Mind knows no bounds when …

The mind knows no bounds when it is moral. When it is physically trained and empowered by creating fulfilling material conditions of morality and goodness. It is only then that one can grow in mindfulness, in concentration, and in wisdom.

Though a moral life is the most natural state of being, sometimes our own habits create resistance and keep us from a fulfilling life. Leaving things behind that we regret. Yesterday, I lost my mind and was rude with someone, I didn’t like the way I behaved. My moral eye didn’t like it. At this point let me explain what I mean by morality, apart from the five precepts, morality means tolerance, love and generosity. Detachment has a lot to do with morality. Ease has a lot to do with morality. In simpler view, when you lose your ease, you are being immoral. Refined meditators very clearly see the link between the baser occupations of greed, lust, ill-will resulting in losing of peace, of ease. So very clearly, I will trade something very precious and hard-earned if I lose the moral path. And morality will exercise the very organs that assist meditation, and eventually enlightenment. I might be millions of aeons from the final goal right now, and this life is like a drop in the ocean, but I need to make it there drop by drop.

One of the surprising discoveries of a meditative life was the significance of a moral life in it. I did live an uneventful and a moral life earlier too, but the effect wasn’t catalysed until meditation brought a lot of self-worth to it. Awareness and mindfulness of each event, wholesomeness of each thought suddenly seemed to acquire premier significance, enabling strength.

Another thing I wanted to express was 'allowing change to happen'. This is something that needs to be done deliberately. I started meditation little knowing what it will turn me into. I was surprised by changes that happened … I suddenly seemed to be following the cult of the noble ones The attitudes start coming, in poise and demeanor. The best thing is to approach meditation with an open mind, to allow change to happen. I seemed to be ‘sacrificing’ a lot of time, I allow this change to happen. (A lot of crap came up as I meditated -- aches and pains, my body resisted, mind resisted, habits resisted and I had to deal with it, meditation after all is not pleasing!)

I was overtaken by passion for meditation, I allow this change to happen. I started making strenuous effort, I allow this to happen. I grew detached, again I balance things in the material world to the extent I could, and allow even this to happen.
Allow the change to come, bend, bow and love the change that comes, for most of us it will be a great discomfort to let these changes come in, but let go …



Five precepts: http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/precepts.html

Sunshine

Have just returned from a trip/walk in the hills. Started from the river bed and reached somewhere up there, loose gravel, alone, apart from the chap who lead me there. Have been doing yoga since the last few days. Somehow getting anchored, discovering what I want to do, or in fact, getting strength to 'not do' things I never meant to be doing. At job, home, routine. Needed a break to start afresh, to let in sunshine.

Nano

Usually we experience things in chunks of moments. These are particularly large blocks of time compared to, say, a nanosecond. Smaller time units like nanoseconds are considered too small for 'cognition' but I discovered experiencing these small moments can be special.
I feel because we are unaware whats going on at unit level (nanoseconds) we develop only a partial view of reality, composed mainly of opinions and partial truths at best. This gives us opinions, and yes, emotions! It is significant to discover the mechanics that built emotions, ideas, reactions and our conclusions about things.

To experience the nanosecond:
Firstly, experience at a very small time unit level requires a very agile mind. (Like gymnasts become capable of impossible feats by continuous practice and training, a human mind can become agile and more capable by directed training, continuous training). Also, it is not just agility that helps to capture these small transient moments that build up to create sense impressions/emotions, one requires significant detachment from emotions to achieve this objectivity. A calm mind, detached from craving/aversion/greed/passion/hatred is a necessary preliminary to achieve concentration to capture the nanosecond experience. It helps reaching 'truthful judgements', a mind free from bias, free to investigate.



The special thing:
Now, the special thing about experiencing reality with this agility and detachment is that you get to see the fabrications that have built your thoughts. When one discovers the mechanism to thoughts it becomes difficult to live with biases, existence become lighter, and most prominently a moral life becomes the most natural state of being. Existence becomes joyful. I know I havent really built the relation between witnessing the discovery of mechanism of thought (frm experiencing truth at nanosecond level) and the change in behavior yet.

The change comes:
There is a significant change in behavior … and such a person is closer to truths than to his/her own thoughts! For example, a person looking at a flower will have a very clear cognition of the smell but will not be particularly pleased. Passing by a sewer this person will again have a very clear cognition (if the mind is still calm and concentrated) of the smell but will not be particularly displeased. The mind is trained for bare cognition from nanomoment to nanomoment and is left with no time to judge with ‘interefering opinions’ or tagging of each experience as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or pleasure and pain. Complete cognition of reality with penetrative experience with smaller time units changes not only the smaller picture but the larger experience as well, along with behavior. The emotional states change and the person becomes free from judging mindlessly, mind is clear to cognize reality as it is. The effect of this is not insignificant, it disables repressions or opinions that create chimeras, obsessions, phobias, guilts, cravings and aversions pulling us into wrong or biased opinions and frees one from uneding spiral of pleasure and pain.

Reality of the world akin to reality experienced is a very powerful state, the mind is lucid, clear and bright. Mind is closer to truth, such state is called the state of concentration 'dhyan', thoughts are linear, efficient and clear. Doubts, guilt, suffering, pain or pleasure don’t exist. Joy of knowledge springs forth. These states have to be practiced to be made more permanent basis of experience and one has to work hard to change habit pattern of the mind, to shift from making judgments/creating emotions to learning to stay calm and detached, even as one goes about very day business rationally (v. imp.:)
To reap a capacity of mind capable of cognition even at the nanosecond level requires constant training by directing one’ attention (vipassana). When such training of mind is perfected ‘knowledge’/Truth/wisdom starts becoming accessible, makes people more loving, wise, and lovable indeed :)

Again, I have an indirect understanding yet, but perhaps a step further than just the written word(shrut pragya) ... a calm mind will further help direct experience. Busy minds seldom reach somewhere.

* For calming the mind reflect upon Death as death, becoming as becoming, origin as origin, passing as passing, being as being, and thoughts as fabrications...

All of us

• I am saying this from a shift in perspective

Regardless of the conditions all of us seem to be subject to suffering, in equal measure. All of us, old, children, young, middle-aged trying to look young, healthy, sick, beautiful ugly—these seem to be the usual demarcations for me—seem to suffer. Now there is some sort of unity, none is superior to another.

Humans articulate suffering and have ‘will’ to make merit and to do wholesome acts. Those with perfected minds achieve liberation, there are some humans who need to do little to come face to face with knowledge while many are under numerous blind folds of ignorance, delusion or greed or anti-lv:) The path is the same for all, again a unity, do wholesome acts of mind, do wholesome acts of body...

lv

Time

And I watched and watched

as the world passed by

and yet didn’t learn.

For it is the depth, not the breadth of experience

that makes truth available.

Another observation that came from reading a meditation book was that learning will keep coming, I don’t have to feel awful about what I didn’t know earlier :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It is one of those days when I feel something that points out a larger emptiness. I feel it is because I feel more ‘connected’ to the outer sphere and inner reality, to emptiness itself—anatta. Have been spending hours meditating, had three consecutive holidays and had little else to do. It is still notional though, yet to come as literal experience.

Also, strangely enough my understanding of things have changed without warning. Love is not about receiving any more, but giving. Love is not passion, not in the least bit, but loving-kindness for all. Quite humbling.

Aspirations are linear and not splintered into a thousand mirages. Yet I have come at odds with common notions that take pride in creating a dependency in love. I have to saddeningly cover the grand liberating gifts of dhamma under the shroud of phrases like ‘I am austere’. There is bounty of satisfaction within and that’s reducing my sensory intake of food, pleasant odors, music etc., not any favoritism for a notion of austerity. Sometimes, one meal a day suffices. Fulfilling, but strange for peers who count my rotis. I have seen these phases of little eating come and go, yet to discover why.

May dhamma spread!

Rock said

A rock was buried in the bed of a river. With seasons the river changed color. During rains it will be muddy, in summers it will be green with algae and in dark winters when the nearby textile factory is active and there's little water, it looks like a little nullah. The rock, with the little awareness it had, looked around at the changing scenario, constantly flowing, changing colors, odor and hue. The rock felt it was travelling, changing. All the cycles never displaced the rock.

Sometimes, everything around us seems to be changing, and we take it as automatically affecting us. We are not what we react as, never are, for it is a flux. Reactions will come and go like fluids in the river, anger, passion, peace and becoming. This kind of change is not growth, its no-travel. One has to look at internal change, the breath, to understand the internal and the external, to understand if there is a change/progression at all?!

Joy

‘Cutivating joy' is more about ‘cognition’.

Even when there is anger, impatience, dissatisfaction, some part of me still seeks joy, and finds it.

Joy is independent of ‘pleasure.’ The difference has taken years to trickle down. Joy is a deeper state of mind than pleasure; it is more of a ‘disposition’.

One cant expect to feel joy after killing/stealing/sexual misconduct/intoxication. Such a person, one would say, is not in a state of joy. Joy is bereft of anguish, greed, hatred, or vengeance.

A stainless mind, a fearless mind, a free mind, is joy.

Cultivating joy

It was easy to swap joy for pleasure. Driving back from college with a friend, my favourite song on the radio, I thought to myself- Is this not pleasure? Well, it was an inconstant pleasure, something that wouldn’t last if we were to keep driving and listening to the song for 2 hours, ten hours … there will be a time when it would satiate me and a new desire would come. I’ll need food and that will be pleasure, then sleep, then this, that …endless like a trap! ‘Pleasure’ is certainly not joy, if I look back and answer my own question today. Also, by refuting pleasure as joy, I have more or less sought something deeper at work than a window in time, a meal, a day or a decade of consumerist existence.

To know right direction from wrong is to know joyful states from ones that bring suffering. Craving and aversion bring suffering; equanimity and awareness bring freedom, liberation. One starts appreciating this by experience, and develops morality, calm, compassion, and mindfulness- states akin to ‘joy’.

With constant mindfulness there is a more vigorous feeling of joy, an undercurrent, a more permanent one.

Letter to a non meditator friend III

Constantly making decisions, we constantly face elimination. Should I eat this, and drop this? Should I listen to this song, this person, this idea? It is all a matter of attaching significance.

Kind of worthwhile to understand this mechanism of significance. Where you place your significance would not come to you automatically, if it does then there is no gap between what you want to do and what you are doing right now, your wishes are your reality, you will and you are able to make the changes easily, without resistance from inside.

How to discover significance in our lives?

Significance is more a matter of creation. Look how you are 'making' your choices. You might be living in a world of ideas but your choices are a good reflection of how much the unconscious is operating its hold. You might believe in good food, see if you grab a tea knowing full well the milk might be adulterated. These operant reflexes, as I call them, will show you, help you discover your significance status by scratching some deeper layers. If you are not exercising when you can and no disability hinders you, you have not attached significance. It is a blessing time is a limitation, you can look through your actions during the day (or month) and come to your larger and inner significance barometer because this limitation sets prorities higher, decides what you actually did.

Start making changes from here.

What kind of changes?

Well, again ironically we know the larger things in this case but miss out the last details and that is where all the action happens. You are reading this mail and still wondering why are you not doing the work you had currently planned ... you are doing something that is ruining your larger plan in a small way.
Observe carefully, these larger changes reside in every moment. Small things, but immediate things. Sometimes implementing is not possible--you can not leave the job right away to start implementing changes, even if you can and will do it in future, you cant change everything suddenly to become the ideal person. Come on, lets accept that :) Now these gaps where we fail to implement are places that rot first. So, if you decided to exercise tomorrow, you made this choice thinking I would perhaps buy breakfast and miss reading the paper if I have to but I will exercise. If you dont then you stock some guilt. You become like a trader, first making a trade between exercise and buying breakfast and then between exercise and an opinion on You.
You know, you stop this trade. Become very clean with yourself. If you plan to wake up for exercise, let that come without trading with something else. Bring it as an intention, strong intention and you see you will get up ... things get easier, not difficult or judgemental--do not let the rot come in, just go on constructing.

In a larger context, do not let a failure in the past, a guilt, or a success affect your intentions or affect the significance you attach to something. No failed relationship should come in form of affecting your underlying actions out of habit. I know a girl who does not wear short sleeves because her ex didnt like them. Let there be no 'carry overs'. Once you do this you will find yourself dropping a lot of things, an old song that haunts you will probably lose its strength, will empty some space in your mind. You would be cleaning a cupboard and stacking fresh significance.

Lv

Letter to a non meditator friend II

Good Morning Gracious



Find time to look at the sky, take a walk.

Mind will wander thinking what to do ...

Bring you mind back and embrace the situation. A lot changes with how we deal with the situation. Not in actions but in perspectives, we can take away all the power a situation may have on our minds just by turning our thoughts.

Think of how things happened to us, we are made to do things that have been unpleasant to us. So much is out of control, for a while let go of the idea of what You did, see how it all happened, how it slipped even as we tried our best to save what we held dear.

And then embrace the situation, we already are deep in it, stop struggling for a while, breathe easy and take a walk.

Sending you love

When we love ...

Love can only mean one thing - love

Love is not mysterious for those loving it

Let me dwell upon what love is not:

Love is not 'touching', not 'feeling', love is not co-incidences, love is not rage, love makes existence gentle

Love does not entice you, love does not lure you, love does not overwhelm, love gives ease

Love is not a rumor, love is not limited, love is not miracle, love is real

Love is not mindless, love is not stupid, love is not cupid, love is not delusion, love is mindfulness

Love is not pleasure, love is not pain, love is not 'want', love is not competition, love is equanimity

Love is not spontaneous for most of us, but then love is not tied not impossible, love is not commited to just 'good', love just is, equally, for all!

When love erupts, it more or less cosumes everything else-all sorrow, all hatred, all bitterness everything vanishes in a surge like that of the waterfalls I saw somewhere in South Africa

Empowering

Just wanted to write that the burden of life becomes easier when you meditate.

Work

To fathom the seriousness of the practice is no easy task. I thought I was serious enough until I was taken to task, to real work. Now, that I see the veil I was under, I find it no surprise that people do not realize the 'seriousness' until they are near death, or withhold some similar strong experience to realize what vaccums we live in. Most people go well past the stage where they can really invest years of hard, focused work on cultivating the insight and faculties required for meditation, without realizing the 'seriousness'.

For one, I know now, meditation (vipassana) is no laid-back, relaxing activity-- I was under that delusion for so long! Like any real job in this world, it requires a through grinding in concepts and correct exercising of technique, just that at times it is much much more difficult because the emotions you might be facing may be as strong as tides in the ocean and at the same time seem intangible. They are Not intangible, just seem to be so, no thought is without significance, and lack of mindfulness and there you go, down in the pits of multiplying sankharas for hours and days on end.

It has been almost a year that I have given up dinner, most days I have gone without food after noon. Lost considerable weight on the boobs and buttocks apart from being weak and thin, frail. This invited a lot of comments from friends and well-wishers. Apparently, even I felt I didnt know my facts so well ... but not for a moment did I doubt about my following the eight precepts. As I lost strength, I knew how strongly physical reality grasped me. What I believed differed from what I 'felt', I noticed how proud I was of my body and how strong the attachment. Taking care of body is one thing, being attached to the point of being deluded is another. Unruly attachment leads to unruly passion, to conducts that risks your happiness, to realise this--one needs to probe these first hand feelings, not indulge one's beliefs that change every now and then. First hand experience surface from such incidents as being hungry and not eating because u have determined t see you reactions, suspending what u 'think' and looking at how you react to physical fabrications first hand, it is only this first-hand experience that gives an opportunity to Work. That is why reading this will not help unless you also practice meditation, it has to come to individual experience, not mental 'belief'.

It is true that the past months I have been taking one early-evening meal, and have regained some of the strength, but I know I have also failed in more ways than one. It wasnt about giving up food, it was about will, releasing greed, releasing ties and compulsions. There were times when I would be busy in the morning ... and during the day, one particular day I came back home from another city and having walked miles was feeling weak and entirely hungry, I delayed taking food until next morning, cultivating even stronger will, stronger that the need for food. This determination has come to my rescue in times of tough decisions and during easy ones, I have been able to preserve discipline, not when it was easy to slip but also in times when it is difficult to slip. I noticed I tend to loose control when I thought Oh! I am in control let me take a bite....when I thought I wasnt giving in to greed I indulged in it!

It was during hostel days that I started thinking about giving up evening meals altogether. Dinners were the best deal of the day ... rich and nutritious. I remember coming back from jog one evening, Asha mam was taking attendance and some girls were sitting around her having dinner, their plates were full of goodies, finger chips, manchurian ... and I felt a strong moment of reflection thus "I have determined to not take dinner, it does not matter what is cooked, I will not react to the food or look at it". Without knowing I had sown a seed that will help my determination during this one year of giving up dinner. In fact, it didnt seem like 'giving up' at all, some time back (one year one month back, when I was still at PGW hostel, Delhi Univeristy) I was yet to discover the joy/pitti. This giving up was not giving up because it was colored by 'joy' rapture of meditation. Being prepared helps, one does not know what lays in the future, investing in mind is true preparation.

Having discovered this joy, away from material pleasure is a relief. I have discovered it only a bit, also now I know that joy that I now experience is also artificial, like cultivated just from will, it is not pure, but yet, I conceptualise the brahma-vihara. It is 'joy' and I notice it, it is as a factor of enlightement, and in no matter what small amount, I shall acknowledge its presence, I acknowledge the presence. Reading Thanissaro Bhikku's "Head and Heart Together" on accesstoinsight.org really helped understanding metta--ignorance sucks, one really needs guidance to come out of igorance. I discovered this site while working at Katha, a resource that gave me guidance and acted as a spiritual companion. I ultimately lost my job as editor at Katha as I used all the time to read the texts on this site. Didnt have a computer at my disposal and didnt have the discretion to buy it from a month's salary, the urgency to read was so great that I read it as soon as I laid my hands on the computer right from the first days at work, work suffered. I was thirsty, Ganges was flowing ...

One strong moment can lead to 10,000 others. Learning itself becomes a swarming tide that engulfs all the broken temporary shackles where the mind is caged. It seems like destruction has met us, that one has to start all over, that giving up a dinner, a job, a passion is unwise for something as abstract as a 'notion of discipline' in med., greed makes us overlook basic precepts, sometimes fear threatens and we give in!

I know I thought I was correct even as I broke some of these rules, cultivating so much harm that it is beyond imagination to fathom the cost I had to bear. Someone not into the practice may think of my opinion of this loss as fear, that I broke the precepts and the loss was as great as I make it out to be, may think I am scared or in misbelief.

However, I am lucky, I see the danger, I have seen the roots, and I have seen how carelessness establishes and feeds on us, destroying all the good we may have done. Usually there is a conviction at the back of the mind--that you are correct--this conviction has to go. *An unskillful mind cant be trusted! That's why complete surrender to the buddha, the dhamma, the sangha.

May I thrust myself with greater force in the practice, a force literally greater than the fear of death, death itself. May I emerge successful.

Replace this conviction with discrimination, replace it with detachment, equanimity, awareness-keep cultivating and practicing to make them stronger.

Why I miss you?

O mistakes! why I miss thee?
O sadness! why I skip thee?

Be...cause you take from me
what was always there, what was always free

And you tag it with a price
and thats certainly not nice!




Pj :)

Letter to a Non-meditator Friend

Dear

I understand what it is to be staying without family ... or knowing there is none around if you want to take a year off from work.
Our situations are different, but I can imagine the plight. One thing is for sure, it does not take just a day to come out of such situations, or feelings. This feeling of plight, even when you are well-placed currently, and more sensible than most, is sometimes too abstract, and one doesnt know exactly what to fix, it seems to permeate everything to some extent.

It will be comforting to know that you wont have to go around changing others or everything around you to gain happiness, you have to take over control of just one thing, your own clarity of mind. What usually happens is that we keep going around in circles, we perceive some people as good, then we start doubting that goodness, and then something crops up again and we replace that trust.
Again the same circle starts of evaluating and revaluating our feelings for someone, and revaluating ourselves against them. All this and more happens when we live superficially, What is it to live superficially, lightly? When we have to constantly change our evaluations of things and people around us, when there is no constancy, when this happens one should understand one is in shallow waters. If one is facing emotional upheavals, one is living superficially. It is not Grand living, it is not noble living. One becomes anguished and that anguish spreads to others. One not only feels vulnerable, but also becomes vulnerable, getting deeply influenced even by small seemingly insignificant matters that steal one of one's vital energy.


It takes lot of patience to steer yourself out of such plight, to become one of stainless steel, it is akin to crossing an ocean, or getting in to a top B-school, it takes effort in the right direction. Some people have a better vessel than others, support of partner, family, children make this ocean easy to cross. What dissuades us from understanding what is right is our own fear of the consequences, greed and delusions about things, they grasp a hold we cant resist. Some moments of clarity may come, but they are deeply overshadowed in everyday humdrum.

One has to learn to expand these moments of intelligence until it spreads to each situation you are facing, when this sensibility that comes with insight, detachment and every-present joy, penetrates and inspires each action you undertake. There is a way to it, and it takes practice.

As long as you know you are on your way, storms can keep coming!

Lv
Pooja

As I Change

This Saturday I went for a group sitting

Finding verse to catch the framework ...

May be there is harm, may be there isn't. This morning I wondered if I'd like to skip a year of hardship and move to the good ones ... it is the same, it is the same ... it is not as if bad is bad or good is good ... for me it should all be the same.

Revisiting

Overwhelming ... powerful ... some connexions stir you, make you cry

Being Born in this great land of dhamma, feeling the air, the soil ... the presence, the sensation


Powerful existence, vigor, placid calmness, humble Himalayas, deserts, depths, sun, rain, scent of the soil, blessing ... the land of Gods

#Am back from a retreat and almost cried out of gratitude. India has been the place for so many seekers in the past, humble home!

Sthit Pragya

When it all passes by and the consciousness remains still-observing!

Starting with identifying just One moment of Clear Observation ...usually it is difficult to identify if you observed well. The moment of clear observation comes when the mind is temporarily free from defilement- greed, avarice etc. giving way to some concentration, focus, some power of will over the mind, some awareness to observe the non-stop reel of thoughts, some stillness of the mind...
Thereon, when one stills the mind, to objectively experience whatever experience is available at hand-pain or pleasure, pleasant or unpleasant, that one discovers a new dimension of observation that does not directly 'suffer' the 'experience' but is just aware - a still mind unaffected by pain, pleasure...very rare moments, very delicate moments for a starter. Even starting to identifying these moments seem like a move closer to being right, only with practice can I sustain this observation even in strong, more intense experiences. Right now, I cant hold it even if I start speaking to someone, it is only when I am quiet ...

So I realized with an oz of deeper understanding the stith pragya must be reference to a person who could sustain this equanimous understanding even in the most intense human experiences, in all experiences in fact! These people conquer not only terror or torture or bliss or elevation, but establish themselves in concentration and awareness. Thus, they fathom not just the conscious mind but also the sub-conscious. Sportsmen too sometimes use somewhat a similar technique to conquer boredom, to achieve concentration, and to better their game through practice, the will to take one more lap, even faster