Sitting in a Pool of Me

Excerpts from Question Your Thinking, Change The World: Quotations from Byron Katie:

We’re often quite sure about what other people need to do, how they should live, and whom they should be with. We have 20/20 vision about others, but not about ourselves. When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.

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We only fear what we are—what we haven’t gone inside and taken a look at and met with understanding. If I think you might see me as boring, it would frighten me, because I haven’t investigated that thought. So it’s not people who frighten me, it’s me that frightens me. That’s my job, until I investigate and stop this fear for myself. The worst that can happen is that I think you think about me what I think about myself. So I am sitting in a pool of me.

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I like to ask, “Are you breathing yourself?” No? Well, maybe you’re not thinking yourself or making decisions either. Maybe it doesn’t move until it moves, like a breath, like the wind. And you tell the story of how you are doing it, so you can keep yourself from the awareness that you are nature, flowing perfectly. Who would you be without the story that you need to make a decision?

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No one has ever been able to control their thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don’t let go of my thoughts—I meet them with understanding, then they let go of me.

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The ego is terrified of the truth. And the truth is that the ego doesn’t exist.

The Combustion of Egoistic Delusions

Excerpt from “This Very Moment,” by Charlotte Joko Beck, from Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path:

anthracite

lignite

Back in the 1920s, when I was maybe eight or ten years old, and living in New Jersey where the winters are cold, we had a furnace in our house that burned coal. It was a big event on the block when the coal truck rolled up and all this stuff poured down the coal chute into the coal bin. I learned that there are two kinds of coal: one was called anthracite or hard coal, and the other was lignite, soft coal. My father told me about the difference in the way those two kinds of coal burned. Anthracite burns cleanly, leaving little ash. Lignite leaves lots of ash. When we burned lignite, the cellar became covered with soot and some of it got upstairs into the living room.

What does this have to do with our practice? Practice is about breaking our exclusive identification with ourselves. This process has sometimes been called purifying the mind. To “purify the mind” doesn’t mean that you become holy or other than you are; it means to strip away that which keeps a person—or furnace—from functioning best.  The furnace functions best with hard coal. But unfortunately what we’re full of is soft coal. There’s a saying in the Bible: “He is like a refiner’s fire.” It’s a common analogy, found in other religions as well. To sit in meditation is to be in the middle of a refining fire. Eido Roshi said once, “This meditation hall is not a peaceful haven, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions.” A meditation hall is not a place for bliss and relaxation, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We’ve all heard of it, yet we use it very seldom. It’s called attention.

Attention is the cutting, burning sword, and our practice is to use that sword as much as we can. None of us is very willing to use it; but when we do—even for a few minutes—some cutting and burning take place. All practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in meditation but in every moment of our life.

Ego-Free States

Excerpts from “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again,” by John Tierney, New York Times, April 12, 2010:

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, California, for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

…Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

…“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

…Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

Read the entire article here…

[Thanks Dōshin!]

Unleashed

Through Narrow Chinks

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”

~ William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally… this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone...”

~ Aldous Huxley, from The Doors of Perception

Our Central Fixation of Self

“Nobody can really explain what the personal self is; we just feel it. It’s a visceral thing. It’s not just how we act and what we say; it’s our central fixation of self. As we see through it, we realize that the personal self is not who we are and that it was not ever anything substantial to begin with. And as we really see into our true nature, there is a paradox that arises: the more we realize that there isn’t a self, the more intimately present we actually are.”

~ Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing

A Position of Imagined Superiority

From Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle:

What a miserable day.

He didn’t have the decency to return my call.

She let me down.

Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They are unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of self through being “right” and making something or someone “wrong.” Being “right” places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego. This also creates some kind of enemy: yes, the ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather can serve that function.

Through habitual mental judgment and emotional contraction, you have a personalized, reactive relationship to people and events in your life. These are all forms of self-created suffering, but they are not recognized as such because to the ego they are satisfying. The ego enhances itself through reactivity and conflict.

How simple would life be without those stories.

It is raining.

He did not call.

I was there. She was not.

The Illusion of Separateness

"These barriers we erect to protect ourselves from the fear of feeling pain are really what cause us to suffer. It isn't the pain itself, it's these barriers we erect and then we are left with this enormous sense of separation and isolation. My favorite definition of ego is the illusion of separateness. It is an illusion, but it's the illusion we all carry around with us that I'm here and you're there. And when pain comes, that separateness gets very, very strong. Just notice. There's this sense of your self that gets much stronger. Then there's this sense of resistance. Or just a sense of No, I don't want it to be like this! That's the barriers. They just come up. Usually they come up in the form of blaming other people or blaming ourselves or there's a lot of talking that goes on, but the basic thing is that we feel this as so painful. So all the teachings agree at this one point: it's all about how to dissolve the barriers."

~ Pema Chödrön, from This Moment is the Perfect Teacher: Ten Buddhist Teachings on Cultivating Inner Strength and Compassion

Going to the Root

"Fear, greed, and the desire for power are the psychological motivating forces not only behind warfare and violence between nations, tribes, religions, and ideologies, but also the cause of incessant conflict in personal relationships. They bring about a distortion in your perception of other people and yourself. Through them, you misinterpret every situation, leading to misguided action designed to rid you of fear and satisfy your need for more, a bottomless hole that can never be filled.

"It is important to realize, however, that fear, greed, and the desire for power are not the dysfunction that we are speaking of, but are themselves created by the dysfunction, which is a deep-seated collective delusion that lies within the mind of each human being. A number of spiritual teachings tell us to let go of fear and desire. But those spiritual practices are usually unsuccessful. They haven't gone to the root of the dysfunction. Fear, greed, and desire for power are not the ultimate causal factors. Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness. This is because it is still part of the same dysfunction, a more subtle and rarified form of self-enhancement, of desire for more and a strengthening of one's conceptual identity, one's self-image. You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the good that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness."

-- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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