A couple of years ago, I started Joy of Level 3 with a meditation that felt literally groundbreaking. I forgot that the fire escape outside my window was being replaced, and ten minutes into my meditation I was meditating on jackhammers. Fortunately, my enthusiasm was such that by the end of my meditation it had become a blissful metaphor for a feeling of complete reconstruction and renewal.
I had a similar experience on this two day retreat, which I did while Ben was visiting his father in Israel. I forgot about the ongoing construction that is being done on the road outside my house. This is not jackhammers for half an hour. This is screechy old backhoes, scrapping metal and massive road digging. It was ceaseless and unpleasant, and I got through it with construction earplugs and white noise. But still, it felt like a very powerful metaphor for what was happening in this meditation. Nothing less than a complete rebuilding of the old and crappy roads in my mind, so that I can have a quicker and easier ride to absolute reality.
Mingyur Rinpoche defines AR as emptiness, a condition in which perceptions are intuitively recognized as an infinite and transitive flow of possible experiences. Most of my life is still spent in relative reality, "the sum of experiences arising from the mistaken idea that whatever you perceive is in and of itself real."
And so I live with this entrenched fear that I won't get what I want or need to have the happiness that I believe can only come from the things my society says will bring happiness. It's not that these societal values won't bring me pleasure or satisfaction, it's that because none of these things are inherently real, i.e. lasting, they can't be the basis of lasting happiness.
What lasts and what can only last is the flow presence, the flow of perception and also the emptiness and clarity in and around it. To recognize absolute well being more intuitively, I have to build a quicker, wider, better infrastructure.
Roads aren't built in a day, or two days. But I believe this weekend I have made a very good start. I have come away with a better understanding of the onion layers of reactivity. What I've been watching with calm abiding is not the pain, the thoughts, the feelings, but more importantly the mind's reactions to the pain, the thoughts the feelings. I am cultivating a bare awareness of bare awareness, hoping to catch the thoughts, feelings, sensations as they arise, and then once caught, do nothing much more than greet them with equanimity.
Hey nice to meet you, self-hatred that is really fear that I won't have what I want, even, especially absolute well-being! The more I recognize this fear, the more misguided it so obviously is. Absolute well-being isn't something you can have, hold, preserve. Absolute reality is a flow, an unfolding of events. The well-being is our ease with that flow. Self-hatred is a major pothole.
The emptiness I experience when my thoughts and fears and reactivity has settled down is wordless and indescribable. It has always bothered me that something wordless is something that can't be passed on. If you can't share it, what is the use of having it? But then I had the insight that this wordless experience is like my spiritual capital. The fruits are like the interest that grows from it. The fruits can be passed on. The joys and pleasure and transient things that I can enjoy more because I have the capital that is permanent, those I can pass on. The capital is something that I can inspire others to have. But I can't give it away. Everyone has to earn their own. Or better yet, everyone has to realize on their own that it is simply there for the taking. But I can't make them see it, take it, or have it.
