somewhere to stand
The safest place to 'come from' - to 'stand' - is enlightenment. Failing that, nowhere is safe. With it, everywhere is safe.
What do I mean by enlightenment? I mean the space where you can embrace whatever arises because it is simply the display of the great ocean of becoming.
As Niguma says: If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation, what can you achieve by applying an antidote?
There is no safe level outside of the understanding that whatever arises to you and the way in which it arises are all only a more or less restricted 'focus-pull' on the infinity of possibility. Once we know this, we can let go our own, crabbed little versions of reality and wander with both hands free in the infinite openness of loving-kindness, compassion and freedom from grasping-attachment even to freedom and openness themselves.
How do we get there? Niguma says: Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them but are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.
Illusory?
Certainly.
Everything we know through the tiny aperture of our pinhole-camera mind is - literally - wrong. Not wrong in the sense of completely mistaken, but more in the sense of imagining that if you have one apple and one screwdriver, since one and one are two, you should logically have either two apples or two screwdrivers.
Conceptuality is inherently dualistic: reality is a single, seamless web.
Concepts, although they are part (and sometimes even a useful part) of it cannot possibly encompass it... It is infinitely more vast, complex and simple than any conceptual mind can fully hold.
So we dwell in our ideas: our hopes, our fears, our extrapolations, wants, refusals... in a world that is totally hand-knitted in fact... And of a 'wool' handspun from our own woolly-mindedness.
When you know this for sure, you recognise thoughts for what they are and they dissolve, like a drawing on water or a snake unwinding itself from seemingly impossible knots...
If you approach the world gently as loving kindness and helpful compassion, oddly enough, the world manifests to you in just that way. If you see it as scary or odd or difficult it is scary or odd or difficult, or even all of these together!
If you can let go attachment to what you imagine is yourself, the universe itself opens up as a vast expanse of ever more beautiful possibility. Not in any 'mystical' sense, but real-ly - as plain as a mango-fruit lying in the palm of your hand... Unmissable.
The universe doesn't change at all and thoughts come and go just as they did before, but you are no longer held by anything except a commitment to being of use to other sentient beings
Ordinary human intelligence; ordinary human kindness... That's all that's needed here.
What do I mean by enlightenment? I mean the space where you can embrace whatever arises because it is simply the display of the great ocean of becoming.
As Niguma says: If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation, what can you achieve by applying an antidote?
There is no safe level outside of the understanding that whatever arises to you and the way in which it arises are all only a more or less restricted 'focus-pull' on the infinity of possibility. Once we know this, we can let go our own, crabbed little versions of reality and wander with both hands free in the infinite openness of loving-kindness, compassion and freedom from grasping-attachment even to freedom and openness themselves.
How do we get there? Niguma says: Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them but are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.
Illusory?
Certainly.
Everything we know through the tiny aperture of our pinhole-camera mind is - literally - wrong. Not wrong in the sense of completely mistaken, but more in the sense of imagining that if you have one apple and one screwdriver, since one and one are two, you should logically have either two apples or two screwdrivers.
Conceptuality is inherently dualistic: reality is a single, seamless web.
Concepts, although they are part (and sometimes even a useful part) of it cannot possibly encompass it... It is infinitely more vast, complex and simple than any conceptual mind can fully hold.
So we dwell in our ideas: our hopes, our fears, our extrapolations, wants, refusals... in a world that is totally hand-knitted in fact... And of a 'wool' handspun from our own woolly-mindedness.
When you know this for sure, you recognise thoughts for what they are and they dissolve, like a drawing on water or a snake unwinding itself from seemingly impossible knots...
If you approach the world gently as loving kindness and helpful compassion, oddly enough, the world manifests to you in just that way. If you see it as scary or odd or difficult it is scary or odd or difficult, or even all of these together!
If you can let go attachment to what you imagine is yourself, the universe itself opens up as a vast expanse of ever more beautiful possibility. Not in any 'mystical' sense, but real-ly - as plain as a mango-fruit lying in the palm of your hand... Unmissable.
The universe doesn't change at all and thoughts come and go just as they did before, but you are no longer held by anything except a commitment to being of use to other sentient beings
Ordinary human intelligence; ordinary human kindness... That's all that's needed here.
posted by cloudhand at 7:14 AM
0 comments
