Month: August 2010

Desire for truth… is it a problem?

Today I’m picking up a topic that was mentioned recently over on a blog I like.

I sometimes hear people in Buddhist circles talking themselves out of wanting to know the truth… or suggesting it’s somehow wrong to entertain even the possibility of getting enlightenment…  because of the desire issue.

Maybe this is not a sticking point for most of you, but I have certainly struggled with it.

So the question is:   If desire is the cause of suffering, is the desire for truth a problem?  Is the desire to get enlightenment and help all beings a problem?

This is (my paraphrased version of) how my teacher answers these questions:

 

Desiring truth is like really fiercely wanting to sit in the chair you are sitting in.  The desire cannot cause suffering because you are sitting in the chair you’re sitting in.

Desire for truth does not arise in the same (painful) way as desire for things that are not happening.  It’s not a problem to want what already is the case.  And truth is already the case.  It hurts when you argue with the truth, it does not hurt when you want what is true.

Arguing with truth sounds like:  ‘I want what I don’t have’ or ‘I don’t want what I have’ or ‘I want things to be different in the future’ or  ‘2+2=5’.

While recognizing truth sounds like:  ‘I don’t know what needs to happen’ or  ‘I want to be exactly where I am, doing this, feeling exactly what I feel’          and… it’s already done.

Truth is…what is revealed when you remove everything that is false.  Truth is what you are.

To awaken, you must strive to live in accord with Truth – as much as you can – until you awaken to the fact that you are it.

Wanting what you have is not desire because radical acceptance of what is satisfies desire before it can exist.

-James Wood The Path of Awakening (2007)  p. 2, 16, 138

 

The Game of Life: Who’s playing?

“True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment.  This inner alignment with now is the end of suffering.”

–Eckhart Tolle

—

“Life is simple.  Everything happens for you, not to you.  Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late.  You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.”

–Byron Katie

—

“What you truly need may not be what you think you need.”

–James Wood

—

I never made any plans-
the Plan is there
and we can fit in
with joyous ease
and delightful uncertainty.

–Shunyata Emanuel Sorenson

—

I like movies.  A lot.  Have you seen The Game?  It’s way high on my list of favorites.

So, Michael Douglas’ character signs up to play a very mysterious game – there seem to be no rules, no boundaries and no objectives.  Or, he is not told what the point is when he signs up to play.

The Game is different for each player, and the rules change continuously, depending on the player’s responses and reactions.  Once a player has committed to the game, it does not stop… until… well, writing too much about it will spoil the effect for those of you who haven’t seen it   :)

—

“Awakening is Truth-recognition.  It is not an experience, state, or form of anything you can mentally know.  The path of awakening involves finding false ideas, or lies, and seeing their falseness.  When you see their falseness, you see truth.  To find truth you have to be a detective.  You have to notice that things don’t add up, like a bad alibi.”

–James Wood The Path of Awakening (2007) p. 2-3

Who’s playing?   ;)

Bones

—

“Reality stands out, utterly free of all that arises, and yet not distinguishable over against any thing or state that arises.  Then consciousness is lifted out of that image of barriers created by skull and skin.”             – Adi Da, Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda


I hold the bones of your head in my hands.
The bones of my hands hold the bones of your hands.
I hold the bones of your feet in my hands.

The moon rises.  We wait.
I see me watching you swim.
I walk you in my feet.
I live you in my bones.
You breathe.  I listen.

There is no preparation for,
no modification
of this.
We are, only now, emptied of stories,
skulls useless, stripped of skin.

—

aw

Have you met a teacher of spiritual awakening?

Have you met or studied in person with any of the teachers listed in the sidebar of the home page here?  I would love to hear from you if you have!!

It is exciting to see ‘spiritual awakening’ become a more commonplace interest.  Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle seem to be the most popular voices right now; they both present the teaching in a way that jives with living a typical modern life.

If you are familiar with Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, probably you have wondered, as I have – what was it like to be with these teachers before they got famous?    How did they teach before they were booking huge, sold-out venues?  Who were their first students?

Perhaps our task of discernment is easier with teachers who already have an established following of relatively intelligent, ‘normal’ people (whatever that means :)

Perhaps it’s easier to recognize teachers who have published books and videos because we can digest the message from a distance.  We can sit back, comfortable in our own homes, and run the material through our BS detectors.  We can check to see if it’s the same message (different expression/terminology) given by the true teachers we already recognize.  We can check to see if the inner teacher says, “yes!”

But before Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now, and before Byron Katie wrote Loving What Is,  I wonder… how did people respond to them?  What was it like to be with them?

Here is a written interview in which Byron Katie talks about the early days after her ‘transition’.  And a super fun video interview with Eckhart Tolle on Canadian TV show The Hour.  In it, Eckhart talks about his childhood.

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I started a Twitter account today… let’s connect if you are there too!

Working with Dreams, by James Wood

Working with Dreams

“Let your dreams wake you up.  Let them show you patterns hidden beneath the surface of your awareness or illuminate ongoing issues… Let them shock you into a new awareness… On a deep level, we all share the same dreams…

Life is like a dream…The foundation of the dream is a lie of independent existence.  Your dream is the one you are having now, a dream of life and death, parading in an endless cycle.”

-James Wood.  The Path of Awakening (2007)  pp. 219-222

If you haven’t seen Inception yet, you’re in for a treat.  I like movies that help us question reality.  Inception is my new favorite!

 

Stress

I got interested in this teaching because I was stressed, and distressed.

I appreciated all the comforts, privileges and pleasures I had in my life, but I could never shake the underlying sensation of dissatisfaction.  (I also felt guilty for feeling dissatisfied, because I had the comforts and privileges.)  I tried to talk myself out of the dissatisfaction.  I worked jobs in social services.  Nothing seemed to help.  I have a serious case of The Dreaded Gom-Boo.

Some may say that stress is just a part of life, that it is wise to just accept it and treat the symptoms – with humor, philosophy, religion, alcohol, etc.  For me, ignoring the haunting dissatisfaction (or temporarily covering it up) has never worked.  I want to get to the bottom of it.

When I discovered this teaching, I learned that I do not have to continue living with stress.

I learned that it is extremely important to focus my attention precisely on the sensation of dissatisfaction, not to avoid it.  It was important to get serious about examining it.

I learned that there are people, even people living now, in modern times and situations, who are free of suffering.  And they are not sitting around enjoying their own personal contentment.  Pain continues to arise in others, so they are busy teaching.  It’s like in action movies, when the heroes fall in love – they do not, will not, stop to enjoy the honeymoon.  They have more people to save, more villains to defeat, and they just keep going, hardly missing a beat, in love and fighting the good fight.

This is a great talk, recently posted on James Wood’s website, that addresses the importance of witnessing the stressful self-contraction without judgment.


The Dreaded Gom-Boo

In the last post, I talked about meditation as medicine.  Yesterday a friend handed me a copy of:  The Dreaded Gom-Boo or The Imaginary Disease that Religion Seeks to Cure. A Collection of Essays and Talks on the “Direct” Process of Enlightenment by Da Free John.

This material is really fantastic, as is all of Adi Da’s work.  I’ll quote some of what really struck me here.

From  Chapter 2, Tell me True – Have You Got the Gom-Boo? by Da Free John

“We start out naively seeking to know and to experience as a way of becoming expansive and happy and ultimately fulfilled.  But our search does not become Happiness.  The more we know and experience, the less happy we are as a general tendency,  because we are qualifying the presumption of Being the more we experience, the more we know, the more we observe in the conventional sense, the more we analyze and see how we are functioning and how Nature works.  Thus, people come to a point of weakness and despair, a feeling of bondage, as a result of the egoic elaboration of their possibilities, and they approach the Sources of Truth, communicated through religious and spiritual culture, as if seeking a cure for this dilemma, this Dreaded Gom-Boo, that is the basis of traditional religious culture.

In truth, the religious or spiritual process has nothing at all do to with the Dreaded Gom-Boo or its cure. It has nothing to do with the disease you want to make the premise of the spiritual process. The first thing you must do when you truly become involved in the process associated with Truth is to understand, and, immediately, directly, presently, to transcend the disease that you seek otherwise to cure. The pursuit of the cure of the disease is the same activity as the one whereby you first acquired the disease. It is a version of the disease, something you do because you are diseased. It is not another process than disease. At most it involves a different relationship to the disease. Whereas previously you unwittingly did everything that compounded the disease, now you want to do everything to get rid of it. The search for the cure is still another way of being diseased. It is not the Way of Truth. It is not the Way that I Teach. It is not true religion or true spirituality. True religion, true spirituality, is the process that takes place when you are already well, when you are in your Native position, when you are established in Truth, Happiness or Reality.

The spiritual process is to understand how you contracted this disease, understand the mechanics of your presuming it always in this present moment so that in every present moment you will be established in the Free Position, the Position of Happiness, Truth, or the presumption of Being. The spiritual process, then becomes the magnification of non-disease, prior Happiness, the prior presumption.”

Da Free John. The Dreaded Gom-Boo. (1983). The Johannine Daist Communion. pp. 44-45

Not all good

For me, being a student of the teaching on freedom from suffering is not about affirming the idea that ‘all is one’ or ‘it’s all good’. It is not all good, and this work reveals how not good it is.

Meditation does not exactly feel good to me. It never really has. It feels like taking medicine. It does not feel like an escape or a relief. In meditation, I do not reach states where I would like to reside permanently. There is no bliss or ‘stream-entry’ happening here.

The light of brighter awareness reveals psychological and emotional content that is not pleasant. It shows me how fiercely I am clinging to a sense of self that is always dissatisfied and threatened. It shows me how much I live in repetitive thoughts about ‘me and my problems’, regrets, hopes, schemes and plots. It shows me how little I trust. That’s how the medicine works. If it feels good in any way, it’s when I note that it is doing what it’s supposed to do.

Being close to an awakened teacher is like taking the strongest dosage of the medicine available, plus some, times ten billion.  I am told that the sense of dissatisfaction gets much louder and more intolerable before it lets go.  It’s pretty loud and intolerable at the moment.

Who are these teachers of spiritual awakening?

One of the many benefits of getting to know James before he wrote his book and got busy teaching was the time we spent discussing the teachers who influenced him when he was a student.

James has an extensive collection of audio tapes, CDs and literature written by awakened individuals.  In those early days we would spend hours watching videos, listening to talks and reading excerpts from the books.  We talked about the material at length.  At first, I was skeptical of every one of these individuals.  I was fond of the Zen tradition of transmission, in which a teacher receives permission to teach from his or her superior, usually after decades of formal practice.   Most of the teachers James introduced me to had not received formal transmission of any sort.  They spoke on their own authority, using their own terms, about awakening.

Listening to the first borrowed audio talk in my car driving home from James’ house, my skepticism flew out the window.  (As I recall, it was a tape of Bryon Katie leading people through The Work… )  I borrowed more material and couldn’t keep my head out of the books.  All these teachers were saying the same thing, in their own terms, in their own ways!  But the message was the same message, and the same root teaching of Zen – life is suffering and there is a way out.  As Byron Katie says, “you are the cause of your suffering, but only all of it.”  This was great news.

I noticed several things as I learned about these teachers.  I noticed that they do not rely on religious traditions, texts or systems.  They may refer to passages in religious texts or use certain rituals, but they communicate only from the authority of their own personal and direct realization.  They speak spontaneously in response to their immediate surroundings, listeners and life circumstances.  Talks do not have the tone of a planned lecture.  In general, there is not a course of study or step by step plan of attainment.  There may be guidelines or mile-markers that students tend to notice along the way, but the mile-markers are not stages of enlightenment, just the possible results of applying certain practices.

In my studies, I did not hear these teachers say – you are already free,  there is nothing you need to do.  There is no denial that we are suffering anxiety, stress, fear, anger and the whole spectrum of negative emotions.  They say, freedom is our birthright, or natural state, and we cannot do anything search-wise to find it.  True freedom comes by grace, and, we can take steps that develop a stronger psychological/physical/emotional/social vessel that is able to contain and express that natural state.  Practices like meditation and inquiry help me.  I am not spiritually awake, but there is progress that I feel as less density and a relief from the sense of dis-ease.

Access to the work of a variety of persons living and expressing the awakened state grew my hope and determination to keep going.  At first exposure, I felt the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and over time I feel my ‘self’ getting lighter.