"Buddhahood without meditation"- s'interesting. There's a line in Gospel of Thomas:
"(29) Jesus said: If the flesh has come into existence because of the spirit, it is a marvel; but if <the> spirit (has come into existence) because of [the body], it is a marvel of marvels. But I marvel at how this great wealth has made its home in such poverty."
(coptic text established and translated by A. Guillaumont, H.-CH. Puech, G. Quispel, W. Till and Yassah âAbd Al Masih, pg 18-19 log. 22, ©1959 E. J. Brill)
The other day I wrote this over on Brad Warner's blog:
âMoreover, any attempt to bridge the gap through the use of words such as âgodâ or âuniverseâ or âmystic consciousnessâ in my experience tends to condition people to ignore the discrete reality from which the sense of continuity arises in favor of an affirmation of continuity apart from discrete reality which is entirely mental, and to suffer as a result.â
Folks like the idea of something continuous and ineffable, and they don't look for its source in the body. That's the lesson Jesus was gently suggesting, at least to me. One more thing that Fred on Brad's blog put me up to:
"The sense of location and the freedom of the sense of location to move are really a part of the movement of breath; if they are constricted, the breath is cut off. That is why Bodhidharma said, "have no coughing or sighing in the mind-- with your mind like a wall you can enter the way" (Denkoroku, translated by Thomas Cleary, 3 pg 111). Through his use of the words "coughing" and "sighing", Bodhidharma points to the intimate relationship between self-awareness, or mind, and continuity in the movement of breath; his direction only really makes sense when the exercise of equalibrioception and proprioception, the senses most identified with the physical awareness of self, is experienced as inherent in the movement of breath, as necessary to the continuity of breath.
Setting up a mindfulness of proprioception, or the freedom of awareness to move, in connection with equalibrioception, or the sense of balanced movement wherever my awareness is now, helps me to relax into my own experience, even if the only result is that I fall asleep." (the full post is here).
You could say that lately I practice as I describe above, yet I am fully aware that the real practice is unintentional, that only the inherent activity can make such a great wealth out of such poverty.
Pardon me while I touch my head to the floor.
