Archive for the ‘Philosophical’ Category

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The Ultimate Reality

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

I have to confess that I do not see the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. And I haven’t a hope of doing so.

But then I’m not claiming to. That was never the point.

Our experiences and our narratives, are a moving frame; a frame that is advancing through time. A frame in which the contents inevitably change as experiences are experienced and as understandings develop, deepen or are transcended.

As the saying goes, no one can put their foot into the same river twice.

Consider:

Many of us who, have looked at a bias held by another, will have thought, ‘This person is being partially blinded by this bias.’ I.e., they are not seeing the world around them as clearly as they might.

I’ve told the story several times about walking into a psych lecture in university. The subject was Freud’s Defense Mechanisms. 45 minutes later, I walked out and saw a changed world around me.

Experiences and insights inevitably push at us to absorb them. After all, we live in an existence wherein change is said to be the only constant. Change presses upon us; whether we open our arms to it or not.

Change changes us. The contents of our moving frame changes. What we are experiencing changes because the contents of our frame have changed.

And, yes, our experience is all still undoubtedly subjective.

There is no question of pulling the curtain away and seeing the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. That was never the point.

But the person who transcends a partially blinding bias will see what is there to be seen more clearly without the distortion.

And thus it is with all beliefs, religions, biases, opinions, hopes and fears; to name a few of our sources of distortion.

Each distortion we diminish lets us see a bit more clearly. Each moves us some immeasurable distance closer to the unobtainable ultimate. Each new thing we learn changes the contents of the frame and alters the view.

If the mutability of the moving frame that our experiences arise from is grasped, then the possibility of influencing what the frame is fed can be conceived.

Choosing to try to diminish all the beliefs, opinions, biases, hopes and fears from within a frame seems likely to increasingly clarify the frame’s perception of the reality around it.

It is a road that promises new vistas for the frame without ever a hint of a promise of the road’s end.

After trying many other things, I’ve found that this is the thing that I find the most intriguing.

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The Need for Meaning

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

This ‘need’ for meaning in our lives shapes so very much of how we perceive the world.

The first thing I would say about this is that for the vast majority of the human race, I would never consider trying to deny them the sustenance of believing that there is a meaning for their life.

But for those few of us out here in the hinterlands thrashing in the bushes, I’d say that we should consider why we humans feel such a thirst for meaning.

We are as clearly the product of the evolution that shaped us.

We are, at this late stage of evolution on this planet, intelligent self-aware creatures.

And the evolution, that we are the products of, has honed us, and the survival of all creatures, upon our ability to reliably detect and understand what is going on around us in the environment; as the optimum way to ensure survival and propagation.

So, we are hard-wired to incessantly try to understand what we are seeing when we look out at the world.

And it is from this trying to understand that arises a terrible cognitive dissonance.

Having manifested self-awareness and the inevitable and concurrent sense of personhood that accompanies self-awareness, the observation that we appear to just live and then die deeply offends our sense of personhood, presence and continuity.

“I am, and I can see that I am, and then … I’m not?” Why, why, why?

Even today, with all of our biological knowledge, the central point of Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene”, eludes us.

“You mean it is not all about me and my sense of persistent personhood?”

In the deeper stages of Zen Buddhism, and other meditative and introspective practices, it is often seen that our egos and our sense of personhood are illusions.

Everything is change. We come, things happen and we go. So it is.

Only the illusionary sense of personhood, and the associated automatically arising defensive barrier, the ego, resist the simple evidence of our transience.

So, in the face of this terrible cognitive dissonance, we dream up religions to ‘explain’ things and to comfort ourselves that our person-hoods are not really just transient patterns.

The book, “The Worm at the Core”, by Sheldon Solomon discusses all of this quite nicely.

If our need for ‘meaning’ drives us to construct religions that we believe in to comfort ourselves, then I can only group this phenomenon into the same basket with the other distortions which stand between us and increased clarity.

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Determinism

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

Determinism or Free-will, These two are a real quandary. People tend to line up on one side or the other of the question; as if there were no other sides.

But there are.

The ‘Either-Or’ construct was probably the earliest bit of logic that our recently evolved semi-intelligent ancestors became consciously aware of. And thus it was enshrined, early on, as one of our first ‘go to’ strategies to be used when reasoning out the world around us.

But in truth, the reality being considered is under no obligation to conform to an ‘Either-Or’ expectation.

Nor does the choice between Free-will and Determinism define the only relevent alternatives.

And that’s a good thing. Because pure Determinism renders us pointless. And Free-will requires us to be Gods independent of existence.

The alternative we have been missing lies all around us; in plain sight.

It is looking out of your eyes this very moment and it in your cat lying on the couch on the other side of the room.

If you are an animal which experiences the urge to survive, then you are that alternative.

Existence is not defined solely by Newtonian cause and effect Determanism on one hand and Quantum probabilities on the other.

There is another dimension to our reality called complexity.

Visualize a line that runs from Determinism on one end to Quantum probabilities on the other. Now, add another line which rises vertically from the first and call it Complexity.

It is on this line that you will find “Life”.

Life is patterns of matter which replicate themselves using energy harvested from the environment around them.

Life has evolved and increased its complexity for nearly 4 billion years.

One form, the evolving complexity took about 600 million years ago, was animals.

The more complex animals have nervous systems. These systems allow the animal’s environment to be sensed so decisions, which optimize its survival and propagation, can be made. Emotionally, these animals ‘care’ if they survive or not.

This is life-based ‘local will’.

So, when you put milk in your coffee today, it was not an action presdestined to happen since existence began. Nor did it require your God essence, from somewhere beyond this causal existence, to step in to help make the choice.

It was just you, you sweet little self-replicating pattern of matter. You, who preserves the coherence of your physical manifestation using excess energy shed by the local stellar unit.

And that’s good.

Good because the saddest part of the Determinism/Free-will debate concerns those who cannot find their way out of this determinist/Free-will trap.

Many of these people are genuine seekers; people who have waded deeply into philosophical questions, spiritual traditions and into non-duality.

And they have begun by correctly concluding that our sense of a personal self and of ego-hood are illusions. And they are.

But then they’ve further concluded that if all existence is one thing, then a personal will must also be an illusion.

This is wrong.

And they do themselves and the world a terrible disservice with this conclusion. Embracing it removes some of our best and brightest from actively contributing to the shaping of our future.

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Be here now?

Friday, December 24th, 2021

My friend,

I’ve read your E-Mail over several times and I’ve let my responses roll around in my mind – sort of like clothes tumbling in a dryer; waiting for one response or another to pop to the top and suggest a beginning response.

But mostly what arises for me is the feeling that I am in a thoughtless and immediate space.

And that I’m watching someone in a thinking space; thinking.

I am here pressed up against the plate glass wall of paradox.

The irony of it almost makes me want to laugh. (not at you, my friend, but at the absurdity of the paradox itself).

Have you seen this skit by Bob Newhart?

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=519168745237080

Thinking about our thinking to try to untangle the problems we feel that we have – because of our thinking.

Does that make you smile?

Or, perhaps, does it makes you want to squirm – and think about it a bit? (smile)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not being cynical, critical or mocking you. I like you far too much for any of that. I highly respect your sincerity in all of this.

But, you are trapped in a paradox; from my POV.

Of course, you could just lead a life of staying busy and not thinking about things; but that will not serve you. You would get nowhere. And just wake up, decades later, no different than you were when you fell asleep.

But, just as surely, if your strategy is to try to sort things out by thinking about them and trying to understand them conceptually, then you will just end up like a conspiracy theorist. Who, after years of trying to see the ‘real truth’, finds nothing but evidence of evidence born of confirmation bias around him in all directions.

The more we think we can think ourselves into ‘seeing life directly and simply’, the further we will get from it.

But there is a place between denial and trying.

Calling it by one word or another is always a risk; because words can lead us back into thinking about words and what they mean.

‘Being’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘acceptance’….

Consider dropping the idea of cause and effect and its suggestion that the way forward is to ‘do things’ to ‘get results’.

Cause and effect, subject and object, this and that, now and then, here and there, and on and on. They will all lead you astray.

They all suggest that ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’ are not perfect. and they suggest that ‘that’, ‘then’ and ‘there’ might be better.

Again, I am not being critical. But I am trying to get you to see that the idea that ‘things are not perfect’ leads us to think about why things are not perfect. And no amount of subject-object consideration can untie the knot and the paradox of duality.

Two blonds are standing. One on either side of the river. One hollers over to the other, “How do I get over there?” And the other shouts back, “You are already over there!”

As Bob Newhart says in the skit, “Just stop”.

Say ‘yes’. It is what it is. You are you. This moment and how it is, is OK.

This moment, just like the past, is indelible – it cannot be changed. Only the future can be changed.

But we make too much of the distinction between now and the future.

Saying ‘yes’ to this moment’s unfolding does not mean that you give up all hope of manifesting a better future.

It means that you recognize that saying ‘yes ‘ to this moment cannot help but create a better future.

Your attitude, at the point of acceptance, is one and the same as your attitude at the point of manifestation.

There is no point in time other than here and now. So, there cannot be any other place from which we can manifest the future.

But our ideas of cause and effect inevitably pull us into ‘do this now and get that later’ notions.

But, in fact, accepting joy in your life at this moment creates a future with more joy. You are both the creator and the created; once you drop believing in the world being a cause and effect mechanism.

Like your life and your life will become more likable.
Like yourself and you will become more likable.
Trust the future and the future will become more trust-able.
Trust your instincts and your instincts will clarify your seeing.

Just stop.

Quit trying to figure it out. Accept and say ‘yes’ to how it is. Feel gratitude for how it is.

Don’t engage in trying to stop. Just stop.

Don’t try to stop thinking. Just stop thinking about thinking.

Don’t try to say ‘yes’ to how it is. Just say ‘yes’.

Don’t try to ‘feel gratitude’. Just feel it.

There is the trying. And there is the doing. One is cause and effect and the other is just … wordless, here and now, one thing, inseparable.

Let yourself pool into simple awareness that says ‘yes’. And look at the world through those eyes.

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Changes

Friday, June 11th, 2021


We all have changed over the years and I’m not an exception.
Maybe I wondered a lot in the past about the future. But I don’t much these days. If I have a motto that expresses what I feel now, it is this: “It is what it is”.
I know we are not getting out of here alive and I feel at peace with the fact.
I know that the more I’ve learned about existence, the more I know I will never understand it. It is increasingly a mystery.
Many years ago, about the time I graduated University, sitting in the screened in porch in the house where Rose and I lived on Dawson Street just around the corner from the Art Theater, you and I were discussing higher consciousness and enlightenment. I recall clearly that you said to me, that if you knew anyone who was going to achieve it (enlightenment), then it would be me. I think you were referring to my unrelenting drive to know and understand things.
Well, all these years later, I think there was some truth in what you said. But like so many things, the imagination of it before you have it, never measures up to what it is like in actual fact.
These days, I don’t think there is ‘enlightenment’ in the glamorous, extreme and magical way most folks think about it. But rather, there is a simple and deep acceptance of “it is what it is”.
There is a dropping of belief in your own Ego and personhood.
There is an untangling of all the voices in your head that were placed there by your family, your church, your school, your society, the media and your friends. And this untangling involves a discarding of all the ‘shoulds’ that permeate us. Dropping them one by one (or adopting them as our own, if they are good) until there is nothing left but our own inherent ‘wants’. And at this point, we can say that we ‘own’ ourselves and that we are the real chooser of what we choose.
There is a steady dropping of beliefs, hopes, fears and opinions. All of these things are simply ways that we try to ‘negotiate’ with existence.
They reflect that we cannot simply accept existence as it is. But rather, that we want shape it to be as we want to it to be.
Existence, seen without beliefs standing between us and it, can be a frightening thing. A thing of mystery, omnipotence and a thing that is utterly unaware of our existence.
So, we ‘fear’ when it may be as we don’t want it to be. And we ‘hope’ that it will be as we want it to be. And we form ‘beliefs’ and opinions about how it is.
Belief systems like reincarnation, Islam and Christianity.
And these belief systems seem to frame the nakedness of reality and make it a more palatable thing for us to deal with. Our beliefs give us the feeling that there is purpose and meaning to our lives and that existence cares about us.
Least you think I’ve fallen into a Nihilist hole and cannot get out, it isn’t so.
Day to day, subjectively, I feel like one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. I deeply love my life and how it is going. I feel deeply blessed – though I haven’t a clue why it is so.
But I’m not in Mary Poppins land. When I look at the world, I see it is a huge, and getting worse, mess. We humans are showing sure signs of moving towards a global disaster and a major reset. I can see this as clearly as I see the letters on the screen in front of me.
So then, the question might be what can we do about it? And I think the probable answer is, ‘Not much”.
We are not the authors of it nor will we be the ones to repair it. We are simply the ones born here and now and who will see what unfolds. It is what it is.
So how can we still enjoy our lives in the midst of all this?
Cherish being alive and try to make someone else happy – just because. After all the complexity of our university educated lives, this must seem far too simple.
But we are just like fish leaping free for a moment from the surface of the sea of mortality. We take ourselves seriously and that is a lot of the problem we create for ourselves and our potential happiness.
It is what it is. Let it be as it is and say ‘yes’ to it. Just as we did when the acid began to get into us and disassembled our egos and made us feel everything directly and intensely.
We can resist or we can say ‘yes’. We can be unhappy that reality isn’t as we want it to be. Or we can embrace it ‘as it is’ and treasure the moments we still have left.
The voices that tell us that we cannot simply stop and accept things as they are are not ours. They are ‘shoulds’ still operating within us after all these years.

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Awareness of Awareness

Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

18 May 2021

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article the other day. It was entitled, “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs“.

It concerned a researcher named Michael Levin who is intensely interested in how electrical currents help shape our bodies. He calls it the ‘Bioelectric Code‘. He has been able to convincingly demonstrate how the mechanisms, some lower creatures use to grow and repair themselves, can be significantly altered through the judicious use of electric currents. And further that these changes are due solely to the introduction of the electric currents themselves; as the genomes of the creatures are not touched.

We’ve known for a long time that electric fields are an integral part of biology. Cells have ion channels that allow their inner and outer charge environments to be balanced in ways that are optimal for the cell’s health and functioning. Cells signal back and forth with other cells via electrical impulses via axons and dendrites. It is becoming ever more apparent now that cells employ the bioelectric spaces between them as a kind of inter-cellular Internet; they use it to build intricate and extensive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones.

The concepts of how creatures develop are moving away from earlier and simpler paradigms in which biological science visualized that genes defined proteins and proteins combined to create cells and that was much of the story of biology.

But we’ve known for some time that large parts of the morphogenesis puzzle were missing. How and why do some stem cells become livers and others become arms or eyes?

It was tempting, early on, to imagine that hidden inside of our genomes were intricate instructions, which we hadn’t discovered yet, which guided a entity’s development from its initial zygotic stage to its full expression as a mature creature.

But matters have turned out to be far more complex than that.

The things that have been accomplished in Levin’s lab are pretty amazing. One of his postdocs noted that in frogs, certain electrical patterns developed in areas where later features like faces and eyes would develop.

As an experiment, the postdoc imposed the electrical pattern that predicted an eye onto the developing frog’s stomach and, amazingly, an eye appeared there. And, once the eye was present, the frog’s nervous system began building optic nerves to connect the new eye to the brain by way of the spinal cord. Clearly, Levin and his students are onto something.

But, exactly what they are on to is still under debate; as you will see if you read the paper itself.

Levin’s former advisor, Clifford Tabin, says he is “agnostic” about how Levin’s “bioelectricity” should be understood. Levin would have bioelectricity be the be-all-and-end-all which largely explains how morphogenesis unfolds.

But others, like Daniel Dennett think that there are also many other moving parts required to make up the full picture. He feels that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other still unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, by now, what any of this has to do with this piece’s title, “Awareness of Awareness“?

Well, we’re going to get to that. But there are still more pieces to tie in.

Dennett thought that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

His list would indicate that the interactions between cells involve a lot more than just the magic of bioelectricity as Levin envisions it. But I don’t think we’re done yet drawing in relevant factors.

As many simpler units come together, Emergent Properties can come forth.

Ants, which are quite simple in and of themselves, combine into colonies which have quite complex behaviors. And it is these new behaviors which seemingly manifest from nowhere. No amount of study of individual ants would ever give a researcher the ability to predict the behaviors and properties of ant colonies. You can read more about all of this in Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

So, we have all the factors Dennett mentioned as ways that cells intercommunicate. And we also have a vertical functional assemblage that progresses from a few local cells into larger groups of cells organized as specific organs like livers, eyes, brains and hearts.

And through all of these organs and their inner organizations and their external communications and co ordinations are all the interactive communication technologies Dennett listed and probably more.

It gets harder and harder to hang on to to all these points at once. One strategy open to us is to realize, through logic, decomposition and analysis, some sort of a simplified picture of what our biological beings are.

But another and deeper insight is to see all of this coordinated movement of many parts as an all-at-once flow that is happening in the immediate now. A non-dualistic immediacy that has no notion of, nor need for, our decompositional analysis in order to simply do what it does.

Now, we are getting close to the point of this article, “Awareness of Awareness“.

If small groups of cells, as Levin asserts and I’m sure Dennett would agree, tend to coordinate their activities through bioelectric fields (and all of the other listed mechanisms) for their own greater good, then wouldn’t such a beneficial organizational mechanism repeat at all levels of organization?

Does not the heart regulate it own activities for the benefit of the heart, directly, and for the benefit of the overall organism, indirectly? And would not every sub-component do the same for itself and for the overall organism?

And what of the sense of self that pervades your overall organism? Is this not the highest level of communication among your disparate parts? Does it not act for the highest good of the organism it represents?

Does it matter if we can say if it is bioelectric or any particular mix of the other contributory items that Dennett mentioned?

From here, a hundred roads and a hundred questions beckon us. Questions about awareness vs. self-awareness. About duality and non-duality. About Free Will and Determinism. But all of them are arising from the dualistic side of us. The mind of cognition and abstraction. The side that decomposes in order to attempt understanding.

But none of that, as endlessly fascinating as it is to the mind, is what I’m interested in here.

I want to talk about the sense of self we feel when our awareness is aware of itself and aware of this material being which hosts the awareness.

Just as a few cells communicate and coordinate among themselves, think of the communication and coordination that occurs when you sit for a moment and empty your mind and let a feeling of peace and well being permeate through you – all of you.

Think of the signal sent for the benefit of the sender when you stop and consciously give thanks for all of the good things in your life.

Think of the message you are sending when you gaze at your body in the mirror and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts your awareness.

Truly, our awareness helps to maintain the boundaries of our existence. Not just because of its flight or fight capabilities but also because it coordinates and directs the sense of well being that serves to optimize our continued existence in the body.

To get to this place where these effects can be beneficently directed, much of the collateral confusion that arises, as a side effect of the mind’s conceptual, linguistic and abstraction capabilities, has to be discriminated and intentionally isolated.

It isn’t that these mental abilities are not valuable. They are immensely valuable and we would not have them if it were not so. But they are tools – they are not what we are.

The self aware, but untrained, mind is like an echo chamber or a mirror. And it is almost inevitable that our burgeoning awareness should mistake the contents of the mind (the concepts, the language and the abstractions) for itself. Many of these contents are instilled into us before we are mature enough to defend ourselves and to question and possibly reject what is being imprinted upon us.

At some point, if we are lucky, we become mature and independent enough to control the further inward flow of ideas. And then, if we experience unease at all the inner dichotomies and inconsistencies, we may begin to sort through the mess.

And, as the mess is cleared and we begin to increasingly identify with our awareness of awareness and to dis-identify with the contents of our minds and our egos, we can being to focus on the message we are sending when we consider ourselves and our bodies and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts us.

It is awareness intentionally giving loving concern and integration to the physical entity that hosts it for the mutual benefit of both.

Let us make a small aside here, to acknowledge all the religions, masters, schools and traditions which have tried unrelentingly for thousands of years to awaken us from the illusion that we are the contents of our minds. And who promised us, that if we could but realize the primacy of our awareness as being what we are, that we should then experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of subjective peace.

I am deeply grounded in science. And I am also deeply grounded in non-duality. I appreciate the power of the mind as a tool. And I also appreciate the immediacy and essential truth that manifests when I stop my mind and see this existence as an immediate and inseparable flow; that I am an inseparable part of.

Following the threads implied in the “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs” paper has enabled me to cobble a tentative connection between how the physical systems of our biological bodies function to communicate, coordinate and preserve themselves and the ideas of higher consciousness that arise from the meditative, spiritual and non-duality worlds in which this same preservation of what we are is deeply honored.

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An Enlightenment

Monday, September 3rd, 2018

On the morning of what he calls his “real awakening,” Adyashanti wrote the following to his teacher, Kwong Roshi –
–
“Roshi, today was a very special day. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. as usual to sit for a few hours before going to Los Gatos. I lit a candle, o?ered incense and bows and sat on my cushion.

Suddenly I heard a bird chirping away outside. The sound entered me in a way it had never before and a voice within spontaneously asked ‘Who hears the sound?’ Instantly the whole world, my perception of it, ?ipped 180 degrees. Everything dropped away. Everything.

I was the hearing. I was the bird. I was everything and I was nothing at all. It’s just like waking up from sleep. Nothing special at all. No excitement. No thrills. Nothing like I thought it would be like. Its like going home. Finding home. Being home. So very ordinary and yet so new. Like being born for the very ?rst time.

Every breath, every step, every thought, every perception is new. The Self returns to the Self, actually the Self realized the Self, but its so ordinary, so natural. Who would have thought there was a common belief that there is going to be a lot of ?reworks, lots of emotion, lots of dazzle, but this waking up is so silent, so quiet, so profound, so present in everything, has everything.

I felt something coming on for months. During the day I would be constantly laughing to myself because everything seemed to be transparent, so impermanent. Everything seemed to be falling away in front of my eyes. A huge void was looming in the background, swallowing everything up, every moment, every perception, almost as soon as it appeared, but I was not afraid at all. In fact, I was excited at watching it all happen.

Energy and conviction grew more day by day. Inside it felt as though all my old ways of perceiving the world and myself were just dissolving into nothing, into nothing. I kept investigating this nothing and this dissolving more and more deeply. Eventually even my questioning was dissolving as soon as it arose.

In some ways I felt dead, but joyously so. On and on it went for weeks, months and then last night the last thought I had was ‘I’m ready.’ The words just spontaneously came to mind, not as anything special, more like a simple fact. I thought nothing of it and went to sleep. The next morning when I heard the bird, everything dropped away and the next thing I knew I was the bird. I was the listening. I was everything. Everything and Nothing. So ordinary.

[A poem he wrote the same morning:]

Today I awoke, ?nally I see the Self has returned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing …
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand lifetimes.
Ten thousand lifetimes but today I am home.
his is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.”

~ Adyashanti (20th-21st century American mystic)

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Letter to a Grandson

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

My dear Grandson,

I want to wish you a very happy birthday. To say that you are showing every sign of being the brightest light of our extended family would not be an exaggeration.

Someday, if not already, you will realize how immensely blessed your life is. The time and place where you were born, your parents, your grandparents; Bernie and Sally, your faith, your intelligence, your curiousity, your excellent body and mind and so many other factors have made you lucky among the billions of we human beings. But, above and beyond that, you have not rested on your luck but, rather, you have taken your good opportunities and used them well. Brilliantly even, I think.

I am deeply curious to see what you will make of your life.

If I might presume to offer you some hard-won advice from my own experiences?

Always question things. Do not simply believe what others tell you. And even if you’ve questioned a thing and think it is good, Go back, in a few years, and give it another good look and see if it still makes sense.

It is natural that the people who teach you give you their best in terms of facts and interpretations of those facts. They are good and sincere people. But there is little that is absolute in this world. History is largely written by the victors and the laws of science are constantly being refined and, at times, reworked as better understandings are gleaned. And, of psychology and philosophy, one can only say that it is as if we have a small candle in our hand as we move into a darkness that is far bigger than we can imagine.

Humans seem intelligent and rational but that is largely an illusion. Compared to the complexity of the existence we find ourselves in, our intelligence is small. And the more we understand, the more we understand how little we understand. The very ideas of who we are and what our place is in this universe are to be questioned and questioned again. And, with sincere inquiry, the scales will fall from your eyes again and again.

Truly, we live in a place of infinite mystery. And what we think we understand today will be shown again and again to be an illusion tomorrow. But, this is not bad because every illusion we drop or see through takes us another step closer to the truth – whatever that might be.

But know that the more you trust yourself and your own vision and the less you trust the vision of the crowd, the more you will move into a form of isolation from your fellows. It is inevitable. Measure yourself by your own yardstick.

I like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. God said they should not eat the Apples from the tree of knowledge. But, tempted, Eve did and they were thrown from the Garden of Eden.

My interpretation of this story is that once you have chosen the path of knowledge, you cannot un-see the things you will come to understand. You will become responsible for what you know. So, what is the saying? “Stay out of the kitchen, if you can’t stand the heat.”

There are thousands of signals hitting us daily. Suggestions about what to believe, how to look, how to act, how to speak, how to dress for success and an and on. Nearly all of them are manipulative. It is rare, indeed, that anyone would sent out such signals without their own motivations and self-interests as the cause of their doing so.

I am not saying this with distain towards them. This is a natural thing. Almost everyone is acting in their own self-interest. When you realize this, it will free you from so much that most people are confused and mesmerized by.

Instead, watch for people you admire. Study them and try to understand what they think and why they act as they do. And when you see things you like in others, make them your own. Intentional self-creation is a powerful art that is little practiced in this world.

Be kind, always, to those who understand less than you do. People may or may not be doing the best that they can. But, really, it is not your business because the only one you are responsible for is you.

And when you want to inspire others, act by example. It is usually far more powerful than words.

And be rigorous in avoiding the “quid pro quo’ traps. Never give a gift, if you are thinking about what you will get back. Give to others what you would like to receive. But do it with no expectation or thought that it will change their behavior.

Do the things you do because they are inherently right in-and-of-themselves and need no further justification.

Think about the differences between your ‘shoulds’ and your ‘wants’ and strive, over time, to weld them into one thing so that you can be of one mind.

Intelligent and inquiring men and woman have been seeking to understand this existence for many thousands of years. Much of their wisdom, from back in our deep past, has been swept aside in this modern age; as we humans have been quite impressed with the new worlds or science and technology that we’ve created.

And make no mistake, much of what was believed in the past was made of superstition and myth.

But, there was genuine wisdom as well.

It is no coincidence that many brilliant, famous men of letters and great achievements in our modern world turn towards the ancients as they come to the latter part of their lives.

In spite of the fact that the ancients lived without science and were surrounded by superstition and myth, some of them spent much of their lives seeking into questions like: what is consciousness, what is existence and what is the meaning of all this that we see around us?

The stories of what they thought and their conclusions still exist; though they are mostly ignored by our world of technology obsessed humans. These are, collectively, called the Mystics, the Enlightened, the Saints and many other names. The holy books of the world’s major religions are filled with their insights; woven in among the superstition and myth.

Someday, when you have cut an arc through all that this modern life offers you, and success, wealth and freedom are yours, then perhaps you will still be motivated by deep curiosity and the urge to know, “What else is there?”

I leave you then with this small gem that I find myself thinking about most days:

If you understand,
Things are just as they are.
If you don’t understand,
things are just as they are.

~ a Zen saying ~

With much love to you,

Grandfather Dennis

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On Enlightenment

Wednesday, January 10th, 2018

Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is a promised-land Shangri-la that’s out there. It has all sorts of powerful and mystical associations that swirl around it. It is one of the preeminent mythologies that has circulated among humankind for thousands of years. Gurus, books, meditation groups, charlatans, respected masters, and the practices and scriptures of several faiths, have, and are, all calling us to ‘the’ path; ‘a’ path, ‘their’ path, the ‘true’ path. And all of them are advising us what to do to ‘get there’. And all of them have different stories and different advice and a lot of it seems pretty cryptic and faith-based.

And, in the end, until you actually ‘get there’ no one can really tell you precisely what ‘it’ is.

The reasons for all the confusion are basically two.

The first reason is that experiencing ‘it’ is quite different from how most of us experience our lives. And it is not easy to transition from our normal/default experiences to the type of experience ‘it’ offers. It is difficult because to make the transition, much of what you think is real, who you think you are, and what you currently believe in – all has to be abandoned.

The second reason is that the state one obtains seems so different, at least initially, is that folks all down through history have idealized it. They have put it on pedestal and elevated it to something magical, mysterious, special. All of this reverence implies that it is somehow discontinuous with our normal life and experiences. They’ve made it into a thing to be spoken about in hushed voices.

But, this idealization of ‘it’ is unnecessary and it ends up obscuring things. Yes, it is difficult to ‘get there’ and, yes, it is a profoundly different experience once one does ‘get there’. But these difficulties and differences are still all just part of the full range of experiences available to us here in this existence that we find ourselves in. There’s nothing magical, supernatural nor discontinuous about ‘it’.

The reverence about ‘it’ seems to arise because many seekers experience a long struggle as they try to drop their beliefs about themselves, the reality around them and to abandon their ego-centric point-of-view. Such struggles can literally take years of meditation and effort. And, after such a long effort, when they finally do ‘get it’, they often feel as if they’ve made a massive breakthrough into a new awareness that is new and discontinuous with everything they’ve ever known before; and quite special. But this is not true.

And to compound the problem, when they have made their breakthrough, the things they begin to say can seem exceeding mysterious and hard to understand for the rest of us. And this leads us to think that they have, indeed, gone ‘somewhere else’ discontinuous with the world we see around us.

They will say things like, “I meditated and studied for years and, in the end, when I finally awoke, I found that I really hadn’t gone anywhere and that there never had been anywhere to go nor anything to do to achieve true realization except to see that I was already there and to stop trying to get there.”

After hearing such a mysterious pronouncement, the mystique and the mystery just grows for the rest of us.

I think there’s a lot of unnecessary confusion about all of this. Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is just another way that the awareness in each of us can be experienced. It is not mysterious, mystical, discontinuous or magical.

As the transition of an awareness filled with egoic beliefs migrates towards being an awareness that is empty of such beliefs, its regard for the existence it finds itself in is more and more infused with the truth that “It is what it is”.

But, awareness hasn’t gone any place. It has just exercised its option to become “…an awareness that is empty of such beliefs….”

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2017-12-26 – In the land of Duality

Tuesday, December 26th, 2017

We are all here in the land of duality, in the land of partial understandings, in the land of limited intelligence.

We can progress and we can learn and, to some extent, we can transcend.

But why do we want to insist that we can come to the end, now? To think that we can come to the unity, to the final understanding that there is no more to understand, to the place where the choices cease and being is all there is?

Clearly, to me, we’re not there and we’re unlikely to get there or be there except in a way that is severely limited by our intelligence and awareness. We are just on one step on the stairway to heaven that has more steps upward than we can begin to imagine from here.

Yes, I can cease here with thought and feel existence being in, through and around me (though they all are one).

But this experience is partial, it is temporally limited, it is and has to be only part of what-is. I cannot shed my skin here born and bred of duality and the world of cause and effect.

Yes, I can stop and say I am giving up choice because I think that’s what lies at the end of the road. But that seems to me to be a hugely premature stopping.

I simply haven’t the the grasp or reach to attain any ‘I’ve got it all’ state.

For me, part of the deep acceptance of my place in existence is to realize that we’re on the road and the road is long and we will not complete the road in these clothes.

And yet, still, the road draws us onward. Blessed be the road for it is all we have.

And when I need refreshment, I stop doing and let the silence and being-ness fill me. Then refreshed, I come to the road again and the endless questions that arise to ask and the illusions to be seen through.

I sense progress and I currently do not think there is anything else.

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, Philosophical | No Comments »

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