Stages on the Way, Part II

Roomy, yes, it's clearly surrender, all the way down.

"You soon sense that you've put WAY too much 'English' on them and they ricochet into chaos, taking your emotions with them."

For anyone questioning the value of their practice, listen up!


"... I can see that it has always been possible."

And that's the kicker. It HAS always been there. Practice is like the orbit of a comet. You start out near the sun and that's pretty much all you can see - this bright, all-obscuring, all-encompassing mass. Slowly, with practice, you move out along a vast elliptical orbit and eek out a longer view, a deeper perspective. It's painful. It presents some nasty stuff. You see yourself with some more objectivity, maybe as others might, and it's ugly and it hurts. That perspective continues to evolve as the orbit lengthens and all the while you are getting to see more and more of the universe and your existence as it really is. It's just like Kenneth lays it out -- objectifying more and more of your experience is the stretching of that orbit. At some point you get far enough out there that you can see the whole thing and it changes you, puts some kind of permanent mark on you so that when you orbit back in it's not quite the same you and not quite the same sun anymore. You get the closed in and the deeper, wide angle perspective at the same time, and it all kinda makes sense. And you really do sit in wonder and amazement that, damn, it was really that way all along and you somehow just didn't see it. Then you laugh or cry and make dinner for the kids.

Weird beautiful.

Perspective.
Palabra.
Post gave me chills and goosebumps.

No matter how hard you try you cannot get a direct look at basic awareness. You can see its effects. You can infer its nature from secondary evidence. You can dwell in it but you cannot look primordial awareness in the eye. It resists becoming an object. It's not an object. It's not you, either. It's everything, and everything is it. It's the strangest thing, the simplest thing, the truest thing, the only thing that never changes, and it just doesn't care. But... and the goofy part is this -- it always induces love and compassion. This, to me, says that love and compassion have a special place in our minds and especially in our hearts. Love and compassion seem to burst forth naturally from that place. I used to read the popular Buddhist magazines (Tricycle, Buddhadharma, etc.) and some of the, ahem, more smarmy Buddhist books and see all the talk about love and compassion and kind of ignore it. But, dammit, IT'S TRUE.

For anyone interested in Zen I recommend Steve Hagen. His Dharma Field Zen Center in Minnesota has a free podcast available and he's written a few nice books on Zen, focusing on the process of being right here, right now, and waking up. It's not earth shattering, sexy Zen. It's down to earth, effective Zen. Until Kenneth finishes his book I think Steve Hagen's are great book to use to introduce people to Buddhism.

My sitting process typically takes one of two paths these days. Path one is to follow the jhanic arc up and then down again. Path two is to do what is basically Soto Zen Shikantaza - I just sit and whatever arises, arises. I do not investigate what arises. I do, however, pretty quickly notice the witness and then soon after pass through that, too. If I had to choose, I'd most often choose path two. It leads to the most basic thing and that seems to have lasting, consequential effects. It's not that the jhanas aren't nice. They're blisssful, especially post-eighth jhana. But they seem now to be much less important than they were when I was fullly on that crazy treadmill called the progress of insight. I think I'm still on that path but I'm not quite sure where on it I am any more, and it just doesn't seem to matter that much now.

I'm sure Kenneth can speak to this better than me, and probably should. I used to want Arahat-ship. Now it doesn't matter that much because, I believe, there is something more important to be had. This awareness has suddenly made the thing, the process, feel complete in a way that I have never before been able to feel. It feels like I can expand on it, learn to dwell in it more often, more or less abide there. But that's embellishing, not continuing. That's horizontal movement, not vertical like the progress of insight is. I'm not sure any of that makes sense, so maybe Kenneth will magicaly appear and help me put it together.

"
This awareness has suddenly made the thing, the process, feel complete in a way that I have never before been able to feel. It feels like I can expand on it, learn to dwell in it more often, more or less abide there. But that's embellishing, not continuing. That's horizontal movement, not vertical like the progress of insight is. I'm not sure any of that makes sense, so maybe Kenneth will magicaly appear and help me put it together.

"

[Chris, it ain't Kenneth, but here's something I read yesterday, about the further reaches of practice, from"Dragon's Play"]

'The bubbling up of events in the field of time is not an alarming external thing, as it was in the early stages. It's just a little tickle, enlivening our play as each bubble pops open and a new situation is revealed. We become free in all this, but not necessarily efficient. Our real expertise is in relaxing into things as they are, without narrow notions of control. So we're not burdened by technical efficiency or by the expectations that come from thinking of ourselves as experts.'

Roomy, thanks.

I'm pretty clearly in some transitional place, but then we're all always in transition. I think what got me going over the last week or so was being hit in the face with the realization that we hold some very deep, deep, deep, deep assumptions about stuff that turn out to be just more relative things, so I ate that and digested it. Feels better now.

-- maybe THAT'S what the old yogis meant, about 'swallowing the river Ganges'...

Digestive metaphor has its place. I once heard a friend, a long time Dzogchen practitioner, tell someone that awakening is like taking a big, satisfying dump.

(Sorry for the language, but....)

"Awakening is like taking a big, satisfying dump



"

Hahahahah That line belongs in the Humour on the Path thread too. Brilliant and I agree! LOL!

A pebble tossed into the pond rests on the sandy bottom
The battle rages and the battelfield is still
The windows are open and the wind howls through a quiet room
There is observation and participation
There is action and stillness
Self and no one
Separated by everything and nothing
The same but different
The world

Back to bed

Test tomorrow

I believe I'm getting a good lesson in why and how koans work. If your mind is presented with what appears to be an intractable, weird, illogical or otherwise impossible unknown, it'll settle in and sit there, all the time, and percolate. This kind of thing has happened a number of times in my practice. There are discrete steps: the conundrum is created or otherwise recognized, it is then distilled and formulated as a koan-like question or problem in a conscious way, it is then tossed into the lower sea of mind-stuff and sloshes around to show up in dreams, when you wake up at 3:00 AM, and as fodder for daily life as situations arise that somehow relate or provide clues. Then, at some point....

BAM!

Or in other cases.....

click

It's amazing and wonderful how things can be hidden for so long by only the thinnest of veils. Truths can light years away and yet live in the house right next door. The universe is fundamentally arranged in this manner as I now perceive it. Things are what they appear to be and yet they are dreams. I am, and I am not. Objects are solid, but they do not exist separately. It's all intertwined all the time. ALL THE TIME. And a great beauty in the world is found in these paradoxical realities. Sadness can be wonderful. Happiness can be hell. Time is, yet there is timelessness.

And when I think of these things, and I do quite a bit these days, my eyes tend to tear up and I'm filled with gratitude to be able to experience this, if only for the briefest of moments. Images and phrases come to mind that represent these paradoxes and sort of explain them in terms I wouldn't be able to use otherwise. I was never a fan of poetry but now I grok poetry. There is something very basic, fundamental and wonderful that flows through everything all the time and, oddly, it's not the simplest thing but the recognition of the way the simplest thing and the real/dreams are actually one and the same, all the time. It's all put together that way. Everything IS that way.

The Dance is always going on. The issue at hand is how to tune in to the music. Every moment is dancing and if you don't hear the music you'll probably miss the dancing and it will seem all too serious and not dance-like -- more like an old black and white television show, like Perry Mason.

"
It's amazing and wonderful how things can be hidden for so long by only the thinnest of veils. Truths can light years away and yet live in the house right next door. The universe is fundamentally arranged in this manner as I now perceive it. Things are what they appear to be and yet they are dreams. I am, and I am not. Objects are solid, but they do not exist separately. It's all intertwined all the time. ALL THE TIME. And a great beauty in the world is found in these paradoxical realities. Sadness can be wonderful. Happiness can be hell. Time is, yet there is timelessness.

And when I think of these things, and I do quite a bit these days, my eyes tend to tear up and I'm filled with gratitude to be able to experience this, if only for the briefest of moments. Images and phrases come to mind that represent these paradoxes and sort of explain them in terms I wouldn't be able to use otherwise. I was never a fan of poetry but now I grok poetry. There is something very basic, fundamental and wonderful that flows through everything all the time and, oddly, it's not the simplest thing but the recognition of the way the simplest thing and the real/dreams are actually one and the same, all the time. It's all put together that way. Everything IS that way.

"

Chris -- You expressed this so beautifully. All of it. For me, though, the most essential part of what you wrote is this:
"There is something very basic, fundamental and wonderful that flows through everything all the time and, oddly, it's not the simplest thing but the recognition of the way the simplest thing and the real/dreams are actually one and the same, all the time. It's all put together that way."

All I can say is "YES, IT IS!"

Thank you, Gozen. What seems to be resolving is how what used to be pieces intertwine, meld, synthesize and otherwise work together as One. I told Kenneth today that the word "synthesize" had meaning for me but there's a much better word: GRACE.

I'm 200% with you here, Chris, especially about the poetry. There's a great passage in 'The Great Gatsby' about the first Europeans landing on these shores and finding themselves in view for the first time of a landscape 'commensurate with their capacity for wonder.' I've always found the best poetry to be that use of language 'commensurate with our capacity for wonder.' Or any of our human responses that draw on the entirety of our being-- wonder, awe, reverence, tenderness, fierce resolve... the whole spectrum. And, yes, 'grace' is the poet's word; 'synthesize', the technician's.

I have a lot to say about what I'll call "wiring" this morning but I can't right now as I'm working a big event.. It's about how experience flows in the mind. Short version: it flows through "you" and it flows through. When it flows through you everything appears solid and you tend to get stuck on things. When it flows through everything is luminous. You can choose which circuit to pay more attention to but both are always in use, and that's the grace part.

So we all hold a bunch of assumptions in our minds, all the time. Practice for me has become the process of pulling these assumptions out into the light. It started with space, then time. Yesterday, last night and this morning it's about the unstated and quietly assumed privileged nature of some metal processes. I think this is a major big deal. The assumption is that some thoughts, proto-thoughts and perceptions have some kind of preferential place, some kind of governing ability, some kind of ownership over our experience. These are baseline, fundamental things. Things that you think govern your experience, things that occur in that weird emptiness that starts right behind your eyes and passes through the very center of your head and then down your brainstem. There's a weird gap, a hole, a space there within which this stuff happens and into which we just don't go. We must eventually GO THERE.

There is no privileged process. Everything you experience is on exactly the same playing field as everything else, adheres to the same rules, abides by the same laws. No matter what that thing is, no matter what the hidden hierarchy assumed, THERE IS NO HIERARCHY.

And yeah, I'm shouting. It's important. I'm convinced this is the last mile.

And you won't know what's really going on (that phrase we hear all the time that describes the ultimate objective we aspire to)... you won't know what's really going on until you go to that place and see what's happening there, all the time. Then, and only then, does it become clear that, in the modern vernacular, what you see is exactly what you get. There's no special stuff, no secret sauce, no God or gods, no kings, no luminous, miraculous or special experiences. Stuff just IS and.... that's that. There is, amazingly, absolutely nowhere else to go and thus nowhere else to aspire to go (critical point, that one, about aspiring, wanting, thinking there's something more to find).

Simple, simple, simple.... but enormously important and life changing. Another one of those things I've found that hid in plain sight right next to me until I was ready to see it.

Interesting what you are talking about, Chris. There is another interview up on Buddhist Geeks with Vince and Daniel talking about the simple model of enlightenment. And what you are talking about is kind of exactly what the anagami has to figure out in order to walk that last mile. I'm not there yet but I love that this is being talked about because it means a lot of us wont be wasting too much time figuring out what to look and not look for and do or not do when we get to that stage. Thanks for the heads up!

www.buddhistgeeks.com/2010/05/the-simple-model-enlightenment/

Thanks as always for your updates Chris... best wishes as you continue on the path. Thanks a lot Nick for that, great read...

I dunno. The picture is ... different than what is said in that essay. I like the Three Gears. My experience is that they all speak to very important aspects of the thing. They all have to be present and integrated. The first is about "do," the second about "see," and the third about "be." We need them all.

On an afternoon sit today, one that featured the jhanic arc, I discovered I have access to another jhana. First gear just keeps on keepin' on, driven as it always is by some unknown but inexorable force, like a spiritual conveyor belt.