27/5
During most personal interactions people are often just looking to ‘find themselves’ through self-validation, reification, ego-boosting, and so forth. ‘Let me tell you this story first,’ they’ll say, and then it ends up only edifying their version of what they think the conversation is about. When you attempt to expand the talk, if it introduces someone or something they’re averse to, then they’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t even think of them’ or ‘I’ve never heard that before. Is it even true?’ The implication being what you’re saying isn’t admissible, as if the conversation were happening in a court of law. So then it’s ’back to me’ on one party’s part. Or perhaps both—yours as well—as it ultimately becomes just another exercise in self reification. Like scrolling the internet, which is a waste of everyone’s precious time. And time is precious. Why? Because life is very tenuous and we really do need to ‘find ourselves’—the more interesting, unselfcentered side—before we use it up boring both ourselves and others to death.
Some half dozen decades ago, self-discovery and the ‘human growth potential movement’ was an honorable pursuit. Seeking out gurus in India, practicing yoga to open chakras, dropping out in an upstate New York mansion with Tim Leary, while you imagined you were dying on LSD and being read The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol). Or taking an endless summer surfing safari and ending up on the perfect wave—almost too boring in length. But eventually, the preoccupation with finding oneself, especially after leaving one’s family, lover, or friends only to end up in debauchery or addiction, soured the whole notion.
This is not exactly the abandonment of worldly attachments and ‘going forth’ of the early hearer’s (Shravaka) sangha with hundreds ascending to the enlightened state of arahant, as revealed in Southern school suttas. Or, as later revealed in the Northern school sutras, the inconceivable numbers of bodhisattvas who accomplished the Ten Bhumis with the Buddha as their guide. This we can say is truly finding oneself, or more accurately, finding the non-self in both oneself and phenomena.
On the other hand, what I’m really talking about—not boring people to death by finding oneself first—is not so different from the Buddha’s original intention of going forth and finding oneself for the sake of all sentient beings. Who suffer in the torrents of samsara perhaps more now than then with our forever wars. And it can be easily accomplished at any number of meditation retreat centers around the world. One should isolate, practice shamata and vipassana, until there’s no need to look for self-affirmation, self reification, and self glorification, after realizing other people ‘selves’ are ultimately as ecstatically ‘empty’ as your own.
12/5
As my masseuse this afternoon seemed alternately an alligator, and then the enchantress Mohini, I can lay claim to having just had the ultimate massage. Looking up at her through the slits of my eyes, I witnessed her stretching out her arms full length in tandem and laying hands to my midsection, pulling its contents from one side to the other, rearranging then releasing internal organs to repose in a better position than before. Then slipping her magical tongs under my ancient sacral, she lifted my tortured rack of vertebrae’s up into the air and then let them kindly into a superior repositioning. It came to me in my bliss she really was at once both a magician and a mythical creature; a bodily composer and re-composer, a beast, an enchantress churning the cosmos with my body, extracting amritsar, holy nectar from excretions deep inside that travel to my body’s surface through emptiness, worm hole-like channels, bindus into nadis, exploding with tracer bliss around the perimeter of an aura where once was an imaginary ‘I'.
26/6
Have you ever wondered how a completely free state, one beyond extremes, can be achieved? Here it is: “They cannot go forth to the aims without realizing sameness, so to teach going forth to sameness, Subhuti then says, [107] For it is the same as space and exceedingly great. As an emptiness the same as like space, because the state of knowledge that is stainless pervades the universe of the knowable in its entirety, this vehicle is great. (302) If they have to try to look after the welfare of beings they never complete it, so to teach going forth to spontaneity, Subhuti then says, One cannot see its coming, or going, and its abiding does not exist. Coming is the past, going the future, and abiding the present. They finish going forth without effort because there is no coming, etc., is the idea. They do not go forth to spontaneity unless they attain a state free from permanence and annihilation, so to teach going forth to a state beyond extremes, he then says, Thus one cannot get at the beginning of this great vehicle, nor at its end, nor at its middle. Thus in the way it will be explained one cannot get at its beginning permanence, its end annihilation, nor middle because there is nothing unrestricted by those two either. [108] Continuing with his explanation he says, But it is self-identical everywhere. Therefore one speaks of a ‘great vehicle.’ Since all dharmas, in their essential nature, are in the state of nirvana, that vehicle is empty of all three time periods. Therefore there is no beginning.” (Abhisamayalamkara, vol. 1 of 4, Sparham, Garet (tr); 302, 3)
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