This truth has been transformative for me in the last week.
I rest in the heartspace (am I really saying that?), but I don't search anymore for sensations, or even emotions as much. I rest in my intention to achieve enlightenment for all beings. The fruit of that intention is not a sensation, a mood, a hormonal shift, all those these things happen, it's ultimately a stillness, and enduring truth.
It feels like emptiness, but it is as full as the cosmos is of stars.
This is liberation.
The body, used to practice sacred teachings,
Should not be harmed in meaningless pursuits.
By acting thus the wishes of all beings
Will swiftly and completely be attained.
-Shantideva
I'm going to write a new chapter in my meditation journal on my experience learning and following The Way of the Bodhisattva.
A large part of this, I know, will be renouncing activities that have been draining me of my spiritual energy. Specifically internet streaming.
Today's my birthday, and the gift that I've given myself this year is a week of adapted retreat, ending in a three day virtual retreat on The Wisdom of Emotions, led by Mingyur Rinpoche.
This was not the kind of deep meditation retreat I've been doing since I went to Dhamma Sutta in 2018. This year, I've had to adapt it to the realities of my father dying and be available for the support, emotional and other that my mother and my brother needed.
The most important thing I learned on this retreat is there is a sea of distance between believing in basic goodness at an intellectual level and believing in it truly and intuitively. This is the whole purpose of meditation, to know deeply in our heart, throughout our body and beyond, that we are good. Only when we do, will we intuitively see the good in others.
In my retreat of 2019, I had peak experiences, but I'm not sure I really saw the way out of the prison. And in the end I went back to many of my bad habits, although I did maintain my meditation practice.
In retreat of 2020, I moved down to the heart, and learned more about non-duality, but I'm not really sure that I understood then, or truly developed an understanding of what it was to live from the heart.
In one sense what had been missing from all of them is this simple practice of open awareness, which I let go of when I took the time to explore Theravada. But taking this time to experience concentrative meditation has had its learning benefits. I know have a felt understanding between the difference of object oriented and subject oriented meditation. And from that, I now have the felt experience of non-conceptual awareness, which I started to really feel and understand in the Mingyur Rinpoche teaching.
But it was in my exploration of my self-hatred, this thought and feeling that has been dogging me for as long as I remember that I feel like I finally found the key. No amount of concentration, or theory, is going to change the reality that I still believe, and thus feel that there is a fundamental badness in me. That needs to change if the bell of my "hate myself" mantra is going to decrease in number and intensity.
Rinpoche teaches there are three levels of mind, the emotional, the conceptual and the habitual. This lines up nicely with Lisa Barrett's theory of emotions. At the first level we have affect, the basic sensations. The conceptual mind sorts these into pleasant and unpleasant sensations and makes guesses and applies concept, words, labels to explain these sensations. The habitual mind makes them automatic so that we don't have to keep repeating the process.
If we want to change our habitual feelings from negative to positive, then we have to go down, find those bad guesses, and labels, and then make those positive emotions habitual.
Easier said than done. But Rinpoche believes that every habitual emotion, even the negative ones, contain the key to their transformation. Every sensation is a desire to be happy, or cease suffering. Our basic impulse is towards this state of joy and equanimity. We don't have to go in and re-label and conceive every emotion. We need to make intuitive this basic truth, that we are basically good and have access to a powerful transformative energy.
Meditation both formal and informal makes this transformation happen.
If I go back to my top insights of 2021, I remember the first one is that in knowing we don't have to change, we change.
Acceptance of our own mind, and of the powerful synergy of all minds together is the thing we need to make habitual, if we are to be liberated.