Ra Samye Ling Day 5
Friday 3:00 p.m.
Hello, Jack! Some people say spam robots don't exist, Jack, but just don't listen to these flatheids, Jack. They don't exist either, at least, not the way they think they exist. So welcome the RaBlissBlog, Jack. I'm always glad you can drop by, along with the Masai Warriors, Martians, and the Holy Ghostie Men.
From half ten to half twelve today I had the best meditations of my life so far. The first one went a bit like this. It was an analytical one, the kind I don't often do.
Calm the mind anyway you do. I was sitting in the back temple facing a picture of the refuge tree. You look for your false sense of self. You can go through the bits you think make you up, like senses, perceptions, arms, legs, etc. You probably won't find it, but it is there sometimes; there's not much point in denying it completely. You might find it in ideations; ideas, thoughts that sometimes arise. It's not always there. It's not there when you're in deep sleep. But it will be there when you're enduring afflictive emotions; when you're angry, frightened, etc.
But you can look at the "I" that thinks it owns your arms and legs and try to dissolve it somehow, if you can find it at all. It's the unchanging, permanent presence that you think you are. Of course, this is a silly way to think is really isn't too smart to stick with that. Look what happened to Boudicca!
Anyway, you try to get calm enough so that there's only the sitting joe and the will to keep sitting. That should do you for now.
So you are in some kind of egolessness, at least for the moment. You've negated the false sense of self.
You're looking at the refuge photie. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. That always does your head in, but you can see that the refuge photie appears as a single thing. It should be quite easy to break that up into parts and realise it's a composite. The wee buddhas sitting in all the branches are helping to make the composition and that might help. Might not.
Although the photie appears in your mind as a single thing, you can dissolve the single thing into parts and eventually you shouldn't find anthing there that you could designate and say: That's it. You mind seems to have made the single separate thing up.
So at this point you have emptiness of self and emptiness of the object you're gazing upon. Are you still with me, Jack? You're doing mind on mind juju here!
So you can start investigating the mind. You are supposed to ask the questions like, what colour is it, what shape is it, etc. You should come up with the sense that the mind is without characteristics or attributes really. (Yes, Jack, that's empty as well!)
It's supposed to be a wee bit like space. Space is everywhere. It contains everything, but it's hard to say exactly where it is or what. But the mind also has the ability to know, so it's not just like space. It cognises stuff.
As you sit there in front of the refuge photie, you can ask where the mind is. You could tell yourself it's between your ears. But the photie has appeared in it and the photie seems to be out there.
How about the moon? Is the mind in the moon? If you think about the moon as you sit there, of course, the mind is in the moon. You can do the analysis you did with yourself and the photie if you like and you'll have to admit that they both seem to be empty.
If you can move the mind from between your ears until it's outside you and inside you, well, Jack, you're head's not so flat now!!
Take your mind to the edge of space. Yes, it's there as well.
The mind seems to be everywhere. If you've still negated your sense of "I" and the false sense of self here, you might be getting somewhere.
If you go back to you and photie, which comes first? Close you eyes and open them again. Your mind has to come first or it wouldn't recognise the photie as photie somehow.
The Nyingma (we're Kagyu here!) idea of the individual mind (sem) and the big mind (rigpa) might be helpful here.
Anyway, how does your individual mind recognise the photie. It's colour and shapes, Jack. It's light, or parts of it, bouncing back off the photie and going in through your eyeball; messages along nerves, etc.
What is light anway? Is it waves (what? What are they?) or is it particles. Do the particles have mass? Is it waves and particles at the same time, depending on how you look at it?
If you go back to the emptiness of all this stuff, maybe you should understand that the photie and you arise simulataneously in mind. Or is it Mind? I'm not to sure about this part, Jack, but if you get to this bit, in a few eons you''ll be able to walk through walls, on water, and all that stuff!
While doing this stuff today, I felt really wonderful. I might even have had a wee realisation of emptiness. Understanding it isn't the point, Jack. You've got to settle into it and get realisations.
That'll be tenpercent off the top!
That took me an hour. Then I stood on my head and then did the diety yoga mentioned in the last post. Never, ever has it been so good! What a fortunate creature I am! But I've only got twenty minutes left of the hour now and will have to look at my email. Of course, I wish you all were here and could do this juju with me. Because as I went to lunch I did feel like a very fortunate creature indeed!
16 minutes to go!
Just checked the mail and comments on the last post.
I thought about Eric last night. Eric goes hiking through the vast wildernesses of Canada sometimes.
I was going to build a fire out on the wee island in the middle of the river. Nothing gets to you there except the midges. My mind was quite calm at that point in the day (did over ten hours meditation yesterday) and I thought of the short story "To Build A Fire" by Jack London. Once I got a short story on the radio and thought I'd better read some to see how to write them (hadn't really read any before). I found this schoolbook with the Jack London story in it and I just loved that story. It's about a joe in the Yukon who dies because he steps into a river and can't build a fire to dry his foot off, so it freezes. Brilliant story. That's when I thought of Eric and the wildernesses of Canada. There are all kinds of ways to calm your mind and put things in perspective. Walking through vast lonely beautiful places must be 0ne of them.
Before I knew anything about meditating, I went for a walk in Scotland. I walked up a road with a sign saying it wasn't really going anywhere and ended up for three days in a tent during a bad storm. The tent got ripped during the first night as the storm tried to blow it over. Anyway, when the weather cleared, I packed up the wet tent, etc., and started walking. I found the West Highland Way, which I'd never heard of. I said you could walk right to Glasgow. Delighted, I was.
That night I built a fire beside Loch Lomond. Looked into the fire and had a kind of cathartic experience about the dead people in my family, dead long ago, and people I hadn't thought about for a long time. Some tears were shed. I hadn't wept for some time. Weeping is cool. Anyway, this machine is just about to shut off.
This is RaBlissBlog coming to you from Bliss Central! Buddhas to the left of me! Buddhas to the right of me!!
Hello, Jack! Some people say spam robots don't exist, Jack, but just don't listen to these flatheids, Jack. They don't exist either, at least, not the way they think they exist. So welcome the RaBlissBlog, Jack. I'm always glad you can drop by, along with the Masai Warriors, Martians, and the Holy Ghostie Men.
From half ten to half twelve today I had the best meditations of my life so far. The first one went a bit like this. It was an analytical one, the kind I don't often do.
Calm the mind anyway you do. I was sitting in the back temple facing a picture of the refuge tree. You look for your false sense of self. You can go through the bits you think make you up, like senses, perceptions, arms, legs, etc. You probably won't find it, but it is there sometimes; there's not much point in denying it completely. You might find it in ideations; ideas, thoughts that sometimes arise. It's not always there. It's not there when you're in deep sleep. But it will be there when you're enduring afflictive emotions; when you're angry, frightened, etc.
But you can look at the "I" that thinks it owns your arms and legs and try to dissolve it somehow, if you can find it at all. It's the unchanging, permanent presence that you think you are. Of course, this is a silly way to think is really isn't too smart to stick with that. Look what happened to Boudicca!
Anyway, you try to get calm enough so that there's only the sitting joe and the will to keep sitting. That should do you for now.
So you are in some kind of egolessness, at least for the moment. You've negated the false sense of self.
You're looking at the refuge photie. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. That always does your head in, but you can see that the refuge photie appears as a single thing. It should be quite easy to break that up into parts and realise it's a composite. The wee buddhas sitting in all the branches are helping to make the composition and that might help. Might not.
Although the photie appears in your mind as a single thing, you can dissolve the single thing into parts and eventually you shouldn't find anthing there that you could designate and say: That's it. You mind seems to have made the single separate thing up.
So at this point you have emptiness of self and emptiness of the object you're gazing upon. Are you still with me, Jack? You're doing mind on mind juju here!
So you can start investigating the mind. You are supposed to ask the questions like, what colour is it, what shape is it, etc. You should come up with the sense that the mind is without characteristics or attributes really. (Yes, Jack, that's empty as well!)
It's supposed to be a wee bit like space. Space is everywhere. It contains everything, but it's hard to say exactly where it is or what. But the mind also has the ability to know, so it's not just like space. It cognises stuff.
As you sit there in front of the refuge photie, you can ask where the mind is. You could tell yourself it's between your ears. But the photie has appeared in it and the photie seems to be out there.
How about the moon? Is the mind in the moon? If you think about the moon as you sit there, of course, the mind is in the moon. You can do the analysis you did with yourself and the photie if you like and you'll have to admit that they both seem to be empty.
If you can move the mind from between your ears until it's outside you and inside you, well, Jack, you're head's not so flat now!!
Take your mind to the edge of space. Yes, it's there as well.
The mind seems to be everywhere. If you've still negated your sense of "I" and the false sense of self here, you might be getting somewhere.
If you go back to you and photie, which comes first? Close you eyes and open them again. Your mind has to come first or it wouldn't recognise the photie as photie somehow.
The Nyingma (we're Kagyu here!) idea of the individual mind (sem) and the big mind (rigpa) might be helpful here.
Anyway, how does your individual mind recognise the photie. It's colour and shapes, Jack. It's light, or parts of it, bouncing back off the photie and going in through your eyeball; messages along nerves, etc.
What is light anway? Is it waves (what? What are they?) or is it particles. Do the particles have mass? Is it waves and particles at the same time, depending on how you look at it?
If you go back to the emptiness of all this stuff, maybe you should understand that the photie and you arise simulataneously in mind. Or is it Mind? I'm not to sure about this part, Jack, but if you get to this bit, in a few eons you''ll be able to walk through walls, on water, and all that stuff!
While doing this stuff today, I felt really wonderful. I might even have had a wee realisation of emptiness. Understanding it isn't the point, Jack. You've got to settle into it and get realisations.
That'll be tenpercent off the top!
That took me an hour. Then I stood on my head and then did the diety yoga mentioned in the last post. Never, ever has it been so good! What a fortunate creature I am! But I've only got twenty minutes left of the hour now and will have to look at my email. Of course, I wish you all were here and could do this juju with me. Because as I went to lunch I did feel like a very fortunate creature indeed!
16 minutes to go!
Just checked the mail and comments on the last post.
I thought about Eric last night. Eric goes hiking through the vast wildernesses of Canada sometimes.
I was going to build a fire out on the wee island in the middle of the river. Nothing gets to you there except the midges. My mind was quite calm at that point in the day (did over ten hours meditation yesterday) and I thought of the short story "To Build A Fire" by Jack London. Once I got a short story on the radio and thought I'd better read some to see how to write them (hadn't really read any before). I found this schoolbook with the Jack London story in it and I just loved that story. It's about a joe in the Yukon who dies because he steps into a river and can't build a fire to dry his foot off, so it freezes. Brilliant story. That's when I thought of Eric and the wildernesses of Canada. There are all kinds of ways to calm your mind and put things in perspective. Walking through vast lonely beautiful places must be 0ne of them.
Before I knew anything about meditating, I went for a walk in Scotland. I walked up a road with a sign saying it wasn't really going anywhere and ended up for three days in a tent during a bad storm. The tent got ripped during the first night as the storm tried to blow it over. Anyway, when the weather cleared, I packed up the wet tent, etc., and started walking. I found the West Highland Way, which I'd never heard of. I said you could walk right to Glasgow. Delighted, I was.
That night I built a fire beside Loch Lomond. Looked into the fire and had a kind of cathartic experience about the dead people in my family, dead long ago, and people I hadn't thought about for a long time. Some tears were shed. I hadn't wept for some time. Weeping is cool. Anyway, this machine is just about to shut off.
This is RaBlissBlog coming to you from Bliss Central! Buddhas to the left of me! Buddhas to the right of me!!
posted by Hotboy at 3:14 PM
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