energy–field pattern–shifts
Far out! I got comment or two. Thank you.
Since it seems to be more or less how it's done, I wanted to add the following, a letter spurred by comments in a letter by a friend of mine (whose website http://www.jungcircle. com/ is well worth the time, by the way) to another (whose site http://www.jungcircle.com/muse and blog http://themoonsfavors.blogspot.com/, ditto)...
I'm not sure it answers her so much as just simply vehicling some musings of my own, but so it goes...
since I'm doing zilch.
What does doing zilch entail? Today - for the first time in years - I sat out on the balcony in the sun doing my daily practice, had a salad and a kip (got up at sparrows after crashing late) and in between pottered around a bit on some texts I'm busy translating myself.
Does this qualify?
The older we get the more we're steered away from chosen paths.
By 'chosen', here, I assume you mean paths you chose yourself, rather than those that chose you?
I gave up those when I first dropped doing music as my only visible (and mainly IN-visible) means of support... Some time around '73... Since then - since I have no other 'plan', no other 'end in view' (aside, perhaps, from aligning myself with the Way) - I've been pretty much content to follow. Far from losing all knowledge of who "i" am, I now feel that I am beginning at last to have the vaguest glimmer of what Buddhism and Taoism are actually on about... Who "I" am, except insofar as that blocks this, is of no interest to me at all and I am certainly happiest when "i" is not there.
In the end, life lives us, not the other way around.
Certainly the karma of one's life - where it plays itself out, the circumstances surrounding it and one's predisposition to one or other way of reading it - are difficult to take control of. Karma as - in Whitehead's terms - 'experientially initiated potentialities for experience' means, basically, that you see only what you believe and then go on to interpret it only in those terms you yourself will allow... Stepping beyond the box - outside of knowing/understanding/conceiving and into the ineffable and inconceivable - is possible in little scurrying forays occasionally, possibly, but to take up residence there takes another kind of courage.
Since it seems to be more or less how it's done, I wanted to add the following, a letter spurred by comments in a letter by a friend of mine (whose website http://www.jungcircle. com/ is well worth the time, by the way) to another (whose site http://www.jungcircle.com/muse and blog http://themoonsfavors.blogspot.com/, ditto)...
I'm not sure it answers her so much as just simply vehicling some musings of my own, but so it goes...
since I'm doing zilch.
What does doing zilch entail? Today - for the first time in years - I sat out on the balcony in the sun doing my daily practice, had a salad and a kip (got up at sparrows after crashing late) and in between pottered around a bit on some texts I'm busy translating myself.
Does this qualify?
The older we get the more we're steered away from chosen paths.
By 'chosen', here, I assume you mean paths you chose yourself, rather than those that chose you?
I gave up those when I first dropped doing music as my only visible (and mainly IN-visible) means of support... Some time around '73... Since then - since I have no other 'plan', no other 'end in view' (aside, perhaps, from aligning myself with the Way) - I've been pretty much content to follow. Far from losing all knowledge of who "i" am, I now feel that I am beginning at last to have the vaguest glimmer of what Buddhism and Taoism are actually on about... Who "I" am, except insofar as that blocks this, is of no interest to me at all and I am certainly happiest when "i" is not there.
In the end, life lives us, not the other way around.
Certainly the karma of one's life - where it plays itself out, the circumstances surrounding it and one's predisposition to one or other way of reading it - are difficult to take control of. Karma as - in Whitehead's terms - 'experientially initiated potentialities for experience' means, basically, that you see only what you believe and then go on to interpret it only in those terms you yourself will allow... Stepping beyond the box - outside of knowing/understanding/conceiving and into the ineffable and inconceivable - is possible in little scurrying forays occasionally, possibly, but to take up residence there takes another kind of courage.
The Diamond Sutra says that the Bodhisattva is one who gives rise to a mind that is unsupported anywhere, and that idea - the idea of stepping off the top of our hundred-foot pole to turn a somersault throughout the universe, to walk with both hands free as the Zen Masters put it - is both intriguing and terrifying.
To be able to conceive of it is one thing, and already marvellous, but... to actually engage in it really does require a no-one not doing no-thing in no-where, the dragon-dance of space dancing space into space...
It's unfortunately also very easy to imagine or wishful think yourself into a trumped-up version of this, and a lot of the history of this planet is the unfortunate result of just such misplaced magisteries because the moment a "truth" becomes established, it is immediately no longer true.
Truths - like everything else - are in the instant, disappearing like the foam on the wave even as they come into being... With other forms appearing to replace them in the very instant of their conception...
That's what 'impermanence' is all about.
Couple this to the fact that every instance of being through the four times and ten directions is merely a momentary facet of the endless interweave of on-offs that is the whole... the least molecule of dust on the last crow's wing requires the entirety of the universe, manifest and unmanifest, to even come into, let alone persist in and then pass out of being. Everything is related to everything else and intimately dependent upon it for everything that it is. Nothing is its independent self.
We take things to be themselves because we have come to expect them to be that, but this is simply projecting what we expect onto what we think we perceive. In fact what we perceive is only the mental impressions we imagine stem from some other reality, 'out there' - the ob iactus - but we have no proof of that 'out there' at all, and any proof we can come up with is always 'in here' - sub iactus... Even the 'beings' and 'things' that people our animate and inanimate universes are simply certain chosen names - certain chosen cut-off reading points - for conglomerations of ever smaller partts and particles - right down to the utterly impalpable - and form in their own turn part and particle of greater wholes...
One buddhist cosmology contends that the universe we know and all that's in it is nothing but a single, sub-atomic particle of a petal among the fourteenth level of petals of a lotus sitting in the begging bowl of the Buddha Vairochana (which means 'Making Manifest as Form'), who is, himself, but one of an infinity of Buddha Vairochanas stretching throughout all of space and time...
So the various mikes perceived by both himself and others, for example, are not even mikes anymore very soon after you start looking into his component parts - This bit here is an eye, that hair, over here is a hand and there's a foot over there... Ah! but mike's hand you will tell me but the hand itself is palm and back, fingers and thumb, and these are skin and flesh, sinew, blood and bone which are, themselves, configurations of cells made up of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, themselves divisible ad infinitum in that, as long as they have spatial position, they will have a front, back, sides, intermediate directions and a centre and as long as they persist, there always be a coming into, persisting and passing out of existence, and every instant, no matter how fleeting, will be divisible into a begiining, middle and end.
Ultimately where is the essential mike?
He is simply a reading on a certain level of these various conglomerates - this small, sweaty, bearded person with short pants and no shirt, his hair tied in a long plait and a goofy expression on his face over here on this chair near the window, for example.
This even before we try to fit him into the society of his family and friends or (with somewhat less success) the community, city, country, civilisation as a whole, the planet, solar system, galaxy or universe...
Nothing at all, in essence, and yet he mikes.
Just as you do whatever you are.
On one level it is quite true that you can't lose the Way - you ARE the Way - but the point here is that we also tend to chop the universe up into 'bite-size' blocks and chunks and then assume those blocks as 'reality' rather than stepping beyond into the forever unknown and unknowable, which is actually where we live.
I don't think life lives us anymore than we live life; life just IS us, and it manifests as it will, sometimes according with what we think and want of it, sometimes not.
I still find it odd (if not downright scary!) that life will as happily suffer as it will rejoice, and as easily manifest as fundamentalist hatred and suspicion as it will open-hearted kindliness and compassion...
I find it difficult not to polarise in a universe where so many are suffering, and where so many others seem to be profiting by their pain...
And I find it terrifying that I am still so much a prey to the negative emotions - particularly anger and irritation - myself!
But I does me best, dunn I?
By the way - don't you think it's time the personal pronoun for the first person singular was cut down to size?
Surely if he, she, it, you, we, they and even me are all lower case, i (perhaps sans the dot?) would serve very well to refer to the grand panjandrum?
... And maybe also even help to get him into proportion vis–à–vis the rest of the universe of which he somehow fondly imagines himself the owner...
To be able to conceive of it is one thing, and already marvellous, but... to actually engage in it really does require a no-one not doing no-thing in no-where, the dragon-dance of space dancing space into space...
It's unfortunately also very easy to imagine or wishful think yourself into a trumped-up version of this, and a lot of the history of this planet is the unfortunate result of just such misplaced magisteries because the moment a "truth" becomes established, it is immediately no longer true.
Truths - like everything else - are in the instant, disappearing like the foam on the wave even as they come into being... With other forms appearing to replace them in the very instant of their conception...
That's what 'impermanence' is all about.
Couple this to the fact that every instance of being through the four times and ten directions is merely a momentary facet of the endless interweave of on-offs that is the whole... the least molecule of dust on the last crow's wing requires the entirety of the universe, manifest and unmanifest, to even come into, let alone persist in and then pass out of being. Everything is related to everything else and intimately dependent upon it for everything that it is. Nothing is its independent self.
We take things to be themselves because we have come to expect them to be that, but this is simply projecting what we expect onto what we think we perceive. In fact what we perceive is only the mental impressions we imagine stem from some other reality, 'out there' - the ob iactus - but we have no proof of that 'out there' at all, and any proof we can come up with is always 'in here' - sub iactus... Even the 'beings' and 'things' that people our animate and inanimate universes are simply certain chosen names - certain chosen cut-off reading points - for conglomerations of ever smaller partts and particles - right down to the utterly impalpable - and form in their own turn part and particle of greater wholes...
One buddhist cosmology contends that the universe we know and all that's in it is nothing but a single, sub-atomic particle of a petal among the fourteenth level of petals of a lotus sitting in the begging bowl of the Buddha Vairochana (which means 'Making Manifest as Form'), who is, himself, but one of an infinity of Buddha Vairochanas stretching throughout all of space and time...
So the various mikes perceived by both himself and others, for example, are not even mikes anymore very soon after you start looking into his component parts - This bit here is an eye, that hair, over here is a hand and there's a foot over there... Ah! but mike's hand you will tell me but the hand itself is palm and back, fingers and thumb, and these are skin and flesh, sinew, blood and bone which are, themselves, configurations of cells made up of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, themselves divisible ad infinitum in that, as long as they have spatial position, they will have a front, back, sides, intermediate directions and a centre and as long as they persist, there always be a coming into, persisting and passing out of existence, and every instant, no matter how fleeting, will be divisible into a begiining, middle and end.
Ultimately where is the essential mike?
He is simply a reading on a certain level of these various conglomerates - this small, sweaty, bearded person with short pants and no shirt, his hair tied in a long plait and a goofy expression on his face over here on this chair near the window, for example.
This even before we try to fit him into the society of his family and friends or (with somewhat less success) the community, city, country, civilisation as a whole, the planet, solar system, galaxy or universe...
Nothing at all, in essence, and yet he mikes.
Just as you do whatever you are.
On one level it is quite true that you can't lose the Way - you ARE the Way - but the point here is that we also tend to chop the universe up into 'bite-size' blocks and chunks and then assume those blocks as 'reality' rather than stepping beyond into the forever unknown and unknowable, which is actually where we live.
I don't think life lives us anymore than we live life; life just IS us, and it manifests as it will, sometimes according with what we think and want of it, sometimes not.
I still find it odd (if not downright scary!) that life will as happily suffer as it will rejoice, and as easily manifest as fundamentalist hatred and suspicion as it will open-hearted kindliness and compassion...
I find it difficult not to polarise in a universe where so many are suffering, and where so many others seem to be profiting by their pain...
And I find it terrifying that I am still so much a prey to the negative emotions - particularly anger and irritation - myself!
But I does me best, dunn I?
By the way - don't you think it's time the personal pronoun for the first person singular was cut down to size?
Surely if he, she, it, you, we, they and even me are all lower case, i (perhaps sans the dot?) would serve very well to refer to the grand panjandrum?
... And maybe also even help to get him into proportion vis–à–vis the rest of the universe of which he somehow fondly imagines himself the owner...
posted by cloudhand at 3:21 AM
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