Sacrifice

From: Warrior's Solution 4

Audio

One day a man reproached Bayazid, the great mystic of the ninth century, saying that he had fasted and prayed and so on for thirty years, and not found the joy or peace which Bayazid had prescribed.  Bayazid said that he might continue for three hundred years and still not find it.   

"How is that?" asked the would-be-illuminate.   

"Because your vanity is a barrier to you" 

"Tell me the remedy." 

"The remedy is one which you cannot take."  

"Tell me nevertheless." 

Bayazid said, "You must go to the barber and have your very respectable beard shaved, remove all your clothes and put on a simple girdle, fill a nose bag with walnuts and suspend it from your neck, go to the market place and call out, 'I will give a walnut to any boy who will strike me on the back of my neck.' Then continue on to the courthouse so that they may see you."   

"But I cannot do that. Please tell me something else that would do." 

"This is the first move and the only one,"  said Bayazid, "but I had already told you that you would not do it, so you cannot be cured."

Ken: When I was in the second three-year retreat one of the retreatants was a very, very intelligent young man from an upper middle class family. He spoke English better than me, and his French of course was superb. And would normally have pursued an academic career which would have ended up as one of the chairs in the department of literature in the Sorbonne or something like that.  And at one point in the retreat a group of us were standing outside the temple, and he said, "Ken, what do you have to do to get some understanding?"  And before I could reply, one of the other French people in the retreat said, "Wow, that's why you have given up so much."  And he said, "I haven't given up anything."  And another person said, "Well you know what it says, "Meditate for twelve years, become enlightened in sixteen," or whatever.  And Francois looked at this person with an expression of scorn and said, "That I could do at a drop of a hat, but I know that it wouldn't be enough."

The theme from yesterday is intent, the theme for today is sacrifice.  The word sacrifice etymologically comes from the Latin, and means quite literally, to make holy.  Sacra, the word for whole, and fico  the verb to do, to make, facra, facra, if I can remember my high school Latin.  

What do we sacrifice?  Well that's illustrated in the first story that I read. This would-be aspirant  has to sacrifice his vanity, his pride. So take a moment and ask yourself what do you have to sacrifice in order to be awake? There are many ways to this and the way that we are using it in this retreat is to meat what runs our lives in conditioning and transform the energy of that into attention and awareness.  So what this means in practice is that we are going to make our conditioned personality holy, in other words we are going to sacrifice it. 

All of you have practiced enough, and have lived long enough to know that there are numerous occasions on a daily basis when something seems to take over and start running the show.  Quite contrary to your intention to be present and awake.  There is a whole web of patterns and conditioning which is set in motion by the resonance that there is experiences in life set in motion, or triggered and that web of patterns takes over.  It is almost as if there is another person inside of us. One person brought this up the other day,  "the ogre inside."  And the way that we are working in this retreat, we call this "person" the appropriate opponent. It's called an opponent because it opposes our intention to be awake and present.  It is called appropriate because it is actually the right focus for our efforts. Too often in our lives we regard some external factor, another person, as an opponent.  The mother in the supermarket who is under pressure for time, but she is with her child and her child is feeling playful and a little mischiefs and does something and the mother gets very upset and she glares at the child, "See what you made me do!"  That is an example of attributing the opponent outside.  But that isn't the opponent, the opponent is the set of patterns inside that was set in motion, that's where we need to direct our attention.   

Aristotle had a line on this, he said "It is very easy to get angry; it is very difficult to get angry at the right person, at the right time, inn the right way."  Always keep in mind that patterned behavior has one function and one function only.  That is to dissipate or degrade attention.  That is the sole purpose of reactive patterns. The sole function.  We are sometimes amazed at the ability of reactive patterns to hijack our attention and to screw things up.  But we shouldn't really be surprised.  The opponent has access to everything, to all of your intelligence, and to all your experience.  It can and does adapt to every condition except one.  It can't adapt to awareness because there is no awareness in the operation of the opponent. There may be intelligence but there is no awareness.

Detecting imbalance

From: Five Elements Five Dakinis 9

Full transcript

Audioclip

Now as I said a few moments ago one is never actually in balance. Instead what happens is you become more and more adept at detecting imbalances, and are able to address them earlier and earlier. So there’s more continuity and less huge fluctuation. And it feels like you’re doing very little, but a great deal is being accomplished. 

So we rely on awareness for the detection of imbalance. In particular, meditation, we have two components of attention. The first, and here I’m using the Mahayana definitions which are different from the Theravadan definitions. Two components of attention are: mindfulness and awareness. Not the big awareness, the direct awareness, just awareness. 

Mindfulness here is defined as being present with the object of attention. So if that’s your breath you’re present with your breath. If it’s a book your attention is resting on the book. If it’s nature of mind you’re experiencing nature of mind. 

Mindfulness is the quality that you always start with. And basically you establish a connection with mindfulness when you are able to rest on the breath for three or more breaths in a row. You have then experienced mindfulness. So it’s not some mystical magical quality. Very ordinary quality just a certain steadiness in attention.

Audioclip 

The second quality, awareness, is defined as knowing what’s going on. And all of you have experienced this in your meditation. Attention becomes steady and there you are resting say with the breath. At the same time you are aware of all that other stuff which is very useful, because it is in that broader awareness that you’re able to detect whether things are in balance or not. “Am I going to sleep. Am I thinking?” etc.

In our practice we get more and more adept at detecting when we’re moving away from clear stable attention. We can move away in one direction, lapsing into dullness; in the other directions lapsing into busyness.

The five elements allow us to bring a higher level of attention to the whole matter of balance. So here the steadiness of attention would be like the earth element. Clarity is the water element. Knowing is the fire element. The dynamic quality is the air element. And the indefinable open quality is the void element.

Now it’s not particularly helpful to sit while you meditate analyzing the quality of your attention like crazy. It takes you out of the practice basically. A lot of us have this problem. We sit there and we have this running commentary on how we’re doing. Anybody else know that one? “You’re doing fine now, just keep going, yep, good [laughter]. Not! You’re getting a little dull, yep. No, don’t follow that thought. That’s it! Good!” [Laughter]. It’s just thought.

We can do the same thing in all areas of our lives. In our relationships the support of nurturing quality is earth. The flow of emotional energy back and forth: water. The passion interest, etc: fire. The ideals that you aspire to: air. And the space in which all this takes place: void.

Buddhahood

A gem from Then and Now, session 36:

Buddhahood (from TAN36: Then and Now (class) 01:02:31.00 - 01:04:31.40)

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Knowing things as they are and knowing things as they appear is possible when we can rest in knowing without the projection of thought or emotion, which is a different way of describing those two distortions. The distortion of conceptual knowing is the projection of thought. And the distortion of emotional reactions is the projection of emotion. So we can say that what buddhahood is, is to know things without projection of thought or emotion.

Now, just take that in for a moment. What would that actually be like? And the first thing that often arises is--we can’t imagine this. Because we are so conditioned to thought and emotion. But if we stay with it a little bit longer than that, we can see that it's going to be a clarity and a precision and an immediacy in that kind of knowing which are almost unimaginable. And there is going to be no possibility of editing, there’s going to be no operation of preference or prejudice. And there’s actually not going to be any sense of separation between subject and object. There will just be experience itself. Experience and awareness arising together. Do you follow?

Approaching Meditation

Approaching Meditation (from SUS07: Sutra Session (questions) 00:56:53.00 - 01:02:54.00)

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A lot of people approach meditation as a place to recharge batteries and get calm, clear, feel good etc. etc. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's very, very helpful that way. But what I've tried to show you today is another possibility. And that is a way to actually practice living. We're actually practicing living by experiencing what is arising--not trying to do anything about it immediately, but actually experiencing it.

One of the other things I do alot--or do some of--is business consulting and you have no idea how often I have to say, "You're trying to implement a solution before you've figured out what the problem is." Something comes up and they just start doing something without taking a look at what the real problem is.

And so one of the things you can use this practice for is actually experiencing what's going on in you and you may have a much better idea of what the real problem is. And we heard that from many people when they said their relationship with the situation changed. And some said, "Oh this is just something--that's the way it is and I can experience it and I don't have to do anything about it." That's a very significant change in the relationship. And sometimes you actually see, "Oh, yes there is something I can do." So that's a second aspect to meditation--it's a way of practicing how to live and how to be in our lives.

There's a small danger here and I want you to pay careful attention to this. If we start using our meditation practice to work through problems, that's going to work for a while and then it's going to start to become a problem in our practice because we're going to be bringing this expectation of working through something. [sound of horn blowing] Oh, more distraction!

And eventually--and I'm trying to give you just a head start on this right now--we'll see that bringing that expectation of working through also creates a problem. It won't hurt at all for you to explore just opening to the situation without any expectation of working through it or changing things or figuring something out. That feels a little uncomfortable very often at the beginning, because there are a lot of things in our lives that we'd just like to solve and get rid of so we don't have to deal with them. But a lot of those things we can't and we may discover some very, very deep feelings in ourselves about--anger about why doesn't the world conform to my expecations more often. At least that's what I have, maybe nobody else has that one.

And through this we begin to come to another aspect of what mediation practice does. And again it's--one can put it as--it's a practice for living--it's about how to meet whatever arises with awareness and openness. So that we can actgually experience it because it's part of our life. What we're doing is practicing experiencing things completely. That may make very significant changes in our lives, but we can say that one way to approach this kind of practice is, "How do I experience my life completely?"

And in this sense we're very much like that NBA forward that I was telling you about, who's practicing, "How do I shoot this shot from here? How do I shoot this shot from here?" And you can go through all these situations in your life and actually practice, "How do I experience this completely? How do I experience this completely? How do I experience this completely?"

And then you may find that when you're going about your day something pops up and you know, because it's in your body, how to experience it completely. Because like that NBA player, when you've got two guys doing a double press on you and you've got one second or less to take the shot, you can't think, "How am I going to take the shot, do I remember?" It has to be so in your body that it just happens. And that's basically what we're doing in the meditation practice. We are practing this and experiencing this stuff over and over again so that When we encounter in our lives it just happens. It's not somthing that we have to remember or think, "Now what do I do here?" or that we've figured out what to do. We practice it so much that it just happens and that's the real purpose of doing this practice. Okay?

Thanks to Ann Braun for this transcription!

Primary Practice Benefits

Primary Practice Benefits (from BWM09: Buddhahood Without Meditation 00:33:28.00 - 00:49:01.00)

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It has certain practical benefits. ... So you tend to notice a lot more.

Of course, the practice Ken is talking about is this one. It has also the benefit of being very simple and easy.

P.S. Test Your Awareness: Do The Test

It Is Not A Thing

It Is Not A Thing (from TAN02: Then and Now (class) 00:36:25.50 - 00:39:21.50)

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Well, the quality of being that anything has, is that it is not a thing, in the same way we saw above, these pieces of paper: big isn’t a thing. It’s relative. It depends on the relationship with other things. So the quality of being that everything has is that it is not a thing. Which means that a Buddha is just as much not a thing as a sentient being. None of us are things.

One way we talk about it in the modern times is that we’re not things, we’re processes. But that actually causes just as much problem. There’s nothing — this goes back to a point I made earlier — there is no thing that I can point to and say, “That is me, that is what I am.” There isn’t anything like that, and that is as true of a Buddha as it is of a sentient being.

This is wonderfully illustrated by a woman, Belle Hooks, who is a student of Lama Yeshe. One day — I think she was in Nepal at this point — she was really, really angry, and it was obvious that she was very angry; she was throwing a tantrum. And in the middle of this Lama Yeshe came up and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind is very angry today.” [laughter]

Now what would you do if you were very angry and someone kept saying, “Buddha mind is very angry today?” How long would your anger last? This was extremely skillful on the one hand, but it’s also profoundly true.

In just what I was saying earlier, this quality of being awake — this possibility of quiet — is present in everything that we experience — even when we’re extremely angry or extremely caught up in jealousy, or desire, or stupidity, or depression, or anything like that. That quality of being awake is there. It may or may not be something that we can access and that’s what we’re going to move into in a minute.

It isn’t good, it isn’t bad, it isn’t this, it isn’t that, it’s not many, it’s not one, it’s not eternal, it’s not eteralism, it’s not nihilism, it’s.... There isn’t any quality you can put on it, but it is something — an experience that is always available to us. One can argue that the main thrust of Buddhist practice is to experience that. And when we do, we experience being without projection and that’s one way (without projection/without confusion) of talking about being awake.

The Six Realms

By George Draffan from:

Driven By Desire - Why The Global Economy Won’t Satisfy Us

Ultimately, it’s not greed or aggression that’s the problem: it’s ignoring, not feeling or understanding, the effects of that greed and aggression. We think some self-indulgent action is going to make us happy, so we do it, and we believe we’ve gotten away with it, so we do it a few more times. All the while, our inappropriate behavior undermines our happiness. Somehow, we never make that connection, and so we keep doing this thing that isn’t making us happy; we do it even harder, faster.

But if we can extricate ourselves from that cycle even for a little while, we begin to see that it isn’t making us happy. The problem then is that the impacts of our behavior are so shocking and horrifying, we immediately go into denial again to numb ourselves. On a personal level, we turn away from homeless people — or never even see them at all, standing there dying. On the economic level, we buy and consume vegetables grown with pesticides because they’re cheaper.

Jensen: I’ve known you for a while, and it’s pretty clear to me that your perspective has been deeply influenced by Buddhism.

Draffan: Yes, what we’re really talking about here is awareness, and Buddhism is all about awareness. It’s about becoming more aware of suffering: that other people suffer; that I suffer. It’s about recognizing that happiness is an elusive — and illusive — goal that we keep striving to reach. And out of that awareness comes a desire for something deeper, a willingness to slow down and start paying attention to what is actually happening, instead of being so focused on getting what I believe will make me happy. When I stop long enough to see what is actually happening — both externally and internally — that clarity enables me to take effective action commensurate with what I and other people really need. Buddhist meditation can be a tool for dismantling habitual behavior and projections.

Jensen: What sort of "projections"?

Draffan: We often project our emotional states onto the world, and this prevents us from seeing it clearly. The ancient Buddhists — and, before them, the Hindus — had a different way of describing this. They believed the world is divided into six realms of being, of which the human is only one. The others are the realms of hungry ghosts, hell beings, animals, gods, and jealous gods. To the ancients, these were literally different realms. To a modern person, it might be more helpful to see them as worlds we project onto this one when in the grip of certain emotional obsessions. Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod has done some excellent work on making these ancient contemplative practices relevant to us today.

The hungry-ghost realm, for example, is projected when you are habitually overcome by grasping and greed. The hungry ghosts have huge stomachs and tiny mouths and necks, so they can never get enough to eat, and whatever they do eat turns to fire. If you’re a hungry ghost, you live in a world rich in resources — like the earth — but as far as you’re concerned, you’re wandering in a desert. Nothing satisfies. Sound familiar?

Of course, normal human desire is not as strong as the grasping greed of the hungry ghosts. In the human realm, you actually get some enjoyment out of the things you acquire or consume, but the satisfaction doesn’t last very long. Once I have dinner, I want dessert. Once I have dessert, I want seconds. Humans’ endless desires lead to constant busyness — always working, always trying to achieve more, always driven by a desire that we can never quite satisfy. A thousand-year-old Tibetan text describes the human realm as one of "incessant activity and constant frustration," a never-ending sense that things are not quite right.

The animal realm is based on instinct. According to this cosmology, animals are very efficient and clever, very suited to their world, but they’re locked into certain instincts. Humans enter the animal realm when we’re locked into our instinctual way of thinking and doing.

The hell-beings realm is where everything is seen as opposition. Everyone is attacking everyone else. It’s a realm of aggression, paranoia, hate, and fighting.

Then there’s the god realm, where you feel complete satisfaction to the point of being self-absorbed. The gods live for thousands of years in total comfort, but at some point their time runs out. As they realize they’re going to die, they suffer even more than the beings in the lower realms, because they’d believed this pleasurable state would last forever.

The jealous-god realm is based, obviously, on jealousy, and also on competition. The jealous gods see how comfortable the gods are, and they want that comfort, too, and will do anything to get it. They constantly attack the god realm, but they always lose.

Even if you don’t believe that these realms exist, you might recognize these same emotional states in yourself. The hungry ghosts, for example, might remind you of the desire to have something that, once you get your hands on it, turns out not to be what you want. We need to notice when this happens and understand what the end result of these obsessions is: being stuck in a projected world where everything is viewed through those emotions.

The basis of Buddhist mindfulness meditation is to slow down and focus your attention on something neutral, such as your breath, because it helps us to see through the projections.

Jensen: You once explained to me the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, "Life is suffering," in a way that helped me to understand its meaning — something I’d never been able to do before.

Draffan: The difficulty is in the translation. I’m not sure suffering is the right word. The word in Sanskrit is dukha, which literally means "a wheel with the axle hole off-center." Dukha means that things never seem quite right, and it encompasses everything from vague existential angst, to excruciating mental and physical torture, to inescapable old age, sickness, and death. Even when we find something that gives us pleasure, these pleasures are never permanent; in the back of our mind is the belief that we should be happy all the time. We’re never completely satisfied. One of the first steps to awareness, I think, is to realize that, although we’re pursuing happiness, we’re actually suffering. We’ve been pursuing something that not only doesn’t satisfy, but doesn’t even exist. As Ken McLeod puts it, "We’ve been barking up a tree that isn’t there."

One traditional metaphor is that we’re licking honey from a knife: We keep tasting that sweetness, but we also feel the pain. So we focus on the honey and keep licking, thinking if we do it carefully enough or fast enough, or get a better knife, we’ll escape the pain.

In the phrase "Life is suffering," the Sanskrit word that’s commonly translated as "life" is samsara, which really means "round and round." It describes a circular way of thinking and behaving: going round and round grasping for things that don’t exist and therefore can’t actually bring you happiness. So, of course, "samsara is dukha," because it’s painful to go round and round trying to get something that’s not real.

The First Noble Truth could be translated as "Your reactive emotions and habitual projections cause you to suffer." Because of our delusions, and because we are controlled by the parts of us that are never satisfied, we turn everything to suffering; we are incapable of enjoying real pleasure, of letting it come and go. The problem isn’t that "life is suffering." The problem is that we are stuck in mental delusions and emotional obsessions.

Jensen: How do you link all this to our economic system?

Draffan: Well, the system is driven by our endless desire, and suffering is the result of our habitual ways of seeing and thinking and doing. I once read about a Canadian lumberman who said, "When I look at trees, I see dollar bills." Before we could deforest a mountain, we had to change the way we perceived it. Before the trees could be cut, they had to be redefined as property, and then as private property.

Once that projection and objectification has taken place — from living being to property, from trees to dollar bills — and once you identify possession of that object as your source of happiness, then everything else falls into place. The forest has been privatized, and the landslides and species extinctions are all externalized.

...

Jensen: What will it take for us to survive?

Draffan: Attention to and care for the world. No matter where you are, or what you’re trying to do — whether it’s in your personal life or in the political realm — slow down, pay attention, and take careful responsibility for everything you do.

Receive The Result

Receive The Result (from PAP10: Power and Presence (retreat) 00:00:43.00 - 00:06:45.00)

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"A Way of Living"