adyashanti - from understanding to realising

quote from einstein and nabakov

I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain.
I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.

—Vladimir Nabokov

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

Einstien - 

letter to a distraught father who had lost his young son and had asked Einstein for some comforting words":

The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (Princeton University Press, 2005: ISBN 0691120749), p. 206

podcast on the history on tibetan buddhism, its daoist / chan roots

by Reggie Ray

says that the tradition we know as mahamudra is actually a blend of Dzogchen, Chan and Daoism

http://www.dharmaocean.org/episode-131-our-basic-nature/

Spontaneous Teaching on the Ten Perfections: A Teaching on the Supreme Yogi, Milarepa.

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Spontaneous Teaching on the Ten Perfections: A Teaching on the Supreme Yogi, Milarepa.

When this body dies, my mind has not died.
I will continue to remain, pervading the five elements.

Apart from giving up self-grasping,
there is no other perfection of generosity.

Apart from giving up deception,
there is no other perfection of morality.

Apart from being fearless of the ultimate truth,
there is no other perfection of patience.

Apart from being inseparable from practice,
there is no other perfection of diligence.

Apart from abiding within the natural state,
there is no other perfection of meditative concentraction.

Apart from realizing the nature of mind,
there is no other perfection of wisdom.

Apart from practicing virtue in whatever you do,
there is no other perfection of skillful means.

Apart from defeating the four maras,
there is no other perfection of power.

Apart from giving up afflictions through the power of awareness,
there is no other perfection of primordial awareness.

Son, rest within non-conceptuality.

In non-conceptual Shamatha meditation, there are no thoughts.
However, an absence of thoughts is not desired.

'Rest within non-conceptuality' means that no phenomenon within samsara and nirvana transcends Mahamudra.

Son, when you meditate on Mahamudra do not exert yourself in virtues of body and speech.

Son, do not grasp at the appearance of great signs and qualities.
This is the source of Mara's prophecy.

Son, rest within a state free of hopes.

Son, rest within a state devoid of grasping at being great.
When you realize the nature of mind, have no desire for clairvoyant powers.

When you actually realize the meaning of Mahamudra, you should not cling to the thought,
"Oh, this is Mahamudra... Now I have realized it!"

You must free this fixation.

I supplicate Lord Milarepa, Laughing Vajra.

-----------------------------------------------------

This heart teaching was given by His Eminence Garchen Triptrul Rinpoche in response to a request for a teaching on the supreme yogi, Milarepa. It was given to a group of retreatants at the auspicious site of Milarepa's cave in Lapchi, Nepal, in 2007. Part of this is recorded on video in "For the Benefit of All Beings."

2pac on why I shine

2pac the realest for saying this.

Posted by Complex on Friday, 23 October 2015

I can't explain Why I shine and no-one else shines, everybody shines in different things

and a lot of things I can't do

I can't play basketball like every other black person in america

but I can act

I know how to go to that true spot in myself cos I'm there every day

I can be me. I can be whoever, because I'm true to me.

I can go to neutral easily

A lot of people - black white mexican young old fat skinny have a problem being true to theyself

The have a problem looking into the mirror and looking directly into their own souls

The reason I sell 6 million records, the reason I can go to jail and come out without a scratch, the reason I can walk around the reason I am who I am today is because

I can look directly into my face and find my soul.

It's there.
It's not sold,

I didn't sell it.

It's still within me

I still feel it

My heart is still connected to my body

Any character

I'mo bring that intensity

That truth that honesty to it

cos I have to repay

for the blessing, from black Jesus, from god

I have to pay for that

by shining

If he give you the voltage, and you waste it - that's the curse

He gave me the voltage - I'mo shine

it's not mine, it's from God

Not that it's so special that nobody got it, but

cos all of our gifts and blessings

and our strengths and our weaknesses

come from God, come from Black Jesus

Whoever, comes from within you

know what I mean? so

it's not really tricky

everybody can do it if they can go to that spot

I guess all the things that happened in my life mean I can go there easily.

wrong view, right view, no view

Wrong View, Right View, No View

 I would like to talk about capacity. It involves telling you all how great you are and how you should cut yourselves some slack and become even greater

 In Buddhist circles they talk about Wrong View, Right View, No View. In Wrong View, we do things because we're selfish, e.g. we organise a Buddhist disco night because we want to be popular and get laid. In Right View, we do things because we are rigidly following some kind of view which hints us towards selflessness, e.g. we run a Buddhist disco night because we think it's good for us to bring joy to others. This is better than Wrong View, but it's just another place to be stuck.

Buddhism is a system of teachings and ethics all built around No View, the result of the Buddha's realisation. All the Right View is only there to support you to reach No View. So while is absolutely true that you need views, we should discard them as soon as we no longer need them. Views are like water-wings, or stabilisers on a bike. No-one should keep using water wings once they can swim safely, this would be daft.

So when are we ready to embrace No View? It seems like a very far away concept, something only for very advanced practitioners. But actually you are doing it, all the time, already. When you see someone floundering and you give them a hug, when you do spontaneous kind things that you didn't expect, like talk to someone you wouldn't usually, or feel moved to react to people on the street. When sometimes you react to emails or to people in a more patient way, without really thinking about it... this is No View in action.

Zen Master Dogen: "All buddhas’ compassion and sympathy for sentient beings are neither for their own sake nor for others. It is just the nature of buddha-dharma. Isn’t it apparent that insects and animals nurture their offspring, exhausting themselves with painful labors, yet in the end have no reward when their offspring are grown? In this way the compassion of small creatures for their offspring naturally resembles the thought of all buddhas for sentient beings."

Let me take a short detour to talk about capacity. In the East, 1000+ years ago, when a lot of the Buddha's stuff was put in writing for lay people and monks, the average person was uneducated, spent a lot of time just surviving, raising a massive family, and came from a relatively narrow mindset (family, farming, religious values). By contrast, we are all educated - we can understand and debate abstract things at a high level, compared to a 1st century illiterate Indian subsistence farmer. We have freedom that they could never imagine, freedom to use our time as we see fit. They spent literally all their time farming and caring for kids in very hard conditions. And we have a wealth of perspectives and experiences that they didn't.

In short, by those standards, we are the creme de la creme of practitioners, like the educated royals and princes that the Buddha would deliver the most direct, high-level teachings to. These teachings generally concerned wisdom, insight, and the nature of mind, not the day-to-day morality issues. When you have learned to ride, you take the stabilisers off. We should be aiming to overcome fixation to any view, as quickly as possible, for the benefit of all beings. The most important view to unfix is the view of self. People of our capacity should be practising hard to see all phenomena - thoughts, feelings, everything we see, everything we hear - as not self, not other. This, and only this, leads to liberation.

A common trap that we might get stuck in is fixing ourselves - by this I mean any kind of trying to fix our psychological problems. Say we notice we have issues with jealousy in relationships, or self-esteem. This is about as relevant to liberation as a broken leg - if we can still meditate, then it's not a problem. If we really think of anything as a problem e.g. my xyz issue, we are simply reinforcing the view of self. In the West we are so privileged to have these conditions - physical comfort, time to practice, education, and we should really aim high in Dharma practice, to do otherwise is cowardly. All the things that have apparently f+@cked us up, in my case, alcholic parent, too much education and then working in advertising for a few years, have actually given us incredible tools and materials, skills, experiences, for transforming the mind at the highest level, do not be fooled into thinking they are obstacles which must be overcome. Do not think that these conditions hinder your capacity, it is in fact the direct opposite! Do not get caught in another systems of rules about morals. Do not get caught in psychological fixing of our emotional stuff. We are like toddlers learning to ride bikes, the stabilisers are off, and we are pedalling, scared, with our dad holding us upright.. "don't let go Dad" we say again and again, and then we look back, see our dad 20 metres away, and we realise we have been pedalling alone for some time now

...such should be our relationship to the views of the Dharma...

If you would like some view meantime, then here is some beautiful prose from the most awesome Tibetan super-enlightened sage Longchenpa c1300. I don't have a clue what he's on about but it gives me a massive Dharma-boner.

"Pure mind is like the empty sky,
without memory, supreme meditation;
it is our own nature, unstirring, uncontrived,
and wherever that abides is the superior mind,
one in buddhahood without any sign,
one in view free of limiting elaboration,
one in meditation free of limiting ideation,
one in conduct free of limiting endeavor,
and one in fruition free of limiting attainment.
vast! spacious! released as it stands!
with neither realization nor non-realization;
experience consummate! no mind! it is open to infinity."

phases of spirituality

===== The Phases of Spirituality =====

1. No spirituality
============
In this mode we think that the causes of our problems are out there in the world. For example, we go from one bad relationship to another, and we think the problem is we just haven't found the right person yet. We are generally resistant to anything which makes us look closely into our own behaviour or psychological make up, unless all the wheels fall off, then we might see a counsellor or therapist as a last resort.
Due to the conditions of our lives we may or may not get tired of this mode of existing. Weirdly enough, it does work for most people! But as you're reading this you are probably not one of them, hard luck. Either we get tired of fighting the conditions of our life, or perhaps we are really winning life, great job, great relationship, nice friends, but still feel that there is something more. This leads us to...

2. Spirituality as self-development
===========================
Through some kind of practice that makes our own patterns clear to us, maybe meditation, maybe CBT, maybe therapy, we start to notice subtle things we are doing which cause our problems. Say we always end up working late, seemingly beyond our control. But maybe we start to see that actually we are not being assertive enough, or we have some strange hidden fear of saying no. As soon as we become aware of these patterns, we can start to change them. We stop hiding, and we see that actually as we change our own behaviour, incredible improvements happen in our lives. We notice that actually we create a lot, almost all of the stress and problems in our lives. We can see that if we keep working on ourselves, our lives will continue to become unimaginably better. We become more in control, more happy, more calm, more able to handle stressful situations. Great!

This is the realm that most spiritual practitioners are working in, it makes sense and it feels like improvement. However it is limited, and simply just another place to get stuck. How is this possible? Because it is still looking for improvements. It is someone seeking more happiness or more peace, or someone changing to try reduce their suffering. If we are dedicated or lucky we may catch on to the fact that we can continue to work on ourselves forever, and our lives may get infinitely better, our emotions and feelings may become infinitely happier, but we suspect there is something more, that this is just another treadmill ... they are right. And so we may find ourselves reluctantly led onto...

3. Spirituality as self-immolation
=========================
At this point, it is clear that there is nothing to do with the contents of our experience that is really fulfilling or meaningful. Sometimes we are happy, sometimes sad. We can work on ourselves to accept the sad times and spend more time happy. But something is still not making sense. This is the existential phase. There is nothing to do with the contents of experience, the problem is the way that experience appears to occur to a someone (us).

At this stage, one is bitten by the insight bug; the real spiritual path begins. Meaning that we leave the realm of trying to influence the contents of our experience, and start trying to relate to experience in a totally different way. People generally aren't really interested in this bit.
People might talk about surrender a lot these days, but what they actually mean is, I want to suffer less, so by surrendering to this moment, I believe than in the future I will be more ok with it. This appears to be the path of self-surrender but actually it's still just clinging to happiness. Any self-surrender undertaken with this mindset is tainted. It is like when we break up with someone, we do some work to just "be with" the grieving. But if there is still the belief, hope that we will get back together, all our efforts in letting go are sullied, there is no true healing happening there... so it is with letting go of the self.

At this point one can be described as "seeking". A knot of consciousness is trying to untie itself, someone in a dream is trying to awaken. Practices focus on trying see the true nature of reality (insight), contemplation, and willingness to face the existential fear of spiritual death (not as bad as it sounds). Then if we are lucky and aren't running from fear too much or using our Enlightenment quest to hide from our real lives, we awaken, hooray! A great illusory battle in unmasking a great fictitious self is won, and nothing at all happens. And so, somewhat anticlimactically, we begin...

4. spirituality as nothing whatsoever
============================
The giant quest is done, we are one with the universe, we are nothing, we are infinite, we are an illusion, so is the world, and the dream of an "I" is seen to be as laughable as a child's imaginary friend. And everything is exactly the same as it was before. The pain of loss still pain, fear of being rejected is still fear. Now the only thing which remains is just to stop doing anything at all, and especially stop being Enlightened, and double especially, trying to get more Enlightened. Anytime we notice ourselves trying to do something, having an opinion about how things should be, Reality asks us politely to drop it. If we refuse, we suffer. And the suffering is worse now, because we know deeply what truth is, and how ugly our false beliefs are. Reality asks us to just return to being totally human, just a mammal, nothing special, everything perfect. And in this giant game of doing nothing, anything and everything can happen.

When all of experience is shimmering and empty,
When each sliver of silence brings infinite plenty,
When it's abundantly clear that there's nothing to get,
When there's nothing inside to defend or protect,
When no-one can die, and no-one can be born.
When all is released as it even takes form
Then nothing remains but some tears and a smile,
And allowing this mammal to play for a while.