Relations, Conditions, Transformation

In thinking about relational existence (I am a body, I move around the world), if you consider the past expressing itself without a sense of "selfness" the thought process, and perhaps reality transforms.

So take all of space and all its forms there are conditions by which the world came to be and we can read about this in science and other religions everywhere; of course, it's better to formulate this for yourself. We can take those conditions and work them down to our own personal story and how our lives came to be and see that it's really no ones fault. Our conditions form our behaviour. As long as we are not seeing it directly there's only a couple of outcomes for any kind of stimulus.

So being a related body that experiences (perhaps creates?), relations and conditions we also transform the whole thing on the way by. We either continue the lineage of ignorance and thus create whatever it may create or we see directly and thus free ourselves. Seeing is the only thing that needs to be done. Once the pain or confusion has been seen directly we have a choice. We can choose to let it be or we can choose to change it and thirdly we can let it pass as all things do. Many times, leaving the situation be is the right answer.

Many people talk about being on a path or journey to some goal or end-point. Maybe its best to let them experience that. The only trouble with that is that whatever goal it may be is either unattainable without previous work, and thus only ever could be a pipe dream, or is fully attainable now. Either way, it's a sense of accomplishment that's being sought. Can we not generate this now? The form that's sought is strictly an attachment that can be dropped if we know that we are able to do this.

For some, it may be necessary to have a goal to "hold on" to. Maybe a process of generating some merit during a goal seeking exercise is necessary to prepare the mind for further acheivement. A sense of accomplishment can be a powerful force to move one from diseased states of mind to one that is able to clearly see the situtation.

A lot of the time, behaviours are there for a reason. Sometimes it's not entirely apparent. Many times if you know the personal story, or can infer bits of it, it's understandable as to why a behaviour is present. This works even for extreme aggression or other more severe mind states. Just because from our point of view, a behaviour is seen as unwholesome doesn't mean that it is so. To re-iterate, behaviours exist for good reasons.

The good news is that we have that pure ability to see and awaken at any point and if we are able to see, in the moment, what our conditions have created then we have the ability to be something else. Our existence is an odd mystery. Whatever is done with it is valid.

Solipsism - solved

I've linked an article by a Buddhist, North American scholar and the reason why I'm replying on it, is due to the "aha" I got from the article. The content of the post is mostly about a philosopher that meets up very closely with Buddhist phenomology. These are topics I'm interested in so it naturally peaked my interest.

I've always been a big adherent of Solipsism in that I've seen it as the only relational system that seemed to make sense - from my thoughts. The "Aha" in this article was that Solipsism only takes place in the recounting of a past moment. The fact that we can only see from our own experience is only grasped at the time of conceptualization. When in direct experience, there's only this experience. For that matter, the whole basis of self/other can only be conceptual. In the moment we are playing out our habits and conditions.

The Hardened Religious

I think this is a view we all suffer from. Once you get baptised, take refuge, or whatever other initiatory rite we may take, we find ourselves identifying and defending. I guess what I've come to is that our religious systems shouldn't be something we draw lines between. To me, it's more like speaking different languages. They can be translated and it takes quite an understanding to do this work.

The views that scare me the most are the ones that are hardened down to the point where the person holding them are willing to kill because the non-adherents are damned anyway. This kind of identification is naturally prone to hierarchy building as there will always be greater and lesser. Someone has to make the decisions right? In that whole process one is measuring and bowing to the greater and ever seeking the fame of the top.

Aren't we all capable of our own decisions? We all know what's right from our experience. Do we need to treat each other as higher and lower? We know that every person is born equal. We're nothing more than humans on the way to death and it all hurts sometimes. Is it possible to treat each other with respect and equality? It seems that the world moves so quickly that we attach to these designations very quickly in reliance on others to do what we know that we can do with a little trust in oneself. Besides, can you truly prove your senses are telling you the truth? (Sorry, my inner existentialist needed some exercise).

A song while dreaming

A kids show song got stuck in my head. In the morning, this is what it turned into. Thanks Foofa!

Who thinks these thoughts, where do they go?

Who thinks these thoughts; some kind of animal?

Who thinks these thoughts, where do they go?

Who thinks these thoughts; who am I? I don't know.

The indestructable

The only thing that cannot be disproven by one view or another is that reality can only be understood by the observer. The observers view is only valid from within the observers understanding. There are truths we can agree on and the world does indeed exist from it's own side, but ultimatlely constructed by mind. Like all my other late posts, mind simply is the fertile ground for phenomena. Both are needed to create reality.

What I'm after here is that even if someone is wrong, this "wrongness" can only be experienced under changing conditions where the wrongness is highlighted. For instance, I say that a given formula is correct like this one 1 = 0. I have some strange way of rendering truth out of this. At that moment, this is truth. It's invalidity won't come to light until there's something/someone else that dances into existence to show that 1 = 1.

On the outer view, we have our relative person. She has a mother, a car, a job. Lots of stuff we can agree on. When we enter the inner world of our subject, what her car or job means to her is something that we may not be able to see but we may be able to understand.

For the next level, we have to look directly at mind. I guess I've been at this threshold for some time. I feel like I've belaboured it a bit over the last couple of posts but I'm still trying to get the habit for myself.

When we look at how we look at our subject's car and how we define it; it become hard to define. To show this, ask yourself "what does a car mean?" We can talk about all the component parts but until we consider any one object independent of it's components we will continue to talk about parts. In order to answer our question we have to look at our minds. What does the car mean. We kinda get lost in our definitions here. They tend to wash away to nothing. We see how the mind is underneath it. It just seems to do this, but theres no-thing. No matter what appears and in what way, this mind of ours just does its thing. Continually cognizing our objects.

So here's an open question: If mind is like space and anything can fit in it and like light in that it make everything "visible", if death is conditional on a body, then, in some way, is there some continuance?

The spectra of definition

While regarding any given definition one has to consider that when making the defintion one makes a duality. This goes to the idea of "appearance making". While meditating, while one is experiencing concentration on the mind we find that definitions arise and fall away. While we usually use our mind to bring up objects that we can agree on with others and perform the actions of our day to day lives. During meditation we get let our definitions go.

When a defintion comes up, it produces duality. So if we look at a tree we can agree the appearance is a tree. There's lots of stuff out there that is not-tree. If we consider that the definition can include all of existence perhaps we can say that anything can have a measure of tree-ness. So instead of saying: is tree? Yes or No. We can say is tree 1 or 1.2 or 0. Of course this is a spectrum between 1 and 0 where 1 is definitely a tree and 0 is definitely not a tree.

I'm digressing from the point though. The spectrum of a phenomena is simply a concept to loosen the ties of duality. When everything happens in empty space (and it does), every definition conditions our experience. Is empty space perhaps intelligent? I don't know, but it certainly is creative!

If we accept that reality is strictly understood by our perception and our perception can be that of empty and creative space; perhaps this whole thing is our perception.

As much this article posits a self, let me interject the opposite. As much as a definition requires the mind to exist, the mind cannot create without the definition. So this empty creative space may exist on its own but without defintions how would one tell? Our mind goes out to welcome the world and the world comes out to meet the mind. Splitting the two is just another defintion.

Be patient, it will pass.

The Double Bind

There's a really odd bind we're all in. In order to "get away" from our situation and into something new, or different, we have to break two bonds. So far as I can tell there's only one way out.

So the first bond is the causes and conditions that we are all privvy to by birth. All of our impressions and understandings being formed by our learned notions. Now, we don't have to think about "previous lives" here, but we can if it suits you. For the contemporary thinker, we have only this life to gain our impressions.

That's the first bind. Our impressions bind us to the understandings of our world. Theoretically we could all be in The Matrix and all our understandings have been manipulated by a giant computer simulation in order to take our electricity that we generate. The basis remains the same. We can't escape our understandings.

The second bind is that any escape that we could devise would be on the basis of our ideas of escape that we've learned. Somehow we've understood this as good and what we have as bad. Well, I have to point everyone off to the the Three Marks of Existence at this point. The funny thing is that our escape is conditioned by our previous existence and therefore can't be an escape. How frusterating!! There's no escape!

Through all this conditioning, we always have a choice. We can choose to suffer more or do actions that will precipitate suffering or we can do something new. This is the way out.

The good news is there's no difference between samsara and nirvana. Good luck friends.