Also, it's easy to practice the method, get good results, and then get obsessed with getting the result back so you forget that you were supposed to practice the method not the result.
Love that idea: "processes of mind can slow and stop, as they are revealed to be unnecessary protections from the vividness of experience." So much packed in there.
I have great faith in humanity, and believe in our innate ability to screw anything up.
The Beatles fan blog Hey Dullblog used to theorise that the marked shift in John Lennon's songwriting, outlook and behaviour from 1968 onwards (obvious to superfans who analyse the band's every move) might have been due to going cold turkey on everything and jumping off the deep end of meditation, probably without any of the necessary guardrails, in Rishikesh. Something inside may have snapped. Otherwise difficult to explain the fact that the Beatles went to India to get enlightened and started treating each other as enemies the minute they got home.
Yes and no; and I'm surprised that Ken McLeod, a vajrayana enjoyer would say that! (So I wonder about the context) Tantra and vajrayana have that fake it until you make it quality to it.
I think adopting the View(tm) early on "you are already enlightened, it's all good as it is, any appearence otherwise is delusion" is very useful.
If one just sits shikantaza and practices the method, one can get stuck.
"I'm just sitting, why am I not making progress". Asking "what would a buddha do? Maybe a buddha would go to therapy, or would recognize that I'm attached to shikantaza and should do anapana now" is a good frame imho.
I love this and am reminded of a teacher who stressed the difference between practice and rehearsal. She had a pet peeve of people confusing the former for the latter. Rehearsal is what you’re describing as “practicing outcomes”. Whereas practice is just being with a thing as it is. Just being present with it and open to what’s happening. Are you avoiding or practicing?
Great piece. The most common way people screw up doing the I Ching is doing it over and over again because they're unable to accept the answer first time round. So I guess that's a fixation on a certain type of result (all divinations should be "good") and a failure of method (method being, be open to *whatever* it says and the deeper currents of the message) so it fits your schema!
Nononono they're actually fully nice-lightened people that's why if you bring up their political counterparts they start grinding their teeth flat and weaving hemp nooses
Bhagavad Gita 2.47: "You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor you should long for inaction."
(Immediately popped in my mind as I read your teaching-essay)
love this, and it’s a principle that i’d imagine carries over to any practice. personally i’m reminded of sales and athletics — have lost many deals and hurt myself many times due to a misplaced focus on achieving the goal rather than practicing the method
But isn't there also a critique about many (most?) Buddhist schools that seem to ask students to just grind away on their cushions for decades (practicing method), without minding if there are no 'results'?
What do you think about self-inquiry through this lens? I personally had huge benefits from self-inquiry practice. but it also seem to depend on the personality structure a lot.
Same thing applies! Self-inquiry is hugely powerful. I would put it in the top 5 most meaningful practices for me personally. But you can easily distort it by practicing methods not results, like asking "where am I" and not earnestly admitting to yourself that there are self-sensations to be found, or "who am I" and not earnestly admitting that you feel a sense of separation still, etc...
Another way of saying it is, I love Ramana Maharshi's metaphor of self-inquiry as the practice of stirring a fire with a stick, such that the stick burns down. But for that to work you've got to actually hold the stick.
ah yes... i fell into this trap first! i was "searching" without searching for the self. just when i started to actually observe where my sense of self was residing when i looked, acted in my daily life, when i treated it like a mathematical problem of finding "X" but not just analytical but with whole body mind intuition then i found the moving cloudy sometimes dissolving weird "self" model. then doing the same with the self sensation. Putting the microscope on the sensation of self, i forget it at times! most psychedelic "technique" i have ever tried.
"unnecessary protections from the vividness of experience" represented by thoughts, mind. Yeah, I love that, Sasha. To me meditation is not so much an activity as a non-doing, where we shed our entanglements with "the world" which includes our mind. Much like going to sleep at night, or dying, we let go of everything that's not essentially us. An Indian Buddhist monk named Tilopa lived between 988 and 1069, and left some advice on meditation in the way of six suggestions, called by those in the tradition of the tantric Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, “Tilopa’s 6 Words,” advice that we may well consider in our practice of “non-doing” we call meditation that encourages, and even affords us the known gifts of healing, love, and awakening…
Tilopa's 6 words:
Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don't try to figure anything out.
Don't try to make anything happen.
Rest. Relax right now and rest.
These suggestions are not addressed to who we really are, but rather to the impermanent, finite mind, the egoic self that generally lives in fear and at least mild anxiety. The quiet calm invoked by our “non-doing” may allow a truer essence to emerge, an ineffable vastness. The key word here is “allow.” We need not search for what we already are. Meditation can be a process that seems counter-intuitive in this world where we incessantly think that “more” is always better than less. Meditation is not something we “do” so much as ceasing certain activities. Just for now. Less becomes more for the sake of the love, healing, and awakening we relax into. Allow. Like when we can’t find a particular word or name we know we know, but the only way of finding it is to allow the habitual clamor of thinking to calm down, and then find what we had forgotten simply bubbles up into view.
Also, it's easy to practice the method, get good results, and then get obsessed with getting the result back so you forget that you were supposed to practice the method not the result.
100%
Love that idea: "processes of mind can slow and stop, as they are revealed to be unnecessary protections from the vividness of experience." So much packed in there.
I have great faith in humanity, and believe in our innate ability to screw anything up.
The Beatles fan blog Hey Dullblog used to theorise that the marked shift in John Lennon's songwriting, outlook and behaviour from 1968 onwards (obvious to superfans who analyse the band's every move) might have been due to going cold turkey on everything and jumping off the deep end of meditation, probably without any of the necessary guardrails, in Rishikesh. Something inside may have snapped. Otherwise difficult to explain the fact that the Beatles went to India to get enlightened and started treating each other as enemies the minute they got home.
Yes and no; and I'm surprised that Ken McLeod, a vajrayana enjoyer would say that! (So I wonder about the context) Tantra and vajrayana have that fake it until you make it quality to it.
I think adopting the View(tm) early on "you are already enlightened, it's all good as it is, any appearence otherwise is delusion" is very useful.
If one just sits shikantaza and practices the method, one can get stuck.
"I'm just sitting, why am I not making progress". Asking "what would a buddha do? Maybe a buddha would go to therapy, or would recognize that I'm attached to shikantaza and should do anapana now" is a good frame imho.
See Ken McLeod's translation of some pith instructions for one synthesis: https://unfetteredmind.org/practice/a-light-in-the-dark/
"Practice method" still applies. "You're already there" is still a method.
I love this and am reminded of a teacher who stressed the difference between practice and rehearsal. She had a pet peeve of people confusing the former for the latter. Rehearsal is what you’re describing as “practicing outcomes”. Whereas practice is just being with a thing as it is. Just being present with it and open to what’s happening. Are you avoiding or practicing?
Great piece. The most common way people screw up doing the I Ching is doing it over and over again because they're unable to accept the answer first time round. So I guess that's a fixation on a certain type of result (all divinations should be "good") and a failure of method (method being, be open to *whatever* it says and the deeper currents of the message) so it fits your schema!
Nononono they're actually fully nice-lightened people that's why if you bring up their political counterparts they start grinding their teeth flat and weaving hemp nooses
Bhagavad Gita 2.47: "You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor you should long for inaction."
(Immediately popped in my mind as I read your teaching-essay)
This is super useful advice. It clearly relates to some of my own past mistakes. Never seen it framed this way . Thanks.
am i an idiot if i think of all of these as the same thing? i sit down and practice all of these at the same time.
no, that sgtm
love this, and it’s a principle that i’d imagine carries over to any practice. personally i’m reminded of sales and athletics — have lost many deals and hurt myself many times due to a misplaced focus on achieving the goal rather than practicing the method
But isn't there also a critique about many (most?) Buddhist schools that seem to ask students to just grind away on their cushions for decades (practicing method), without minding if there are no 'results'?
Sure, this is a critique of bad Zen instruction, which is indeed bad.
In my experience, Vipassana too (at least Westernized IMS/Spirit Rock).
10/10
What do you think about self-inquiry through this lens? I personally had huge benefits from self-inquiry practice. but it also seem to depend on the personality structure a lot.
Same thing applies! Self-inquiry is hugely powerful. I would put it in the top 5 most meaningful practices for me personally. But you can easily distort it by practicing methods not results, like asking "where am I" and not earnestly admitting to yourself that there are self-sensations to be found, or "who am I" and not earnestly admitting that you feel a sense of separation still, etc...
Another way of saying it is, I love Ramana Maharshi's metaphor of self-inquiry as the practice of stirring a fire with a stick, such that the stick burns down. But for that to work you've got to actually hold the stick.
ah yes... i fell into this trap first! i was "searching" without searching for the self. just when i started to actually observe where my sense of self was residing when i looked, acted in my daily life, when i treated it like a mathematical problem of finding "X" but not just analytical but with whole body mind intuition then i found the moving cloudy sometimes dissolving weird "self" model. then doing the same with the self sensation. Putting the microscope on the sensation of self, i forget it at times! most psychedelic "technique" i have ever tried.
"unnecessary protections from the vividness of experience" represented by thoughts, mind. Yeah, I love that, Sasha. To me meditation is not so much an activity as a non-doing, where we shed our entanglements with "the world" which includes our mind. Much like going to sleep at night, or dying, we let go of everything that's not essentially us. An Indian Buddhist monk named Tilopa lived between 988 and 1069, and left some advice on meditation in the way of six suggestions, called by those in the tradition of the tantric Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, “Tilopa’s 6 Words,” advice that we may well consider in our practice of “non-doing” we call meditation that encourages, and even affords us the known gifts of healing, love, and awakening…
Tilopa's 6 words:
Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don't try to figure anything out.
Don't try to make anything happen.
Rest. Relax right now and rest.
These suggestions are not addressed to who we really are, but rather to the impermanent, finite mind, the egoic self that generally lives in fear and at least mild anxiety. The quiet calm invoked by our “non-doing” may allow a truer essence to emerge, an ineffable vastness. The key word here is “allow.” We need not search for what we already are. Meditation can be a process that seems counter-intuitive in this world where we incessantly think that “more” is always better than less. Meditation is not something we “do” so much as ceasing certain activities. Just for now. Less becomes more for the sake of the love, healing, and awakening we relax into. Allow. Like when we can’t find a particular word or name we know we know, but the only way of finding it is to allow the habitual clamor of thinking to calm down, and then find what we had forgotten simply bubbles up into view.
Namaste,
Bobby
you ever see the difference between standing naked before god vs trying really hard to look like a pitiful subject? that's the prayer version