Reclusland

Heading back to the Monastery for another sesshin. Be back on Sunday (this one’s a long one)….

And with that, good bye.

(found here)

Finally wrapping up the Paradiso.  Wonderful stuff.  Love the 10 levels of reality here.  It starts with a stationary Earth, up through each sphere which turns wider and wider, and then ends in the unmovable Empyrean.  Stillness to movement to stillness, very nice.

Sorry for the silence here.  I’m still realing (pun completely intended) from a retreat last weekend with Malidoma Some (hence the last post), and my thoughts are moving too quickly to word-ize them at this point.  Plus on Monday I’m off to the Monastery again for a full week’s sesshin.  After that I expect things will stabilize a bit more…

Just a heads up that I’ll be heading up to Zen Mountain Monastery from Thursday through Sunday.  Totally incommunicado, as usual, but ya’ll feel free to carry on as usual in my absence.

<cricket chirrup>

<cricket chirrup>

<cricket chirrup>

Well, in any case, here’s some pictures that’ve been on my hard drive for years, for your enjoyment:

In sesshin you often speak about recognizing and regulating ki, or energy, in all parts of our life. This has really helped me. How do you suggest working with ki in zazen?

There are many ways of cultivating ki, such as yoga, qigong, and tai chi. However, the ideal way to cultivate the all-embracing ki that informs our entire being is through zazen. Zazen is a matter of physically experiencing our essential oneness with the very existence of the universe, and it is through this experience that our ki develops. What is most important is that we partake of ki in its universal expression.

We can cultivate ki creatively as we go about our daily lives. Such cultivation-in-action is called dochu no kufu. However, a living practice depends on a thorough grounding in jochu no kufu, the quiet cultivation of seated meditation. There is no basic separation between “passive” and “active,” of course, but those who are unable to partake of universal essence in sitting will not be able to partake of it in action. The fundamental point in zazen is to experience oneself not as a separate, limited body but as the body of the entire universe.

The body itself is central to zazen. When meditating we regulate the body, regulate the breath, and regulate the mind. Ki fills our physical being to overflowing and expands through the breath to an ever-widening circle of our surroundings until it permeates the universe itself. This activation of our universal mind is the true meaning of “regulating the mind” in zazen.

Is this word “ki,” as you are using it, synonymous with buddha-nature?

To know buddhanature is to experience the way in which our wisdom, our consciousness, and our sensation are one with all that exists. “Buddhanature” is simply a word we use to indicate that universal functioning in which the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and especially mind grasp the whole and not just the part. Buddhanature is recognizing the life of buddha in every creature, in every tree and blade of grass.

Ki is our very essence. Lacking ki, we look with our eyes but cannot see. Lacking ki, we think but cannot understand. To embrace and partake of all existence is possible because ki is the essence of all things. From this, too, manifests the wisdom that recognizes buddhanature.

(from this interview)

Q. If you are feeling very confused and trying to work your way out of the confusion, it would seem that you are trying too hard. But if you do not try at all, then are we to understand that we are fooling ourselves?

A. Yes, but that does not mean that one has to live by the extremes of trying too hard or not trying at all. One has to work with a kind of “middle way,” a complete state of “being as you are. ” We could describe this with a lot of words, but one really has to do it. If you really start living the middle way, then you will see it, you will find it. You must allow yourself to trust yourself, to trust in your own intelligence. We are tremendous people, we have tremendous things in us. We simply have to let ourselves be. External aid cannot help. If you are not willing to let yourself grow, then you fall into the self-destructive process of confusion.

Some years ago I was sitting around a television watching The Wizard of Oz with my family and some family friends including their little 5-year-old, Tommy. When we got to the part where the flying monkeys attack Dorothy, somebody elbowed me and pointed to little Tommy, who was sitting, mouth wide open in abject terror, eyes riveted to the TV screen. The elbowing continued around the room until all of the adults in the room where watching little Tommy, who was completely oblivious to the fact that he was now the center of attention. Little Tommy was embedded. As far as he was concerned, it was he who was being attacked by flying monkeys. Finally, one of the adults, moved to compassion by Tommy’s suffering, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s all right, Tommy. You’re here with us. It’s just a movie.”

It’s possible that different people use the term “radical identification” in different ways (I hadn’t heard the term before I saw it in your post), but I would say that little Tommy was “radically identified.” And he was suffering. It was an act of compassion to reach out and help him dis-embed from his nightmare. We can learn to do that for ourselves; we can be our own wake-up call. It’s a beautiful thing to wake up and look around, only to find that you are safe and sound in your own living room, surrounded by loved ones. You can still watch the movie, but without the suffering. This is enlightenment, and this is why dis-embeddedness is preferable to radical identification.

(from comments on this article)

The huge temptation when walking the spiritual path is to try desperately to find a way to get the simple ease of the sambhogakaya and the indestructible, transcendent and deathless luminosity of the dharmakaya while secretly hoping that the down to earth, mundane, intimate, visceral, vulnerable, and often embarrassing nirmanakaya will just sort of crawl away and die or at least radically reform itself. The nirmanakaya is often treated as though it were the bastard stepchild of the fully enlightened condition, but you can’t have one without the others. Intimacy with reality is bought at the price of attaining transcendence beyond reality. Transcendence is bought at the price of attaining intimacy with reality. These inescapable facts should not be forgotten.

emphasis mine, though I’m not sure if its necessarily an “inescapable fact”.  Finally finished MTCB.  All I have to say is Daniel has done a great service with his openness, attention to detail, and illumination of his journey.  If we could all report back as well as he has, we might finally be bale to start understanding this thing.

Buddhi is dependent upon an alliance through misapprehension, Avidya, with Purusha in order to accumulate -or attempt to accumulate- knowledge. Once the realization arrives through this accumulation that information gathering and the mutable knowledge gained therefore is not Wisdom, the alliance (Avidya) disappears and only Purusha remains, immutable and free.

This comes from a rather scholarly Buddhist Geeks article by John Eberly giving a background on Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry, and other forms of Indian spirituality.  Well worth the read, if you can summon up the focus to follow the ideas through the thick underbrush of  language.   The above in particular hit me.

For those not inclined to read the article all the way through, this quote, to my mind, states something like: We get confused trying to accumulate facts about things, thinking these “mutable knowledges” as permanent wisdom.  Only when we see these as mutable and not the same as the wisdom we mistake it for, are we able to begin to understand wisdom.

Am I arguing that it is useless to gather knowledge?  No, we’d be in a pretty dark place without knowledge.  The problem is, if we assume some bit of knowledge as being somehow true (ie: as being Wisdom), we stop looking at it. Rather than trying to grasp and hold as much information as we can, it is better to learn how to quickly and accurately perceive information as it flows through our awareness.  We gain nothing but blindness by attempting to hold on it (or for that matter, by attempting to push it away as well).

“Samsara literally means “wandering-on.” Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live. But in the early Buddhist texts, it’s the answer, not to the question, “Where are we?” but to the question, “What are we doing?” Instead of a place, it’s a process: the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.

The process can sometimes be enjoyable. In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn’t entail so much suffering. The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us. Moving into a new world requires effort: not only the pains and risks of taking birth, but also the hard knocks – mental and physical – that come from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again.”

(found via Crashingly Beautiful)

Given our basic dualistic illusion, it often seems that we must let things go in some sort of literal sense, such as quitting a job, in order to “let it go” in the insight sense, to see the true nature of the sensations that make up the process. This is obviously not true, but such erroneous logic can be very tempting.