Erwin Hessle
erwinhessle.com> writes:
> On Jan 22, 7:52 am, monkeym...@hactrn.ch (Monkey Mind) wrote:
>> It's a fairly natural process, and just takes time to evolve. At
>> first, one wants to "get it right", and this will at one point seem a
>> pointless repetition of ritual: even sitting down to meditate. At one
>> point, the question starts to loom, "what the hell am I really doing
>> this for?" When one lets this question stand, exploring it instead of
>> trying to answer it, a sense of spaciousness will open up, making room
>> for forther development.
>
> What I think would be great is if people could learn to avoid the
> tendency to attach esoteric explanations to otherwise simple
> phenomena. This paragraph is maybe half way towards what I'm talking
> about.
Well, spirituality is often hard to talk about because of a lack of
precise vocabulary. So some people tend towards the poetic, some
towards the enigmatic modes of expression - few actually find a way to
express themselves in concise prose.
> This "how can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
> nonsense; the fact is he *can't* "show you Zen" at all.
The professor probably wanted the Zen master to show him Zen.
> What he can do - allegedly, at least - is to help you see Zen for
> yourself, and in order to do this you need context. Zen is not the
> Eiffel Tower; someone cannot just transport you to a physical
> location and have you see it. It's a *way* of perceiving, and in
> order to perceive in that way, some kind of "position" has to be
> build up first.
>
> This is the real meaning behind the old "prepare the temple and then
> await the indwelling of the Angel" idea. You say "When one lets this
> question stand, exploring it instead of trying to answer it, a sense
> of spaciousness will open up, making room for forther development,"
> but you can only "let it stand" after a period of trying to answer it
> *first*.
Yes, the process takes time, as I mentioned. After a while of trying
all sorts of things, the question comes up. The Buddha phrased it in
terms of suffering. It takes a bit of practice and experience to see
the question not as a query or quiz situation, as a demand directed at
oneself (hard to put in words without resorting to cheesy overused
terms), but as an expression of [insert favorite metaphor here:
emptiness, suchness, nonduality, the unknown, no-self, the deathless,
etc.].
Koan practice is a technique to induce this.
There are other approaches.
> It's inevitable. If enlightenment was just about not asking
> questions, and not using words, as various people here would like
> you to believe, then babies and dogs would be enlightened.
> One person here has actually argued that rocks are enlightened,
> which illustrates what gibberish this attachment to esoterica can
> generate in otherwise intelligent people.
On the other hand, maybe they perceived the way the boundary between
"self" and "other" keeps shifting around all the time, and maybe a
rock was involved. I don't know the details of the argument you allude
to.
> The satori or "eureka" moment in Zen arises largely as a result of
> "negative exploration," of discovering that "it isn't that" many, many
> times. If, for the sake of argument, we define "enlightenment" as
> "perception without interpretation," then you could have many such
> experiences, but they are going to mean precisely nothing to you
> unless you have first done lots and lots of perceiving *with*
> interpretation, and discovered the problems inherent in this. This is
> why a "sense of spaciousness" opens up; you can't have an answer
> without a question.
(smartass remark: You can, actually, a famous one being "42")
> The whole legend of "before and after the Fall" illustrates the
> exact same idea.
This never occurred to me - (non)-perception of nakedness?
> While enlightenment in one sense cannot really be described as
> "progress," or "development" or "attainment," in another sense it has
> to be described that way, since you need to build up a point of view
> that will enable you to perceive what it is. What is being "attained"
> is not enlightenment itself, but a position from which this way of
> perceiving can be conducted.
"The road to [place] is not [place]" is a standard analogy. You travel
the road to get there, but arriving is not travelling.
> There's an analogy with weight training, here; the actual muscle
> gain occurs during the recovery phase, during the rest phase, but it
> won't occur unless you do the workout in the first place. You first
> restrict the muscles, and then relax them to let them grow into the
> absence of restriction. Similarly, you can't "empty your cup"
> without having a full cup to begin with. In order to find the
> "answer," you have to forcibly find out what's wrong with lots of
> other alternatives, and then be still and just look around for a
> while. It's a cumulative process, as you say, and "emptying your
> cup" is only half of that process.
You have to start somewhere.
> Now, some people are going to argue that nobody ever has any problem
> filling their cup up, and so they don't need help with it; it's only
> the emptying that they need assistance with. The fact is that most
> people hold their cups (to continue this silly and inane analogy) at
> such an angle that it can hardly hold anything at all, to the point
> where emptying it has little practical impact, it was so full of space
> to begin with. The difficulty is that this cup needs to be balanced in
> order to be held vertical, and since every person is a different point
> of balance, there is no set method for accomplishing it. It's dead
> easy to tell someone to empty it, which is why so many self-professed
> "experts" harp on about it so much; it's considerably more difficult
> to tell them how to fill it in the first place, and that's why so many
> people fall into the "just do the practice and shut up" trap.
You do take the analogy to extremes, for all your dislike of it.
In a story attributed to the Buddha, he mentions clay vessels with
holes, those with cracks, as well as the full and empty vessels. Very
thorough man.
> What needs to be done is this "sense of spaciousness ... making room
> for forther development" needs to be taken advantage of, and the
> practice modified in light of it each time, actually following
> through on that promise of "further development."
In all the many lists the Buddha taught, there is also the teaching of
the four bases of power/success (iddhipada):
desire (directed towards the goal of the practice)
persistence or effort
intent or will
discrimination
That last quality of discrimination is important: the ability to
evaluate results, and learn from past mistakes and successes.
> If done properly, the actual method will end up being vastly, vastly
> different from person to person. Adherence to "schools" or
> "systems" is merely a cowardly way of avoiding doing this, and these
> "just do the practice" louts are clean out of resources. If you just
> keep banging away at the same old meditation every time, you're
> never going to get anywhere, because the practice does not cause the
> result; as you are implying, the result occurs in the growth which
> follows the cessation of practice, and this will only happen if you
> are intelligently modifying the practice in response to the
> development.
Well put.
Ajahn Chah once said something to the effect that just sitting still
for long periods of time will *not* make anybody enlightened. Chicken
can sit for days on their nests.
Likewise for watching the breath. They have instruments at the
hostpital that will monitor the breath much more precisely than any
meditator can ever hope to.
Cheers,
Florian
--
Every man passes out of life as if he had just been born.
-- Epicurus (Vatican Sayings 60)
