The impact of emptiness

  

Eight years ago I started the new year with the decision to have a word of the year, "abundance." 2015 was a good year.  But 2016, I went the other way and chose "emptiness."Looking back the emptiness year was a year that truly changed my life. 

That's the paradox of life.  If you want a sense of abundance, emptiness is the value that will generate that effortlessly.  If you focus on stuff, you just end up with more stuff. 

But the mind resists. Do I have the courage to truly value emptiness?

Read an article yesterday that claimed a focus on defined values it what gets people to stay motivated when their instrinsic motivation fails.  By definining emptiness as my value, I wonder if this is a quicker way to recharge than abundance. 

If I were to value and focus on emptiness, where do I see my life five years from now?

I'm enlightened, self realized, equipped to help others know happiness.  

 

Truth body

The wisdom or truth body is the union of emptiness and clarity. The dharmakaya.

I am feeling the flow of this grounded groundlessness more and more every morning.  I feel the gentle urge to clean so that I can see the natural purity of my mind reflected back to me. 

But I feel the resitance. I worry that I'll lose my old, wordly self. I feel a certain nostalgia for my confusion. 

This week I turned 60.  I'm entering my golden years. 

I know what I want to feel: joyful wisdom.  Happy for no reason.

Maybe one path to the dharmakaya is being able to look back on our past confusion with gentle affection. Like being our own grandparent. 

Tummo

 

Top 5 insights of 2022

 1.  My Happy Losar insight. Taking refuge and becomming a Tibetan Buddhist creates the conditions of being "locked in."  Like RRSPs, like marriage, like any lifetime or longterm committment, there is an accumulation of resources and rewards. Having a Sadhana practice bears emotional fruit, and strengthens the subtle body in ways that a more variable practice probably doesn't. But the real driver is devotion. The increasing sense of inseperablity between my essence and that of all the buddahs, gurus, and deities, is what created the condition for sustained non-duality. 

2.  The paradox in the Way of the Bodhissatva of the something that doesn not exist, and yet is not nothing, creates the conditions for rest.  The result is the ground of wisdom and an understanding of the true nature of mind. 

When something and its nonexistence

Both are absent from before the mind 

No other option does the latter have.

It comes to perfect rest from concepts free  

3. The mind is not a thing, but an event.   If we can see it this way then we can see feelings as events, and "clarity as an infinitely expansive state of awareness." This helps us see the mind as a flow, not a fixed thing.  And as a result everything is simply part of this flow. 

4.  It is a very powerful practice to remember a dream and ask "who is dreaming this dream?" Stay with it and any sense of integrated self soon dissolves.

5.  If the key to sustaining wisdom seeing yourself as pure, or purifiying how you see yourself?.  Or maybe both.  During Tantra immersion I will toggle with both these insights.  

Tantra Retreat: The Three Points

Whether one meditates on an elaborate or concise version of creation stage, there are three main points: Clarity of form purifies attachment to the appearing object, recollecting the purity frees one from clinging to corporeality, and maintaining pride vanquishes clinging to ordinary self.

Important takeaway:  "recollecting  purity" does not mean remember some kind of pristine energy or identity.  It means being able to see  the conceptual models as conceptual models and purifying attachment to these concepts.  E.g. "I hate myself,"  I can see that this self I believe is solid and object of entrenched aversion is actually empty.  Also the "I" that is doing the hating is empty.  This becomes clearer still when I develop a counterpoint vision of a self as a deity. 

Tara visualization helps to develop that recognition of the fundamenta emptiness of all mental models. 

Toggling with tantra

A new, very strange dream to work with.

I grew a third eye!

This might have something to do with the White Tara practice I've been doing. I'm toggling between tantra, Dzogchen, and the last week of Bodhisattva immersion.

Toggling between effort and effortlessness, the joy of non-duality seems to be arising more spontaneously this week.  I've been doing analytical meditation that is working to dissolve the self, and I've been experimenting more with tantric practices.

Feeling inner space, lucidity and the pleasures of deity practice is opening up more channels, and unleashing great big boulders of stress.

Maybe I am ready to start letting it all go.  

As long as space endures...

I miss writing.

Trying to find that space in myself where life makes sense. Where there is the possibility of clarity. This weekend on the Way of the Bodhisattva closing retreat, I've had some insights that I know are true roots.

I've finally understood the dynamics of emptiness. 

When something and its nonexistence

Both are absent from before the mind 

No other option does the latter have.

It comes to perfect rest from concepts free

It is said that when Shantideva recited these lines, he floated up and disappeared.  

I have no plans to disappear, but in a certain way I did this weekend. My intuitive belief in the solidity of myself is substantially less intuitive after two days of "sense of self" meditation.  With a less solid sense of self it's easier to let go of suffering. 

But it's also easier to develop buddah nature, compassion, joy, equanimity. The immeasurables. 

Even if the inner refuge is an illusion, it is more stable floating on emptiness. 

 

intentions are more stable than emotions

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 one and the many

« This knowing does not have time. Neither does it belong to particles. This knowing quality does not belong to subject and object. It does not exist, nor does it not exist. It is not both, nor neither. It is everywhere and nowhere. There is no beginning, so this luminous mind is never going to die. »

Mingyur Rinpoche

Hunger

"May we be free of hunger and discord,
 And have joy and a world at peace."

This is a line from the aspiration I always start my meditation with.

Last year I became conscious of the amount of discord in my life. This year I'm going to focus on the hunger.

Not so much physical hunger because I rarely let myself get hungry. But the many other kinds of hunger in my life that keep me in a perpetual state of lack. Or so it feels sometimes. Trying to avoid feeling this hunger doesn't work. Just rewards it and makes it deeper and more entrenched. Denying it is why I'm so afraid of emptiness. Because in the emptiness of meditation I see and feel it.

Or so it seems.  To paraphrase Tsoknyi Rinpoche. the feeling is real, but is it true? Am I in a state of actual need? Or is this feeling just the result of the constant narrative in my head that keeps me there?

This week I will just be with this hunger, and do Rinpoche's essence love meditation. Sink deep, deep into my gut where the hunger seems to live and see how love responds.

Resolution

My resolution for this year is to meditate on emptiness every evening before I go to bed .

Last year, my focus was on abundance.  This year I move to the other side of the spectrum and familiarize myself with emptiness.

I'm nervous about this resolution, because I know that I'm fundamentally afraid of emptiness.  It's like the glass bridge I read about in Tsoknyi Rinpoche's book. I know that meditating on emptiness can't hurt me, but letting go of expectations, plans, thoughts, memories, feels like a loss of self.  And how do we live without this constant self-building?  If we stop for an hour or a day, will we have less of a self to be proud of and to make us feel powerful?

Meditating on emptiness is where I really test my belief. Conceptually I believe that selflessness is key to true happiness. Or I believe that I should believe that.  But experientially when I'm not working on the self, I feel at risk. If I'm not planning, hoping, worrying dreaming, what am I creating?

Yet, meditating on emptiness doesn't mean an empty life. I'm sure.  It's not about creating an empty head. Or a life empty of action. It's about creating space, and cultivating the power to let go of the things in life that don't really give us joy, or aren't truly useful.  A painting or picture that is too busy is not necessarily creative, it can be cluttered and complicated.

I've spent too much of my life holding on to things, people, situations, places, behaviours that haven't brought me real joy. This year is about discovering the source of true, stable, enduring joy.  Emptiness is potential, a fresh start. Yes it's a little frightening, but so is any change.

It's a risk I take for myself, and for the people I care about.  And for everyone I touch in my life.

Here goes.

Happy New Year.