Reclusland

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CHANGING LINE: Hexagram Thirty-Six/Line Six

Six at the top means:
Not light but darkness.
First he climbed up to heaven,
Then plunged into the depths of the earth.

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

The world is full
of half-enlightened masters.
Overly clever, too “sensitive” to
live in the real world, they
surround themselves with selfish
pleasures and bestow their grandiose
teachings upon the unwary.

Prematurely publicizing themselves, intent
upon reaching some spiritual climax, they
constantly sacrifice the truth
and deviate from the Tao.
What they really offer the world
is their own confusion.

The true master understands that
enlightenment is not the end,
but the means. Realizing that
virtue is her goal, she accepts
the long and often arduous cultivation
that is necessary to attain it.

She doesn’t scheme to become a leader,
but quietly shoulders whatever
responsibilities fall to her.
Unattached to her accomplishments,
taking credit for nothing at all,
she guides the whole world by guiding
the individuals who come to her.

She shares her divine energy with
her students, encouraging them,
creating trials to strengthen them,
scolding them to awaken them,
directing the streams of their lives
toward the infinite ocean of the Tao.

If you aspire to this sort of mastery,
then root yourself in the Tao. Relinquish
your negative habits and attitudes.
Strengthen your sincerity.
Live in the real world, and extend
your virtue to it without discrimination
in the daily round.

Be the truest father or mother,
the truest brother or sister,
the truest friend, and the truest disciple.

Humbly respect and serve your teacher,
and dedicate your entire being
unwaveringly to self-cultivation.
Then you will surely achieve self-mastery
and be able to help others in doing the same.

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!

(from here)

The revealment of the infinite in the finite, which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of flowers. It is in the soul of man. For there will seeks its manifestation in will, and freedom turns to win its final prize in the freedom of surrender.

(from here)

Purple monkey wrenches, flung through the air by red baboons.
Done they are, with working on the master’s cars.
Time travel and the pyramids fill their thoughts. Lost continents…

Whence Atlantis? And why Atlantis?
Too much said already; the dryness comes.
Descend, oh seeker! Lower yourself into the watery depths.
Soak, become muddied, deluded, diluted. Disillusioned.

In the bamboo forests of the mind, peppered with blind ninjas,
Thoughts crash and slash each other, when by random chance they meet.
Such a war of double speak. Can you contain these multitudes?

More importantly, should you?

I feel the desert returning; the jungle people are growing tired.
The sea people are laughing as they ride the tides away.
The desert people sit, staring dully at the whispering sands around their feet.

Is this, then, to be the source? The chrysalis and the butterfly?
Perhaps we are better off without such dusty butterflies…

But if not this, not now, not here…
Then what, when, where?

It is not as if it can’t happen. But will it ever happen?

To retain our relevance, we must grow within and out of.

Have we not learned by now, how birth is a bloody, horrible struggle?

Labor pains, and in the seventies, the water broke.
More blood, more struggle…
Now we must push! And breathe!

Let them tell you it can’t be done. Let them tell you it is not worth the struggle.
Let them continue to stare at the dust, these desert people.
We will reclaim our jungle. And if it is not to be reclaimed, we will build it anew.

The kingdom of heaven is inside you and all around you.
Why will you not-see-it?

A long time ago, before it ever got released, I’d heard about CG Jung’s Red Book and got a little obsessed with it.  Fascinated by what it represented, I scoured the internet, looking for any images from it that were available.  I found of few, one of the most fascinating of which was this one:

This, supposedly, is an image of Jung’s “Shadow” archtype, right when Jung finally cornered it.  Note the hat, wing-like robes, and checkerboard floor, as well as the overall colors.

Then, recently, someone on tumblr posted some work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish/Mexican surrealist active in the mid 1900′s, right around the same time as Jung.  I was fascinated by the piece I saw and decided to go looking for more.  And then I came upon this piece:

The same flowing clothes, the same checkerboard floor, the same hat (or close enough), the same color scheme, the same weird ambient lighting, and the same hallway leading to the suggestion of a doorway behind the figure.  The same symmetrical layout of the robes, with the split down the middle.

I suppose there’s a slim chance Remedios Varo saw Jung’s piece, as they were active around the same time.  But Jung was notoriously secretive about his Red Book (hence it only being published now) and Varo was based in Paris and then Mexico after the nazi’s took Paris.   Jung was also not a big fan of the surrealists (a fact I learned a talk given by the curator of the Red Book exhibit at the Rubin Museum, which I’ve written about here) so it seems pretty likely that the Varo would never have had a chance to review Jung’s private paintings.

But the similarities here are striking, and given the realms of exploration of both Jung and Varo, I think this says a lot about the underlying layers of the psyche and the idea of thoughts being just another thing we perceive “out there”.  If only we could figure out what this “out there” is…

The Malian Boy & The Shiny Seed from Kitanoo on Vimeo.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That the world is, is the mystical.

(from here, where there’s more good stuff)

“We can never think of the present. We can only be the present”

(found via here)

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CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Sixteen/Line Five

Six in the fifth place means:
Persistently ill, and still does not die.

Here enthusiasm is obstructed. A man is under constant pressure, which prevents him from breathing freely. However, this pressure has its advantage – it prevents him from consuming his powers in empty enthusiasm. Thus constant pressure can actually serve to keep one alive.

J. Krishnamurti in Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal (March 18th, 1983)

So, here’s one attempt at capturing a moment from my sesshin session last week.

During a sesshin (in the Mountains and Rivers Order, at least), the resident teachers or senior students will give a talk each day, around mid-afternoon, between lunch and dinner, in the middle of the day’s longest period of meditation.   At the most recent sesshin I attended, Ryushin Sensei, Abbot of the monastery, gave two linked talks, both about the first Chinese Zen master, Boddhidharma’s student Hui K’o.  For those unfamiliar with Zen lore, Hui K’o was reputed to have studied all the different traditions of his time and still felt his understanding was incomplete.  Then, in a dream, he was told to go to Shaolin (yes, that Shaolin) in search of a teacher who had come from India to spread “Chan” (the Chinese name for Zen). He came to the temple at Shaolin and found Bodhidharma seated in meditation, facing a wall. He asked to be taught by Bodhidharma and was completely ignored.

Undaunted, he stood outside in the snow all night, refusing to be turned away. The next morning when Bodhidharma saw him still standing in the cold, he asked Hui K’o what he wanted. Again, Hui K’o asked to be taught, and again Bodhidharma turned him away. So Hui K’o took out a sharp sword, cut of his left arm, and presented it to Bodhidharma as an offering of his sincerity. Bodhidharma, as Ryushin put it, shrugged, and said “I guess you’ll do…”

Although a harsh story, one has to keep in mind that this is a bit of a legend, and as such, should be taken as being “more true than it is real”, in a Joseph Campbell kind of way. Hui K’o, it was later pointed out, would become Bodhidharma’s only enlightened heir.  Towards the end of his life, he gave up teaching at Shaolin entirely and retired in anonymity to a nearby city, where he taught and worked as a toilet cleaner. Supposedly, he loved cleaning toilets. Later, he ran afoul of a more prominent teacher on the local scene, and was ordered to be put to death, to which he went calmly. (Night)shades of Socrates…..

In any case, the point at hand was how we cling to things, to ideas, self-images, and how acting as if these things are really our self is what makes us suffer. An example was given of an (unnamed) student who had lost their black-berry, and how the loss of that black-berry caused so much stress because of how much identity had been placed into it.  This was not meant as a condemnation, more as an example of the way the mind works.

And yet, even if, like Hui K’o we were to lose something much more intimately connected to us, like an arm, we continue on, still a whole being, while the arm lays there, dripping blood on the carpet, yet clearly not a part of us any more. How much less should a blackberry or a self-concept be clung to as a form of identity, when we can clearly let it go much more easily than we can an arm, and still remain what we are: a complete being.

Also up for discussion in a different talk (given by Shugen Sensei of the Temple here in Brooklyn) were some writings of Dogen’s, where he says to “sit in zazen, and when a self-concept arises, enter into it, with eyes sharp and ears sharp.” This interested me, as the basic instructions we receive in Zazen are to focus on the breath, and, when a thought rises, to see it and let it go, bringing our focus back on the breath. This something I’ve been struggling with for a few years, despite my feeling of having been helped immensely by my practice, I’m still not quite sure I’m doing it right.

Dogen’s advice seemed to imply a deeper level for me in the practice. I am not just a self watching my thoughts arise, I am an awareness, watching for self-concepts to arise/solidify. Entering into them with/as awareness, “eyes sharp and ears sharp”, I watch them, investigate what they are, and then, low-and-behold, they simply fade away. This felt much more effective to me than simply watching the thoughts arise and pass away (which so far has felt more like flipping the channel but remaining parked in front of the TV).

So, having come to this conclusion from the talk, I wanted to immediately sit and begin put my insight-into-practice into practice. But no, sadly, after the talks, we go for walking meditation outside, up and down the mountain.  After all the sitting, its a great way to get the blood flowing again, so I didn’t in any way begrudge it. But the whole time spent walking, Ryushin’s talk and the investigation of the self-concepts turned around in my mind.

Then, coming down from the mountain, back to the monastery, we were walking through the parking area when I looked down and saw a snakeskin on the ground. And it hit me. All ideas of self, all concepts we hold on to about who we are, are really just sensations that have arisen inside of us, in response to something that was occurring in the moment.  We have taken these things to be “what we are” when they are really just a form that “what we are” has taken on in response to the moment. Like a snake, we need to let these self concepts pull away, or else we will constatly be snagging them on things as we go along. This causes suffering, and we were better off just letting them go and moving on. Nothing to hold on to here folks, move along….

Or to be a bit more pithy about it, it’s the skin that gets stuck, not the snake.

So, big insight there. Very happily I bring it back into the zendo to sit, and it slowly begins to occur to me that a large part of my self-concept is that of “someone with a spiritual practice”, “someone who wants to be enlightened”. And has been pointed out to me on tumblr “By definition you can’t get what you want.” Because in order to want something, you must necessarily be defining yourself as someone who doesn’t have it.  A self definition you clearly must give up, if you ever want to experience having anything.

Anyway, we could argue semantics about that little insight for weeks, I’m sure, but that’s what struck me, and it’s really made me re-examine my practice and my motives behind it (an ongoing theme for me, it seems).

At the end of a sesshin, back in the old days, you would have something called Sozan, where you would go before your teacher and present a summary of your experience over that sesshin. Maizumi Roshi, the teacher of Daido Roshi (Daido Roshi being the founder of the MRO), changed that when he started holding sesshins in LA. It became “Open Sozan” where, during a period of meditation, anyone in the group could speak out about their experience, sharing with their fellow practitioners. Which is nice, because this is the first time the silence is lifted the entire week, outside of speaking with the teacher during face-to-face dokusan during meditation.

So, during open Sozan, I told my little story of the snakeskin, not in so many words as I have here, more a quickly spouted, rather emotional bit a speech. I was happy with how it turned out then, and I’m pretty happy with how its turned out here as well. And with that, this sesshin story is pretty much over.

Oh, except for one last thing. Later that morning, after Open Sozan, I went out to the parking area to check on the snakeskin. It took me a while to find it again, but when I did, I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t a snakeskin after all. It was, in fact, an entire snake…

Ok, so I know I said I’m not into that new-agey tendency to equate the “quantum” with the “spiritual” (and vice versa) but I came across a few of things on today on tumblr that seemed pretty relate-able nonetheless.  Granted, the first isn’t really “quantum” (though it seems that way at first), and the second and the third aren’t really “spiritual” either…

Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Now, the point of the article seems to be that, if we take this idea as true, it follows that we experience “non-entropic events” (such as our coffee reheating spontaneously) we just simply don’t remember them.  That sounds pretty nonsensical to me, but that bit’s not really relevant to the point I’m making here.  Neither does it really matter whether it’s a “quantum” type of entanglement or not.

The key thing is the hypothesis the article starts out with: when we observe any system, the system and our “selves” cannot properly be described separately.

That strikes me as both true and very important.  And it brings to mind this quote from Eihei Dogen, also recently found on tumblr:

Just at the moment
Ear and sound
Do not interfere—
There is no voice
There is no speaker.

Which I would assume, this being Dogen, could probably be ended with something along the lines of “There is just the hearing”.

See also this excerpt from the Surangama Sutra if you feel like reading something a bit heavier.

Or, if you prefer light, there’s this J. Krishnamurti quote, also found on tumblr today:

Have you watched your thinking? I watched that car go by, it was a blue car. Can I watch my thought in the same way, as it moves from one thing to another? And if it does, find out if it can end; instead of it being a long thread, break it, see what happens. Can you break a thought and say, “Well, that’s enough, enough is enough” and just end that thought and see what happens before the next thought is waiting. Before it springs on you, watch it. In that space, in that interval, what happens?

And I’d like end by mentioning the Buddhist idea of the six sense objects/facilities:
- eye / sight
- ear / hearing
- nose / smell
- tongue / taste
- skin / touch
- mind / thought

Thought can be considered a way of sensing something, and even the english language admits this, in a way.  We “have” thoughts, we don’t “become” thoughts.  And yet, how much of what we think/know of our “self” is based entirely on thoughts we’ve had about it?

Ask yourself: if we “have a thought”, what is it that is doing the “having”?

An inquirer can never be lonely. He does not have to worry who is going to guide him or instruct him. Leave that to life. Leave that to the law of love. Be concerned with the honesty, the integrity and the intensity of your own inquiry, correlate it with all the life and leave the rest to life itself.

(from here)

Self deception often arises because you are afraid of your own intelligence and afraid you won’t be able to deal properly with your life. You are unable to acknowledge your own innate wisdom. Instead, you see wisdom as some monumental thing outside of yourself. That attitude has to be overcome.

(from here)

A best-of of the past several months, presented in the order they were taken, in the hopes of creating a story (of sorts…)

Posted this recently on the research feed:

The Quintessence Field

• In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein’s equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent “dark energy” of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.
• To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence.
• This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein’s equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.
• According to the UCL team’s models, inflation would have induced quantum fluctuations in the quintessence field. When the universe began its more sedate expansion after inflation ended, the field and its fluctuations would have been frozen into the fabric of space-time, so that the energy density of the field did not change with time.
• This field would have had no impact on the early universe, which would have been dominated by matter and radiation. But eventually, as the universe grew, its expansion rate slowed down and the influence of matter and radiation diminished, the relative strength of the quintessence field increased, causing the expansion of space-time to accelerate.

More modern day alchemy!  Sounding strangely reminiscent of the old “sphere who’s center is everywhere and who’s circumference is nowhere…”

And then today I read this from my “list of things to read” (can’t remember where I found it originally):

Nisargadatta’s Difference Between Consciousness & Awareness

• When he uses the term “consciousness” he seems to equate that term with the “I Am ” and when he talks about “awareness” he is pointing to something altogether beyond the consciousness (“I Am”), that is, to the absolute.
• When the realization has established itself that I am the consciousness itself when I realize that I am the “I am” he take us to the next realization which is when I subsequently realize that I am NOT the “I am,” I am beyond that, I am pure awareness only!
• If I am conscious it is always conscious OF something. Consciousness always has an object of which I am conscious. So while the realization of my identity as the “I am” is very much closer to reality than the idea that “I am so-and-so, a person” it is still a step away from the final realization of the absolute, that I am the non- dual awareness which is allowing the consciousness to be conscious. Awareness is that which is shining through the consciousness, but it is beyond the consciousness itself.
• You are beyond the beingness, beyond the consciousness, beyond the sense of presence, you are the pure awareness only by which the conscious has been able to come into being: you are the absolutely pure original awareness only.” This latter realization can only proceed out of the former realization. First I must realize that I am the “I am,” the universal consciousness, then out of that I can realize that I am NOT the “I am!” I am actually the absolute only, and nothing else REALLY exists at all! Everything else is no more real than a dream.
• (T)he consciousness can only exist because of the prior shining of pure awareness. The awareness, on the other hand, does not depend on any way whatsoever on the consciousness, and is not even touched by it. The consciousness comes and goes, waking and sleeping, birth and death, but the awareness is always there. The consciousness suddenly appears in the morning on top of the birthless and deathless ever existing pure nondual awareness. Other than that absolute, there is really nothing.

Some interesting parallels there between Nisargadatta’s awareness and this “quintessence field”.  Though I am not a fan of “quantum souls” or “chakra string theories” any commonalities between high-level subject investigation and high level objective investigation do interest me.  For poetic purposes alone, if nothing else…

PS: I am working on some sesshin stories, hoping for some time this weekend to finish them up.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

(via here)