Contemplative Smorgasboord...

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From: Mike Dickman@o...
Date: Fri May 11, 2001 1:19 pm
Subject: Re: [JUNG-FIRE] Re: Wave Work

With regard to your saying:

"... I can understand wanting to put ground under one's feet. What you
describe sounds like standing on the deck of a small ship while the waves
are pounding it back an forth and the wind is rising to make a foothold even
harder.
"My terribly Western mind has a bit of a problem with never feeling solid
ground under my feet. I don't mean cling to security desperately, because
the whole point of the negative fear we all have is just this, the realization
that security is only within and cannot come from an outside force..."

.. voila two quotes, one from Longchen Rab'jampa, 14th. c. luminary of
Tibetan Buddhism, and the other from Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, an amazing
old lama who has just recently passed away in Nepal.

"...This body of endowments and freedoms is like a boat,
But it is hard to find and easily falls apart.
If you do not make use of it now,
You will never be able to cross the ocean of samsara
And will experience incessant suffering of all kinds,
Neverseeing any end to the ocean of birth and death,
Thatfoams endlessly with sickness and old–age
As the waves of delusion hurl you from the heights to the depths of the world
And you are swept off into its vastness, terrifying and unbearable..."

and

"... As sentient beings, we think, we remember, we plan—and the attention
thus exerted moves towards an object and sticks to it. This mental
movement is called thinking or conceptual mind. We have many different
expressions in Tibetan to describe the functioning of this basic attitude of
mind, of this extroverted consciousness unaware of its own nature. This
ignorant mind grabs hold of objects, forms concepts about them, and gets
involved and caught up in the concepts it has created. This is the nature of
samsara, and it has been continuing through beginningless lifetimes up to
the present moment.
"All these involvements are merely fabricated creations; they are not the
natural state. They are based on the concepts of subject and object,
perceiver and perceived. This dualistic structure, together with the disturbing
emotions and the karma that is produced through them, are the forces that
drive us from one samsaric experience to another. Yet all the while, there is
still the basic nature, which is not made out of anything whatsoever. It is
totally unconstructed and empty, and at the same time it is aware: it has the
quality of being able to cognize. This indivisible unity of being empty and
cognizant is our original ground that is never lost."

> My soul /self has
> to be my security, since this is where I " know" the divine rests.
> I do have a psyche and I am my psyche, am I not? How different are the
meanings
> of psyche ,self and soul? Do not those negative feelings and the good well up
> from the unconscious unbidden? We cannot control the unconscious, but must
deal
> with it as it comes, good, bad or indifferent.
*Here is something I wrote on the subject of spirit, soul and self to another
group:

"The extraordinary thing about (this) approach is that, up to this point
we have been working very much on a negative path - a path of discovering
what the self is NOT - a veritable via negativa. We have discovered for
example that the self such as we conceive of it is not in forms, feelings,
perceptions, response or consciousness, not in any of the five senses or five
elements, that, in fact, there is NO self such as we conceive of it anwhere
out there, in here or in between. Basically that NO MATTER *HOW* WE
CONCEIVE OF IT, as existent, non-existent, both or neither, being utterly
transcends all such categorisation.
"Now suddenly, and so as to pacify all final and subtle wrong views, a via
positiva of sorts seems to reassert itself.
"Are we, at last, on solid ground?
"According to the (previous) path, everything that is not emptiness is relative
truth and absolute truth is that everything that can appear in any way
whatsoever is actually just empty projection. Th(is further) path says that
everything included in the twin veils of conflicting emotions and obscurations
to omniscience is empty of a self (rang tong), but that the primordial nature -
open and space-like awareness endowed with all qualities of enlightenment
is empty only of what is not itself (shen tong) - that what has to be dissolved
are the veils of conflicting emotions and obscurations to omniscience, just as
gold, throughout its purification, remains gold, just as the sun, day and night
and in the presence or absence of cloud, remains the sun...
The obscuration of conflicting emotion is dissolved in meditation. We'll look
at that in a moment. The obscuration to knowledge is dissolved in the post-
meditation state.
"So what is the meditation? Meditation is remembering the one true safe
place of refuge - the innate Buddha of your own being - and taking refuge
only in this for the benefit of all sentient beings until such time as samsara
is emptied.
"Then just relaxing body and mind and gently opening up to everything that
comes without attachment, without judgement, without creating a special
state you have to attain 'out there' or a special mindset you need to maintain
'in here' and not getting hung up on anything else in between. That's all there
is to it;
"And then, dedicating the merit at the end. 'May any merit there is in this be
for the benefit of all that lives'. Thus we link our drop of merit to the vast
ocean of the merit of the great one's throughout space and time.
"We pass out of 'passing time' and into 'real time - timelessness - and out of
'just so much space' into 'real space' beyond all space, the environment
naturally arises as a mandala of deities, sound as mantra, and all movement
of mind becomes the expression of the absolute nature of being... one is one
and identical with the teacher, with all teachers throughout all of space and
time.
"Non-conceptual meditation has nothing to do with blanking out thoughts. It
is the state where the helpful thoughts no longer find anyone to help and the
robber-like thoughts can find nothing to steal - where thought itself becomes
an adornment to the vast spaciousness of mind... no difference between the
still and the moving.
"(...) The non-conceptual mind of primordial awareness with all its
innate qualities of perfection is not an object of the conceptualising process
- it is not some created state brought about by causes and conditions and
thus is not negated by (...) reasoning. It can therefore be said to be the only
thing that really does have a true existence.
"It is important to bear in mind that this does not make it an object of the
conceptual process - ANYthing that can be conceptualised is dependently
arising and therefore empty.
"This is directly experienced. Any concept at all obscures it.
"All the powerful purification methods of the six classes of tantra, and all
the precious realisations of Ch'an, Madhyamika and Dzogchen are based on it.
These latter arise from the realisation of teacher's mind meeting with one's
own trust and devotion in such a way that one becomes aware of the direct
experience of awareness for oneself, and this becomes the basis for all one's
later practice until genuine stability in realisation is attained...
"... Guenther takes the particle 'vi' in vijnana' as meaning 'divided against
itself', which is highly instructive. The Shentong view is in no wise divided
against itself.
"...The point of the Third Turning of the Wheel and why it is so important.
is that it indicates the fact of the presence of the Buddha Nature in all
beings, thereby giving confidence, brings humility to those who consider
themselves superior to others because of having genuinely given rise to an
enlightened attitude, dissolves all attachment to the veils and obscurations
as being really real, removes the fault of considering the actually real - the
innate spacious awareness of the natural mind - as unreal, and removes the
obstacle of considering differences between oneself and others and the
nature of oneself and others as different from that of Buddha Nature, thereby
opening the door to genuine compassion."

Sorry this has taken so long to get done... Hope it still means something in
any present context!

Lots of love,
m

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