Category: Meditation

True prayer

 “Prayer is the surrender of judgment about what should happen, letting Truth run your life. It is rightly understood as a form of meditation. The most common form of prayer consists in asking God for something for yourself, or petitionary prayer. This is not true prayer. Can you really know that you will be better off getting what you want? Can you really know what is best for you or anyone else? Since God’s will is what is happening at any given moment, praying for a specific outcome implies a basic distrust of God’s will. Not trusting God’s will is a barrier to Liberation. If you really knew what was best for you, wouldn’t you have made it by now? Wouldn’t you be truly happy? True prayer implies surrender to God’s will, to Reality.

What else is there?”

-from Ten Paths to Freedom by James Wood

The snowball of judgment and how to stop it, by James Wood

THE “SNOWBALL” OF JUDGMENT AND HOW TO STOP IT 

“Judgments snowball until the mass of mind-material overwhelms you. It is important to know how to break the cycle. Notice if you judge, and then notice if you judge yourself for judging, and then notice if you judge yourself for judging yourself for judging, and so on. If the tangled mess is too complex and hard to follow, just notice the feeling of all those judgments until you can discern patterns and notice those. The better you get at noticing what you are thinking and feeling in the moment, the quieter your mind will become, and the more you will be able to notice individual thoughts before they can spin out of control. You must see yourself exactly as you are in the moment without flinching or turning away, without apology or rationalization, without creating a ” me” out of it—as in I’m no good because I’m angry and I’m angry because I’m no good. That is how you get wound up tight. That generates more anger. You are afraid of dissolving, so you contract in fear, judging yourself to defend against dissolution. Ecstasy is terrifying for the ego to taste, much less BE.

Your mind will try to lash out and get you involved in its ugliness by getting you to judge yourself for judging. Remember, you are not your mind. If your mind lashes out, notice it but recognize that you are the witness while your mind is the perpetrator. Let it show you what you are doing unconsciously, because on some level you are imbuing your mind with a sense of self that keeps it going. The mind tries to get you to identify with it. You are not your mind, but you are responsible for its behavior, in the same way that you are not a vicious dog, but if you own a vicious dog, you are responsible for watching it and keeping it from attacking others or responding appropriately if it does attack someone. As you go through your day, notice what the mind is doing. Keep it on a leash. Discipline it by developing discriminating awareness. Often, the mind lies in wait for you to let your guard down. If your mind suddenly rages out of control, just notice it. Like a vicious dog, it’s not who you are. It may feel like you, but it’s not. You must witness it impersonally and see it for what it is, without judgment. This keeps you from beating yourself up when you see what it’s up to.

Judgment obscures your true nature and keeps you from having permanent peace and satisfaction, like a pond that is clogged with trash. If you unclog the pond and tap into life without judgment, you will taste the sweetness of Freedom like spring water from a pristine well, the Truth you have been looking for as long as you can remember.”

  -from Ten Paths to Freedom by James Wood

Who am I?

“You will know who you are when your memory

no longer describes you.”

–Vernon Howard  1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle # 1354

What is meditation?

True Meditation by Adyashanti

 

True meditation has no direction, goals, or method. All methods aim at achieving a certain state of mind. All states are limited, impermanent and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial consciousness.

 

True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not fixated on objects of perception. When you first start to meditate, you notice that awareness is always focused on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.

 

In true meditation all objects are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to manipulate or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness (consciousness) is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

 

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.

 

Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes.

 

As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.

 

The simple yet profound question “Who Am I?” can then reveal one’s self not to be the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom of Being — Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all objects come and go as manifestations of the Eternal Unborn Self that YOU ARE.

 

© 1999 Adyashanti. All rights reserved.

 

Reflections on meeting the Teacher

I had been practicing Zen for a few years. Many of the folks I sat zazen with had been at it for decades and thinking about that terrified me.

When I heard from a friend that James was ‘awake’ – as in, enlightened, free of dukkha – I had to check it out. Could it be? Someone, living, not far away, but across town, in Tucson, Arizona, had done what it seemed so impossible to do? I was all doubt, skepticism and Zen-snobbery.

I had to meet him. I had questions.

The rest is history, you could say. Things sped up.

Shortly after I started working with James, an answer to the Mu koan appeared. I had been chewing on that one, and giving ridiculous attempts at answers to my Zen teacher, for about 3 years. I started to see more translation of in-zazen-realizations into the rest of life.

For me, teachers of spiritual awakening are access points, way-pointers, nudging me toward what’s possible. James’ perspective and friendship help keep me going in the right direction, like the breadcrumbs that lead out of the deep dark forest.

Here is a beautiful piece in which Richard Moss writes about meeting Franklin Merrell-Wolff.

Joel S. Goldsmith on the function of the spiritual master:

In some religious teachings, there are those known as masters, just as in ancient days Jesus was called Master. A master is one who has achieved some measure of spiritual freedom, which means some measure of nonattachment to the things and thoughts of the world. People often get the idea, however, that the function of a master is to take over another’s mind and life and to govern and manage them for that person, but a master is one to whom a person can go and through whose help and co-operation he can be lifted up into a state of spiritual consciousness and discernment where he himself realizes the Master in his own consciousness. The Master is not a man: the Master is a state of unfolded and developed consciousness.

– Joel S. Goldsmith. The World is New (1997).

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

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.