Fixation And A Number Of Good Quotes

Playing catch-up with recent postings:

R quoted Rinpoche:
"It is much better to sit next to Indra and eat happily..."
Ramon: - and pass the amrita, please!

J-P quotes Abhinavagupta:

Concentration and calming the mind. If this meditation
is difficult, take a simple object like a stone or a piece of wood,
place it in front of you, gently focus on the object without
blinking, allow nothing else to take hold of your mind.

There's that 'without blinking' suggestion again. Not blinking sure stirs
up the solar plexus energies! And smiling widely while doing so allows
tearing to continue to bathe the corneas. (Of course I'm 'doing something'
again, but perhaps 'staring as if in amazement' is self-arising?)

Referencing J-P's Vijñânabhairava Tantra quotes, I was overjoyed some
years ago to find one of my favorite self-discoveries (nursing on the
uvula/soft palate) listed there, (right next to the 'not-blinking
suggestion again):

LIE DOWN AS DEAD. ENRAGED IN WRATH, STAY SO. OR
STARE WITHOUT MOVING AN EYELASH. OR SUCK SOMETHING AND
BECOME THE SUCKING.

Also in "Zen Flesh Zen Bones," and also published by Rajneesh

52.
A. Lie down as dead. Enraged in wrath, stay so.
B. Or stare without moving an eyelash.
C. Or suck something and become the sucking.

-=-=-=
As for item "A" above, it makes me think of Ramana's teenage experience.
Except the 'enraged in wrath' I don't understand, unless this has to do
with frowning fiercely while stiffening the body in a rigor-like state.
Hm, trying it right now, I sense an 8-pulses-per-second visual strobe
effect.

I enjoy little mnemonic devices, such as the tip of the tongue held
between the teeth. Also, sometimes nothing's happening in my mind
except a random melody, and melodies seem to dissolve other thoughts,
yes?

I also like Alan Wallace's 'Awareness in Empty Space' exercise:

"Imagine yourself as a child lying on your back, gazing up into
a cloudless sky, and blowing soap bubbles through a plastic
ring. As a bubble drifts up into the sky, you watch it rise,
and this brings your attention to the sky. While you are
looking at the bubble, it pops, and you keep your attention
right where the bubble had been. Your awareness now lies in
empty space."

B. Alan Wallace, "Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up"
Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365
Buddhist Inspirations," edited by Josh Bartok

I've also been enjoyng Arthur Zajonc's "Catching the Light; The Entwined
History of Light and Mind" Oxford Univ Press, 1993 A quote that I found
of interest because I'd never thought of it before:
"Light itself is always invisible. We see only things, only objects, not
light."

Perhaps we cannot 'see' light in the same way that we cannot see our
buddha nature? Perhaps light IS awareness? Quoting from an 'R' posting:

The sambhogakaya is that dimension in which the
potentialities of sound, light, and rays the three fundamental
sources of manifestation, appear as the pure vision of the
mandala, the origin of the tantric teachings.

Hm, why are 'light' and 'rays' listed separately? And sound? My
happy inner melodies?

Loss of Awareness in jhana, and Ramana

I appreciate your reply, M.J. And understand what you’re saying, especially
‘wakeful sleep’. But I still think that inasmuch as ‘the sounding breath’
is self-arising (through deep relaxation in sleep), it offers us a key to
that final door that might otherwise take 20 years sitting in a cave,
something that few of us are willing to do – or capable of doing – these
days. Luckily, Mother is very beneficent.
This remark of yours was especially helpful:

”concentration is not opposed to such total relaxation. The
word 'concentrate' means to focus on one centre, and in order
to experience total relaxation we must be focused in our real
centre, which is our true and essential self.”

I understand now that there's a stage where Concentration and Relaxation
become the same. This is something I had been wrestling with for some
time - i.e. how to remain on the meditation object (which requires some
application of focus/fixation) while at the same time going ever deeper
into relaxation.
Yesterday I visualized 'concentration' as a golden ball gradually
sinking into a deep ocean of relaxation, and found this helpful.
Regarding this from your book
The Happiness of Being page 13 (that you pointed me towards),
how did Sri Ramana know he went through a true ‘physical death’
experience, i.e. that his heart ‘stopped beating’ and that he was
‘out’ for 20 minutes?

Sri Ramana merely simulated the signs of physical death.
But he explained on several occasions that he
did not merely simulate it, but actually underwent the
experience of physical death at that time. Because he fixed his
whole attention so firmly and intensely upon his
consciousness of being, not only did his breathing cease, but
his heart stopped beating, and all the other biological
functions that indicate life also came to a standstill. Thus his
body literally lay lifeless for about twenty minutes, until
suddenly life again surged through it, and his heartbeat and
breath started to function as normal.

To put this into perspective, here is a quote from “The Jhanas”
by Ajahn Brahmavamso, page 29 of 46, distributed free by The
Buddhist Fellowship, Singapore

A lay disciple once told me how he had “fluked” a deep
jhana while meditating at home. His wife thought he had
died and sent for an ambulance. He was rushed to hospital
in a wail of loud sirens. In the emergency room, there was
no heartbeat registered on the E.C.G., nor brain activity
to be seen by the E.E.G. So the doctor on put defibrillators
on his chest to re-activate his heart. Even though he was
being bounced up and down on the hospital bed through the
force of the electric shocks, he didn’t feel a thing! When
he emerged from the jhana in the emergency room, perfectly
all right, he had no knowledge of how he had got there,
nor of ambulances and sirens, nor of body-jerking defibrill-
ators. All that long time that he was in jhana, he was fully
aware, but only of bliss. This is an example of what is meant
by the five senses shutting down within the experience of jhana.

Comment:
Although I disagree with Ajahn B regarding the shutting down of
the five senses in_ all_ jhana states (including the the lower
four jhanas,) this reported experience cannot be disregarded,
and does seem to reference Sri R’s own.

I thought you also might find the following of interest.
It was quoted on the Way-of-Light Yahoo list
that focuses mostly on Tibetan Dzogchen/Mahamudra:

From the Choying Dzod By Longchengpa From Chapter 9:
"Awareness, involving no plans or actions, no coming or
going, entails no time frame or antidote, so drop reification
and effort.
If there is a deliberate frame of reference, it is a cause of
bondage.
Do not rely on any fixed construct whatsoever - let go in evenness!

It is of no concern whether or not all phenomena are timelessly free.
It is of no concern whether or not the way of abiding is pure by nature.

It is of no concern whether or not mind itself is free of elaboration.
It is of no concern whether or not anything has ever existed within
the fundamentally unconditioned, genuine state.

It is of no concern whether or not samsara and nirvana
are by nature a duality.
It is of no concern whether or not all thoughts and expressions
are transcended.
It is of no concern whether or not confused attempts
at proof and refutation are demolished.
It is of no concern whether or not the view to be realized has
been realized.

It is of no concern whether or not you meditate
on the ultimate meaning of the true nature of phenomena.
It is of no concern whether or not you engage in examination,
since there is nothing to accept or reject.
It is of no concern whether or not the way of abiding
has ever existed as the fruition.
It is of no concern whether or not you have traversed
the paths and levels of realization.

It is of no concern whether or not you are free of all obscurations.
It is of no concern whether or not the development and
completion stages perfect your true nature.
It is of no concern whether or not the fruition of liberation is
attained.
It is of no concern whether or not you wander in the six states of samsara.

It is of no concern whether or not the nature of being
is spontaneous presence.
It is of no concern whether or not you are bound
by dualistic perceptions of affirmation and denial.
It is of no concern whether or not you have arrived
at the enlightened intent of the true nature of phenomena.
It is of no concern whether or not you follow
in the footsteps of masters of the past.

No matter what arises, even if heaven and earth change
places, there is a bare state of relaxed openness, without any
underlying basis.

Without any reference points nebulous, ephemeral and
evanescent - this is the mode of a lunatic, free of the duality
of hope and fear.

With unbiased view and meditation,
ordinary consciousness that is caught up in reification
collapses.
Without the entanglements of wishful thinking,
there is no "thing" to strive for or achieve.

Let whatever happens happen and whatever manifests
manifest.
Let whatever occurs occur and whatever is be.
Let whatever is anything at all be nothing at all.

With your conduct unpredictable
you make the final leap into awareness
without the slightest basis for determining what is spiritual
or not,
and so this bare state with no reference point
is beyond the cage of philosophy.

Whether eating, moving around, lying down, or sitting,
day and night you rest in infinite evenness,
so that you experience the true nature of phenomena as their
equalness.
There are no gods to worship, no demons to exorcise,
nothing to cultivate in meditation this is the completely
"ordinary" state.

With this single state of evenness, the uncontrived ruler
that has no pride -
there is oneness, a relaxed and unstructured openness.
How delightful!
Things are timelessly ensured without having to be done,
and free of effort and achievement, you are content.

Breath-holding and Ramana's rigor

I’ve been looking again at Ramana Maharshi’s ‘death’ experience
as a youth, and am now pretty sure he included ‘body rigor’ i.e. a
full body contraction to duplicate rigor mortis - (see quotes below
from “Happiness and the Art of Being” by a Michael James who spent
some years at Ramana’s ashram with his main disciples.) See:
http://www.happinessofbeing.com/resources/happiness_art_being.html
for an online copy of th 500+ page ebook. The two words in
bold below are my edits.

Ramana:
'All right, death has come! What is death? What is it that
dies? This body is going to die – let it die.' Deciding thus, he
lay down like a corpse, rigid and without breathing, and
turned his mind inwards to discover what death would
actually do to him. He later described the truth that dawned
upon him at that moment as follows:
"This body is dead. It will now be taken to the cremation
ground, burnt, and reduced to ashes. But with the destruction
of this body, am I also destroyed? Is this body really 'I'?
Although this body is lying lifeless as a corpse, I know that I
am. Unaffected in the least by this death, my being is shining
clearly. Therefore I am not this body which dies. I am the ‘I’
which is indestructible. Of all things, I alone am the reality.
This body is subject to death, but I, who transcend the body,
am that which lives eternally. The death that came to this
body cannot affect me."
Although he described his experience of death in so many
words, he explained that this truth actually dawned upon him
in an instant, not as reasoning or verbalised thoughts, but as a
direct experience, without the least action of mind. So intense
was his fear and consequent urge to know the truth of death,
that without actually thinking anything he turned his
attention away from his rigid and lifeless body and towards
the innermost core of his being, the pure consciousness 'I am'.

His use of the word 'rigid' in describing how he lay down and
duplicated the death experience makes me think I'm intuiting
correctly that he included the rigor mortis he had observed in
corpses. Keep in mind that in India, as in many third world
countries, exposure to dead bodies is much more common than in
our over-sanitized -- and death-phobic -- culture.

Breath-holding is a very ancient technique in mystical circles - in
fact, some levels of samadhi in yoga are defined as 'breathless' --
and of course there are those occasional fakirs who allow themselves
to be buried alive, etc. Also, as I've writen on this blog before,
the original Christian baptism involved suffocation - the baptizer
clapped one hand over your nose and mouth so that you wouldn't inhale
water while being held under. The idea was to keep you there until
you passed out but not until you died. I've checked this out with a
couple of ministers and they agree with me (!). Of course the baptizer's
skill involved knowing when to let you up - probably when you ceased
struggling. At that point the body probably had released various near-
death, endorphins and the baptizee had 'seen the light,' so to speak.

Native American warriors also were remarkably stoic when captured and
tortured, and here again there were probably some NDEs triggered by
initiations that involved breath-holding.

As children, many of us experimented with hyperventilating and then
stiffening the body and holding the breath - and thus passing out -
so I'm pretty sure I'm onto something with all this. In fact, in 1977
I was visiting a bar in Oakland, and demo’d to a bunch of guys,
mostly African-American, how a combination of the bellows breath, a
toke of MJ and the Camel asana will take you out. About three guys
tried it, and each passed out to come back, eyes shining. I figured
we could’ve started a new religion on the spot, and beat a hasty
retreat.

Someone responded to the above regarding breath-holding as follows:

"The technique about holding the exhale is also used in Magical
Work to power a thought form. As for the "reset"....holding the
breath,inhale or exhale,gives the cells a feeling of oxygen
deprivation. They start to freak and can be programmed in
that agitated/moving state. Similar to pointing an iron bar to
magnetic north and striking it with a mallet. It becomes a
weak magnet. With the cells,you want to align them to a
mantra or visualization while resetting with the held breath."

Interesting!

By the way, all these 'on the edge' exercises that I post here and
elsewhere are for your general interest only. You try them at your
own risk.