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it’s so heart breaking having this month long retreat finishing up this week. only two days left. we’ve all become such good friends here, the intensity perhaps bonds us faster and more deeply even though the time was short. today jean-marie from montreal left early, and before he left he read a small quote from the book born in tibet, where chogyam trungpa taught a three month series of teachings just before escaping for india.
I thanked all those who had been at the [teachings]; I had learned in the teaching and they in attending. I said ‘none of us know what the future may bring, and we may never be allowed to be together again in the flesh, but spiritually we are one. Our having had this opportunity to be together is the beginning of a union that will last for many lives. To bring all this into our daily lives we must continue our efforts to follow the promptings of the [teacher] within ourselves. We must keep the balance between our mundane activities and our strivings for spiritual perfection. We must do our best to help all beings caught in the suffering that the world is now experiencing. We who have had this wonderful time together must now disperse. The assembly hall will soon be empty, with the shrine, the throne and the decorations all dismantled, but we must not be too distressed.
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Before meditating, before recognizing things to be as they are, one will have seen the radiance of this mind as solid external things that are sources of pleasure and pain. But through practicing meditation, and through coming to recognize things as they are, you will come to see that all of these appearances are merely the display or radiance or light of the mind which experiences them.
an interesting idea to ponder, though it has the risk of slipping into nihilism. our sense perceptions are just giving us raw data, so any ‘things’ we see or feel are definitely because of minds involvement and not innate. take a look around your room right now. is your mind really separate from the things you see? or are you seeing them because of your mind with all of it’s prejudice and habituation?
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found this interesting interview with Miranda Snow about women in tantric buddhism, in the July 1994 Shambhala Sun magazine. she also wrote the book titled passionate enlightenment. in the interview she posits that the tantric forms of buddhism may have been originated and help primarily by women, only later to become institutionalized and patriarchal in india and tibet. when asked about how these teachings might change how people might relate to each other in relationship, she had said something interesting:
By sharing their emotions, they bring them into conscious awareness and begin to weave emotions into their spiritual path together. Both of them are committed to a relationship that is devoted to mutual enlightenment. Therefore, they’re trying to, in essence, enlighten their emotions together. They move their emotions to a higher range, so that they transform ordinary attachment, which is generally self-centered and causes great suffering, into something that might be called transcendental attachment. In transcendental attachment, the emotions that arise from intimacy - such as please and the joy of communion and the bliss of erotic passion - are cultivated together and deepened and then used as a basis for meditating upon emptiness. They’re recognized as empty and then they’re used as a basis for meditation.
a major theme in my retreat this month has been intensely looking at sense perceptions, emotions, and thoughts so that we can see their inherent empty but luminous nature. normally you would think intensifying would make them more solid, more problematic, or then they would capture the mind as distraction more fervently. but the opposite seems to happen, and that is the tantric approach. by looking at extreme detail, at our experience more and more vividly, increasing the boundaries and the contrast more and more, suddenly we find the boundaries dissolve, we find the experience is really shifty, flickering, darting here and there, fleeting, and ungraspable. the more vivid the experience the more ungraspable we find it. and that’s one way how we discover the impermanence and empty yet luminous (aka. vivid) nature of phenomenon. in fact that’s how we discover that our sense of “self” is also luminous and empty.
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in high school a few of us convinced a world history teacher to lead a japanese language class. mr. wilson was a wonderful teacher, full of stories of his time in japan and anecdotes that made learning the language more fun. he also pushed us well. he has since gone on to become a well published japanese translator. his translation of the way of the samurai seems to be the standard now at bookstores i’ve visited. i am very grateful to him.
during that class, he gave us one traditional haiku as a lesson in how older forms versus newer forms of japanese words were used to convey additional meaning. the haiku read in japanese:
furu ike ya
kawazu tobi komu
mizu no oto
translating this into english loses the nuance, but it would roughly render:
ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the sound of water
so why is this poem so famous? it’s not the nuance, i suspect. like the use of the older form of frog or pond to convey an unspoiled scene deep in a forest. i’ve always wondered why this haiku was such a big deal.
well investigating sense perceptions and the nature of mind this week had me thinking about it again. i’d invite you to contemplate this in the form of a question, “when a thought jumps into your mind, where does the sound of the thought come from?”
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when i first arrived, i was talking to acharya john rockwell - who is leading this month long program - about his trips to atlanta georgia. that’s where i first met him, when i took my refuge vows there and sat in on a sadhana of mahamudra class. turns out his parents live there and that’s why he was teaching in georgia once or twice a year.
someone at the table teased him for only visiting that much, and he explained that they were typical WASPs (white anglo-saxon protestants) and therefore they were really self-sufficient. he chuckled that if one of them got seriously ill he probably wouldn’t hear about it, and if one died he’d probably just get a post card a few weeks later letting him know. those were just a part of WASP culture he mused.
“ah ha!”, I thought. that’s my culture too! my friends have often teased me about how self-sufficient i am and my parents are. someone joked with my father when i was about to leave for college, that i would probably only call once and that’s the last they would hear from me. my father joked back that i probably wouldn’t even call once. but my parents are the same way. i often hear that one has had a serious illness or biopsy after the fact, or as if it was no big deal and i shouldn’t worry or anything. hearing acharya rockwell describe his own family this way made me suddenly feel less weird and instead part of a movement, a culture, that i had never really considered existed. yay, i’m a WASP. (snicker)
but not entirely. i’m more than a third irish, which maybe imparts a communicative side somewhat in conflict with my typical self-sufficient and quiet anglican roots. in fact, if one was raised with a mix of values and social norms, a mix of quiet and loud, polite and gossipy, wouldn’t that lead one to feel conflicted at times? to have conflicting desires to have alone time and also to have socialization? i do feel conflicted often about how much time to spend with friends versus my own space. there are probably many causes and conditions for that. but it’s interesting to consider that some of the different desires in my life have been cultural and from growing up in a blend of cultures.
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so i’ve been here now almost three weeks. the pond has been frozen over. the snow has settled on the ground. it’s much quieter outside now, except you can still hear to bubbling and churning of the Stevens River nearby along with all the small streams feeding it.
this time last year i was sitting the same intensive meditation retreat, and my mind had settled in a similar way then. but i had forgotten how settled my mind can get, how deeply relaxed i can feel, how content to just watch the snow fall outside. it’s so beautiful here. but the beauty isn’t just the natural environment and the seasons, it’s also my mind being open to it for a change.
i’ve lived in some really beautiful places, had gorgeous views out of my bedroom windows, had fantastic experiences, travelled, a privileged upbringing, safe environments, loving friends and family. but it’s astounding the capacity of mind to turn everything into ordinary, into yesterday’s news, into not good enough. i’m really curious why that is, how that happens. travel is a great example of how we seek out something fresh and new, and we feed off the energy of the novel and curious. even returning from a long trip we can find our home refreshing, small things about it rewarding and interesting again. i think this meditation practice is in some way learning how to open to experience again so it is renewed, fresh, and interesting even if we’re just entering the same bathroom we’ve had for twenty years; the richness of our sense perceptions always available to us instead of pushing them away with conceptualization and boredom.
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before i have to shut up though, here is a quick picture that i snapped on the drive up through new york. click here for a larger version.
it’s from my tiny little camera phone. the abstract fuzzy image looks ok though, eh?
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after a wonderfully fun few days visiting friends and family on the east coast, i’m back in vermont again and my 28-day retreat is starting. i’m expecting to be in silence for the next week or two, will try to check in and say hi to ya’ll then.
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the last two hundred years has marked a shift from governments and religions being our primary vehicles for social organization toward corporations having prominence. what does that mean long term for humanity? primarily, i’m curious if there is a way to assert pressure on companies besides just publicity and transparency for a higher social consciousness and value system. i found mark’s reframing of shareholders as transaction partners an interesting commentary but not nearly clear enough in corporate governance for the future (and present?) world of corporate power. governments need constitutions and systems of laws in order to clarify and enact effective policy for social well being, but corporate structure and governance just doesn’t have the parallels beyond the indirect effect of publicity on revenue. mark correctly classifies corporations as sociopaths for that reason. trade unions are perhaps an interesting model. if corporations long term are more relevant than governments as organizing social constructs, how can we migrate successful social influence for the common good to that model?
perhaps governments will primarily become the geographic trade unions of the future, not asserting a national identity so much as asserting that role of corporate governance on the mega-corporations and keiretsus. what’s troubling to me about that is that globalization may continue to reduce the individual government’s influence over a corporation. will we have the will to empower the united nations with that oversight of corporate governance? or will it take another major shift in world consciousness, after a long bought of social ill, to apply that change? like the impending ice age?
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a live snow monkey cam from japan. how cute! (thanks lindsay)
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