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.  

Back Together

If my morning journals are anything to go by, I'm getting more clarity and wisdom in my life. But, there's one sentence I wrote that rings true.  My ego continues to leap up, like a beagle my family once had, desperately trying to grab food from the dinner table. There's still a compulsion in me and in one moment, so if feels like, it can sabotage everything.

At least that's what it feels like at work these day, where for whatever reason, valid or not, I'm not feeling safe.   I'm tired of my ego and its paranoid storylines.  I'm tired of how much energy it takes to have daydream arguments with everyone in the company.  I'm tired of how much television it takes to numb the misery that it has created for me. I'm tried of eating my pain.

I want to be who I really am, this calm and steady and clear awareness. I want to feel pulled into the drama of subtle changes in my psyche.  I want to feel a healthy detachment from the dramas that everyone else is living in.

I want to stay committed to awareness of breath, nostrils, sensation in the body. I want to keep writing from that place.

Yet, I feel like I'm breaking up with myself.  When instead I'm reuniting with myself . When instead I'm coming home after decades of war.  And the self I'm coming back to has been keeping things safe, and loving.

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

Self, no-self

This week I’ve been thinking and reading about the self and about the idea of no-self.

Enlightenment, according to Shinzen Young is the paradigm shift where we see the no-self and never go back to believing in self again. He compares the shift to going from a tribe that believes that there’s a monster that eats the moon, to one that understands the solar eclipse. Enlightenment doesn’t mean that there isn’t darkness, it’s the understanding of the causes of the darkness.

The cause of much of the darkness in our lives is this attachment to self. I write those words and I feel a sudden despair that I will ever be able to write about Buddhism in any way that doesn’t sound dry and intellectual. What I want to convey is the sense that it is really living from this “self” that dulls the mind. The self is a flickering fire that is kept alive on the kindling of time, the slow burning past, the dry twigs of the future. It burns up so much energy. To live with non-self is to be a surfer on vast and powerful waves of abundant calm and pleasure.

 That’s what my meditations on non-self have felt like this week. Like, I have a choice.  I can live in this puny little sense of self. Or I can tap into this awesome power that’s always there for me. But there’s this life, as a mother, as a non-profit executive that pulls me away from my true ambition: to coast on waves of bliss.

 The trick I suspect is to make intuitive that each of these paths is a manifestation of awareness.  I’m not sure I would have been able to sustain any of these insights without a basic understanding of feedback loops that I got from programming, and that is what I want kids to know from a very young age, that they can build things--toys, bridges, selves--and then take them apart. That they can decompose problems and emotions down to the component parts of calm and agitation, pleasure and displeasure. That they don’t have to be caught up in all these manifestations from the past.  

 I can do both. I can be an executive of a flourishing non-profit and I can surf on the waves. The trick is to not get attached to the theory that I have to be one of these things.

Easter Retreat 2

Any sense of agency I have is illusory.  There is a self that has been programmed by my biology, my culture, my family.  I am stepping outside of it from time to time, but it is still driven by that programming and the central drive of that programming is anger.

I can feed the peace, the happiness and joy.  The mind is telling a story, a series of events.  If I watch it, there's a possibility it will settle into a different rhythm. The Buddhist story is that these are the natural and essential qualities.  I can't attest to whether this is true, but it's certainly a more pleasant story that the one where we are essentially angry and discordant.

In the meantime though, my most normal patterns are towards anger. And this anger is ultimately very rewarding, or I wouldn't keep going back to it like a rat on a wheel.  It's my quickest and surest path to dopamine.

After going for an hour long walk, my meditations are focussing on that energy in the tailbone. I had a couple of interesting hours sitting in this energy, feeling bliss, feeling my anxiety and aversion to bliss, trying to hold it in equanimity by shifting between the bliss and open awareness.  I started to feel that liquid warmth, even some uncoiling.

Is this what we lost from our Sapien past. This wonderful feeling around out pelvic floor back when we used to be more of a squatting sitting around species?

It didn't last. Eventually I started to feel a restlessness, a boredom, an urge to get it all done with. But the insight that remains is that this self really doesn't have as much agency as I want to believe. There is this self that is mostly motivated by angry parents, a greedy, hierarchical culture.  I will never know if humans are basically good or basically bad, but I do know that when I feel good I am more generous and kinder to others.

In one meditation today, I thought about my family, and felt such anger towards them. That dissipated and for a while I felt good. When I though of each and everyone of them I had an entirely different feeling towards them. When I was a different person, they were different people, I was willing to cut them more slack. My perceptions of people are changed by how I feel about myself.

Nearing the end of day 2.  I've watched a teaching by Mingyur Rinpoche on finding  basic wisdom in "defilements."  It feels like the entire weekend has been leading to this.  There are five defilements, hatred, craving, ignorance, pride and envy.  His meditation technique is to ask "what do I really want."  It's possible that the answer to this will often be surface and related to these states of mind, states he believes have been created by culture.  But if we keep asking we will find our true nature, our deep, true essence, which is pure, pristine, beautiful.  Down there we want happiness, love, peace.  And if we ask long, enough and deep enough we will get there  Don't grasp at it, just get there and be there.

This is what the last two hours of my meditation will be.

And after that, the insight.

Yes my superficial, man, woman or parent-made desires, are strong. Maybe even stronger right now than the desires of my wisest level of self.  But I am extremely fortunate to know that, and even more fortunate to have a reasonably well-worn path back to wisdom. I can look at my messy home and remember that this is happening because I'm letting my cravings take over again. I can sit with them and I can sit with my peace and get the energy and wisdom back that I need.  I can look at the scale and realize that I need to spend an extra hour a day sitting with my healthiest drives.  I know this.

And I know I can do it.