Random Ramblings

Today's reading was mostly a meditation on interbeing. "At first it seems as though things exist outside one another period the sun is not the moon. This Galaxy is not another Galaxy. You are outside me. The father is outside the son. But looking deeply, we see that things are interwoven. We cannot take the rain out of the flower or the oxygen out of the tree. We cannot take the father out of the son or the son out of the father. We cannot take anything out of anything else. We are the mountains and rivers, we are the sun and stars. Everything inter- is. This is what the physicist David Bohm called the implicate order. At first we see only the explicate order, but as soon as we realize that things do not exist outside one another, we touch the deepest level of the cosmic. We realized that we cannot take the water out of the wave. And then we cannot take the wave out of the water. Just as the wave is the water itself, we are the ultimate.

“Many still believe that God exists separately from the cosmos, his creation. But you cannot remove God from yourself; You cannot remove the ultimate from yourself. Nirvana is there within you. If we want to touch the ultimate, we have to look within our own body and not outside. Contemplating deeply the body from within, we can touch reality in itself. If your mindfulness and concentration are deep as you practice walking meditation in nature, or as you contemplate a beautiful sunset for your own human body, you can touch the true nature of the cosmos.”

I think I miscounted the number of bodies in this chapter because we're up to six and it is still not done! I'm going to do three more this morning.

The third body is the spiritual practice body, or the Dharma body. “We cultivate our spiritual practice body-- which we can also call our Dharma body-- by cultivating the seeds of awakening and mindfulness in our daily life... It is up to each one of us to develop a strong spiritual practice body every day. Every time you take 1 peaceful step or one mindful breath, your spiritual practice grows. Every time you embrace a strong emotion with mindfulness and restore your clarity and calm, it grows. Then, in difficult moments, your spiritual practice body will be right there with you when you need it.”

“My physical body may not last very long, but I know that my spiritual practice body, my Dharma body, is strong enough to continue for a very long time period it has helped me through so much. If it were not for my Dharma body, if it were not for my practice of mindfulness, I would never have been able to overcome the great difficulties, pain, and despair I have faced in my life. I have encountered wars and violence, my country was divided, my society and Buddhist community were wrought apart, and we encountered so much hatred discrimination and despair. It is thanks to my Dharma body that I've been able to survive, and not only survive but overcome all these difficulties, and grow and transform through them.”

The fourth body is the community body. He talks about meeting Martin Luther King junior and talking about building a “beloved community.” “a beloved community is a community of people who share the same aspiration and want to support each other to realize that aspiration. If we want to grow on our spiritual path, we need a community and spiritual friends to support and nourish us. And in return we support and nourish them, like cells in the same body.”

The fifth body is the body outside the body. “Each one of us can be present in many places in the world. We can be here and at the same time in a prison period we can be here and also in a distant country where the children suffer from malnutrition. We don't have to be present with our physical body. When I write a book, I transform myself into thousands of me that can go a little bit everywhere. Every book becomes my body outside the body.” He then talks about prisoners who have “learned to breathe, to walk, and to speak with kindness and compassion. These prisoners are also me. They are my body, because they have read my books; They are practicing what they have read and are continuing me. They are my body outside my body.”

The sixth body is the continuation body. “Throughout our life we produce energy. We say things and do things, and every thought, every word, and every act carries our signature. What we produce as thoughts, as speech, as action, continues to influence the world, and that is our continuation body. Our actions carry us into the future. We are like stars whose light energy continues to radiate across the cosmos millions of years after they become extinct. New line when you produce the thought of hatred, anger, or despair, it harms you and it also harms the world. None of us wants to be continued like that. We all want to produce thoughts of compassion, understanding, and love. When you are able to produce a thought of compassion and understanding it is healing and nourishing for yourself and for the world.... our words our energy that has a ripple effect far beyond our imagining. We must learn the art of communicating so our speech can bring about love, reconciliation, and understanding.”

Today I begin The Art of Living, which is another book by Thich Nhat Hanh, based on lectures he gave in Plum Village a couple of years before his 2014 stroke. The introduction starts off by talking about how astronauts appreciated the beauty of the earth when they were in space.

“Seeing its beauty and wonder, astronauts feel great love for the whole earth. They know billions of people they're living out their lives on this little planet, with all their joy, happiness, and suffering. They see violence, wars, famine, and environmental destruction. At the same time, they see clearly that this wonderful little blue planet, so fragile impressions, is irreplaceable. As one astronaut put it, “we went to the moon as technicians; We returned as humanitarians.”

“Science is the pursuit of understanding, helping us to understand distant stars and galaxies, our place in the cosmos, as well as the intimate fabric of matter, living cells, and our own bodies. Science, like philosophy, is concerned with understanding the nature of existence and the meaning of life. Spirituality is also a field of research and study. We want to understand ourselves, the world around us, and what it means to be alive on earth. We want to discover who we really are, and we want to understand our suffering. Understanding our suffering gives rise to acceptance in love, and this is what determines our quality of life. We all need to be understood and to be loved. And we all want to understand and to love.

“Spirituality is not religion. It is a path for us to generate happiness, understanding, and love, so we can live deeply each moment of our life. Having a spiritual dimension of our lives does not mean escaping life or dwelling in a place of bliss outside the world but discovering ways to handle life difficulties and generate peace, joy, and happiness right where we are, on this beautiful planet. The spirit of practicing mindfulness, concentration, and insight in Buddhism is very close to the spirit of science. We don't use expensive instruments but rather our clear mind and our stillness to look deeply and investigate reality for ourselves with openness and non discrimination.”

The other three paramitas are exertion, meditation, and wisdom.

"When we begin to practice exertion, we see that sometimes we can do it and sometimes we can't. The question becomes, how do we connect with inspiration? How do we connect with the spark and joy that's available in every moment? Exertion is not like pushing ourselves. It's not a project to complete or erase we have to win. It's like waking up on a cold, so we did in a mountain cabin ready to go for a walk but knowing that first you have to get out of bed and make a fire. You'd rather stay in the cozy bed, but you jump out and make the fire because the brightness of the day in front of you is bigger than staying in the bed...

"If we really knew how unhappy it was making this whole planet that we all tried to avoid pain and seek pleasure- how that was making us so miserable and cutting us off from our basic heart and our basic intelligence- then we would practice meditation as if our hair were on fire. We would practice as if a big snake had just landed in our lap. There wouldn't be any question of thinking we had a lot of time and we could do this later....

"When we sit down to meditate, we can connect with something unconditional- a state of mind, a basic environment that does not grasp or reject anything. Meditation is probably the only activity that doesn't add anything to the picture. Everything is allowed to come and go without further embellishment. Meditation is a totally nonviolent non aggressive occupation. Not filling the space, allowing for the possibility of connecting with unconditional openness- this provides the basis for real change period you might say this is setting ourselves a task that is almost impossible. Maybe that is true. But on the other hand, the more we sit with this impossibility, the more we find it's always possible after all."

Tonglen
I kind of want to copy this whole chapter, but I will try to be more restrained.
“In order to feel compassion for other people, we have to feel compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kind, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean, you name it-to have compassion and to care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding those things in ourselves. In fact, our whole attitude towards pain can change period instead of fending it off or hiding from it, we could open our hearts and allow ourselves to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.

“Tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering- our own and that which is all around us, everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming our fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be.

“We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person whom we know to be hurting and wish to help. For instance, if we know of a child who is being hurt, we breathe in with the wish to take away all of that child's pain and fear. Then as we without, we send happiness, joy, or whatever will relieve that child. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others pain so they can be well and having more space to relax and open- breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever the heel we could bring them relief and happiness. Often, however, we don't do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance our anger, or whatever our personal pain happens to be just then.

“At that point we can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what we are feeling and for millions of other people just like us who are at that very moment feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe we are able to name our pain. We recognize it clearly as terror for revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So we breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion, and we send out relief or whatever opens up the space for ourselves and all those countless others. Maybe we can't name what we're feeling. But we can feel it-the tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness, or whatever. We simply contact what we are feeling and breathe in, take it in, for all of us- and send out relief for all of us.... Tonnglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In the process, we become liberated from very ancient patterns of selfishness. We begin to feel love for both ourselves and others; We will begin to take care of ourselves and others.

“Tonglen can be done for those who are ill, those who are dying or who have died, those who are in pain of any kind. It can be done as a formal meditation practice or right on the spot of any time period we are out walking and we see someone in pain- right on the spot we can begin to breathe in that person's pain we send out relief period or we are just as likely to see someone in pain and look away. The pain brings up our fear and anger; It brings up our resistance and confusion. So on the spot we can do tonglen for all the people who are just like ourselves, all those who wish to be compassionate but instead are afraid- who wish to be brave but instead are cowardly. Rather than beating ourselves up, we can use our personal stuckness as a stepping stone to understand what people are up against all over the world. Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us. Use what seems like poison as medicine. We can use our personal suffering as a path to compassion for all beings.

Formal tonglen has 4 stages:
1. Connect with bodhicitta--rest your mind briefly, for a second or two, in a state of openness or stillness
2. Work with texture. Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy- a sense of claustrophobia- and breathe out of feeling cool, bright, and light- a sense of freshness.
3. Work with a personal situation- any painful situation that's real to you. Traditionally begin by starting with someone you care about and wish to help, but if you're stuck, you can do the practice for the pain you're feeling and simultaneously all like you who feel that kind of suffering. For example, if you're feeling inadequate, breathe that in for yourself and all the others in the same boat, and send out confidence and adequacy
4. finally, make the take again and sending out bigger. If you are doing tonglen for someone you love, extended out to those who are in the same situation as your friend.

It's the weekend, so back to Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is true. This chapter is about the mental modules that rule your life. In the previous chapter he had been talking about how what we think of the self is not according to modern psychology a unified whole, but we have different sorts of mental modules. In this chapter he gives some examples of that, talking about psychological studies where people make different choices if they've just watched a romantic movie versus a scary movie, etc. He suggests that different emotions can trigger what he calls “sub selves”- different modules that orient us to make different sorts of decisions. For example, he cites a study of jealousy, which activates all sorts of different physiological processes to prepare for violence; mental processes that involve scrutinizing memory and the behavior of partners; shame programs; searching for new mate programs; etc.

So the basic idea is that our emotions don't just shape the way we perceive things, but may actually trigger a whole set of new behavioral and other aspects of the mind, a different module or sub self; some of these are connected to evolutionary psychology. So he connects this to an example of a psychological experiment asking whether people are willing to defer receiving $100 now so they can receive $150.00 in the future. Men who had just seen pictures of an attractive woman were less likely to take that trade. He hypothesizes that “during evolution meant with access to resources such as food and with high social status were better able to attract mates. So if there is indeed a mate acquisition module, you'd expect it to feature the following algorithm: men who see signs of a near term courtship opportunity take advantage of any near term resource acquisition opportunities, even if that means forgoing more distant opportunities. They want their resources- which in modern environment means cash- now.”

He says we shouldn't get too hung up on the subselves model because there's a lot of movement between the different missions, but I do think the sub selves he quotes- and the authors are Kenrick and Griskevicius--Are pretty interesting. The missions are quote self protection, made attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends) kin care, social status, and disease avoidance.
One point P repeats a number of times is that we're not aware of these modules, and that means we are often unaware of things that trigger ourselves to make different decisions. The psychological studies indicate that, just as when you've split the two hemispheres of the brain and one side is not aware of a trigger on the other side, the mind makes up a narrative to explain choices it may not understand. So we're pretty unaware of how our motives are being shaped by these things. So this is one of the reasons why he says of the five hour aggregates, consciousness really can't be seen as the CEO in charge of everything. Because the decisions are often being made at a level beyond your conscious state of awareness.

I also read the chapter called how thoughts think themselves. I love that he opens this with the difference between the pasana mindfulness meditation Tibetan visual imagery meditation and Zen koan meditation, by saying quote Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and vipassana is for psychologists.” This is why he says mindfulness is good for studying the human mind, or at least your own mind.

He suggests that mindfulness meditation might help us notice the modular mind. He's pretty funny. He says here's an experiment just follow these four easy steps: one period sit down on a cushion 2. Try to focus on your breath 3. (This step is the easiest) Fail to focus on your breathing very long period 4. Notice what kind of thoughts are making you fail. Then he has a whole list of things your mind is wandering to think about: imagining dates with attractive people, imagining encounters you've had an analyzing them, indulging in revenge fantasies, imagining the beer you're going to have when you get home, thinking about the great shot you hit on the golf course, worrying about a relative, etc.

In addition to all of these thoughts being about you or your relationship to other people, about the past and the future, they are also examples of modules- attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing status, caring for kin, social affiliations, etcetera. Perhaps the wandering mind is different modules competing for your attention. He also suggests that if you're able to go on a prolonged meditation retreat, “it will seem more and more like your mind isn't wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders."

So while he quotes meditation teachers as saying thoughts think themselves, what he actually believes is that modules think thoughts. Or rather, “modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in something stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts --that is they enter consciousness.”

“Being compassionate is a pretty tall order. All of us are in relationships every day of our lives, but particularly if we are people who want to help others- people with cancer, people with aids, abused women or children, abused animals, anyone who's hurting-something we soon notice is that the person we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through the door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can't handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to benefit others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; Will be confronted with ourselves.

“Roshi Bernard Glassman is a Zen teacher who runs a project for the homeless in Yonkers NY. Last time I heard him speak, he said something that struck me: he said he doesn't really do this work to help others; He does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.

“Although this is ordinary Buddhist thinking, it's difficult to live it. It's even difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves, and what we reject in ourselves is what we're going to reject out there. But that, in a nutshell, this is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves, will hate in others period to the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at.”

“We think that if we just meditate it enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing and feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, with some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. During this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, someone’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we're going to arrive at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce and 700 people are coming for lunch.

“The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache and sometimes you feel 100% healthy period from an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, but because it involves rejecting a lot of your base of experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man's land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh period to live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yamara is fear of death, it's actually fear of life.... Without the maras, would the Buddha have awakened? Would he have attained enlightenment without them? Weren't they his best friends, since they showed him who he was and what was true? All the maras point the way to being completely awake and alive by letting go, by letting ourselves die moment after moment, at the end of each out breath. When we wake up, we can live fully without seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, without recreating ourselves when we fall apart. We can let ourselves feel our emotions as hot or cold, vibrating or smooth, instead of using our emotions to keep ourselves ignorant and dumb. We can give up on being perfect and experience each moment to its fullest."

Still reading Why Buddhism is true ; the two chapters I read today were on No-self and theories of the mind from psychology. This section is a little basic because he's assuming people don't know about the teaching of no-self, and he goes through an early sermon of the Buddha about the 5 aggregates and how we're not really any of them. The only part of this that stuck out for me was that one of the Buddha's main arguments is not the impermanence of every part (though I'm sure that's in the sermon), but rather that we're not really in control of our form, our perceptions, our feelings, our mental formations, etc.

That's important because the modern psychology parallel is that we're not really in control of our brains and how they drive us; he goes into a lot of psychological studies (people with split left and brain hemispheres, etc) of how we often really don't know what's driving us, and modern theories that are brains are modular (split into a number of competing processes with none of them in true control). I think this is leading up to something but I felt that two chapters were enough--so more next weekend!

“Can we also celebrate egolessness? Often we think of egolessness as a great loss, but it's actually a gain. The acknowledgement of egolessness, our natural state, is like regaining eyesight after having been lined or regaining hearing after having been death. Egolessness has been compared to rays of the sun. With no solid sun, the rays just radiate outward. In the same way, wakefulness naturally radiates out when we're not so concerned with ourselves. Egolessness is the same thing as basic goodness or Buddha nature, our unconditional being. It's what we always have and never really lose.

"could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness period from an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It's covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.

"So how do we celebrate impermanence, suffering, and egolessness in our everyday lives? When impermanence presents itself in our lives, we can recognize it as impermanence.... Then we can recognize our reaction to impermanence. This is where curiosity comes in. Usually we just react habitually to events in our lives. We become resentful or delighted, excited or disappointed. There's no intelligent involved, no cheerfulness. But when we recognize impermanence as impermanence, we can also notice what our reaction to impermanence is. This is called mindfulness, awareness, curiosity, inquisitiveness, paying attention. Whatever we call it, it's a very helpful practice, the practice of coming to know ourselves completely."