Reclusland

“When you look straight at/into something, it tends to disappear into primordial emptiness.” – Bentinho Massaro (why everything is perfect, and we can do whatever we desire)

“if you want to find something, stop looking. if you want to move something: look for it.” – Brook Bartlett (because wanting and not finding, or not wanting and not moving, both imply hidden resistance)

“you have to know what you’re about, you have to feel your life flowing, and you have to sense your body.” – George Adie (know, feel, and sense)

“we choose whether to empower thoughts by taking them as truth, or disempower thoughts by recognizing them as programming.” – Hope Johnson (how to grow good karma)

(putting ‘em here for future reference)

Sorry its been so quiet here.  Real life is getting more and more filled, and so this virtual “external hard drive” of mine is still laying dormant, verdant spring or not.  But I wanted to share this little bit of an essay I read recently, as it ties into many discussions that have happened on this blog in the past.  I disagree with the overall perspective of the article, and in fact stopped reading when the author asks where the Kali is in the Kali Yuga.  But I found this particular paragraph interesting for the way it ties the idea of “is there free will?” with the concept of “no-self/no doer”.

But the one thing that the most dedicated Shamanic healer (unless he is truly a holy man, truly wakan), or the most evil CIA brainwasher of the infamous MK-ULTRA mind-control program, forgets to ask, is: where did that intent come from? Is he actually deluded enough to believe that he has summoned it out of nothing? On the basis of what intent might he have been able to do that? The magician is like powerful, skilled and courageous warrior who confronts the enemy and triumphs (or is killed or captured, but for the sake of the argument let us say he triumphs). He feels powerful, successful, and seems entirely justified in this feeling. But zoom out to the next larger frame of reference and what do we see? This warrior is now revealed as nothing but a soldier acting under orders. Whose orders? Along what chain-of-command? In the service of what overall strategy, what political agenda? The soldier sees and knows next to nothing of this; that’s not his business; his business is simply to do what he’s told. And the same is true of the magician. He may be imminently successful in enacting his intent—but as to where that intent came from, he is in total ignorance. He never asks that question, never looks in that direction, because he believes he is the Doer. To obey your own intent is to act under the command, under the tyranny I would say, of forces you will never see as they are, or understand, or be able to name. You may come up with some sort of psychological insight into patterns of intent you take as causal, or into the nature of the spirit beings to whom you attribute them, but the true origin of these patterns is completely hidden from you. Why? Because if you are the Doer, your knowledge, for all your excursions into the grim, fascinating, multifarious worlds of the Unseen, begins and ends with you yourself. The only way to even begin to see the real patterns that lie behind your intent is to recognize that the Doer is Allah—no-one else, because there IS no-one else. Instead of obeying our own intent, it is our duty, by the Trust that is laid upon us, to intend to obey Reality alone: “There is no power or might except by Allah”. This is the precise point where our true freedom lies—the point where our intent to submit to Allah effectively is Allah.

(the hands always made me laugh the most)

To me, the key hidden in all of this is that one needs to pay attention to the motivations which give rise to their actions.  Because the motivations are never “yours”, but they all have their own taste, and the agreement to let them manifest that taste is yours to sign…

The essay also leaves unanswered the question: what if he (or she) doesn’t believe they are “the doer”?  Is “magic” impossible without a separate self?  Is being a channel for higher energies to manifest through not the definition of doing God’s Will?  What is the line between submitting to the Will of God and being lazy?  Not that I have answers, but it’s an interesting place to do that whole “thinking” thing.

Remember this?  Crazy me is doing it again, this time for a month (for which I leave a little later today, whee!)…

Assuming that things will still be being next year, I’ll see you all then.

Peace out 2012, it’s been cool.

This morning, I was reading an excerpt from Darwin’s journals (or was it his autobiography? I cannot recall).  He discussed his lost love of poetry and Shakespeare, how glad such things used to make him, and he lamented that such things now bored him immensely.  His mind seemed to have become only a machine for reviewing large quantities of facts and pulling from them a general theory.   He said something along the lines of this making him sad and, very likely, being an unhealthy thing for the mind too.  This implied, to me, a sort of descent into a sort of degeneracy, though perhaps that says more about my mind than about his.

I don’t have the book with me now, or else I would be more precise.  Please forgive my lack of references.

Later that morning, I was heading in to Starbucks to purchase my daily dose of what Terrence McKenna labeled the shamanic drug of business. Outside, a young homeless man (scraggly beard, long brown hair, stained clothes, my age) was laying on the ground, shoes at his side, kicking his sock-clad feet in the air and babbling to himself.  On my way out I handed him a few coins.  I am embarrassed to admit I unable to look at him so until then; t felt safer to do so upon leaving than it did upon entering.

When I handed him the coins, he looked up at me, very excited, and started talking to me.  I stood and listened a bit.  My memory recorded it as something like “reflexive, recurrence, becoming, unfolding, enfolding, turning, triangular, dyslexic!” and then a bit about a melted glass lens refracting perfectly.

This is, I feel, a true enough recounting of his words, though, again, I feel perhaps a bit too much of myself in the words chosen and their arrangement.

He seemed to be both figuring out his theories and telling them to me at the same time, and appeared to be very happy to be doing so.  His eyes were very kind, but (unless it was only in my imagination) there was no real connection in them.  And yet, something in me recognized myself in him, and in knew I had tasted the pleasure he found in his babbling.

Luckily for me I have some social connections, a job, and a blog, so I am safe for now.  I believe I may rightly consider this blog my padded cell, though, happily for me, it remains unlocked.  Or perhaps it’s better said that it is locked and only I have the key, and that my cell has a window in it as wide as the world.  In my case, such a window can also serve as a ventilation unit.  If memory serves, Darwin come from money, and while money does not ventilate by itself, it can be used create experiences that ventilate well enough.  That man outside of Starbucks had no means of ventilation.

So, yes, it does seem that I am safe, for now.  But that tendency that Darwin mentioned, that analysis of fact and creation of theory, is a pleasurable, addicting activity, and one can run heedlessly into many dangers pursuing it.  While philosophy is dry science, poetry is wet magic. Wet lubricates dry, grease in the axle hole making the ride smooth, saving us from the creation of friction.  No friction, no fumes. No fumes, no need for ventilation.

Wait.  No. Strike that.

Philosophy is language created out for knowledge, from clarity.

Poetry is language created out of emotion, from feeling.

To remain a poet philosopher, you must find a way  to love both the poetry and the philosophy. Otherwise, you may head past the tipping point and over into your doom.  I can only pray that my appreciation of, and skill with, these things always and ever increase. And that this may continue for the greater social good only, and my own good besides.

I have been trying to read poetry daily, lately.  This how I found the Darwin excerpt, in fact.  It’s in The Rag And Bone Shop of the Heart.

Mind has been reorganized to intuitively process and affect quantum-scale events; allowing her to “see” incoming timelines and probabilities

The source kind of ruins things (a bit) but before you click through, see how that sentence sits with you…

The internet is a self-referential web of concepts.  It creates an echo chamber within which realities false and true arise and pass away at greater and greater speeds.  Samsara on rocket fuel…  This can lead to an eventual “punch in the gut” from “objective reality”.  And those who are able to say “Ok, yes, and this too” are able to take advantage of this and begin once again to separate the chaff from the wheat.  Those who withdraw and refuse to admit the pain of the punch encase themselves even deeper into the echo chamber and are lost in, and eventually destroyed by, the cacophony. Conservatives stare into the abyss.

Remember the abyss?

“It is perhaps worth adding, as a footnote, a slightly different angle on the same difficulty.  The arbitrariness of the existing verbal concepts is not their only disadvantage, for once they are invented, verbal concepts have a further ill-effect on us.  We lose the ability to modify them.  In the unselfconscious situation the action of culture on form is a very subtle business, made up of many minute concrete influences.  But once these influences are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin to seriously impede our ability to see beyond them.
Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form.  Other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not well reflected.  Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality.  Each concept, at the time of its invention no more than a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomes a precept.  We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation.
The Roman bias toward functionalism and engineering did not reach its peak until after Vitruvius had formulates the functionalist doctrine.  The Parthenon could only have been created during a time of preoccupation with aesthetic problems, after the earlier Greek invention of the concept of ‘beauty.’  England’s nineteenth century low-cost slums were conceived only after monetary values had explicitly been given great importance through the concept ‘economics,’ invented not long before.
In this fashion the selfconscious individual’s grasp of problems is consistently misled.  His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating.  Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well  The concepts control his perception of fit and misfit – until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately.”  – Christopher Alxander, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”

Quick-and-dirty is a term used in reference to anything that is an easy way to implement a workaround or “kludge”. Its usage is popular among programmers, who use it to describe a crude solution or programming implementation that is imperfect but which solves or masks the problem at hand, and is generally faster and easier to put in place than a proper solution. It is also used in cognitive science to describe first-pass cognitive processes that might attempt to quickly process information in a simple way before resorting to more heavy resource-consuming processes. Recognizing the attractiveness of implementing changes speedily, there was a general move to formalize this as rapid application development. Quick-and-dirty solutions often attend to a specific instance of a problem rather than fixing the cause of the more general problem. As such, they are sometimes used to keep an item of software or hardware working temporarily until a proper fix can be made.

No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, or briefer than the sum of time. – Borges

(And this experience is God’s Speech, God’s participals and diphthongs, God’s verbs, God’s meter and rhyme scheme, God’s conjugation.  And we are the part this Speech which exists to experience this Speech and to speak back to the Speaker while still being part of what is Spoken. Yet we seem only to want to speak of our own role, never turning to speak of the whole flow of Expression, of which we are both a part and all.  Thus, we keep our light under a bushel basket, and cover ourselves over to hide within the garden, so God does not See us.  And even though the Speech that God Sees is made Good in the Seeing, still we hide with our roles…)

So let start helping God make that proper fix by getting our heads out from behind our fig leaf bushel baskets…  How many times is God going let God’self get punched in the gut because we are not saying “OK, yes, and this too” for God, as the Speech of God, as that which is the Speech and knows the Speech?

A quantum superposition captures those mixed feelings. It does not mean our brains are literally quantum computers, as some physicists have speculated. Rather quantum physics is a useful metaphor for the fluidity of human thought.

(link fixed, 12/6/12)

“Whether we like it or not, however rational we should like it to be, there is a factor of judgement in the choice and use of a logical system which we cannot avoid.  Logical pictures, like any others, are made by simplifications and selections.  It is up to us to see which simplifications we wish to make, which aspects to consider significant, which picture to adopt.  And this decision is logically arbitrary.  However reasonable and sound the picture is internally, the choice of a picture must, in the end, be irrational.  For even if we can give reasons for choosing one logical scheme rather than another, these reasons only imply that there is another decision scheme behind the first (very likely not explicit).   Perhaps there is still another behind the second one.  But somewhere there are decisions made that are not rational in any sense, that are subject to nothing more than the personal bias of the decision maker.  Logical methods, at best, rearrange the way in which personal bias is to be introduced into a problem.  Of course, this “at best” is rather important.  Present intuitive methods unhappily introduce personal bias in such a way that it makes problems impossible to solve correctly.  Our purpose must be to repattern the bias so that it no longer interferes in this destructive way with the process of design, and no longer inhibits clarity of form.”  – Christopher Alexander, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”

—–

What comes to mind for me:

Rational form ultimately springs from the non-rational root of personal choice.  Sadly this is almost always done unconsciously, buried under too many previous layers of so-called impersonal rationality.  The fruit of this unconsciousness is to insist in the complete rationality of our forms and systems, an insistence which sits un-well with 0ur intuition.  Our intuition can feel the irrationality beneath the rational, but our adherence to the rational will not allow us to admit the truth of our intuition’s judgement.  The proper choice here would be to work to consciously admit the irrational at the root of all rational systems, while not abandoning the use of rational systems in general.  But, because we rarely choose to dig that deeply into our rational systems, and because we are scared of completely losing them, the intuition is denied its validation, and instead is reactionarily whored out as “”anti-rational,” a foe of rationality, rather than what lies behind all rational systems.  This weakens the truth at the heart of the intuition and makes it unreliable.

Since we refuse to admit the irrational at the root of the rational, even while our intuition tells us that it is ultimately irrational, we therefore must block out part of the intuitive, while still needing to rely on this crippled intuition whenever our rational systems fails us.  What is needed instead is an admittance, a confession, that the so-called rational is ultimately based on the irrational, and therefore the rational must be allowed to die away and grow back as the irrational reality of the situation demands.  The irrational is our source and our true identity.  The rational is a growth, an addition, a beard or makeup upon the original face of the irrational.  It can be used to make the irrational beautiful, but it must never be allowed to be mistaken as ultimate.  Only the irrational is ever truly ultimate.

This paints a picture of endless death and rebirth.  Whether this is a complete picture of the true state of things remains to be seen…

It is not that “you” don’t exist.

It is that awareness of anything requires tension.  Without tension, awareness just is, there is no registration of anything on any level.

But to say that “you” don’t exist is to still equate “you” with tension.  You are not tension.  You are complete tensionlessness.  But perhaps you are tenionlessness that can make use of tension, if tension is not rejected.

Tension here might be the same as (or similar to) holding, resistance, dukha, projections, etc…

There is nothing wrong with tension.  It is OK when it happens.  But there is a way of no tension, and tension cannot experience it.

The “you” that is tension is simply a sensation that passed through your awareness that accidentally got held onto.

Tension is not the problem, ignorance of tension is the problem.  But ignorance and tension are actually the same thing.  Being free of ignorance is being free of tension.

The Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”, Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, English phonetics pronunciation: gnōthi seauton (also … σαυτόν … sauton with the ε contracted), was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek periegetic (travelogue) writer Pausanias (10.24.1). – wikipedia

In many Polynesian cultures, it is believed that a person’s errors (called hara or hala) caused illness.  The therapy that counters this sickness is confession. The patient, or a family member, may confess. If no one confesses an error, the patient may die. The Vanuatu people believe that secrecy is what gives power to the illness. When the error is confessed, it no longer has power over the person. – wikipedia

For self-knowledge would certainly be maintained by me to be the very essence of knowledge, and in this I agree with him who dedicated the inscription, ‘Know thyself!’ at Delphi. That word, if I am not mistaken, is put there as a sort of salutation which the god addresses to those who enter the temple; as much as to say that the ordinary salutation of ‘Hail!’ is not right, and that the exhortation ‘Be temperate!’ would be a far better way of saluting one another. The notion of him who dedicated the inscription was, as I believe, that the god speaks to those who enter his temple, not as men speak; but, when a worshipper enters, the first word which he hears is ‘Be temperate!’ This, however, like a prophet he expresses in a sort of riddle, for ‘Know thyself!’ and ‘Be temperate!’ are the same, as I maintain… – Plato, in Charmides

 The idea of jnana centers around a cognitive event which is recognized when experienced. It is knowledge inseparable from the total experience of reality, especially a total reality… – wikipedia

Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. – Matthew 18:18

(W)ithin the body, bodies of many particular desires are enfolded. Since I stop considering them as my nature or as my property, they tend immediately to reunite with nature which ceases, at the same instant, to be considered as something exterior. They now appear as animals which have been enclosed for a long time within the human skin and which, once freed, hasten to rejoin their own packs. – Renee Daumal

He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. – Genesis 2:19

Everything is good.  Life bubbles up as goodness and mixes with allthatis.

While mixing, certain things are misunderstood, certain things seem to be blocked, and certain things are abandoned before they are resolved back into the goodness from which they come and which they carry within them.

There is not a weakness in this misunderstanding, in this blockage, nor in this abandonment.  Or, if there is a weakness, it is a weakness we all share.

But after a certain amount of time, these things that are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned start to hurt.  They both are pain and cause pain.  To say that this is evil is to say that your hand should not burn when it is placed into the fire.

But how to respond to the pain, either our own or others?  We can become numb, or we can seek momentary pleasure (wait, same thing…)

Or we can give into the pain, and allow it to express itself through us, amplify it so that it’s voice is even more easy to hear.  And it is here that we appear evil.  But we are not evil, we are just in pain.  Because we are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned.

There is no evil.  There is only ignorance, and the pain it gives rise to, and our identification with that pain, and our expression of that identification.  All else is always already good.

What else can we  do? Rest in this, and let (it) go.  It might hurt to pass the pain, a piece of spiritual kidney stone built up from the blockage, but don’t let that dissuade you.

God is love, because love is always open.  Alwaysopen, isGod, may peacebewithus…

A paradox, of sorts, for your consideration:

“I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous food, yet the people seated around the tables were pale and emaciated, moaning in hunger. As I came closer, I understood their predicament.”

“Every person held a full spoon, but both arms were splinted with wooden slats so he could not bend either elbow to bring the food to his mouth. It broke my heart to hear the tortured groans of these poor people as they held their food so near but could not consume it.”

“Next I went to visit Heaven. I was surprised to see the same setting I had witnessed in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food. But in contrast to Hell, the people here in Heaven were sitting contentedly talking with each other, obviously sated from their sumptuous meal.”

“As I came closer, I was amazed to discover that here, too, each person had his arms splinted on wooden slats that prevented him from bending his elbows. How, then, did they manage to eat?”

“As I watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he stretched across the table and fed the person across from him! The recipient of this kindness thanked him and returned the favor by leaning across the table to feed his benefactor.”

—

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

—

Buddha puts forth the absolute truth of anatta, not-self, and yet, his first words upon realizing enlightenment were: “I and all sentient beings on earth, together, attain enlightenment at the same time.”

Ego, the self-image, is a scarecrow planted in your garden.  Being too busy dressing it up, we miss the birds and the weeds.  Instead, turn your attention to the cultivation of your garden, and let scarecrow take care of itself.

To insist on the primacy of movement originating from the self-image is to mistrust something that is trustable to the absolute.  To cling is to trust in something other than what is.  Everything that springs from such behavior is, ultimately, tragically flawed.  It carries within it the seeds of its own failure.

“You can only hate yourself if you have some kind of stand point or some kind of idea about who you are supposed to be, and then who you are of course doesn’t measure up, so you hate that. You hate who you *actually* are, you hate your tenderness, you hate your light, you hate your darkness. So the more we let go of our story line, the less reference points we have to hate ourselves.” ~ Reggie Ray

Since one story is pretty obviously a bad thing, is it possible to live with multiple stories?  What would doing so do to our sense of identity?

All this talk of “animals” has got me thinking.  If our desires and thoughts can be compared to animals that, when seen clearly, run about fairly randomly within the wilderness of our own naked awareness, what does that say about the whole “free will vs. determination” debate?  When desires, which are the source of any “willed” action, are seen to be separate, impermanent, component “creatures” which come and go as they will, can the idea of a personal will even exist?

Gurdjieff would have said yes; BUT in his system, the ability to “will” or “to do” was something only possible for a very realized being, impossible for most of us standard grade three-centered-beings.  The Buddha (and please do correct me if you think I’m wrong on any of this) would have said no; no-self + dukkha + impermanence leaves little ground for a “will” to take root.  Christians have the whole “thy will be done” thing.  And Hindus, I believe, are sort of all over the map about that, depending on which school of Hindu thought one subscribes to.

Since there is no unity among the great religions and traditions, we standard level folk can’t point any fingers and say “well, everyone says it’s like that, so it must be so.  And it’s more fun that way I think (which might be why they’ve done us the favor of disagreeing).  However, while appreciating the fun that comes along with any good mystery, I also kind of have my own opinion on the matter, one that was recalled to mind recently by the quote on “animals” from Herbert and Daumal.

To whit: “free will” takes as its base the idea that we can do what we want.  Yet this doesn’t take into account that we do not choose our desires.  That is, discovering that we desire a certain outcome, we cannot then choose to change desires and begin to desire a totally different outcome.  We can choose to act on one or another of our many desires, and we can choose the degree of free rein we allow them, but this is not the same as choosing what it is that we will. Given that we cannot choose to will, I do not see how we can actually claim to have anything a personal will.  If anything, we are engaged in a supremely difficult balancing act of different desires while things change around us at a rapid, rapid pace.  Not a good basis for saying that we control our own fates.

For me, this pretty much wraps up the whole “free will vs. determination” thing, in a fairly logical manner, without resorting to any sort of dogmatism.  Total free will is impossible, but, at the same time, it does not follow that everything is already 100% determined.  It’s a false argument.  Stuff just comes up, be it “external” stuff or “internal” stuff, and all we can do is choose when and how they react with each other.  There is choice in that, and some room to exercise a bit of will power, but only within limited options.  And chances are, we are much more limited by the options than we care to admit.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

So yeah, that’s my thoughts on the matter.  However, I do think there’s a good chance I’m missing something in the argument.  Does it hold weight?  Is it water-tight?  Since I personally quite like the whole explanation, it says to me that I need an outside opinion on that matter.  So, what do you say, oh wise and learned readership?  Am I missing any logical circuits there?  Anything unnoticed dimensions that make the whole thing much more ambiguous than what I’ve laid out above?  I’d actually like to see this picked apart here, so please, do me the favor of doing so.

Typing this up in it’s entirety because it’s just that good.  Daumal’s perspective on Buddhism here is not one commonly found nowadays.  One must keep in mind that Daumal was a scholar of Sanskrit and the Vedas, and so would be more inclined to see Buddhism as a heresy, as I imagine it was seen by the Vedic sages.  Daumal also discusses, and seems to agree with, Mrs. David-Neel’s take on the concept of “anatta” or “not self”, a topic of deep interest for me.  I’m leaving this up for a few days, please do take the time to read it; and remember, this was written in France in 1936.  Western spiritual seekers along Eastern routes, this is the history of your people; learn it well.

“This would only be another book on Buddhism if the author had not been a Buddhist, had not lived a great part of her life in Buddhist countries, and had not already published four or five animated books which this one completes and illuminates on her life in Tibet.”

“Thinking and living as a Buddhist does not deny a deep sense of Occidental culture and a very critical spirit.  Mrs. David-Neel approaches Buddhism as a method, an art of living: true of all doctrines useful for deliverance – the rest is error or lost time.  The Buddha said it in similar terms.  Our century needs this shouted in its ears.  It would be desirable to shout, loudly, another Buddhist rule: be your own lamp and disbelieve everything that you have not actually experienced; for our “science” applies this rule exclusively to a knowledge of external objects.”

“The Buddhist doctrines, with their common base and divergences, are elucidated by principles of superior utility and direct experience.  Mrs. David-Neel shows this essential very clearly with a marked and justified preference for the oral doctrines of the “Great Vehicle,” which gives adaptations of the Buddhist teaching to the social and religious traditions of the northern Buddhist countries.”

“After reading the book, and reflecting on its contents, I realized that these great principles have nothing which is especially Buddhist; it is only our civilization that ignores them.  Buddhism adopted them from the Hindu tradition, from which it later separated.  Why don’t we, then, take them from the Brahmanic sources, instead of searching for them in the Buddhist heresy?  The Hindu tradition, because it is a tradition, embodies all aspects of life, and in particular the stages, professions, ceremonies, and institutions.  The result is that the Brahmanical texts, with their purely Indian references, are not very accessible to the Occidental.  Whereas Buddhism, in separating itself from the social life of India, established a more universal expression; in appearance at least, for it will become truly universal only when it integrates itself into the quotidian life of the individual and his society: the Buddhist heresy becomes then a tradition culture, as in Tibet, in the form of Lamaism.  Heresy is the messenger of tradition: where it settles, it dies in fertilizing the seed of a new tradition.”

“It is necessary – and this is simply to take Buddhism to the letter – to judge the Buddhist teaching on its actual utility.  If not, certain of their formulas will be in great danger.  Thus the disdain of Buddhism (that of the South, at least) for social life; its mistrust (theoretically) of the old Hindu rule of the human stages, according to which a man could not “retire into the forest until having experienced a normal human life” and having seen “the children of his children”; and too, the formula of the “nonreality of the I,” which has lead unhappy theosophists to moral and spiritual annihilation.  A formula, so well corrected by this definition of nirvana, cited by Mrs. David-Neel: “Nirvana means the perception of reality as it truly is.  And when, by a complete change (a turning inside-out) in all methods of mental processes, there follows an understanding of oneself (by oneself) – this I call nirvana.”

“A philosopher might regret that the speculative doctrines of Buddhism, with its various cosmological and theological schools, have not been explicated by the author.  But this is of little importance, as it has been done in many other works.  Mrs. David-Neel, with good reason, wished to speak to us about Buddhist life and not about Buddhist “philosophy” (which thrives especially well in our European imagination).”

“In the appendix, the author gives numerous citations, translations from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan; and several pages – one would have liked more – on the Zen sect.  A patriarch of this sect said:
To look for illumination by separating oneself from this world, is as absurd as to search for the horns of a hare.
And:
Do not think of good, do not think of evil, but look, in the present moment, at your original face – the one you had before you were born.”

“For this citation alone, the book is a treasure, a treasure difficult to find.”

The other day I came home from a grocery run, opened the door (somehow), arms full of bags, and was hit by a subtle scent of rot.  Seems the garbage was in need of taking out.  How had I missed that before leaving earlier?  The rot must have somehow gone deeper while I was out. No big deal, let me put these groceries down, and then away, and pour myself a glass of this newly-purchased milk, sit down to check the mail, first the snail variety and then the electronic kind, then all sorts of wandering of the electronic variety, then suddenly hours have gone by and its time to go out and meet friends for diner.  Coming back from diner, I once again notice the smell.  Why had I forgotten about it when I’d been home before?  How could I have missed that stench?  This time, I tie up the bag and leave it by the door to take with me the next time I leave the house.  I also open up a few windows.  The air is fresh and clean, and the source of the rot set up for removal.

What’s been happening with my meditation practice lately (and, to be truthful, is my usual base-level meditation experience) is that I’ll sit for the allotted time, watching my breath, or opening to the unknown moment of now, following my thoughts as they flow along, watching-accepting-releasing bodily tension.  And that’s it.  Nothing arises, nothing seems to want to present itself to my attention, nothing demands that my focus turn toward it.  Just is-ness doing its thing, in this little section of timespace that this body/mind/nervous-system I seem to be inhabiting has the honor and responsibility of experiencing properly.  Then, I get up from the cushion and go about my day.  And minutes, hours, sometimes even a day or two later, something does come up.  My conditioned existence jostles a bit of garbage loose from the tightly gripping mindhand and there’s that sudden subtle shift.  Rot is released for removal, and the fresh air pouring in the windows is free to enter the space newly emptied.

So, I guess what I take away from this is that sometimes we need to simply get out of the house so we can re-attune our senses to notice just where that garbage that needs to be tied up and put out for disposal.  Both need not happen together.  By leaving our house behind, we we return, we can notice stenches previously ignored.

I had a thought recently that all mythology can be thought of as a sort of Iron Chef battle.  On the show, different chefs have access to the same pool of ingredients and must make a series of dishes using these ingredients to be placed before the show’s judges.  By the end of the show, the dishes prepared by each chef are widely different, despite the fact that they start with the same initial ingredients.

Similarly, any mythological system is taking the same basic ingredients, the human body, mind, heart, nervous system, and everything else that contributes to our subjective experience, and is trying to make a story out of it.  Originally, we all started out with basically the same thing.  Knowledge of the basics is often similar culture to culture, and while the basics can be quite powerful, they are often thought of as somehow “below” or “lesser” than more further developed systems.  And just as often ignored, to the detriment of those who do so.  One cannot remove the roots from a tree…

As these sort of “primitive” mythologies were further developed by different cultures, they became more and more complex and idiosyncratic.  Each culture developed their own distinctive mythological framework, and while certain myths are more readily comparable, this is only due to the fact that the respective cultures were already somewhat in tune with each other, having been acted upon by similar cultural and natural forces.

And from there, each mythic system breaks down further and further as time goes by, fragmenting and splintering, creating nooks and crannies, like some sort of fractal pattern.  And as Jospeh Campbell pointed out, all religions, all spiritual teachings, can be thought of as myths.  And so, by extension, all spiritual teachers can be thought of as myth-makers.   And we find ourselves right back at our original Iron Chef premise.  Each teacher takes the wealth of mythological systems accumulated over the centuries that humanity has been making such systems, and tries to prepare a dish that best pleases the palate of the modern spiritual seeker.  Except that, instead of just having their palates pleased, the best dishes are those that help the student to become a mythmaker themself.  And, at the ultimate end of the pattern of fractal splintering, we have each person, creating their own individual mythic structure with which to understand their life, and we trade different pieces back and forth between ourselves, each furthering the others development.

“And all cosmic truths become known to everyone on those planets because those beings who by their conscious efforts learn some truth or other share it with others, and in this way, little by little, all cosmic truths become known to all the beings of that planet, whatever may be their aspirations and degree of self-perfecting.” – Beelzebub’s Tales

“The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light.  He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation.  He does not demand light instead of darkness.  He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.”

(via Parabola’s email newletter.  Sign up here!)

I can see how a misunderstanding of this perfectly valid explanation of truth could lead to the impression that we are somehow unworthy of God’s love, or that we are somehow inherently flawed beings. Original sin rises from something like this, as does the first noble truth, but neither should be taken as a condemnation.  God loves us and wants us to be happy.  That is all there is.

If one is uncomfortable with the religious language, perhaps this could be another way to look at this same core concept.

Note on line 104: “‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ (literally ‘clear and not clear’) characterize the natural forces rejoined to their principle (the devas) or separated from it (the asuras).

The Natya Sastra is a Sanskrit text on the origin of the theater as a mystic art, attributed to the sage Bharata and considered by some as the fifth Veda.  It describes the creation of art of theater by Brahma, which he gives to the sage Bharata to be used to instruct people in the sacred.  The first play Bharata chooses to put on is the story of the defeat of the asuras by the devas.  He does such a good job that the asuras in the audience are offended and stop the actors in their tracts, necessitating an actual battle between them and the devas, in order to free the actors from paralysis.  Daumal, a Sanskrit scholar, surrealist poet, and student of Gurdjieff, offers his own translation this part this text with notes nearly as extensive as the text itself.  It is one of several works by Daumal in the above book.

What I find most interesting in the above note is the equating of “good and evil” with “clear and unclear”.  Elsewhere in the text, Daumal chooses to translate “devas” as “gods”, a common enough translation.  However, he also chooses to translate “asuras” as “titans” which, to me at least, is a new way of looking at the asuras.  In Greek mythology, the gods go to war with the titans, just as the devas do with the asuras in Hindu mythology.  Thus, this note shows points out a perspective that can take into account both the Hindu and the Greek mythological structures: that the natural forces rejoined with their principle (i.e.: the Absolute) are going to war with the natural forces who are not joined with the Absolute.  In this, one can also hear echoes of Satan’s “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” from Paradise Lost.

A caveat though, that, while the Greek, Hindu, and Christian depictions of the forces of good and evil are similar when looked at in this way, one cannot say that they each play the same larger role within the overarching mythic/social structure of the three cultures.  The stories, exploits, and explanations of the various divine and demonic beings clearly all come out of very different cultural contexts, and so cannot and should not be held up as “the same”. In the very least, if one looks at the chronology of the relationship between the two groups, one finds major differences, which, because they have to be dealt with in a logical manner, do much to color the relationship between the two groups, and between the concepts of “good” and “evil” within these mythic structures.  The devas and asuras are children of the same god, making them fairly equal in stature.  The greek gods, however, are children of the titans, meaning that “good” sprang out of “evil” and defeated it, while the Christian demons are fallen version of the angels, showing that “evil”, in fact, came from a movement away from “good”.  This is the power of the stories we tell ourselves…

However, while these beings all play different roles in their respective cultures, we can also look at mythology as a stage upon which humanity watches its own internal motivating forces as if they were external objective beings.  From this viewpoint, what becomes important are the places where the different mythic structures overlap, as it is there that we can hope to find ground common to all humanity.  Therefore, the myth of “good” and “evil” can been seen as the conflict between that which is “clear” and that which is “unclear”, or as that which is “connected” with the absolute and that which is “not connected”.  Evil, then, becomes not a fault or a sin or an inherent baseness, but rather a blindness, an unheeded loneliness, or an ignorance to be outgrown. The various forms of divine and demonic can be seen as these inherently human traits given regional clothing according to the style of the times, so to speak.

And so we have a battle between those internal motivating factors of humanity which are “connected with their principle” and those which are “not connected with their principle”.  It is telling, then, that in this text, the asuras are also called “obstructors”, “hinderers”, “prisoners”, “the cut”, “the separated”, “the bound”, and “the end”.  And it is also telling just how easily they are defeated by the devas…

Not from the Natya Sastra, but an interesting picture nonetheless.

When discomfort occurs, we often process some of it, not all.

Comfort also occurs, but soon thereafter, discomfort from the past arises with it.

This is because in the comfort, we have reached an equilibrium, and the past discomfort we could not process now demands our attention.

Discomfort in comfort is our chance to deal with the past.

Do not make the mistake of running from it, seeking further discomfort in order to escape the safety of equilibrium, hiding once again from the past.

You are only digging yourself deeper.

Scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains…. But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the (stress). They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm…. “It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms.” – From the NY Times

Contrary to previous research, the study found that people who engage in behaviors that increase competency, for example at work, school or the gym, experience decreased happiness in the moment, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of momentary stress. Despite the negative effects felt on an hourly basis, participants reported that these same activities made them feel happy and satisfied when they looked back on their day as a whole. This surprising find suggests that in the process of becoming proficient at something, individuals may need to endure temporary stress to reap the happiness benefits associated with increased competency. – From Science Daily

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. — Chinese Proverb

To exert control, you must create a solid place of tension from which to generate that force. Feel this in your mind and body when you try to “take control” of something.  And in fact, this solidification may lead to change in the world.  But, “know the male, yet keep to the female“, holding that force in place will not hold the change in place.  This is to confuse cause with effect.

“All composite things pass away…” – Buddha (famous last words…)

“By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement – evolutionary or devolutionary.  Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist.  Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes.  But it moves of itself when you do not move.  It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you” – One of Frank Herbert’s Zensunni admonitions.

“Peace is Letting Go-Returning to the Silence that cannot enter the realm of words because it is too pure to be contained in words. This is why the tree, the stone, the river, and the mountain are quiet.” -Malidoma Some (via Parabola Magazine‘s FB page)

(I)t’s not logically consistent that things are exactly perfect in this moment, and there is endless room for self-improvement. Those are contradictory statements… But I think here’s the thing about that paradox: if you fall into either side of the paradox, you fall from grace…. (I)f you fall into the addiction of self-improvement, then you really never enjoy this moment because you’re always trying to fix yourself.   On the other hand, you can fall into the other side, into the delusion of everything is perfect.  And that I would say is the delusion of enlightenment, which is very common in Advaita, nondual circles. This idea, “Well, there’s nobody here, there’s nothing to fix.” Well, how come your life looks so broken then? How come you’ve got relationships that don’t work and you can’t pay the rent if everything is perfect as it is? So…both are the truth: things are perfect and you are in a dance that is evolutionary. And when you are actually willing to be in the evolutionary dance, you can see there are endless things to fix and improve and work on as an art form—but it has no end. You’re in an endless process of upgrading that really has no final point of arrival. – Arjuna Ardagh (from IATE)

When Hyakujo Osho delivered a certain series of sermons, an old man always followed the monks to the main hall and listened to him. When the monks left the hall, the old man would also leave. One day, however, he remained behind, and Hyakujo asked him, “Who are you, standing here before me?” The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the old days of Kashyapa Buddha, I was a head monk, living here on this mountain. One day a student asked me, ‘Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?’ I answered, ‘No, he does not.’ Since then I have been doomed to undergo five hundred rebirths as a fox. I beg you now to give the turning word to release me from my life as a fox. Tell me, does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?” Hyakujo answered, “He does not ignore causation.” No sooner had the old man heard these words than he was enlightened. – The Gateless Gate, Koan 2

Let us play, but in reverse,
the Waltz of Eden’s Fall.
Perhaps we’ll yet regain that Garden,
coming through its Western wall.

“At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.”

(via a friend)

I wonder, can it work this way?  With either love of another person, or love of God, can we fill in the blanks with memories of past experiences?  Or must each new moment be lived as it is born and dies within and around us?  Although each moment is new, can memory serve any useful purpose, or is it only a stone which trips us up?  How to keep the levels separate, so that truth and memory can dance together, allowing truth to always and in everything trump memory, but without cutting away the nuance and skill which memory allows?

To the world-explorers, the myth-true lay over the horizon, or amongst the mountain peaks. Those of action sought the unknown there, and confronted truth and beauty.

Now, all horizons are inhabited by us, all mountainous values are known. What little empty spaces are left are dried up veins of pyrite, seeds spat out after the fruit has been devoured, for we know the ripe and golden flesh is long gone.

Where can we turn, to find our myth-true? Where is our unknown self? Where it has truly been all along. Within. The vast and ever-undiscovered country.