doc benway

🤣 Truth is I have felt anger and frustration from loved ones on occasion when I’m not angry or sad enough to meet their expectations. The flip side is the stabilizing effect one can have in trying circumstances and the appreciation and open heartedness I can feel from others as a result. Try it! But read the room…

You’re probably right but I don’t generally get to choose how I feel,. My experience is that the feeling is just there, like thoughts - I don’t choose what thought comes up if I watch closely, but I can choose not to feed it or suppress it or I can be so identified with it that I lose my shit completely, completely unaware, and that is the response. The emotion comes before the response and for me it is not destructive if the response is appropriate. Yes, the key for me is in the “without harboring” which is a part of not identifying. I do think all of the trainings we do lessen our tendency to get swept up in thought and emotion, making the emotion less destructive but not necessarily less powerful; and deeper insights into the nature of our mind can profoundly affect how we experience what positivity and negativity mean. Unconditioned compassion is like the sun and shines on all equally but don’t imagine it is so naive as to not know hatred. It subsumes and pervades all of it. Hatred exists in this world, it is “hard wired” in our karma, as do love and lust and as a human it is as it is. It’s OK to think and feel and allow it to guide but not by getting swept up unaware, better to express the fuller context in action. When I’m enlightened I’ll pay careful attention to see what emotions are there and try to report back. 😘

I used to date a bird well oliver 180 and yes, she could be quite aggressive! Big claws and awesome speed!

My comments were genuine but I’d say more like responsive thoughts in the moment than a fixed position. 😄 You’d have to ask them, not sure they’d tell me the truth… What I can say is that my relationships with my family are far more meaningful, open and direct than ever before, much closer and less judgmental, less reactive. I don’t see the emotions or thoughts themselves as destructive, they are intangible and transient experiences. When seen for what they are they can be allowed to come and go. Of course emotions are linked to karma but karma means action, quite literally, and in the presence of thought and emotion we have, or can cultivate, the ability to choose our actions independent of the transient thoughts and feelings, no? I can be furious and murder someone or I can be furious, pause to reflect on the consequences of my actions, and let it pass. These things happen. It is not the emotion but our choices that are destructive IMO. Wonderful questions that are very fertile until stifled with intellectual answers. This is the fuel on the path. For myself I have experienced that reducing my identification with passing feelings, thoughts, roles, and circumstances has allowed me to be more loving, more open, and kinder. As such changes have occurred in my life and relationships my faith in my path has grown.

If by authentic you mean unconditional, then I would say positive and negative do not apply as unconditional compassion is beyond judgement and discrimination. If you do not mean unconditional then I would say that conditional compassion is not inherently positive, there is often a self-serving component to it. Hatred for slavery can be constructive, as can hatred for corrupt leaders, environmental destruction, and abusers of the vulnerable, and the list goes on.

I disagree with both the aim and premise, with all due respect to you and Venerable Chöje Lama Phuntsok. Emotions are not inherently destructive or constructive, they are simply transient flows of energy. It is our relationship to emotion and the associated actions that can be destructive or constructive. And "destructive" and "constructive" need to be defined, either can be functional or dysfunctional. In my view, the aim of practice is not to eradicate emotions, even "destructive emotions," but to reduce and ultimately eradicate the over-identification with emotion that results in dysfunctional reactivity. This is why the central focus of understanding and practice are related to the nature and experience of self.

According to the Buddhist and Bön traditions every one of you has been my mother through the endless cycles of rebirth. Happy Mothers Day to all of you, my mothers past, present, and future; and to our dear Mother Earth! May she find the wherewithall to continue to tolerate and bless her needy and careless children...

Some very good points here. One challenge in the 21st century is finding air, water, and food that are unpolluted. The entire planet is rapidly becoming a "dirty environment," at least the areas most of us occupy and can access and the areas and processes from which we can obtain what we need. So much of our food and water is routinely stripped of nutrients and tainted in some fashion, especially water which should be a rich source of minerals but for most of us is either filtered, distilled, or modified such that it actually leeches minerals from our system rather than providing them. There is nothing necessarily healthy about a vegetarian lifestyle, nor unhealthy about an omnivorous lifestyle IMO. The devil is in the details, as they say. I mostly abstain from eating animals and birds for humanitarian reasons, not health reasons. It's simply a personal choice based on the horrific conditions we create for the creatures whose lives support ours. When we look around us it is clear that all living creatures consume other living things, it is simply the way of things. I don't disagree that there is a sentience of sorts in all living things, all things that can sustain us, and I am knowingly biased towards protecting mammals and birds from the terrors of humanity more so than sea creatures and flora. Am I a hypocrite? Probably so. I recently had a wonderful meal at a small vegan restaurant and got to chatting with the chef/owner and her mother. She had a background in chemistry and culinary arts. She went into the plant-based food industry and was so put off by the processes and products that she left it behind and decided to find her own way. Her feelings about the plant-based food industry are quite negative from a health and sustainability perspective. She nows crafts beautiful vegan food without trying to imitate meat but rather featuring and promoting fresh ingredients for what they offer as they are.

Another point worthy of making is that the objective is not to divert emotional reactivity. Emotion is necessary and valuable but often becomes dysfunctional for us due to poor processing. We repress/suppress/avoid due to aversion which makes it stronger and more tenacious. We grasp, hold on, and chase due to attachment which has a similar result. This is what Apech is pointing out from his chariot. The idea of reducing attachment and aversion is not less engagement at all, if anything it is more. In lessening aversion we engage more completely and nakedly with that we tend to avoid. In lessening attachment we engage more completely with everything else that was neglected due to our infatuation. The nature of the emotional reactivity in general becomes more clear and skillful practice aids in processing. This type of dissolution is not avoidance and not diversion, it is meaningful liberation. It allows the emotional content to express itself as much as needed until it naturally runs its course.

Thank goodness that’s not the case for our Daoist sisters and brothers! 😎

This reminds me of an amazing and powerful film called Rubaru Roshni, a documentary about victims of horrific crimes and the power of forgiveness.

One thing that may be worth mentioning here is that in working with attachment and aversion, I don't look at them as emotions in and of themselves but more as actions related to emotional content. Attachment is my tendency to hold onto or chase after things that generate positive emotion. Aversion is my tendency to deny, ignore, push away, repress, or suppress things that generate negative emotion. Reducing aversion does not mean eliminating the negative emotional content or invalidating powerful experiences, it means to reduce the tendency to avoid, suppress or repress the experience and associated emotion. Reducing aversion allows me to get closer to the negative emotions which is necessary for processing and ultimately reducing how these things can control my life, very often without conscious knowledge of what is happening. The same can be said for dealing with attachment. It's not about avoiding the feelings, if anything it is about experiencing those feeling as fully as possible and for as long as necessary until they have served their (important and valuable) purpose and are able to move and possibly release. As I've developed experience and skill in my meditation practice I've noticed a few changes. I seem to feel things far more deeply, both on the positive and negative ends of the spectrum. It can be overwhelming at times. Prior to getting involved in my current practice, I would have described myself as an emotional imbecile; repressing and suppressing things unaware, not recognizing or appropriately responding to my own or others' emotional needs, reacting or acting in a conditioned pattern, often coming from a place of distortion and negative emotion. Currently, even as I feel things more fully and powerfully, I find myself being less reactive and less predictable. Rather than conditioned patterns and emotional reactivity guiding my actions, there is more space and openness, more patience and clarity. I find myself doing and saying things that sometimes surprise me and others, in a good way. In my opinion, it is inaccurate to propose that Buddhist practices remove emotions or invalidate powerful life experiences, be they traumatic or thrilling. What has happened is that emotional reactivity is seen in context, with less personal identification, and has far less control over my choices and patterns of behavior. This leads to more sensible choices and fewer regrets. This is what freedom from aversion and attachment have meant for me and the only way to discover this is through working with the emotions directly and consistently. Emotions are an extremely important part of my path and will be until my end.

This is an example of the beauty of using the word space as a metaphor for the ground of being. Space is all-pervasive, even when occupied the space is still there. One cannot say there are two spaces, or more, as it is continuous and unbounded. On the other hand, it is imprecise to call it one space because space is insubstantial, it cannot be defined, limited, or imputed. Space is indiscriminate, everything is allowed to arise and to release, it does not block, resist, grasp, or prefer anything in particular whether physical, mental, or energetic.

In the tradition I follow stillness and silence are two doors leading to the same "place." There is a third as well, spaciousness in the heart/mind. Each door can be effective by itself or in combination with others depending on our individual circumstances, proclivities, and needs. Once we have a taste of where these doors lead we can see that the experience has qualities of each - stillness (of the body), silence (of the speech), and spaciousness (of the heart/mind).

Dzogchen could be defined as a way to relax completely. This can be clearly understood from the terms used to denote the state of contemplation, such as "leave it just as it is" (cog bzhag), "cutting loose one's tension" (khregs chod), beyond effort" (rtsol bral), and so on. Some scholars have classified Dzogchen as a "direct path," comparing it to teachings such as Zen, where this expression is often used. In Dzogchen texts, however, the phrases "direct path" and "nongradual path" (cig car) are never used, because the concept of a "direct path" implies necessarily that there must be, on the one hand, a place from which one departs, and on the other, a place where one arrives. But in Dzogchen there is a single principle of the state of knowledge, and if one possesses this state one discovers that right from the beginning one is already there where one wants to arrive. For this reason the state is said to be "self-perfected" (lhun grub). ~ Chögyal Namkhai Norbu from 'Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State'

I work with silence a lot in my personal practice and I appreciate this point you make. Silence can always be filled with content of various kinds depending on circumstances (planes, subplanes, sense organs, conditions, intention, etc...) and yet the silence is always the "firmament" which supports and allows those frequencies to manifest and present themselves to our experience. No matter what arises one can always refocus on the silence. When we focus on the content, we limit what the potential to some degree. When we focus on the silence, we allow ourselves to remain open and fully aware of the full and unlimited potential of what may be available, to what may be needed in any given moment.

I generally qualify this. For most people meditation, especially the more simplistic methods like open awareness, are an acquired skill. Some folks can experience a worsening of symptoms of mental illness associated with meditation because it causes them to release their defense mechanisms. In the long run it may be a good thing but not every is ready for it. I think some caution is prudent when approaching meditation if there is a possibility or history of mental illness.

No, I would say they are not. The words can certainly be interpreted as either engaging intention and effort or not engaging intention and effort. Words have no absolute or inherent meaning. They have definitions but people supply the meaning. And when we are talking about words written in a defunct language 500 years after they were uttered and then translated into at least two other languages prior to translation into English… well then being attached to the words has questionable value IMO. I don’t think the meaning of such instructions is to exert effort or intention to find something. It is more about discovering something that is already always there, one’s true nature, one’s “place.” It’s similar to waking up from sleep. Is there intention or effort involved waking? One simply finds oneself awake. It is a bit like that. But of course that is only my interpretation.

When using this colloquialism in a dzogchen (or wu wei) context, would it be better to say… you not do you? 😁 Sorry to see you go.

I’ve found it interesting to reflect on the relationship of mind and body. Is mind a part of the body or is body a part of the mind? Neither is ever a hair’s breadth from Buddha nature. In the teachings I follow Buddha nature does not belong to anything, not even nirvana. Nirvana refers to liberation which is always related to samsara. Buddha nature is the ultimate root of both samsara and nirvana but belongs to neither.

Terminology can get confusing and is sometimes ambiguous but fortunately it is nothing but terminology… In the Tibetan traditions, the nature of mind is synonymous with Buddha nature. While the nature of mind and the mind are distinct, the phrase pure and perfect mind, sometimes pure mind or even simply mind, have been used to denote the nature of mind. There are some teachings that use the word mind to mean both samsaric mind and Buddha nature depending on context. Context is very important in understanding the teacher or author’s intention.

Who is mother to what is unborn? I think this is what stirling refers to when he says "all purpose is illusory."

I suspect your question is rhetorical but I'll offer a response anyway for anyone interested. One way to approach this question is the recognition that cessation is already always there - it's the stillness within movement, the silence beneath sound, the spaciousness that hosts form. It is the foundation of what and who we are, ever-present yet too close to notice. There is nothing we can do or think about that will cause cessation to occur, it is non-doing that allows cessation. Leaving everything that arises just as it is, not engaging, not suppressing, not even observing. This is the direction we go and is referred to as non-meditation. The process starts out very active by necessity due to our habitual patterns. Observing and noticing distraction and engagement, then releasing and resting - over and over again. The use of energetic methods can help the clearing and opening to occur. Eventually the process requires less and less effort until the releasing occurs of itself with an inertia all its own,. Any excitement, any thinking are always obstacles. Leaving these be as they are, not engaging, is the way to move closer to cessation.