Intentions

You can have a group of people hang out with the same teacher, or perform the same mediation practice, and their outcomes will be determined by their individual intentions for participating in the common practice.
I haven’t found a more influential factor of a practice’s outcome than one’s intention for performing that practice.
Peter’s comment at BATGAP

Peter’s comment, which I love, brings to mind a story of a local meditation teacher who one day, aggravated with her students told them, “You do just enough to feel better.” Meaning, they wanted to simply do the bare minimum and escape into the feel good airy-fairy.

Why do you bother with your spiritual practice? What is it that you really want?
Community? Stress relief? Self improvement?
Has it become mere habit?
Or, has it slipped beyond any personal choice, to become a force beyond yourself?
I find it rather presumptuous to assume that I know why anyone meditates. And I find it useful to periodically look into my own motivations, because, as Peter points out, intentions have a direct effect upon outcomes.

When I was with Adyashanti this summer I noticed that he spoke of three practices: Meditation, Inquiry, and Contemplation. I liked seeing this as it seemed to bring some new balance, order, and perspective to terms that float around inside my head.
Now, he is giving away a booklet entitled “The Way of Liberation” which you can download for free for a while. It’s a really simple, straightforward explanation of these three practices. I love the sparseness of the language, like his Summary of the Teaching:

Be still.
Question every thought.
Contemplate the source of Reality.

There it is: meditation, inquiry, contemplation.
If your intention is liberation, it’s good to know the bases.

In The Way of Liberation, Adya begins by suggesting you address your aspirations (intention by any other name…) and he states it almost as a warning:
To clarify your aspiration means knowing exactly what it is that your spiritual life aspires to, not as a future goal but in each mo¬ment. In other words, what do you value most in your life—not in the sense of moral values, but in the sense of what is most im¬portant to you. Contemplate this question.
Do not assume that you know what your highest aspiration is, or even what is most important to you.
Dig deep within, contemplate, and meditate on what the spiritual quest is about for you; don’t let anyone else define your aspiration for you…
Very few people have Truth or Reality as deep values.
They may think that they value Truth, but their actions do not bear this out.
Generally, most people have competing and conflicting values, which manifest as both internal and external conflict.

Where am I going with all this? I am not sure.
But, more and more I understand how important it is to truly value what is true.
What is it that you REALLY want?

I was reading The Seven Story Mountain recently. In this autobiography, Thomas Merton said something that simply stunned me as if I’d never before heard truly heard such a teaching. He said:
If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it… I would never have entered a Trappist monastery

Question every thought. Question all assumptions and the rules that get drummed into you.
I don’t want to miss out on Life and yet, I do not even know what there is to miss and how best to use my time.
A friend and I compare notes.
I worry that I will waste my life by not being engaged enough with others.
I fear I am too content to sit upon my back porch and watch the sky.
And then my friend worries that she will waste her life by always being addictively too busy.

There is no such thing as a path to enlightenment… What you can do is to remove any and all illusions, especially the ones you value most…
Adya, The Way of Liberation

I read these words this morning at the breakfast table and made these notes upon the page margin:
How do I recognize illusion?
When I feel resistance to what is… when I feel separation…
What illusions do I most value?
I am in control… I exist as an individual, born and will die…
Are not illusions my most persistent thoughts?
I could do better… I’m not loved… I am a silly mess… I have failed… If I were enlightened all my problems would be solved…

I hope you will ask yourself a similar inquiry. I found it somewhat surprising and it began an opening of perspective until I heard a voice from the radio behind me shouting:
Are you crying?
Are you crying?
There’s no crying!
There’s no crying in baseball!
Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own

The Library of Congress is inducting this film and these words into the National Film Registry for its contribution to American culture. Somehow, that seemed just perfect, just perfect and the end of any commentary I might offer.
Meditate, Inquire, Contemplate. My intention is upon discoverying what’s true, despite all appearances.

Only the Phonies

“Only the phonies don’t end up enlightened.”
Or so, Adya’s teacher told him.
Or so, I keep reminding myself.
“Otherwise, we’re chasing what someone told us.”

Drop That

Canvas F, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.
Tibetan Saying

I mentioned yesterday that "I am suspicious" - that what I experience may be what Maharishi called Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness. I wanted to just leave a note on how that suspicion arose. I also want to emphasize, this is just a suspicion. Something to consider, a possibility to inquire into. So, here’s how the suspicion arose.

My friend, whom I call my little spiritual irritant because just about anything she says seems to have this way of irritating me, sent me a quote. We have been at this for two years now, and I am finally looking at these little irritations as marvelous invitations to explore where some misconception has velcroed onto spaciousness.

So, my friend sent me this quote. She actually thought I’d like it:
I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple… the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there?
What else do we need?
Edward Albee

Well, I really took issue with the phrase, What else is there?
What else is there? … there’s the infinity of pure being!
The absolute never changing seemed to get ignored with this concentration on the surfaces of the ever changing, and I found that really irritating.
So, I offered back quotes of Andrew Wyeth:
Most people come to my work through the realism and then discover the abstractness.
A sea shell lying on the sand is frozen in time, eternal.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

She smiled at the thought of irritating me and explained:
I find those details to BE the essence of the abstract, at every moment, in each precious sensation or experience or whatever.

I didn’t find that explanation helpful to my irritation. But, I read it over several times, slowly, trying to get what she was saying…
details are the essence of the abstract…
the essence of the abstract… is the details

Bam, it hit me. That is a statement from the point of view of Unity, Oneness.
The understanding immediately brought back a saying we’d previously argued over:
The world is illusion.
Brahman alone is real.
The world is Brahman.

My friend speaks from the perspective of that last line: The world is Brahman.
And I am sitting there trying to get her to agree that Brahman alone is real.
I was arguing from the perspective of duality – of Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness.
My next thought was, “Wow! Why do that? Drop that!”
Shortly after that, I realized I was taking my position because that is what I know. It's no theory.
I stagger through this world of illusion day after day, taxing my body, trying to ignore this “radical duality” between Brahman and the world.

Then there was a quiet "hummmm". And the suspicion arose. Is that’s what’s going on here?
This might be what's called Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness.
That was rather surprising.
And, upon this suspicion another thought rose.
Perhaps, I should consider Unity. To that point I'd no idea what Unity might feel like on an experiential level.  What if I looked...
It’s almost as if by simply allowing “perhaps the time is ripe,” actually permitted experience to shift.
Now, as I re-read this, I can only think, "Thick as a brick!"  How'd I miss this?  And so simple! Drop one belief and everything shifts on its own...

So, this Sunday I leave for a week’s retreat with Adyashanti. Last year I asked him about being stuck in the witness and he told me I’d have to discover for myself how to “witness from your heart.” I had NO IDEA what that meant. He said it was something like that Catholic image of ripping open the flaming heart of Jesus. I knew the image, but it was no help.

However, from the moment of the thought, “Drop that!” something shifted. First, the witnessing became quite intense. An abstract infinity seemed intent upon pouring down into my head. It obviously needed to work its way throughout my body. And that wasn’t happening. I ended up missing a fair amount of work and sleeping 12 hours a day as my body tried to adjust. The strain seemed to throw me into vertigous migraines.

Something also seemed to happen with my heart. I began to see deeply into the simplest moments: a freshman wandering the halls looking at science posters, an old woman walking up the street … noticing could reduce me to tears by the beauty that was revealed. I began to notice how things are one, as direct experience.

Last weekend, I went to a workshop with my Taoist Teacher. My silent request was for the energy imbalances of my physical body be soothed. Energy work is a Taoist forte and they didn’t let me down. In essence, my heart was ripped open in a meditation. I discovered that sacred flaming heart… words do not suffice, and the classic image is right on. With that opening the infinity stuck around my head descended into heart and from there belly.  There's physical comfort now.

So, that’s the note. I’m not sure that any of this matters. But, oddly, just as I was convinced there’s no point in this blog, several people wrote and said “thank you.” So, oh well. Here’s a note. And maybe this is the best way to end for now:
Anyone who has “seen the nature” is unlikely to claim to be an enlightened person, even when a master has confirmed the experience; he or she simply knows what a glimpse of enlightenment entails. Indeed, anyone claiming to be enlightened is probably acting erroneously from an inflated ego, which a teacher has been unable to contain. Simple humility alone will normally prevent any such claim.
Sheng-yen, Illuminating Silence: the practice of Chinese Zen

I know times change. But, this rings true to me. I like it very much.

Eye to Eye

Bennie, my other little dog

I take many photos of my face… I do not know why I do this.
I am not particularly fascinated with it, and I cannot say there is anything at all I hope to find there…
Whenever I see myself in the mirror, or in a photo, it is in some way like looking at a newly made map of a continent surveyed and explored for the very first time.
Excitement and possibility.
Unknown and dangerous.
There are no memories or experiences of the thing.
Takuin, Self Portrait

I like Takuin. I like him a lot. He is so obviously awake.
It feels soft and good to visit his site and the Asian flavored beauty there.
But, when I read these words, I felt such a wave of dismay.

Geez, I look into the mirror and I have memories. Or at least a head full of thoughts and is that not experience?
So, I exhale in dismay. I am nowhere near awake!
I am flooded by the very kinds of impulses Takuin encourages one to drop.

I read his words again in some desperate attempt to understand, only to find more failure:
When I look into a mirror or at a photograph I am fascinated.
I can be stopped cold by fascination: “My god, is that what I look like?”

It seems the deepest mystery.
“I am that.”
It is totally astounding…
“There are no memories or experience of the thing.”

Suddenly, I understand!
Takuin just chose different words like:
newly surveyed, explored for the first time, unknown, excitement.
Now, I see they fit. Their poetry was just slightly at a different angle.

I have been wrestling with the question , “Am I awake?”
But, looking in the mirror and being presented with my supposed face, simply undercuts so much confusion.
I KNOW that I am not my body. Who I am is Mystery beyond words.
Otherwise, the mirror could never be so strange.

It is so obvious.
I had a little dog once, Annie. She loved to climb the kitchen stairs so that she could peek through the banister and meet my partner or me directly eye to eye.
Eye to eye.
Even a little dog recognizes that she and I, that consciousness, pours most clearly through the eyes. Forget this body stuff.
And if a little dog knows this, surely I can get it too.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
Dogen

But, you see, we can look into a mirror with a couple different levels to the focus.
Sometimes I look and focus on my face, the reflection of the Light.
Sometimes I look and instead notice a greasy smudge or scar upon the glass. The moment my attention goes to the imperfection, I lose all notice of my reflection. And I get lost in the mirror's dirt.
But, that doesn’t mean for a moment that the image, the reflection, has disappeared.

Eye to eye, there is only Light.
And of course we are awake.

But, there will be times the focus falls upon the flaws.
That is an interesting phenomenon, that little subtlety of focus. Even with the routine of looking in a mirror  sometimes we look and notice the glass instead, if only for a moment.

An Inquiry

half bath inverted
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

In a couple of weeks, I am going to see my Taoist Teacher, Wong Loh Sin See.
It’s been a year since I was last with the Teacher, so I was soaking in my morning tub thinking about what I hoped to gain from the coming workshop.
Just after I had satisfactorily clarified my intentions, I heard the Teacher’s voice:
“Patty, what is enlightenment?”

I thought a moment before replying, realizing he had touched a nerve.
“I could give you a definition, an explanation in words.
“But, I don’t know that I know …
what enlightenment feels like to be lived or embodied.”

At least, that was how I was going to finish my sentence.
Instead, I heard what I had just said:

“I don’t know that I know”

This revelation stopped me cold.
Stunned into silence:
I know!

It’s just life as I live it every day.
That’s how it feels.
It’s that simple.

By then, I had melted into tears.
And immediately the mind and commentary kicked in.
“Insights like this are supposed to be met with laughter not tears.”
And I was OK with the “incorrect response,”
as I zipped right on to the next thought, “Now! Can you just let it be?”

… No...
Embodiment can always go deeper.
Going deeper, becoming clearer, gentler, softer – those had been my intentions for the workshop.
What will being clearer be like?

That’s what I don’t know.
That's the mystery and delight of the next moment.

We were both enlightened in the most profound and deep way; we were both fulfilled.
And yet there was [something] that had not risen to the surface to be met.
And that's what had to be seen…
I had to be willing to discover how I was and what deals I had made with myself to overlook this.
And so, it's endless. And vigilance is necessary until the last breath…
Gangaji, Awakening is Endless 

Happy July 4th

Me 1956 b
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Enlightenment happens when it is perceived that the notions of “non-existence” or “void” or “emptiness” are indeed futile and empty.
Such notions are merely the indications or pointers that the end of the intellectual road has been reached.
Appreception happens the moment the seeker turns around and finds that he is already at the destination.
He is home.
Ramesh Balsekar, The Final Truth

I found a copy of The Final Truth yesterday while cleaning out my mother’s house.
This morning as I perused it, I came across these words.
And something began to click.
Perhaps it was because I had just read and was seeing my way through these words:

Whatever is conceived as the “void” or nothingness cannot be an object at all.
It is what the perceiver of it is.
It cannot be seen either to exist or not exist, for it cannot be seen at all!
What really happens is that the perceiver at this junction is trying to look at what he is after having reached a sort of dead-end.

Having been at this dead-end many times it seems quite familiar now, and I do make it into an image… then I had the thought, “my” thought, not Balsekar’s:

There is nothing I can do, because there’s nothing to do.

I was thinking about all the teachings that point out that all the ego’s attempts to transcend itself are logically impossible and thus requirea moment’s Grace to sweep one away.
But, I’d never really seen it being impossible because there is nowhere to go, nothing to do.
You’re there. You’re home, having “turned around” (which is ridiculously easy) …

I read:
What should really happen now is that the perceiver should turn around and wake up to the truth that he is face to face with his own nature.
The void of the dead-end is precisely what the eye sees when it attempts to look at itself.

And I thought about when I was five and wondering, “What was it like before I was born?”
(Never doubting my immortality, the question had arisen because I had suddenly been gripped by a fear that being dead for eternity would be boring.)
Trying to recall my existence before birth, I saw a vast, dark emptiness. Nothing! And too, no boredom!
I stopped worrying and finished my task of returning the milk to the refrigerator.

And I shall probably spend the rest of my life obfuscating the point I saw clearly when five years old.

This may be why the old Zen masters sometimes simply pound the stick upon the ground and shout, “This is It!” ... What's it take to wake you up?

There’s nothing I can do, because there is nothing to do… and still, there is a path we have to walk. Such a delicate, delicate, beautiful, paradox.

Happy Independence Day!

Unenlightening Yourself

Claudia's rocks
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

When a person’s awakening vacillates, he or she often asks me, “How do I stay in the awakened state? That is asking the wrong question… Spirit never asks itself, “How do I stay within myself?” That would be ridiculous. It just makes no sense...

What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself.
What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren’t true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the gravitational field of the dream state? ...

How is it specifically that I’m putting myself back in illusion… even though re-identification is totally spontaneous and it’s not happening to anybody and it’s not anybody’s fault – we still need to investigate how it happens.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World.

As I took up my investigation into “witnessing” I saw clearly that my pattern for many years has been to have a period of intense witnessing during which I was sure consciousness had shifted. Then, after some time, I would begin to doubt the authenticity of both my experience and interpretation.

I would decide, “No, this isn’t witnessing,” but merely something totally out of kilter physically. In essence, I would pathologize the situation. And off I’d go, stewing in that direction. How could I mend my body? Then, hopefully, the gap of witnessing would close and the unreality of creation would feel real once more. And I would stop telling myself a pretty spiritual story when in fact I was “sick.”

But, when I decided to accept that witnessing was a foundation I could count on, a fairly permanent, consistent spiritual experience, and investigate into the nature of the witness, I had to drop the habit of pathologizing.

Not that the habit didn’t try to re-establish itself. But, now I see it as that – simply a habit, a pattern of thought. I also see the power this belief has to immediately unenlighten.
So, I let it go. Dropped it. And guess what:

Our ideas about what’s good and bad and what’s happening to us are TOTALLY conditioned. We prefer soft grace over fierce grace. But soft grace is actually no better than fierce grace. It’s all grace…

If you want it to become stable, as I said, don’t worry about trying to get enlightenment back. Look in the moment, this moment, any moment: How am I unenlightening myself?

If you want to become stabilized in It – That’s how to do it.
“Humm, how am I un-realizing myself right now?”
Cause you can always see that.
And when you see that, the realization reveals itself of its own accord.
Adyashanti, Omega Institute, July, 2007.

Adya was right.
I dropped pathologizing and the witness became “the stick that stirs the funeral pyre [and] is itself consumed by the fire.”

But, this still left the doubt of consistency and permanency in the experience of consciousness. There are varying levels of intensity to the witnessing.
And again, doubt would always enter: “Have I lost it?”
I must have been mistaken. I am not enlightened.

Then, I recalled what “coming out” had been like. Discovering the truth in this instance had seemed a life and death decision. And I agonized for years.
Once I finally found the truth (and it wasn’t a decision- it was a seeing), I went through several days of fearing I would lose my realization if it slipped from my awareness.
So, I tried to hold it in my mind, “I’m gay. I’m gay.”

Well, guess what – sexual orientation doesn’t depend at all upon keeping it in your attention day and night. Which is not to say clearly knowing the reality doesn’t make all the difference in the world! It's just that the reality doesn't depend upon always noticing, "I gay."

Couldn’t awakening and enlightenment be similar?
You have to see and know. But, it needn’t be right there in your face every waking and sleeping moment.
Perhaps the Witness could also come and go in intensity without changing the reality of the situation. Because, whenever I chose to look, to pay attention, there it is unchanged.

I suspected that once again, holding an incorrect belief made me doubt my experience, made me unenlighten myself.
A couple days later I came across these words of Douglas Harding:

[Ramana] said when he was asked whether he was brilliantly awake or alert all the time that sometimes it’s like the treble melody in the piece of music which you attend to; if you’re attending to that music then that’s what you attend to, not to the bass accompaniment. But if the bass accompaniment were to stop you would notice it, and sometimes his experience is more in the bass accompaniment, and sometimes in the treble melody, and therefore there are rhythms of attention.

And the way I put it, is this. I think practice is enormously important indispensable to keep coming back to this. Coming back to it until it’s natural to be natural.
…it’s like my love for Catherine, for instance. For hours and hours, it might be the whole day when I didn’t think of Catherine. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love her anymore. There’s a level in my being where I go on loving her whether I’m celebrating it and spelling it out or not.

The love is going on anyway, and it’s similar with who I really, really, really am. I mean this deep, deep conviction of who I really, really, really am is not an idolatrous being hooked on all the time in being absorbed in that Reality… I’m convinced that it doesn’t have to be raised to consciousness the whole time. To think that it has to be raised to full consciousness the whole time seems to me a species of idolatry.

So, I was right. And Adya was right.
And, one by one, I have been examining how it is I unenlighten myself.
I am seeing what isn’t true.
Each “seeing” bursts a false belief and soothes my mind, my over active, scientific, skeptical, aggitated mind.

So, for most people some version of this is part of the phase of how awakening happens.
You know, awakening is sudden.
Enlightenment is the total harmonization of the Absolute and Relative so that we not only see and realize that the Absolute and Relative are One, but feel it, act it, and behave it on all levels of being.
Adyashanti, Omega Institute, July, 2007. CD 9 Track 6

Adya told me this three years ago. But, I hadn’t really listened.

The Tax for Having a Life

You have not been educated to that you could be perfect from the beginning.
You think you will be perfect at the end.
And therefore a journey comes into play, the birth of all religions comes out of this.
So do we need the journey?
For a while, that seems unavoidable… we must taste the tax for having a life.
Mooji, You Can Be Free Today

Thanks to FaceBook I have reconnected with a friend I’ve not seen in over twenty years. Mark and I taught TM together in the late ‘70’s.
What a marvel to compare notes about the path after thirty years.
We speak the same language. We share the same roots… and a lifetime of practice has flowed past the bridge.

I asked Mark which non-dual teacher he likes the best.
I wasn’t that surprised that he said, “Mooji.”
Mooji’s soft, gentle, loving manner feels so like Maharishi to me.
Turns out, Mark had the opportunity to sit an hour with Mooji in personal dialog:

My question was about my teacher of Vedic wisdom (MMY, of course) teaching that the human nervous system over time and through repeated alternation of meditation and activity develops the ability to maintain pure awareness 24/7.
His response, quite lovingly, was, "Bullshit."

Ah! So Maharishi’s teaching left Mark with the same question I had – is awakening spontaneous and in the moment, or is there some kind of process, a ripening, that’s required?
I tried to look at this sometime ago. Now’s as good a time as any to revisit the subject.
Why? Because paying the tax bill has become just about unbearable to me.



Or, perhaps these words of Joan Tollifson will make the point from yet another angle.
I came to Joan on a tip[ from another FaceBook friend. Someone I have never met and known less than a year.

Some say enlightenment is the absence of suffering,
some say it is the absence of non-functional thinking,
some say it is the end of identification with the thinking mind,
some say it is the absence of ego or the dissolution of the separate self,
some say it is the absence of any sense of agency or of being the author of the thoughts and actions that arise.

Some say it is the realization of Oneness,
others describe it as the merging of difference and unity.
Some compare enlightenment to lucid dreaming in the waking state and say that it is the abiding realization that all of consciousness is a dream state, including the entire movie of waking life and the whole spiritual search.
Some insist that enlightenment manifests only as saintly behavior and is characterized by being soft-spoken, generous, kind, vegetarian and pacifist, while others insist you can be enlightened and still be an alcoholic, a meat-eater, a womanizer, a thief, a warrior, or someone prone to angry outbursts.
Some say enlightenment happens suddenly and irrevocably at a particular time on a particular day, and that it is a permanent, final shift;
others describe it as a gradual unfolding;
and some say that it only ever happens Now and that it never happens to somebody…

Who has it right?…
Who (or what) is it, exactly, that would be enlightened or unenlightened? …

Enlightenment doesn't “happen.“
It is.
It is neither gradual nor sudden, and what is realized is both ever-present and ever-fresh.

It can appear gradual in the story where it seems (in retrospect) that awakening was a shift that unfolded slowly over time—that which is false was seen through ever-more clearly, ever-more deeply, ever-more subtly, ever-more often, ever-more completely….

To say, “I am enlightened and it happened on May 2nd at two o’clock in the afternoon,” sounds to my ear like a good story.
To say that “I am not enlightened yet, but maybe someday I will be,” sounds like a different story.
Both stories refer to a “somebody” that I have been unable to actually find, a “somebody” that is the bottomline myth or idea (the snake in the rope).
Joan Tollifson, Am I Enlightened?

I like Joan. Reading her entire article is worthwhile.
And if that is too many words, click here and watch a bit of video.
How very different from Mooji.
I just love to see the packaging!

Is this how Buddha is suppose to look?

White Faced Buddha
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The idea of enlightenment is tied up with our images of wise men and wise women. We have all sorts of preconceptions about how such wise beings are supposed to look, supposed to talk, and supposed to act… Based on our particular preconceived notions, we may try to sort out who among us is enlightened to greater or lesser degrees. We would like to match what we see with whatever standard we have created. But in doing so, not only may we apply inadequate standards but we may also be fooled…
Judith Lief

And too, we hold ourselves up to these imagined standards, which can sometimes cause confusion.
We might even talk ourselves out of awakening.

You may or may not have noticed, that I feel a bit disappointed in my Taoist practice for the lack of emphasis it puts upon enlightenment.

This de-emphasis has even confused me, for Taoism does have a strong tradition of seeking enlightenment and becoming one with the Tao.
In fact, I loved the Taoist term for such a person. They are called “real human beings.”

So, on the path that I have walked, there have been these “tenors” to the different teachings.
In TM, we were all dead set, busting a gut on becoming enlightened.
Maharishi assured us it was possible, though he was also handing out no guarantees as to a timeframe.
Next, came Taoism and the de-emphasis. I know my initial interest with Adyashanti lay in his invitation to “all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation seriously.” So, you might call that something of a backlash.
Well, now, I have been listening to Adya for almost two years and I’m beginning to believe that we have little if any control upon our own awakening.
To paraphrase both Adya and Eckhart Tolle, our practice and meditation only point us in the correct direction, so if per chance Grace should strike and our ego lets go for a moment, perhaps we’ll stay awake.

So, on I plod each day now. (Will She strike today?)
And in my plodding, not so long ago, I came across Numinous Nonsense.

That’s a great name, Numinous Nonsense.
It’s also a website written by Vince Horn.
Here, I found the most cogent discussion of the spiritual seeker’s relationship to enlightenment I have ever seen.

The discussion is introduced with this quote from Buddhist teacher, Judith Lief.
So, I invite you to go there (here) to enjoy the whole discussion.
I think the topic is important.
It impinges upon “spiritual materialism” – that No-No I have often been accused of. (I can also end on prepositions.)
It also addresses best attempts to avoid this trap while still staying true to the quest.

And as long as I am on the subject, I will takes this opportunity to mention that Vince also runs a site called Buddhist Geeks which offers podcasts on interesting subjects.
I found the recent discussions on dream practice with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche very interesting.

I ordered Rinpoche’s book. Perhaps, in there I will find an explanation of my uncomfortable waking from sleep experiences. Or, an explanation of that dream I mentioned about flying.

So, that’s it for now. Don’t just sit there.
Click somewhere and learn something.
Maybe we can all have a bit of fun as we plod forward, waiting for Grace, free from spiritual materialism to whatever extent we can be. (Can you believe the term has made it into Wikipedia! How very funny and a bit strange.)

A Double Movement

mouette insectes
Originally uploaded by olivier gilet

Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality.
Pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be.
Thomas Merton, The New Man.

Merton is speaking of Adam’s pride. And his words are almost “throw away” wisdom as he proceeds on to the explanations I carefully underlined in my 1961 Mentor-Omega paperback book, the pages of which are now quite yellow, fragile and ready to crumble.
Merton continues:

Adam’s sin was a double movement of introversion and extraversion. He withdrew from God into himself and then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of exterior things…
Adam turned human nature inside out and passed it on in this condition to all his children…

Each of us has the task of turning the thing right side out … and the task is by no means easy.

That phrase, “a double movement of introversion and extroversion” has stuck with me through the decades, as I’ve tried to turn “the thing right side out.” It has been by no means easy, or perhaps more accurately, quite a measure of my pride and insatiable need for unreality.

Seven years ago or so, I was delighted to discover the Taoist text entitled, “Turning the Light Around.” It described a technique that I realized I could perform. A practice that if performed for 100 days promised that I would become immortal.
I lasted about 10 before things just got “too weird.”
Unreality is so ingrained in me as Real.

The words also invoke contemplations I mentioned not so long ago - the strange twisting inversion of consciousness I discovered as I tried to diagram the flow of creativity throughout Creation. Our minds can travel “from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest,” in Maharishi’s jargon. To me, this journey forms a kind of Klein bottle – a geometrical object that you can imagine but not build since a Klein bottle requires four dimensions. (Oddly, it’s surface passes through itself without a hole. Is this a metaphor of transcendence, I have to wonder?)

So, my ears perked up the other night as I listened to Eckhardt Tolle on the true nature of space and time:

Go out on a clear night and look up at the sky…What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the “body’ of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space – it is also within you…. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension…
What you perceive externally as space and time are… the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity, perceived as if they had an external existence outside you. Within you, both space and time have an inner equivalent that reveals their true nature, as well as your own. Whereas space is the still, infinitely deep realm of no-mind, the inner equivalent of time is presence, awareness of the eternal Now.
The Power of Now, Chapter Six, The Inner Body

The teachers of enlightenment speak of two a two-step process.
First, it is necessary to wake-up to your own true nature. Know your Self to be unbounded. Second, the ego must dissolve into an awareness of unity.

Maharishi clarified the distinctions between Cosmic Consciousness and Unity Consciousness. Adyashanti speaks of awakening as the first step to becoming fully enlightenment. And Merton, has this double movement – pulling the senses out from identification with the world, becoming re-centered in the self and then melting into God.

People don’t seem to speak of Merton anymore. So, let me end with more of his words. More phrases that have stuck with me all this time.

For Krish:
If we would return to God…we must reverse Adam’s journey, we must go back the way he came. The path lies through the center of our soul.

Here he echoes Tolle’s instruction that the inner body is a portal into Being:
The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell…In your natural state of connectedness with being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body…to “inhabit the body” is to feel the body from within… and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form.

For Becky:
The sense of being “carried” and “drawn” by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father…[Son and Holy Ghost (to put it in the Catholic)]

For Dan:
When the light of God’s truth begins to find its way through the mists of illusion and self-deception…the false self which we inherited from Adam begins to experience the strange panic that Adam felt when…he hid in the trees in the garden because he heard the voice of the Lord God in the afternoon.
If we are to recover our own identity… we must learn to stop saying: “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid.”

OK – I’ll sign onto Dan’s passage too. And end with this one, which I really like:

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself… If that is who he thinks he is, then he is already done for, because he is no longer alive, even though he may seem to exist.
Actually he is only pushing the responsibility for his existent on to society… he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street.
Thomas Merton, The New Man, Spirit in Bondage.

Smaller than the Smallest, Larger than the Largest

Spinal Tap
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk brought to mind a phrase Maharish was quite fond of:
Knowledge is structured in Consciousness.
(i.e. what you know depends upon whether you are asleep or awake or dreaming, your state of consciousness.)

And there is a corollary:
Every state of consciousness is supported by a unique physiology.
(i.e. observe the body’s behavior during waking, sleeping, and dreaming states. Or view the physiological parameters elegantly diagramed by dream researcher, J. Allan Hobson.)

By contrast, Adyashanti chooses to emphasize a very different point.
Adya says enlightenment is not a state of consciousness.
Which I think is his way of emphasizing that the Consciousness experienced in Enlightenment is the Pure Consciousness of Non-Changing and Ever-Present Wholeness.

Pure Consciousness is not generated by the brain.
Pure Consciousness is the ground, the clay – from which the universe, all brains and all brain-states arise.
(And, personally, given as I am to physiology, I still think one of these brain-states supports the behavior we think of as “enlightened.” That is to say, a specific brain state supports Consciousness becoming conscious.)

It is all very circular -
like some kind of möbius strip, or better yet
M.C. Escher’s, “Drawing Hands.”

Maharishi used to tell us,
The range of Creative Intelligence (Consciousness) is from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest.

As I tried to understand this - just what could be smaller than the smallest
and also larger than the largest -
I used to contemplate a hierarchy of academic disciplines that ran something along these lines:

When describing the smallest things
quantum physics begins with the vacuum and QED (quantum electro-dynamics)
which is the basis of all chemistry
which is the basis of all biology
which leads to needing sociology
and geology for studies of the World
which leads to planets and astronomy
which leads to galaxies and spiral nebulae, space-time and gravity,
and of course the big-bang (where everything comes out of nothing)
which must be understood in terms of astrophysics
which loops us back to QED and the vacuum.

Can you picture what this means?
I could never quite swallow that the vacuum was actually Pure Consciousness.
But years later when I re-read my notes I found that Maharishi believed they were identical.

So yesterday, I went looking one more time.
I found these words online, those of a physicist, regarding QED:

To be sure, we are electromagnetic creatures in an electromagnetic world, existing at the intersection between light and electricity.

If you haven’t done so already, do listen to Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk at the TED conference.
You’ll find this is pretty much what she discovered for her self.

Let Katie Describe It

Double Nautilus
Originally uploaded by dbl nautilus

When you start to realize what Truth is, you recognize that Truth is not an abstraction, it is not out there at a distance from you… You discover that Truth is who you are without your story or script, right now… It’s not something you prepare for or earn or deserve. Awakening is a radical shift in identity. You think you’re you, but you’re not. You are eternal being.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing.

A “radical shift in identity” those are the operative words I’d like to point out just now. Adya says you don’t prepare for this, but I think that in some sense you must.
How else to describe the ego’s flight in terror?
How else to explain the grieving process?
Something in you can get a glimpse.

And the rest of this consists of excerpts from Byron Katie’s little book, Question Your Thinking Change The World, found in the chapter on Self Realization.

It’s common for me to speak from the position of a personality, from the position of mankind, from the position of the earth, from the position of God, from the position of a rock.
And I’ll call myself “it,” because I don’t have a reference point for separation.
I am all those things, and I don’t have any concept that I’m not.
I’ve simply learned to speak in a way that doesn’t alienate people.
It leaves me benign, unseen, unknown.
It leaves me in a comfortable place for people.

I would kiss the ground I walk on – it’s all me.
But to kiss the ground would draw attention to itself.
That’s what the first three years after I woke up looked like.
It’s subtler now, more invisible.
It has matured.

As closely as I can describe it in words, I am your heart.
I am what you look like inside yourself…
I am no one.
I am just a mirror.
I am the face in the mirror.

I am your heart.
I am the depth you don't listen to: in your face, from here.
It had to get louder, because your beliefs block it out from there...
I am the voice so covered up with beliefs that you can't hear it inside yourself.
So I appear out here, in your face –
which is really inside yourself.

I experience everything frame by frame.
It’s like looking at the comics…
each frame is a universe in itself, not connected with any other…
There is literally no time and space, no past future or present, even, no one coming, no one going…
There’s no meaning to it, no motive in it.
And finally you get to a place where nothing moves.
That is home, the place we all long for…

People ask how I can live if nothing has any meaning and I am no one.
It’s very simple.
We are being lived.
We’re not doing it…
Without a story, we move effortlessly, in perfect health, fluidity, freely, with a lot of love, and without war, without resistance…

The reason this speaks is because it does.
If I thought I was doing it, I wouldn’t be such a fool.
My only purpose is to do what I’m apparently doing…
if someone asks me a question, my purpose is to give my experience through my answer.
I’m an effect of their suffering…

It’s personal and it’s not personal.
It’s personal in that the whole world is me – a mirror image that I am and love.
Without it, I am bodiless…
On the other hand, it’s not personal, because I see nothing more than a mirror image.
Until God – reality- moves, I have no movement.
Every movement, every sound, every breath, every molecule, every atom is nothing more than a mirror image of God…

Whenever you speak, it’s God speaking.
When a flower blooms, it’s God.
When Hitler marches, it’s God.
I see only God.

Every word is the sound of God.
Every word is the word of God.
There is nothing personal here.
And everything is personal.
If the moon rises, it’s for you.
You’re the one watching it! (And that’s just a beginning.)

There is no this soul or that soul.
There’s only one.
And that’s the last story.
There’s only one. And not even that…

Even so-called truths eventually fall away.
Every truth is a distortion of what is.
The last truth – I call it the last judgment – is
“God is everything, God is good.”
Ultimately even this isn’t true.
But as long as it works for you, I say keep it and have a wonderful life.