Ideas Welcome

Two details regarding the Spirit Rock retreat last week that I haven’t figured out at all:

First, I experienced a lot of anticipation leading up to the retreat. I probably talked too much about it with colleagues and friends, but they were patient and indulgent with my unfocused animation. As a yoga teacher persuaded me a long time ago, it’s often best to set aside expectations before embarking on a new sort of experience. But I didn’t manage that overly well this time.

To get to Spirit Rock for the start of the retreat on Wednesday, December 10, I had to catch a flight from DEN to SFO. Nothing terribly unusual about that. I get to the airport in the morning, check through security, find the gate, login, and field last-minute office work by email. The gate attendant calls the boarding sequence. I board, find my seat, and settle in.

And sitting there on the airplane, my mind shifts a bit, and I see everything from an outsider’s perspective – to borrow Oliver Sack’s phrase, like an anthropologist from Mars.

No, wait. That’s too cold. More like the first-time-appreciation of Miranda’s “…brave, new world…” phrasing, before Huxley turned it dark and naïve.

The people walking down the center aisle of the plane are a varied lot, each remarkable, each strange, each new. That they are embodiments of consciousness is remarkable, strange, and new. That I can see them is remarkable, strange, and new.

After a time, the sense subsides, leaving new tracings in my mind.

How? Why? Exactly what?

Couldn’t tell you.

Second, as I mentioned in a previous post, three days into the retreat, I woke, showered, walked to the meditation hall and sat the pre-dawn meditation. When the bell rang gently, I got up, left the hall, put on my shoes, and began walking down the hill to the dining hall.

As I walked on a little dirt path down the hill, my sense of self turned suddenly transparent, and I saw from the perspective of something other than Sean. Not that there wasn’t a Sean – he was there, but he wasn’t the perspective I was seeing from. He was the perspective that something was seeing through. That perspective was filled with quiet, abiding joy – joy at the cold air, joy at the diminishing cramp in Sean’s neck, joy at the emptiness before eating, joy at the peace of the retreat, joy at Sean’s sore right knee, joy at the slanting sun, joy at the cloud of exhaled air.
The sense sustained itself for a time, then subsided.

It’s hard to find the right words for the completely natural sense of seeing through the self of that experience.

* * *

Ideas or references to others’ ideas about such experiences are welcome.

Karma

A few days ago, Kavita raised a question about karma, so I thought I'd post this to see if I can get a discussion started:

In simple terms, what does karma mean? It means that whatever we do, with our body, speech, or mind, will have a corresponding result. Each action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said by the masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a little seed can become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: "Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain." Similarly he said: "Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel." Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed "by time, fire, or water." Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

- Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

The Buddha identified karma as a volitional activity. That is, each volition in the mind is like a seed with tremendous potential. In the same way that the smallest acorn contains the potential of a great oak tree, so too each of our willed actions contains the seed of karmic results. The particular result depends on the qualities of mind associated with each volition. Greed, hatred, and delusion are unwholesome qualities that produce fruits of suffering; generosity, love, and wisdom are wholesome factors that bear fruits of happiness. The Buddha called the understanding of this law of karma, the law of action and result, the "light of the world," because it illuminates how life unfolds and why things are the way they are. The wisdom of this understanding allows us the freedom to make wise choices in our life.

- Joseph Goldstein, "Insight Meditation"; from Everyday Mind.

My view of karma: when a mind acts (by deciding, by refusing to decide, by choosing, by noticing, by ignoring, by fantasizing, whatever), it changes not only the body in which it is most immediately embedded, but the mind also changes itself. Most of the choosing that a mind does, it does without the choices ever reaching a conscious level, so it can be hard to track the operation of karma precisely. But by bringing more of our thought processes to the stage of awareness, where thoughts can be seen directly and evaluated explicitly begins to facilitate understanding of karma. Also, becoming aware of the "background noise" of a mind -- quieting enough to see directly the thoughts, memories, and etc., that seem to arise of their own accord -- allows us to begin to trace the occurrence of a particular thought or memory back to a mind-action that created the karma (causal situation) that brought that particular thought/memory to mind in the present.

As I think about all the possible thoughts, memories or etc. that could arise in this exact moment of mind, there is a reason that a particular memory occurred. Karma is the method of explaining that occurrence. Either those thoughts arise without a cause, in which case those thoughts and the world that is perceived as a function of those thoughts are inexplicable, or they arise due to a cause (or due to several causes).

Seeing karma is an exercise in interpreting the mind-events of the present by reference to prior actions. Living karma is creating future mind-events by the way we act in the present. At this point, it may be worth noting that while I refer to "mind-events," everything that we experience, we experience through a mind (though I use the term "mind" quite broadly, including all that we experience subjectively, whatever the mechanism or inclusion of others within that term).

From such a stance, it's easier for me to understand how various articulations of karma can seem (or can even be adopted by those who perceive it so) to be pre-rational magical thinking. Do I think that rain falls on my crops because I paid my tithing (or sacrificed my lamb, or gave water to the thirsty, or fasted, or chanted some mantra a thousand times)? No. I don't. But I'm confident that how I perceive the rain or lack of rain, and especially how I choose to respond to the rain or lack of rain will in the future affect my perceptions and thoughts about crops or drought. Also, I'm reasonably confident that I can trace my perceptions of and reactions to the crops or the drought by finding mind-events in the past that have conditioned those perceptions and reactions.

Finally, in this discussion, it may be helpful to make clear that my notion of "self" is not limited to the space inside my skin, especially when it comes to considering karma. An event inside my tiny little mind is as much an event of the Earth or the Cosmos as it is of the neural pathways in my brain. Modern science has done a wonderful job of helping us perceive some aspects of karma -- of how our actions affect the world around us and inside us -- but there are yet many ways that we affect the world that we haven't figured out, yet. So while I don't think it rains on my crops because I did something good previously, I'm interested in understanding more about how my actions -- even those we usually think of as "just mental actions" -- may affect the world outside my skin.

Thoughts?

Not Trying

Today: the counterpose to yesterday's thought

Yoda:

Do or do not. There is no try.

Last Saturday, a teacher called Handstand, saw the class full of non-handstands, and stopped to teach us a mechanical point: to move into handstand, the starting point is to draw the navel toward the spine, and then, from there, to draw the abdominal muscles up toward, and into the space of the rib cage. In yoga-speak, this abdominal maneuver is called "uddiyana bandha." I didn't have the shoulder stamina left at the time to really commit to handstand, but I tried the abdominal lock and made a half-hearted attempt to move into handstand. As with any half-hearted effort, I didn't move into handstand. But I did feel a completely unexpected stability that I had never imagined.

So this morning, I thought I'd better give the new approach to handstand a try (as tomorrow I get more shoulder surgery, and any effort at handstand will be out of bounds for a while). I positioned my hands about 20" from the wall, and I tried to engage uddiyana bandha. And my mind freaked on me. I got nervous. Worried. Unclear. Weird. I couldn't bring myself to repeat the structure of the pose that I perceived on Saturday. So I flipped up into my usual version of Handstand, that relies on the wall to keep me from flipping all the way over.

In meditation following practice, I found my mind moving into ego thoughts -- "what I do makes me a model yogi"; "I'm a good father"; "I'm trying Handstand -- that's a good thing, even if I don't do it right"; the posts I make on line are pretty good." I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. All projection and aspiration. No doing or not doing. Maybe I'm getting Yoda's point, after all.