Perceptual shifting and the Buddha nature

In contemplating the nature of Rigpa and nondualistic awareness I began to consider the similarities to so many popular games these days and their virtual universes.  In these worlds we imagine self as an avatar going about our day in an imaginary world collecting coins, interacting with others, and fighting the occasional battle. You are not the avatar, and though you are aware of this, you observe and direct the avatars movements. When the avatar engages in battle you do not have fear of dying because you know it is not you. The you that directs the avatar is, by comparison, impermanent. You can always start over again. The avatar is a reflection of you, the avatars experience is a reflection of experience. But it is not you, you are the observer. 

Through the view that the avatar is an extension, and ultimately an illusion you recognize that the suffering of the avatar is an illusion and the relationship between avatar and world is nondualistic, as inseparable as the pixels from the image they compose. Opening to the expansiveness of the world of the avatars you see that to believe self is the avatar would be a delusion. Most of us do not identify so strongly with the avatar and the world of the avatar that we confuse it for our true nature.  However, for the few who do, this is a delusion, a confusion of the true nature of our being.  

In delusion the confused experience a perceptual shift that obscures the mirror like quality of true experience. However, shifting our perception beyond self, beyond the avatar, frees us from attachment. From this perspective we see impermanence and recognize the nature of the material. The material world of the avatar is woven into samsara, the suffering of the avatar. It provides objects and people that can become attachments, but only when we forget these attachments only exist as a part of samsara. They are no more a part of our primordial nature than a blade of grass or a window pane in our avatar world. However all things in the avatar world come from the same source and spring from the same ground. This rendered world is the world of illusions. These programed traits and events are our karmic inertia. The ground is the same for samsara and nirvana. What determines its samsaric nature is the strength of our attachment and our confusion over the nature of mind and our primordial nature. The primordial nature exists beyond ground. When the world of the avatar ends our primordial nature does not end. We return again with a new avatar and a new life and collect our coins and find new battles. In this virtual world we are always awakened relative to our avatar. Except in rare cases of mental illness, we are never confused about the distinction between the avatar and our true nature.  If we do loose this distinction we recognize it as delusion.  

However, though the world we accept to be real is very similar, most have not awakened to its true nature.  We do not see our karma as a challenge to be overcome, we perceive it as all there is.  We trap ourselves with attachments and cling to this world and all its things.  We fear an end to this existence, and ask for answers to ease our suffering, some means to pacify our fear.  But usually we ask for the wrong things.  We don't recognize samsara so we ask for solutions that feed our attachment. And even if we do recognize samsara we may feel bound by our Karma.  We feel bound, and feel we must first unbind to move forward. This can seem like an impossible task, but what binds us? What holds us back? This too is illusion.  If we recognize our true nature then we recognize there was never anything to unbind.  The more we are bound the more we our shown the essence of samasara, and the more we are provoked by our karma to finally awaken. Our path to awakening is not lengthened, it's shortened. The nature of our suffering brings us closer to allowing our confusion to dawn as wisdom. This occurs through a perceptual shift in our awareness and a recognition that this game serves a purpose. In this moment we recognize we are already free and may awaken from our slumber.  

Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?

I recently finished reading a short book entitled “The Toltec Prophecies of Don Miguel Ruiz.” Here are the prophecies he describes:

PROPHECY ONE - The Sixth Sun Dawns
PROPHECY TWO - God Awakens
PROPHECY THREE - Intuition Arises
PROPHECY FOUR - Heaven is Known Here on Earth

According to Don Miguel we are already living in the age of the sixth Sun. It is the dawn of a new age and fulfillment of four ancient Toltec prophecies. The god that awakens is within us. All that we require to know heaven on Earth is to awaken to our own divinity. Don Miguel explains that our present existence is a sort of slumbering dream, a hell of our own creation, a hell born of our detachment from our true nature, our true potential. This same concept is very much a part of Buddhism. This notion that life is but a dream, and we each have within us the potential to awaken to an enlightened transcendent state. So, as I’ve been pondering these connections, I was led today to this poem by Edgar Allen Poe.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

A Dream Within a Dream – Edgar Allen Poe

I was immediately struck by the way his poem seemed to capture that cusp of awareness, that fleeting moment where all that we know to be tangible becomes suspiciously intangible, and in a moment of existential anguish we cry out this question. "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" It’s a question many of us have asked, but are we courageous enough in our conviction to accept the intangible? Are we truly free enough of this material firmament to let go, if only in mind, and release our grasp upon these sands, these apparent solid illusions of the concreteness of our reality? To accept that all that we see or seem may yet be, but a dream within a dream? And if not... having glimpsed the waters edge, can we live forever in this existential torment so beautifully captured by Poe? Or... has the time now come to sacrifice the security of the shore, and swim in the vast ocean of our awakening, as a new dawn breaks and the sixth sun rises.

The Frog and the Scorpion

An Aesops Fable:

A scorpion and a frog met beside the bank of a river and the scorpion asked the frog "Please Mr. Frog will you carry me upon your back across the river, for I have no other way to cross."  The frog, wary of the danger replies, "How do I know you won't sting me, after all, you are a scorpion." The scorpion stated rather matter of factly, "Of course I will not sting you, because if I do, I surely will die too.  After all, I cannot swim." 

The frog, satisfied by the apparent logic of the scorpions response sets out across the river, scorpion on his back.  Suddenly, midstream, the frog feels a sharp sting.  Slowly, the venom coursing through his body, the frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink.  Knowing the scorpion has doomed them both to drown the frog only has the strength to gasp "Why?"

Facing certain death the scorpion can only reply "Because I am a scorpion, and it's in my nature to sting..." 

The moral of this story has been interpreted many different ways.  There is no malice, no anger, no real intention to harm, behind the scorpions actions.  Only an indiscreet error leading to inevitable destruction.  A virtue, not of the sharpness of the sting, but of the potency of its venom.  

We all have a capacity to be the scorpion or the frog.  To accept a risk of being hurt, and a risk of hurting others.  Such is the complexity of all relationships.  I've found that, though Buddhism provides the tools to know equanimity and loving kindness, regardless of practice, it is the nature of life that sometimes we become the frog, and sometimes we become the scorpion.  Though we may strive to perfect ourselves, we are as yet unperfected.  

Expansion and Contraction

I have a new yoga teacher who I'm really starting to like. She does a more traditional Hatha practice and at the beginning of each practice she draws an observation from the yoga sutra's and attempts to connect it to daily life. Today she discussed expansion and contraction, in the context of breath, our muscles, and even our economy.

As I sat in my beginning meditation I allowed my mind to open to expansion and contraction. The universe itself was birthed into being as it rapidly expanded from a singularity, slowly expanding still, perhaps only to contract again in some far distant future. Pondering the steady expansion of our universe I was reminded of the Hermetic saying "as above so below, as below so above." A concept seemingly linking all things however small to that which exists on a grander cosmological, even spiritual scale. But what is "below" that is "above"? What thing, what characteristic, is so transcendent? Perhaps it's as simple as expansion and contraction.

As above so below.  Expansion and contraction is the quality that defines life itself. We breath in, we breath out. To breath in and to breath out is to be alive. To contract and to expand, it is a beating heart, it is the engagement of our muscles to allow our movement in the world. To project and open to receive. to copulate and create new life. To extrovert, or introvert. To open to others, or draw into ourselves. Expansion and contraction, breathing in and breathing out, taking things in and letting things go. These are the yin and the yang, the fire and water, and the sun and the moon. The poetic dichotomy of elements themselves bound in yoga, bound in union. These are the masculine and feminine aspects, projecting outward, and opening to receive. Expansion and contraction, a duality, represented on many different levels, symbolic, physical, sexual, and cosmological. Yoga is union, and to manifest union yoga is the cultivation, the balancing, of expansion and contraction. We see this duality in Pranayama, in the form of the physical practice, and in the form of harnessing the masculine and feminine energies of Kundalini. Yoga is union, both within the physical self and within the divine. The divinity within us with the source, with the primordial energy of the universe. Our existence itself, on every level, an expansion or contraction, and yoga, a tool to bring balance to their union.

A Noble Truth

It is in our nature to suffer.
We suffer because we cling to things that are transient, and all things in life are transient.
Our suffering can be overcome.
A path exists, available to each of us, that will lead to an end to our suffering.

These are a paraphrase, an interpretation, of the four noble truths. The Buddha's first gift to the world. They are simple ideas, and yet worthy of a lifetime of contemplation. We suffer because of attachment, craving, and clinging. It comes in many forms, our relationships, our materialism, even our approach to spirituality. We are socialized to identify self via object, to define our individual nature by what we do, what we wear, and with whom we consort. We are social animals in a social world, desperate for acceptance and the approval of others. We build a fortress around our ego, ever vigilant of those that might challenge our sense of self. We construct elaborate measures to quantify our worth, beginning with a score on a test that ranks us as less than or more than, onwards to wealth, career, and title. Our culture, particularly in the West encourages us to feed ego, to define our individual nature, to separate ourselves from fellow man. In feeding ego we feed alienation. We feed insecurity, desire, doubt. Who are we, but what we appear as to others? Where is the self, when all our mental jewelry, the adornments supporting our ego, are stripped away?

I've been contemplating a quote by Telliard de Chardin "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings sharing a human experience."

We are spiritual beings sharing a human experience... If we but accept this simple premise, how can we possibly see our existence as rooted in the pursuit of supporting ego? This life, this canvas, is but a stage for our development. A fine tool for the refinement of our truest nature. We are each threads woven together into the tapestry of our shared reality. Our experiences, our choices, our karma, tied together in every loop and stitch, and reverberating out across the fabric of our collective being. We are entangled, energetic, and eternal, and ultimately we are one.

If we are spiritual beings sharing a human experience why then do we suffer? Perhaps we suffer because we have forgotten our nature. Perhaps we suffer to find our path and awaken to our truest self. Perhaps our suffering is instead our gift, a sharp blade, which used properly, can cleave us of our ignorance, and awaken us to our potential. A means to remind us of a first noble truth, lost in our modernity, the truth that we are all simply spiritual beings sharing a human experience.

Touching the Naked Singularity

While perusing the magazines at Borders this evening I saw the words NAKED SINGULARITIES emblazoned on the cover of this months Scientific American. Naked singularities represent a sibling of black holes. I think I've always been intrigued by such phenomena. Dwarfed by the vastness of the cosmos, we may appear small and insignificant, but I choose to believe we've been graced with the awareness and the intellect to be the eyes of the universe staring back within itself. For those unfamiliar, singularities are the parts of a black hole where the strength of gravity becomes infinite and all of the mass of the collapsed star and any neighboring matter become compressed into a tiny dot in space. From our perception, they are dimensionless points where space and time have become twisted, pulled, and compressed. They are like the stuff of the Big Bang, a point of non space filled with immense gravitational energy, yet existing in a reality beyond our physics, beyond our technologies, but perhaps not beyond our mathematics and our imaginations. The naked singularity is a black hole without the event horizon. Those spinning vortex's depicted so colorfully in movies, like the whirlpools associated with ancient monsters from the sea, gobbling up all with the misfortune to wander by. It is naked because it is no longer obscured by the distorting effects of the event horizon. It simply sits in space, unadorned, twisting space and time for all that roam too near.

Seeing this headline reminded me of a verse I wrote a very long time ago. It was intended as a celebration of my passion for skiing, and that dance between skier and mountain choreographed by gravity's persistent pull. This is the first time I've shared it in a very long time.

Silently shredding the albescent blanket I touched a naked singularity and found a timeless moment...

Birthing into the blogosphere

Well, I've gone and done it.  I've created a blog.  The truth is, until recently, I've always had somewhat of mild distain for exactly the type of blog I've endeavored to publish.  Idle ramblings, rare creative moments, a small voice calling out into the ethereal void.  At best a lone synaptic flare penetrating into the collective unconscious, stirring an idea, a thought, perhaps even an emotion, in some distant other.  Of course, that makes the grand assumption that anyone save myself graces their eyes upon this page.  Is anything I have to share really that important?  Probably not, but I imagine that like beauty that choice rests with the beholder.  So, though I profess to be no sage, unwise beyond my years, I've come to share my idle ramblings and inspired moments.