Top 10 insights of 2023

1. "Trust the clarity"  from Song of Realization wrap up  .  I went on many meditation retreats this year. The fruit of these teachings has been a stronger understanding of what clarity is.  It's not illumination in itself,  but the recognition of illumination. But it's not something to strive for, anymore than we need to hold a flashlight to a candle. Just trust it and be in it.  

2. The practice of just going beyond.  That energy is not emptiness.  That we must keep going beyond and be vigilant for when we are conceptualizing.  Energy is important, but it's not the objective of meditation.  And it's easy to mistake energy for emptiness. 

3. Effortless is most easily achieved by staying with intention. This was from a Dharma Geek session with Cortland. He took us through breathing meditation and showed us how if we focussed less on breath and simply on the intention to be with breath, samatha was more more effortless.

4. Happy for no reason. I develop the truth body

5. Compassion is the antidote to empathy burnout, but also empathetic joy. I've been enjoying feeling empathetic joy to my guru and my yidam of late. 

6. Anytime Anywhere meditation is just about being with the default mind.  Being present with it. 

7. Vajra Dakini, I really feel the clarity behind my harmful emotions. 

8. After the new ice storm, I remembered that inspiration is easier to see in emptiness.

9. Because intense emotions are effortless we can leverage them to make awareness effortless.  Like waterskiing! 

10. No fundamental difference between sleep dreaming and awake dreaming.  When I see suffering in daily life, I can awaken into lucidity in the same way I would if I recognized it in a dream. 

The One Taste

Had an insight this morning that the "taste of purification" is not so much developing a taste for what is pure, but is a recognition of the purity that is always here in the nature of mind. 

I choose to sustain the recognition of this purity for the rest of my life.  The recognition of purity has a physiological response, like the taste of a strawberry. Everytime I recognize it, I have that response and the recognition is embodied. 

This is taking fruition as the path. 

Top insights of 2021

1. The most difficult emotions contain the seed of deep compassion.  I discovered this in a self-directed retreat, and later in retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche.  In fact, if I really have the courage to sit with self hatred, it starts to move around become three dimensional, reflect the space around and inevitably becomes joy.  Joy on tap. 

We are of the universe and the universe is always well, even if every part of it is dying.

2. Emotional understanding requires repetition, says Tsoknyi Rinpoche

...repeating a teaching is not just for your conceptual mind. Once your conceptual mind understands, you think you understand. But that kind of understanding is not enough because repetition is for your mind's emotional understanding.

3. If emotions are predictions as Lisa Feldman Barrett convingly theorizes, then joy is the prediction of wellness.  Both relative and absolute.  

4. By this logic equanimity is the prediction of balance. 

5. Intentions are more stable than emotions. This helped me through the worst days of my father's death. 

6.  I was struck by the idea that gratitude is the cause of happiness not the effect. Feeling grateful for what is going to happen is a prediction feeling that is tied to intention. 

7.  I developed new words to describe my feelings: incrementum, the feeling of maintaining a small change that will in time create well being. Remomentum, restarting a habit that will restore well being. Being aware of these feelings is driving in second gear. Noticing they have become automatic is third gear. 

8. I had some peak meditation experience from fasting.  It's possible that  skillful fasting can contribute to longevity. 

9. Reading the last chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva to my father before he died has created a bond with that text that will last for the rest of my life. 

 As long as space endures, and being are to be found, may I remain to drive away the sorrows of the world

10.  Confusion is responsible for my mistakes not "me." 

 

 

 

Ignorance

One of my greatest challenges in life is maintaining an awareness of my ignorance. To some extent I do this "naturally" by feeling stupid and incompetent now matter how much I read and write, or how many people tell my I'm smart.  But feeling stupid is a different thing from being aware of one's blind spots, skills deficits and rationalizations.

This week in my insight meditation in on perception and reality at work.  Being aware of my ignorance, but also my wisdom is crucial as I go into some complicated  negotiations with a specialist from a schoolboard.

I know that I am still ignorant of how to stay awake, and avoid being at the mercy of my cravings and a lifetime of poor emotional and work habits.

And I feel that keenly as I see my son take on so many of my worst weaknesses.

Maybe that is the motivation I need to awaken and stay awake.

Insight and writing

You'd think as I cultivate insight I would want to write more. But I don't. Maybe it's because insight practice moves you beyond concepts and writing is so conceptual.

Of course, writing doesn't have to be conceptual. And the best writing usually isn't. So maybe that will change as I settle more regularly into that place of clarity.

Woke up this morning at 4:30 and just sat in feelings of aversion, loathing, hatred.  Much bringing this on. A mostly miserable evening at my parents, which I probably contributed towards somewhat. I was supposed to show up for jury duty on Monday. Relieved to discover I didn't. Then found out that the reason the trial had been cancelled was because the court system was so backed up that the supreme court forced them to let go of the accused. He had been in jail for almost five years. Too long, obviously. But the case against him was strong. He had spent time in prison twice for spousal abuse and was on trial for slitting his 21 year old wife's throat.  It has hit me this morning how much work there is to do to make the world more livable for so many people who are suffering.

I've been sitting in aversion and grief and some sadness.  The sadness feels good. I don't feel it enough. But sadness is an essential ingredient of insight. Without it are you really aware of the impermanence of life?

That said I don't want to feast on death. I'm a human, not a crow.

Insight

It's time now to get serious about insight.

A few years back I did the Tergar workshop in cultivating wisdom. Since then, I've been cycling back through my compassion and mind calming practices, but the time has come to re-visit insight. I've been feeling stuck and I need a framework for getting back into the stream of vitality I seem to have lost.

This all started last week with an exercise I did on turning beloved activities into big, wildly improbable goals.  I love meditation, so the improbable goal I set for myself was to do a 10 day retreat in Montabello. Improbable because I don't think Ben is ready to live alone for 10 days. But I wrote it down anyways, and within a few days I was thinking about what it was I wanted from this retreat. I re-read this great article in the New York Times by my friend Jeff Warren, about his own crazy experience starting and failing  a month long one-on-one retreat with Daniel Ingram in Alabama, the Anxiety of the Long Distance Meditator.  And then I started reading Daniel Ingram's book of hardcore stream entry exercises.  I did some for a few days, but then it hit me.  I've already done this. I re-read some of my entries from my Tergar workshop and remembered what an awesome time that was.  How it lead to achieving other goals, like landing an agent. Why not go back to what I know. Insight is insight. I've had it before I can recover it again.

So I'm off.  Six months back on the path of wisdom.  I will, of course, keep you posted.

New Post

This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.

It started with what are now the basics.  A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone.  A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.

I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."

After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.

Suddenly I was angry.  But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.

I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience.  Not every moment had to be peace.  There could be authentic peace, even in anger.

And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.

The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.

I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.

I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt.  I was tired of this climb.

And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.

Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.

A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)

I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational.  So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.

But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

Scattered Mind Insight

Earlier this week, I watched a talk given by Shinzen Young at Google. He said something that hit me as a writer.  Insight when you have a scattered mind tends to be superficial, personal, and psychological. With a focused mind insight has more depth and spiritual weight.

I've never really considered how important the quality of the mind is to get insight to stay.  That sounds crazy now, because it's so obvious.  But I've tended to think of meditation as something I do for me, not something I do to make my insight more transmittable to the world.

Of course, because my mind is so scattered, I haven't been able to focus on the problem of focus, so it's a kind of a recursive problem.

Add to this the problem that I grew up in a family of scatter brains and suddenly I feel like I'm in "mid-mountain" with this meditation project.

Mid-mountain is a term I learned yesterday reading Malcom Gladwell. It refers to a famous transportation project in nineteenth century Massachusetts that ended up in massive cost overrun because they thought that it would be a lot easier to blast through a mountain than it was.  they known how much it was going to cost, they never would have gone ahead.  But had they not gone ahead, Massachusetts would not have been able to ship its goods so easily to the expanding West, and would never have become as wealthy as it it.

If I'd known how long it would take to get my mind in shape, I'm not sure I would have started this meditation project. If I'd known what I was eventually going to realize about myself, how truly out of control my mind really is, I wouldn't have had the courage.

But I'm here now with this meditation practice that I've been cultivating for years.  And I know there is a lot of insight there ready to be shipped out.

One day I will look back and know that the cost was worth it.