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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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May 21, 2015 - 09:14am PT
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Lovegasoline: I believe It's worth digging a little deeper to understand the variety of often very subtle interpretive biases - cultural, ideological, philosophical, and soteriological - and discussing them.
Thanks for your erudite posts. I enjoyed reading them. You seem to be pointing out how spiritual traditions becomes en vogue.
However, I think they may be particularly cognitive and interpretative. They may be a form of yarn-spinning.
Buddhism has been imported / exported more than once, and every time it was (or was essentially forced to), it changed and seemed to have gained new life. Some would suggest that is a form of growth and evolution. If consciousness is becoming conscious of itself, then one should think change and impermanence are to be expected. The new will displace the old. Looking at the new through old frameworks may well give rise to cynicism, which tends to be a form of critique.
On the other hand, there is no need to get involved in any interpretation or criticism when WHAT is right in front of one is all that there is. One can then recognize “self-liberation.”
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"...The particular method of Dzogchen is called the Path of Self-Liberation, and to apply it nothing need be renounced, purified, or transformed. Whatever arises as one's karmic vision is used as the path. The great master Pha Tampa Sangye [South Indian Yogin of the 11 century (ed.)] once said: It is not the circumstances which arise as one's karmic vision that condition a person into the dualistic state; it is a person's own attachment that enables what arises to condition him. If this attachment is to be cut through in the most rapid and effective way, the mind's spontaneous capacity to self-liberate must be brought into play. The term self-liberation should not, however, be taken as implying that there is some 'self' or ego there to be liberated. It is a fundamental assumption...at the Dzogchen level, that all phenomena are void of selfnature. 'Self -Liberation', in the Dzogchen sense, means that whatever manifests in the field of experience of the practitioner is allowed to arise just as it is, without judgement of it as good or bad, beautiful or ugly. And in that same moment, if there is no clinging, or attachment, without effort, or even volition, whatever it is that arises, whether as a thought or as a seemingly external event, automatically liberates itself, by itself, and of itself. Practicing in this way the seeds of the poison tree of dualistic vision never even get a chance to sprout, much less to take root and grow.
So the practitioner lives his or her life in an ordinary way, without needing any rules other than one's own awareness, always remaining in the primordial state through integrating that state with whatever arises as part of experience -- with absolutely nothing to be seen outwardly to show that one is practicing. This is what is meant by self-liberation, this is what is meant by the name Dzogchen - which means Great Perfection - and this is what is meant by non-dual contemplation, or simply contemplation....
(Dzogchen teacher, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche)
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"Self-liberation and liberation upon arising are not characteristics of thought; they are what happens when the nature of thought is recognized. So it’s not the case that you either recognize the self-liberation or don’t; self-liberation is the result of recognition. Normally, thoughts are anything but self-liberated. A thought arises, and it takes us over, and that produces another thought, and so on. On the basis of these thoughts, we generate further confused projections, on the basis of which we experience pleasure and pain. Now, when the nature of a thought is recognized, what happens to that thought is very much like, as is traditionally said, what happens when a snake untangles or unties the knots it’s tied itself into. The snake does it itself; no one has to come along and help the snake out. In the same way, when you look at the thought directly, for example, a thought of anger, and you see its nature, then the thought does not generate a further thought; the anger is not prolonged. As soon as the nature is seen, at that moment, the poisonous quality of the anger just disappears and dissolves; and that is self-liberation or liberation upon arising."
(Thrangu Rinpoche, "Pointing Out the Dharmakaya”)
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Even these are interpretations . . . even these are unnecessary.
Be well.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 21, 2015 - 12:26pm PT
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. . . it's useful from time to time to undertake a secondary inquiry and examine the whole enchilada to consider how the practice functions, what it's uses are, and how it's applied to the larger matrix of one's life (LG)
That's not metaphysics. And IMHO entirely appropriate for this thread. However, for instance, the idea that the "emptiness" one experiences as a meditator coincides with virtual particles in physics is, and belongs on the other threads. That's all I meant.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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May 23, 2015 - 10:59pm PT
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Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” applies to everyone.
Everything takes care of itself.
I just watched Eastwood’s sniper movie this Memorial Weekend, and I relate. Life does stuff to you, and you change and get maimed. The movie engineers moments that take me away where there are grand right and wrongs, where everything requires involvement.
Gripping stories, but none so remarkable as the one I find myself in. Nothing is quite real.
It's quite ok. There is a sense of free-falling freedom. Things are coming at me at just about what I can handle.
I wish I were younger. Challenges have become beautiful dancing partners.
Life is a movie in slow motion. Each of us is the most fascinating character in it. (Oh, geez.)
The movie on war this Memorial Day weekend reminds me how important it is to ease up a bit. Try to relax.
Lean-in . . . and ease up.
Trying to figure what THIS is all about is a waste of time and energy.
There are no choices in anything.
You just surf.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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May 24, 2015 - 09:22pm PT
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Trying to figure what THIS is all about is a waste of time and energy. There are no choices in anything
The death knell of free will . . .
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
(Adyashanti)
Be well,
:-)
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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I can't remember where but I read once that when you are enlightened, everyone else is enlightened too. Or something like that.
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deschamps
Gym climber
Flagstaff, AZ
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Does anyone else experience a physical sense of mental space when meditating?
I have been meditating for a couple of years now and am beginning to physically feel an open uncluttered feeling of space in my mind.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Does anyone else experience a physical sense of mental space when meditating?
Yeah, kinda. It's a real bummer though, when the garbage truck outside crashes the bins and the noise makes all that wonderful space collapse in an instant. Back to square one.
But seriously, I think that feeling is one of those experiences that keeps us coming back for more. There is a sense of peace there that is quite profound.
Try moving around in that space and maybe put some furniture in there and invite some guests. The fun never ends.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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"Yeah, kinda. It's a real bummer though, when the garbage truck outside crashes the bins and the noise makes all that wonderful space collapse in an instant. Back to square one."
I sat retreat last month and just as the retreat started with 20 plus of us sitting the neighbor starts jack hammering his patio. I found it hilarious but felt sorry for anyone thinking meditation should be done in a quiet environment. I have been sitting city located retreats for many years so have always had various noise happening at all different levels from raging mentally ill, to the geese across the street, to the guy that plays drums everyday for a few hours. One of the easiest and most effective ways to meditate is to just listen while you sit. And as you get better at "just listening " you will have a better chance of "just listening " (without judgement) outside of the meditation room.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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I once read of a Zen meditation hall where the Zen master intentionally kept a pack of dogs underneath the meditation area.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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I found it hilarious but felt sorry for anyone thinking meditation should be done in a quiet environment.
Is this where your practice has gotten you? lol.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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I found it hilarious but felt sorry for anyone thinking meditation should be done in a quiet environment.
Is this where your practice has gotten you? lol.
I had a sense of humor about the jackhammer and empathy for those that didn't.
How can practice get you somewhere? Moment to moment is where you are. Practice getting you somewhere is an illusion.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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I apologize. I'm just not that evolved. And I'm not Zen either. I'm not even sure I would want to be. Comparison is the thief of joy.
I have actually thought about deleting all my posts on this thread. I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm just going to sniff some glue with Locker.
I'm not digging what I hath wrought.
Especially that time I tried to meditoot while running naked through a patch of nettles on mushrooms.
Just kidding. Dude, You're Golden.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Wayno: It's a real bummer though, when the garbage truck outside crashes the bins and the noise makes all that wonderful space collapse in an instant. Back to square one.
Sure, that happens. :-) It’s kinda funny, isn’t it?
I get that where I live in a downtown high rise. We have lots of construction going on here in Seattle these days. A few months ago, I counted 28 cranes at work in the downtown area. They’re tearing up the streets all over the place, putting up towers, burying lines, hauling dirt in big long trucks, and what not. Then there are the ambulance drivers, firemen, and police who turn their sirens on when heading out for donuts. Drivers down on the streets get incensed at the traffic (it can take me 25 minutes to get out of the downtown area at the wrong time of day), and their honking regularly getting their frustrations out. So when I sit in the morning, there’s always something that’s arising in consciousness.
Everything is practice—or noticing.
If you sit in the quietest room made, or in the darkest room possible, or lay in a sensory deprivation tank, you continue to get full-on experience. Experience can’t be turned off, even when you’re asleep or under surgery. I go to New York, Tokyo, school, or close myself into a basement at midnight with no lights on, and experience is ON.
It’s not what you’re sitting in around you that’s worth noting. It’s the noticing that’s worth noticing.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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You know Mike, since you are in Seattle, you should join us(Seattle supertopo wining and dining group) and share some of the good times. Or let's just have a beer sometime.
Wayno
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Just sent you an email. Cool.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 14, 2015 - 11:38pm PT
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My little insight in my teaching in business is how I talk about (i) a firm's performance and (ii) descriptions of “what is” (a firm’s approach to its environment). Both of those tell us everything we need to know. The rest is not knowledge, but it might be insight from our models. But those models do not stipulate what we should do. That takes a vision, and we all can have our own. What would that be?
Are we in synch with reality? It’s a dance. How well can we dance? Are we moving forward, backward, side-to-side with what draws us forward and pushes us back?
It’s like movement on stone, this perfect give-and-take with everything.
If we could just relax.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 16, 2015 - 10:49am PT
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Here is a really well spoken interview about Buddhism and psychedelics from Kokyo Henkels facebook site. Alot of clear simple teaching/statements. Enjoy!
BUDDHISM AND THE PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY
Interview with Terence McKenna for Zig Zag Zen
ALLAN BADINER: You have emerged as the leading spokesperson for the use of psychedelics. What is the history of your encounter with Buddhism?
TERENCE MCKENNA: Like so many people in the sixties, I came up through D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen, which were very popular at a certain point. And then early on because of my art historical bent, I became interested in Tibetan Buddhism. But my interest was not exactly Buddhism. It was more the shamanic pre-Buddhist Tibet phenomenon of the Bön religion—which grew out of the shamanic culture of pre-Buddhist Tibet. I found among Tibetan Buddhists a lot of prejudice against the Bön. They were definitely second-class citizens inside theocratic Tibet, and they still are.
BADINER: Buddhist practice didn’t attract you?
MCKENNA: Buddhist psychology was very interesting to me. I came to it through the works of Herbert Günther, who was a Heideggerian originally, and then found Mahayana thought parallel to his Heideggerianism. I was influenced by a book called Tibetan Buddhism Without Mystification, published later as Treasures of the Tibetan Middle Way, which contrasted paradoxically differing schools of Buddhist thought; Nagarjuna’s writings on nothingness were also a big influence.
BADINER: What did you make of the Abhidhamma—the psychological com- ponent of Buddhist teaching?
MCKENNA: The Buddhist style of talking about the constructs of the mind is now a universalist style. The puzzle to me is how Buddhism achieves all of this without psychedelics; not only how but why, since these dimensions of experience seem fairly easily accessed, given hallucinogenic substances and plants, and excruciatingly rare and unusual by any other means.
BADINER: How would Buddhism fit into your notion of the psychedelic society
that you often talk about?
MCKENNA: Well, compassion is the central moral teaching of Buddhism and, hope- fully, the central moral intuition of the psychedelic experience. So at the ethical level I think these things are mutually reinforcing and very good for each other. Compassion is what we lack. Buddhism preaches compassion. Psychedelics give people the power to overcome habitual behaviors.
Compassion is a function of awareness. You cannot attain greater aware- ness without necessarily attaining greater compassion, whether you’re attaining this awareness through Buddhist practice or through psychedelic experience.
BADINER: So compassion and awareness are the twin pillars of both Buddhism and the psychedelic society.
MCKENNA: Compassion and awareness. To my mind the real contrast between Buddhism and psychedelic shamanism is between a theory out of which experi- ences can be teased and an experience out of which theory can be teased.
BADINER: Well, this is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, to abandon belief systems for direct experience.
MCKENNA: Yes, but like an onion, Buddhism has many layers. For instance, folk Buddhism is obsessed with reincarnation. Philosophical Buddhism knows there is no abiding self. How can these two things be reconciled? Logically they can’t, but religions aren’t logical. Religions are structures in the mass psyche that fulfill needs not dictated by reason alone. Any complex, philosophical system makes room for self-contradiction.
BADINER: One of the significant contributions Buddhism offers this culture is that it creates a context for the experience of death. You have said the aware- ness of death is one of the most important insights that the psychedelic experience offers. Are they similar perspectives?
MCKENNA: Well, they’re similar in that I think the goal is the same. The goal, the view of both positions is that life is a preparation for death and that this prepa- ration is a specific preparation. In other words, certain facts must be known, certain techniques must be mastered, and then the passage out of physicality and on to whatever lies beyond is more smoothly met. So in that sense they are very similar, and they seem to be talking about the same territory.
BADINER: You’ve said that the twin horrors or twin problems of Western society are ego and materialism, combining in a kind of naive monotheism. Why is Buddhism any less a remedy than psychedelics?
MCKENNA: Well, it’s less a remedy only in the sense that it’s an argument, not an experience.
BADINER: But it’s a series of practices that enable experience.
MCKENNA: Yeah, but you have to do it. The thing about psychedelics is the inev- itability of it once you simply commit to swallowing the pill. But Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism, which are fatally destroying the planet. I mean, it’s not an abstract thing. The most important thing Buddhism can do for us is to show us inner wealth and to de-emphasize object fetishism, which is a very primitive religious impulse. It’s an aboriginal religious impulse to fetishize objects and Buddhism shows a way out of that.
BADINER: The way you describe ecstasy has kind of a Buddhist flavor . . . the edge or the depth of human feeling that includes suffering. This resonates with the Buddhist notion that nirvana encompasses samsara.
MCKENNA: True ecstasy is a union of opposites. It’s the felt experience of paradox, so it is exalting and illuminating at the same time that it’s terrifying and threat- ening. It dissolves all boundaries.
BADINER: Are you anticipating the emergence of a Buddhist psychedelic culture?
MCKENNA: No, it’s a Buddhist, psychedelic, green, feminist culture! I’ve always felt that Buddhism, ecological thinking, psychedelic thinking, and feminism are the four parts of a solution. These things are somewhat fragmented from each other, but they are the obvious pieces of the puzzle. An honoring of the feminine, an honoring of the planet, a stress on dematerialism and compassion, and the tools to revivify and make coherent those three.
BADINER: The tools being psychedelic substances?
MCKENNA: Yes. It would be very interesting to find Buddhists who were open- minded enough to go back and start from scratch with psychedelics and not do the ordinary “We’ve got a better way” rap, but to say, “Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Let’s go through these things with all our practice and all our under- standing and all our technique and put it with botany, chemistry, and all this ethnography.” And then what could you come up with? If, as Baker Roshi says, people advance quickly with psychedelics, then advance them quickly with psychedelics. And then when they reach a point where practice and method are primary, practice and method should move to the fore. And maybe there are several times when these things would switch position.
BADINER: You don’t see any contradiction in being a Buddhist and exploring psychedelics?
MCKENNA: No, I would almost say, how can you be a serious Buddhist if you’re not exploring psychedelics? Then you’re sort of an armchair Buddhist, a Buddhist from theory, a Buddhist from practice, but it’s sort of training wheels practice. I mean, the real thing is, take the old boat out and give it a spin.
BADINER: Maybe you should try taking out the old zafu for a spin!
MCKENNA: Or, try both!
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