Layers of self - peeling back the onion

That's what I keep telling all those Greenpeace people that bug me on the street. Doesn't seem to help. They just keep coming.

Ha Activists don't appreciate emptiness. Occupy shunyata! (Oh wait...)

Yeh, though it's a fascinating project. I think what we're trying to do is work out an abhidharma psychology that integrates western insights into developmental stuff with contemplative insights into subtle processes of referentiality. Cool topic Eran!

Good thing your bank account wasn't empty

http://sengchen.wordpress.com/

Here's a very succinct summary of the Aro take on 'not-self'. "Ego is merely a style of being—a mannerism—a habit. Where is your
fingernail-biting habit when you no longer bite your nails? Where is
your smoking habit when you no longer smoke? Where is your depression
habit when you are cheerful? Where is our dualism habit when we find the presence of awareness?"

[to Tomo, if you still find 'presence of awareness' confusing-- it's when the 'sense of being aware' is turned up to 11, so that the being-aware is the foreground and 'the stuff I'm aware of' is the background. It's one of those things that can be experienced, but can't be 'figured out.' Which is why most of what I or anyone else says about it is relatively lame.]

I still bite my nails.

Here's some spontaneous nonsense: what if... the ego habit is the habit that thinks it can (or should be able to) control all the other habits (and feels proud or ashamed depending...), so it has a tricky confound built-in when ego tries to initiate "practice" as a process of eliminating, transforming or liberating ego all it can do is reinforce the assumptions that constitute it (chiefly, that it actually has a privileged position in relation to other mental-emotional-behavioral movements).

Oh, and nail biters really bug me So cut that out right now

A friend described it as sending the fire chief to investigate the arson...except he himself is the arsonist.

A teacher I listened to once (I don't remember who) told a story that had similar use: that at first the ego thinks practice is really cool -it's going to lead to feeling good, yay. And then when practice starts getting deeper, and the ego sees that it is going to have to take an early retirement if this process keeps up, it starts throwing up good reasons to stop: fear, confusion, doubt, etc. Maybe you should practice differently, because this doesn't always feel good. You really just need to read more, understand everything conceptually, not look so closely... And one can get sidetracked by that.

What I don't fully understand is that somehow there can be a point at which the process that practice starts gains its own momentum, and all our flailing around and struggling and practicing starts to seem more and more useless. No matter what we do, things keep changing and unpeeling and unfolding out of our control. I'm not sure everyone experiences their journey the same way, but for me, at least, that was a really significant part of "practice" at a certain point - a growing realization that I wasn't in charge at all, and there was really nothing I could do to make anything be different than it actually was. I kept trying. Spates of full-on rage and fighting alternating with calm acceptance. It was, frankly, often terrifying at the time. It was pretty damn hilarious later.

@ Ona--- Yeah, that's a great point! I forgive you the nail biting...

"What I don't fully understand is that somehow there can be a point at
which the process that practice starts gains its own momentum, and all
our flailing around and struggling and practicing starts to seem more
and more useless"

It's like, at first one starts out with that surface ego going to practice because of the promise of "better" experience(s)-- "it's going to lead to feeling good, yay'-- and then as the insights into the insubstantial, ephemeral nature of everything start rolling in, deeper, more visceral and subconscious layers of ego (which still totally believe in their own substiality and permanence) start to go "whoa, wtf? I am not even real?--- no thanks, this sucks; I can't deal with this dissolving into nothingness in each moment BS! " but THEN something even deeper comes out, something authentic in us, which recognizes freedom and reality and truth when it sees it. For that element of our being, this journey is all about coming home!

And all of those elements swirling together every day... quite a tumultuous process, at times

To tie this to another discussion here, is that momentum at all related to the length of time you devote to practice per day? Or asked another way, what likelihood is there to get that kind of momentum if practice is limited to some small amount per day (even if you manage to make it day-in-day-out)?


-tomo

Tomo, I know people who practice hours every day, who go on retreats three times a year with the "best" teachers, etc, who want nothing to do with this momentum. I really don't think there's a mechanical relationship of practice time to the process of awakening; each individual is different. But what we all have in common in this respect, or so I speculate, is that there needs to be a certain ripeness and willingness for that momentum to come forth and start taking over. That means a certain kind of honesty has to be brought TO formal practice (or discovered in it, and then brought out in everyday life).

Which brings up the question: what do you mean by practice? If you mean sitting still applying some attentional technique, then it's probably obvious where my own bias lies: it's perhaps completely irrelevant

However, if by "practice" you mean something like intentionally attending to experience as it happens with the commitment to fully experience each moment as completely and honestly as possible (which means letting go of all the presuppositions one carried from "beginningless time" about experience and existence which are contradicted by what one actually finds-- then, I would say this kind of practice probably has to become your normal waking state mode in order to give that intuitive, instinctual, inexorable insight-mind a chance to take over with enough prominence for a deep breakthrough to become an authentic possibility/inevitability.

I'd echo Jake, Tomo-- the most effective 'practice' I ever adopted was to 'take in', even very briefly, hints like 'no excuses'; 'pray continually'; 'how do you "not-know" what you've known?'; 'everywhere I go, the "chicken" sees;' 'who, me? uh-oh: yep, me.' Awakeness, sensitivity, emergent clarity-- whatever you call it, the signs of its existence and activity keep popping up. Eventually, even if I'm a hard case, I'm gonna have to admit that I'm surrounded. By the time you think you've 'got' momentum, it's been carrying you along for quite awhile. While you tried to figure out what it is, and how to make some, it has been gathering steam...

For me anyhow, there was never any heroic vanquishing or snuffing out of 'the ego'-- it was more like the accumulation of examples of what a poorly crafted, unconvincing, threadbare work of fiction it was. And getting bored. Yeah, sure, circumstances can tempt me to have another go and come up with something more artful; but I seem to lack the motives to persist that I had. Nothing deflates the whole enterprise more than the moments of seeing its silliness.

[...] By the time you think you've 'got' momentum, it's been carrying you along for quite awhile. While you tried to figure out what it is, and how to make some, it has been gathering steam... [...]
For me anyhow, there was never any heroic vanquishing or snuffing out of 'the ego'-- it was more like the accumulation of examples of what a poorly crafted, unconvincing, threadbare work of fiction it was. And getting bored.


-kategowen

Wow, brilliantly put! Yes, exactly!

Tomo, I know people who practice hours every day, who go on retreats three times a year with the "best" teachers, etc, who want nothing to do with this momentum. I really don't think there's a mechanical relationship of practice time to the process of awakening; each individual is different. But what we all have in common in this respect, or so I speculate, is that there needs to be a certain ripeness and willingness for that momentum to come forth and start taking over. That means a certain kind of honesty has to be brought TO formal practice (or discovered in it, and then brought out in everyday life)....


-jake

Me, too. I know several people personally who spent decades in intensive formal practices - even at monasteries - and never really got "very far." Then one day they had a change of relationship to the practice, a realization that there was more to it than this endless sitting, some kind of giving over the their whole heart to the possibility of awakening, and in a matter of a short time the layers started falling away fast. One can be a very skilled meditator in a technical way without really seeing much from it.

And likewise I know people who meditate 20-30 minutes a day, maybe twice a day when they can, and have made surprisingly rapid progress in a matter of months or a few short years.

There is some combination of determination, willingness, commitment and a sort of utter surrender to the process that seems to help. And when practice can be brought into the day, not confined to the cushion, then "hours on the cushion" certainly becomes much less important.

that's too funny, Chris!

It strikes me that most of what I write would be more useful if it were at less remove, less abstract and aphoristic. So, in the spirit of attempting to be helpful:

The cutting edge of my practice since the first coup de grace has been: being 'right'-- 'needing' to be right, believing myself to be right, arguing the case that I am right, being defined by being right. And that has been a long time even starting to wither away; the process has been neither easy nor decorous. It involved countless instances of seeing the reflex, in the moment. Initially, the embarrassment made me grip it tighter, as if I could keep it my private indulgence by holding it closer. This despite the still, small voice having piped up-- and been echoed by me-- 'Being right is the BOOBY prize; being intimate is the real thing.'

So, repeated the dynamic countless times, each time having another pixel of the big picture pop into view. "The evidence is, that this is not secret, Kate; it's in plain view. Others may be being tactful; they may be preoccupied. But they are unfailingly reacting, nonetheless. And no, the fact that you ARE right, by some objective measure, does not make any difference."

Now I'm not claiming anything beyond having a certain clarity about all this, and having lightened up a bunch as a result-- that, and being unconfused when 'righteousness-karma' smacks me upside the head once again. I surmise that 'self' gets to be one of those things I can't be bothered with, eventually, after all the things I thought it would accomplish reveal themselves as mirages. Again and again, for as long as it takes.

It strikes me that Conceit is one of the last defilements to go in the Buddhist tradition... I think that's probably the same thing as "being right" and also the context for the other most resilient defilements (greed, hatred, delusion).

I can appreciate how -- after the most obvious wake-up to this dynamic -- the dynamic becomes subtler and more pervasive, seen everywhere...

RIght now I'm getting the feeling of how much it will take and frankly I'm daunted, but I'm inspired by your commitment to recollect the mirage-ness of it "for as long as it takes". There are days when forever seems to be the best guess at how long it will take, but there really isn't any other choice once you've seen the man behind the curtain...

Although there are temptations, and I been seeing that recently. Which is a oblique way of saying I've been realizing I've been corrupted by it lately. Because when the baggage gets dropped a little, performance increases a lot. Do I start claiming that? Is that now the new me? Are those my bragging rights as a skilled practioner? I AM right and they are WRONG, so certainly that makes me

---

and gotcha! Sso there is the potential to get trapped again, so there continues to be all the conditions for the next karma wake up slap!

I have a feeling, too, that the pervasiveness of the confusion will eventually lift away, like morning fog... or maybe like the pop of a new year's champaign cork? Who knows

But there is, even in my crude stages of this work, a sense that just giving up that dynamic in the small way I can, when ever I can, giving up that drive to re-establish the solidity of a self that is a particular way, has some particular level of skill, that KNOWS with certainty (not just "is knowing something momentarily")... by giving that up, it cuts the chain of positioning and the karma that inevitably follows -- and offers some mid-term relief/freedom, which is encouragement towards continuing on for as long as it takes.

In blunt terms, I've spent the last couple of years having the recurrent idea that I may very well be annoying-- at least sometimes. And, for some reason, even for the first few 'uh-oh! that can't be right!' times it was more strangely interesting, than fuel for mounting a defense of justification and ire at whomever I was thinking might be finding me annoying. The Big Insight of some years back seems to have lightened things up in this way: the same old pack of mangy-mutt qualities and habits comes sniffing around, but they don't seem as rabid any more, so you get curious about their looks and behavior, where they came from, where they're headed...

Or, more plainly, somehow consequences are as apparent as the urge to 'defend' myself in the old offensive way: I can fire off the smart remark, and this is how it will feel between me and this person I see with great frequency. Might better wait for a more promising impulse.

Thanks for joining in the exploration, Shargrol!

I see a bit of a "to and fro" kind of dynamic when I look. I try to be good or interesting to attract, and then I feel my "giving" or my "entertaining" being taken an advantaged of and I then push away. If you don't fall for it, I'm annoying/cloying, but if my charm is working, I'm wonderfully open. (And sometimes I am genuinely so.) So it depends how you catch me.

But the entire dynamic has its root in the initial wanting to control the situation. That's the interesting thing to me, that initial need to control. It's a fear. At this point in my practice, I see that need to control weakening (and the kind of non-intentional wonderfully open nature just there) and I suspect that the former is the self that will go away.

It's a pleasure Kate!

Then again... who knows?