And I got to thinking about life. Making it count. Pretty typical stuff, really.
But it hit me that whatever you think constitutes how to live life: climbing mountains, skydiving, meditating, lover deeper and talking sweeter (as Tim McGraw has it), meditating, pursuing your passions: there always has to be some room for doubt, and a residual, contemplative awareness.
I put the number at 25%. Do what you think you should be doing, but keep 25% of your awareness unattached, so that you can see the metainformation outside of the system.
This was my thought. I think it is what I instinctively do. Looking at it written, I don’t know if this is wise, but I will often an analogy. In Kum Nye meditation, you leave your mouth very slightly open and touch the top of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. Supposedly it is to complete an energy circuit. I believe the rest of the system so I suppose I believe this too. Certainly, though, that is a passive way of preventing you from tightening your jaw and lips, as many of us do thoughtlessly throughout the day.
In my own world, it might in fact be a good idea to meditate three hours a day, or do yoga for three hours a day, or even both. You are here to travel spiritually. Make your time here count.
But I think whenever you get obsessed with the One Thing, you lose something. There are always new things being blown from the future or the past or from distant lands into your life, and if you only focus on the One Thing–and that one thing could even be mindfulness, ironically enough, if you are dogmatic about it–you will miss them.
I don’t feel like I am expressing myself well here. It was a sensation I had, something which fluttered in with the fall leaves, then fluttered out. Perhaps I am describing Grace, what the Christians call grace, or at least what I understand the Christians to call grace (damn son: did you get them to twist your brain somewhere?)
There is a latent concept in meditation that “enlightenment”, so called (and I think in practice this refers to a large continuum of related but qualitatively different experiences by different individuals), is something you get at the line of long period of directed effort. For example, I was reading yesterday about these meditation caves in Bhutan, where people aspiring to Buddhahood meditate first three days, then if they are good with that 3 months, then finally if they are good with that, 3 years. At the end of the 3 years, presumably something good has happened, but not necessarily “enlightenment”. That is a gift, and I guess this is my point: that energy, that light, is always there. It is not necessarily a product of effort and striving. You can do the effort and get nothing, and be lazy and complacent and poof there it is.
Obviously, emotionally healthy people will organize their lives around effort of some sort. You have to work. Empirically, that and loving relationships count for most of the happiness in the world. Not watching TV. TV really doesn’t make anyone happy. By and large, neither does most time spent on the internet. Not even jacking off to beautiful women.
I think that’s closer to what I wanted to say.
I will add that it also occurred to me to comment that there are countless paths to enlightenment. In some respects each of us has to invent our own. This is another meaning of that saying I quote from time to time that “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Pure Buddhists are not Buddhists.
Rambling–I’m drinking coffee and warming up my brain for what will no doubt be a very tiring day–I was talking with a gal I know in a bar a few weeks ago. She got religion, and it seems to have done her good. And she thinks Buddhists worship the Buddha. This is a common misconception.
But really, thinking about it, when you see monks chanting mantras directed at a picture or icon of the Buddha, or some other luminary, like Padmasambhava, and lighting candles and burning incense, is such a perception really completely wrong? This is not killing the Buddha at all. Quite the opposite.
And culturally, sociologically, of course, this makes a ton of sense. We all seek grounding, tradition, the expected, a habitual rhythm to life. But if the Buddha argued anything, it was that all those things were fragile, transitory, impermanent, and that relying on them was Duhkha, now or in the future.
As I understand the doctrine, it would actually be now, in the sense that some part of you senses that you are held up by a network of fragile webs which can be taken from you at any moment. This latent, unconscious sense holds you back from the joy and fulfillment you could attain if you released yourself from those webs.
Blech. I need to stop procrastinating and go do something for that ugly beautiful money. I will say, though: this is not a bad way to procrastinate.