doc benway

The highest level practice I've come across to date is awareness. It is extraordinarily effective, simple (thought not easy), and there is little need to find a guru. It's not terribly sexy or exciting but it will transform anyone who invests the time and effort. What I mean is simply to look at everything about yourself as if you were someone else - look at how you feel, what you are thinking, how you interact with others, how they respond to you, really look carefully and deeply and keep it up over time. While it is not terribly necessary, or even beneficial, to look at this from an analytical point of view, it is very instructive to at least touch upon what it is that leads us to make the choices we do and see how that aligns with our values and goals. Similarly, looking just as carefully at everything around you as if it was the first time you'd ever seen it, trying to avoid labeling things but rather looking at them fresh with the possibility of seeing something new. IMO, there is nothing more important than this.

Two interesting resources I can suggest if you're interested - Time's Arrow and Archimedes Point by Huw Price. Not an easy read, but very interesting. Jiddu Krishnamurti offers some stimulating discussion on the nature of time. He refers to time as the movement of thought. Worth exploring his stuff if you haven't already.

It's pretty clear why the quote cannot be considered Dzogchen. To me that is not the issue. Anyone serious about exploring Vedanta methods or Dzogchen methods will do so and learn what matters. Anyone not serious about the practices will not get very far along anyway... What's interesting to take note of for me is that this quote WAS selected to grace the book and one would assume that Chogyal Namkhai Norbu was aware of this and approved. If not, that would be an even more interesting situation. I thought that Clemente did a very good job with The Mirror.

The heart is simply a portal, a concept in many ways, a convention. It is an opening through which we can view the world and other living things. It is only one perspective and it is not stagnant. It is always in flux. If we allow ourselves to open and connect to others through the heart, we still allow our full presence to engage. Everything is moving through us, we are not locking in on something or limiting anything. So there is nowhere for anything to get stuck or overly concentrated. The heart is just a gate, and there are others, and I think we use the different gates as we need to based on what the universe is doing through us at the moment.

I recently finished reading The Mirror: Advice on Presence and Awareness by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It lays bare the practice and enlightens discussion and understanding of the path. I like this quote - "On the other hand, if our mind does not get distracted and oblivious but instead manages to gain self-control and maintain presence of its true State without being conditioned by illusion it becomes the essence of all the teachings and the root of all the paths. In fact, all of the phenomena of dualistic vision - nirvana and samsara, happiness and suffering, good and bad - arise solely from the mind and have no other origin. That is why it is said that a mind free of distraction is the basis of all paths and the deepest point of the practice." If this one wants to complain about this quote and that one wants to attach himself to that image, fine. I will continue to try and let go of distraction. I suspect that Ramana Maharshi had managed to let go of distraction to a very thorough degree. I doubt those challenging his words or Chogyal Namkhai Norbu's choice of using them, have equalled either of their depths of inquiry. And I could be wrong. And it really doesn't matter. And for anyone who does read the book, I'd recommend doing so as a stimulus to actually practice. Continue to come back and read, then sit and let it work on you. It is not nearly as valuable otherwise...

no allowances made; attention to each atom - of time in being

Taomeow makes a good point. I've already given my kids the best advice I know how. One of the more important things I've tried to impress upon them is the insight that no one has the power to 'make' us feel or act in a certain way unless we give them that power. No one has the power to make me angry - I choose anger, or I choose sadness, or even worse, I'm conditioned to feel or act without ever being aware that I have a choice. This is a delusion that has been programmed into us. It's not easy to see for oneself, but once seen it is very liberating.

Two great posts... it's certainly a twisty, tricksy path we navigate. One of the reasons I come here is to bump into the folks de_paradise refers to. At the same time, there is a way of integrating our progress into our worldly lives for those of us who choose families over monastics. Nice to have both of you here. _/\_

May I add to your painting? You mention a fundamental level of clear light. And there are fluctuations within that which you describe as bubbles. Another elegant analogy I've seen to describe this is foam, indicating a multitude of bubbles expanding, contracting, translating, breathing, bursting, reforming... At our human level, all appearance is what it is as a direct consequence of our unique sensory apparatus. If our sensory organs were different, we as biological organisms would evoke an entirely different universe out of the foam. The universe appears quite different to an earthworm, a bat, a tree, a dog... I can't even imagine extraterrestrial possibilities, or those that may be right here, right now, but existing at a wavelength that is outside that which we can access. It's fantastic to imagine exploring the world through our nose or pressure sensors along our ribs, or through leaves and roots. And which universe is the "accurate" one? The very visual universe of humans any of the multitude of others? The universe feels solid because our skin is soft. Sound exists because we have ears and a brain to interpret the alteration in pressure on our tympanic membranes. And there are shapes and textures, colors and sounds, far beyond what we are capable of experiencing because we are like radio or tv antennae tuned to a very limited bandwidth. We ignore infinitely more than we experience and we experience an infinity of perception. So in this way we are an equal partner in creation in every moment. Creation is always occurring. We are doing it and it is doing us. Each of us is a nexus of universal forces converging on and in us as an aperture in which we evoke and experience it/us in each moment. And it is all covered up by the story we tell ourselves to make sense of it all as you mentioned earlier. If we can let go of the story, we can be reborn in each instant and see that we are, and always were, IT. Will always be and have always been nothing other than IT. What else could we possibly be? Sorry to go on like that but IT just sort of does that sometimes.... Peace y'all

With all due respect to you and your teacher, I think the problem is with how you've been taught to practice the MCO. The method I learned has little to nothing to do with visualization and imagination. The method you're working with is too intellectual and too visual. This may be why you are bringing too much energy into your head and your thoughts rather than stabilizing by allowing the energy to descend into the body. You're welcome to PM me if you're interested in any more input from me. Good luck

I agree with hagar here. Meditation done properly will open you up rather than shut out unwanted content of the mind. As you open, you begin to more deeply experience the thoughts, emotions, and everything else inside and outside. This can be a very vulnerable and difficult process. It is only by passing through all of this that one reaches a point of acceptance and stability. The security provided by meditative work is a security founded on total insecurity. One relinquishes "control" by seeing through the illusion of the "controller" and ultimately finds solace and confidence in its absence within presence.

Bringing time into the discussion, IMO, is an error created by our thought process. "Creation" (loaded word which has undesired connotations here) is occurring in every instant. I think that is the salient message in the scientific work MPG quoted earlier. There is no before and after, only now. But our brains and our language struggle dealing with now and conveniently create before and after.

I'd like to get something off my chest here. I was frustrated in that thread by the fact that, despite repeated and sincere efforts at correction, you repeatedly and stubbornly equated Buddhism with nihilism and continue to do so in another thread (albeit jokingly). The misconception is not the problem but your unwillingness to be open to correction is. At some point it simply becomes taunting rather than communication. Quite so - unfortunately the issue with communication often becomes one of people not really listening or opening to something new. Rather we look to someone else's words for something to reinforce our own belief or we try to impose upon them to agree with our point of view. One of the greatest things I learned from reading JKrishnamurti and Anthony Demello is the art and skill of listening and I admittedly have a long way to go in that arena.

I have to disagree here and it may just be your grammar. I don't think the Dao De Jing really implies a time before and after. I don't think the visible "came from" the invisible. The visible and invisible are always already present, both aspects of reality. The idea of a time before and a time after is a natural consequence of the human condition and the nature of thought and memory. And I could also be projecting my own ideas and experience onto reality and, as MH likes to say, I reserve the right to be completely mistaken.

While I agree that the scientific method is constantly making progress in understanding and explaining observed phenomena (and then realizing it's completely wrong and changing direction abruptly), the video and associated links do not answer the original question. In fact, at ~3:00, the presenter admits that we have no idea how to explain the observed energy that exists in empty space or its source. Scientists are expert at and notorious for making up numbers, like constants, to account for extreme variances in expected vs. observed results and then conveniently ignoring those adjustments as long as the variances are neutralized. While we may be able to put forth theories regarding the observation of an interactive dance of matter and anti-matter, this does nothing to posit an explanation as to "an impetus to create" which was the original question.

A related perspective on emptiness... (not intended to be comprehensive) Empty does not mean absent or non-existent. It really means empty of inherent existent, that is not existing in and of itself as separate from everything else including "me". A related way to look at this is the following. Any "thing" you want to refer to has never been isolated from everything else around it in your personal experience. Look carefully at this and see if it is true. So the table we're referring to has never been experienced in the absence of everything else in the realm of experience at any given moment. Every time I open my eyes and look at a table, I see everything else around it - chairs, floor, light fixture, room, myself in the mirror, neighborhood, street, galaxy, etc... depending on where and how I am looking. And I am always in the equation as well (Heisenberg demonstrated this for the science aficionados). Our stubborn insistence on separating out a display of our senses from everything around it and from ourselves is completely gratuitous, arbitrary, and corrupts the reality that is so obvious. It is all always there, including the one doing the registering. And at the same time, none of it can be singled out and shown to exist in and of itself. All of our defining and dividing into component parts is artificial. And the separating of other from self is equally artificial. It is simply a convention that maintains our sense of relative existence. It is a natural consequence of our unique sensory apparatus and thought process including memory and the sense of time as a condition of the movement of thought, memory, and projection. Very tough to talk about but very apparent when we look directly and deeply without our expectations and presumptions.

I'm not advocating alcohol or drugs but the alteration of one's normal everyday conscious awareness can be a valuable aid to the spiritual search. We are so inured to our condition that we don't see it clearly. Changing that experience of conscious awareness temporarily through drugs, alcohol, meditation, and so forth, can help shake the foundation of what is taken for granted and help people begin to question the basic condition. Like putting dye in the water could perhaps help a fish to see the water for the first time, perhaps. That said, based on my own experience of different mind altering conditions and substances, I'd have to say that alcohol, at least for me, would be the least helpful.

Your wish may go unfulfilled rails. I try to avoid labeling myself as an ...ist of an sort - I despise labels. That said, the basic tenets of Buddhist thought are profound and point in the direction of reality when experienced directly (as do those of the other great traditions from slightly different perspectives). The problem is that there is nothing so difficult to capture in words as one's direct and personal experience of reality. That applies as much to mundane experience like sight, touch, smell, and sound, as to 'mystical and magical' terms and concepts like sunyata and pratityasamutpada. I would challenge you to show me the color yellow in your own words, based on your own experience, without comparison. Or if you prefer, share with me what wet is, or sweet. When we communicate experience, it is necessary to find a common ground that we can take as a frame of reference and then agree upon how our individual experience is like or unlike that referent. It's easy with sensory experience. In the case of emptiness and dependent origination, it is only possible to really communicate the experience with someone who has had a similar experience for comparison. When someone who has had direct non-dual experience reads a description written by another of a comparable experience, it is known instantly because of the shared frame of reference. When one is simply reciting phrases and descriptions without direct experience, it is equally obvious.

Great article CT - I never read blogs but I may now have to change that... That said, I don't think it answers the original question. Hopefully it does give the OP a clue as to the error in how the question is being asked. While there are some very good explanations and descriptions of things like sunyata and pratityasamutpada out there, the op is looking for an explanation of God or a first cause - words like "source of all original creation" and "impetus to create" are embedded in a presumption of first cause and inherent existence. Hence my answer - no.

No

So when the sage goes to a motel, does he use a credit or ATM card?

waves of soul music inspired by rhythms from Bootsy Collins' bass http://25.media.tumblr.com/97fd8c42c326bd1547f026a2f47f1472/tumblr_mhf05uoFsL1qll1ero1_500.jpg

Good luck to you Heath. It was nice having you around for a while.

First of all we're discussing a sage - an idealistic character. So it is logical to infer that the idealistic character will respond in an idealistic manner. If the person we are discussing is incapable of acknowledging, experiencing, and working with an irrational fear before responding in a programmed manner, then I think the original premise is flawed - we are not discussing a sage. Secondly, what I'm describing is a very accessible technique. It is not at all limited to idealistic people or situations. It is very easy to do. It's simply a matter of practice. It's best to start under controlled circumstances and gradually apply it to more and more extreme circumstances. I do it all the time. I do it as a way of working with and through a variety of emotional and psychological challenges - facing the daily grind, dealing with anger, dealing with unpleasant people and situations, etc... Edited to add - Third, what I am describing is not even a response. It is simply making a habit of living in awareness rather than a conditioned response. One can't negate fear until it is first felt. I'm talking about feeling it fully before responding. One would think the sage would be aware of his surroundings and feelings and would respond appropriately, rather than in a dysfunctional, irrational fashion.

Sorry to come so late to the party. Most of my thoughts have already been put out there by others but I'll toss out some ideas, anyway. The sage is a mythological creature. I guess each of us has an idea of what that means and that's the point of the thread in the first place... In my imagination, the sage would enter the apartment, notice the spiders, and then look at the reaction they elicited in her, if any. Assuming that a strong feeling of fear arose, she would look deeply into that fear. She would allow it to unfold and blossom fully. She would not analyze it at an intellectual level but simply experience it in the body, in the emotions, in reality. At this point the sage would see the fear for what it is and then would simply choose to stay in the room or to move on, depending on whether the spiders posed a substantial threat to her health and well being.