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.

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...

Pith fear

In my meditation this morning I revisited one of the most groundbreaking insights of last weekend's retreat.  At the pit of all my suffering is the fear that I won't get what I want.  But if I rest calmly in that subtle knot of fear, I connect with the deepest reward of living, that complex loop and flow of neurotransmitters in the limbic area of my brain, serotonin, dopamine and neuropeptides.

This is the mechanism of the grasping.  The reptilian brain fears that it won't get what it wants, the body responds with anxiety, the brain reaches for any of the multitude of options that exist in my current landscape.  And the next thing you know I'm eating cake and watching Game of Thrones.

More and more my formal meditation is about reaching down into my gut, feeling the displeasure and restlessness that trigger this fear, and sitting with it until absolute well-being sets in. The serotonin starts to flow from the source, my limbic system starts to loosen up and soon I'm sitting in the bright clear pond of calm and pleasure.

Of course,  then the fear sets in because my first thoughts are a) will I be able to make this feeling permanent b) if this feeling were to become permanent, would I lose the motivation to want anything? And the loop starts again.  I rest in the fear as the object of meditation until absolute well being starts to flow back again.

Will this absolute well-being become more intuitive?

Are there any reasons why it wouldn't?  Maybe the fear becomes deeper and more reactionary because I'm spending too much time trying to cram a lifetime of wellbeing into the painful hole of a life motivated more by depression.

Be diligent, but also, be patient.

Construction Retreat

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.