To Forget the Self
The degree to which we can forget the self is the degree to which we can walk the way.
photo credit: Joel Bedford
Something New
Form is exactly emptiness and emptiness is exactly form. This beautiful and difficult life is enlightenment, the timeless season. Yet historically religious institutions, yes even Buddhism, have separated the two and discouraged the development of our personal lives.
For example, we were told that we should certainly not pay attention to our financial lives as we pursued the spiritual. Strangely enough, the institutions telling us that owned fabulous amounts of property, the most elaborate real estate ever built in the form of churches and monasteries. Who was it that was paying for all that? Guess.
They also made science either criminal (remember Gallileo?) or irrelevant. Scientific thinking was taboo as well. We have inherited so much of value from Buddhism but as we do with science, we need to build on what is rational, what is of value and what is provable. In short, Buddhism needs to evolve.
In Lost Coin we want to go forward and make practice really new without discarding the traditional methods. Our shaky world demands it. Practice can’t be medieval or superstitious. We need to embrace our world – every inch and moment of it. Mind is Buddha, life is awakening. Every moment of it .
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form. This shore is the other shore.
photo credit: kevin dooley
Empowerment
Central to Buddhism and many esoteric traditions is the practice of empowerment. A student or adept must learn to give up their own power, their concepts, ideas and positions in order to be empowered by the lineage. The power of the Dharma is transmitted by the lineage holder – the teacher.
This is a very important practice. When a student instead empowers themselves they are empowering the ego. This empowers greed, anger and ignorance In fact, it embraces and supports a kind of weakness that is harmful to oneself and others. Students, and even teachers who have not been forged by this process manifest this weakness. They diminish the Dharma.
The true empowerment of the lineage is transcendent. It allows individuals to do what they could not do before for themselves and others. Having left home a long time ago, the adept now truly comes home.
Giving up one’s self power to be empowered by the lineage happens at many steps along the way. It is very important. Because this is so important to me as a person entrusted to hold the lineage, when I empower my students it will not be based on what they say. It will be based on what they do which demonstrates what they really value, what effort and sincerity and commitment they bring to the practice: in short who they really are.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
The Entrance
Do not practice thinking that realization must become
the object of one’s knowledge and vision and be grasped conceptually.
Eihei Dogen
Genjokoan
This is the practice that is beyond Buddhism, Dharmas, time and space. It is the roar of truth. Only those with great determination and courage can loosen themselves from the shackles of reason and knowing and gain entrance here.
photo credit: on1stsite.
The Real World
Reality is more benevolent, interesting and workable than our thoughts about it. It is also unknowable and magical.
photo credit: visualpanic
The Matrix
We find ourselves in a difficult situation. We think we are awake, but we are mechanical/asleep. Our behaviors are manipulated easily: to sell us things, convince us of things.
Our three ways of processing – intellectual, emotional and kinesthetic are mechanical. Input x and the output is y.
The code for our mechanical behaviors and perceptions was written a long time ago. This is so both in our personal lives and in the history of humanty. The interaction of the intellectual, emotional and kinesthetic perceptions is also mechanical. When we think we are being logical we have usually been hijacked by our negative emotions or our fantasies. Thoughts proceed by themselves as do emotions.
We don’t make conscious choices.
Yes, we are living our life in a Skinner Box.(Or in the Matrix – if you are more familiar with that.)
What’s a poor boy or girl to do?
There is nothing to do when you are in a box or pod dreaming you are awake – except to wake up. To develop consciousness. So first that needs to be understood.
Only then does the hard work begin – and you need a method.
photo credit: Lucia..
Two Autumns
I go,
you stay;
two autumns.
Buson
Each of us is our own world. That world has no edges – it permeates everywhere.
This is enlightenment.
Accepting our aloneness and responsibility takes courage.
Getting stuck there is narcissism.
Not perceiving our all encompassing aloneness is delusion.
What is like when one is neither stuck in separateness nor aloneness?
Autumn evening,
The fog streams.
No one can grasp it.
photo credit: Hamed Saber
The Dharma's Open Eye
In speaking of religion we hear the phrase “blind faith”. Having your eyes closed, being deluded, is certainly not a desirable thing. But do we see our own “blind faith”? Our faith in the material world, the faith we place in what we are taught about achieving happiness in it: the blind simplicity of things we believe.
The Dharma points to our blindness. It speaks to us and says “in your analysis, in your beliefs, have you included the fact that everything changes, that you will grow old and sick and die. That you will lose all you love and that all your explanations for this truth have no foundation or proof whatsoever.
It is for this reason that we must strive to awaken.
photo credit: Wonderlane
Deep Knowledge
Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.
~ Milton Erickson
This is from my point of view so much the heart of the matter and so well put that there is little I can add to it – other than please keep reading this over and over.
photo credit: 85mm.ch
Sphere of Implication
photo credit: jenny downing
If we observe our thoughts we can see that they flow from one to another without stop. I would like to look at an aspect of this that I will call the sphere of implication. The sphere of implication is all the ideas, beliefs and world views attached to experience – its meaning. The meaning of an abstraction or a snowflake or a person.
What happens when we remove the sphere of implication and the associated thoughts? You have the thing itself, the basis of reality. You have no eye, ear nose, tongue, body, mind – the ground of being. You have the thing itself, the snowflake itself.
From this basis, this thoughtless truth, the sphere of implication fills the universe – and is nothing but the flowerings of of the mind. Sphere upon spheres, flowering in the air, flowering through time – endlessly
Wonderful snowflakes, they fall nowhere else but here
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