Sweetening

In many mystical traditions it is accepted that as one individual cleanses her mind of resentment, hostilities and attachments, all other minds benefit and show a similar ripening. That's how it seems to me right now, and while I was just meditating and in this period of doing the work of developing a heart dedicated to compassion.

MR, speaking about Buddha Shakyamuni the other day, mentioned that some believe when a Buddha gains enlightenment, all beings simultaneoius follow suit. So why aren't we all enlightned then, he asked. He didn't answer this question. Well, perhaps we're more enlightened than we would have been otherwise. As for me, I found it curious when, walking down Prospect Park West, I was suddenly delighted that there are 6.77 billion people on earth. 6.77 billion flames to light my heart up. This is rather a large shift from my former (hopefully) mindset in which the enormous human population makes me want to scream about resource depletion and the ravaging of the earth.

The train of thought brings to mind Rumi's extraordinary poem called "An Invisible Bee." Here's a skepful:

Look how desire has changed in you,
how light and colorless it is.

with the world growing new marvels
because of your changing. Your soul

has become an invisible bee. We
don't see it working, but there's

the full honeycomb! Your body's height,
six feet or so, but your soul rises

through nine levels of sky. A barrel
corked with earth and a raw wooden

spile keeps the oldest vieyard's wine
inside. When I see you, it is not so

much you physical form, but the company
of two riders, you pure-fire devotion

and your love for the one who teaches you;
then the sun and moon on foot behind those.

plunge

I wasn't really ready to meditate until about 2 years ago. I vaguely remember what it was like when I'd try... something like when you try to body surf and get caught by a wave and tossed around, smashing face against sand, inhaling salt water through the nose, getting the bathing suit filled with grit.

Why did it feel like that? I have an idea. I think it was the strength of intense unresolved psychic traumas and fears that buffeted me so much I'd feel queasy, but in an unconscious way, so that I hardly knew what was happening. I think Buddhists would talk bout these forces as "winds."

In the year or two before I started to meditate I went through pockets of intense upheaval, as if I was allowing karma to arise, pay my debts and get on with it. As the months went on, I experienced a death-in-life every so often, when some long held issue or belief about myself or others that limited my experience of the world would emerge from my energy field, come to a head, erupt, dissolve, dissolve so completely it was as if it had never existed in the first place. Gone. Attachments renunciated, but not deliberately and consciously, but as if my magic, or as a product of me getting out of the way so my higher self could kick my posterior to high heaven, saying "enough is enough!" It hurt. And then it was over. And then there was bliss, and stillness.

I believe Hindu Gurus such as Maharshi call this process letting go of "sheaths." I think that' very apt. On the other side of those sheaths, I started to meet the goddess behind all goddesses, Tara-Fatima-Guadalupe-Kali-Prajnapamitra-Yemia, who set my heart on fire with her illuminating lamp. Let the love that she lit there spread to all living things in the form of deep and true compassion.

So then finally it changed, and it became not only comfortable for me to hang out with myself in the darkness of my closed eyes, but very appealing, weighted by a profound blissful stillness. It was like slipping into a shallow ocean alive with little electric fish that buzzed and tingled while waves of warmth rippled deliciousness through this void I call myself, and within, an immense, soothing anchor. Work with shaman Joe Monkman helped me greatly in gaining a level of comfort with being in the present moment, in my body, with myself, and helped pave a path for me to go deeper, finding in myself that which can nurture, warm, and brighten and pacify my mind.

22 minutes

This day started well but I became more anxious and restless as time went on, insecure about all my choices, some pain around the heart and the right hip. At 2 I decided to meditate for a while and laid down. With so many people at work I felt a little Guilty and saw how obscenely luxurious this would look to so many, but was too keen on taking refuge to care too much. I fell asleep many times only to remember that I was dreaming. What did I see, a luminous saber toothed tiger swimming above me in clear water, mugwort, bees, and many other fleeting things. At one point I became more lucid and started to ask very directly for guidance, before falling off again. Somehow when in the liminal state I started to chant to myself about a loving, wise mind, saw the very slurred face of a smiling, happy man and opened my eyes to see that the clock read 2:22. I woke up in a different state of mind, as an instrument of a loving heart, with awareness of how much more tender and generous my heart has become over the last 4 years. With a loving heart as my ground of being, I felt like I'd found my lost anchor. How did I wake up to bodhichitta?

A strange note, the pain in my right hip moved to the left side. I had meditated with a quartz crystal in my left hand, I've heard it said that they help realize wishes.

mana prana chi ki

A nugget from the Wikipedia article on qigong...

In some styles of qigong, it is taught that humanity and nature are inseparable, and any belief otherwise is held to be an artificial discrimination based on a limited, two-dimensional view of human life. According to this philosophy, access to higher energy states and the subsequent health benefits said to be provided by these higher states is possible through the principle of cultivating virtue (de or te 德, see Tao Te Ching, chapters 16, 19, 28, 32, 37, and 57). Cultivating virtue could be described as a process by which one comes to realize that one was never separated from the primal, undifferentiated state of being free of artificial discrimination that is the true nature of the universe. Progress toward this goal can be made with the aid of deep relaxation (meditation), and deep relaxation is facilitated by the practice of qigong.

progress, really!

I'm finally coming back to something that I new very well a year or two ago but got sidetracked from. At that time when I'd meditate the feeling was of getting into a warm bath, of making time to enjoy all of these small energy events occuring in the body, tingles here and there, taps, emanations of heat, odd pulls and swoops. I guess because there are so many ways to meditate I lost my sense that all I needed to do was get into that bath and observe the currents of energy.

Reading Mysteries of the Life Force by Peter Meech has helped me become aware that the kind of steeping I was doing was a tribute to the life force, which grows when nurtured by awareness. The Chi Kung master who is the subject of the book teaches that when we properly nurture chi, it heals us, knowing exactly what to do.

Sometimes it requires patience to feel anything. Other times the sensations are rather remarkable. I was just meditating on the brown sofa in the living room and feeling the sensation of fingertips making delicate down strokes around the crown chakra, pressure in the third eye regions and tingling lines helping to relax tension in my left glutial. After a while I had the inclination to put both hands over my heart which brought a heavy warmth and radiance to it. I began to feel that my heart wanted to drink from the chi of my hands steadily and heartily and would not let them leave there. Oh, poor heart. Then I felt like moving the left hand down to dan tian and felt the energy from that little furnace connect with the heart energy in a powerful column of radiant, warm stillness. Now, as I write this, I still feel a very distinct pressure on my third eye and the happiness in my still recharging heart.

I suppose if the life force likes to be cradled in the awarness, then it also won't mind being cradled in an um, blog.

But wow, what a way to go. From what I've been reading there's a whole mountain range of life force that I haven't even come close to and wouldn't be strong enough to perceive at this point. And then, there's those little devils who are so good at stealing it away when I'm not looking.

Thinking about Chi

This morning it appears that meditation that simply observes various sensations appearing in the body is a meditation on chi, or a way of cradling and strengthening the life force. This meditation has a wider scope than that meant to be purely an excercise in strengthening focus by observing the breath.

Chi seems to appear as ebbs of coolness and heat, electrical rushes here and there, maybe down through the tongue and into the fingertips, tickles and pricks, and hopefully the development of a sensation of heat in the dan tian. But this isn't something to be controlled, we can trust when we pay respects to the subtle life force within us it knows better than us where to travel and how to heal, and how to instill deeper wisdom.

Maybe we can call chi "nectar." Yesterday at the Tara Puja Matthew explained how the word nectar derives from the roots of a word for "death" and the root of the word "tar" which means to cross over.

Nectar is derived from Latin nectar "drink of the gods", which in turn has its origins in the Greek word νέκταρ (néktar), presumed to be a compound of the elements nek- "death" and -tar "overcoming". The earliest recorded use of its current meaning, "sweet liquid in flowers", is 1609.[1] ~wikipedia

I had no idea the word was as loaded as the flowers that offer it.
He also mentioned a book called Ocean of Nectar by Geshe, which is a title I'm going to have to look into.

When we break, God rejoices

That is, when we give up because we realize it's never going to happen, when we exceed the limits of our smallness, when we give birth to something larger than our egos and preferences, when we realize there's no way we're up to the task we set before ourselves, but in spite of that, we're full tilt in effortless bounty.

happy with less

That seems to be the message of the day, coming to me with surprising sanity in spite of the groggy exhausted achy condition I'm in for no reason I can pin down, except for that most optimistic diagnosis some like to call "a healing crisis."

So many buttons I've pressed today are sticky, what glommed on to the camera? The Y key downstairs? Entropy the enemy, the weights on the bench press, it's not easy to get anything done. It's not easy to do something good. In fact, to do something really really good is really really hard and we do fail often, don't we? We're all climbing very slippery vines.

Through the fog of my middle world malaise comes a renewed appreciation in all the things I take for granted, breathing, for instance. I can do that. All the food in the refrigerator, the warmth and tremendous beauty of friends and company, the minds also hard at work trying to navigate this trying maze. Nature, whose beauty expands with each second, third and fourth look. Whose call is so loud.

Our lot is hard, our choices difficult. We are pulled in every direction and hunger for so much, and each of our steps is threatened with innumerable pitfalls. We find it hard to place limits on our indulgence, indulgences that undermine our better sense. How much more then should we celebrate every wholesome resolution, every graceful evolution, every just revolution.

The Puzzle of Order

What a gorgeous day it is today, what subtle architecture of light seems to fill the hour. While my to do list beckons, I have to take time to ruminate a bit on Order as it appears this morning.

Each plant and animal and living structure bears its unique order, cascading hierarchies of traits like you see most clearly in trees. I also see these beautiful subtle structures in people and am so deeply moved and humbled. In each mind, unique tendencies and preferences uncoil from an inimitable sensibility, especially in the case of artists, whose work sometimes reflects the delicate playfulness and self-atunement which to my mind resembles the infinitely various patterns God's breath makes when it blows and melts the elements into networks of unutterable beauty. A man, a woman, her mind, a snowflake, a dancing city of woven light.

Considering the infinite array of order in minerals, plants and animals, elements, planets, suns and galaxies, this 3 dimensional patchwork of form and law, the instinct of animals and man, the sensibilities and interests of writers and artists, builders and chefs, doctors and mothers and gardeners and arborists, the invisible cords that pull the curiosity of scientists into various configurations, leave me peaceful and fulfilled. For once, not hungry. For a moment, happy to be like air or water and mold to revelations of form.