Here’s a goose egg for you!… or two until I sort this out later!
Yes ok…though pattern recognition and labelling comes into play… it’s ungraspable… shape and colour…
It can’t nourish your body …yet it comes on the wind of best wishes with the recording of Part (viii)… which is now available.
The nourishment these teachings offer can help to open us to how we are… to the wisdom which underlies equanimity free of bias towards friends and relatives and against enemies and strangers…*
As we digest these the ego slims…and whether or not eggs cake or chocolate are on the table doesn’t matter so much… we’re finding our way out of captivity towards liberation.
As it says in the book Finding Freedom…we already have the foundation, our own mind… study gives us a map… meditation gives us a method… but we have to choose do the work…
It’s Easter Sunday tomorrow… let’s have an easter-egg hunt for the children!
Maybe it’s a parent wanting to give the children a good time …or a focus for a get together… or maybe to raise some funds for charity by changing for entry.
The goal offered the child is finding the chocolate eggs, maybe finding the most chocolate eggs…!
But the allure of the quest depends on many variable factors…how many eggs have already been eaten, what’s the weather like, who else is participating, their age and mood…how many they find…. what other entertainment is available…
There may be pleasure in the quest and the consumption, but we can see if we look…that neither the eggs nor the factors nor the pleasure nor the participants… are self-existing and enduring phenomena…
Then we might think… are there any phenomena, whether seemingly internal or external, which are stably so, enduring reliably through time?
Followed by why are we looking for stability?…are we perhaps a rather shaky some ‘thing’ looking for some more reliable ‘thing’ on which to lean… to steady us as we hop from one thing to another?
Is there stability anywhere …and if so… where is it?… and how come we don’t experience it…?
When we rely on our ‘normal-human’ dualistic mind-set – that set of assumptions gives us the sense that being a knowable ‘something’ is unquestionably true…and that ‘the rest’ – all we consider to be ‘not us’, consists of other knowable somethings….
….and that knowing something about them or having an opinion about them… is a sign of our intelligence…
and that not knowing… is a sign of our stupidity**
It’s as if by sleight of hand, by employing this kind of knowledge…which more truly is ‘making sense of’ apparently self-existing stuff according to our interpretations… or through repetition of the interpretations of others… we can convince ourselves…and others who see things through a similar lens… that this selective knowledge gives validity to our view of others, ourselves, the world… and our place in it.
I can remember a sentence in a Ladybird book for children… where Janet and John’s activities are described as ‘we measure and we weigh’…
Boy, do we ever!
But does any of this mental activity take us any closer to discovering the heart of the matter, of our ‘selves’… or are we weaving an insubstantial yet somehow reassuring egoic cover-up… which a buddha would recognise as delusive
…a smoke-screen of beliefs which obscures and impedes any deep investigation into the relationship between our attachment to concepts…and suffering…?
If our eyes open a bit… through connection with the dharma we can start to put our conditioned frame of reference into question…
and shed light on the processes …whereby we habitually label define and invest in appearances as if they were self-existing things and fail to realise that it’s the energy of our own mind which flows with our attention that confers an apparent solidity or givenness to phenomena as we in-vest/ dress them up… wrapping them, subject-to object, in whatever mental clothing comes to mind…
In this way what ever I, as I take myself to be, remain as the centre…the judge, the one who knows what’s what….this is this and that is that!’ and we’re
This on-going activity obscures our ongoing presence and the clarity of our potential so we become lost, captivated, where we are…and in taking ourselves to be a thing amongst things we are vulnerable to fusion with any thought formation including the arising poisons… and moving more deeply into confusion.
So as we are studying the dharma map and gaining a deeper understanding of how we blind ourselves with our confused beliefs about the manner in which we exist… a sense of the why’s and wherefores…. mediation is a process with which, with the goal of freedom from delusion, we need to frequently engage…
How would we be if we gently eased out of our biased interpretations, if we had a rest from high-lighting and low-lighting transient occurrences according to the methodologies we habitually employ in making our evaluations and coming to definitive conclusions?
This coming Sunday is the first Sunday of the month, a simply sitting Sunday… so some of us will be sitting apart but together… not hunting for any answers…not using any methods to analyse what’s occurring…
We’ll be sitting on our bums and using that opportunity as much as we are able, to not interfere with, not to invest in nor reject… any of the phenomena arising in the experiential field…allowing the revelation of our mind as it is.
This particular practice is not easy…it takes practice allied with the study that illuminates the why’s and wherefores of getting lost…
If we can engage little and often it will get easier…and we can engage with more shamatha instead if that’s what we need to help us.
Coming into connection with the dharma teachings we are invited to become like the ‘Great goose’ of Indian mythology which can filter out the milk from the water it was mixed with… and be clear about finding and making use of what we need for liberation in this lifetime …
* The last line of the four immeasurable prayer as given in the book The deep and Vast Freedom of the Dharma by James Low…it’s a wonderful guide for our practice!
** part (viii) turns this assumption on it’s head!
