Śraddhā (faith)

Three types of faith, or three aspects of faith, covering three aspects of being, and three types of responses:

1. Trusting faith (emotional), "it is important"
2. Lucid faith (cognitive), "it is meaningful"
3. Longing faith (volitional), "it is worthwhile"

The three types of faith are (I believe, but my memory might be wrong) traditional, but the connection to the emotional, cognitive, and volitional is that of Sangharakshita's.

The things in quotes are what I have distilled as my own response to each of the types (or aspects) of faith. I was using these three phrases, that is, this is important, this is meaningful, and this is worthwhile, to describe that which I experienced as my response to faith long before I ever knew about the division of Śraddhā into these three particular categories.

Making these connections felt almost like assembling many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

State of mind

Freedom is a very abstract thing.

I read somewhere in one of the many books on ideology, political philosophy and democracy that I've been reading during this holiday, that freedom (or it might have been democracy, they seem to mean the same thing to many, and most of the authors were liberals) is a state of mind.

It seems like a reasonable thing to say. Likewise, going for refuge is a state of mind, not merely an intensity of external practice.

It's too late in the night to continue thinking...

Holiday in France

I'm getting back to writing after three months of not writing very much at all. In fact, I haven't even had decent time or space for reflection at all, and it's only due to this one-week holiday in France (with my partner and her sisters, mother, and a friend) that I've been able to stop and think for any substantial length of time (while the girls have been exploring the countryside).

It's interesting (scary) to notice how easily my energies are diverted. Extra responsibilities at work uses both time and mind-space previously available for reflection, study and other Dharma practices. Fortunately, the pressure from work is slowly decreasing, and this together with a planned solitary retreat in early September are the reasons I don't worry, at the moment. I hope to be back with my ordinary work load towards the end of the year.

It seems as if solitude and retreat are necessary conditions for intensification of practice, at least for me. For the future, I will need to make sure that I give planning for times of solitude the same weight as planning for other retreats or holiday.

Without the depth of practice that I know I can have during and after a time of solitude, my time feels wasted, which in turn makes me feel frustrated and agitated. It is enough to know that I've wasted much of my life wandering aimlessly, without any purpose, from one thing to the next. To know what needs to be done, and to not have the time, space, or energy to pursue it, is far worse.

The dream of the mobile phone

Another dream that I had during the Anapanasati retreat (on the night between the 5th and 6th of April):

I dreamt that for some reason or other had to turn on my mobile phone. I might have had to send someone an important SMS or something. In turning it on, it proceeds to receive all queued-up text messages and emails.

With a sense of frustration I realise that every message is being presented to me at once. I cannot see which ones of them might be important and which ones are not. In fact, can't even tell one message from the other,it just a blur of letters and graphics.

I woke up and spent a good 10 minutes feverishly thinking about how to go about sorting it all out, until I realised it had been a dream.

Be well!

Notes for meditation interview 5/4-2010

On the Anapanasati retreat, we had meditation interviews. These were opportunities to talk to an experienced meditator for 10 minutes every evening as a way of asking questions related to the practice, and to have the opportunity to verbalise experience, concerns, and other things that arose during the day. This was the only talking that we did during the silence of the retreat.

I usually took notes during the day. These would serve as the starting point for the interview in the evening. These are notes for the interview on the 5th of April that I jotted down in my notebook:

Dull in the morning.
Possibly too much sleep.
Cold and uncomfortable, sinking.
Restless shrine room.

Dullness leaves, replaced with alertness.
Happy and content.
Full of energy, but still settled.
(joy)

Starting to feel the flow of the practice, how one stage leads into the next stage.
Finding the contemplation of vedana liberating.

The practice is so much simpler than what I thought!
Need to build on Just Sitting.

That is all.
Be well!

Grandpa-mind

Ok, so I can't properly recall the story behind this one, but I found it most useful in meditation. It was mentioned during the Anapanasati retreat in early April. The thinking around this is my own, but the initial story was similar.

When meditating, try to meditate with grandpa-mind (or, as it may be, grandma-mind).

We usually meditate with mind of a worried parent, watching our children run around and cause all sorts of havoc, anxiously on the tips of our toes ready to intervene if the play starts to go badly. The children are our thoughts, and our thoughts come, go, and run around, just like small kids sometimes do.

Think of how grandpa would watch the children play and run around. He would not care too much about what they got up to. He knows that he doesn't need to watch every turn of their play and that they won't hurt themselves too badly, if at all. He can sit contently in his chair (smoking his pipe, as mine used to do), possibly just aware that when the kids are picked up to go home, or to be taken to bed, as they eventually will be, it will once more be quiet.

So, don't worry about your thought and worries, planning and memories. In meditation you can sit safely knowing that they will come, go, and maybe stay with you for some time. It's all right.

It's not only about you

On the Anapanasati retreat a month ago, on the 4th of April, our teacher (Satyaraja) related a story about someone going to Bhante Sangharakshita with either a question or an experience, I can't remember which or any details about the exchange of words, but it doesn't matter. The crux of the story was the response from Bhante: It's not only about you.

Now, it's not only about me just happened to be one of the attitudes to Dharma practice that I have found most helpful. As someone who struggles with being too wilful, keeping this phrase in mind focuses me on the real purpose of Dharma practice, which is to work towards the liberation of all beings. I found that constantly reminding myself about this simple fact gave rise to śraddhā, and with śraddhā there is no hindrances whatsoever in Dharma practice.

This is from my notebook:

Practicing the Dharma is not only about me. The Dharma is bigger then me. It existed before me. It is more profound than I can imagine.

Therefore, I should reverence the Dharma. I should make myself available to it so that it may work itself out through me.

Is this what is meant by going for refuge to the Dharma?

The dream of the girl who could see the holy grail

On the Anapanasati retreat a few weeks ago I had a peculiar dream on the first night (2nd-3rd of April). It is quite common to have all sorts of interesting dreams when one is on retreat. They can be due to all sorts of things, but often nothing more strange than sleeping in a unfamiliar bed in a dorm together with other guys that you may or may not have seen before (some of them possibly snoring).

The dream went something like this:

The Anapanasati Retreat 2010

On the 1st of April this year, I went on my second Anapanasati retreat at Padmaloka. The retreat is a 10 day long meditation retreat, most of it in silence, and quite intense.

The first time I attended the retreat, in 2009, I had never been on a long meditation retreat before, and I had a completely unhelpful approach. To cut a long story short, I was far too willful, which led to getting stuck, which led to frustration and ill will. Meditators will recognise this as an easy to make mistake, for some people.

So, this time around I approached the practice from the direction of the Just Sitting practice. One might say that I let the structure of the Anapanasati practice guide my Just Sitting practice. This was, for me, precisely the right way to practice at this point.

Lots of useful small and large insights made themselves known during the week, and I'm hoping to write a handful of shorter blog entries around them. Some of them might only be a few sentences long and mostly for my own memory's sake.

I'll start with the structure of the retreat.

Three Minute Breathing Space

For a friend: A simple method for being.

Awareness (30s)

Deliberately adopt an erect and dignified posture. If possible, close your eyes. Then ask: What is my experience right now... in thoughts... in feelings... and in bodily sensations?

Acknowledge and register your experience, even if it is unwanted.

Gathering (90s)

Then gently redirect full attention to your breathing. Observe each in-breath, and each out-breath, as they follow, one after the other.

Your breath can function as an anchor to bring you into the present and help you tune into a state of awareness and stillness.

Expanding (30s)

Expand the field of your awareness around your breathing, so that it includes a sense of your body as a whole, your posture, and facial expression.

Reconnect with your surroundings and with the general direction of the day.

[adapted from instructions from Segal, Williams, and Teasdale]

What I've learnt from meditation

There's a couple of things that I've learnt from meditation, and that is that people, things, and events are generally more interesting than what they first appear to be, and that creativity surfaces in the space left by doing nothing.

Therapy

I haven't written in a while again. There's been a period of quite a lot of work. I volunteered to take some extra responsibilities at work for a limited time (until the end of February), and it's been taking up too much head space for any serious reflection to take place.

What I have been thinking about is, amongst other things, meditation (and Buddhist practice in general) in relation to science and therapy.

I think it's great if people get interested in meditation from a scientific point of view, or because they see it as some kind of therapy (they meditate to become calmer, more focussed, etc.), but it troubles me when meditation is pitched in this way to people by some Buddhist practitioners.

(a week or so passes here)

Now, after some further thinking I believe that the issue is not that there are Buddhists that try to pitch meditation as therapy, but rather that I feel uncomfortable with it. It can not be bad to have more people practising meditation, and if they are engaging regularly with their practice there will definitely be results beyond the narrow scope of their therapeutic needs. I will need to further ponder this.


Time to sleep a bit.
Good night.

Just Sitting

Today I attended a practice day on the Just Sitting practice at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, led by Satyaraja.

I'm just leaving these residues from the day in the blog for my own benefit.

The five "Justs":

1. Just settling.
   
2. Just waiting.
   
3. Just watching.
   
4. Just enjoying.
   
5. Just sitting.
   

Bhavana, meditation, is usually directed (as in the mindfulness of breathing and the metta bhavana), but may also be undirected (according to the Satipatthana Sutta). The undirected bhavana is the just sitting practice.

The talk by Subhuti that inspired Satyaraja to lead this practice day may be found at http://media.libsyn.com/media/dharmachakra/podcast35.mp3 (about 40 minutes).

Trying to study

I'm in a study group, a Dharma study group. I've been in this group for something like four or five years now and while the others slowly have been replaced over the years, I'm still here.

At the moment we're looking at the Dhammapada, an very early text which is part of the Pali Canon. The particular translation we're using (there's 50+ translations of the Dhammapada into English) is that by Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order (which was until recently the Western Buddhist Order).

The way we run the group is that one of us volunteers to summarise a particular text or seminar, and on the evening he gives the summary as a short presentation. We usually pause the presentation every now and again to ask questions or to discuss the contents. The study leader might bring out further points for discussion that he thinks are important.

I'm doing the first summary this year, on Thursday this week. It's on a commentary on first few verses from the chapter called Buddhavagga, or The Enlightened One (chapter 14, verses 179-187). Currently I've got as far as reading the commentary and making a mind-map of the main points (using FreeMind, a quite good piece of mind-mapping software, IMHO). I now have to re-read the commentary a number of times to make sure I know the flow of the text and can talk freely about it without resorting to reading from it too much.

I'll leave it at that for tonight, blogging-wise I mean, I still have a lot of reading to do. I'll finish with a favourite quote from this material, Dhp 14:183 (in translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu),

The non-doing of any evil,
the performance of what's skillful,
the cleansing of one's own mind:
  this is the teaching
  of the Awakened.

Be well!

[Image adapted from original at WikiMedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tipitaka_scripture.jpg]

Moderation

It is easier not to eat than to eat in moderation.

Water fasting experiment, day 7+1, breaking the fast

In the beginning of my water fast I did some reading on how to break a fast. It is serious and complicated business.

I now understand that it is important to break a period of fasting in the right way. One of the texts that I read (well, most of them actually) laid out a schedule for breaking a fast, stretching over several days after the "end" of the fast. I will not follow its advice strictly, but it has alerted me to the fact that I need to be extra careful with not over-eating and to closely monitor my reactions to food in general over the first days (maybe even the whole first week), not eating things that my stomach may disagree with.

I broke my fast with diluted juices, yoghurt, and bananas. I have some baby food (I was not going to purée anything myself) which got to be ok to eat, much dried fruit, and I believe I have some vegetable soups (the powder variety) lying around as well... The first batch of food went straight through in an hour (no surprise, my guts are clean enough to use for sausages), but the rest stayed for longer. Just hoping I won't get too constipated later.

Also, I would actually discourage anyone reading this from water fasting for extended periods (more than a week), unless supervised or well experienced, especially if doing it for the first time. A four-day water fast would be quite enough to have to work with discipline for the sake of dealing with the effects of craving, which, being a greed-type of person, is partly why I did this. As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, the only obvious change from day four onwards was that I was getting physically weaker, and this was worse than any positive change, mental or otherwise, during the same time.

In the future, I may fast again, but I will probably keep to short three or four-day water fasts, or longer fasts on liquid diet (soups and juices). The next obvious opportunity for me to try a longer fast will be in the end of December when I have two weeks of solitary retreat planned.

If I ever do another water fast of this length or longer, it will have to be in the summer, under the conditions of a retreat, preferable with other people around, and most importantly, with ample of time to manage the transition into and out of the fast.

May all beings be happy!

Water fasting experiment, day 7, looking back

Today is the last day of my seven-day water fasting experiment.

It's been interesting and I have learnt things about myself. I will probably continue to notice how this period of fasting has changed the way I'm living.

These are the effects of fasting on the way I behave and on how my mind works, as far as I can tell at present: