Direct Contact

From “Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation,” by Shinzen Young:

The essence of this practice can be stated as a simple formula: ordinary experience plus mindfulness plus equanimity yields insight and purification. In this formula, each term is defined very precisely. Ordinary experience is defined as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the feeling body and the thinking mind. Mindfulness is defined as specificity in awareness, clarity in awareness, continuity in awareness, richness in awareness, precision in awareness. Equanimity is defined as not interfering with the flow of the senses at any level, including the level of preconscious processing.

When sufficient mindfulness and equanimity are brought to bear on ordinary experience, we arrive at purification and insight. And, as a result of the purification and insight, our intrinsic happiness, our true birthright and spiritual reality, gets uncovered and we discover that what we thought was the world of phenomena—the world of time, space, and matter—turns out to really be a world of spiritual energy, and that we are in direct contact with it moment by moment. Because, when the senses become purified, when the inner conflicts—at all levels—have been broken up, the flow of these ordinary senses turns into a prayer, a mantra, a sacred song, and we find that, just by living our life, we are in moment-by-moment contact with the Source. In the Christian contemplative tradition this is called the "practice of the presence of God." In the Jewish mystical tradition it is called briah yesh me ayn—the experience of things (yesh) being continuously created (briah) from no-thing (ayn), that is, from God.

For most people the senses are opaque. A window is opaque if it is covered by soot; light can't come through. The soot is craving, aversion, and ignorance. When that's cleared away, the ordinary senses become literally transparent. It is very hard to describe what this is like. Hearing returns to being part of the effortless flow of nature, seeing returns to being part of the effortless flow of nature, and likewise with smelling, tasting, the body sensations whether they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, they all go back to being part of "God's breath" so to speak.

Even the thinking process returns to being part of this effortless flow. At the beginning stages of meditation one is very concerned with overcoming the wandering thoughts in order to develop enough calm and concentration to be able to practice mindfulness. But when you get further along in the process there will be no necessity whatsoever to have a still mind because the ordinary flow of thought will be experienced as not different from the activity of the Source.

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We Can Be with Both

“Psychology has refined such a nuanced observation, understanding and insight about the particulars of our human psyches. And certain existential truths that are universal, of course. And there is a realm that we call absolute or universal. It’s not separate. We can call it emptiness, there are so many names. But it’s completely interwoven. It’s one with, it’s connected to, the words don’t express the fact that it’s not  separate from the particular. And the trick for us as practitioners, whether we are practitioners of psychology or meditation, is to really see and unite these experiences so that we can be present with the ordinary moments of our life, and more and more hold an understanding of those moments as being deeply significant, expressions of the truth of that moment. Not truth with a capital T that some reified, always true…but the truth of that moment because it’s life. It’s life in the form of you, me, this moment of experience. And then, when we really can truly know that, so many things are possible for us. We don’t have to be afraid of experience or afraid of our own minds. Of course, we like flowers, we hate weeds. We wish for happy experiences and we kind of dread scary sad ones. But as practitioners we can really be with both.”

~ Trudy Goodman, from “Zen, Vipassana, and Psychotherapy,” Buddhist Geeks Podcast: Episode 173 (May 24, 2010)

The Same Enlightenment

Filmed in Nov. 2009 at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.

Human Sensory System

From “Spiritual Practices and the Sliding Scale of Identity,” from Har-Prakash Khalsa’s blog:

Shinzen Young has reworked the common western categorization of the sensory system into a simplified and elegant model. This TSSFIT chart, particularly when combined with the triple skill-set of mindfulness – concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity— is eminently practical and effective in helping us to understand how the various constellations of the human sensory system, and our relationship to that sensory system, affects identity and behaviour.

In the west we usually conceive of the sensory system as seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling. External sights and sounds are usually identified as other—other people, other beings, or the world in general as something existing separate in relation to our conventional sense of self.

Now when we consider how our conventional sense of self arises, what we most identify as who we are is composed of a combination of our body’s touches (for a simple working model smell and taste will be considered special categories of touch or body space—see chart below) and emotional feelings, and thoughts that have internal visual and auditory components, or T-F-I-T for short.

Individually we often refer to this as “my” body and mind. Deeper within the self-referential body/mind system are the feelings and thought combinations arising in F-I-T, or feel, image, and talk space.

Our reactivity arises most personally as F-I-T activity – shame, embarrassment, rage, terror, grief, happiness, joy, compassion, etc., accompanied and reinforced through thought. “You’re making fun of me!” “I love you.” “That’s mine!” These sensory components of body and mind are self-referentially reflected and reinforced in the “I”, “me”, “mine” of our language.

There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but as we’ll see later, if that’s all we identify with we stay limited within our conventional fixed identity.

Now let’s look at the chart below. Notice how in the right side of the TSSFIT chart the FEEL-IMAGE-TALK, or F-I-T sensory spaces, represent the more subjective “I, me, mine” conventional sense of self. On the left side of our chart the T-S-S sensory spaces represent a more “not I, me, mine”, or a more objective “other” or “world” space.

HUMAN SENSORY SYSTEM
Conventional Sense of Self and World

“T-S-S” Space Objective—Other/World	“F-I-T” Space Subjective—Self (I, Me, Mine)
Touch (body space, smell, taste)	Feel (emotional/body space)
Sight (external seeing space)	Image (visual thinking space)
Sound (external listening space)	Talk (auditory thinking space)

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@c4chaos

Life is a Giant Feedback Device

"As long as you stay focused, you’re perfectly happy, but it’s when you get scattered that your life becomes unhappy. I came to realize that life is actually a giant biofeedback device. The reason you go to the monastery is so you eventually come to the place where you can see ordinary daily life as a monastery; it just took a special situation in order to develop that sensitivity.”

~ Shinzen Young, from “Shinzen Young: The Reluctant Monk,” NEXUS, July/August 2009

The Dhamma Brothers

"In 2002, Donaldson Correctional Facility [near Birmingham, Alabama] became the first maximum-security prison in North America to hold an extended Vipassana retreat, an emotionally and physically demanding course of silent meditation lasting ten days. The Dhamma Brothers tells a dramatic tale of human potential and transformation as it closely follows and documents the stories of 36 prison inmates who enter this arduous and intensive program. It challenges assumptions about the nature of prisons as places of punishment rather than rehabilitation and raises the question: is it possible for these men, some of who have committed horrendous crimes, to change?"

• Trailer
• "Staring at Death, and Finding Their Bliss" (Whitney Joiner, New York Times, Sep. 13, 2007)
• "Purpose and Method of Vipassana Meditation" (Shinzen Young)

The Key to Life is to Forget Things

"The key to long life, is to immediately forget things. If you forget, then instantly and inevitably, a new state of consciousness always arises," says Sasaki Roshi, a Zen master who turned 100 years old this month. My meditation teacher, Shinzen Young interprets for his teacher in this short news clip.

Sasaki Roshi entered a Rinzai monastery when he was fourteen. He earned the title of Roshi (which means "old" and "teacher") when he was forty and moved to California to teach in 1962. His most famous student is Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer-writer who served as the Roshi's personal assistant during the years he spent in seclusion at Mt. Baldy Zen Center.

Shinzen was ordained as a Shingon monk in Mt. Koya, and has been teaching Vipassana meditation for thirty years. He draws the majority of his teaching analogies from mathematical and scientific concepts and emphasizes the similarity among the contemplative and ethical traditions of the world's religions. He has extensive experience coaching people who are suffering from chronic and acute pain.

Mind the Gap

"You know marriage and kids, it’s wonderful, but it doesn’t give you meaning. I mean it gives you an imperative, but it doesn’t help you. My father always used to say -- you know in the tube -- ‘Mind the gap.’ I don’t know, it’s just the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is."

- Cate Blanchett as Sheba Hart in Notes on a Scandal