Tag Archives: conditioning

your self-shining magnificence

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This beautiful piece of wisdom was written by Michael A. Rodriguez, and published on his new website/blog at boundless awareness.com under the title One Bright Pearl. Please check out Michael’s site – his approach honours “both radical non-duality and the paths that emphasize the evolution of consciousness.” There’s a refreshing inclusivity, authenticity and articulate clarity about his writing. Highly recommended.

One Bright Pearl - http://www.boundlessawareness.org

One Bright Pearl

 
One of my favorite Zen sayings was by Hsuan-sha: “The whole universe is one bright pearl.” Another translation runs like this: “The entire world of the ten directions is a single shining [or ‘luminous’] jewel.” There are other versions, but I like these two variations the best.

I often think the entire dharma – and perhaps drama – is contained in this expression. It speaks to me. That statement could only have arisen from the awakened state, and in fact, most people are asleep precisely to the reality to which this statement points. If you could wake up to this one truth, you would wake up altogether.

Somehow, by the mysterious mechanism of memory, the unknowable self-luminous jewel of awareness seems to become shrouded by what we take to be the known. We essentially come to live in a claustrophobic prison of the known and do not see the absurdly obvious fact that the reality of boundless experience could not possibly be shining more luminously. As the writer Samuel Beckett once wrote, “habit is a great deadener.” Because of habit, which functions by way of the veiling power of memory, we start to live within the narrow confines of our routines and fall asleep to the radiance of Mind. Actually, Mind falls asleep and dreams within itself a limited world made of habit. It’s not personal. This falling asleep happens slowly over many years, and it begins to happen before we are conscious of the fact. Because of conditioning and education from the moment we’re born (and even before that in terms of cell memory), it creeps up on us below the threshold of conscious awareness and solidifies as cognitive structures of experience in exactly the same way that hypnotic suggestion works.

The other main problem is that you, boundless awareness, have been conditioned to dwell with your attention in the human world of limited concepts. To wake up to the fact that you are already limitlessly shining in all directions as one bright pearl, try taking your attention off the human realm and contemplate, instead, the fact that “the universe” literally has no beginning or end. Ever since I was a child, this contemplation has always produced in me a rapturous wonder. Just think about it. Right now, human beings are running around as though they know what this whole thing is, as though we exist in a limited world that has boundaries and borders and edges. But it doesn’t! I’m not speaking mystically or poetically here. It’s literal. How could there possibly be more freedom? The universe (from which your body-mind is not separate) does not begin or end somewhere. It’s immensurable in exactly the same way that a nighttime dream is immeasurable. How much “space” does a nighttime dream take up? I hope you got the point with my rhetorical question!

Now, whatever this is obviously has a self-aware quality that shines as the fact of conscious knowing. I say “self-aware” because since it does not have any limits, there can’t be anything “outside” it to be aware of it. The limitless totality, therefore, is simply self-aware and shining as the limitless totality of experience. In other words, it’s a limitless subjective experience to awareness itself that does not contain a single object. Not one. Why? Because “objects” have to have limits (otherwise they would not be knowable), but objects are inseparable from the limitless environment. “Objects” are illusions of memory.

The fact is that you only ever experience yourself as one bright pearl. You as boundless awareness are the most precious jewel that could ever be. Try contemplating this fact over and over again until you wake up to your self-shining magnificence. To say that “it’s not far from you” is a severe understatement; it is you.

– Michael A. Rodriguez

Image and text from boundlessawareness.org

Gratitude!

 

on saving your own life

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shining river

 

On Saving Your Own Life – November 19, 2009

 
Yes, it’s a paradox.  You’ve fallen into the wild knowing that the life you thought was ‘yours’, isn’t.  It isn’t yours any more than the rise and fall of your overlooked breath.  You are awake to your wild awakeness.  Well, occasionally.

And yet.

And yet the choices involved in being alive and healthy don’t go away.  It’s a lie to assert that they do, and a trap to believe that they should.  Every minute of every day choices are being made – in most cases, unconsciously.  Patterns of conditioning are playing themselves out, tirelessly.

Wild awakeness – effortless awaring – has a knack of bringing robot-mind into focus.  There’s a glimpse of the old reflexes groaning on.

And at that precise point a nanosecond window of opportunity opens – the story can change.

The ‘I’-stream, the lifestream, can flow in a fresh and unknown course.

(‘I’-stream?  Lifestream?  This language is being invented as writer-mind moves into ineffable territory.  These terms imply something utterly non-personal.  And yet wholly You.)

Life has no agenda other than its ongoing health, wellbeing and survival.  It knows the score in these matters.  And it knows when to withdraw its resources and start over.  That can be pretty tough love.

But for those of us in whom Life still has an investment, the toughest love turns out to be Self-love.  It scares us witless to ponder the ultimate unselfishness of Selfishness.

Yet Life has an awesome way of looking after itself once efforts to contain and control it are deconstructed.  Notions that life needs saving act to build a mega dam across its path – a dam that generates dis-ease and stagnation.

The paradox is only apparent: whatever you choose – whatever – is the movement of Life as it branches, eddies, streams, dances, disappears underground, springs forth, tumbles, flattens out in depression, rages, murmurs, merges, evaporates … while it pretends to be You.

– ml

I wrote the post above almost six years ago. It was early on in the life of this blog – only a few months after the departure of the beloveds whose care and wellbeing had been the focus of my life for the better part of a decade. My health was in tatters. I was receiving treatment for chronic fatigue and was enduring the nightmare of paroxysmal vertigo and nausea. I was slowly learning how to look after ‘my own self’ again.

The vertigo revisited last weekend, severe enough to warrant a little holiday in hospital. On the other side of the experience, I marvel at the way these words remain as relevant as when they were penned. I’m reposting them to remind myself that “the toughest love turns out to be Self-love.” With the world spinning and the stomach heaving it’s easy to overlook the Shining Self. Yet it’s right here, whirling like a dervish, inviting me to release, relax, weep, disappear altogether into its subterranean womb – into Rio Abajo Rio – the great river beneath the river of the world.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes,

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them.

I would add that we can also arrive there unintentionally, unexpectedly, delivered by grief or illness or any experience that knocks us out of our ‘normal’ sense of self, and that our arrival is always the necessary Grace for the deepening and widening of Love’s embrace of Itself: the ultimate Selfishness.

Image by Reuters from Google.

 

cracking open

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This is a guest post written by my friend Amrita Skye Blaine. It was first posted, in part, on her blog The Heart of the Matter. I’m sure most readers will find themselves nodding in recognition at her personal description of her path from belief in the myth of separation (from the holy Whole), to the understanding of how we perpetuate this myth via our unexamined thoughts, to the full-blown and embodied apperception of the impossibility of separation.

Which is where the story of our life really begins, in Truth.

 –

Cracking Open - image credit http://uncoverawareness.wordpress.com/

 

When we are born, we are wide open; innocent and vulnerable, we know nothing, and trust everything. From that moment forward, we develop a shell of protection. This may occur quickly if our infancy is traumatic, or incrementally if we are raised in a nurturing and safe environment. But the shell develops, either way—in response to being denied, physically hurt or neglected, snapped at, not understood, or any number of other ways we are shaken into learning that we are separate. Our parents teach us this too, in hundreds of tiny ways. I cannot speak for all countries, but in the western cultures, we do not escape the experience of separation.

We cling to our shell because it is familiar. It is how we have learned to move in the world, based on decisions we made at a very early age. I learned that I needed to protect myself from my older brother’s wrath, and then expanded that world view to include all men. I understood that if I didn’t abide by my mother’s rules, she psychically withdrew her love. My heart contracted; it no longer felt safe or comfortable to remain open.

Later in life, some of us are drawn to unlearning this sense of separation that we have accumulated. This can occur abruptly, but that is rare. For me, it has taken a long time. Perhaps this process begins on our own, but it is more likely that we find a teacher, someone who can point both by the example of their presence, and their teachings, to the deeper truth of who and what we are.

Finally, after many decades, and with the pointers of more than one teacher, a dear and thoughtful husband, and friends, I learned to see the ways that I cut myself off, made myself separate. Later, I saw how believing my thoughts framed my world, and the old patterns and conditioning fell away more quickly. This leaves a softer and more vulnerable heart; this is the process of cracking open. Just like the baby chicken who grows until its shell is so unbearably tight that in desperation it flails and pecks it until it breaks, we too must crack open the shell of our own creation. After the first crack, when a touch of light pours in and we taste a new way, the unlearning may be able to be slowed, but it will not be stopped. We crack open to the truth and to love until we see that they are not two. We were never separate—never were, never can be.

– Amrita Skye Blaine

 The Heart of the Matter

Amrita’s unedited text concluded with a quote from yours truly –
something I’d written in a comment on my last post
imperishable, unnameable, the unknowing

“It is exactly so: the shape of the heart is changed. And there is no way back.”
Thank you dear Amrita.

Image source

keep far away

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Today marks the fifth anniversary of my mother’s departure to the Cosmic Recycling Agency. Which means this little blog is now nearly five years old. To celebrate the memory of Miriam’s quiet yet influential life and all those who have contributed to the blog, I thought I’d post something that held special significance for Mum. I found it while sifting through cartons stored since my parents’ departure – an exercise in time-travel, like watching an excruciatingly intimate movie unfold before one’s eyes. There’s everything from bank statements and medical bills to little notebooks filled with their personal jottings and daily chores. If I rest my mind on any one item, I can so easily reconstruct the whole scenario – the context, the weather, the players, the feelings – and I can melt into the thusness of that place and time. Which is, of course, right here and now!

One folder is particularly compelling for me. It’s a simple clearfile with no cover or title. I probably gave it to Miriam years ago, to file her correspondence. In the front pocket she has placed a little breathscribe blessing – a painting I sent her years ago when I was working in England. And inside she has gathered up a mixed and marvelous collection of writings that inspired her (including some of my own). In her last years, she kept this folder beside her bed. It was her own little Bible, she said.

I intend to share some of the things that are tucked into this treasure of a folder – starting today with this rather odd poetic piece from J Krishnamurti. I say odd, because the style of writing seems quite different from K’s usual pragmatism. It’s a style, however, to which Mum’s ears were attuned – and the message is profound. In spite of first appearances, he’s not talking about running away from the world, society and one’s responsibilities. He’s not talking about separation in time or space.

His insistence is that one must keep “so far away that even you cannot find yourself”. Or “others”. That one must keep beyond the reach of all that would condition the mind – education, religion, philosophy, nationalism and stray renegade thoughts. That one must keep safely anchored in the unassailable purity of one’s own perfect Presence.

 

Milford Sound, Aotearoa New Zealand - http://www.amazingnz.com/8Days-English.html

 

You should never be here too much; be so far away that they can’t find you, they can’t get at you to shape, to mould. Be far away, like the mountains, like the unpolluted air; be so far away that you have no parents, no relations, no family, no country; be so far away that you don’t know even where you are. Don’t let them find you; don’t come into contact with them too closely.

Keep far away where even you can’t find yourself; keep a distance which can never be crossed over; keep a passage open always thorough which no one can come. Don’t shut the door for there is no door, only an open, endless passage; if you shut any door, they will be very close to you, then you are lost.

Keep far away where their breath can’t reach you and their breath travels very far and very deeply; don’t get contaminated by them, by their word, by their gesture, by their great knowledge; they have great knowledge but be far away from them where even you cannot find yourself. For they are waiting for you, at every corner, in every house to shape you, to mould you, to tear you to pieces and then put you together in their own image. Their gods, the little ones and the big ones, are the images of themselves, carved by their own mind or by their own hands. They are waiting for you, the churchman and the communist, the believer and the non-believer, for they are both the same; they think they are different but they are not for they both brainwash you, till you are of them, till you repeat their words, till you worship their saints, the ancient and the recent; they have armies for their gods and for their countries and they are experts in killing.

Keep far away but they are waiting for you, the educator and the businessman; one trains you for the others to conform to the demands of their society, which is a deadly thing;* they will make you into a scientist, into an engineer, into an expert of almost anything from cooking to architecture to philosophy.

Keep far, far away; they are waiting for you, the politician and the reformer; the one drags you down into the gutter and then the other reforms you; they juggle with words and you will be lost in their wilderness.

Keep far away; they are waiting for you, the experts in god and the bomb throwers: the one will convince you and the other [show you] how to kill; there are so many ways to find god and so many, many ways to kill. But besides all these, there are hoards of others to tell you what to do and what not to do; keep away from all of them, so far away that you cannot find yourself or any other. You too would like to play with all of them who are waiting for you but then the play becomes so complicated and entertaining that you will be lost. You should never be here too much, be so far away that even you cannot find yourself.

– J Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti’s Notebook

* They have a thing called society and family: these are their real gods, the net in which you will be entangled. [Krishnamurti’s insertion in the full text edition]

Find a comprehensive selection of Krishnamurti’s books at the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust website.

Image Credit – Milford Sound, Aotearoa New Zealand

Last year’s celebratory post: a light with no source

cutting through to naked experience

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This is an extract from Contemplating Illusion Through Loving All Life, a new booklet from one of my precious Noble Mentors, Lama Mark Webber.

Meet the Great Illusionists – fast-talking clusters of brain cells that map out a ‘me’ and its entire experience of time and space – and just for a moment contemplate the utter unreality of your entire mental and physical landscape. It will change you forever.

Down the rabbit-hole we go … spinning, whirling whiffs of emptiness …

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The illusion that one can hold any fixed mental position even for a millisecond is untrue.  All mental objects, thoughts, and sensations are fabricated.  Don’t believe me, take a close look.  To do so will take pellucid, naked mindfulness and inquiry, unbroken by thoughts and distractions.  No amount of intellectual certainty will be enough.  Reading a modern neuro-cognitive textbook that says the same thing will not be enough.  Yet the illusion of permanency and constancy, formed by a lifetime of talking brain cell clusters makes this fabrication appear to be very real.  In modern neuro-cognitive terms, these fabrications are ‘maps’ in the mind.  Our images and concepts of body, feelings, self and other, are but maps.  The tree you see, the bell you hear are not out there; however something is, but ‘it’ is fantastically vast in scope.

Ordinary experience, even most profound meditation and visionary experiences, are not what is.  Experiences appear solid only by conditioning.  Knock out those brain cells, those patterns or maps formed by normal conditioning, through physical-mental trauma or temporarily through insight meditation, and it all goes.  Deeply relax the rigidity via deep meditation and the illusion vanishes.  It only takes a small needle in a small part of the brain, and a human cannot recognize him or her-self, even when looking in a mirror.  Or use the sharp needle of penetrative insight, while looking in a mirror: “Is that Uncle Fred or perhaps… it is familiar… yes, hummm, Aunt Marge perhaps in that mirror?  And, more precisely, what do you call that thing I am looking at!”

Many illusions, really delusions, appear to exist, veils upon veils.  There’s the illusion that heaps of information are the same as meaningful content.  The illusion of not needing a Noble Mentor.  The illusion of permanency.  The illusion of concreteness.  The illusion that one can hold any fixed mental position.  The illusion of self.  The illusion of not-self.  The illusion of separate entities.  The illusion of happiness.  The illusion of unhappiness.  The illusion that objects are bad or good.  The illusion that we can Google our way out of this thicket.  The illusion that all thoughts are bad.  The illusion that thought is ultimately bad.  The illusion of speech as an inferior way of communicating.  The illusion of everlasting peace.  The illusion of space and light.  Even the illusion of some-body to become enlightened.  The illusion of a mind!  Cut through them all!  Cessation of clinging means cessation of clinging!

How many nice Buddhists keep forgetting the Four Noble Truths?  Far too many! Practitioners are often looking for some higher, deeper, more esoteric instructions. Finding something better than “Cease clinging (tanha) and dukkha ceases?”  Trying to negotiate out of the truth?

St. John of the Cross, a Spanish saint of the 16th century, declared the vital point of non-clinging in his famous and glorious poem, The Ascent of Mount Carmel:

When you turn toward something
you cease to cast
your self upon the all
For to go from the all to the all
you must leave your self in all
And when you come to the
possession of all
you must possess it
without wanting anything
In this nakedness the spirit
finds its rest, for when it
covets nothing, nothing
raises it up, and nothing
weighs it down, because it is
in the centre of its humility
When it covets something
in this very desire it is wearied

Compassion!

~ Lama Mark Webber

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In a similar vein:

finding my mind …  isn’t mine!

nonduality and the mutating brain

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another one bites the dust

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It’s taken some getting used to – for a silver-haired ex educator for whom utterances of the public variety used to be carefully crafted and justifiable – not to mention purposeful – but I can now happily admit that I haven’t a clue why words get posted when they do, or why they wish to be expressed.  I have learned to live with helpless hopeless unknowingness and what’s more, to trust it totally.  So when I wrote about compassion and big sticks I was curious to know what that was all about.

Compassion.  The concept can be, like love, a loaded gun smoking with fluffy, sentimental do-good notions.  That’s why Buddhists spend a great deal of time clarifying its ruthless qualities.  I’m not a Buddhist (or anything else) but I do appreciate that the most compassionate action is probably that which helps to unstitch non-negotiable stories that are unhelpful and cause suffering for sentient beings.  This was the context in which HH the Dalai Lama spoke of the big stick at Krishnamurti’s memorial service, for K could be very uncompromising when it came to outing our largely unconscious and heavily guarded conditioning.

I confess to a kind of exhilaration these days when Life shines its Light straight into a dusty corner of the archive and reveals a well-wrapped story that hasn’t been opened up for scrutiny.  The stick needs to be at-hand, for I know that unpicking the threads will be no facile matter – one is, after all, unpicking the fabric of the wee-me.  I also know it will be the most compassionate thing that I can do for myself – and most importantly, I know that I’m not doing a darned thing.  Life ITself is meeting and welcoming ITs own creations in mind, and airing out the cupboard, so to speak.

I wonder if you have ever had the experience of enduring a long-standing health problem, perhaps involving much discomfort and pain, and in spite of it all, resisting a form of treatment because of a negative story being held in the mind – and usually affirmed by one’s N&D?  Have you stubbornly stuck to notions that you ought to be able to heal yourself ‘naturally’ (as if anything in Creation could ultimately be un-natural), that if you just buy more remedies, change your diet and lifestyle you’ll get the better of it?  I wonder if you’ve lived with the subtle guilt that comes from long-term ill health and the feeling that your friends wish you’d get over it?  I wonder if you’ve had a story running that if you could just change your story the problem would vanish?  Any, maybe all, of these approaches can provide effective relief with time.  But the big stick of compassion doesn’t tolerate time.

Compassion wants to act in the instant, when your symptoms are so unbearable that you don’t even want to know about tomorrow.  Compassion is ultimate loving kindness towards beloved Life in this moment without regard for consequence.  Compassion is Life saving ITself in the only moment it knows.  The Present.

The big stick stirred up a story here this last week.  Poked its eyes out.  Returned it to Emptiness.

The details are irrelevant; the dynamics are universal.  Person ails but resists the remedy.  Person has story running about the nasty remedy.  Person’s condition worsens.  Person won’t take the medicine.  Person’s condition becomes critical, unbearable.  Person is on knees begging for help.  Compassion hands out the medicine.  Person grabs it, takes it.  Lives.  Heals.  Person is grateful beyond expression.  Compassion smiles that smile, the one where you know you are Loved beyond measure.  Person suddenly notices the label on the little pill:  Beloved.

– miriam louisa

on saving your own life

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This Unlit Light: Georgia O'Keeffe - It was Blue and Green

 

Yes, it’s a paradox.  You’ve fallen into the wild knowing that the life you thought was ‘yours’, isn’t.  It isn’t yours any more than the rise and fall of your overlooked breath.  You are awake to your wild awakeness.  Well, occasionally.

And yet.

And yet the choices involved in being alive and healthy don’t go away.  It’s a lie to assert that they do, and a trap to believe that they should.  Every minute of every day choices are being made – in most cases, unconsciously.  Patterns of conditioning are playing themselves out, tirelessly.

Wild awakeness – effortless awaring – has a knack of bringing robot-mind into focus.  There’s a glimpse of the old reflexes groaning on.

And at that precise point a nanosecond window of opportunity opens – the story can change.

The ‘I’-stream, the lifestream, can flow in a fresh and unknown course.

(‘I’-stream?  Lifestream?  This language is being invented as writer-mind moves into ineffable territory.  These terms imply something utterly non-personal.  And yet wholly You.)

Life has no agenda other than its ongoing health, wellbeing and survival.  It knows the score in these matters.  And it knows when to withdraw its resources and start over.  That can be pretty tough love.

But for those of us in whom Life still has an investment, the toughest love turns out to be Self-love.  It scares us witless to ponder the ultimate unselfishness of Selfishness.

Yet Life has an awesome way of looking after itself once efforts to contain and control it are deconstructed.  Notions that life needs saving act to build a mega dam across its path – a dam that generates dis-ease and stagnation.

The paradox is only apparent: whatever you choose – whatever – is the movement of Life as it branches, eddies, streams, dances, disappears underground, springs forth, tumbles, flattens out in depression, rages, murmurs, merges, evaporates … while it pretends to be You.

– miriam louisa