Examining self-hatred in primordial consciousness

Last week I discovered Dzogchen, direct pointing out of primordial consciousness. 

I reduced it down to the 3 vital points: 

1. recognize this consciousness free of concepts
2. Be in the decision to be one with this consciousness
3. Know that this consciousness is self-liberating

Now my work is examining the most pernicious and painful concepts as they arise. For me this has always been self-hatred. With all my work and Vipassana, I still hear this inner, poisonous mantra regularly throughout my day, "I hate myself."  I don't think I hate myself, and yet it's there ringing like a church bell. 

So be it.  The seeds of liberation are in there somewhere.  I feel that hatred, I know that it's a conditioned creating. I don't believe that hatred exists in this first consciousness.  Hatred feels real, but it's just a bad dream and I believe I can wake up from it. 

In fact two nights ago I had a very visceral self-hatred dream.  A woman who I saw in the dream as someone sweet, but fundamentally ignorant, started telling me what a fraud I was. I was hurt, shocked and reduced to a contemptuous, scornful tirade of telling her how unworthy her viewpoint was of mine, or anyone's consideration. I felt deeply ashamed of myself of attacking this woman. Tried to make it up to everyone by doing dishes. 

There you go, my life story in a nutshell. 

So the question for this week is who would I be if I didn't deep down believe that I hate myself?

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.

Awakened Awareness

I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to simply give myself permission to rest in awakened awareness and just be what happens.

I guess I needed a book like Beyond Mindfulness by Stephan Bodian.   He is an advocate for the direct approach, making awareness the object of awareness, and relaxing into absolute well-being, over relentless scanning.

I've had this book for a while in my virtual library, and I even started reading it a few months back. But for whatever reason it didn't take.  I suppose I still felt a certain loyalty to the Goenka method. After all I had made it something of a new year's resolution to follow it religiously. 

This concept of locality changed that a little.  And thinking about Mingyur Rinpoche's description of happiness as Absolute well-being. After spending a week just being in the energy of my gut, I felt inspired to explore the vast field of consciousness anchored by this lucid anchored energy at my core.

Also, I'm tired of constantly trying to get somewhere. Tired of travelling.  The Adventure has now become one of finding my way back home.

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...

The Adventure of not knowing

If you don't expect to know what's going to happen, if you have no expectations, life can always feel like an adventure.

Like any adventure you need to have your supplies, otherwise it's an adventure in hell. You need to have maturity and skills and good instincts. You need the right attitudes, like patience, negotiation skills and you need compassion for yourself and the people you will meet.  And you need above all the ability to signal love, calmness, open heartedness.

To survive and thrive in adventure, above all, you need to know that place of refuge within you. There are things you can know and carry with you throughout all the places and events that you do not know.  You need to be able to access your refuge on call and know deep inside you that it is always there. 

#1 motivation blocker

I've been thinking this week about the difference between impulsivity and inspiration.

I believe that my impulsivity arises from a need to find stimulation to escape the dullness of a mind trapped by learned helplessness.  According to Mingyur Rinpoche, "faint heartendness" is the #1 blocker of our true, buddah nature.  He tells an interesting story in Joy of Living, about a woman who, early in his vocation as an international teacher, told him about her self-hatred.  He didn't know what that meant. This speaks to the new theory of neuroscience that I'm learning, that all our emotions are culturally constructed. My own self-hatred is a prison constructed from my experience and my circumstances.  When I sit with it I feel its core as a low arousal unpleasantness.

The "stims" that I've lived with all my life, my hand flapping, my grievance collecting, the jumping, the angry daydreams, these are all ways of trying to kickstart my muddy heart. 

But I'm experimenting right now with a different way.  I am following Rinpoche's instruction in seeing life as a dream, and thus feeling this faint heartedness and sense of powerlessness as that.  Seeing it the same way I would if I were in a lucid dream and then allowing the mind to open up to all kinds of possibilities of power.  I'm also spending more time in my meditation in that hypnagogic state, between dreams and wakefulness.

It certainly opened my mind up to changing one pattern.  I imagined that my room was miraculously tidy, and every time I finished my meditation, I felt an overwhelming urge to clean.

I am sitting in this moment in the cleanest room I've had in years.

Narayan Helen Libenson speaks of "don't know" mind, and how practicing this attitude of knowing that we don't know liberates us from all the patterns and habits that we delude ourselves into believing are our identity.

Being comfortable with the feeling of not knowing is what allows life to remain fresh and inspired. It's a natural stimulation that comes from the natural way that life changes, rather than the constant chasing after sensations that comes from a life that has calcified into dull routine.