Excerpts from journal, Summer 2000^[1]

 

•••••••••••• Freedom from suffering

            Is there a difference between suffering and tension, between suffering and passion, between suffering and pain? What is suffering?

Am I somehow free to suffer, to cease suffering. Can I make this choice in each moment? If so, how can I choose to cease suffering?

Even if life is pervasively sick, tense, decaying, hollow, blind, impermanent, struggling, perhaps one is free from total despair or misery; perhaps one is free to be authentically joyful.

 

•••••••••••• Impermanence

            It’s not that something exists for awhile as one thing and then changes. Rather all existence is rooted in change and not separate from change from beginning to end. Things are not ‘impermanent’ but rather ‘impermanence.’

•           Impermanence is not only the destruction of Being, but is the very substance of Being. Thus, I shouldn't merely accept impermanence as one accepts a flaw, but fully illuminate and embrace it; create my entire life within it.

•           The truth of transience is inevitable. The substance of Being is flow. There is no solidity, no form, no accumulation, no gathering or summing-up of life or experience. We do not own our time; there is no I to own it. This flow cannot be arrested, it cannot be caught or held. We will not be able to view this later on. This momentary flow Being is the Reality which we often fail to see, which we often hide from.

•           Remembering death still shocks me, makes me feel more alive. Wow. We can’t hold onto anything; can’t keep anything. Don’t know anything: who we are, whether we will continue and for how long…

•           The bubble may burst at any time. Water slipping through a glass pipe.

•           I feel like I’ve lost something, but really I don’t think that I have. Always losing time. I never had it to begin with.

•           An illusory aspect of the self is that there is a self which devours experience, consumes it, possesses it, owns it, accumulates it. E.g. that ‘I’ posses my past and future experiences somehow, whereas someone else possesses their past and future experiences.

•           No separation of Being and Time. For example, being spending time, wasting time, passing time, grasping time. Being is itself Time.

•           It seems that all experience is Lost, that it cannot be caught, arrested, etc. Amazing that all experience is Lost!, given the vastness, the diversity, the greatness of all experience. Amazing that the experience of all beings is lost, regardless.

•           And yet I wonder, what is it that all experience is lost? That it doesn’t pile up, accumulate? When has a single moment ever abided? And yet, when has a single moment ever ended?

 

•••••••••••• A possible definition of "joy"

            Joy is not an object of awareness but rather awareness itself. Joy is the Light of Being, the fact that I am actually awake, that I actually feel what I feel.

            All mental and physical activity is joy. (For example, intellection and judgement as well as sensation, and so on.)

Thus sadness is a form of joy, pain is a form of joy. Thus it is joy which is suffering by grasping at joy.

            Joy and suffering are simultaneous.

•           One can rest one’s heart in the Light of Being.

•           To have faith that what I love is present in each moment. To have faith not only that joy exists, but that it exists in every moment although it is so often unseen.

•           That all existence may be joy.

 

•••••••••••• Metaphysics: Awareness, Freedom

            Is it possible that everything is Aware?!! (That is, somehow alive with being and self-defined value.)

            That which people might intend by the ‘conscious’ mind, I speculatively name the ‘arch-consciousness’: a meta-regulative psychological mechanism for the human organism. But why would this be the only Aware phenomenon? (That is perhaps, with experience, will, freedom, etc…) Why would only biological phenomena be Aware? Of course I don't know that everything is Aware, but I don't know for sure that it isn't, either.

Even the continuity-flow of the arch-consciousness from one moment to the next may be an illusion. (That is, in each moment, this consciousness may embody memories of previous existence, but each memory is phenomenon-in-itself.) Yet the division of phenomena may also be illusory; each interpenetrating regardless of temporal or spatial proximity. Thus, although all phenomena were Aware, Awareness might not belong to any particular phenomenon.

•           If we do have some ability to change circumstances for the better, then where does this freedom come from? In a metaphysical sense this is a mystery although in actuality this freedom is precisely oneself. So it might be more effective to clarify this freedom through direct awareness rather than through logic. This freedom does not necessarily require a permanent soul-entity-essence separate from concrete phenomenal psychophysical reality.

 

•••••••••••• Interpersonal

            More feeling that people are more the same, searching for some kind of happiness. More being able to observe people with increasing honesty, sympathy, and identification. Seeing that people are afraid of each other, and that they also long to love each other.

•           Slowly I let it in that I am not the only one awake, that the entire world is filled with creative, well intentioned people who are nevertheless suffering and dying.

•           We will all meet each other’s shining shadows in this great void.

•           Subjective existences, while they are held apart, have no boundaries. That is, although past and future experiences are held apart, there are no boundaries; although self and other experiences are held apart, there are no boundaries.

•           There is an infinite space between people which can’t be crossed. And yet perhaps we cross infinite times in each moment without realizing it.

•           Even as humans are individuated through causality, so are they completely interwoven through causality.

•           Communication with other people a way of developing faith in outside Being, in the real existence of a vast living world outside myself: suffering, passionate, joyful, authentic, experiential, willful, free, intelligent, wise, illuminative, creative, Awake.

            Communication a way of meeting outside Being. In actuality this meeting, this flow of inside and outside Being, is perpetual and inevitable. The instantaneous inside spark of I is continually met with, surrounded by the infinite unknown of outside time and space. It continuously flows out of and returns into that unknown. Increasing openness to this flow, this duality, this death, this selflessness.

            This meeting does not take place in marks or degrees; it isn’t  a product of specific events. Total unity between humans cannot occur through events. With respect to separation, separation is unbreakable. Yet with respect to unity, unity is unbroken. Each specific relational event brings forth this separation and this unity in some way. Perhaps one can open up to and create from the truth of unity and interdependence.

•           Developing compassion, identification for outside Being. Decreasing narcissism and increasing respect for others.

 

•••••••••••• Possible definitions of meditation

            Just This.

•           The honest and compassionate activity of the human heart. The divine search for divinity.

•           Being oneself. Being oneself wholeheartedly, honestly, actively.

•           Awareness, with non-attachment. Non-dual awareness, illumination.

•           Meditation, just this: Right now, what is this, this is this.

•           Clarifying Reality. Being honest about reality, illuminating reality. Acting appropriately to Reality. Being attentive to, faithful to, devoted to the Real.

 

•••••••••••• Cultivation without means-end dichotomy.

            More and more seeing that the search itself is holy. Seeing all of our attempts to grasp the logic of it as impossible but as a beautiful activity / expression of life, of our deepest heart. Practice as more and more continuous, less waiting for definition, for perfection.

•           There is a kind of mental trick which is not what I mean by cultivation without means-end dichotomy. An example of this is the idea that if you don't try to achieve something, you will stop worrying about it so much and end up achieving it after all.

            This sort of strategy might work out okay in certain situations, but what I'm talking about is I think less self-deceptive and less unstable. It is grounded in true embracing-acceptance-faithfulness-clarification-illumination of the Real, of the primacy of the Real over achievement.

•••••••••••• Formless, unlimited practice

            A formless practice. Boundless, unlimited, open. Infinite possible specific practices (including meditation techniques, ideas, experiences, etc.) may take place within it, but it is not limited to them, not dependent on their completion.

•           Formless practice takes place without a specific model. Practice is exploratory and continuous; it doesn’t wait for perfect, explicit instructions. An exploration rather than a static practice, always eluding definition.

            So it doesn’t limit the truth of existence. It doesn’t separate truth and existence.

•           The openness of life itself teaches us. The boundless freedom calls to us. It is always here teaching us that we are free, that we don’t have to limit ourselves, to cling to something, some way. If you chase, it  flees; if you flee, it chases. And yet it is always here, always this.

•           I may be limiting my experience by trying to realize a specific concept. Setting up a standard requiring something, seeking safety of conceptual castle objectivity. Trying to produce something, yet This--just as it is--is already far more profound than anything I would produce.

•           Limitless meaning and that incredible openness. Not getting dumbly stuck in simple, limited lines of possibility laden with good and bad tiredly measured. Embracing that openness, that undefined-ness rather than trying to catch something.

•           Experience does not wait for the completion or perfection of one’s philosophical understanding. Rather the act of philosophizing is a perpetually ongoing part of one’s experience. Uncertainty does not disrupt experience, nor does the quest for knowledge. Only the dependence on certainty would do so.

•           Don’t wait until you’ve figured out how you want to be and then try to experience that. Not attaching to any one view or expectation of practice; not trying to realize some specific ideal. For example, not requiring it to be seen as joyful or to make one happy. Just honest and open clarification, illumination.

•           Just this: being that which is, beyond trying to make it good or change it. That is, being fully open and attentive to supposedly negative emotions etc. as well as enjoyment, not trying to alchemize / transform them.

•           Not seeking to change aversion, displeasure, anxiety, confusion, fear regret etc. but illuminating them clearly, honestly, without attachment or aversion. They are not a disturbance to meditation at all but are rather the very phenomena of meditation; they are in themselves perfect truth. Not following, believing in, attaching to them, but not trying to eliminate them.

 

•••••••••••• Openness to different states of mind

            Perhaps an ongoing, semi-conscious desire to grasp experience by perfecting experience. As experience cannot be grasped, this hunger cannot be satiated. Trying to satiate it with profound meditative experiences or extreme calmness might not be too different from trying to satiate it in other ways.

•           I often feel like I am engaged in an intense struggle between my love and my fear. I at times I have thought that I have an excessive amount of fear; I have often struggled to cast it off, to be only joyful and full of love. Yet I’ve never been able to hold onto it. The hunger for that fearless, tensionless state seems to me to be a tremendous cause of suffering. Perhaps it is more helpful to accept the mind as it is. Cultivation takes place, but without means-end dichotomy. I don't not attempt to forcibly purify the mind of all supposedly negative emotions and grip onto some kind of ideal mind-experience-state.

•           Gradually letting go of trying to attain some perfectly tranquil heavenly state of mind and then enjoying my life completely, uninterruptedly thereafter. Letting go of trying to consume and digest my life. Perhaps eradicating my hatred / revulsion is an unrealistic goal. Acceptance should be open enough to accept non-acceptance.

 

•••••••••••• Acceptance, embracing

            Being faithful, honest, accepting, embracing the real exactly as it is. Planting feet in reality instead of objects of desire.

•           Much hope and fear. Trying not to get caught by either one. Hope and fear always exist together. So, not placing my heart in my hope’s completion but in the real.

•           ...Non-attachment. Non-grasping, not pushing away. Not struggling. Letting go. No gaining idea, no goal, nothing to achieve. Appreciating ones life, enjoying it as it is. Being present. Trying not to just wish I was elsewhere. Liberating aspect of impermanence. Overcoming fear of happiness, long habit of unhappiness. Equanimity. Not getting caught by good and bad, not getting caught by plans, projects. Not clinging to notions of gain and loss...

•           Perhaps less a matter of ending tension and more a matter of embracing tension.

•           Accepting the constant anxiety that all my little plans conflict with one another, with reality. That constant tension, that constant unease. Really genuinely not being attached to one outcome / way / experience / circumstance or another. Not only to scheme for comfort but to revel in this discomfort. Practicing to not obscure the beauty of my life.

•           Accepting my life as a chaotic adventure unfolding. Trying to make the best of it, but without actually knowing what that might be, without expecting something completely specific.

•           That phenomena are impermanent doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t embrace them, it means that one should embrace impermanence itself as well, the very impermanent aspect of the phenomena. Not getting caught by should-be’s. Not getting caught into forgetting its wondrous miracle-ness.

•           Home in chaos? The ability to say “This is my life,” to accept it, embrace it.

•           …Acceptance of imperfection, incompletion, uncertainty, errors, transience, sickness, loss, ungraspable-ness, troubles, worries, tensions, problems, etc.…

•           Resting my heart in the real. Faith that I am free to rest my heart in the real, faith that the Real is joyful. Not waiting for an emotional or experiential manifestation of this; rather it is an act of will.

•           “Liberation means that in birth we are liberated from birth; in death we are liberated from death. Thus there is detachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the great way.” -Eihei Dogen. Middle path between thirst for existence and thirst for nonexistence. That which is, in all its specificity; radical completion of the reality principle.

•           When Life is judged, it may happen to appear inadequate. But what is it inadequate in comparison to? All processes of judgement, assumption, comparison, etc. are an inseparable product of Life itself, exactly as it is in its totality. To reject Life is ultimately a rejection of the very basis of that rejection itself. To say that Life is definitively either bad or good is ultimately meaningless; there is no external standard by which to judge. Deeply anxiously wondering whether it’s good or bad may not ever really produce a final answer. Judging one’s life may be ultimately unnecessary.

•           Aversive, unpleasant experiences can ultimately be nourishing, in the practice they offer in accepting, accepting non-acceptance, etc.

•           By habit I tend to wallow in the sickness, just get bogged down in it, stuck in my ideas about what is wrong and how far I must go to be saved, what needs to be different before I can really live my life.

•           Heaven and Earth are not apart. A wonderful, terrifying practice. How I start to see it, then let it get carried away in the stream of worries, imperfections. ‘It would be heaven, but…’ Don’t believe it, don’t get caught!

•••••••••••• The ideal the real

            Although life is fundamentally positive, the focus of consciousness is fundamentally on the negative. I.e. the lack, the cracks in the dam, the dangers to the organism, the gap between ideal and real. Instead of seeing only the gap between the ideal and the real, see the Creation of the Real from the Void.

•           Learning to love the Real rather than only the Ideal.

•••••••••••• Acting without acting

            Don’t think that you have departed from it (regret). Don’t think you are to reach it (almost there).

•           Concern for relative contingent value does not conflict with practice. Practice does not attempt to abandon freedom, decision-making, anxiety, indecision, ambiguity, uncertainty or responsibility, rather it wholeheartedly embraces them as necessary and vital aspects of life.

•           Paradox acceptance, change. Paradox knowing, accepting unlimited uncertainty.

•           Letting go: not depending on fulfillment of established preferences, desires. Not being miserable amidst their absence. Not attaching to the belief in incompletion. Although I may strive for something, there is actually no need or benefit to being miserable if I haven’t yet got it, fail to get it, lose it , etc. This misery, this denigration of one’s life as it is, is extraneous.

•           Dwelling in regret is not necessary for acting fully toward the good, for understanding and ceasing to repeat past errors. Rather it hinders one by giving one a sense of tiredness, of defeat. To understand and accept that the nature of error is eternal and pervasive helps free one from dwelling in regret.

 

•••••••••••• Miscellaneous

A lot of wondering at life, of not taking these particularities for granted… Phenomena, events, times, places, people, circumstances, experiences, they are like this wonderful waterfall of light, each drop a treasure of incomparable beauty, the joy of catching touching each specific miracle just once, and maybe just once more, and just once more again perhaps… The anguish of having it all slip through our fingers. And yet perhaps there is no separate self to touch or grasp or lose hold of the light; perhaps the self is nothing other than the light.

•           I began to think that perhaps we never quite learn-grasp anything from moment to moment, that perhaps in a way each moment is the same moment.

•           Dependence on that which does not exist causes suffering.

•           Time has arrived. This is now this Specific now this particular time and place.

•           This writing is only one part of the real world. The experience is the real world, shifting, transient, painful, real.

•           This momentary flow Being is so transient, so formless, so unreal in the sense that it can’t be caught and viewed objectively, yet it is the soul of all reality. We have no self, each moment is instantly lost in time, and yet This is fully, powerfully, painfully, joyfully real. Negation of form, self, permanence; affirmation of This.

•           Previously my tendency was more exclusively oriented to visual beauty. Now appreciating more of the inner sensations of my body, such as circulation, etc.; appreciating the harmony which we almost always take for granted.

•           I had this feeling like of the substance of living / experience being this soupy quality hard to describe but that quality is always here when one is alive.

•           Life is like a dream: we think that we are walking on top of the world, but actually we are in the midst of it.

•           This is the placeless place. We are off the map here. In the void, no anchor.

•           One might say, ‘as nothing matters, why bother staying awake?’ But then again, ‘Why not stay awake?’ I think that this may be a crux. I find myself gradually learning that pain is not all that fearsome and pleasure not all that worth suffering over.

•           Chasing one’s tail. Longing to be oneself.

•           Oh you poor bastard, you’re in such a hurry to get out of that black pit. Struggling aimlessly only binds you tighter.

•           Cultivating awareness, without attachment. Awareness of suffering, of the causation of suffering, of the cessation of suffering. Awareness of immediacy, awareness of Awareness, Awakeness, of I.

•           Better to be comfortable in emptiness, suchness, the present, than to require the relentless attention to projects plans regrets ideals just in order to distract. Some amount of restless thought that avoids the present moment is a matter of busying oneself because of some failure to integrate pain, emptiness, immediacy, impermanence, aloneness, uncertainty, blindness, suffering, tension, struggle, freedom, and so on. So sad not to be as aware of Life as possible because of this fear and flight!

•           Believing that we are trapped—that our souls are trapped, obstructed by some problem or sickness—we trap ourselves. Our life and its limitations do not exist apart from each other, thus to say that we are limited by them is to suffer based on an imaginary dualism.

•           Practices such as ceasing suffering, acceptance, etc. may seem humble and non-dramatic, yet they help to open up and free the actuality of Life, which is itself powerful and incredible beyond comparison.

•           I feel like I am becoming gradually more comfortable with that intense open vision, that hungry-fearful suffering may not necessarily go along with it, that there is freedom there.

•           In a way, the mystery of life frees life. (For example, the mystery of death.)

•           To have faith that there is another side to life, other than suffering. Something is definitely wrong, but there is more to life that something being wrong.

•           We are so full. In this emptiness, so full.