Buddhism Question

I think I know what you meant JL. Those moment's when it is impossible to think of anything more to want or need.

Cyracuz,

Those moments don't just happen, do they? They are the result of years of practice, that was sometimes dreary and seemingly unproductive. Practice sometimes was at the cost of doing something else that might have been more immediately pleasurable. Over years, coaxing music out of a wooden box with merciless strings gradually emerged. You learned a ritual associated with the instrument; tune, scales, finding a seat, whatever. Then you focus your mind. The room you play to is still out there, but becomes almost inconsequential as you center your thought on the music itself. You are acutely aware of the band, and all of a sudden you are transported.

Practicing Buddhism is similar. You begin by learning a few essential chords, and you practice diligently every day. In Buddhism, you practice meditation and the fundamentals you are still struggling to master. Sometimes it is tedious and you are tempted to just toss the whole thing in the scrap barrel. The early pleasures of being able to pick out Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, begins to fade and the discipline chafes. What you may not notice is that your ability to completely focus your mind is becoming easier, and your thoughts, words and behavior are subtly shifting away from patterns that cause you and the world suffering. The people around you might notice the difference in you before you recognize it yourself. You will become less impatient, slower to become angry, and more accepting of little troubles and annoyances. One day you will be out walking, and suddenly between steps you will think for a moment that you've lost your mind. Your ego will seem to dissolve, and you will be tempted to hold tight to it out of fear that you are doomed. The world around you will dissolve along with your sense of being an independent being, one among many. Time will be suspended and you will experience eternity. With the end of time, space becomes first static and then it also dissolves. You will be filled with joy and a sense of completeness as your now egoless separateness merges once again into the Great Ineffable, the Buddha Nature, Satory, Enlightenment. In Oneness there is no suffering, no anxiety, no loneliness ... only Ultimate Reality from which the Phenomenal World arises. Then your foot will hit the ground and you will be momentarily dazed by the Experience. You will be driven to re-experience that moment for the rest of your life. Sometimes, a person will repeatedly merge into the totality, but maybe not.

This is similar to what you experience while playing music and become consumed by it. The difference is that music is a human artificiality that only reminds of what we know and yearn for in our deepest being. The Enlightenment experience is the open cage door that the canary is eternally seeking.

First you have to learn the chords and how to focus your attention in the midst of tempting distractions. You practice every day/moment as your efforts to mitigate suffering develop. One day, you will discover that the practice itself yields satisfactory results, and that you suffer less. The people around you, also seeking a palliative for suffering, will suffer less. This is a wonderful reward, even if you never develop the genius to play at Carnegie Hall. On the other hand, when you least expect it the doors that separate us from understanding and merging int the Great Ineffable will open a crack, or maybe even swing totally open flooding you with light. Instead of bursting with joy, you become at last joy itself.

Asherman

You are right. Years of practice have enabled me to reach a level skill that enables me to play without thought.
Also, it has given me a broader understanding of music, and most of the principles that govern music and playing are directly transferable to life in general. But one only sees that after years of playing. I started at the age of three, and that is 25 years ago.

The ability to focus my mind, for instance, enables me to quickly understand new things I come into contact with, and this training has also enabled me to understand my own frame of mind at any given time much easier. Often I notice when I am getting angry, for instance, and sometimes I am capable of making anger dissapear by altering my frame of mind. I realize that the emotion wasn't anger at all, it was just how I was inclined to interpret it.

But this litany of "I" and "me" is making me uncomfortable. I think I'll stop now... :wink:

Cryacuz, I don't think I am referring to satiety; I'm referring to the sense that everything is perfect (including "good" and "bad") just as it is.

Asherman, your last post motivated me to practice scales on the fiddle for an hour. Thanks.

I have been very busy over the past few days and havent been able to get back , but i find this very intresting.

I think I understand this. I wrote a poem once about the act of thinking, which I feel expresses the core of this idea. My grasp of it is but an intuition as of yet, so I cannot find the words to adequately explain it in terms of "everything". But I'll post the poem in any case.

The flaw in every complete philosophy
The point on wich every philosopher lies
Is it's masqerade of coherency
Of symmetry where chaos resides
But everyone knows who truly knows his mind
That questions posed devise in part their answers
Thus what you seek is always what you'll find
And once again by the dance outwaltzed; the dancer
Because thoughts do not appear at thinker's summons
Nor at his scheduled hour do they call
They lurk within the depths of his mind's dungeons
Until suddenly into his head they fall
So I repeat what greater men have stated
The thought, it came to me because I waited

So when we see misery and suffering in the world it is because we are looking for it. It is what we want to see...

But I don't know if this makes sense to anyone but me :wink:

I am not sure, Cyracuz, that we find or see what we seek, if I understand you well, or what our mind is thinking, because Buddha found misery and unhappiness etc. although he did not know anything about that before. And I am thinking, maybe it is not related, but in Chinese philosophy, it is often mentioned that the mind should be emptied in order to learn or to meditate.

This is really a difficult topic in that I think about the relationship between what Buddha taught about the meditation/concentration and the breathing techniques that help in that, versus the meditation in Taoism, the chi aspect and the yin/yang harmony concept. Confucius also mentioned about concentration on learning. And what about the concept of breathing - breath, being the breath of life versus the concept of spirit in Greek philosophy. Lots for me to sort out. Now I really need to work hard on that concentration/breathing stuff to start in the proper direction.

Weocome cello.

Yes, it is a difficult topic, and I am not having an easy time sorting it out myself.
But our conscious facilities such as expectations, intentions, will and thought can only get us so far.

From what I gather, buddhists think that our conscious efforts, all the facilities possessed by our councious selves are inadequate to grasp the full extent of absolute reality.

The fullest understanding of these things has always come to me when I've managed to empty the mind of these things.

And when I'm "back in myself" the recollections seem distant as if I dreamed them, only the feeling experienced during these moments linger for some time after.

Thanks for the welcome, Cyracuz.

I reread the above posts and I find interesting your comments about finding happiness when playing music. I wonder if it is because you concentrate on the music or if it is music itself that makes people happy.

I also wonder whether little children "know" more than us since they are supposedly devoid of prior knowledge, and whether what they know is "the reality". So by "educating" them, if we are not distorting the reality or truth for them.

cello

I think it is the aspect of concentration that is the beneficial part. I think so, because I've had people share similar experiences in areas that are not so "universal" as music.

What you say about children is interesting. I've heard somewhere that all children are born with a perfect ear for musical notes, and that it is messed up in the early years by the learning of language, with it's patterns of sounds that don't fit any musical patterns. But I cannot say if this is true or not.

But I do believe that learning some things make us "blind" to others, and that in this fashion we can build walls for ourselves, making unbiased learning very difficult.

Cryacuz, I agree with you that for the most part "buddhists think that our conscious efforts, all the facilities possessed by our councious selves are inadequate to grasp the full extent of absolute reality".

Let me add my impression that while (zen) Buddhist "technique" does require great effort of concentration, this is so only during the first ten or so years. With time one comes to realize--I mean really see--that there is no conscious SELF to make such efforts, there are only the efforts themselves (actions without agents). At that point meditation becomes sufficiently refined that the paradox of a self trying eliminate a self ends. What remains after the cessation of self IS itself "absolute reality" in its infinite mundange expressions.

JL

I understand. Again I would like to refer to the practice of playing music. The longer one does it, the easier it is to assume the concentration needed, and though the effort required never lessens, it becomes easier to rise to the challenge the more one does it. Is it similar with the practice of zen?

Cryacuz, sorry I didn't see your question until now. In my experience zazen (sitting meditation) has become--when it goes well--completely effortless. The key term here is "completely. An ounce of effort creates ego (indeed the effort requires ego as the agent of the effort). But the feeling of ego goes away only when you make no effort to eject it. It's a very subtle process that evolves into your practice with time.

Thanks for the reply JL. Better late than never So it is similar with music, in that it takes practice. The ego is like trainingwheels for a bike, as I understand this. In the beginning you need them to ride, but after a while they just get in the way. Then I guess that patience is a key word for me.

JLNobody & Cyracuz, i thought all it took was to think of not thinking.

Hehe...
If you think of not thinking, you're still thinking.

I think that the founder of Soto Zen did instruct his monks to "think about not thinking" when meditating, but that has been also translated as "without thinking" which has been contrasted with "not thinking." One source provides a triple distinction regarding the experience of mind according to Dogen. Against the usual notion we have of (1) normal thinking there is the ostensible opposite of (1) "not thinking". But this is not the posture taken in Soto zen meditation because "not thinking" is only a form of thinking. "Without thinking," on the other hand, is, I guess, a form of pre-cognitive experience. I think of it as the kind of sensory awareness most people have when looking at a totally abstract painting, a painting which provides no opportunity for inserting (or hooks for hanging) meaning onto pure images (as we do when we see running horses in cloud formations), or when a congenitally blind person sees for the first time.
This is what we all do without being aware that we are doing so. It is the continuous base of IMMEDIATE (not yet processed) experience. It's just that upon "seeing" we immediately interpret (i.e., insert meaning into) the sensory forms, and we do it so quickly that we think the forms COME to us with inherent meaning*. When we meditate long enough we come to see our experiences more as "RAW" (pre-cognitive or uninterpreted) rather than "COOKED" (interpreted and categorized) phenomena, and in so doing we realize--in our bones, not just cognitively--the constructed (i.e., necessarily delusional) nature of our world. To look "without thinking" is to do zen meditation.

* This is similar to the error of the man who asked the astronomer how astronomy has come to learn the names of the planets and stars it studies.

I think that the founder of Soto Zen did instruct his monks to "think about not thinking" when meditating, but that has been also translated as "without thinking" which has been contrasted with "not thinking." One source provides a triple distinction regarding the experience of mind according to Dogen. Against the usual notion we have of (1) normal thinking there is the ostensible opposite of (1) "not thinking". But this is not the posture taken in Soto zen meditation because "not thinking" is only a form of thinking. "Without thinking," on the other hand, is, I guess, a form of pre-cognitive experience. I think of it as the kind of sensory awareness most people have when looking at a totally abstract painting, a painting which provides no opportunity for inserting (or hooks for hanging) meaning onto pure images (as we do when we see running horses in cloud formations), or when a congenitally blind person sees for the first time.
This is what we all do without being aware that we are doing so. It is the continuous base of IMMEDIATE (not yet processed) experience. It's just that upon "seeing" we immediately interpret (i.e., insert meaning into) the sensory forms, and we do it so quickly that we think the forms COME to us with inherent meaning*. When we meditate long enough we come to see our experiences more as "RAW" (pre-cognitive or uninterpreted) rather than "COOKED" (interpreted and categorized) phenomena, and in so doing we realize--in our bones, not just cognitively--the constructed (i.e., necessarily delusional) nature of our world. To look "without thinking" is to do zen meditation.

* This is similar to the error of the man who asked the astronomer how astronomy has come to learn the names of the planets and stars it studies.

I have nothing to add onto JL's excellent post. Anyone who can sit with, and be guided by JL is in very good hands. Someday, perhaps we will meet in person for a cup of tea.

I second that, Asherman. I've benefitted greatly from JL sharing his insights here on A2K, and we've had many illuminating conversations.