Stages on the Way, Part II

"It's not an idea. It's not "cool" like penetrating insight. It is completely authentic and achingly beautiful." -- Gozen

Well, that's where my practice has gone, Gozen. The first many years was about mind. "Cool" mind things, vipassana insights about how the mind processes information, how the senses work, how concentration (still a funky word for what it really is) works and leads to realization during jhanic activity. Mind is driving the process. Then a huge tectonic shift. Major continental plates move around. It's like going from BC to AD. And all of a sudden the heart is what matters and what drives. It's probably the biggest transition in practice. BIgger than stream entry for me. Bigger than A&P, although all of that is fondly remembered as points at which "Insight Disease" becomes one's daily reality.

Then, one day.... watch the universe play out, be it as it plays out, combine with it, flow with it, never struggle in it, never need anything more or anything less. It's all just perfection that can't be any other way (a really crazy idea people seem to have, and I sometimes have it, is that it should be some other way - suffering comes from that), and it's inside and outside and it's endless and it's timeless and it's amazingly beautiful because of exactly the way it is.

Oh, you can get a lot out of the practice beforehand, but after The Shift the technicolor, 3D nature of reality blossoms and much, much more truth is revealed, and it JUST KNOWS.

Authentic. Yeah.

You will one day have a crisis. I've been in the middle of a pretty deep one since late Monday night. The only reason I want to share this with you is to say that my practice has made coping with this crisis, which is about a person who is very dear to me, survivable. Many folks, and I was one of them, question the practical value of their practice. I've seen highly realized people say they can't place a purpose or value on their practice. Well, that's BS. I'm here to tell you that there is a very practical value to what you're doing.

In years past this particular crisis would have been very difficult for me to cope with. I would have been concerned more about its effects on me than on the person truly in the middle of it, desperately needing my help. My practice brings me enough equanimity and knowledge of the mind to avoid that death spiral. It also helps me deal with healthcare practitioners in a rational, calm and purposeful manner. Knowing that I'm simply not in control of events, and that this is the dharma "warts and all" (quoting Kenneth), has freed me up to be of much more greater use to the person who now needs my attention, full and calm.

So if you ever wondered why you're practicing, stop now. This universe will one day throw you a curve ball. Your practice will enable you to hit it.

Peace.

So nice to hear.
I've always had two basic ideas about the purpose of my practice:
1. to know myself and reality with complete intimacy
2. to be able to meet real life with as much wisdom as possible in each moment in order to make it fuller and better for myself and anyone else that is effected by my thoughts and actions.
Neither of these purposes has any limits and any improvement in either one is great.
It's nice to have purpose #2 so completely affirmed by someone with a strong practice.

Telecaster --

"1. to know myself and reality with complete intimacy
2. to be able to meet real life with as much wisdom as possible in each moment in order to make it fuller and better for myself and anyone else that is effected by my thoughts and actions."

This may sound odd but those two bullets are actually the same thing

"
Telecaster --

"1. to know myself and reality with complete intimacy
2. to be able to meet real life with as much wisdom as possible in each moment in order to make it fuller and better for myself and anyone else that is effected by my thoughts and actions."

This may sound odd but those two bullets are actually the same thing



"

Not odd, but exactly right.

"
You will one day have a crisis. I've been in the middle of a pretty deep one since late Monday night. The only reason I want to share this with you is to say that my practice has made coping with this crisis, which is about a person who is very dear to me, survivable. Many folks, and I was one of them, question the practical value of their practice. I've seen highly realized people say they can't place a purpose or value on their practice. Well, that's BS. I'm here to tell you that there is a very practical value to what you're doing.

In years past this particular crisis would have been very difficult for me to cope with. I would have been concerned more about its effects on me than on the person truly in the middle of it, desperately needing my help. My practice brings me enough equanimity and knowledge of the mind to avoid that death spiral. It also helps me deal with healthcare practitioners in a rational, calm and purposeful manner. Knowing that I'm simply not in control of events, and that this is the dharma "warts and all" (quoting Kenneth), has freed me up to be of much more greater use to the person who now needs my attention, full and calm.

So if you ever wondered why you're practicing, stop now. This universe will one day throw you a curve ball. Your practice will enable you to hit it.

Peace.

"

BTW Chris, I copied&pasted your post and emailed to a friend, another Buddhist practitioner, who happens to also be going through a crisis right now. It really helped. Thanks for sharing so clearly and openly what you are going through. It is an act of generosity that will not be forgotten.

I will try to describe something that has just recently become the most important thing. It is a sense, a feeling, an access to, an uncovering of "is." This sense is accessible all the time. In order to access it I have to stop everything else and let all of it go, then... just be. "Is" then manifests. "Is" has no real definition and cannot be explained, but is sort of like the bottom line, baseline, the *truth* of experience and existence. It's realizing that everything... just "is." This is where all awareness ultimately resides and is the source of everything I see, know, don't see and don't know. It doesn't relate to me and it doesn't care about me. In fact, it doesn't care about anything at all, but it knows everything and it is the absolute truth of everything. Everything "is," and cannot be any other way, so "is' is the identity for the universe, seen, unseen, known and unknown.

I can feel "is" but I can't explain it, describe it. You feel "is," too, all the time. It's the simplest thing ever, and you can just drop all the complex ideas and concepts and philosophies that people use to explain spirituality. Those just won't help you find "is." Finding "is" is like putting on a perfectly fitting glove of the whole of experience and the entire universe. You are home, and all the crap you struggle with, the complexities you see, the problems you have to solve will now be glorious, integral parts of what just "is."

I think "is" has become far more apparent as I have needed it more this week. I can't explain that and don't think I should even try.

Oh, one more little item: I don't think you can get any simpler and I don't think there's anywhere else to go from "is."

cmarti, I can't recall if you're the one who finds Tibetan words irritating-- if so, consider that I found the icon for 'lightning flash' and inserted it here... BUT one of the things that blows my mind is that the spiritual 'terms of art' are so precise and profoundly developed. "Cho" the Tibetan word used to translate the Sanskrit 'dharma' means "AS IT IS" ( wherefore the title of Tulku Urgyen's book ).

The 'somewhere else to go' from here is the back-flip where 'form is exactly emptiness' turns into 'emptiness is exactly form' and voila, the phenomenal world is transformed in the place where it stands. The 'somewhere' of nowhere else.

Amazing, innit?

"
Oh, one more little item: I don't think you can get any simpler and I don't think there's anywhere else to go from "is."

"

Yes, no matter what we choose to call it -- and each person resonates strongly with whichever word or phrase touches them most deeply -- the idea of the most fundamental, most simple, most basic and irreducible as the root and home of all, is what we point to with our chosen words.

For me, the resonant phrase is "the feeling of BEING." It is a feeling, not an idea. It is sheer BEING, prior to form and attributes. It can be known directly, but not as something other than who you really are.

"cmarti, I can't recall if you're the one who finds Tibetan words irritating"

Roomy, I'm sure I gave you and others that impression at some point. But I did not, do not, find Tibetan words irritating. I found the houses of cards some human beings construct from Tibetan words frustrating. That frustration is MY FAULT, not theirs.

Just wanted to clear that up

See, in the process, while we're in the throes of whatever this is, when it happens, as it is happening, the glimpse we get is through a foggy window. Aiming at the real and authentic at that point can be a hit and miss kind of thing. Once the fog clears nothing could be more obvious and the errors we made - I made - look silly, childish and misguided. I appreciate your pointing this out to me so I can correct it and apologize to anyone who was in the path of my silliness.

Today I'm walking around in a familiar world that I get to see for the first time.

Oh, I have a "sort of" koan:

What is the most powerful thing?

I've been thinking this morning that there is a boundary that gets crossed by human beings that leads to this practice, i.e.; the investigation of what's really going on. I was thinking about how I got started. What motivated me? It was a deep dissatisfaction with my understanding (really a misunderstanding) of how this body and mind fit into the rest of the universe. It was clear something was wrong. The maps I was using, the explanations I was given or adopted just didn't quite match up to the experience. I was often at odds with experience, my expectations of it, my models of "the way things work." This, I think, is the essence of suffering, otherwise known as unsatisfaction, or dissatisfaction. It's not physical pain or even emotional pain that causes this feeling. It's a metaphysical, psychological, paradigmatic disconnect. It's the hint that the suffering is happening to a fiction, a shadow of the knowledge that the idea "this" is happening to any one separate thing in particular is wrong.

Somehow when a human being recognizes or experiences this disconnect a quest can be born. I see this now in my daughter, who is 17 and is suffers depression. She and I got the chance to talk at great length earlier this week and it became clear to me, unless I'm projecting, that she senses the same dissatisfaction with the process of life that I did, but at a much older age. So now I'm thinking that people who recognize this mismatch, this paradigmatic disconnect, are the ones who will ultimately develop the drive and energy to awaken, and that we, people like us, need to figure out a way to provide an opening to these people.

I recognize this experiential paradigmatic mismatch in my daughter but not in my three sons. I don't know what causes one person to perceive this and another not, but that is a fascinating, even compelling area of investigation that I would dearly love to explore.

"It can be known directly, but not as something other than who you really are."

This is critical, I think, as feeling what I call "is" cannot be done until the dropping of all conceptual baggage and the unspoken assumptions about who "I" am are gone. I remember reading, way back when, that this process is one of subtraction, not addition. Nothing could be more descriptive in this regard, Gozen, and I think your point should be etched into the doorway of every Buddhist temple. One has to "die" before one can feel it.

It's time again to read "Moon in a Dewdrop." This is my way, outside of talking to Kenneth and Gozen, of testing my understanding. Every time I read it I see more and find more beauty. It's a gift from no one

"
"It can be known directly, but not as something other than who you really are."

This is critical, I think, as feeling what I call "is" cannot be done until the dropping of all conceptual baggage and the unspoken assumptions about who "I" am are gone. I remember reading, way back when, that this process is one of subtraction, not addition. Nothing could be more descriptive in this regard, Gozen, and I think your point should be etched into the doorway of every Buddhist temple. One has to "die" before one can feel it.

"

Chris, I especially like your last sentence: "One has to 'die' before one can feel it."

A contemporary Zen master from Japan whose name I forget would freak out some of his American students when they sat down for zazen because he would proclaim "Die on your cushions!"

When I first learned about this, I laughed. It's perfect! That's exactly the right attitude! Talk about a stark injunction to drop EVERYTHING!

"Chris, I especially like your last sentence: "One has to 'die' before one can feel it."

A contemporary Zen master from Japan whose name I forget would freak out some of his American students when they sat down for zazen because he would proclaim "Die on your cushions!"

When I first learned about this, I laughed. It's perfect! That's exactly the right attitude! Talk about a stark injunction to drop EVERYTHING!
"

And this really is how it works. This letting go of our small, constricted self - allowing it to "die before death" - is what allows us to gain the True perspective. I think this is true at all stages of awakening, from stream entry to the final transition and integration.

It is rather amusing, however, to see for one's self that the small, constricted ego-self doesn't really die. There has never been a small self in the first place! Hence the reason why enlightened people still appear to have "egos". A human being without a personality is no better than a stone Buddha, and we know from the sutras that the Buddha's enlightenment didn't render him comatose.

What a wonderfully paradoxical universe we are.

~Jackson

Good point, Jackson. It's more accurate to say, "What dies is one's belief in the separate, permanent self," but part of me says that's nowhere near as impactful or poetic, and the impactful and the poetic do have a role to play in our awakening

BTW, Jackson, I see you're taking a break from your deep, hard practice. I think that's a smart move. I do it, too, probably more than I should but then being a homeowner, jobholder, spouse and parent forces it on me.

"
BTW, Jackson, I see you're taking a break from your deep, hard practice. I think that's a smart move. I do it, too, probably more than I should but then being a homeowner, jobholder, spouse and parent forces it on me.

"

Yep, I'm just going to reduce the intensity for a while. I have a graduate school application to complete, student loan stuff to deal with, and household concerns to attend to. Periods of intensive practice are important, and so are periods of rest. It's time to explore the latter.

Business has taken me away from these message boards most of this week but not away from my practice. Though I'm busy and can't sit formally the practice still goes along under its own power and inertia, driven by whatever universal energies drive such things. I notice a vast difference in perspective these days. It waits for me to feel it when I want or, when idle, the mind drops away and it just manifests.

Kenneth asked if I noticed folks around me noticing this difference. I said "no" but I wasn't paying enough attention. After he asked and after I started watching, I think they do notice. It shows in a subtle way. I'll post more about this later because at first I thought it might be wishful thinking and I was more or less engaged in a self-fulfilling prophesy or a placebo type effect. Now I don't think so but I want to observe a little more and talk about it in detail later.

Bottom line -- people pay more attention to the person who is most present at the time. Presence, a calm, steady presence, seems to equate to energy, the energy being focused what's really going on right now. I've been paying attention to this phenomenon and it's quite real. One who is truly present is also able to "see" the energies of others, read that energy, read those others, in a way that many people might call clairvoyant. It's not. It's just that most people are preoccupied. Asleep, to use the Buddha's metaphor.

Yup-- as Anne Lamott said, 'You must be present to win.' (Understanding 'win' as a gross metaphor; it's not the kind of winning that requires others to lose.) It's really a shocking discovery-- how elaborately and systematically one has gotten in one's own way. And everyone else's. Feels so good to stop.

" Feels so good to stop."-roomy

Reminds me of something Bill Hamilton used to say about the afterglow that follows an intensive meditation retreat:

"Meditation is like beating your head against the wall; it feels really good when you stop."

I don't know exactly what this means but my old "light-headedness" feeling is back and has increased substantially yesterday and today. It's akin to being right on the edge of entering a jhana, and if I stop doing things and relax.... BOOM! Jhana-land. This feeling brings an odd image to mind -- that of a jelly-like brain infused with an electrical current. Wet, static-y, energetic.