Now Gita

Arjunas of the world, unite!

Forget the shackles of your fear-induced investments for identity-related safety goals involving selves and time you’ve never had.

There is no time! The past is but a fiction, and the future only science fiction all about a world that never will exist.

Only you exist! Right here, right now, and you are that existence, only that existence, nothing but existence!

Arjunas of the world, exist!

And be that bliss...


~Son Rivers 2009

Being Mostly Dimeter Triplets

The river is wide,
the sky is high,
the shore is seen

as opposite,
but we are nothing
but such metaphors

for all this loving
something named
I am.


Son Rivers 2009

Begin Living

Begin with emptiness. Begin with nothing—without the nothing. Begin with that beginning without beginning. But just begin!

Imagine! Imagine everything we think is life. Imagine mothers and fathers and children and friends! Imagine lovers! Just imagine!

What else on earth is there to do? There’ll be eternities to meditate. There’ll be endless balls of string to ravel and unravel.

But now, revel! Revel alone; revel in love; revel in valiant living! Revel in that revel that loves reveling! Revel! Revel! Revel!


~Son Rivers 2009

I Heart Way

Rinse as much past from your senses as you possibly can every single moment.

The past is just a bunch of beliefs we bring into the present. Not a single one of them is absolutely real.

Thoughts police your mind; beliefs are an occupying force within your heart.

The mind may laugh; the heart will smile.

A natural smile is the body's doorway to the heart.

Tidal Realities

The river outside my door is tidal; I never know the heights or depths it’ll be on any given morning.

It’s ten foot variations cause its waters to descend and seem a stream, or else ascend towards quite apparent flood.

Slack tides can be destabilizing to the nature of things, but a river flowing rapidly upstream is just unnatural.

Although it’s feared my most, impermanence is, after all, the norm. But a river that repeats itself appears to stay the same.

It’s as if there were an incandescent current woven within it all that’s actually unchanging.


~Son Rivers 2009

Some Pointers Toward Li Po

Do not look at what you see; look at what's there.

Intellect says you can never arrive at your destination because there's always half the distance left to go; only intuition gets you there.

All words divide. Speak clearly in a language your audience will understand. The larger that, the more your words should tend to silence.

Hsieh Ling-yun's poetry resembles the point where two great rivers join (Tao & Buddhism), the color of their currents still visible before they blend to Zen.

Love the final myth of Li Po: drunk in a boat, he jumps into the river and drowns trying to embrace the moon. Talk about your pointers!

Thoughtless

The first time I hiked a mountain in the land of the precipitous Whites, I was alone and quaked in fear.

Half-way up the trail, I came to a fantastic ash tree, its lustrous bark imprinted with the claws of a bear.

After that, all experience—house-like boulders, talking streams, vistas glimpsed through virgin trees—surrendered into one.

Finally at the open summit, almost out of breath, I looked out upon a faultless view of endless and empty peaks.

The silence was perfectly contemplative... until another hiker, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, asked me what I thought.


~Son Rivers 2009

After Reading Hsieh Ling-yun

Sitting within these walls of books, I try to remember springtime mountains and fluent streams.

And following this point of view, I come to the middle of a quiet col that holds a silent little pond.

The surface of the pond is still, reflecting birch and ash and sky; my eyes are drawn into its depths and I see everything!

But I'm looking out my window now and the stark November landscape teaches me a thing or two about absolutely nothing.


~Son Rivers 2009

On Hsieh Ling-Yun, Li, and Shang

~Li~ the system of principles according to which the ten thousand things burgeon forth spontaneously from the generative void (D. Hinton)

~Shang~ an aesthetic experience of the wild mountain realm as a single overwhelming whole (D. Hinton)

For Hsieh [Ling-yun], one comes to a deep understanding of ~li~ [inner pattern] through adoration (~shang~) (D. Hinton)

After 46 sections detailing wilderness in poem called 'Dwelling in the Mountains,' Hsieh Ling-Yun writes following 'closer'

In these remote and secluded depths of quiet mystery,
silence boundless, distances empty,

you see endeavor denies our nature
and appearance the inner pattern.

When eyes and ears can tell us nothing of such things,
how could anyone follow the path with mere footsteps?

I’ve distilled all antiquity in the steady cycle of seasons,
trusting to the enlightened insight of five-fold vision,

and now, abiding by this wisdom, I let my brush rest,
let shallow thoughts settle away and these words end.

Much of David Hinton's translation of Hsieh Ling-yun's poem 'Dwelling in the Mountains' can be read here: http://bit.ly/7AkAnm

Mything the Point

Mythology creates a metalanguage using gods as super-metaphors by filling those word-names with ten thousand qualities--then verbing them.

Using mythology in direct communication is only useful when that meta-language is shared by your intended audience.

Therefore, if your intended audience is a 21st century 'Western' one, then the question is: what is their (our) actual mythology?

The new mythology is simply the oldest: Nature.

No Bird Watching

This time I met two painters on the viewing platform overlooking the great marshes of Plum Island.

Unlike birdwatchers, they were making their own landscaped wildlife from a palette of godlike colors.

What they were painting though was not what I was seeing and what I was seeing in their art was not what they were painting.

But out there somewhere in-between the burning reeds and grasses slides a Great Blue Heron, singular, original, alive.


~Son Rivers 2009

Merrimack Sutra

This river was the source of water power for the greatest mills of early industrial America and so they deemed it great.

Once polluted, now reclaimed, fishermen, boats, and trophy homes utilize its sparkling waters and so they deem it great.

I've been to its bank and listened to it currents and know the river isn't great. The river flows. And that is--all.


~Son Rivers 2009

Affectionate Awareness

I listened to Adyashanti on his live radio program Wednesday night and in a question concerning Nisargadatta, he discussed Affectionate Awakening. In doing so, he discussed the need to stumble upon the right balance, that if awareness was centered in the mind only, it would tend to be cold, but that it needed to center itself in the heart. Exactly! Awakening may begin through the mind, but it will “end” in the heart.

But resting in affectionate awareness is almost something impossible to discuss. Attention to emotion is one thing, but awareness is everything. One needs to speak with the inarticulate speech of the heart to describe it. The mind can only point to it.

More pointing to come.

Spirit

There’s a voice I first heard in the mountains.
It was sighing underneath a yellow arctic flower.
It was shouting among the birches in the col.
After some years, it followed me back home
and took up residence between the books and picture frames.
Tonight its silent song is burning like a candle in an empty room.


~Son Rivers 2009

A One, A Two...

Last night I came across this quote on Twitter (by @Conduru):

"Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict."
~Rabindranath Tagore.

This could be the motto of what I’ve been trying to approach here with the ‘resting in feeling’ or ‘knowing with the heart.’

This practice, if you can call it such, or lifestyle, which would be as appropriate a term, if not too taken too flippantly, is the perfect balance of living in the world and not of the world, as Jesus said, or being in samsara, but samsara not being in you, as Ramakrishna said.

As posted yesterday, resting in feeling can be a barometer for those sticky thought-beliefs that sink one in fear, anger, and sadness. To that effect, it can be called a practice. But an important aspect (maybe the most important) lies in the knowing, not of the heart, because that’s the conduit, but the Truth.

Maybe intuition will have more to say tomorrow.

Disconnect

What is it to rest in one’s feeling or to know with the heart.

First, let’s say what it’s not. It’s not living in some romantic notion of the world. That’s the mind’s interpretation of the heart, and as usual, it’s completely wrong. Love in this manner is just more ego-driven desire.

The heart, or feeling, is what you really are. It’s Being itself. It’s the bliss of our existence. It is the reality of love itself.

(At this point, I’d like to repeat something I wrote last month as the continuation of this post.)

I once heard [Miguel] Ruiz say that emotions are a spectrum of the white light of love filtered through the perception of thought. ...

Not only is there truth in all of this, but there is practice in the relative world as well. Emotions are telling. They tell us what untrue thoughts we still believe in at some level. Therefore, emotions are something to be truly felt and recognized, embraced. They certainly are not to be avoided or repressed, but they are not to be wallowed within either.

Because behind the painful emotions, the emotional suffering, lies the lie. There is the thought we believe in which is totally untrue and is causing this suffering. Feel the painful emotion and trace it back to that thought.

This is not to say that the truth doesn't simply lie in resting in awareness. It does. It is. But there comes a time sometimes when the veil of thought hides this truth, and this is merely a way, a practice, to unveil awareness from the darkness of suffering, and really feel real again.

And that’s just the half of it.

Sunday's Sermon

Brahman is the Great Emptiness, the One Stillness.
Atman is Vibration, Energy.
The Upanishads reveal: Brahman is Atman! Atman is Brahman!

The English Teacher's Sutra

This is That.
No these.
No those.
It's demonstrative.

Samsara

We may be in samsara, but samsara should not be in us.

~Ramakrishna

Two Goes Into One

This process of awakening to the one truth can be divided in two. There’s the disconnect from the untruth and the reconnect to the truth, although one has never not been connected to the truth. It’s the classic example of a person looking for one’s eyeglasses while wearing them.

The disconnect is trickier than some would imagine though. After all, what else does one need to do than rest in awareness? But the falsehoods of belief run deep and sometimes are not completely eradicated, and often lay low, beneath the radar, ready to arrest at any moment. Sudden bouts of sadness, fear and anger will arise, sometimes in such a way as to be debilitating.

But there’s a practice that straddles both processes and can be utilized, in fact should be utilized (as much as anything can ever be a ‘should’), in all hours. Truth be told, it actually gives lie to the conceit that this is a two-step process.

Let’s call it resting in one’s feeling or knowing with one’s heart.


(to be continued)

Practicing Truth

So where is the one truth? Your conditioned self is not truth; your thoughts are not truth; even the world you sense is not truth.

Being is true. Consciousness is true. Bliss is true. You are that, and you are true.

In Being, you are presence. In Consciousness, you are intuition. In Bliss, you are feeling.

It is thought-belief that divides you from yourself, that creates the duality of you and the other. There is no other but in thought.

Thus there are aids, practices, to help make the reconnection, after you have disconnected from thought-belief through the initial practice of right knowledge.

The koan of self-inquiry (who am I) will reconnect you to presence. Meditation will reconnect you to intuition. A clear heart, unburdened of belief-generated emotion will reconnect you to feeling.

Actually all will reconnect you to all. In essence, they reconnect you to you, and in so doing, you disappear, leaving only One Truth.


to be continued?

The New and Improved Nameless!

We interrupt this program for a word from our sponsor.

It is the most basic thing, but it can never be explained. It is formless and nameless. Yet, we must point at it using some name as the pointer, always remembering that it is not actually That.

We can call it Emptiness to point to the quality that it’s not a form. We can call it Nameless to point to the quality that it cannot be named. There are many names that are used in such a way.

I find the following useful, simply because they are not singular, and therefore can never be monomaniacal in their use, and also because they approach an essential quality by negating a nihilistic one.

First we know that we are. We exist. Call this state of existence, Being, pointing only to the quality that it’s not non-existent.

Second we are conscious of an awareness beyond our thoughts. Call this Consciousness, pointing only to the quality that it’s not unaware.

Third, when our thoughts are not believed, when our feeling is not colored by thought-driven emotion, we find ourselves in peace. Call this Bliss, pointing only to the quality that it’s not a state of suffering.

This is the Sat-Chit-Ananda of which Vedanta speaks. It is purely a pointer, a way, which attempts to triangulate the position of the One Truth.

Still, it is not the way.


to be continued

No Way

Thus we negate the lies of the mind with the truth of the mind, and so soften the spot.

But it is imperative to know that the truth of the mind is not the one truth. In fact, the mind can never know the one truth.

Such knowing by the mind is only philosophical at best.

One can convince oneself with a new nondual belief, and one can function evenly under the guise of that new belief, but a belief is never the one truth, and such evenness is never free from the irregularities of despair.

But don’t despair, there is a way.


to be continued

The Trinity of Discernment

We are socially conditioned from our birth into a virtual reality of thought, which evaluates the sense-created world in our mind. In this manner, we are three degrees from truth.

The world we sense is not the absolute world; the reality we think is real isn't at all; our viewpoint in general is not even ours, but one socially-conditioned.

But because it’s all in our mind, we have the ability to discern that our world, our reality, and our conditioning are all not true (although such full discernment is not easy at all). Furthermore, we have the ability to discern that the only truth must be here and now.

But that’s not the truth of it.




(to be continued)

One Truth; Part Four: I Think

At some point in the evolution of our story, the mind becomes evaluative, and then, incredibly, self-evaluative. The ability to think arises and evolves, and in that world of thought, we live, we believe, and we long for identity. An alien culture has formed.

The existential ‘I am’ becomes the belief ‘I am something’ (fill in the blank with a thought) or finer, ‘I used to be something’ or finest, ‘I should be something else.’ The sense-recorded present becomes a world of past and future as well.

This is the fall. The world ‘as is’ becomes a world of good and bad, a judgmental world, a dream world. Paradise is lost. The veil has been dropped. What we really are has been replaced with what we think we are. It’s not ‘I think, therefore I am’ as much as it is ‘I think, therefore I forget what I really am.’

But only in our minds. And that is the Good News.

to be continued

Sensing Reality

To oversimplify, yet still retain the substance of the truth, our world is our senses. In the big picture, we know everything is quantum mechanics, likely some filament of string theory, and we are just a pattern in one large unified field.

What we interpret to be our world is what our senses record it to be. Different degrees of sense, different world. A dog’s world is black and white. A dolphin’s world is sonar. The immediate world is what our five senses record on the dashboard of our brain. Our version of reality is literally in our mind.

And that’s when things get interesting.

Being Social

It’s probably best to begin at what we think is the beginning, that is, what we think we are, a human being.

The fact is we are socially conditioned to be a human being. From the moment of our birth, it's the grand plan. We are nurtured and we are schooled. We are forced and we are fooled. We are given a name, a catch-all, and we gather an identity as an individual, like so much string wound tight around a ball.

But of course, it was all here before we got here. So where did this beginning begin?

Self-Evident

I am, but we declare. In what’s known as spirituality or nonduality, pointers abound. There’s a multi-thousand years tradition in which teachers and schools have created the ten thousand ways and means of getting to the one truth.

Call it That, Mind, Spirit, Consciousness, Emptiness, Now, etc., you’re still calling something nameless a name. Too often that name, that pointer, becomes an end in itself. Thus, religion, or something real close to it. Often the names and metaphors just intersect, cross, contradict, and ultimately confuse.

Not to mention the practices! Too often the practice becomes the point, when it too is just a non-verbal pointer.

Ultimately it is up to each individual (from the viewpoint of the relative) to determine the one truth. But because it is nameless, it may be necessary to look at it in many ways. These are mine.

(to be continued)

Hailstones (a retweeter)

On the dark blue waters of ten thousand waves, one white swan.

To seek earnestly to know one's real nature--this is said to be devotion. ~Shankara

Ego is nothing other than a thought; there is nothing inherently bad about it. The only error is believing it.

You are not the conditioning that causes suffering, nor are you the pleasures that temporarily evade the pain. You are always The Healing.

Nature witholds nothing from itself, until there is nothing to give. ~Byron Katie

On the shore, I think, boats are like thoughts on the river. November is a time for such clear meditation. Only the river!

To know you are God with the mind is madness; to know you are God with the heart is enlightenment.

All pointers, like all metaphors, ultimately break down. They are, like everything in this world, impermanent.

Truth is not attained; Ignorance is dispelled.

It's not about wording; it's about disspelling.

The ocean of Brahman is full of nectar... My mind fell like a hailstone into that vast expanse... Touching one drop of it I melted away...

... ~Shankara

Only Heart (retweet poem)

Domesticated self-conditioned
dream-state ghost is thinking up
a virtual reality
to die for.
History, geography,
religion, quantum physics,
general relativity,
but most importantly
psychology self-validate
their own creation.

The mind is but a spider web
that keeps on spinning.
The mind is caught
within that spider web
created by the mind.
The mind can never free itself;
at best it can convince itself
it’s spun a great big web
in which it has ensnared itself.

Only the heart can know
there never was a web.
Only the heart can know itself
and in that knowing know it all.
Only the empty luminous
pure and bliss-filled heart.


~SonRivers 2009

There’s No November Like A Sutra (Retweet Poem)

In New England, November is
the Empty month:
no leaves, no snow,
no nothing.

The summer birds have all flown away;
the winter birds have not yet arrived.
The ever-present ever-shining
chickadee is reigning!

Still, the Blue Jays squawk.
Let them squawk!

I forgot the docks!
And every single boat
but for a lonely kayak or two.
Gone, gone!

The mighty river flowing
pure and free
to the empty beach-lined
empty sea.

The only sutra is
the sutra of the sea.


~Son Rivers 2009

Chop Suchness, Carry Brahman

There’s a difference between questioning the paradox of a Zen koan until your mind disappears, and answering it, or worse, mistaking the question for an answer.

For example, take the ‘chop wood and carry water’ comparison. The same occurs before enlightenment and after enlightenment, the saying goes. But to accept this as some answer involving an ordinary continuum is entirely missing the point. Yes, chopping wood and carrying water happens before and after. But there’s a world of difference, and that’s the paradox, and the point.

Then there’s the Zen triplet made popular in the Sixties by Donovan: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” It’s similar to the previous wood and water, except it presents the fulcrum in the middle, the mystical point of the absolute truth.

Not to travel too far off course, but Prabhavananda speaks to three ways that the Upanishads approach the concept of Brahman, what he calls three “spontaneous records of mystical experience.”

In the first, Brahman is presented as something almost separate from the world. It’s the unmanifest presence behind the manifested universe. It’s the duality of body and soul. The first mountain, objective, though in an enlightened view.

In the second, the fulcrum of our proposition at hand, there is no Brahman, just silence, that which is not seen by the eye, but that by which the eye sees. No mountain. Prabhavanada says this is the mystical union with the truth, “the peak of unitary consciousness,” from which one will return to...

The third, the intermediate stage. Here, one witnesses the world, but sees that it is Brahman. The Upanishads refer to figures of clay as a metaphor for the names and forms of the world. But all is the clay, all is Brahman. Shankara’s famous statement: “The world is an illusion, Brahman alone is real, Brahman is the world.” Our mountain of clay is a mountain of Brahman.

And this is the point. In the first wood or water or mountain, there is the objective reality of wood or water or mountain. But in the second wood and water and mountain, there is Suchness, there is Brahman.

There is not a continuum of the ordinary. To suggest so is either irresponsible, ignorant, or lazy, depending on where “you” are, and to "whom" you are speaking to. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

But of course, these have been a lot of words to say something that can’t be said. And that is the real point of the koan, after all.

An Empty Wood

Shanti,
shanti,
shanti.

Lately
the ten thousand
multi-colored leaves have fallen

and the woods are now
this timeless revelation
that

the living crystal waters of
this long lost hidden pond
were always there,

like a bright blue inner eye—
reflecting endless depths
of empty sky.


~Son Rivers 2009