I hate myself

This week Dan Harris interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche on 10% happier.  At the end of the interview Rinpoche led a guided meditation in just being what you are. "When you know you don't need to change. That's when you change." 

I put a lot of energy into trying to stop hating myself, but it occurs to me this morning, that maybe I don't need to change this part of my mind. Self-hatred can be that lump of coal in my heart that is really a diamond.  It bring me right to the source of my vulnerability. 

What would happen if I truly believed that I didn't need to change this?

And what if my meditation going forward was truly about accepting what was, the conceptual mind, the confusion, the striving, despite all my effort a non-striving? 

I had a vision of myself this morning, like if I were one of those people so rich that they just have a bank account that builds wealth without work.

Could I get to the point where I saw many times, everyday, that I am this rich? That I will be until my last breath.  

When I can greet this statement "I hate myself" like a lifetime loving companion, with the love I would feel to  a long lost friend who just walked through the door, I will know I am here.

The Secret to the Direct Approach

I'm already doing it. 

I've always been doing it. 

Trying to practice the three vital points, and reading a book by Byron Katie, about her experience living in non-dual awareness, and definitely having some good meditations. 

I came across a book this morning that seemed appropriate to my journey "Standing As Awareness" by Greg Goode.  Published the same year that I started this blog, his approach is to simply make intuitive the belief that Awareness is always aware of itself, with or without our striving.  We need to gradually fall in love with that expansive awareness and feel it as an expanded self that is too big to ever be an object of awareness. In this approach there is no need for "self" improvement, because the self is the totality of everything, the thinking, not the thinker. Just be what is. 

I've also been reading Byron Katie's "A Mind At Home With Itself," her version of the Diamond Sutra (the oldest book in the world).  I've been practicing Katie's The Work to see if it can bring my closer to the non-dual awareness that she lives in.  And I've been applying Dzogchen to my most pernicious thought "I hate myself."  Katie suggest questioning this thought. "Is it true?" and then pondering what it would feel like if I didn't believe it.  The closer I am to believing that I am actually this bigger process of awareness, rather than this abstract object of awareness (my self), the harder is to belief this thought "I hate myself."  It doesn't make sense because if I am Awareness, not the object, or even the witness, just the big expansive process of consciousness, then there can't be an "I" to hate with this other "I."   

And if I'm not an I that can hate myself, then others can't be objects of my hatred. 

Examining self-hatred in primordial consciousness

Last week I discovered Dzogchen, direct pointing out of primordial consciousness. 

I reduced it down to the 3 vital points: 

1. recognize this consciousness free of concepts
2. Be in the decision to be one with this consciousness
3. Know that this consciousness is self-liberating

Now my work is examining the most pernicious and painful concepts as they arise. For me this has always been self-hatred. With all my work and Vipassana, I still hear this inner, poisonous mantra regularly throughout my day, "I hate myself."  I don't think I hate myself, and yet it's there ringing like a church bell. 

So be it.  The seeds of liberation are in there somewhere.  I feel that hatred, I know that it's a conditioned creating. I don't believe that hatred exists in this first consciousness.  Hatred feels real, but it's just a bad dream and I believe I can wake up from it. 

In fact two nights ago I had a very visceral self-hatred dream.  A woman who I saw in the dream as someone sweet, but fundamentally ignorant, started telling me what a fraud I was. I was hurt, shocked and reduced to a contemptuous, scornful tirade of telling her how unworthy her viewpoint was of mine, or anyone's consideration. I felt deeply ashamed of myself of attacking this woman. Tried to make it up to everyone by doing dishes. 

There you go, my life story in a nutshell. 

So the question for this week is who would I be if I didn't deep down believe that I hate myself?

Dzogchen

This week I discovered a new practice that has changed everything.

It's called the "three words that strike the vital point." I learned it Mind Beyond Death by Dzogchen Dolop. The objective of this practice is to unite us immediately and permanently with the primordial state of consciousness.

It's quite simple, but extremely effective and it works for me.  In a nutshell the process is

1.  recognize that there is a primordial state beyond all concepts and be with it.
2. Decide to let this state be the one thing, transcending the usual neurological categories of unpleasant/pleasant, low and high arousal. 
3. Be confident that this state is self-liberating, that resting in pure, primordial awareness will liberate us naturally. 

The meditations that I've done in this state of been effortless, deeply peaceful, and timeless. I know there are still concepts arising. But I know that beneath these concepts is a pure vast, eternal boundless and uniting consciousness. From time to time the self disappears into it. Right now I'm still in the self, but feeling a lot of tingly kalapas that tell me my body rooted concepts are dissolving. 

It's exciting, but of course the excitement won't last. And that's a good thing. When pure consciousness becomes ordinary consciousness, I am home. 

Timelessness

This morning in meditation I truly lost my sense of time.  I couldn't tell if the chime that signals I'm  five minutes from the end of my meditation was the chime that signals that I'm 35 minutes from the end of meditation.  I suspected meditation was almost over, but it flew by so fast I really couldn't tell.

So I rested in this place of not knowing. I'm going to have to get used to that place because the direct approach that I'm now on means giving up the fixations I'm used to. Fixations on my sense of threat. Fixations on this "self" I want to improve. Fixations on this sense of not having enough, being enough, doing enough.  These are my guideposts to the place that I know, which is a place of struggle and suffering.

I don't know this new place, even though my true, absolute self is home. In the end that's just a concept too.  I can't imagine ever forgetting what I've learned in the last few weeks, that this place of affect is my escape from the painful patterns that have become my conditioned life. But I know I can, so I write this down.

Yesterday I understood from Stephan Bodian's book that I have these fixated themes in my life. Well actually one fixated theme.  That I'm under attack.  I don't like criticism.  I particularly don't like being criticized for giving criticism. The theme that I'm fixated on is that I can't live a life of candour, but also that I can't handle a life of candour.  My mind brings me back again and again to this.  This it not a failing on the part of my mind. It's simply bringing me back to this place that I need to resolve and let go of.  Or at least loosen, if I am to live a life with more ease and balance.  I need to learn, rather than struggle with it, I can let it pass through.

But I also need to get down to the core emotions that are at the root of this reactive pattern.  I care about myself.  I want to protect myself from attack, and I want to protect others from attack. I am fixated on this theme because I want safety, and I want others to be safe.

First I need to know this place of enough.  Or know, more deeply, that I don't know it.

Awakened Awareness

I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to simply give myself permission to rest in awakened awareness and just be what happens.

I guess I needed a book like Beyond Mindfulness by Stephan Bodian.   He is an advocate for the direct approach, making awareness the object of awareness, and relaxing into absolute well-being, over relentless scanning.

I've had this book for a while in my virtual library, and I even started reading it a few months back. But for whatever reason it didn't take.  I suppose I still felt a certain loyalty to the Goenka method. After all I had made it something of a new year's resolution to follow it religiously. 

This concept of locality changed that a little.  And thinking about Mingyur Rinpoche's description of happiness as Absolute well-being. After spending a week just being in the energy of my gut, I felt inspired to explore the vast field of consciousness anchored by this lucid anchored energy at my core.

Also, I'm tired of constantly trying to get somewhere. Tired of travelling.  The Adventure has now become one of finding my way back home.

locality

Been thinking a lot about the truth that data works most efficiently when it is localized, i.e closeby, easily accessed.  This is why, for instance, AI is most powerful when all the data is stored in one place and why Amazon and google aren't going anywhere, anytime soon.

It's why to make well-being absolute , we have to bring our attention to the actual place where that well-being is produced.  The gut, the serotonin motherlode

I've been experimenting with renewed attention to my dan tien for the last week.  It's very powerful. I feel the intensity of that energy.

But I've also been experimenting this weekend with the direct path.  Being aware of global awareness, the reality that there is inter being and that there is awareness outside the material location of well-being. This big awareness that unites us will always be more powerful, collectively, than what we can harness in one body. In the best and wisest world, both yield their power towards the liberation of all.

The use of locality should ultimately be the ability to create global interdependence and sustainable peace throughout the world. In the same way we focus energy in the dan tien so that we can engage with everything that exists outside the centre.  We focus on the the dan tien so that in time we can let go of the dan tien.

Only

To whatever degree we know that we deeply have what we need within ourselves, we will let go...