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.

Read more…

One’s Own Perception

From “Ratmechanics,” by Katy Bowman:

We humans may not whisk, but we do have a very similar system in our body. It’s called the proprioceptive system.

Proprioception means “one’s own perception.” No, it’s not like your opinion or anything like that, but it is the ability for one part of your body to know where it is relative to the other parts. Unlike the rat, who is using the deformation of its whiskers to create an image of what is external (similar to a dolphin using sonar to “see” shapes in front of it as it is swimming), we use our proprioceptive system to create an image of what is internal, or inside the skin. Propriception works in the same way as the whiskers though. The deformation of the joints and muscles sends information to the receptors (proprioceptors) within the moving muscles and their joints. That information about a change in skeletal position then travels via our neurons to the brain to create an image.

Read more…

See also:

• Combined to a Unique Degree
• The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

[Thanks, Kit!]

We Create the World

"When you have an awareness of anything internally, you perceive that externally. We really do, I believe, create the world that we live in. The word ‘eye’, in its Sanskrit and Hebrew root, means fountain. In other words, this is not an organ that's receiving vibrations from what's out there going through the brain and being interpreted. It's a projector."

~ Hubert Selby, Jr., from Memories, Dreams & Addictions. Interview with Ellen Burstyn. Special feature on Requiem for a Dream, Director's Cut DVD release. (2001)

See also: A List of Indignities

What’s Always Here

Excerpt from Natural Awareness: Guided Meditations and Teachings for Welcoming All Experience by Pema Chödrön:

There are various ways to say what we’re doing here. One of them is uncovering our natural wakefulness or open awareness. Not attaining it or achieving it, but relaxing enough to experience it—to tune into it. What’s always said is like tuning into what’s always here.

When you listen to sounds…

For just a moment, just listen.

Can you hear your heartbeat?

Or feel your heartbeat?

Can you hear your breath?

The idea is that your heart is hopefully always beating. You’re always breathing. But there’s no consciousness of it. In the same way, you’re not conscious of the sounds. We all know what it’s like to walk a city block or country street — or anywhere — and be so lost in thought that you don’t see anything that’s on that street — just enough to keep you from bumping into people or falling down. But you miss a lot.

So the practice is returning or tuning into this natural ability to be present and see and hear — to be conscious, really. You could call it a practice of being fully conscious as opposed to being unconscious. Which is a pretty typical state. Lost in thought. Wandering away.

The point I’m trying to make is it’s not about acquiring something, but uncovering or tuning into a natural wakefulness, a natural awareness, an open awareness that’s always been here.

Listen to Your Life

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

~ Frederick Buechner, from Now and Then

Satisfied with the Mystery

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man...I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence—as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

~ Albert Einstein, from The World as I See It

 

[Thanks for the Einstein quote, Liv!]

At the Heart of Change

The first few sentences of “Forgetting” by W.S. Merwin, from The Book of Fables:

First you must know that the whole of the physical world floats in each of the senses at the same time. Each of them reveals to us a different aspect of the kingdom of change. But none of them reveals the unnamable stillness that unites them. At the heart of change it lies unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling, unchanging, holding within itself the beginning and the end. It is ours. It is our only possession. Yet we cannot take it in to our hands, which change, nor see it with our eyes, which change, nor hear it or taste it or smell it. None of the senses can come to it. Except backwards.

Any more than they can come to each other.

Yet they point the way. And most authoritatively as they disappear.

Emptiness and Fullness

“We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration. ‘Yes,’ we say at the full brightness, ‘this is what I just meant.’ ‘No,’ we feel at the dawning, ‘this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.’ In every crescendo of sensation, in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon.”

~ William James, from A Pluralistic Universe (Chapter 7: The Continuity of Experience)

Open Up to What is Normally Invisible

Excerpt from “Holding Life Consciously,” a Speaking of Faith conversation with Arthur Zajonc, Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and Professor of Physics, Amherst College (June 24, 2010):

So the contemplative becomes an avenue not only into a kind of interiority for ourselves, you know, our own moral and, say, lives of purpose and meaning and so forth that we may brood over, which is something different than meditating. But also there's an objective character to the contemplative inquiry, the kind that [Rudolph] Steiner is interested in where one is oriented towards the other, towards the world around us, towards nature.

And one comes to know the interior of the exterior. One comes to know the inside of every outside. It's not only human beings that have an interior or an inside, but that the world around us as well can be known inwardly. Strike a bell and you can listen to the sound, but you can also move towards the qualities that are more aesthetic and even moral in nature that deal with the sounding bell or the particular color or that painting that's there or the music that you're hearing.

So life is dense with those levels of experience, but we need to calm ourselves, get clear, get quiet, direct attention, sustain the attention, open up to what is normally invisible, and certain things begin to show themselves. Maybe gently to begin with, but nonetheless it deepens and enriches our lives. If we are committed to knowledge, then we ought to be committed also to exploring the world with these lenses, with this method in mind and heart.

You know, otherwise we're kind of doing it halfway. And then when we go to solve the problems of our world, whether they're educational or environmental, we're bringing only half of our intelligence to bear; we've left the other half idle or relegated it to religious philosophers. But if we're going to be integral ourselves, you know, have a perspective which is whole, then we need to bring all of our capacities to the issues that we confront, spiritual capacities as well as more conventional sensory-based intellects and the like.

Another World

"Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci."

~ Paul Éluard

Talking of Power and Love
by Paul Éluard

Between all my torments between death and self
Between my despair and the reason for living
There is injustice and this evil of men
That I cannot accept there is my anger

There are the blood-coloured fighters of Spain
There are the sky-coloured fighters of Greece
The bread the blood the sky and the right to hope
For all the innocents who hate evil

The light is always close to dying
Life always ready to become earth
But spring is reborn that is never done with
A bud lifts from dark and the warmth settles

And the warmth will have the right of the selfish
Their atrophied senses will not resist
I hear the fire talk lightly of coolness
I hear a man speak what he has not known

You who were my flesh’s sensitive conscience
You I love forever you who made me
You will not tolerate oppression or injury
You’ll sing in dream of earthly happiness
You’ll dream of freedom and I’ll continue you

Experiencing Things Directly

“The improvising is something that I nurtured in bed mostly, where if I wanted to describe a feeling, I would just do this thing where I’d force my brain to exist without preconceptions. And then, usually if I did that enough, I would just think of something — a new way to describe a feeling. And then in my newest book (Shoplifting from American Apparel), I deliberately didn’t do any of that…My detachment is more kind of trying to advocate to myself a way of living life that is kind of pre-language, just like experiencing things directly.”

~ Tao Lin, speaking with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (December 3, 2009)

*     *     *

ugly fish poem, part one
by Tao Lin, from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

i have licked the ashen barnacles of the low ports of melbourne 

low in elevation (when viewed from the highway)

i have swam with the handsome redfish of the small piers of melbourne

i have been to jetty park near cape canaveral, mackeral, jewfish,

the little mermaid, and journeyed deep into the rocks, at my own peril,

to stare at the handsome feet of young caucasian humans

i have felt a love of life that i believe is good 

and i have felt it alone; i have always felt alienated from my peers

i am an alone ugly fish

the concrete manifestation of my emotional center is a skinned red onion covered

by local newspapers under a boardwalk at cocoa beach

i know many terms but speak only in concrete specifics

from afar i have appreciated the manatee for its round body

from within i have appreciated the manatee for its veganism

my favorite poets include mary oliver and alice notley

i am a playful companion, a tactful friend

and compassionate lover; a mutant sturgeon sniffs a seahorse with a nose located on its stomach

i have lain on the ocean floor alone at night on my birthday 

and felt very aroused and ugly 

i have willfully and simultaneously subjected myself to multiple irreconcilable philosophies 

i have held my body with my little fins

on the fourth of july 

and made excruciating screams of despair

i have my grotesque appearance and my small mind to accomplish these many tasks

i have made small noises of despair in the presence of those i respect most

i have suffered unseen in the nooks of jetty park

and i have swam unseen 

and i have swam fast; any speed that exists i have swam at that speed; i have been wild with loneliness 

and felt the generosity of loneliness

i have seen a hammerhead shark strike a manatee then flee in confusion

i have seen a manatee strike a baby hammerhead shark repeatedly

until a small brown-gray paste floats away

i have seen a blue whale scream in joy then wake from a dream

i have seen a giant tuna swim upside-down with lust into a concrete wall

in frustration, and i know how it feels, 

as i have felt the center for international studies of subatomic particles inside of me 

and swam with it in the foamy waters of cape canaveral

i have tasted the still-frozen midsections of bulk shrimp and fought away other shrimp with my fins

conversely i have tasted the artificially flavored centers of soy meats

i am almost nine years old

i have seen the decapitated heads of pigfish 

drop into the ocean: their faces were shiny

thank you for reading so far

i'll finish the rest of this poem very soon

i hope you like me so far

Blooming, Buzzing, Confusion

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing, confusion.”

~ William James, The Principles of Psychology

Fully Occupied

"To be a poet you must be crazy about language; and you must believe in the uniqueness of every person, and therefore in your own. To find your voice you must forget about finding it, and trust that if you pay sufficient attention to life you will be found to have something to say which no one else can say. And if at the same time your love of language leads you to develop your vocabulary, your ear, and your form-sense, and if you are scrupulously honest, you will arrive at writing what you apprehend in a way which embodies that vision which is yours alone. And that will be your voice, unsought, singing out from you of itself." 

~ Denise Levertov

The Métier of Blossoming    
by Denise Levertov 

Fully occupied with growing—that's
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I've got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour's
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year's achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.

One morning—and so soon!—the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!

Seeing Through the Story

“Joseph Campbell has that great idea about mythologies, that a myth functions best when it’s transparent, when people see through the story to themselves. When something gets to the point where it becomes the vehicle for people sorting out their own themes, I think you’ve achieved a kind of holy grail. Maybe the best you can say is that you’ve managed to do something true to your own sensations. But at the same time you realize that this has nothing to do with you.”

~ Edward Norton, from “‘Fight Club’ Fight Goes On,” by Dennis Lim, New York Times, November 6, 2009

Touch the Sound

“Award-winning director and cinematographer, Thomas Riedelsheimer,  takes us on an journey through a universe of sound with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They map a world of the senses — images and sounds. Hearing images, seeing sound. With Evelyn, we experience sound as palpable and rhythm as the basis of everything that is.”

~ From the Touch the Sound web page

An Experience Beyond Thought

"Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all…A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

~ Ben Wishaw as John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star

Bright Star
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Beginning with What It Can Perceive

Excerpts from Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz, featured in the The Week Magazine (October 2, 2009):

…forgetting what we think we know is the best way to begin understanding dogs…If we want to understand the life of any animal, we need to know what things are meaningful to it, beginning with what it can perceive—what it can see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense.

…

Human noses have about 6 million of these receptor sites; beagle noses have more than 300 million. The difference in the smell experience is exponential. Next to a beagle, we are downright anosmic, smelling nothing. We might notice if our coffee’s been sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar; a dog can detect a teaspoon of sugar diluted in a million gallons of water.
What’s this like? Imagine if each detail of our visual world were matched by a corresponding smell. Each petal on a rose may be distinct, having been visited by insects leaving pollen footprints from faraway flowers. What is to us just a single stem actually holds a record of who held it, and when. A burst of chemicals marks where a leaf was torn. Imagine smelling every minute visual detail. That might be the experience of a rose to a dog.

…

A dog looking around a room does not think he is surrounded by human things; he sees—and smells—dog things.

What we may think an object is for, or what it makes us think of, may or may not match the dog’s idea of the object’s function or meaning. Objects are defined by how you can act upon them: what the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called their “functional tone.” A dog may be indifferent to chairs, but if trained to jump on one, he learns that the chair has a sitting tone: It can be sat upon. But other things that we may identify as chair-like are not so seen by dogs: stools, tables, arms of couches. Stools and tables are in some other category of objects: obstacles, perhaps, in their path toward the eating tone of the kitchen. A ball, a pen, a teddy bear, and a shoe are in some ways equivalent: All are objects that one can get one’s mouth around.

…

What about a dog’s power of visual and mental perception? Look a dog in the eyes and you get the definite feeling that he is looking back. Dogs return our gaze. They are looking at us in the same way that we look at them. Naturally we wonder, is the dog thinking about us the way we are thinking about the dog?

In fact, we are known by our dogs probably far better than we know them. They are the consummate eavesdroppers and Peeping Toms: Let into the privacy of our rooms, they quietly spy on our every move. They know about our comings and goings. They know whom we sleep with, what we eat. We share our homes with uncounted numbers of mice, millipedes, and mites—none bothers to look our way. Dogs, by contrast, watch us from across the room, from the window, and out of the corners of their eyes. Their sight is used to see what we attend to. In some ways, this is similar to us, but in other ways it surpasses human capacity.

Dogs are anthropologists among us. They are students of our behavior. And what makes them especially good anthropologists is that they never tire of attending to minute changes in our expressions, our moods, our outlooks. Unlike us, they don’t become inured to people.

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)

More…

@c4chaos

No Thing Here

In the seen, there is only the seen,
in the heard, there is only the heard,
in the sensed, there is only the sensed,
in the cognized, there is only the cognized.
Thus you should see that
indeed there is no thing here;

…as you see that there is no thing there,
you will see that
you are therefore located neither in the world of this,
nor in the world of that,
nor in any place
betwixt the two.
This alone is the end of suffering.

~ Buddha, from the Udana

At breakfast on Saturday, the sun slowly crept up the window until it was shining almost directly into my eyes. It occurred to me that while it feels like the sun was moving, it was really the me, the table, the room, the building, and the earth that were all rotating imperceptibly.

It’s been nearly four hundred years since Galileo began defending heliocentrism, and yet it still does seem to us that we are at the center of the universe. The image of a sphere of water and dirt and plants and animals careening through space remains unsettling. We still go to the beach to watch the sun rise and set. It is challenging to imagine that people living in other time zones are currently sleeping while we are going about our business awake.

If the sun isn’t menacing me or entertaining me, and the ground beneath my feet isn’t stationary, where am I supposed to find a safe place to make my home? Our nervous systems crave certainty and solidity and, in their absence, have created a complex process for representing stability.

It is very useful to accept these illusions, but at some point we can’t help seeing through them. We navigate the uncertainty by trying to determine what the absence of true solidity means. Some interpret it as nihilism, others find that there being no thing simply means that every thing is in constant dynamic flux.

Mindfulness practice, seems to be one way that the need for things to be fixed gets eroded gradually. This allows us to live more comfortably inside the illusion as well as being able to experience the wonder of participating in the ongoing flow of the universe.

The Theater of the Mind

“Charles Bonnet said he wondered how ‘the theater of the mind’ could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, two hundred and fifty years later, I think we’re beginning to glimpse how this is done.”

~ Oliver Sacks, from “What Hallucination Reveals about Our Minds,” TED Talks (February 2009)