sitting monkey is place where
david evans
writes about meditation, buddhism, and related topics.
not exactly the instructions i would give, but who can resist the wisdom of a cowboy alligator? so odd and cute!
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from considering faith that the situation has a basic workability, including the tenderness of our situation, and recognizing our fear and not turning away from it, a kind of confidence arises they say. the logic goes, we can continue to practice in this way and it will make a positive difference; meditation has an ordinary kind of impact.
this is what to me is meant by doubtlessness in my meditation tradition. by practicing meditation, and then working directly with our fear, cynicism, and other emotions we start to develop a kind of confidence in the workability of our situation. further it happens naturally as a result of the familiarity with fear instead of ignoring fear in some kind of rambo bravado.
it’s also called ’stepping out of the cocoon’ in shambhala jargon, and here cocoon is a kind of tendency toward conceptualizing — of our self and others and the situation — as a reaction to fear and groundlessness.
like when someone looks at me funny, i have an urge to understand why. was it something i said? or did? or is there food on my face again? could be. but it also could be totally unrelated to me. or i might just remind someone of another person altogether. really what i experienced was a moment of groundlessness, of not knowing. and that not knowing was uncomfortable.
the urge to ‘figure it out’ is a kind of cocooning urge. i want to label what was going on and set it aside in a neat and orderly worldview. and i’m constantly wanting to do that, neatly organize my experiences so they make sense: which is helpful, but the ‘urge’ to do that is subconscious and can go way too far. do i really need to know why that person looked at me funny? did they even? or am i just paranoid?
so recognizing the ‘urge’ to pin things down, that is quite helpful and is cultivated by a meditation practice and leads to greater fearlessness, in my experience. it has something to do with becoming familiar with groundlessness, but for me it is mostly just seeing this very human quality of wanting to ‘pin things down’ or ‘figure things out’ all the time, at least that is my tendency.
fearlessness is another funny term with respect to meditation in my tradition. i guess you could consider the shaolin and samurai warriors, who meditated as a way to culture fearlessness. but typical macho fearlessness or bravado isn’t what was meant.
i saw a poster this week which read, “fearlessness is going forward anyway” and i think that is the kind we’re discussing this weekend. the instruction for how to do that is to feel one’s fear directly, get curious about it, notice it or become more and more familiar with it, and in doing so one naturally expresses true fearlessness. the practice is to deliberately notice the fear and not turn away from it or ignore that it is a part of our situation. allowing ourselves to feel fear, to let that be part of our makeup and not feel embarrassed or guilty or angry is a necessary step – though still really a practice for me personally. i hate to acknowledge that i’m just human sometimes.
i’m helping with a shambhala training weekend this weekend, and some of the topics planned include faith, fearlessness, and doubtlessness. the first concept, faith, makes it sound religious to my ear. but the term is not used to mean that we must have some kind of blind faith, some intentional blindness, in order to proceed. rather it conveys a trust in causality and also that a tender, genuine goodness or workability is part of us and part of all situations. that we can connect with our heart and how we feel; or that could include a sense of freshness and beauty in experience; or that the world or people can always surprise us.
causality perhaps we can agree upon, but this also means that no one is inherently bad. rather we’re influenced by a multitude of things in our lifetime, and sometimes we’re born into privilege and sometimes we were not. therefore, it all matters in some small or larger way.
that we all have some genuine, fundamental goodness or intelligence might be harder to accept. do pirates in somali waters, who murder boat crews for their cargo, have a basic and fundamental goodness? something to contemplate perhaps, but that situation may be too removed or foreign to consider. what about the jerk that cuts us off on the freeway, or the dostoyevskian clerk who ignores our pleas seemingly just to exert some power over us? do they have basic goodness? probably not displayed in our interaction with them, but with somebody else? like with a puppy or a small child? can’t we agree that everyone has something that makes them tender, vulnerable — even if it is just a memory or trigger — and that tenderness is an expression of a more basic goodness? something to consider.
boing boing discovered some silent films shot in tibet during the 1940’s, which are pretty amazing to watch:
the first is a film by tsien-line shen, resident chinese commissioner in lhasa from 1942 to 1947. it mostly shows official ceremonies but has some video of a young dalai lama.
the second by sir basil gould, the british political officer of sikkim, bhutan and tibet in 1935, documents two trips to lhasa.
and the third assembles clips from the 1940s in tibet from the BFI National Archives. it features a very young dalai lama.
the bfi apparently now has these for sale, as well as over 20 hours of films from tibet between 1922 and 1949 on their mediatheque web site.
i’ve been blogging since april of 2003. and my interests have migrated but somewhat settled on three topics: design / professional, personal, and meditation related. but lately i’ve encountered some writers block, perhaps because those three categories are so disparate i don’t know who my audience might be for any given post.
focus? naw… let’s splinter instead into three blogs and subscribe to just the topics you’re actually interested in. if you stumbled here, use the tabs across the top to discover the other now separate blogs.
this site will host my thoughts on meditation and other meditation-related topics.
this weekend rocked. i helped with a meditation program, the first of a five weekend series called shambhala training. we have about 27 participants. they were amazing. and we did a LOT of meditation practice together, as well as talks, discussion groups, and working with people one-on-one on their technique. i’m really inspired and feeling lighter today.
this weekend we’re officially launching the portland chapter of the interdependence project with ethan nichtern visiting from new york: including a thursday evening sit, all-day saturday meditation program, and a sunday launch party.
if you’re interested the details are at the launch weekend website. make sure to pre-register for the day-long.
laura ross, a fan of ethan’s podcasts, had the enthusiasm to start the group. i came on to help her as a meditation instructor and we’ve been testing the waters for the last couple months with a regular thursday night sitting group.
this weekend is the culmination of laura’s initial vision and drive, and she made this happen with tremendous effort and a courageous leap. we now have enthusiastic regular meditators like nick, stacey, mindy, alejandro, sarah and some new folks like steven, kevin, plus more each week. over twenty people are registered already for the day-long on saturday. woo hoo!
sorry for the brief haitus, i’m preparing to lead a day-long meditation class on saturday, modeled after the book “turning the mind into an ally” by sakyong mipham. mostly have my talks outlined and the schedule worked out, now just meditating extra and reviewing my notes. should be fun.
samadhi cushions, the non-profit who made the very cushions i meditate upon, has a hip new ad posted on youtube. who knew a meditation store could be so… up to date?
and they have another short video just about the store.