I have started to read, “Mindfulness in Plain English” by
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana for the second time, and I am wondering who
read it the first time. It may be because the articulation of this man’s
description of mindfulness is so brilliant and whole, that one stops
having ones own ideas while in the presence of the simple truth. Not
once have I found myself saying, “oh, yeah, I remember that” and
skipping down to the next paragraph, even though I was sure that I had
read this book so carefully before. When you hear the truth, it drops
you into the present moment. This present moment has never been
experienced before, so I guess it shouldn’t seem so unusual that I would
not even remember the last present moment that this teacher dropped me
into.
I would like to share a little of the moments of dharma that I experienced yesterday, sitting on my porch in the blessed sun. I read six pages in two hours. This book is a masterpiece and the gift of a great teacher.
“When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know reality without illusions, complete with all its pain and danger, real freedom and security will be yours. This is not a doctrine we are trying to drill into you; it is an observable reality, something you can and should see for yourself.”
But the clear and concise articulation of humanness was like a soft breeze of forgiveness in my afternoon.
“There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending you whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meet somehow and look okay from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything is caving in on you—-you keep those to yourself. Meanwhile, down under all of that, you just know that there has to be some other way to live, a better way to look at the world, a way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance every now and then; you get a good job. You fall in love. You win a game. For awhile things are better, Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and humdrum fade away. …..smoke in the wind….you are left with just a memory and a vague awareness that something is wrong.
You feel that there really is a whole other realm of depth and sensitivity available in life; somehow you are just not seeing it. You wind up feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are really not touching life. You are not “making it” again. Then even that vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old reality. The world looks like the usual foul place. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of you time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights.
So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just human. And you suffer from the malady that infects every human being. It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms; chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including people closest to you, blocked up feelings and emotional deadness,—–many, many arms. None of us is entirely free of it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves with goals, projects, and concerns about status. But in never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception, a little voice in the back of the mind that keeps saying, “not good enough yet. Need to have more. Have to make it better. Have to be better.”"
“Meditation is running straight into reality.”
“It allows you to blow aside the illusions and free yourself from all the polite little lies you tell yourself all the time.”
At one point, he describes the “surge” of life. This really impacted me, yesterday. I have been doing a lot of investigation lately on intense, uncomfortable feelings in the body and the accompanying thoughts that freeze these feeling and make them heavy and solid. My experience is that this intense energy would not be so uncomfortable and we would not be so inclined to run away to our thoughts, if we conceptually labeled it as something normal and natural in our human body. What is really the difference between the energy of joy and anxiety accept the running away and the thoughts? I think that both of these energies are divine energy. We need to accept the feelings of intense anxiety in our bodies with the same welcome mat that we put out for joy and bliss. The are both the “surge” of life. Let it flow. Don’t grab on to it in fear or pleasure. Let it flow…..in and out……everything passes, everything changes…
Nx
I would like to share a little of the moments of dharma that I experienced yesterday, sitting on my porch in the blessed sun. I read six pages in two hours. This book is a masterpiece and the gift of a great teacher.
“When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know reality without illusions, complete with all its pain and danger, real freedom and security will be yours. This is not a doctrine we are trying to drill into you; it is an observable reality, something you can and should see for yourself.”
But the clear and concise articulation of humanness was like a soft breeze of forgiveness in my afternoon.
“There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending you whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meet somehow and look okay from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything is caving in on you—-you keep those to yourself. Meanwhile, down under all of that, you just know that there has to be some other way to live, a better way to look at the world, a way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance every now and then; you get a good job. You fall in love. You win a game. For awhile things are better, Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and humdrum fade away. …..smoke in the wind….you are left with just a memory and a vague awareness that something is wrong.
You feel that there really is a whole other realm of depth and sensitivity available in life; somehow you are just not seeing it. You wind up feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are really not touching life. You are not “making it” again. Then even that vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old reality. The world looks like the usual foul place. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of you time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights.
So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just human. And you suffer from the malady that infects every human being. It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms; chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including people closest to you, blocked up feelings and emotional deadness,—–many, many arms. None of us is entirely free of it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves with goals, projects, and concerns about status. But in never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception, a little voice in the back of the mind that keeps saying, “not good enough yet. Need to have more. Have to make it better. Have to be better.”"
“Meditation is running straight into reality.”
“It allows you to blow aside the illusions and free yourself from all the polite little lies you tell yourself all the time.”
At one point, he describes the “surge” of life. This really impacted me, yesterday. I have been doing a lot of investigation lately on intense, uncomfortable feelings in the body and the accompanying thoughts that freeze these feeling and make them heavy and solid. My experience is that this intense energy would not be so uncomfortable and we would not be so inclined to run away to our thoughts, if we conceptually labeled it as something normal and natural in our human body. What is really the difference between the energy of joy and anxiety accept the running away and the thoughts? I think that both of these energies are divine energy. We need to accept the feelings of intense anxiety in our bodies with the same welcome mat that we put out for joy and bliss. The are both the “surge” of life. Let it flow. Don’t grab on to it in fear or pleasure. Let it flow…..in and out……everything passes, everything changes…
Nx
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