on time machines, weaving words and loosening our belt so that our minds can expand…

My last blog post touched a lot of nerves- in a good way, from what I can tell, and it also seemed to have displeased others who came away from it thinking that it was written to complain about laziness, ‘spiritual materialism’ and the existence of a spiritual marketplace which often become more of a self-help, soft-core spiritual path.  While I understand the reaction, I don’t agree with such facile readings of the post- not that its difficile in the first place.

Whatever the case may be, whether these posts, and this blog, are worth the ether that allow them a fragile existence of any kind or not, leads me to a few deeper problems that have been something of a point of concern as well as curiosity for me lately, that is:  language and time.

I would first like to avoid the immediate association with these terms any cosmic relationship with philosophy and loosey-goosey bedroom-eyed mysticism, while simultaneously acknowledging that language and time are obviously thematically treated in great depth in both the study of philosophy and mysticism.  It may be that we are best served (for the purposes of this post) in allowing our analytical minds, the mind of blended comparisons and of discernment, to step aside as we examine for ourselves within the context of the personal meditation experience, how and what language and time mean, and how they appear.  Let’s put aside the study philosophy and try to approach this from what unfolds naturally on the meditation cushion, or, as we walk, or dream, as we paint and dance through this life of ours- for meditation experiences are always different from philosophical investigations.

We define ourselves through the use of language.  Outwardly we describe who we are physically, our characteristics and so forth, and then we fill in all of the details, our personalities, likes and dislikes, and all the rest.  We further dabble in collaborative fiction through supporting the personal narratives of our friends and loved ones, and in offering counter-narrative of those we dislike.  Soon, what may have begun as a relatively blank page (a debatable point indeed) has become filled with a testimony of who we would like be, who we envision ourselves as, and the way that we interpret the world around us.  This language is a tapestry of meaning, one in which we both consciously and unconsciously weave together a living history, along with the plotted trajectories of the future events that have yet to be lived.  In and of themselves these products of our individual relationship with language are amazing works of art that capture how we conceive, what we can allow to be, and what we must keep at bay.  They are our hells and our anchors; perhaps they prevent us from flying off into a manic subconscious world; or perhaps they confine us to knowable modalities of being that provide us with the tools for the experience of life.  Whichever the case may be, and I suspect that it is most likely a combination of the two (and many others) at differing points in time, language -in this context- acts, more often than not, like a prison; it is like a thief, and even more, language is like an unreliable friend whom we continue to trust even though she will continue to disappoint.  For somehow we cannot describe away the pain of loss, the experience of death, the terrible bouts with illness, and the fact that one day we will be forced to say goodbye to all that we hold dear- no matter how much we may try.

The images we create with our internal literary drives have a hieroglyphic quality in the true sense of the word hieroglyphic, that is: a highly symbolic form of writing which is difficult to interpret/assign meaning.  In the beginning was the word.  From that word, an entire world was created, a veritable cosmos- our interwoven personal narratives develop with increasing complexity and nuance creating a web, a net, or systemic literary story-line in which we capture every detail.  As I sit here, writing both this blog post as well as my experience of today, the soft beautiful light coming through the windows between the treas and fluttering prayer flags is captured as is the sweet smell of a yet uneaten pineapple offered in a recent Mahakala tsok that simultaneously soothes and excites.

Everything we do, all we experience, tends to be added to this net of meaning that is cast upon the phenomenal world.

There are times when we are able to put down our pens, or turn off whatever device we use to compose these narratives of distinctive being- one of the most common device in such work is our discursive mind.  The mind of spacial relationships, of color schemes, the mind of philosophy and dualistic comparisons.  Perhaps this is also the sociology mind, the mind of architecture, the mind of economics, and the mind of urban planning.  That part of us which organizes, the desire to play with the economics of mind; the way we become hypnotized by the production, consumption, and transfer of phenomena.

When we can put this down- although we’re not really putting anything down- then what we were formerly engaging with becomes less of an object and more of an experience.  There is almost a sense of relief in this, a wonderful supporting ease and perhaps the experience of a type of contentment.

In his very condensed version of the Ninth Karmapa’s The Ocean of Meaning, entitled Opening the Door to Certainty, the late Kyabje Bokar Rinpoche touched upon the enhancement practices of Mahamudra meditation.  These are described as ‘enhancement through eliminating five false ideas’.   The first of the five false ideas is that of objects.  Of eliminating the false ideas about objects Bokar Rinpoche writes:

Without grasping something real in the notion of samsara that must be abandoned and nirvana that must be actualized, but placing ourselves in the infinite one-taste of primordial awareness [of knowing] the non-duality of all phenomena gathered by pairs such as virtue and non-virtue, we eliminate false ideas about objects.

This is a wonderfully powerful instruction, that while presented as an enhancement practice in the context of the Mahamudra system, is worthy of examining, especially in light of how easily we craft global narratives of everything within and without.  I wonder how we can ‘place ourselves in the infinite one-taste of primordial awareness’ or settle ourselves in a position of quiet knowing in which we can allow ourselves to dissolve the need for narrative, comparisons, and allow the direct of experience of the world around us (and within us) to arise; a dancing array of inherently perfect appearance.  Easier said than done?  I’m not so sure about that- if we can playfully try to fold this into our everyday activities, I suspect that bit by bit we can massage the habits of stale knowing.  If we can play around with the view we’re really practicing something profound.

The second of the five false ideas is that of time.  Of eliminating the false ideas about time, Bokar Rinpoche continues:

Although there is no fundamental truth about the reality of the three times, we think within a mode obscured by the division into three times.  Consequently, realizing equanimity which does not establish a distinction of the three times, we eliminate the false ideas about time.

This instruction is especially relevant in helping to loosen the grasping of the compelling reality of our narration as we constantly pin things down (including ourselves) to various points in time.  Our past informs us in the present and helps determine the future; or so we tend to think.  Ideas of time having particular characteristics is a lovely subtle subject- Buddhism is rife with them: the number of aeons, life times, or years that it will take before we fully awaken is just one example.  Assuming that the past was a particular way, the notion of the golden days of long ago in relation to these degenerate times, is another poignant example.  The very notion of systematic evolution (individual spiritual evolution) is a wonderful blended assumption rooted in the false ideas of objects and time.  How many others do we hold on to?

What other unexamined aspects of our faith tradition do we just assume out of the habits of appearance and time?  What would it be like if we crafted our own notions based upon our experiences?

Wangchuk Dorje reminds us: “The division of the three times (past, present, and future) are simply the imputations of ignorant fools.”  More specifically, he warns us that included within this is the relationship that we may feel that we have with the past and future.  He further continues, “yogins and yoginis who have manifested this [realization] are able to bless a great aeon into an instant and an instant into a great aeon…  …if they were separate entities this would not be possible.”  Yet it is possible, and, it is up to us to ease into allowing this possibility.  This gets back to having set ideas about who we are, what we are capable of, and all of the other stories we have woven.

What happens when we wrestle with the solidity of time?  Or loosen our belts so that time can slip away…

When will your liberation occur?  Forget the texts, and all of the things you have heard, when will it be possible to truly ease into the mind’s essential nature?  After ngondro?  After you have mastered your yidam practice?  After a three year retreat?  After ordination?  After you die, in the bardo?  After you die seven times?  One hundred thousand times?  In the future? What about right now?  Did you already do it in the past, but got all distracted?

When we can see words as playful birds, and time reflected in the way that clouds appear and disappear in the sky, and the the solidity of our identities as the smoke of incense floating through the the rays of a setting sun, then maybe we can experience mind a little more clearly.  Not just the mind’s stillness, but by feeling out, as if expanding awareness to meet the bounds of space, without saying, doing, thinking, making notations, and without being Buddhist.  In trying to do this over and over, the artifice of relative reality can be seen, a necessary strange place that allows us to communicate, to help others, to support ourselves in the process of familiarizing ourselves with the mind- but not ourselves, not our identities.  Yet when we tighten our belts, we become men and women, Buddhists, with mass, height, characteristics, distinct identities that feel, want and need.  We have a cannon to follow and refer to, we experiment less and assume that it will all work out in the future, a bunch of now moments later, but the very now we live in is never seen as the free open experience of whatever arises without characteristics.

Wangchuk Dorje reminds us that we cannot realize this through “merely listening and reflecting, examining and analyzing, being very knowledgeable, having a sharp intellect, being skilled in exposition, being an excellent teacher or logician, and the like.”  He goes on to quote the Gandavyuhasutra:

The teachings of the perfect Buddha are not realized by simply hearing them.  For example, someone may be helplessly carried away by a river but still die of thirst. Not to meditate on the dharma is like that.

And:

Someone may stand at the cross roads and wish everyone prosperity, but they won’t receive any of it themselves.  Not to meditate on the dharma is like that.

We can go around with ideas of this and that, with loads of empowerments, secret instructions and a plethora of practices to choose from but the real wisdom comes from practice, from trial and error.  In fact, just one simple practice is more than enough- by sticking to it and blending it with our waking and sleeping moments great wonders are possible.  We are very well served by examining how and why we hold these truths about ourselves, our paths, and time to be self-evident. In attempting to let the constancy of our personal narrative fall away like an unneeded belt, lets take these words and use them to unzip themselves so that our view is that of the experience of mind, fresh, free, naked and not of the three times.