Path of Liberation Level 3-4

I am doing path of liberation level 3 & f Spontaneous Presence and Liberation. Interesting that YMR characterizes the recognitions achieved in these levels as retirement from Samsara. I am semi retiring from my job and retiring from suffering in the same weekend. Do I have enough spiritual wealth to retire?

Wouldn't that be nice.  If only I weren't still struggling financially.  But I've made progress.  Not as much as I'd like, but I'm going in a better direction than I was before. 

Some notes from Day 1: 

• Horizontal is seeing the gap, seeing stillness.  Vertical is seeing the river. Even if you are overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings as long as you are conscious that you are seeing them you are in awareness. Resting in awareness doesn't have to be horizontal. 
• Recognition of emptiness dispels ignorance. When ignorance is gone, grasping, fixating, craving dissolves.  As does hatred. 
• Level 1-2 is inward looking (movement, stillness) 3 -4 is outward looking.

Day 2:

Last night for the first time that I'm aware of I had an almost dreamless sleep.  It feels pretty good!

Big takeaway.  In Kagyu there is no energy out there from which we draw because energy doesn't actually exist.  It's all manifestation and emptiness. 

Innate clarity is:

•  beyond 6 conscioueness, always open through the ten directions
•  the truth that dispels ignorance, grasping
• not the thing that is reflected in it.  
• not the anger, or the sadness, or the fear.   It remains when those things dissolve. 
• not the energy. It's what the energy arises from and dissolves into.  It's not even the light. 

George: Englightenment happens in the present moment. 

Day 3:

How do we know that we are seeing union of emptiness and clarity? Being with it after we have familiarized through analysis (JOL 3) and 1 & 2 we experience it beyond concept. 

Anger can't exist without object. Innate clarity can exist without object.

Emotions, negative and positive need an object. But innate clarity doesn't need an object to be sustained. 

If you are conscious you are in innate clarity.  No need to do anything, no need to create anything.  

Sleep by resting in nature of mind, luminous clarity. 

after transformation

grasping become loving kindness

aversion becomes compassion

Day 4

Two ways to deal with kleishas:

• resting in the lucidity
• hosting the kleisha until it dissolves into lucidity

Daemon Again

It's to the left, above my shoulder, this presence I feel after I've maintained an hour long practice for a significant chunk of time. It's to the soul, what the ego is to the self, or so I've read. This energy that feels like a self, but also something much stronger and purer.

It's the reason I do this, to have a sense of direction, power and connection. And now it's the reason I maintain this practice.

This morning I had such a strong sense of how regular, long meditation practice, at least an hour a day every morning makes of my body a kind of antenna.  I feel connected to this kind of frequency and it keeps me on the right path. All I have to do is rest in it and it penetrates my mind.

But then what?, says the inchworm when it reaches the top of the blade of grass.

To just be. To be the wisdom that shines from within. To help other recognize that wisdom in themselves. To allow ordinary bad habits dry up, and ordinary good habits to glow the extraordinary..

To be rich in this energy and power.

It's Over

This labour day weekend my mother invited Ben and I to Underhill House, a cottage owned by a wealthy friend. So called because it's a house built into a hill. The roof is grass, and light comes in through a series of skylight. Downhill from the house was a lovely man made pond. By far the most tranquil, private spot I've ever meditated in. No witnesses other than the occasional dragonfly.

I had a religious moment, sitting by the glass surface, pines reflecting the emptiness that I aspire to in meditation. I felt the larger witness to it all, that vast presence that is always there no matter how alone we are.

Alongside the feeling of vast presence, was the habit of returning to my petty squabbles with my mother, my anxieties, my feeling of helplessness over the distractions that continue to buzz through my mind.

When will it ever end?

And then in the next moment I recognized this as grasping.  It ended there in that moment.  Of course I want that "ending" to last. But all that has ended really is my awareness of it.  Presence never ends.

Looking for happiness in anything else is like trying to harness a dragonfly for thrills when really the most exciting experience is the pond.

This presence it seems, has followed me home, although the truth is it's always been here in my home, however small and however squalid.

I don't need to harness it's power.  I just need to keep remembering that it's here.

I need to let it harness me.

Mindfulness Sundays

So last week I made a resolution that I would work on making the present my default mode.  I want to get out of the normal default network of mind trawling around in the future and the past, cultivating a buzzing host of anxieties about the future and a dark chaotic maze of resentments, shames and guilts from the past.  I want to keep my mind as much as reasonably possible in the fresh air and vitality of the present moment.
 This has been especially hard last week because I have taken advantage of an opportunity to do something I've been wanting to try out for a long time.  I'm going to be teaching coding to fifth grade students and their teachers and I'm going to be learning first hand about the challenges of bringing programming literacy into the classroom. My enthusiasm from this now has me constantly wrapped up in the future building expectations and anxieties about public speaking, how much time this will take from my book and other plans, etc.
  The house is a mess, I'm less focussed on Ben, and then I find myself anxious about that.
  So today I decided that I would try and make this Sunday and every Sunday  a day of presence. A day when I'm largely focussed on simple tasks and pleasure that can be done with the maximum amount of presence. My reading will be largely devoted to spiritual and contemplative texts. There will be many standing and breathing practices.
 If  I've committed myself to presence as the mode in which I do all of my activities on this day, then I will become naturally more conscious of Default Mode Network (DMN, or Damn DMN, which I've decided to now call it.) My hope is that this will carry forward into the next week.

The Year Ahead

It's a Saturday morning. I've just completed a two hour meditation. I feel connected to the magnetic energy of mild happiness. The now energy that is always available to me.  The energy I want to set as my new default mode.
My friend Jeff Warren wrote a fascinating article in Psychology Tomorrow about a man who after several decades of meditation discovered one day that his self-referential self had just disappeared.  Got up and just walked away.  He was no longer in the default mode that the vast majority of people live in, that place where our minds wander around bumping into the past and future, rarely settled in the present. He was now just present all the time.
 It was great.  Problems got solved effortlessly. He was free of all self created suffering. There seems to have really been a happily everafter.
 I've been accepting this all day. Revelling in it.  But the minute I write it down, skepticism sets in.  How can we be happily ever after. We can't. He didn't stop solving problems, which means he didn't stop having problems to solve.  But the problems weren't coming from him anymore. They weren't coming from this "self."  His whole "I" just disappeared.
I want to live that way.  I'm sick of the constant "I."  I love the energy of the now. I love the stillness of life without all this restless, anxious energy leading me around like a dog on a leash.
So, it's decided.  My year ahead is living from this energy.  This now energy, which I'm going to program into my life as my default state. When I don't know what to do, I just rest in this state of being.  Once I've decided on the next task, I do it from this place of quiet attention. My mind is no longer a self propelling machine.  It is my tool, and I use this tool to bring me to this place of being outside the mind. This place right at the cusp of awareness.

Dictation

This week I am no longer alone.

I've noticed of the course of many years of practice that if I manage to maintain a one hour meditation time for more than a couple of months that I start to feel an intelligence in my life. A voice starts to speak to me, to reassure me, to guide me, to bring my attention back to the present again and again. At times I've thought of this as my muse.  But from now on I'm going to think of it as a daemon.

Not a demon. A daemon, in the Greek sense of the term, and energy that drives the soul.  Thomas Moore, the Jungian psychologist, writes in Original Self, that the daemon is to the soul what the ego is to the self.  If we are to live from the soul, from chi, from kundalini, from whatever vitality we've chosen to cultivate, having that intelligence that keeps us on the path is an essential drive.

Ben's been studying the Renaissance this week at school. So I'm conscious of this shift we made several centuries ago as a civilization to place man at the center of the world instead of God. What we ended up placing in the center was the ego. If we could shift again what would we place at the centre? I would like to think it would be the soul.  Perhaps consciousness.  Whatever this energy is that transports us to a better place, a more peaceful place, a more joyful place.

This week I have felt it become more central to my life, not just because of my daemon emerging.  I've started to feel this kind of double body. Almost like double vision, but it's more like double feeling. Sometimes I see my heart as a green energy pulsating a little bit outside of and to the right of my body. Sometimes I  just sit with waves and the rythms of the universe.

Last night I did a long meditation.  Almost two hours and felt the undeniable deep warm coil of energy. Not the whole flow yet,  distinct parts in my neck and my upper abdomen.  Nothing imagined there.  This was a physical energy.

Daemon has instructed me to stop watching T.V. and Netlix, so I don't have much else to do but to become aware of it.

The adventure continues.