Scientists catching up with Buddhism on issue of no-self

Natasha Mitchell of ABC Radio National and Radio Australia had another interesting guest on All in the mind show – German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinge spoke about his research of the self as well as the first hand accounts of out of body experiences and lucid dreaming. Metzinge published his conclusions in the book “The Ego tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” and needless to say I am quite eager to engage my brain cells with it. As I understood from the interview,  not only it brings the light on the mechanics of the process of selfing (right, Metzinger views the self as not a thing, something solid that exists somewhere – where? – but the ongoing process, the construct) but also discusses how and why it evolved. Why do I so badly need to believe into my self ?

Glad to hear more scientists are catching up on what Buddhism saw already two thousand years ago – there is no self, but rather a set of experiences and our memory that connects them. (Metzinger is actually a long time meditator himself).

John Daido Loori descended the mountain

Was planning on going to the Zen Mountain Monastery for a month of art and meditation with John Daido Loori next summer when I got a Tweet that he was retiring.  A selfish thought popped up at once, “Could he not wait for another year? He cannot be that old!”. Then I read that he had a few days left to live and now an email (very glad I did not get that news as a Tweet!) from Dosho saying Daido Loori passed away.

I never knew him but in my heart of hearts he’s been one my teachers. I read “The Zen of Creativity” when I knew little of Zen and had a very solid idea of what art was about and that I was never in it.  Daido Loori showed me that art could be a doorway to serious and transformative spiritual practice, no matter whether we call ourselves an artist or not. It is not a level of technical skill or originality that matters but how intimate we become with the subject, like in his work The Tao of Water . In order to do that we have to learn to develop a new, dynamic seeing (with the whole body and mind) and become unhindered by our own ideas and attitudes.

I never knew Daido Loori personally but I am grateful I have come to know about him and his life. That alone had an impact on my seeing and perceiving.  Another thought that came was, “Well, what do I do now?”. I guess I will just keep practicing dynamic seeing and relaxing into the creative process moment after moment, day after day.

My heart goes to all those who knew John Daido Loori and whose lives he touched.

Living with the question

During the last Webinar we were looking into the following passage from Genjokoan:

Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off.

As part of the homework we are to read the passage before zazen and reflect on the question:

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

For starters, I came to appreciate reading the text before the sitting even though at first the words did not make much sense to me.  Soon I started noticing how doing that opened up my mind to the passage and to Dosho’s question in the activities of everyday life (living practice).  Now I did not have to remember the question itself;  it was following me everywhere. All of a sudden I would come up with the answer after I have dealt with the situation at hand.

Guest post: Fugen on Jukai experience

Note from Irisha:

Many of the Leafers have started the preparatory study for the second online Jukai and put their sewing skills to test. Once again I did not think I was ready for taking Jukai this year for a number of reasons but asked Fugen (Torbjörn), one of the last year’s Jukai takers and a committed Leafer, to share about the ceremony itself and what Jukai meant to him. In this post he shares his Jukai experience.

What about you? Have you taken Jukai or whatever equivalent can be found in your tradition?  Did it influence your life? If so, how? What is your take on the formal commitment to the practice?

Fugen on Jukai experience

What is the meaning of “Jukai”?

According to the Buddhist Dictionary, Jukai literally means “to receive” or “to undertake the Precepts”.  It is the ceremony both of one’s formally committing to the Buddhist Sangha and to the practice of Zen Buddhism, and of one’s undertaking the Sixteen Mahayana Bodhisattva Precepts as guidelines for life.

Mental yoga a là Dogen: what did the monk see?

It is a challenge to be working on Genjokoan and it’s inspiring to do that with the teacher that taggs on our sleeves to remind us to avoid the Zen snare of dry, conceptual understanding and encourages us to “have a keen and sensitive busshit detector to do this work “.

Once again – the koan in the Genjo Koan, with Mayu fanning himself and the bowing monk.

Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself?”

“Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent,” Mayu replied,” you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk again.

Mayu just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

Dosho tosses us the question again and again:

What did the monk see that he expressed by bowing?

In one of the posts on his blog he writes:

“Now you might find yourself wanting to dismiss the question. “Bowing is just bowing.” This is one-sided, emphasizing not thinking, and so doesn’t have the power to cause a lineage to bloom (or to ripen the great earth’s goldenness). Watch out for the snare using Zen talk to not deal with this issue (or any other)!

What Dogen saw in the monks bow, and what the Genjokoan unpacks in rolling hopping along vividness, had such an enormous power that it caused our lineage to bloom for some hundreds of years with all the freedom that goes with it.

If we today dismiss the needle point of this question or are satisfied with thin explanations, we won’t have the strength of love to bring it forth in our daily life.“

Here’s my humble take on it. We have the preconditions for life: a body and oxygen we find in the air. Yet to realise life itself, to manifest the living, we have to bring oxygen into the body by inhaling the air and exhaling it, inhaling and exhaling… For as long as we live.

The same goes for practice. Practice equals the verb just like breathing is. We cannot breath just by simply understanding the mechanics of it, cognitively knowing how it works. Knowledge of what makes a practice is useless if it is separate from the activities of everyday life.  If we stop breathing our organs will not get enough oxygen and will stop functioning. Practice is dead without the realisation of it, the actual doing it. We cannot know the practice, we have to live it.

The door makes no promise

Have started listening to the  program “Meditations that can change your life” by Rick Hanson and Rick Mendius that they recorded for Sounds True. Both are interested in neurology and Buddism. It appears our brain is biologically biased towards negativity to ensure our survival and we tend to remember and overestimate the importance the negative experiences over the positive ones.  This brain of ours proved to be invaluable when we lived close to other species that could be a threat to us. We separated ourselves from nature and chose to live behind the walls so we would feel safer yet are we more relaxed today about our lives? The same incredibly smart and complex tool that served us now contributes to our suffering: while very seldom our physical survival is under threat the biological programming remains the same. We tend to react (overreact!) to many life situations and even just thoughts about them as if we are under threat which costs us a lot of energy, not to mention that it diverts our attention from experiencing life.

“Hope undermines efforts because it takes us away from the present. By coming back to what is right here in front of you right now, you see that meditation and internal transformative work are the best and most direct paths toward being present in life. Energy flows into practice because you see that you have no choice”.

- Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life

As the initial enthusiasm fades after a couple of months of meditation (once again, the mind tends to bring to focus the things I have not yet accomplished rather than a noticeable and positive shift in attitude towards life experiences – also a result of biological conditioning), the question arises: “What is the point of all this?”. But as Ken points out, what choice have I got?

I’ve been run by those habituated patterns for most part of my life and missed a huge chunk of it fighting the monsters in my head so I am pretty determined to try a different path for a change like finally getting real about life. Being at war with myself and the world costs a lot of energy and never ever made things better anyway. Yet even if there are no assurances in the practice itself  I see no other choice but to keep going.  At the very least it will keep me busy for the rest of my life – am blessed with the enough internal material for a few lifetimes.

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note, by Adrienne Rich

Dealing with creative ideas during meditation

In my short life as a meditator I’ve noticed that when the mind finally settles down it gets into a creative mode and generates insights. The temptation is then strong to allow myself to stay with those ideas for fear of forgetting or because they appear to be more exciting that just sitting. Wouldn’ that be a waste to let those ideas show up at the door and do nothing about it? What difference would it make if I did explore those ideas during meditaiton?

Ken McLeod in the chapter on cultivating attention in Wake up to Your Life explains how we can reaffirm the old habituated patterns by succumbing to those creative insights:

“Calm and peace in the mind allow you to see things more clearly. When you sit in meditation, insights into interactions with people, business affairs, or personal problems arise spontaneously. Creative ideas and images arise from nowhere. Thoughts and thinking don’t really disturb the quality of attention. Instead of only resting with the breath, you feel that you can use meditation to be more creative, to solve problems and generate insights, and that you can do all that without disrupting attention.
You are wrong.

The fallen body loved by life

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

-  Rumi

SU-EN Butoh Company had a world premier of their performance Luscious at Dansenshus in Stockholm last Thursday. They devoted the project to the 50th anniversary of Tatsumi Hijikata’s scandalous performance Kinjiki – forbidden colours in Tokyo.

Coming home

As my commuter train arrived to the Stockholm Central Station yesterday I got off the train and for a short moment did not exactly knew where I was. I thought we arrived to a different platform and I’d have to take a different way out. Turning my head around to get oriented I noticed that people were going in two directions: to the left, towards the station, the way I used to go and to the right, towards the stairs I never paid attention to before.

I was not in a hurry so I followed the people who went to the right wondering where I would end up. When I climbed the stairs to the street level I recognised the spot and understood that just taking a few steps in the opposite direction and a flight of stairs saved me at least five minutes of walking: I discovered a shortcut! Besides, I didn’t have to go through the building full of stressed people and did not have to rush myself. All because for a short moment I got disoriented and had to take in as much information as possible to make a decision about the route.  I was no longer operating on autopilot. This allowed me to look at the same situation with new eyes and notice more options.

That business of the edge

Before I start working my edge it would be helpful to find it first. What is my edge then? What is an edge in the context of a spiritual practice?  The idea of looking for one at the edge of the known resonates with me. The edge is where I no longer have a script or for a moment forget about it. Or – is it?

Dosho brought to my attention during our very first talk that:

• one probably has to go over the edge to find it;
• the edge moves with time;

One of my edges is being awake in relationships. At least sometimes. A hard task, one for the people who want to grow muscle of awakening by exercising it and not just thinking of it.