And thus the desire of defending liberty caused each to prevail [raise itself] in proportion as they oppressed the other. And the course of such incidents is, that while men sought not to fear, they begun to make others fear, and that injury which they ward off from themselves, they inflict on another, as if it should be necessary either to offend or to be offended.
(via Jayarava’s Raves)
Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice.
Better still is meditation.
But better than meditation is renunciation of the desire for the fruit of action),
For, there follows immediate peace.
Because of the natural progression of development, a yogi will tend to spend a certain amount of time developing or fleshing out each stratum of mind. They are developed in order, one by one (and then again, at a deeper level, as in a spiral). And the “cutting edge” of your practice, the one that forms the temporary ceiling of how far up the spectrum of consciousness you can go in any given sitting, will color your experience all day long. That’s why a yogi whose cutting edge is the A&P thinks life is beautiful and getting better. And that’s why a yogi whose cutting edge is the dukkha nanas thinks life is dreadful and getting worse: it’s all about where you are encountering the stickiness of your own mind. In other words, the place you haven’t yet made peace with draws you like a magnet.
Some parts of your mind are inherently heavenly and some parts are inherently hellish. You won’t get rid of any of it, so you may as well abandon that project as soon as possible. The kind of freedom that will satisfy comes from being equally at home in heaven and hell. Make friends with your own built-in hell and be free. Reject parts of your own mind and only suffering can result.
(from here)
(emphasis mine)
http://reclusland.tumblr.com/day/2010/04/29
or to be more correct, it’s a link to a poem… (and not just the TNH piece)
Ven. Kobutsu has kindly sent in some pictures of himself and Harley. Since the pair seems to be so popular around here, I thought it best to given them their own post. Though I totally reserve the right to reuse these pictures again for future quotes from Kobutsu (or Harley).
(for any interested parties, more pictures of the right honorable Harley Malone are available here)
Also, just for the record, this is officially both the first submission we’ve had here at Reclusland, and our first “exclusive” as well! : )
Information overload produces pattern recognition.
from a debate between McLuhan and Norman Mailer
(it’s awesome, go watch it!)
Several overlapping quotes today:
“Human beings, without their conscious minds knowing it, were putting themselves into situation after situation the real function of which was to make each individual meet and contend with, and in some measure overcome the very things in himself that blocked the way to his real being and proper consciousness” – Jean Toomer
“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” – Carl Jung
“Cravings are the natural inclination in response to primary dukkha.” – Marguerite Manteau-Rao
Higher than what? What is the nature of that that this is higher than? And what we learn here is the answer to that question. What it is that is the groundwork. Before we can get higher, we need to know what is. Higher than what? Higher consciousness. What is our consciousness that we are getting higher than? First we need to know that. Then we can worry about getting higher.
I threw my back out on Sunday at parkour, and have been bedridden for the past few days. Finally able to get up and move about today. I have to keep things reeeallly slow, but its a happy improvement. I’m still not sure what happened. I wasn’t doing anything complicated, must have just landed wrong or something. But anyway, the three days off of work has been a welcomed rest (nothing like being stuck in bed all day to make you get the proper amount of sleep) AND I’ve found a new medicine for backaches/muscle sprains, stuff like that. This stuff is great. The pain goes away within seconds and its got that all-important menthol burn…
(I don’t normally shill for things on this site, not counting the google ads, but this stuff has proved so helpful, I wanted to mention it)
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming soon enough.
Confrontation doesn’t always bring a solution to the problem, but until you confront the problem, there will be no solution.
(found via Anarchobodhi’s Commentary on the Kalamata Sutra)
An amazing article posted by Jackson of Truth A Paradox at KFD.
Go check it out, good stuff. And the responses are top-notch as well.
This work is designed to help a man in such a way that if he works, and is diligent, the world can touch his soul. We are able to act as an intermediary between the material and the most intimate fragments of what can be called sacred consciousness; this is our purpose, and the allegory of the fall of man–of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden– is in large part a parable about the loss of exactly this ability.
(from his blog post here)
(Contemplation) is a vivid realization of the fact that “life” and “being” in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, an awareness of the reality of that Source.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
“Whatever I perceive assists in revealing a secret identity for which my ordinary identity is a sign….Since I attend to perception as a witness, it can be said that I am attendant to my own birthing.” – David Appelbaum
“We think we live in subject-object orientation, but do we? If we watch our attention we are all object; that is, our attention is completely identified with the object. Or we are all subject, completely identified, indwelling, full of self-concern. But because you are now being introduced to the idea and practice of having a double attention – having a recognition of both the subject and object simultaneously – it was suddenly realized how swallowed up you were.” – William Patrick Patterson
from Ann’s post here.
This is the idea I was trying to work through with my earlier post.
Prince Abhaya: “Lord, when wise nobles or priests, householders or contemplatives, having formulated questions, come to the Tathagata and ask him, does this line of reasoning appear to his awareness beforehand — ‘If those who approach me ask this, I — thus asked — will answer in this way’ — or does the Tathagata come up with the answer on the spot?”
Buddha: “In that case, prince, I will ask you a counter-question. Answer as you see fit. What do you think: are you skilled in the parts of a chariot?”
Prince Abhaya: “Yes, lord. I am skilled in the parts of a chariot.”
Buddha: “And what do you think: When people come & ask you, ‘What is the name of this part of the chariot?’ does this line of reasoning appear to your awareness beforehand — ‘If those who approach me ask this, I — thus asked — will answer in this way’ — or do you come up with the answer on the spot?”
Prince Abhaya: “Lord, I am renowned for being skilled in the parts of a chariot. All the parts of a chariot are well-known to me. I come up with the answer on the spot.”
Buddha: “In the same way, prince, when wise nobles or priests, householders or contemplatives, having formulated questions, come to the Tathagata and ask him, he comes up with the answer on the spot. Why is that? Because the property of the Dhamma is thoroughly penetrated by the Tathagata. From his thorough penetration of the property of the Dhamma, he comes up with the answer on the spot.” 2
When this was said, Prince Abhaya said to the Blessed One: “Magnificent, lord! Magnificent! Just as if he were to place upright what was overturned, to reveal what was hidden, to show the way to one who was lost, or to carry a lamp into the dark so that those with eyes could see forms, in the same way has the Blessed One — through many lines of reasoning — made the Dhamma clear. I go to the Blessed One for refuge, to the Dhamma, and to the Sangha of monks. May the Blessed One remember me as a lay follower who has gone to him for refuge, from this day forward, for life.”
from the Abhaya Sutta, as found via Mind Deep
At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”
The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”
Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back… but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”
So I’m off for another sesshin, this time at the temple in Brooklyn. I’ll be beyond the realms of electronic communication for the next 4 days (no verbal communication either, for that matter), and back here probably on Monday.
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have to admit that I can’t hear the word sesshin without thinking of this old Offspring song:
Session! I’ll never learn
Session! God knows I try
Session! Keep coming back for session and I don’t know why
Session! I’ll never learn,
Session! I’ll never see
Session! Just tell me why these sessions got a hold on, got another hold on me
I love these guys. Even with Pretty Fly for a White Guy taken into account…
I have strong feelings about this sort of thing, having worked at any number of places for whom, literally and metaphorically, the solution for a squeaky wheel is always an ‘anti-squeak system’ of some kind. And that’s worse, for then you’ve got a squeaky wheel and you can’t tell any more.
(And then you find a squeak in the anti-squeak system.)
(from the comments, but too good not to re-post here)
The term “law of karma,” in and of itself, is open to question as a valid definition. “The model of karma” is perhaps a more apropos translation or, more precisely, “the model of karma/vipaka.” It’s important to recognize that models, and even laws of the universe, are mere intellectual concepts of what is; they are not “tathata,” or “suchness,” itself. Buddhism is not about concepts. No concept can trump the pure experience of reality as it is. In addition, the “karma/vipaka model” is always a slice out of time. It can never include all time, because every cause can be seen as an effect of a prior cause, and every effect the cause of a prior effect, in an “it’s turtles all the way down” infinite regression.
(from here)
“deconstruction n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: what remains to be thought: a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’: what makes every identity at once itself and different from itself: a logic of spectrality: a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology: what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.”
The book is a fable told using the story of Jesus as a starting point. In Pullman’s tale (Pullman of the Golden Compass series) Jesus was born with a twin brother, Christ, who (ironically given his name) is the less divine of the two brothers. A continuation into my contemplations on no-self.
Pullman’s Jesus is scathing about “smartarse priests” who talk about God’s absence really being his presence. Well, yes: Christians use this kind of language. But not to let themselves off lightly; they’re arguing that you only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled – so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your self-centred wish-fulfilment fantasies.
What’s left, then? This is the difficult moment. Either you sense that you are confronting an energy so immense and unconditioned that there are no adequate words for it; or you give up. From Paul to Luther, George Herbert or Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hitler’s prisons, there are plenty who haven’t given up; and they haven’t given up because they see their experience in the light of something like this understanding of Gethsemane and the crucifixion.
read the whole thing here or check out the book on amazon or wikipedia.
In the center of the horror, of the civilization, there is the happiness to be alive.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
“I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim.”
