Miles' Summary

Untamed, horse bucks, sways
One moment rough, next is calm
I, along for the ride

This poem came to me mid-week after practice, and sums up the week's work for me rather well.  The "rough" moments were those flooded with thought or pregnant with emotions.  The mind was off-balance, not able to concentrate so well.  Initially, thoughts that I was doing something wrong arose, providing steady ground for more thoughts to form.  These thoughts had a couple of effects: first, they prevented me from seeing what they were commenting about, offering a sort of distraction from reality; and second, prolonged the period of chaotic thoughts or strong emotions.  Allowing thoughts to drift back to the idea that I was enlightened and this was simply a manifestation of my enlightenment offered space for viewing the thoughts.  The breath also was a vehicle for enabling a stepping back.  Ironically enough, stepping back was also stepping in, as seeing such thoughts and emotions without the distraction of commentary moved me deeper into what was actually going on.

Calmer times were characterized by a sort of flow state, where each moment cascaded into the next, like a single point on a river, where all of the water that moves by is replaced by new water coming from behind it.  There was no need for any adjustment; just allowing things to unfold was enough.  Although there were periods where thoughts did not arise, interestingly much of the time the thoughts sort of migrate by continuously – watching and not interacting with them does not stop them from popping up to say Hi every now and then, or even in continuous bursts of multiple thoughts that flood the concentration.  Letting them roll by allows them to just keep moving on.

My yoga practice has been a very fruitful place for observation and exploration this week as well.  One experience was that of becoming annoyed with a teacher I do not regularly study with and not enjoying her teaching style during class.  Thoughts drifted to the idea of finding a way to irritate her.  Being there, I realized that the second thing that happens when I get irritated (after harming myself) is the desire to pass the same pain on to others.  The moment reminded me of a lecture that I once heard about violence among baboons, who have a very violent culture, and are continuously hitting each other.  A researcher found that at least half of the violence in their society was "referred violence," meaning that a medium-sized baboon, when hit by a bigger baboon, then took out his frustration on a smaller baboon.  While there are numerous implications to this experience, what really struck me was seeing directly how one's own mind state can so profoundly affect others, and that it only does so at the profound cost of the irritated person, who must achieve a state of such anger that it is no longer able to be contained.

 
Responses

Reading Piet's comments last week, I was confused by some of his words, especially the middle paragraph:

"During my morning sittings, I noticed a few times my tendency to let everything dissolve into the empty completeness that the wh talks about, while forgetting to include my own sense of self in doing so. When I first noticed this mistake, an image came to mind of my sense of self as using a straw to suck up the emptiness of the world, while still holding on to itself as the unquestioned center of the universe. Whenever I noticed that tendency, I could quickly relax that stubborn sense of self. It seemed to thrive on anonymity, and couldn't very well continue when exposed. Exposure immediately led to a much more relaxed sense of both body and mind."

Specifically, I was confused by the "mistake" of losing a sense of self, as selflessness struck me (perhaps incorrectly) as one of the more profound implications of the WH.  I am also confused by the idea of holding on to a view of the self as the unquestioned center of the universe.  Please correct me if I am seeing this wrong (especially since you are the astronomer, not me J), but how can there be a center to an infinite space?  Is the center not arbitrary?  In further reading, I am tempted to conjecture that the loss of self that you felt was only an error because it was a thought of anonymity rather than an actual loss of self, and I can see how awakening to that could be quite liberating.  I am not certain that this was what you meant.  Can you explain some more what you mean by this?