Shamanic Journey Workshop in June

The workshop surpassed my expectations. Michael Harner is indeed old and slow, often forgetting what he's saying, apologizing, reporting that he's just found himself in Ecuador. He laughs, a lot, and for a long time. He makes frequent stabs at organized religion and oppressive regimes (including ours). His presence is penetrative, in the gentlest of ways. Power is attracted to him and it clings to him; it drips and oozes off him, like a number of the animistic spirit world is cloaking him so densely that little critters are falling off everywhere. During one journeywork session, I was laying with my eyes open while my partner was journeying on my behalf, and Michael walked by. As he passed near me, I got a strong sense of him being an old, old oak tree, moving slowly for the depth of his roots.

August Post to Zen Discussion Group

To me, the more interesting questions raised by the film “What The Bleep Do We Know” concerns our interest in using scientific language to prove our consciousness and validate our physical and metaphysical experiences (think "intelligent design"!!). With intersubjectivity looming as the great epistemological frontier of the 21st Century, and the dawn of the Enlightenment a dim memory, what fabulous questions are in store for monkey minds!?!?!

We have lived an eon of "reason", what if we're headed for an eon of "faith"? What of the language of Buddhism? It is looked to as a wise Master here, since it's language covers breaches of empirical evidence with elegant dispassion. The Four Noble Truths are basically an ancient Rx, are they not?!

This article covers some ground work of "quantum mysticism":
http://www.wie.org/j27/what-the-bleep.asp

Excerpt: "So maybe the widespread popularity of quantum mysticism, and its latest offspring, *What the Bleep*, is pointing not just to our cultural propensity to be enamored by the amazing insights and innovations of science but to our innate fear of scientific materialism, which seeks, by definition, to squelch soul or spirit wherever it finds it."

June Post to Zen Discussion Group

Here's a question about knowledge.

:-)

How do you study the dharmas with non-attachment? How do you decide what knowledge to hold dear, and which to consider with equanimity?

On what basis do you decide whether it's more important to know who the 6th Patriarch is or what the 6th Ground is? To read a sutra, or to avoid texts?

If we vow to master the dharmas, we're putting a lot of investment in them. How would we find equanimity to release them as easily as hold them?

Can we just sit, as it's been suggested, and find all our knowledge, there, inside? Can we do this with no training or guidance? One of the central aspects of Zen practice is having a teacher. What is their function, if not to pass on knowledge?

The best I can make of it, today, is to consider Right Effort, arising skillful qualities. The moral and philosophical tenets of zen (Buddhism, the Tao) are objects that provide pivot points for our attention, and hold little value outside of that function. (Yes, it logically follows that Playboy Magazine is just as useful a text as the Diamond Sutra.) Zen, zazen, is practicing awareness, of dancing such pivot points. To me a fruitful sitting isn't the one in which I've had an easy and tranquil mind, it's the one in which I've struggled on my pivot points. When I exercise my capacity for equanimity through observing my thoughts, it works much as repetitions in the gym, which build a muscle by first tearing it: dancing my pivot points breaks my habits and I get to build new, more aware mental formations to dance with another day. :-)

I've also read the analogy that it's like fine tuning an instrument, which is why we're always practicing and never performing.

So, what do you know?

Excerpt from a Letter, May 2006

Allowing, letting, letting go, surrendering. I couldn't agree with you more. Our layers of stories, habits, desires, defenses, fears ... aka thoughts, can be pulled away to reveal the ever-present happiness which eludes no one, yet is habited by few. Awakening, awareness, enlightenment are acts of surrender not force, of shedding not accumulating, of vulnerability not defense.

"Vulnerable and protected" ... I look forward to finding synergy, simplicity there. Masks are fascinating, intellectual, creative catalysts for storytelling, perhaps for teaching and translating. I wonder how mask is involved in the arts of warriors. Is mushya shugyo a process of honing mask, or discarding it? What do warriors chose to be open and vulnerable to? I've found models in yoga (strengthful surrender), zazen (disciplined mindlessness), and other .... ummm .... more obscure practices, but failures to produce that balance can leave one feeling like a tin duck, at the mercy of the shooter's quality of aim. ... Hmm, it just occurred to me that shifting my thinking from defense to protection opens up possibilities :-) .

Your sailing/woman metaphors triggered some questions and thinking for me and I find I actually have a lot to say regarding that and feminine and masculine energy in sea imagery (and in general) ... but then I'd be rambling. Suffice it to say I'd been wondering at the caricature of the lone woman in sea imagery (lighthouse, siren, widow on the shore...), and what you wrote opened up a new image of the porousness of the feminine, so pervasive that language can only approach it in metaphor ... hmmm. I've been building a boat in my mind for some months, but I think it's actually a metaphor for a man (or maybe masculinity), and, notably, I'd never pictured its sails!

Karma study, March 2006

Me:
Say, here's a karma story an old woman from Vietnam remembered from her childhood. Wonder what you have to say about it:

“A woman was being beaten by her husband. She went to the Buddhist abbot to get his blessing to leave him. The abbot told her that leaving him would not solve her problem, that in a previous life the husband had been the beaten wife and the wife had been the abuser. He told her that she must suffer her fate to pay her karmic debt, or she would just be reborn into again and again. He instructed her to place slim bundles of hollow reeds around the house, so that when her husband wanted to beat her he would grab one of them. In this way, he could enact his need, and she could receive it without harm. She did this and very quickly he stopped beating her ... her acceptance repayed the karmic dept.”

He:
I believe the Woman is at a place in her life where she is deciding, whether she knows it or not, when enough is going to be enough. I believe we, as Human Beings, have the ability to see in the mirror what our short-comings are and then be able to do something about it. I for one no longer enjoy hanging around people who remind me of what I once was at what I believe was my worst. I believe that each and every one of us has the choice to stand up and say "Enough".

So as far as the Abbots' advice...Shakespeare may have said it this way..."The Metaphors The Thing". Basically, the Abbott is saying, "When you are tired of the way things are, you will do something about it". At least that's what I think...and you did ask me what I thought. Thanks. ; )

Me:
I don't know much about karma. I took up very loose and casual dharma studies a few months ago, and started at the beginning: the four noble truths. Caroline Myss' notion of sacred contracts interest me, but then I'm also just getting into reading a little Ouspensky and Gurdjeff (heh), and have become most interested in framing the great psycho/emotional/mystical cosmic goo dance (aka existence) as a direct channel from sensing to knowing to believing to behaving to producing outcome, as often as possible ... without losing touch of wonderousness and awe. From that perspective, the tale seemed more useful as a koan than a morality play, and interestingly you are the first person I've shared it with who has done the same! The way you framed the significance of the behaviors resonates with me the most: awareness, leading to questioning, leading to behavior, leading to outcome.

I'm most interested in the experiences of regular and expanded consciousness that are grounded in my body in some way. Through yoga, sex, zen meditation, and alter-sensory experiences like Reiki, hallucinogenics, and shamanic meditation, I've been developing a sensitivity to different energies, or impulses in my self (and more limitedly in others), specifically manifested in bodily sensations. I think it's not much different from "gut feeling" or adrenaline rushes that make one's neck hair stand on end ... but are more varied than the usual menu of fear, sex, hunger, empathy, ... . I'm interested in chi, kundalini, etc. ... but am equally as happy with blood sugar levels, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

The thing I like about our karma story, is that outcome changes through action (doing/not doing) rather than language (negotiation). Rather than giving power to a law of judicious logic, she chooses vulnerability and self-responsibility. The question I don't have an answer to, is whether either of their awareness is necessary for resolution. Unless, of course, either of them wants to have that information available for future choices they might make. I prefer to think awareness is necessary, but then I know people who consistently come from a place of right action, with out much meta thought around it. My observer self witnesses my action self, and when I'm all in tune I function with the depth of primal matter, and a rightness of spirit. That's a resolved experience that's hard to beat for the good outcome and wonderousness I mentioned above. I wonder if without the observer self, life would be fluid, but without the gratitude that awareness produces.

Questions about self awareness and choice, as well as one's influence in the world fascinate, mesmerize and confound me. I've become more comfortable with states of confusion, recognizing they house the act of shedding a skin. Cognitive dissonance as weekend get away ... . My turn-around times are becoming shorter, too. But, I will fess up to being messy sometimes. I tend to feel too intense for most people, which I think is mostly projection, since there are so few people I actually share that stuff with, in a real way, beyond the conversationally interesting.

He:
You make a wonderful point regarding whether awareness is necessary from either the Husband or the Wife from our Karmic Tale to bring about resolution. The point in question being, ' would Life without the observer self, although fluid in it's anarchistic way, be as wondrous without the gratitude that awareness produces?'. I think not. Experience indicates, without fail, gratitude produces happiness. Without the observer self, life would be just that...life. I guess the miracle still exists, maybe just at a level that has become comfortable. As for myself, I have found that gratitude for what I have in my life, for taking responsibility for my actions, for the simple realization of my part in any future "now"...

Quoted to me in a letter

"...a little softness can feel dangerous but is life affirming in the quietest of ways. So quiet in fact it seems a miracle to be heard." Kahty Chen--March, 2006