Conversations With Master Phil

Phil wrote:

Ramon, you had me laughing for sure [with previous blog entry]... Are you having problems with some Advaita types? hmmm

I wrote this in 2003, but have been reading a Dzogchen (instant enlightenment) Yahoo list and something reminded me of it, so I posted it.

...I think we are born in a state of Bliss/Nirvana and lose it plugging into our bodies and learning to cope. Nothing to let go of, if you tell yourself you are bound to something and need to let go of it then you are bound. I have no problem. Give up giving up, transcend transcending all seems like good advice to me.

Yup, good stuff, although I think because of our 'education' and 'life experiences' we have to first make the effort to achieve 'fixation' on our chosen object of meditation before we can totally relax everything. At least that's been my experience. Voluntary blinking seems the easiest path to no-mind fixation these days for me.

But my problems commences with reincarnation, if reincarnation is an illusion, why do I have such strong past life memories and what's the point of reincarnation if we are all supposed to learn how to escape it?

I'm not sure I'd call it an illusion as much as a dream state (is there a difference?) that our witness self (pure awareness) is experiencing for reasons that may be out of our ken at the moment, or for the reason you express below.

Enter Sri Aurobindo. We are providing maturing souls for an evolving species and there is no escaping reincarnation. hmmm. Problems there too, number one being, is it such a positive message? Integral yoga holds that the reason all the world's religons have legends and beliefs in a golden glorious future - heaven on earth, the Kingdom of God - is that we are evolving towards it and manifesting it ourselves. It paints a positive view of the future, and right there warning lights go on. Am I attracted to this philosophy just because I want to believe something positive or????...

(Ducking the question) I ran across this quote from the Buddha. It interests me because it gives a _physical_ exercise to deal with intrusive thoughts. This instruction echoes the phrase "Shut firm the mouth" in Tilopa's instruction on Mahamudra, which I also take literally (the 'firm' part). Quoting from the Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts as found at
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/sutta/majjhima/mn-020-tb0.html

In the same way, if evil, unskillful thoughts — connected with desire, aversion or delusion — still arise in the monk* while he is attending to the relaxing of thought-fabrication with regard to those thoughts, then — with his teeth clenched and his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth — he should beat down, constrain, and crush his mind with his awareness.

*I prefer the translation 'waif' or 'beggar' for 'bhikkhu' instead of 'monk.'

Anyway, I still think that voluntary blinks are an easier path to no-mind, but I'm also interested in this approach. Heh! Your valve chatter may vary depending on oil levels.

Advaita Vedanta says the body is like a clay pot and the soul, the air inside the pot. Break the pot and you can't tell the air that was inside the pot from the rest of the air. So the soul merges back into God after death, nothing to attain to, nothing to let go of. I am not the doer, I am the witness of it. Its sweet and simple, but one shouldn't become attatched to any philosophy too strongly.

I'm with you and A.V. all the way! We all dissolve into God after death, so what's the big deal, you might ask? Well... unless you recognize the flash of brilliant white light at the moment of death and merge into it, there might exist the possibility of falling into one of the various heavens -- at least that's what the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches. Now I think that the Bodhisattva Vow is just heroic and beyond brilliant, and that when we experience certain absorptionlevels there arises the spontaneous urge to share with / teach others. But frankly, I'm getting my ticket punched after this first and last incarnation. I really think that my http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifpurpose /job / whatever-it-is that I'm here to demonstrate is that you can do it all in one lifetime - survive war, bombs, murder, loss of family, abandonment, a weird but privileged childhood, go bohemian, go beat, go zen, go radical Christian something, go screw up big time as an adult, experience poverty level hand-to-mouth, flounder around ruining relationships, go animist, go hippy, go shaman, go crazy and still emerge from it all like a pooch emerging from a tsunami, shake off all the accrued karmic mud and find a life with wonderful wife and three great sons that will allow me to pursue buddhahood or something close to it -- all in one lifetime! -- not on any particularly defined path but more by dancing my own dance across the sunlit meadows of Mt. Meru. Amazing! I ascribe my modest successes to having had a conventful of sisters praying for me daily on the Hudson River outside NYC for 30 years, and nesting happily in David Spero's sahaja samadhi for the past three years. Talk about lucky! Gratitude definitely overrunneth my cup!

Sri Aurobindo was one of the most brilliant minds of his era.

That is true, and I respect very much his achievement -- and his positive view of the evolution of the human spirit. But a great deal of his writing I believe only favors his own sadhana and is of no direct use to others. How many Morningstarian communards attempted to read my copy of the "The Synthesis of Yoga" and just couldn't hack it? I mean, what the fuck? If it wasn't for Satprem's "The Adventure of Consciousness" that put Aurobindo into some sort of absorbable format, we would just have been stuck
with some sort of Cambridge University colonial-wanna-be-as-smart- as-those-upper- class-English-twits lecturing himself into nothingness.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that nowhere does Sri A. ever explain in detail how he achieved the silent mind in three days in that hotel room with his yogi teacher. This is the only paragraph he ever wrote about achieving the silent mind, and frankly it's useless unless you're born a Pablo Casals of Contemplation.

"In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit, and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside. I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain, and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a laborer in a thought- factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire."

Sri Aurobindo quoted in "Sri Aurobindo, a Biography & History" by S. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar p. 260

There is a tradition in Zen Buddhism that if the student does not surpass the master, the master is thereby dishonored. I believe this - or at least that if the teacher cannot bring the sincere student up to his/her own level of achievement, the teacher has failed. In my opinion, Sri Aurobundo failed to do this with everyone (as far as I know) except Mother Mira Alfasa, and probably she was already on a higher level before they began their relationship. Who manifests first? SHE does!

Doing a doughnut wheelie in this discussion, here's a quote from a Carthusian monk sent to me today by a woman who started as a Catholic contemplative and now is a Tibetan Buddhist:

To live by God alone and for God alone, that is the heart of our secret and the true essence of our solitude... To wish for nothing else, to know nothing else, to have nothing else, but God and God alone; “to be nothing else, so that only thou be God,” to quote the profound words of a contemplative soul;... Every other care beside this one and only Love is superfluous. Anything that has no part in the infinite self is too small for the human heart.
There are not many souls which have the power to recognize the beauty of the Absolute... Rare are the souls intrepid enough to acknowledge all their weaknesses, to acknowledge their very nonentity. Rare are the souls which really dare to be nothing, and which, in that very act are humble enough to be content to be divine.... It is not possible to formulate a “theory” of this kind of life or to express in words its essence: it is too simple. “To love,” “to live in naked reality” - that is all that we can say with human words."

This expresses very well the 'neti-neti' / bhakti path, which has been the basic Christian approach and works very well, although it is of course the excruciating Via Negativa, the crucifixion of the ego. Having experienced this path quite fully in my early twenties (via baptism preparation at the Bruderhof), I still prefer the Via Positiva (dissolving into THAT-ness) which the hippie/psychedelic experience teaches and which does not get hung up on the suffering aspect.
I still wonder what the original Christian experience was that allowed them to march singing into the Colosseum to meet their deaths in the mouths of wild animals. I think it had to do with the original baptism experience. Baptism I think was more or less unique to Christianity - at least it certainly was not part of Judaism - maybe John the Baptist copied it from somewhere - or brought it from the Essenes. But basically I believe it was a near-death by drowning experience - the baptizer
clapped his hands over your nose and mouth and held you under until you stopped struggled. It took a bit of skill to know exactly when to haul you up and not have you cross over permanently. But I think only an NDE of this sort can explain the strength of belief of these folks.
By the way, my ex-boss the Presbyterian minister across the street agreed with me when I told her this, so I guess it's kosher in the seminaries. Curiously, the NBE seems to have mainly survived as a method for dunking witches until they confessed (and then allowed to drown) or currently in CIA secret dungeons as a torture method (tying the prisoner to a plank that's dunked over and over again). I wonder what sort of NBE's these poor people experience and how it changes their belief system.

End of today's rant! Thanks, Phil, for revving me up! (valves a-chatter, and reaching for the 'oil can.')