Stages, Part the Third

Thanks for sharing this with us and I hope things will cycle back soon. Depression is a flat out horrible thing. I'm sure you are doing a lot more good than you know just being an awake presence in the midst of this.

Let me add my voice to the others' messages of encouragement and support, Chris. And add that the hard times are what shows you what a diamond the practice path you're on really is: Kwan Yin is a bodhisattva because she HEARS [can bear without flinching] 'the cries of the world'. She hasn't taken her magic accomplishments and run off to never-never Nirvana.

Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate your support.

Small words of support is what I can offer.

Metta and Karuna

Andrew

Dear Chris,

Sending love and hope to you and your whole family.

Kenneth

Thinking of your family too. Hopefully some of these positive vibes can come in handy.

I sincerely hope things turn out better for you and your family too...

Thanks again, everyone. It's great to think about all of you thinking of us over here.

"And add that the hard times are what shows you what a diamond the practice path you're on really is: Kwan Yin is a bodhisattva because she HEARS [can bear without flinching] 'the cries of the world'. She hasn't taken her magic accomplishments and run off to never-never Nirvana." -- Roomy

I've been thinking about this since I read it. It has amazing resonance for me right now, Kate.

Thanks.

It's been an emotional week for me so when someone tries to sell me the idea that I might be worse off because I'm "letting" myself fully be a human being.... well, let's just say whoever might say that has either not enough experience (on or off the cushion) or that they're very much in love with an *idea.* What happens to us - interpreted either as inside or outside - is just what happens to us. We're fully formed as we are and there's nothing to be gained and much to be lost by artificially removing chosen parts of our human-ness. Hard to believe anyone thinks there's anything "new" available to our nature anyway since we've been around as human beings for, oh, just a few hundred thousand years. That's why stories from ancient times ring just as true now as they did back then - even the most ancient story reaches our human-ness, our emotions, our hopes, our fears, our dreams, our very nature. When I see pictures of cave drawings from Europe that are hundreds of thousands of years old I immediately grok the people who drew those images. Why? Because we're all human beings, ancient and modern, and that just hasn't changed.

And yes, this is coming from an emotional place. Who ever said we lose our emotions somewhere down this path is wrong. Like the sense of self, they will always be there. The challenge os to accept them as they present to you, moment by moment, and deal with what presents skillfully and with grace.

I used to read a lot about Zen, and one of the things that always came up in the Zen literature was that at some point a yogi's realization is "unshakeable." I was always curious about that because my realizations were pretty shakeable back then. Well, guess what? Those Zen people are right. Some realizations are really and truly unshakeable. That's one reason why the "new" shiny thing just doesn't sit well here. This is also, I believe, a major difference between the more fundamental Theravadans and the Thai Forest Theravadans and the Mahayana. If you never, ever let go, if you are laser-beamed into the purely investigative, the doing, the seeking, and not the pure being, you will never see the clearest light. But once you do, once that recognition occurs, it changes your perspective on the rest of your practice.

I had a really interesting lucid dream at about 3:00 this morning. I was in the 4th jhana and fell "asleep" there and then took a sort of guided tour of the mind. It was like one of those Disney rides. I was flying through the various strata of mind and I was able to discern how the layers were mapped to the way the world is experienced. For example, I was flown through the layer of self, below which there is no self in evidence, and after which there is. I was flown through the layer of space, below which there is no sense of space and after which there is, and similarly the layer of time, and then raw perception, and so on. Of course, the dream confirms for me how these things work because at the end of this weird tour was the source, IS. IS -- the source of everything else. The raw CPU of mind.

Somehow these experiences seem to re-set perception, expectation and experience. I don't know how but it's like an integration exercise that takes what is learned in meditation or through other realization and mixes it in with moment to moment experience so that experience get flavored by the insights gained. Maybe. Seems like, anyway.

The reason I was semi-awake at that early hour is also interesting to me. For the past few years every time I'm off work, like this past week and for a week back in April, I seem to have some kind of odd jhana magnet that gets engaged in my mind. I walk around all the time with an enhanced kind of "buzzy" and light headed feeling that's the same one I remember from first getting easy access to these states. And if I slow down, calm down or rest the mind at all then it starts right up through the jhanic arc, sort of like being sucked up in a vacuum. That had happened again just before the lucid dream.

Telecaster asked AugustLeo after AugustLeo said "everything is subjective":

"You don't mean "everything" is subjective, right? You just mean things like senations, thoughts, concepts, experiences. Or, are you saying that objects like stars and trees and rocks and water and air that have atoms and molecules are subjective as well? (or just our personal experiences of them?) Okay, that's my question." -- telecaster

Here's my take on this (it's an interesting area, IMHO) -- AugustLeo is right. Everything is subjective. There is a reality out there but we don't/can't experience it directly. We experience everything through our senses and our mind. Both introduce error and mind introduces interpretation. We, you and I, can look at the same thing and legitimately disagree about what it is. And if you dig down deep enough, through practice, you can find that I was talking about in post number 117 up there, and when you do you realize that that non-dual awareness, that raw recognition of pure IS-ness, is where all things are born (arise) and die (pass away). There is nothing more than that process, going on all the time, that creates the universe that we experience from moment to moment. What we experience is THAT, interpreted by mind as the subject-object duality out of habit, and it manifests most of the time as stuff that's "out there" or stuff that's "in here" - what we think of as objective reality and subjectivity. Truth is, it's all one thing, coming from IS-ness.

This isn't intuitive because we grow up believing in "out there" and "in here" but we also know that our practice is that by which we reveal what's really going on, objectifying the process of perception so that we can see it for what it is -- objects which are impermanent, not satisfactory and not self.

Many of us (I did this a lot) fall into the habit of thinking that practice in the Theravada four path tradition is about wondrous states and stages, wild mind effects and experiences and rapturous concentration states. Yeah, all those things happen. But in the end the objective of the practice is to know what we are, just how we as human beings exist in this world and how to live most skillfully within those parameters. All the deepest jhanas and all the wildest experiences put together are still not awakening or enlightenment. They're just deep jhanas and wild experiences. They're states. Awakening is not a state.

An awakened mind is much better than any jhana, any pure abode jhana, any fruition bliss wave, better than anything I have ever experienced and continue to experience in my whole entire life. If there is one thing you practice for...it's to awaken. Everything else is a by-product. Trust me when I say, don't waste to much time dawdling in this blissed out state or that blissed out state or having this weird-arse experience or that weird-arse experience. The awakened mind is what you are searching for. Trust me, it's what you want!

Sorry Chris, I am still on cloud 9.

I'm afraid this is going to sound arrogant or something, but it IS true and interesting for now:
lately when I read yogis excitedly describe states and experiences (or see myself get excited about my own) I kind of feel a twinge of sympathy or something like sorrow and want to tell them: "hey, it's not going to last and I guarantee you are going to feel like hell at some point in the near future so just ... chill."
(This is NOT directed at anyone in particular other than telecaster)

Mike, you continually impress me with your common sense and wisdom.

Nick, thanks for agreeing with me so enthusiastically

"
Mike, you continually impress me with your common sense and wisdom.

Nick, thanks for agreeing with me so enthusiastically

"

Thanks, man. I like to be impressive.

New koan:

How do you live your life?

Something has been eating at me this week and I it's about purpose. This practice can't be just a process. It's got to be about purpose, too. About why and, through deeper and deeper understanding through time, about how. Process is a dead end, I think, but purpose has no end. Figuring out how to skillfully deal with everything that is presented to us has to be the ultimate objective - and that's not an objective that's about "me." So it seems there's another set of principles surrounding the thing we call "not self." Since the whole universe is interconnected it's clear that what affects me affects you, affects everything. There are intricate webs of causes, effects, symptoms, solutions.

So the koan "How do you live your life?" becomes a truly interesting thing to ponder and also a prescription when taken a certain way. Waking up can't be a dead end. We have to wake up to something, right? I keep asking myself... what is that?

I keep watching thoughts of amazement at the fact that "I" am not suffering anymore. Sure, negative phenomena arises, and someone cut infront of me in the bus queue and irritation arose, but with nowhere to land, ...haha, no suffering like before. And that has allowed me to be the person I always wanted to be (in the last 4 days at least). Not the miserable, selfish arsehole I was for the past 10 years. Now I'm taking salsa lessons!!!!!!! WOOOOT!
In other words, I am gonna finally just live my life as the person I always wanted to be and love my fiancee like she deserves. The absence of insight disease means I have more time to now think about .....being a nice human being. Not sure if that answered your koan, but I think Im just bubbling with joy at the moment again. hehe!

i love the zen saying "see with your ears and hear with your eyes" and your question makes me think of it.
the rub I think is that we have to answer the question all on our own every moment and it can't be answered with our brains unless we want to cause suffering

I don't think there's any one answer to the koan, Nick. It's up to each of us to find it for ourselves and I suspect our answers change over time. Bubbling with joy and learning salsa dancing is a great one, though.

"... we have to answer the question all on our own every moment and it can't be answered with our brains unless we want to cause suffering"

You possess wisdom, Mr. Monson.

"
New koan:

How do you live your life?

"

You're in august company, Chris, to have come to this--
Ikkyu:

only one koan matters
you

And Dogen calls it Genjokoan, which Shinzen Young translates as 'self-existent koan'-- the insoluble question you answer with your life.

And, what Mike said.