Meaning, More or Less

In various discussions of Adyashanti’s new book, The End of Your World, the points raised around the loss of meaning drew the most feedback here.

I’ve begun listening to the audio of the retreat from August of 2007 on which the book is said to be based. It spans the course of almost a week of talks, so is many hours long. Far more content than the book.

In response to a question on Monday morning (file 1-11), Adya describes the changes in meaning that occur with awakening. He goes into some detail on this point, in a different way than in the book.

He earlier has observed the difference between understanding something and the much deeper realizing it. When we now live it. “When we are present with it, here.“

First, he observes that there is a realization that nothing matters. The world is an illusion, the me is false. None of it matters. But at the same time, “this makes everything matter, even though it doesn’t.” (laughs) There is freedom in that.

The mind will naturally register the experience that “nothing matters”. HOWEVER, what often happens is the remnants of a me try to grasp hold. The thought grasps this idea “nothing matters” and creates a division. The realization becomes the attachment to the thought of the realization. “You can feel the lights dimming.” as Adya put it. The clarity of the realization is lost and we respond to the thought, rather than the openness.

He asks what is the moment, without the belief? Without the idea that something matters or doesn’t matter. The realization is far beyond the thought.

He talked about it’s subtleness. It can take time to see this and process it away. How the mind can grab our realizations and distort them, change oneness into division. Mind creates a false dilemma – there is no solution when it’s a false conflict.

It’s very common to have this apparent dilemma. It can sometimes take a little time to see through this enough to let it go. “It’s just the diminishing of the me.” Then something just exhausts itself and it ends. We live the reality of letting go of the idea of it. That is freedom from meaning and not meaning.

Then it was no longer necessary to understand it or choose the right thing, to consider the shoulds and shouldn’ts, or the compassion or not compassion.

“And then, surprise, surprise there is just the spontaneous movement of what is. Without the commentator, it’s easy to follow.“

He makes just one qualification. Morality is good for the ego. But when that’s leaving, the concepts have to go too.
Davidya

And What do you Want?

Later he mentions “Meaning is nothing more than the story we attach to something.“

Biocentrism

The most recent issue of Discover magazine has an interesting article on “Biocentrism”. The basic idea is that the physical universe is created by life or consciousness and time and space are mental constructs.

As scientists have observed, the universe and laws of nature seem to have been designed for life. Quantum experiments exhibit all sorts of strange results. But if you flip the idea over and see life as creating the universe, then it all makes much more sense.

I’ve talked about this process here a number of times. Consciousness is not an effect of brain function, it’s the other way around. Consciousness is fundamental, even to the quantum vacuum state. Certainly, it’s an interactive 2 way set – the senses do create changes in consciousness. But they do so in forming a feedback loop.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/may/01-the-biocentric-universe-life-creates-time-space-cosmos

The ideas are presented in a book: Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Words Fail

There is a curious thing about writing about the journey. Like a trip to a foreign land, we may struggle to describe the experience at times. But then, at a certain point, words will simply fail to capture the essence of life. Giving something a name becomes meaningless.

Of course there are the obvious ones.

Like what is your name?

It’s something we use all the time. Yet when the core identity is roasted, calling yourself a name become meaningless. You are no longer that. Soon enough, we return to using the name for our “person”, but it’s like a nickname you might give your car.

Who you now are has no name. You are as an increment of the one, a wave on the ocean of….

Many try to describe it. Even use words to describe no words, like Tao. Source. Brahman. That. But the words now remain symbols for something that cannot be conceived. A symbol that represents nothing.

What is Love?

As I wrote back on Love is, there is human love, and then there is divine love.

How does one understand divine love? We struggle to manage and heal our personal pain. But what of a love that can contain all suffering of all beings, all at once? And not even ripple.

We may use words that contain love, like Compassion and Faith.

But what word do we use when passion blends with divine love? Curiously, there are words in English for major happiness, like Ecstasy and Rapture. But what of rapturous passionate divinity?

What do we call it when passion and compassion join? And what do we call it when love expands and absorbs everything? To say there is only love compares it to something small like the universe.

To a writer or teacher, this can present points of challenge. How do we describe what cannot be described, when the very act of trying to describe it creates concepts that fall far short? It’s like saying God is big or an atom is small.

In the end, one can only share the words. At some point, they will meet the person returning to that place and great them.
Davidya

All Life is in the Moment

At a certain point in our journey, we’ll begin to experience everything as being now. If we’ve had a very visual journey, we may experience time collapsing into the moment. The nodes of the mesh of our history becoming one point, all moving together. The series of “me”s from our past, all found to be one we. Then the we’s of all people found to be one cosmic person.

While each personality can continue to have distinct experiences, they are not separated by time. I suspect this may be where the images of gods with many arms or  heads may come from. All at once. Everything in relationship to the one.

Back on The Past, I used the second part of Norman Maclaren’s film Pas de Deux as a way of visualizing it. More artful perhaps, but it can give a sense of it with the interconnectivity.

Today I got a link to the Thousand-Hand Guan Yin dancers, all said to be deaf. It illustrates the idea in a similar way.

Emotional Style?

Recently I read an overview of Emotional Alchemy, a book by Tara Bennett-Goleman. The review was rather poor, simply listing the “emotional styles” without any further background or links. “Emotional styles” are essentially styles of background conditioning. The book is subtitled “How the Mind can Heal the Heart” which turns out to be a reference to mindfulness.

“Mindfulness means seeing things as they are without trying to change them,” Tara writes. “The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself.” Her web site indicates the ideas arise out of Cognitive Therapy and her practice of Buddhist non-judgmental awareness and the cultivation of compassion. She refers to deep-seated emotional habits that are formed in childhood.

The overview identified Tara’s 10 emotional styles:
Abandonment
Entitlement
Subjugation
Exclusion
Mistrust
Failure
Unlovability
Perfectionism
Deprivation
Vulnerability

The basic idea being that the emotional style will determine how you tend to respond to events. Mistrust? An expectation of failure?

Her husband wrote the book Emotional Intelligence and developed a model of “emotional competencies” in leadership. There is considerable debate around the idea of emotion being a form of intelligence. (EQ or EIQ) Personally, I think there can be intelligence within emotional states but they can also be self-driven – i.e.: emotions driving other emotions, creating loops. Without intelligent substructure, they tend to chaos rather than order and resolution. Intelligence, in this context, is not contained in basic emotions themselves.

I’ve not read either book, but can make a few observations on the idea of Emotional Styles generally. The book may or may not cover some of this. For one, if you take this at purely face value, what you’re doing is giving a name to a shadow. This may make it more conscious but also makes it more real. Unless you use a clearing technique with it, It just adds to the story. It may make the feelings OK calling it a style, but may also make it a “lifestyle”, like celebrating your neurosis.

An example of this was on Oprah’s series with Eckhart Tolle. In it, Oprah observed that if she went into nature and named things, she stayed in the mind. If she was simply there, not naming things, the beauty and wholeness of nature was obvious and it was much easier to be present. The mind wants to name and categorize our experiences, but this very act can take us away from them.

Note that some Styles are quite similar, like Subjugation & Deprivation. The emotional motivation may vary slightly but the consequence is much the same.

I’ll also note that these “styles” will be closely associated with roles. For example, we may be quite smooth in a family scenario but prone to expect failure in work roles.

And finally, there are affiliations in the group that may be sequential or interrelated. The reason I suggest this is that the emotional responsiveness or style is an effect of a more subconscious dynamic. Emotions are good clues to lead us into it and make in conscious. Not by labeling but by experiencing and allowing the experience. But styles are not causal. Thus, resolving them will not clear the essential backstory, what I call the shadow story.

I’ve spoken of this a number of times. The basic idea is that we carry a shadow story that’s driven by the sub-conscious fear driven identity. The story’s expression varies but one of the consequences is this “style” in our roles.

For example, we may have a story of blame. We screwed up in our deep past and that story has carried forward into this life. That may manifest itself in only some or all roles and may manifest different styles or blended styles. Blame, for example, may show up as Perfectionism, Failure, and Unloveability. Perhaps even Exclusion.

We can resolve each of these ‘layers of the onion’ one by one, or we can follow the trail down and make the identity conscious. Then the whole construct will dissolve from the bottom up. Much easier to go for the root.
Davidya

PS – In researching the article, I ran into a shorter work by the author. It explains her thinking further. I can see value here but understanding the deeper drivers will help bring long term peace.

http://www.bemindful.org/emotalchem.htm

Memory and Change

This weekend, I went to a special film showing of Sita Sings. Unusually, it put me  downtown during the day. The chance came to go to a coffee shop I frequented about 35 years ago. Enjoyed some great chats with the proprietors there on meditation, Ouspensky, and such. They were gay and formerly night club owners, so had great stories. I had another one of those nicknames there due to a preference for triple chocolate donuts. (laughs)

Trouble was, the place was no longer a coffee shop. It had become a luncheon place who’s specialty, believe it or not, was being abusive. (laughs) The waiter told the US customers beside me they were either government hacks or on a day pass from jail. He argued politics with another, then told him to f-off while he ate his soup. It was a sort of jovial and polite rudeness if there is such a thing. Curiously, they complemented me on my choice, though they had no desserts anymore.

It reminded me of the curious nature of memory. How we hold the past as reality until shown otherwise.

A few other examples come to mind. Like when you go back to where you grew up and find everything seems so much smaller. Or you see an old friend you have not seen in 20 years. Even if you’ve seen pictures in the meantime, it’s probably not replaced the memory. High school reunions are another like that. Some people have hardly changed, others you’d never recognize. Or the seniors who talk about how it is in the “old country” long after their homeland has changed.

A personal example. My father died when I was quite young. In my late 30′s, I realized all of my “memories” of him were in black and white as it was all based on photos and family stories. There was no ‘real’ memories.

This is the nature of the mind. It plays it’s story and fills in the gaps with circumstantial data and beliefs so that it can explain everything.

The best way to understand the mechanics of memory is the film model. When we watch a movie, we’re seeing some 24 still pictures a second flashed in sequence on a screen. Moving fast enough, they blur together into smooth motion. The physical world is much the same. Some people report the experience of seeing the world like being in a theatre – consciousness projecting out and creating the illusion of world.

We could say the motion picture illusion works due to the nature of perception, how the eyes see. But more deeply it works because it’s how the world is created. We think we’re the audience but we’re the projector. This is awakening, to the light. (laughs)

A memory is a still picture or a clip of that projection we saved. Most of life runs across the screen of our senses and away, forever forgotten. Especially if it doesn’t fit our story. What did you have for lunch last Thursday? But every so often, we “bookmark” or make a record of key moments. But because memories are made in the mind, we can “remember” anything. Create memories just like we create the world.

What then is a memory? A moment of mental story? Memory is way ahead of Pixar in creating artificial worlds. Further complicating it is that we always see the memory replay from where we are now. When we remember our 8th birthday, we’re not remembering it from the consciousness of when we were 8, we’re remembering it from now. It’s playing with a different lens. People will often reevaluate and change the saved memories over the years. Just compare your family stores with a sibling to see how much differently they saw the circumstance, and how differently they’ve kept the file.

Most remarkable of all, many people quite literally live in their past, rehashing what happened, what might have happened, constantly reviewing and editing.

What is changes all the time. We work to keep our unchanging memories alive, yet change them by our mere review. Such a curious thing to care about.
Davidya

Where Hope Ends

Last summer I wrote an article called Deeper than Tolerance. It became one of the most popular posts here. I spoke of how Tolerance was not acceptance. Tolerance is conditional and thus still contains resistance. On Sunday, I heard a talk by Rev. Austin Hennesssey of the SCDL.

He observed that when we make “I hope” statements, we’re really saying “I want it like this”. It is a statement of control or expectation. He suggested reframing such statements to be “I wonder”. I Wonder releases the attachment and shifts the attention to curiosity and allowing, rather than engaging the controller.

For example, rather than “I hope I get a job”, what about “I wonder what the new job will be like.” “I hope she likes me” becomes “I wonder if we’ll be a match.”

I thought this was a very useful observation. The English language is full of ego hooks.

Certainly tolerance is greater than hate. And hope is better than despair. Hope  certainly inspired many in the last US election. But both are still voices of the ego, the me who wants control.

When we become that which always is, what need is there for hope? When we watch, without attachment, that which always changes, we soon see it just changes. It too continues. As physics would say, energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form.

When we step into a deeper sense of our universal self, we begin to step out of that need to control. We begin to move into acceptance, then allowing. This is beyond tolerance. It is the end of hope.
Davidya

Isha on Duality

Isha speaks about duality vs Love consciousness, from her recent film.

Some notes from the release conference.

The first movie clip and info about the film

Her web site   www.isha.com
Her blog  www.ishasystem.blogspot.com

Awakening and Motivation

As readers of this blog know, I like to explore different ways of seeing the awakening process. Although the process is broadly consistent, how it is experienced and the terminology one might use varies widely. Sharing different views of the journey can offer further clarity and insight.

Although I differ in some ways, I’ve often found Adyashanti’s perspective quite useful. Recently, I finished reading one of his earlier books, “The Impact of Awakening“.

Two things from it I’d like to touch on – one is the loss of meaning his most recent book raised, and the other is another way he’s described the awakening process.

Awakening

In the book, Adya differentiates realization from liberation. Essentially, realization allows the liberation and liberation is it’s completion. Similar to non-abiding and abiding awakening he talks of in the later book.

Within the process of liberation or enlightenment, he speaks twice of personal and impersonal enlightenment.

Personal enlightenment he describes as “exclusive transcendence, in that it excludes the world of space and time.” We awaken within and have internal unity but remain separate from expression. This is what is typically called Self realization or Cosmic Consciousness here.

Non-personal enlightenment is an “inclusive transcendence; it sees that the world of space and time is the expression of eternity. Thus, it is a truly non-dual perspective.” “Beyond non-personal freedom lies Liberation.” Put another way, full enlightenment arrives after unity.

He also touches on the “vast non-personal Love for the whole, for all beings and things. It is the realization that you are the whole.“

This is the process of awakening to unity or oneness. As Adyashanti describes in “Emptiness Dancing“, after first awakening Self moves forward and absorbs the head, heart and gut. In absorbing the heart, divine Love awakens. This builds the ‘bridge to unity’. Absorbing the gut is when the identity falls away.

This middle stage of the heart is differentiated a little more by some teachers who experienced it more distinctly. God realization is the typical term. However some teachers observe that full God realization often doesn’t happen until after unity for westerners.

These are the 3 stages I typically refer to. Self, God, and Unity. The stages themselves are just concepts. The key is to recognize there is much more than just awakening. Quite literally, Self realization is nothing in comparison to what can unfold after it. “…a freedom that is in any sense personal seems pale in comparison to…love” Like comparing a dry desert to the ocean of love, even if you do have the bliss.

There are quite a few teachers I’ve run into that are awake but have not yet seen the non-personal stage nor have a teaching that mentions it. They confuse Vedanta (end of knowledge) and Advaita (non-dualism) with internal unity, not recognizing further awakening. This can get in the way of it’s unfolding. Not that it requires a seeker to gain it but it is much helped by attention and allowing.

Embodiment

Embodiment is another notable term Adyashanti used. “Embodiment starts with the realization that every manifest thing and non-thing constitutes your true body.”  “The entire cosmos is your body. Let your humanness reflect and manifest the whole.”

This is sometimes called the cosmic body or in Sanskrit, Purusha. From what I’ve seen, there can be habits of mind that think ‘what is personal and what is cosmic?’ for a time until it’s fully seen that there is no such difference. Just some left over concepts. We, as he describes, give “myself to the vastness.” (yep – more of that allowing)

We could describe this as another value of oneness where we are not only of one spirit and one mind, but one body as well. There is only one set of chakras. A littler hard to conceive?

Motivation

We’ve discussed the loss of meaning on the path recently. Adya also spoke of this in reference to the process from personal to impersonal.

“With the dawning of Liberation, all motivations drop away. One does not act out of any reason or motivation, action simply occurs. Many mistake personal freedom for liberation because in personal freedom, it is common to loose self-centered motivations to act. Many get stuck there thinking that they are in the highest state, but they are actually stuck in the emptiness, or absence of self-centered motivations. They have not yet awakened to a truly selfless, non-personal love and life of service.”

I mentioned another quote in comments recently on this as well. Buddhist Roshi Bernie Glassman said “There’s a state in Japanese Zen that’s called the “Cave of Satan.” It’s that place where you just stay—because there’s nothing to do. And you can get in that state and it can be an overwhelming experience. But the point is to kick the person out of that cave.”

Satan isn’t a Zen term, so I would be interested in knowing what the actual term is, but it illustrates the point if a little bit dramatically.

The solution Adyashanti talks about is love. Awakening the heart. It is the awakening of that love, compassion, and faith that allows the divine to flow through us without resistance.

“In Liberation you are in that state which is prior to any causation… Actions simply happen. From the outside, such actions may be viewed as loving, kind, and wise, but to the liberated one, all happens spontaneously and free of any motive. Actions arise out of the most natural, primordial state.“

I found this offered some further insight. You?
Davidya

(It should be noted that I usually use the terms personal and impersonal to refer to perceptive modes, particularly around God.)

Quiet Passion

When we read material like Sera Beaks, we may get the impression that passion is an overt act, something we express in a large way. We may point to certain cultures as examples of greater passion. Or to some activities like music or dance.

But what of writing or painting? They can equally be a passion. A book can touch us just like flamenco or a lover. Really, it depends on the mode of expression. Some modes are more dramatic, some more subtle. But passion may still be the driver.

Passion is something felt. Being moved from within. The inner volcano that drives the tiger of power in our belly.  Sometimes, I’m deeply moved by what flows out in writing.

Remember – it is attachment to emotions, resistance to experience that is the root of suffering, not the emotions themselves. Emotions are what drives life into expression.

Passion is the fire of love, love coming into form. Without passion, the world would go silent and dark. We would cease to be.
Davidya