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Greetings!
This Friday night we begin the Basics of Buddhism course. We will be studying the foundational principles of Buddhism in a step-by-step, gradual way. This class is intended to be easy entry for beginners but also insightful for experienced practitioners. It will include teachings from the Dalai Lama, Pema Chodron, Ken McLeod and others. Now Friday nights will have two tracks: - Wake Up to Your Life on the first and third Fridays.
- Buddhism Basics on the second and fourth Fridays.
You are welcome to attend one or both tracks. Friday nights, 7-9 pm. Doors open at 6:45. 1716A Linden Avenue (door on the right)
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Verse 22 from The 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva
A Teaching by Ken McLeod
Whatever arises in experience is your own mind.
Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations.
Know that and don't generate
Subject-object fixations -- this is the practice of a bodhisattva.
You can't escape what arises in your experience. It can't be done. Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, joy, pain, anger, love, peace, turmoil, confusion, clarity, it's all yours. There is no escape. This is your life.
As soon as you say, "I don't want to experience this" or "This is not me", you have defined a self, your self. Because you reject a part of your life, the "you" you have created will always feel incomplete and unresolved. This is a path of struggle and suffering. Grasping is similar: a sense of self that needs something other to be complete. And ignoring is, by definition, a distancing from experience.
The first step is to accept experience. Don't oppose it. Don't grasp it. Don't ignore it.
When something happens in your life and strong feelings arise, so do stories and associations. You think, you analyze, you speculate, you wonder, you dream, you muse, you ponder, you paint. Whether you are seduced, polarized or paralyzed, you are taken out of direct experience, i.e., what is happening in your body, the visceral charge of emotions, the expanse and clarity of awareness, what is happening right in front of you.
The stories confuse you. You end up lost in a world of thought and projection. Your incomplete self is thrown around by a multitude of interpretations. You lose all connection with the present and act out what the stories tell you to do. They are always about the past, however, not about what is happening right now, and the imprecision or the inappropriateness of your actions just creates more problems. It's a vicious, vicious cycle. Welcome to samsara!
In spiritual practice we seek a way of life, a way of experiencing life, which is not solely determined by our genes, biological propensities, or cultural conditioning. Thus, whenever possible, accept what is arising in your experience. Don't believe it; just accept it.
What is mind? It's not the brain. The brain is an organ. The brain doesn't think, it doesn't feel, and it is not aware.
Mind is your experience of life. It is simultaneously the space in which experience arises and the experiences that do arise, just as sound is simultaneously the silence in which sound arises and the sound itself. Experience and experiencing cannot be separated, any more than the two ends of a pencil can be separated. Yet we habitually associate "I" with knowing and "object" with experience.
Knowing isn't the same as understanding. When we understand something, we have an explanation, and what we understand is now determined, predictable. Understanding takes the life out of experience. Knowing leads you into an infinitely deep, infinitely intimate relationship with experience, where knowing and known are not separate.
You can't understand mind. You can't understand life. You can know it. As long as you oppose or grasp or ignore, however, you set up a separate self and you will never know it completely.
Quotation
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe"; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
"This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
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Let's wake up!
With love,
Rita Frizzell
Luminous Mind
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