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.