being."  I am nothing and therefore everything.  "Am" is the first flicker and the last remnant of manifestation emergent from the unmanifest.  As apperception fleshes out into "am," the world is born.  This is why the sages tell us that we create the cosmos and the cosmos is us.  This is why the Zen masters can tell us to swallow the Pacific in a single gulp.

October 4, 2011

"...the non-arising of ego activity leaves the mind open for the direct or intuitional apprehension..." - WWW

Thus, the misguided quest of the novice meditator to silence his mind, to "attain" enlightenment, which is like trying to stop the wind with a screen door.  Meditation is not laying down sandbags to staunch the flood of thought; it is laying down, period, and allowing the wind to blow and thoughts to flow and whatever happens to happen.  Thoughts are merely illusory products of an illusory ego, shadows of a shadow, not who or what we really are. Did all that tumult in your dreams last night leave a single mark when you opened your eyes this morning?  Resting in "am," in consciousness without content, will of itself unfold into true vision of reality.  We can facilitate these conditions.  Just as a tropical wave over warm seas unfolds into a hurricane, enlightenment is "an effect of in-seeing," as WWW says.  It dawns when we nurture conditions propitious for awakening.  

September 30, 2011

"Even the best writing is like taking pot-shots at the moon." - Wei Wu Wei

"What I told 'ya, what I said,
Steal your face right off your head." - Robert Hunter

Stop seeking, rest in Rigpa, be a sentient bud in infinite solitude.  This is divine abandonment.  Beyond that it's all just poppycock of an opium dream.

September 29, 2011

I am always already non-phenomenally here.  I can sense or feel this absence as clearly as I sense supposedly phenomenal presence, which is actually an illusion of mind.  In fact the two are one without a second, undivided and indivisible.  The truth is, when I describe it as Being-Knowledge-Bliss I am merely describing colors emergent from a prism.

I feel subjectivity as a wispy skeleton of ash at the edge of collapse.  I feel transparent and brimming at once.  This is nothing new.  I have simply awakened to what has always been so.

"What, then, is it?  No sort of "what."  Just sheer phenomenal absence, whose absence is us (THIS which we are)." - Wei Wu Wei

Senses are tentacles of the unmanifest.  Good name for a rock band somewhere in there.

Here is WWW at his best:

"Therefore 'it' is ultimate and absolute phenomenal absence and the absence of that concept of 'absence,' which is absolute presence."


Oy.  I think he has all the bases covered.  I'm pretty sure his statement is so pure it is foreign.  Dense, too, almost opaque and impenetrable at first.  But he encapsulates or projects reality in just a few words--no easy feat.  Dude is crazy deep.

Mind chills the wind,
Strips the leaves,
Snaps the trunk,
Uproots the tree.
Mind is a typhoon run amok,
But bye and bye,
I am the Eye.

The purpose?  To live life on a basis of truth rather than false premises.  Yes, this is a judgement, a spiritually visceral judgement.  In WWW's terms, a "whole-mind" judgement.

September 28, 2011

We rend "what is" into past, present and future, just as a blank key is ground to fit a lock and open a door, in this case the door of cognition.  All of time and space are but renderings of our imagination.  Problems ensue when we take our imagination for reality.  Conversely, our problems, which are imaginary anyway, are solved for once and all when we "re-cognize" this false reality as illusory.  This is enlightenment.  In reality, "what is" never changes a lick.  In reality, our brief bouts of selfhood are no more than flickerings of a flame.  This is neither good nor bad.  It is perfect.

September 27, 2011

My vision has been going south lately.  I struggle to read--very frustrating.  However, I did have some moments of incredibly moving clarity during a visit from San Pedro this past weekend.  Tears of joy clarity, the kind we all have buried deep within us beneath layers of conditioning.  I watched "Concert for Bangladesh" and completely broke down sobbing when Harrison sang "Here Comes the Sun."  The man radiated compassion.  Dylan, too.  I may just be an old fuddy-duddy, but I have yet to see a band or a poet carry the torch those guys lit for us.  Maybe U2 and Springsteen tried, but nobody lately.

September 22, 2011

Oh, this Wei Wu Wei, such a character.  It figures he's French.  He reminds me of a philosopher version of the French writer, Robbe-Grille.  R.G. had his day in the 60's I think, back in the Grove Press days when a lot of weird stuff came out as experimental fiction.  R-G was known for what I would call flatline writing: creating scenes with the unwinking and nonjudgmental eye of a camera.  No comment minimalism or objectivism, dry as church as I recall.  But he was terrific at whatever the hell he was doing.  Same goes in spades for WWW.  The man is uncompromising in telling the truth even if it sounds insane.

September 21, 2011

If  this "thing of ours" is so true and wonderful, then why aren't there more people seeking it?  Well, probably because it makes no sense from our vantage formed by a lifetime of false conditioning.  How are we to be encouraged to follow, as WWW puts it, "the pathless way that leads no body from no there to no here?"  Some may stumble upon it via the mystical aspect of their religious tradition.  Meister Eckhart is an example of this.  He is also an example of how the enlightened ones were persecuted by the dim bulbs of fundamentalism.  Others, like myself, may have been leading lives so miserably off track we were literally driven to seek it.  We had been softened up enough by hard knocks to listen to our intuition, to follow our "sadguru," as it is known in yoga.  Nor is enlightenment easy to teach, or even cognizable in the ordinary sense of the word.  Most daunting of all, enlightenment is a suicide mission for the ego, for our misguided sense of ourselves as separate and individual.

September 18, 2011

"It is devoid of any trace of objectivity." - Huang Po

The one, the unity, the common essence, is boundless and undivided, empty and unqualified, encompassing both manifest and unmanifest.  It cradles being as implicitly and imperceptibly as loam cradles organic nutrients.

I am rereading "Open Secret" by Wei Wu Wei, the Frenchman, who was probably the most opaque and frustrating master I had ever read.  The work now reads like a primer, very pure.  What I took to be tortured logic has been supplanted by quick, clear recognition of truth.  I'm glad WWW finally got it right.  I'm happy they named the Web after him, too.

September 17, 2011

I laugh each time I learn of another "discovery" by science that belatedly (3,000 years?) confirms the truth of Advaita. It seems to me that much of 20th century science moved towards recognition of the perceiver's effect upon the perceived, thus coloring reality, or what we think real, in many subtle and heretofore unacknowledged ways.  Psychology, conditioning, environment, our particular experiences all affect and shape our experience of reality.  Advaita advances this a bit more by positing a reality absent of perceiver and perceived, undivided and indivisible. The sages tell us that there is no "doer" or "doership."  Now I read that a German neuroscientist at a prestigious Berlin research facility has conducted studies that suggest "consciousness of a decision may be a mere bio-chemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on our actions."  In other words, our supposed free will, our choices, are after-the-fact responses.  This scientist used a modern brain scanner to arrive at his conclusion.  The rishi's of old could have told him that numberless causes through infinite time underlie every supposed action we attribute to free will.  Everything everywhere must be exactly so for me to lift my little finger, supposedly volitionally.  We are not living, we are being lived and unaware of it.  This is the next paradigm, a new vantage for 21st century science.  Of course, the rishi's would laugh as they explained, because they knew it's all an illusory game anyway and that eventually, should we survive so long, we will come full circle to the truth:

"There is neither creation nor destruction,
Neither destiny or free will,
Neither path nor achievement;
This is the final truth." - Sri Ramana Maharshi

Ultimately, dark matter will be found to consist of ourselves, the same substance we observe when we gaze at our own face without a mirror.  It's everywhere.

September 15, 2011

S.R. states that he is passing on "a sacred technology" of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and enlightenment practices.  He sees them as being adapted and perpetuated in the West just as Tibet, itself, began to blink off beneath the Chinese invasion.  He urges us toward "a depth of understanding of the tradition fused with a real awareness of the problems and challenges of modern life."  Without exaggeration, practicing and teaching these truths will in great measure determine the survival of humanity, and more importantly, the quality of life should we survive.  On the positive side, every human being possesses a predilection, a propensity for awakening.  But it is buried deep beneath lifetimes of false conditioning all stemming from the basic misidentification of ourselves as separate body-minds.  Restless discontent and rampant consumerism are just further evidence of how far off the mark we live.

Too often we make the search for enlightenment a search for bliss, that is, our particular mental formulation of bliss.  Yes, bliss is at the very heart of awakening, but it is bliss of unexpected substance (or emptiness), "neti-neti" bliss, bliss consisting of freedom and absence, not endorphins and narcissism.   

September 14, 2011

I watched the Tampa tea party-hosted Republican presidential debate last night - aghast.  The low-light came when Ron Paul was presented a question of what the government ought to do for a thirty-year-old who rolled the dice and went without health insurance, had an accident, was in a coma.  Before Paul even had a chance to vocalize his usual "no government is good government" response, the tea party patrons in the hall began to shout "let him die!"  This crushing economic recession is inexorably crushing social civility with it.  I can only hope that I am witnessing a radical minority and there are enough of us left who keep our heads to vote down this stuff in a general election.  Otherwise all signs point to a fascist climate similar to 30's Nazi Germany.
"...
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." - Yeats

My boy, Yeats, knew our politics all too well when he darkly noted "the centre cannot hold."

"...instead of embracing the 'emptiness'..., in which we could find the bliss of being free from and unburdened by any idea, reference, or concept, we grasp at the dubious security of the familiar comforting drama of our emotions, driven by our deep habitual tendencies." - S.R.

And that goes double for conservatives.

September 13, 2011

That higher spiritual reality is here and now in life, if only we can discover and enter it." S.R.

"It's like an entrance to eternity." - Wojtek Ballzun, a railworker from Warsaw as he gazed at the sunken fountains of the 9/11 memorial.

September 12, 2011

Amongst all the 9/11 coverage this week I watched one show about the selection and building of the memorial at the site.  Five thousand applicants sent in ideas, visions, models, and ultimately one utilizing the footprints of the original towers was chosen.  Two massive pond/fountains were hewn from the foundation, some 30' down below the surface, probably about 1 acre each.  But what really struck me were the words their architect used to describe them.  Standing within the vast space of one of these fountains still under construction, stories beneath the ground, the man explained the design as an effort "to evoke the absence of presence," and thus the impermanence of things we tend to think permanent.  He could as easily have reversed it to the presence of absence and in either case be dancing with very subtle and very real descriptions of our intuitive seventh sense.  This was one sensitive architect.  He went on to describe the fountain waters as representing "gentle persistence."  What better way to describe the yoga of enlightenment as gentle persistence continuously flowing to awaken a feeling of the absence of presence!

September 9, 2011

Eyes opened or closed, no matter, everything perceived becomes incidental, secondary to a unified state of presence.  Everything I say or write obscures it - what paradox!  This seventh sense does not distinguish, it engulfs, swallows whole effortlessly all that is.  It is empty and full at once.    

September 8, 2011

"All substances are my own mind, and this mind is emptiness, unarisen and unobstructed."  - Tibetan Book of the Dead
"Thinking this, keep your mind natural and undiluted, self-contained in its own nature like water poured into water, just as it is, loose, open and relaxed."  TBLD

How to "keep your mind" like this, that is the key for me now.  To help us get there, yogis of all stripes have broadcast hundreds of methods, most of them based upon some form of extended concentration: breath, mantra, parts of the body, sensory objects, chakras, mental constructs, visualizations, etc.  Followed in earnest, any such method may take us to a precipice of mindfulness, of sorts, where we stand completely immersed and still, gazing into an abyss.  The great teachers nudge us off the cliff with their pointers.  We fall from "I am" to "am," and that false bottom drops into neither "am" or "not-am."  We fall until zero-gravity brings us to a halt in a state of undiluted clarity and fullness, water poured into water.

September 4, 2011

Let be be finale of seem. - Wallace Stevens

September 1, 2011

America has a self-appointed (wealth appointed) aristocracy every bit as moneyed and honey'd as that sheikh-filled sandbox across the pond--uh oh, I'm reading the paper again, damn it.

August 31, 2011

Is what I experience non-dual?  Yes in that the "sensing" is global, boundless, without a center.  The explaining is dual because I must use words such as "emptiness," which imply their opposite. S.R. says that we must establish ourselves in this state until it becomes a constantly blazing fire, evaporating all sensual and mental clutter before it has effect.  Me?  I am a sputtering fire, still falling back into darkness, conscious and then unconscious in intervals.  The samskaras run deep.

I've noticed that ever since I started receiving and reading the newspaper first thing each day my mood sours, whereas before first thing out of the gate was spiritual reading and contemplation and good vibrations.  I may have to resist the paper, at least until sundown when I can walk off the fumes.  American air is humid with venom these days.
  

August 30, 2011

The seventh sense is global, that is to say, beginning-less, endless, without dimension or qualification.  S.R. describes it as the clear sky just before sunrise, in other words, empty yet all-pervasive and all-pervaded.  As experienced in life, this sense dissolves identification with the body-mind into transparent consciousness, hollow mind-stuff.  What is sensed is blissful.  Dissolution of the body-mind takes with it all the ties that bind: emotion, desire, fear, memory, expectation, all boil down into a single weightless, boundless, untainted presence.  You are doing it, or rather, you are it right now, already and always, just unawares.  Opening to the seventh sense requires less effort than lifting your eyes to the sky.  

August 28, 2011

"It is folly to expect a wounded mind to diagnose itself...."  I read this in the paper today, a condemnation of the lack of treatment given a marine Iraq war vet who committed DUI manslaughter.  The guy had a history of blackout drinking along with three purple hearts and a mind full of nightmares.  I recall in the midst of my own lost youth how I questioned my own perception and wondered, how does a sick mind living within the confines of a distorted reality know that it is sick?  Extrapolated further, how does the bulk of humanity living today in limited, conditional ignorance free itself from imprisonment of which it is not even aware?  And so most of us continue on in a life of restlessness and discontent bounded by the poles of fear and desire, ever seeking surcease in the transient, futilely. It's what we know.  It is confirmed by those around us, although they too wander lost without knowing so.  I understand now why most of the great ones lived in an agony of compassion.

August 27, 2011

"It is the difference between looking up at the sky from within a glass dome, and standing outside in the open air. We have to break out of the dome of ordinary mind altogether to discover and let in the fresh air of Rigpa."  S.R.

Great analogy, using glass.  We don't tend to notice glass, just as we remain ignorant of our limitations, of the veil of conditioning in which we operate.  We think we see and experience the sky as it really is.  It's all we've ever known, and most folks around us confirm this because it's all they've ever known.  And then for the lucky ones, the open-minded ones, along comes the truth by way of a person or a book or intuition, and their guidance engenders a practice to clarify and eventually wear away the glass.  Once our false assumptions, like the glass, are eradicated, or seen for what they are, nothing changes and everything changes.  What we assumed was reality we now realize was stale and stagnant as this new perspective imbues us with the untainted fresh air of truth.   Best of all, once the artificial dome is gone, the artificial "me" who created it goes too.  Sky is just the place, so to speak, in which everything comes and goes. Once the dome disintegrates like Ramakrishna's jug of Ganges water, sky rushes to sky and Ganges rushes to Ganges, everything merges as if that dome/body-mind never existed.  Which in truth it never did.

August 24, 2011

"The nature of everything is open and naked like sky.  Luminous emptiness, without center or circumference: the pure, naked Rigpa dawns." - The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The above describes very precisely what I feel or what I recognize when I turn my attention (or perhaps turn it off) toward a great wide-open without content, not even a body-mind.  Yes it is like open sky, invisible and omnipresent, and yes in the absence of all obfuscation it is luminous.  It is that in which everything abides and of which everything consists.  It has no boundaries, big or small.  But the mental grooves, the samskaras, run deep.

My task now is not to open to Rigpa - I already have - my task is to purify my recognition, to stay awake.

August 23, 2011

During the final stages of dying, says S.R., "there arises a great experience of bliss, as all the thought states resulting from desire...cease to function."  Notice the connection between absence of desire and bliss.  He doesn't say that pain ceases and bliss ensues.  He makes no mention of fear.  Once the weight of desire is off it, bliss will of itself buoy to the surface.  I notice more and more how haunted people are, how harried by incessant restlessness and discontent.  It's painful to watch.   Bliss is absence of all that tugging and pulling, all the depletion of misdirected energies.  Bliss is clear and still.  Every day I practice recognition of this clarity. When I am still and in it and of it, everything simply is, and the "am" in which they arise disappears like darkness at sunrise.

August 20, 2011

"Awakening" and "liberation" are two of the closest approximations I can muster--they ring true to my experience of the past year or so.  Awakening suggests opening up at last to what has always been the case, and liberation implies freedom from everything to do with the body-mind.  So we awaken to the fact that we are and always have been free of the fabricated self, of the ego with its incessant demands.  Its sort of like coming to AA after years of drunkenness, getting sober, and then reflecting with astonishment upon the altered and delusional life of the crazy alcoholic who is me.  Not to be arrogant, but I feel deep compassion for the bulk of us who live in ignorance, everybody hustling to get whatever they can in their allotted three score and ten.  No wonder we live in a climate of desire and fear run amok.

August 19, 2011

No day, no night, just the moment in black or white.
This hedge is a tangle of grey bones;
The birds flit through like fish over dead coral.

At home in ignorance, at home they dance
Upon dead bones beneath budding leaf
While the squirrels play for keeps with nipping teeth.

My tapes hiss and crackle.
Soon the machine will go
And those who made the machine will go
And those who cared about the machine will go
And my tapes will hold their peace
Like a still wind in misplaced space.

August 16, 2011

Abandoning ourselves to a Jesus or a Buddha (Bhakti) or just abandoning our selves (Jnana) both have the same spiritual end: freedom from the false, fabricated self.  One way leaves a trace of ash while the other consumes all.    As I continue to read "TBLD" I am reminded here and there where Buddhism falls short for me.  It boils down to using the mind to generate beneficial visualization, to "invoke" deities and mantras and such.  Even wrapped in the deepest absorption, something that begins in the mind remains attached to that subtly gossamer golden chain to nowhere that always leads back to its origin: mind.  Invoking anything is an act of mind and therefore a veil, no matter how filmy and fine.

If a tree fell alone in the forest, would Wallace Stevens hear it?  You bet.

The Snow Man


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sounds of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same place

For the listener, who listens in the snow
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

August 10, 2011

Joseph Heller just nails corporate America in "Something Happened."  Boss to subordinate: "I want inferior people with superior minds who feel in their bones their lives would be over if they lost their jobs with me."  Gives me a kind of creepy corporate PTSD flashback, right on the nerve.  No surprise after a quarter century on the Fortune 50 firing line with a company that hemorrhaged over 100,000 jobs during the last third of my career.  I staggered out the door leaking mental and physical health all over the sidewalk.  I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed of myself.  In truth, neither.  Like so many of us, I was swept up in a tide of conditioning and soon swimming with the sharks, bent on survival of myself and my family.  Everything had to happen just so for that violent wave to wash me up on this very fine beach, indeed.  I am a fortunate son. 

August 9, 2011

Last night I decided to explore the Advaitan world at large, so I hopped onto advaita.org and actually took part in a chatroom/lecture by Wayne "Ram Tzu" Liquorman.  I was intrigued by a video of him recounting his history, some of which I identified with, but now I don't know what to think, especially given my overly cynical view of self-anointed "gurus."  Poor Wayne seemed to be running a mental health clinic for awhile there, and that sort of tangent can do damage if the guru is not adept.  I typed in a question about what I have been experiencing of late and he confirmed that they were genuine spiritual experiences. I asked a couple of other self-aggrandizing questions that he mercifully ignored.  I had hoped for more...something, depth?...and may tune in again to get a better feel for him.  I think the group had a downer effect on him.  My hope was based on Liquorman's proximity to Nisargadatta by way of his guru, Ramesh Balkesar, who was an interpreter for N.M. for 3 years.  Unfortunately, Balkesar has a bit of philandering and monetary baggage, internet innuendo (so it must be true), and that tends to fuel my cynicism.  I've read a couple of R.B.'s books--very heady, lots of syllables, kind of N.M. with a PhD--and found them a bit dry for my oh so exquisite palate.  But Liquorman is not R.B., and he does seem to have some street cred out there, so maybe I'll deign to listen in again.

August 6, 2011

Chapter 10 of "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying"--"The Innermost Essence"--is a masterpiece of enlightenment literature.  The last section of it, though, "The Rainbow Body," is a bit much for this old boy born and bred in the so-called scientific age.  Of course, science is just the highest form of solving crossword puzzles and by no means an end in itself.  We formulate them ourselves, solve them, then move on to the next, never paying attention or tribute to the unchanging blank page on which all is written.  Anyway, Christians might find that section rather interesting from the standpoint of Jesus' empty tomb.  Then again, Christians aren't likely to burn their fingers handling satanic literature like TBLD.

Each night I walk about 4 miles.  Each month and now each week I spend more and more of these walks in what can only be described as a samadhi or Rigpa state: the feet keep walking but I have nothing to do with them as body dissolves and mind jabbers less and less, at a distance. I can say this with certainty born of experience: in the absence of body there does remain a kind of empty radiance, and in the absence of mind a boundless freedom that could be termed bliss.  I understand now why some masters were known to smile at impending death, even calling it "home."

August 4, 2011

Dzogchen meditation uses the term "the View" to describe awakened perception.  S.R. uses an analogy of living in a house atop the highest mountain in the world, towering above all else, and suddenly the walls and roof disappear: the View manifests!  It was there all along.  I would only add that viewer and view dissolve into viewing alone.  Perhaps the body-mind drops through a trapdoor and rolls down the mountain, never to be seen again?

"The masters stress that to stabilize the View in meditation, it is essential, first of all, to accomplish this practice in a special environment of retreat, where all the favorable conditions are present; midst the distractions and busyness of the world, however much you meditate, true experience will not be born in your mind....If you are unable to continue that flow at all times and in all situations, mixing your practice with everyday life, it will not serve as a remedy when unfavorable circumstances arise, and you will be led astray into delusion by thoughts and emotions."  S.R.

This bears out my own experience in retirement.  The View has quickened and now exerts a subtle magnetism, ever drawing me back to it (except when the Market crashes, like today...hmmm...work to be done yet).  However, had I not imposed a daily discipline of meditation and study, even a modicum of it, I would not be as ripe for progress as I find myself today.  And I had a few glimpses of the View during those years of tumult, despite adverse conditions.  The carrot appeared for just a few moments before it, too, faded away--long enough to shore up my faith.  No matter what conditions you find yourself, at all cost start the ball rolling, now.

August 3, 2011

"The ordinary, habitual mind with its projections is extremely powerful.  It keeps returning, and takes hold of us easily when we are inattentive or distracted."

"Rigpa is a state in which there is no longer any doubt: there is not really a mind to doubt.  You see directly."

"Meditation is not striving, but naturally becoming assimilated into it."  S.R.

Yes.  I would only disagree in calling Rigpa a state, which to me implies something temporal that makes way for the next state, and the next, and so on.  If anything, Rigpa is a fallback state, a constant, just as repose is a fallback from tension.  Rigpa is an equivalent to Turiya in Hinduism, the fourth state beyond and within the three temporal states of waking, sleeping, and dreamless sleep.  Paradoxically, it is clear of yet containing the ordinary habitual mind.  Thoughts are the effulgence of Rigpa and, if recognized as such immediately, will not take hold and bear us away.  Meditation quickens this recognition.

I had a dream about the cat, and now it clicks.  In the dream some people had found her and held her.  I recognized the white tuft on her neck and was overwhelmed with tearful joy.  They handed her over and I gently placed her in a shopping cart, then found us rolling through a large school campus in search of my car.  Jazzy looked up at me from the cart, smiled, and said "I love you."  Then she transformed into a bird and flew off to join a flock of birds circling a large tree in an open grassy area amongst the campus buildings.  She perched on a branch.  I cried for her to return with deep wrenching sobs.  She wouldn't come and I woke up, very sad.  Today I sit here in my usual perch under the umbrella, watching the regulars, the birds flitting through the hedge amongst the feeders.  And now I realize that my love for my recently deceased pets has found a new outlet, been transformed in a sense, in this daily array of cardinals, jays, finches, starlings and, yes, catbirds, and that the eye of Nature gazes back upon me and says "I love you."

"Among twenty snow mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird."  Wallace Stevens

Jnana is the wrench of applied Advaita, tightening invisible screws with a tremendous absence of torque.

August 2, 2011

"...the primordial wisdom, the naked union of emptiness and intrinsic awareness."  S.R.

You want it put into words?  There it is, distilled into half a dozen words for you.  Now gnaw on that primordial bone awhile.  Rend meaning from those words.  Worry them until they relieve all worries and answer all questions.  Emptiness is intrinsically awareness, as water is intrinsically wet.  What is the fabric of thought?  Consciousness.  What is the fabric of consciousness?  Emptiness.  And what is the primordial tenet?  Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.  Emptiness > Awareness > Consciousness > Form.  Each infuses each in a Big Bang of silence and stillness.  Now drop all the cogitating and gaze at your own face without a mirror.

"This certainty of the View is what has to be deepened through glimpse after glimpse of the nature of mind, and stabilized through the continuous discipline of meditation."  S.R.

This is exactly where I'm at.  Now, with about a year and a half's distance from my last job, I can see how the pace of ripening has picked up.  Fewer distractions and more concentration will do that for you.  S.R. notes how the modern world impedes sustenance of these conditions.  He says that despite this we can create our own climate for ripening by making "skillful use" of these negative hindrances.  Of course, S.R. never worked for Motorola.  I suppose some folks can awaken in the midst of clawing for survival in corporate America.  All I could do was find time each day to meditate and perhaps read something hopeful.  Now, finally, I feel that I have full rein.  Even at this late date, it's a beautiful no-thing.

July 25, 2011

I watch the white belly of a squirrel splayed flat against the lanai screen only a few feet from my face. His heart pounds, trembles, against the thin skin of his chest. He is nervous to the point of paralysis. When I looked up from my book he froze just before jumping into the hedge to the bird feeder. Scared stiff. He looks skinned and hung up to dry. Nature's creatures are so nervous. The birds are always flitting, heads swiveling constantly even while feeding. Is there a difference between fear and vigilance? Vigilance is courageous fear. One afternoon I saw a hawk dive into the hedge like an osprey hits the water, talons first. I could see a lot of thrashing from where I stood inside the house. When I walked out to the pool he was gone, and probably a young squirrel or tasty snake with it. I try to reassure the squirrel before me with a series of clucks, as my father taught. Actually my father would clink together two nickels to call in the squirrels, a pump action .22 rifle slung under his arm. Come to think of it, these animals have every right to be nervous.

July 24, 2011

It should be obvious to all that even countries with the best intentions - the U.S. being a prime example - will eventually run dangerously astray without a spiritual compass. This past decade has seen epic excesses of greed and fear take down still another empire. Now, though, the world is so interconnected that reverberations from one miscreant country kneecaps all of us. East and West exist no longer. We are dominoes that will rise or fall together. Although Advaita arose long ago in the east, it consists of universal truth, the truth that can save us from ourselves.

"To follow the path of wisdom has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our society is dedicated to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it, because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice, and the entire society in which we live seems to negate every idea of sacredness or eternal meaning. So at the time of our most acute danger, when our very future is in doubt, we as human beings find ourselves at our most bewildered, and trapped in a nightmare of our own creation." S.R.

That about sums things up nicely, and his book came out in 1992! I'm sure S.R. has nodded ruefully every misstep of the way since. I fear it will take a savage fall for humanity to open us again to our wisdom teachings. Religion just exacerbates the situation with its virulent fundamentalist strains. We truly do need a messiah, someone enlightened and supremely charismatic to serve up the wheat of the spiritual path and discard the deadly chaff.

July 22, 2011

"Gradually, as we listen to the teachings, certain passages and insights in them will strike a strange chord in us, memories of our true nature will start to trickle back, and a deep feeling of something homely and uncannily familiar will slowly awaken." S.R.

There is a not too subtle brainwashing in all of this. The difference is in what remains after the washing: rather than a whole new set of concepts and prejudices, Jnana washes clean. We aren't using soap and water here, but industrial strength solvents. Shuttered windows resolve into an absence of walls - into the great wide open that was there before, during and after our ego had its day in the sun.

July 20, 2011

Last night during my walk I saw an owl swooping between streetlights. That's how they like to hunt in our neighborhood, perched in darkness just above the floodlit lawns of suburbia, swooping down before those night critters know what hit them. This is much like our ego as we proceed down the floodlit path toward spiritual freedom when suddenly and silently we are seized and swept up into the pitch darkness of our shadow. Our search for spirit has been waylaid, swept up and set down on a stone to be disemboweled in the forlorn cry  "why-me-me-me...?" of ego. Why me? I think of Peter Finch in the movie "Network," imbued by his vision and asking God "why me, Lord?" "Because you're on television, dummy," God answers him. That should be our answer to our own ego when it attacks. Why? Because you're alive, human, on the air, dummy.

July 19, 2011

S.R. from "TBLD" again: We need training in three wisdom tools to facilitate awakening. They are:

1) Wisdom of listening and hearing
2) Wisdom of contemplation and reflection
3) Wisdom of meditations.

Perhaps "civilization" will survive long enough to recognize these as the true ABC's of a child's education. Sure beats 30 years of reading books and practicing on faith, otherwise known as my way. We need teachers of wisdom in the West, genuine teachers of immutable truth. As an aloof westerner, though, I just might be too cynical of frauds and imposters to fully accept a human teacher. That's another problem westerners have, kind of a spiritual post traumatic stress syndrome. So I put in my 30 years and came in the backdoor...

"To be ego-less, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable." S.R.

Actually just the opposite is true. Awakening brings recognition of colors and the clear light from which they came, and yes, it does bring recognition of our brains as fabricators of empty realities, as dream-weavers. Nothing wrong with seeing the real as real and the false as false. This way freedom lies, freedom from the fiction of "rich romance."

"...in the space of freedom opened up my meditation...you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature." S.R.

This "momentary release" is the seed of earnestness, a siren call for more meditation, more mindfulness, until the time comes when it is not so momentary, and it is tapped or accessed with a mere shift of attention to "am."

July 15, 2011

Some days I feel like a wind chime in a dead calm. Just had our cat euthanized. We are pet-less for the first time in twenty years. How ironic that I am reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the Bardos chapter, about freedom through hopelessness, surrender, abandonment. This is a common thread in all mystic traditions.

Buddhism is more Jnana in approach, Christianity more Bhakti.

Another cat is now prowling our hedge, as if it knows somehow the property rights have changed. One cat bites the dust and nature rushes into the vacuum it abhors with a brand new one.

July 14, 2011

Yes, everything is empty, empty enough to swallow whole.

"...the absolute, naked, sky-like primordial purity of the nature of our mind..." S.R.

Funny how it takes five adjectives and two nouns to describe emptiness, but necessary so we don't get hung up in a narrow field. Each adjective alone describes our true nature in total, yet each adds its own little flavor. Many props to S.R. for not sloughing it off in one or two hackneyed words. He is a teacher, a pointer of great sensitivity.

July 13, 2011

"The beater and the beaten
mere players of a game
ephemeral as a dream" - Muso

When the rubber hits the road, are you a palm bending before a hurricane or a pine snapping and filling the air with debris? A graceful life is ever aware and accepting of impending death. Whatever comes - no big deal. When genuine, this attitude does not engender dark depression. It is freedom, itself, from the little big man.

I do not drink alcohol because it takes me to a place that makes Jack a dull boy, and it usually leads me into trouble with either the laws of physics or the laws of the land, or both. It hurts, and I learn my lesson every time. I am fond of pot again, though. It's good for my glaucoma and it doesn't block access to open squelch awareness. I also thoroughly enjoy its chief side effect. Our society is largely insane, so I understand why it's illegal. As for its effect on my practice, I can relate to Ram Dass' guru after RD gave him a couple of hits of acid. The man hid under a blanket for some hours, and when he emerged he basically said, "very entertaining, but it has no effect on the Atman, the real self." There have even been awakened masters who were drinkers.  Gasan, a Zen master.from a couple of centuries ago, said: "One go of sake and I'm vivacious, five go and I'm mild as a spring day, one sho (ten go) and the wintry moon is high in the sky, the carp leaps from the deep pond."

Unfortunately, two or three more sho for me would likely send me high in the sky through my windshield, hoping not to land in a deep pond.

This business of remaining conscious of our mortality does not mean we are morbid or possessed of some secret knowledge, merely that we accept death as we expect day to follow night. Here's a good example:

"Ex-emperor: Gudo, what happens to the man of enlightenment and the man of illusion after death?
Gudo: How should I know, sir?
Ex-emperor: Why, because you're a master!
Gudo: Yes, sir, but no dead one!

July 12, 2011

Yin and Yang. Light and dark. Good, bad, positive, negative. Polar opposites fused to each other by the middle way. In fact imbued each by the other, the seed of one implanted in the other. At least this is so from the perspective of little big man. Who would believe that the father of the atomic bomb would have this to say?:

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein.

That about says it all, folks, and it came from the mouth of no babe. "A kind of optical delusion" of consciousness misidentified with the body-mind. Oh Albert, you weren't just smart, you were wise!

July 11, 2011

We are innately good. Instinctively we know this, even when in the throes of self-love run riot. Our true purpose in life is to realize our own bliss. We just get terribly confused along the way.

"It is that goodness that we are all trying to uncover and free. Whenever we act positively, we move toward it, and whenever we cannot express it in our lives and actions, we feel miserable and frustrated." S.R.

The solution? "Nourish and practice kindness."

And then there are those hellbent after freedom through money and material acquisition. Think of the addicts of finance on Wall Street who broke the bank where selfishness is concerned. They are everywhere. I rubbed plenty of their elbows during my corporate stint. They have created a system that rewards short term results, long term consequences be damned, and it has wrought havoc across the planet.

How ironic that our innate inclination to realize our bliss has gone so far off the tracks. Humankind needs a strong positive push away from entrenched greed and towards kindness. When will people listen to the wisdom we already possess?

July 10, 2011

This is death, the stone cold answer: for any number of reasons the body-mind declines and shuts down, the senses wink off, perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly, and that chattering monkey between our ears begins to lose coherence in a slow, slurring slide, like Hal in "2001," and then...from the perspective of the body-mind, annihilation. But only the body-mind is gone. What we are, call it consciousness without content, call it spirit, what you will, remains, free, untethered and never tethered. Our death returns us to the Clear Light, to shining Being-Consciousness-Bliss.  This is not to say we should blow our brains out this minute - I love life and feel graced by it - but to point out the pointless clinging to the most obviously transient thing we think we possess: our lives. Of course, this is all easily said beneath this umbrella as the birds chirp.

July 7, 2011

"Become as resourceful in inspiring yourself to enter your own peace as you are at being neurotic and competitive in the world." S.R.

This should be flashing on that big Times Square billboard, or a screensaver that flitters across every tear-stained monitor in every sweat-stained cubicle in the world.

Religion in the workplace: "My sons, may you all be over quota and under budget. Now go in peace. Oh, and leave your forecast at the door."

"To embody the transcendent is why we are here." S.R.

Right boss? How in God's name are we going to turn from money to spirit? From ephemeral pleasures, ephemeral security to transcendence? Where's the payoff in a belly full of transcendence? The pendulum now swung to extreme materialism must swing back, probably first to cataclysmic austerity, then to a middle way more fertile for Awakening to take hold. That is the savage irony of this world, that we are already imbued with Being-Knowledge-Bliss but blind to it and therefore desperately fighting for survival of--dear diary, gotta go shopping now, see you tomorrow.

July 6, 2011

"If one keeps in the buddha-mind without straying, there's no further satori to seek." Bankei

"Straying." That's the rub. Too often yet I find myself a stray dog in a world of steak bones. I could gnaw all day long on any one of them. This is the purpose of mindfulness training, to domesticate the stray dog in us.

"My advice to those whose eyes have not yet been opened to the truth--leap from the net and see how immense is the ocean." Tanzan

July 5, 2011

Bankei was sort of the Krishnamurti of Zen patriarchs. Since his own awakening, so he thought, required no method or effort, he felt duty-bound to preach: "To attain the truth today all one needs is self-criticism. There's no need to talk about Buddhism and Zen...all of you have the buddha-mind." Same, too, with K, who left the Theosophists and for the remainder of his life seemed to spurn any tradition. He basically preached a doctrine of "choiceless" awareness. Both men drew big crowds and, from what I've read, little in generating realization amongst their followers. Bankei's sect died out after his death, and I'm seeing far fewer of K's books in the stores these days. I think both men overlooked Ramakrishna's approach of different strokes for different folks or Jesus' selective shout-out to "those who have ears to hear." Personally, I needed a huge smack in the ass from life to dislodge me from my conditioned ego, and I have benefited greatly from slow and steady meditation (which is largely superfluous lately).

Today every word of B + K rings true, but 30 years ago they would have been just so much nonsense. I see the inbred resistance each time I try to convey something of this to family members: vehemence or a pitying assumption that Daddy's high again. It's like asking a blind man to visualize something. The difference is that the blind man's eyes are irreversibly damaged, while our intuitive, spiritual eye is merely dormant, asleep.

"Remain firmly in the self-sufficient budding-mind of non-birth." Bankei

This command is as clear to me as being told to stand up on two legs - when I am already doing so! I just hadn't noticed until you told me.