For the New Year

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, but I thought I'll make a bit of an exception this year. I've been thinking about this for quite some time, and I've come up with three resolutions. I already do not smoke nor drink and I'm not overweight, so my resolutions are a bit different from the most common ones. Also, I see them more like slogans, akin to the slogans of the Lojong practice.

Water fasting experiment, day 3

Some things I've noticed during the water fast so far:

1. Time is different. I can sit for an hour watching the birds eat from the bird feeders in the garden.
   
   
2. I'm finding it hard to keep my hands and feet warm. This might be related to the next point.
   
   
3. I'm drinking more water than I thought I would, around 1.5 litres every 3rd hour for the 14-16 hours of the day that I am awake, i.e. between 7 and 8 litres a day. I think this is a bit too much so I will try to decrease it to the 4 litres a day that I had planned. I don't want to poison myself with too much water.
   
   How much should I drink?
   
   The British Dietetic Association recommends between 1.5 and 2.5 litres a day (6 to 8 glasses). Elsewhere, it is recommended to drink as many litres as your weight in kilograms divided by 30 (2.7 litres if I'm 80 kg), or as many US fluid ounces as half your weight in pounds (88 fl oz if I'm 176 lbs).
   
   Looking for the above information provided me with lots of interesting reading, and as soon as I've finished my fasting I'll try to be a bit more observant with the amount of water I'm drinking (I think I'm usually not drinking enough).
   
   
4. When craving food, I sometimes get a phantom sensation of tastes in my mouth, like that of bread or peanuts.
   
   
5. My mouth tastes horrid in the evenings. It probably doesn't smell too good either.
   
   
6. I definitely use food as a source of comfort. It's so easy to pick up an apple or a sandwich even though I'm not really hungry. Another thing to keep in mind once the fast is over...

Apart from all that, I'm sleeping fine and although I'm very slow to get up in the morning I feel fine once I've meditated. I have revised my times a bit and I now do my meditation at 7 am, which means that the dawn is well underway when I get up from my seat, which is nice. I haven't taken the walks I said I would, but I'm ok with that.

Be well.

Water fasting, a seven-day experiment

Water fasting is a type of fasting where nothing but water is consumed over a specific time. The reasons why people might go through a period of fasting are many, but they usually span the health/spiritual spectra.

I'm planning a seven-day water fast between the morning of the 27th of December and the morning of the 3rd of January. It's an experiment.

All is real

All is real, or rather, everything is as real as anything else.

Nothing is just a fantasy.

The magician, and the siddhi, knows this. For them, there is no difference between the dream, the imagined, and the conventional reality.

Therein lies their power.

Refuge verses

This is the short refuge verse I end my meditation practice with:

From now onwards,
Until the attainment of Enlightenment,
With great reverence of body, speech, and mind,
I go for refuge to the Buddha Śākyamuni.

These lines are taken from the Tiratna Vandana, the Salutation to the Three Jewels:

Buddham jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.
Dhammaṅ jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.
Sanghaṁ jīvita-pariyantam saranaṁ gacchāmi.

[Photo by me]

Toki Pona

On Facebook this evening, a friend joined the group "kulupu toki pi toki pona", a common interest Facebook group dedicated to the discussion of the language Toki Pona. I had never heard of this language before and it looked strange indeed, so I decided to investigate further (which is why I'm still up and about at this time of the night).

According to Wikipedia, Toki Pona is a conlang, a constructed language, that

[...] is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion.

Again, according to Wikipedia, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

[...] is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

As someone who enjoys exploring mind and looking at experience and how I relate to it, I find this quite exciting and fascinating. I will try to put some time aside to study Toki Pona, or at least read more about it. My friend sent me a link to some Toki Pona lessons, that should be a start at least...

The idea that language shapes the way we experience the world is very interesting indeed, so I need to follow that hypothesis up as well.

But at this moment, I'm far too tired to do much more thinking at all.

Be well.

This place

This place, in the middle of this circus, in the midst of performers, colours, and sawdust. In the eye of the storm, Vajrasana.


[Photo by me of the Akshobhya statue at Vajrasana retreat centre, Suffolk, UK]

Lila

I was walking down a road the other day, and I decided to walk on the edge of the pavement, balancing with the cars and lorries of the road on my right and the relative safety of the pedestrian area on my left.

If I put my mind to it I am quite good at it, walking along on the edge without swaying too much and without falling this way or the other. And I imagine that there is no road on my right and that there is no pavement to my left, but a drop of several hundred meters on either side. And I imagine that I need to bring these vitally important things over to the other side of this chasm. It doesn't make it harder to balance though, and the imaginary cross-winds doesn't seem to cause much disturbance. I even allow myself to catch my balance by using a couple of centimetres of the pavement.

Maybe I'm just not taking my fantasies seriously enough?

Writing, sleeping, mindstuff

I didn't write a blog entry last week. I was feeling a bit tired and sluggish the whole week for some reason and I couldn't gather my thoughts enough to write about anything in particular.

I still don't quite know what to write, but I do know that there's a number of themes I'd like to explore somehow in the future.

Oh, there's a vaguely interesting thing I've noticed in my early morning meditation that could write about today.

I meditate between 06:00 and approximately 07:00 or 07:15 every morning (on weekends I might go back to sleep after sitting), and I have found that this is a good way of making my meditation part of the morning routine (which is important, otherwise it wouldn't happen).

I get up, out of bed, and I walk over to my meditation place in the next room. I dedicate the practice, meditate for an hour or so, and recite a simple refuge verse after having transferred the merits of the practice. The practice I do varies from day to day with my mood and the weather. It's the mindfulness of breathing (a simplified form of the anapanasati practice), the metta bhavana, or just sitting.

Something that I've noticed is that my mind is full of stuff. It's not as if there are well-formed thoughts or ideas floating around as there might be if I'm sitting during the day. No, this is just stuff that my mind is trying to wade though, like objects in a fog or in a dark room, mindstuff that is left over from the dreams I've probably had, dream leftovers. I can feel my mind trying to get hold of it, slipping from shape to shape, like over wet stones in a ford, but without getting hold of anything that I can label. It's like failing to pick up peas from a plate with a fork. It takes about 10-15 minutes for this to clear, which is why I usually just sit with myself without doing anything in particular (apart from possibly engaging in body awareness exercises) for the first part of the sit.

It's likely that the fluff that lives in my mind after waking up is just itself trying to get into gear for the day.

When the morning mists of my mind has cleared, I pick the practice that comes to me naturally, or I pick the practice I haven't done for a while, or I default to the metta bhavana.

That's all for today. Take care.


[Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

White Tara

Oṃ Tāre Tuttāre Ture Mama Ayuḥ Punya Jñānā Puṣtiṃ Kuru Svāhā.

White Tara has made her appearance a number of times over the last month or so, in different ways. I don't know why, and what follows is just the result of me bringing this image to mind and turning it around for a while.

White Tara is an interesting figure in many ways. In a sense, she's the introverted big sister of Green Tara. While Green Tara is the enlightened compassion which reaches out, an active force in the world, White Tara does not reach out in any obvious way (Green Tara is always depicted as about to step down from her mediation seat, but White Tara does not). She reaches inwards instead. There's more of a wisdom aspect in her. She holds the compassion that is wise, or maybe even the wisdom that is compassionate.

What are the reasons I say that? She is white, which is the colour of purity, of the unstained wisdom of the Buddhas. She has seven eyes. Apart from her two ordinary eyes, there are eyes in the palms of her hands and on the soles of her feet, and there's an eye in her forehead too. These eyes signifies that the acts performed by her in body and mind are mindful, guided by wisdom, while motivated by a keen interest and concern for the well-being of all beings.

With her right hand, out of her compassionate nature, she forms the varada mudra of giving or of bestowing blessings. With her left hand, she forms the abhaya mudra of bestowing fearlessness while at the same time holding three blue lotuses in different stages of development. Although the mudras are the same as those of Green Tara, White Tara is said to specifically bestow the blessings of long life, merit, and wisdom. This together with the lotuses in three stages of development creates, at least in my mind, a sense of someone willing to help with one's spiritual development in a very pragmatic way.

White Tara is sometimes called the Mother Of all Buddhas, just like Pranjaparamita, the goddess of the Perfection of Wisdom. She is the mother of all Buddhas in the sense that she combines wisdom and compassion, and in doing so she combines the introverted qualities with the extraverted, outreaching aspect of the enlightened mind. She is, in short, complete, able to stand on her own. She embodies a complete path to Enlightenment.

The sense I have of White Tara and Green Tara is that they move on either side of Tara, the Saviouress. One on the wisdom side, the other on the side of compassion, each one in their own way reaching out to the people whose minds are more inclined to one or the other.


[The photos in this post are by me of paintings of White Tara and Green Tara by Aloka; Padmaloka retreat centre, Norfolk, UK]

Love

It looks like I've got several friends who are in love at the moment (and it's not even spring). It's complicated and emotional, and it turns their lives upside down in all the wrong ways.

I wish I could give them advice, but I can't.

Well, maybe I can.

Don't hurry, that would be one thing I could say. But that's pretty lame advice, because this animal demands to be fed now. It's blind and easily hurt, and when you fail to properly attended to it, it runs its claws deep into your chest. Being incapable of forming words, it can not express itself in any other way.

There's a totally different beast though, one that is borne out of the patience of friendship. Compared to the untamed solitary love, this love may not be easily spotted at first, because it doesn't make a fuss of itself. Once it it acknowledged, it doesn't necessarily explode or even bloom, not at once, but it may do so later. It is enough to quietly recognise that, yes, there it is. It is easily fed and often satisfied with being remembered, by both.

No higher teachings

My teacher once said

There are no higher teachings, just deeper understandings.

For a mind that is cultivated on the ideals of scientific progress, it might be a bit difficult to fully grasp the implications of this. It means that once you've seen something, look again, and once you have understood something, re-learn it. It simply implies, for me at least, that patient perseverance and humiliation are good teachers.

There is, for example, a certain humiliation in attending beginner's meditation classes. I find myself silently protesting, saying I know this stuff, how to sit, how to breathe, how to meditate, or how I'm no beginner, that I've been doing this more or less daily for five years now.

But I haven't got a clue, really. I know I don't actually know very much, but on a much deeper level there's this silly and arrogant mind of mine that believes it does, and could it have the higher teaching now, please?

By patiently subjecting me to to the well known experience of breathing I find that I don't have any grasp of it at all. Experience is a shape-shifting drama, always just out of reach. When seeing this, when I accept that I've lost my foothold, that there wasn't ever a solid foundation to start with, that's when I finally may start to let go.

From The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava, Canto 93. His final departing advice:

Let these three expressions:

I do not have,
I do not understand,
I do not know

Be repeated over and over again.
This is the heart of my advice.

Introduction

It seems to me that my mind has texture, like the air I breathe has texture. With texture comes a certain solidity, something tangible, something that can be perceived or experienced.

The feel of a rough piece of wood is bound to give rise to all kinds of emotional responses, as would the feel of smooth skin, wet moss, or adhesive tape. In the same way, the texture of my mind sparks off feelings, giving rise to emotions.

The mind, in an every-day practical sense, is me, and yet it is perceived by me, by this very mind. It curves back upon itself like a Klein bottle, its inside being its own outside. Ultimately, as with the Klein bottle, there is no paradox in this. The mind affects all other senses, and is pushed and pulled this way and that by them, constantly shifting and twisting.

More importantly, though, is that the texture of mind is a reflection of reality, a mold of experiences, thoughts, and memories. Actually, the word impression is a very good one, implying that everything that I perceive (including mind itself) makes indentations in my mind, creating its texture.

So, in other words, this blog is about reflections on meditation and on life in general. It will contain the impressions left by things I've experienced.

I don't aim to write very often, and possibly not entries that are this long. In fact, I can make no promises other than that I'll post something whenever I'd like to put things into words, because putting things into words sometimes makes experiences more real.