Zen Win

There is a Quietness

By Jiddu Krishnamurti

I hope that you will listen, but not with the memory of what you already know; and this is very difficult to do. You listen to something, and your mind immediately reacts with its knowledge, its conclusions, its opinions, its past memories. It listens, inquiring for a future understanding.

Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.

You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.

If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.

When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain.

an average transition for me

by day mad for breath
by night breath divine
this sacred rhythm
dews the mind's grasses
lays feathered heads
into infinite subtlety
where out seeps an ecstatic moon
a mirror of stillness somehow dancing
a wiggling ochre-wrapped worm
breathing vibes like a mother
all the while just sitting
breathing
being
by night third eyes silent rise
from ancient clear watery planets
a milky solution of night gone gone
gone baby bodhisattva
so freaky far beyond
in succulent neon fields
where eyes are mounting eyes
seeing copulating purring
all the while this hokey pokey of
silken implicate order
dreams and anti-dreams
draws such love to flux
calls only love to bear us
so by night humble
a dawning universe comes
and she has wrapped it around
such darling hips of creation
we laugh because we know
there never was a war
all that was just silly talk
falling asleep
by the light of our moon

Love,
Rev MoonPie

Quantum Physics and Evolving Consciousness

In my opinion, this is more than your average hokey, generic fusion of quantum mechanics and spirituality, as it is a novel way of meditating on breath.

Source: http://www.lightomega.org/Quantum-Physics-and-Evolving-Consciousness.html

by Julie Redstone

(The following discussion is based on David Bohm's theory of the 'Implicate Order', developed in the 1980s in order to explain the strange behavior of sub-atomic particles. The central underlying theme of Bohm's theory is that there is a unifying reality which underlies physical reality called the 'implicate order'. This 'order' unifies the totality of existence so that nothing is separate from anything else).

________________

Today, we can venture into a discussion of quantum physics and its relationship to consciousness because much has been written about this in recent decades, and also because analogies taken from the physical world can often help us understand the spiritual world. This is because the principle "as above, so below" is universally true, whether we perceive it to be so or not.

Since the 1920s, the field of quantum physics has catapulted us forward in our understanding of the physical world. It has taken some physicists to the edge of this world, to the place where the physical interfaces with the spiritual. One area of quantum physics in which this is true involves the creation and destruction of sub-atomic particles. It is because of the inherent mystery at this level, of things coming into and going out of existence, that we can explore the fertile ground of present knowledge and ask broader questions regarding being and non-being - spiritual questions arising out of this mystery.

Within quantum physics, it is understood that in a vacuum - a space that has, as much as possible, been emptied of both matter and energy - that some background energy still remains. Out of this background energy, particles continually emerge and disappear^.1 Some of these particles have a 'virtual' reality - a reality that is similar to that of 'real' particles, but different from them in the length of time that they exist.

'Virtual' particles appear out of the 'nothingness' of the vacuum and disappear back into it again after such a very short time in existence, that one could almost say that they did not exist at all. 'Virtual' particles can also become 'real' particles, becoming measurable and lasting longer, depending on how much energy is added to the vacuum.² Also, both virtual and real particles can change into other particles before they disappear from existence.

The fluidity of this landscape of sub-atomic particles is like the foam frothing on a turbulent sea. However, the seas of the earth are something we know and have ideas about. We observe their tides, their wave-patterns, and foam. What we don't know is where sub-atomic particles - the constituents of the 'quantum foam' - go when they are not 'real' or even 'virtual', or what the generating force is for this turbulence.

This is a serious question. Some physicists define the vacuum state as a state of nothingness. However, it has also been defined as a state of being which appears on the physical level to contain nothing, but which plays an active role in determining which particles emerge from it and become 'explicate' or real. The 'implicate order' can be seen as both a physical and metaphysical construction - the name for a vast Intelligence which contains all things within itself and which 'en-folds' or 'un-folds' these things so that they emerge into the reality we experience as real.

The 'implicate order', should it exist, would appear to have the capability of creating separate particles which appear to us as real (un-foldment), and also of reabsorbing these particles (en-foldment) so that they disappear into it and become part of the background again. Whether we are talking about muons, electrons, pions, or positrons, there are a number of questions that arise out of this focus:

Why do certain particles arise then disappear?

Why do they change into other particles?

Is there a guiding Intelligence that is continually creating physical matter out of background nothingness?

Is the Implicate Order something close to what we think of as God?

The view that nothingness is filled with something, though not something we can see or measure, takes us from the realm of the physical into the realm of the spiritual. From a spiritual perspective, we may be seeing our own future - the future of consciousness. For there is an analogy that can be made between the way sub-atomic particles operate - the way they come into and go out of existence - and the way individual consciousness has the potential for operating as it evolves. For example, we can hold the possibility that individual consciousness, like sub-atomic particles, has the capacity to 'un-fold' and 'en-fold' as particles do - hovering between being and non-being, and that this dual awareness is the result of an evolving awareness, a consciousness infused by Divine 'breath'.

II.

Divine 'breath' is the infused life of God as it affects all beings. It is not restricted to any particular belief system, tradition, or religion. Sacred 'breathing', which is the experience of Divine 'breath', does not just involve taking in air, but rather taking in the higher frequencies of Light. Such breathing contains within itself both the capacity to individualize consciousness, and also to return it to the state of non-duality.

The infusion of Divine breath involves a process analogous to inhaling and exhaling on the physical plane but with this qualification - that the pulsations of Light which polarize and unite consciousness between time and eternity, between form and formlessness, do not necessarily alternate in time in the way that inhaling and exhaling do. Rather, they may be considered to be ponts of reference on a continuum, both ends of which can remain in consciousness. Also, in contrast to the physical act of breathing which is within the awareness of every creature, the awareness of Divine breath is not automatic within human consciousness at the present time. Rather, it corresponds to a consciousness that has developed a capacity to attune to the higher frequencies of Light.

For such a consciousness, the inhalation pulse of 'sacred breathing' brings consciousness into a state of self-discernment - one in which the individualized self becomes a unique expression of the Infinite. The exhalation pulse, by contrast, brings consciousness into oneness with the Universal - with that which is All. In the latter state, individualized identity disappears, and, like a drop of water in the ocean, becomes part of the All.

Divine breath is the origin of life in the Universe. It is the gift of the Mother/Creatrix/God who infuses life with Light and brings consciousness into awareness of being both a self and also merged within a greater Unity. The role of Divine intention is that consciousness on all levels, the human as well as the sub-atomic, will come to realize itself as unified so that matter and consciousness will no longer be separate. Though such movement is only in its beginning stages at this time, the purification of the earth and of individual consciousness will accelerate this process, bringing the fruits of sacred breathing to each soul who seeks the light, as naturally and inevitably as physical breathing takes place today. In this way the un-folding and en-folding aspects of reality will ultimately be realized.

The means to the deepening experience of Divine breath are purification and purity which allow the greater incorporation of light within the cellular structure of the body. These awaken the capacity to see and feel the Divine behind individual physical life, as well as the capacity to feel One with All. As a model for this dual experience, quantum physics illustrates in the behavior of the tiniest sub-atomic particles, life's purpose and the purpose of consciousness, down to the smallest dimensions of physical reality.

Tao te Ching – The Nature of Polarity

Tao te Ching – The Nature of Polarity by Alan Watts

AT THE VERY ROOTS of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world.

Alan Watt's Taoism Continued

To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric, current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that + and north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.

People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is "to make the world a better place" - to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness. But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially "good and healthy" are creating more problems than they solve. We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes -us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away -from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself. Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves-that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, "Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe." This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one's actions may use them and not fight them. In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of "going with the grain." The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.

In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), and their conventional signs are — respectively -- and The ideograms indicate the sunny and shady sides of a hill, fou, and they are associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland. Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other. When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. Obviously, the male has the convex penis and the female the concave vagina; and though people have regarded the former as a possession and the latter as a deprivation (Freud's "penis envy"), any fool should be able to recognize that one cannot have the outstanding without the instanding, and that a rampant membrum virile is no good without somewhere, to put it, and vice versa. But the male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:

Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.

The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female.

The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:

When everyone knows beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;

When everyone knows good as goodness, there is already evil.

"To be" and "not to be" arise mutually;

Difficult and easy are mutually realized;

Long and short are mutually contrasted;

High and low are mutually posited; ...

Before and after are in mutual sequence.

They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting. It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from nonbeing as sound from silence and and light from space.

Thirty spokes unite at the wheel's hub;

It is the center hole [literally, "from their not being"]

that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut out doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.

I do not know if this point can really be argued in our logic, but I find it impossible to conceive any form whatsoever without relatively empty space. We ignore space just because it is uniform, as water to fish and air to birds. It is almost impossible to give intelligible descriptions of elements or dimensions which are constant in all experiences-such as consciousness, time, motion, or electricity. Yet electricity is very much here, having measurable and controllable properties. But Professor Harold A. Wilson, writing on "Electricity" in the 1947 Encyclopaedia Britannica, says:

The study of electricity to-day comprehends a vast range of phenomena, in all of which we are brought back ultimately to the fundamental conceptions of electric charge and of electric and magnetic fields. These conceptions are at present ultimates, not explained in terms of others. In the past there have been various attempts to explain them in terms of electric fluids and ethers having the properties of material bodies known to us by the study of mechanics. To-day, however, we find that the phenomena of electricity cannot be so explained, and the tendency is to explain all other phenomena in terms of electricity, taken as a fundamental thing. The question, "What is electricity?" is therefore essentially unanswerable, if by it is sought an explanation of the nature of electricity in terms of material bodies.

That, from a scientist, is pure metaphysics. Change a few words, and it would be Saint Thomas Aquinas writing about God.

Yet, as I feel it intuitively, "space" and "void" (k'ung) are very much here, and every child teases itself out of thought by trying to imagine space expanding out and out with no limit. This space is not "just nothing" as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:

The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.

Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary. How, one might ask, would you know that you are alive unless you had once been dead? How can one speak of reality or is-ness except in the context of the polar apprehension of void?

Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form, se, and emptiness, k'ung-of which the Hridaya Sutra says, "That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form." This seeming paradox is at once intelligible in terms of the idea of clarity, ch'ing, for we think of clarity at once as translucent and unobstructed space, and as form articulate in every detail-as what photographers, using finely polished lenses, call "high resolution"~-and this takes us back to what Lao-tzu said of the usefulness of doors and windows. Through perfect nothing we see perfect something. In much the same way, philosophers of the Yin-Yang School (-3rd century) saw the positive - and negative - - as aspects of fai chi, the Great Ultimate, initially represented as an empty circle, as wu chi, although chi seems to have had the original meaning of a ridgepole upon which, of course, the two sides of a roof, yang and yin, would lean.

The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity. The two principles are, as I have suggested, not opposed like the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, but in love, and it is curious that their traditional emblem is that double helix which is at once the pattern of sexual communication and of the spiral galaxies.

One yin and one yang is called the Tao-. The passionate union of yin and yang and the copulation of husband and wife is the eternal pattern of the universe. If heaven and earth did not mingle, whence would everything receive life?

The practical problem of life was not to let their wrestling match get out of hand. Only recently have the Chinese set their hearts upon some kind of utopia, but this must be understood as the necessary react-ion -to years and years of foreign exploitation, anarchy, and extreme poverty. But in the -4th -century Chuang-tzu wrote:

Thus, those who say that they would have right without its correlate, wrong, or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the universe, nor the nature of all creation. One might as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of the negative principle without the - positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet people keep on discussing it without stop; such people must be either fools or knaves.

Both Lao-tzu (once, in ch. 42) and Chuang-tzu (many times) mention the yin-yang polarity, but there is no reference to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, in which the permutations and combinations of the two forces (liang yi) are worked out in detail, in terms of the sixty-four hexagrams of yin and yang lines. Yet the I Ching is supposed to have been the most ancient of all the Chinese classics, dating from as far back as the -2nd or even -3rd millennium, and thus to exhibit the basic patterns of Chinese thought and culture. But in that neither Lao-tzu nor Chuang-tzu mentions it, quotes it, nor uses its characteristic terminology, the.hoary antiquity and authority of this text must be called in question.10 On the other hand, since at least the -3rd century Chinese savants have commented on this work in such a way as to perfume it with their thoughts and thus to give it a philosophical profundity. Readers of the great Wilhelm translation, and especially those who use it for divination, should be aware that he has interspersed the earliest forms of the text with passages from the "Wings," or Appendices, most of which are certainly later than -250. In other words, the Wilhelm translation gives us a true picture of the I Ching as used and understood in China in relatively modem times. But my guess is that in the -5th and -4th centuries it was circulating as an orally transmitted folk wisdom, of indeterminable antiquity, comparable to the art of reading tea-leaves or the lines on the palm of the hand. There might have been written versions of it, but they would have been of the status of the Farmer's Almanac or popular guides to the meaning of dreams.

Thus the I Ching, as a specific text, does not appear to have influenced Taoism until after the days of Lao-tzu and Chuang tzu. Nevertheless, there is a common element in the rationale of the I Ching and early Taoist philosophy. Briefly, this element is the recognition that opposites are polar, or interdependent, and that there is something in us-which Groddeck, Freud, and Jung called "the Unconscious" - Which may be called upon for a higher wisdom than can be figured out by logic. In more up-to-date terms one might say that the labyrinth of the nervous system can integrate more variables than the scanning process of conscious attention, though this way of putting it is still a concession to the mechanistic assumptions of +19th-century science. But one uses such language mainly to stay in communication with colleagues who have not outgrown it.

The I Ching involves a method for the random sorting of milfoil twigs or coins. The twigs or the coins are thus sorted or thrown six times, with a question seriously held-in mind. Each casting results in a yin - - or yang - line, so that one builds up, from the bottom, a hexagram such as:

The hexagram is composed of two trigrams--in this case, the upper signifies fire and the lower water-and is the last of the sixty-four hexagrams. Turning to the text, one reads:

THE JUDGMENT

Before completion. Success.

'But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,

Gets his tail in the water,

There is nothing that would further.

THE IMAGE

Fire over water:

The image of the condition before transition.

Thus the superior man is careful In the differentiation of things,

So that each finds its place."

The comment is invariably oracular, vague, and ambivalent, but a person taking it seriously will use it. like a Rorschach blot and project into it, from his "unconscious," whatever there is in him to find in it. This is surely a way of allowing oneself to think without keeping a tight guard on one's thoughts, whether logical or moral. The same sort of process is at work in the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and in eidetic vision, whereby we descry faces, forms, and pictures in the grain of wood or marble, or in the shapes of clouds. In this connection I must quote some anecdotes about Ch'an (Zen) painters of the +13th century.

About the year 1215, a Zen priest called MU Ch'i came to Hangchow, where he rebuilt a ruined monastery. By rapid swirls of ink he attempted, with undeniable success, to capture the moments of exaltation and set down the fleeting visions which he obtained from the frenzy of wine, the stupor of tea, or the vacancy of inanition. Ch'en J~Mg, about the same time, was noted for the simplicity of his life and the competence with which he fulfilled his duties as a magistrate.... Finally, he was admired for his habits of a confirmed drunkard. "He made clouds by splashing ink on his pictures. For mists he spat out water. When wrought up by wine he uttered a great shout and, seizing his hat, used it as a brush, roughly smearing his drawing; after which he finished his work with a ~ proper brush." One of the first painters of the sect, Wang Hsia, who lived in the' early ninth century, would perform when he was drunk real tours de force, going so far as to plunge his head into a bucket of ink and flop it over a piece of silk on which there appeared, as if by magic, lakes, trees, enchanted mountains. But none seems to have carried emancipation further, among these priests, than Ying Yu-Chien, secretary of the famous temple Ching-Tzu Si, who would take a cat-like pleasure in spattering and lacerating the sheet.

The remarks about Ch'en Jung, in particular, suggest thai these gentlemen, having spattered the silk with ink, would contemplate the mess until they could project the shapes and outlines of landscape. Thereafter they would take "the proper brush" and with a few touches bring it out for all to see.

Cases of this use of the creative un-, sub-, or superconscious are so numerous among painters (including Leonardo), physicists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians that we need not go into further examples. I am sure that the I Ching oracles are used in the same way as these painters used splashes of ink-as forms to be contemplated empty-mindedly until the hidden meaning reveals itself, in accordance with one's own unconscious tendencies. As with astrology, the rituals and calculations of consulting the I Ching are a kind of doodling which quiets the repressive anxieties of consciousness and, with luck, allows useful insights to emerge from one's deeper centers.

The book, therefore, is not entirely superstitious. Consider that when we are about to make decisions we usually collect as much information as we can; but often it is so ambivalent that we are reduced to tossing a coin which can say either "Yes" or "No," “Do” or "Don't." Would there be some advantage to having, as it were, a coin with sixty-four sides? The hexagram, drawn above might be saying, "No, yes, no; yes, no, yes." Also it should be noted as a curious characteristic of the I Ching that there are no absolutely good or bad hexagrams in its cyclic series.

This may be illustrated by the Taoist story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, "May be." The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, "May be." And then, the following day, his son tried to saddle and ride one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy for the misfortune. He said, "May be." The day after that, conscription officers came to the village to seize young men for the army, but because of the broken leg the farmer’s son was rejected. When the neighbors came in to say how fortunately everything had turned out, he said, "May be."

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is protected from monotony by the by the fact that, in just the same way, remembering alternates with forgetting. This is the Good of good-and-bad.

The Breath of Life

By Dennis Lewis

The first step in healthy breathing is to become conscious of how we actually breathe. From the perspective of the world's great spiritual traditions, our breath not only brings needed oxygen and other gases to the physical body, but it can also bring, when we are conscious of it, the finer energies (prana, chi, and so on) needed to help nourish our higher bodies--the subtle body, causal body, and so on. Whatever we may believe about our soul and spirit, our breath, and how we breathe, is intimately connected with all aspects of our being.

In today's noisy, high-stress world, many of us sit, stand, sleep, speak, act, and move in ways that undermine our breathing and our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. When we look at ourselves in action, when we actually sense and observe ourselves honestly for a moment, we see that we carry enormous amounts of unnecessary tension throughout our bodies. We may sense it in our hands, face, eyes, jaw, tongue, throat, belly, back, chest, and so on (even tension in our feet can undermine our breathing). These tensions can and often do impede the natural, harmonious movement of the diaphragm and its coordination with the secondary breathing muscles. They also impede the harmonious flow of the breath of life through our body/mind.

We can do all the breathing exercises in the world, but if we don't begin to see and free ourselves from the unnecessary tensions that we carry day in and day out--if we are unable to find a state of dynamic relaxation in the midst of daily living--these exercises won't do much good. In fact, without such relaxation and without real self-knowledge and self-awareness, breathing exercises can often exacerbate the tensions already present and create dangerous biochemical and physiological imbalances in our body/mind.

In beginning to study these unnecessary tensions in ourselves, which are generated in large part by our mostly unconscious attitudes toward ourselves and others, one of the most useful situations with which to begin is when we find ourselves in a hurry, which, for many of us, is almost all the time. Next time you catch yourself rushing through your life on the way some place other than where you are right now (and this can be a mental or emotional "rushing" as well as a physical one), sense your entire body and pay particular attention to your breathing. What does your breath feel like? Does it feel open and spacious? Most likely it feels small and cramped. Ask yourself if this is really how you want to live your life, always tensing toward something to be done or enjoyed (or something you believe will be better) in the future. Yes, the future is important and we all have plenty to do on its behalf, but what's the point of all this "doing" if we don't actually feel and appreciate the pure miracle of our aliveness, our being, right here and now? What's the point of all of this activity if we are not open enough to receive and appreciate the life force flowing through us and others and the rich scale of impressions and perceptions that come with it?

It is only through a constant deep-felt appreciation of the value and miracle of being itself that our lives will take on real meaning, that our relationships with others will become imbued with intelligence and compassion, and that we will find effective solutions to the ever-growing problems we face. If we are constantly filled with unnecessary tension based on judgments about the past and expectations about the future, our breath will remain cramped and disharmonious, we will never discover what it means to be truly human, and our lives on this planet will only get worse no matter what brilliant strategies we devise or how much force and aggression we use to put them into action.

To see and release the unnecessary tensions that fill our lives, and to allow the breath of life to manifest fully through us and others, begins with sensing and observing ourselves at this very moment, paying special attention to the tensions that propel us through time, as well as the inner attitudes that fuel them. It begins with being present to "what is," without any self-deception. This is the beginning of real transformation, both for ourselves personally and for the world. And it all begins with awareness of the breath.
Safe, Powerful Breathing Exercise

One of the safest and most powerful breathing practices or exercises you can undertake is to consciously follow your breathing in the many changing circumstances of your life. As you inhale, simply be aware that you are inhaling. As you exhale, simply be aware that you are exhaling. Try this exercise for 10 minutes or so at a time at least three times a day. It will help free you from your automatic thoughts and emotional reactions and thus enable you to live with more receptivity and clarity in the present moment. You may find this exercise especially useful at moments when you are anxious or angry. With roots in Buddhism and the other great spiritual traditions, this is a wonderful practice for both beginners and advanced practitioners.

truth can't be sold

truth be told
sometimes eyes sag
though the heart lovingly
pours another drink of itself
and compassion tips its hat
to jeweled exaltation

truth be told
the pheonix sometimes sleeps
though webs of symbiosis
keep us feeling new
and alive
and awake
blossoming into change

truth be told
shit's sometimes raw
and truth must be heard
how everything in essence
contains its opposite
waking up to change

truth be told
this is my only truth to tell

Love,
Rev MoonPie

Lively and Buoyant

If you want to be free,
get to know your real self.
It has no form, no appearance,
no root, no basis, no abode,
but is lively and buoyant.

-Rinzai

Cat Explains Meaning of Life

Source: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/enso.html

The Reality of Enso

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

At 6:30am, at the gentle sound of the Burmese gong, I emerged from a deep state of absorption to find myself in the meditation hall of the Chuang Yen Monastery in upstate New York, surrounded by twenty shuffling men. I hadn't twitched a muscle for one hour and hadn't eaten since noon of the previous day, but neither stretching nor hunger were on my mind. I was aware of one and one thought only, which instantaneously pierced the very core of my being: everything I had read about the Japanese Enso symbol was real.

I do not mean "real" in a handwavy philosophical sense, with a lingering shadow of a doubt that it could be just nonsensical "Eastern mumbo-jumbo". I use the word "real" in a very physical sense, in the same way one would use it to describe a chair, or the beating of one's heart, or the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I saw it with an unprecedented clarity of mind. Occasionally, I had approached similar clarity in the Russian baths when I jumped from a hundred and fifty degree sauna into a pool of ice cold water. The heated body, forced to deal with a tremendous temperature gradient, violently contracts the blood vessels to preserve heat, ridding the mind of every last thought in the process. The baths, the sauna, the pool, life's trials and tribulations, victories and defeats, are momentarily eradicated from consciousness along with the everpresent notion of self, leaving for only a few precious moments the magnificent clarity of pristine awareness.

But the clarity of mind induced by the ancient ritual of Russian baths disappears as quickly as it appears. For an untrained mind it is clarity without insight - a mere glimpse of a glimpse of freedom that is possible to achieve. It was only with the slow, painstaking effort of meditation that my mind was able to relax long enough to see for just a few brief moments the reality of Enso and the remarkable beauty and harmony it symbolizes.

Making a pilgrimage from the comfortable Western life of fast food and flat screen TVs to the raw asceticism of a Buddhist monastery to see Enso is not unlike going on vacation from the urban jungle of an inner American city to a picturesque European village. Initially, returning to the previous way of life seems like a personal sacrifice, but after a short while the routine takes over and the memory of what could have been dims. In the same way, momentarily seeing Enso is only intellectual sightseeing. Being one with what it symbolizes every moment of one's life requires a far greater effort than moving from the New World to the Old, in exchange for a far greater reward. I would trade any material fortune to have that clarity always with me, if only because I now know that the purity of mind it affords would allow me to rebuild this fortune effortlessly. I say this because for the contemporary mind this prospect is far more attractive than the real gift - that one who has purity of mind needs no fortunes.

So far I've been using the familiar possessive verbs when talking about attainment of clarity, but in reality it is not a process of acquiring but the process of letting go. It is about letting go of the idea that following one's breath for an hour is a stupid practice, letting go of the feelings of discomfort from sitting on the floor, letting go of the tenseness of the large muscles on one's back and the tiny muscles on one's skull and face. It is about letting go of the desire to move, just a little bit, just this once, and of the overwhelming desire to get up and do something, anything, anything to avoid sitting quietly with one's own thoughts. It is about letting go of furious anger directed at the creaking door that keeps stealing one's attention, letting go of a dozen itches that inevitably arise all over the body, and letting go of the desire to laugh because of the absurdity of the situation.

Then follows letting go of the racing thoughts about everything but the breath - thoughts about hunger, and what's for lunch, and how you haven't had lunch with some friend for a while, and what gift you'll get him for his birthday. It's about letting go of the expectation that you could follow your breath for a little longer than you could before, and letting go of the worrying that your mind is filled with so much trash. It's about letting go of planning, and remembering, and randomly arising sexual images, and the archetypal fantasies of saving beautiful women from dire situations in order to win everyone's admiration, and fears that one day your parents will pass away, leaving you in the world completely alone. It is about letting go of everything and just following the breath, the beautiful, radiant, subtle, magnificent breath amidst infinite emptiness, admiring its gentle tides... only to hear the gong and open one's eyes, and remember that you are you, sitting on the floor in a room among other people, and that you're hungry, and noticing that your leg fell asleep, and realizing that you have a million neuroses that you were able to briefly let go of by the magic of following the instructions left by some ancient sages.

It is then that you realize that your neuroses, and thoughts, and worries, and expectations, and projections, and addictions creep into everything you do, from intimate relationships, to casual conversations, to writing essays, to building software, to sweeping the floor. And you know that if you could free yourself permanently from restlessness, and dullness, and anger, and lust, and fears, and doubt, just like you did for a few precious minutes just now, in a twitch of a finger you could amass fortunes, or change the world, or paint a perfect Enso, or... you could just be content with listening to your own breath.