Conventions are Alive

What is convention? Conventions are not just verbal words occurring in thought.

Conventions are alive! They bring I, universe, car, movement alive.. or red patches into “the redness of rose”. The power and magic of conventions.
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Qualities and Afflictions
Someone having a substantialist view of Mind quoted Longchenpa,

“Buddha Mind is empty of afflictions but is not empty of the Buddha qualities”


I responded:

That’s besides the point, it is empty of intrinsic existence. The Buddha qualities like compassion etc do not belong to an inherently existing entity but are naturally manifest as Buddha nature “without ground or agent”. Just like there is no redness of a rose and yet red patches manifesting as a display of the five lights without belonging to subject or object.



"And so we carefully investigate the arising, abiding, and vanishing of our own mind. Next, we look into whether it is produced or ceases. We do this to the point where we have no doubt whatsoever. We want to be utterly clear about the status of our own mind, absolutely certain that it does not in any way truly exist. Once we come to that conclusion, we see that our mind is without existence or nonexistence: it is not characterized by permanence or annihilation: it has neither edge nor center.

Until we fully abandon doubt regarding this, we cannot get to the actual Dzogchen view. So long as we harbor doubt, we cannot leave behind all bias toward permanence and impermanence. So you must gain certainty that the basis of all qualities is neither existent nor nonexistent, neither eternal nor annihilated, nor associated with any boundary or core.

Until you settle this well and digest it deeply, you will not find it possible to enter the self-settled, self-liberated state. You will not know the natural, spontaneous quality of your own mind, or its self-piloting and naturally settled nature. And you will not have the correct Dzogchen view."

"Our recognition that neither sheer awareness nor the afflictions obstructing it are truly established is special seeing. This seer is naked, clear, and empty. The special seeing that knows this is itself a clear emptiness, a nakedness of mind. Seen and seer are not separate, for both are clear and both are empty. They are not different. And it is special seeing's place to understand that they are not separate. This is how special seeing and serene abiding are unified. This is how we can carry afflictions to the path."

- Strands of Jewels, Khetsun Sangpo
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Tsongkhapa's Epistemic Nonduality

Sonam Thakchoe (The Two Truths Debate: Tsongkhapa and Gorampa on the Middle Way):

"Tsongkhapa regards the nondual realization of ultimate truth as an epistemic event... ...Tsongkhapa does not hold the achievement of nondual wisdom as equivalent to the cessation of cognitive activity...

Tsongkhapa's description of the way the meditator arrives at nondual understanding is as follows. The cognitive agent experiences a fusion of subjectivity and its object, which refer here not to self and outside world but rather to elements within the meditator's own psychophysical aggregates. The meditator remains introspective, not engaging the outside world, but the outside world as such does not disappear. What occurs is instead a total cessation of the dualities between subject I and object mine, between thinker and thought, between feeler and feelings, between mind and body, between seeing and seen, and so forth. Initially a meditator perceives, for instance, that in each act of seeing, two factors are always present: the object seen and the act of seeing it. While each single act of seeing involves dissolution, the object seen and the act of seeing actually consist of numerous physical and mental processes that are seen to dissolve serially and successively. Eventually, the meditator also notices the dissolution of the dissolution itself.

In other words, the meditator first realizes the fluctuating and transitory character of the five aggregates, which is then followed by further realization of the aggregates as empty and selfless, and finally by the realization of the emptiness of even the empty and selfless phenomena. Nondual knowledge is thus arrived at, in Tsongkhapa's view, through the direct experience of seeing the truths within one's own aggregates, rather than being convinced of the truth of certain abstractions through rational argument or persuasion. Since the process here is a cognitive experience that operates entirely within the domain of one's psychophysical aggregates, it is therefore an epistemic but not a metaphysical nonduality.

This is how, according to Tsongkhapa, an arya has direct nonconceptual and nondual access to the transcendent nature of his own five psychophysical aggregates during meditative equipoise. In the wake of meditative equipoise, an arya engages with dualistic worldly activities, such as taking part in philosophical discourse, practicing different social conventions, and so on. The arya will thus make use of socio-linguistic conventions, but since the arya has eradicated all reifying tendencies, even these worldly dualistic engagements will be seen as consistent with nondual wisdom. Both non-dual and dual wisdoms, especially in the case of a buddha, Tsongkhapa argues, are fully commensurate."

"Both Tsong khapa and Go rampa describe non-dual knowledge as being like a process of mixing water. They argue that the fusion between subjectivity and objectivity, from the meditator's point of view, reaches its climax in their non-dual state in a way that is like mixing clean water from two different jars by pouring it all into one jar. Tsong khapa for example argues: "from the vantage point of the wisdom that directly realises ultimate reality, there is not even the slightest duality between object and the object-possessing consciousness. Like mixing water with water, [yogi] dwells in the meditative equipoise".' Tsongkhapa insists, however, that this metaphor should not be taken too far or too literally. It refers only to the cognitive process that occurs in total dissolution, and to the experience associated with that process, and must not be taken to represent the achivement of a metaphysical unity."

“So, as far as Tsong khapa is concerned, there is no contradiction in claiming that, from the empirical standpoint, on the one hand, non-dual wisdom constitutes the subjective pole of consciousnesses with ultimate truth as its objective counterpart; from the ultimate vantage point, on the other hand, non-dual wisdom and ultimate truth, "are free from the duality of act (bya ba) and object acted upon (byed pa)".

In the non-dual state, even the cognitive interplay between subject and object appears, from the meditator's point of view, completely to cease. This is because, as Tsong khapa points out, "duality of act and object acted upon is posited strictly from the perspective of empirical cognition".

Although the dual appearances of subject and object completely dissolve from the perspective of non-dual wisdom, and thus the meditator does not experience the mutual interaction between distinct and separate elements—between the seer and the seen—the meditator nonetheless engages in an act of 'mere seeing'. As the Buddha explains to Bahiya:

In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the
heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In
reference to the cognised, only the cognised. That is how you should
train yourself [Ud I. 10]... then Bahiya, there is no you in terms of that.
When there is no you in terms of that, there is no you there. When there
is no you there, you are neither here not yonder nor between the two.
This, just this, is the end of stress [Ud I. 101.

The experience of 'mere seeing' in a non-dual form is valid only when it is empirically grounded and when there is cognitive activity occurring between non-dual wisdom and non-dual ultimate truth.”

"Although all empirically given truths such as the aggregate of form, feelings etc., are contingently produced and have diverse conventional characters, all of them, according to Tsong khapa, are ultimately empty of the inherent arising. They share the universal characteristic (ro gcig, eka-rasa), literally, the same 'taste'. The Buddha, for example, makes this statement: "just as the great ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, even so does this dharma and discipline have but one taste, the taste of release" [AN VIII.19].

The Samadhirajasatra (ting nge 'dzin rgyal po'i mdo) tells us: "By knowing one all are known. And by seeing one all are seen. Despite many things are said about [ultimate truth] in the conventional terms, no haughtiness should arise from it",' and furthermore, "Just as you have recognised ('du shes) personality, even so you should apply the same insight with respect to all [phenomena]. All phenomena are of the [same] nature like a clear space".

In the Gaganagamjasamadhi (Nam mkha'i mdzod kyi ting nge 'dzin), it is stated that: "Whoever by meditating on one phenomenon knows all phenomena as apprehensible like illusions and mirages, and knows them as hollow, false and ephemeral will before long reach the summum bonum (snying po) of enlightenment".

And Aryadeva also tells us that "whosoever sees one is said to see all. That which is emptiness of one is the emptiness of all" [VIII:191].

 Referring to this last passage from Aryadeva, Candrakirti has this to say:

The emptiness of the essence of form is itself the emptinesses of the essences of aggregates such as feeling. Similarly, the emptiness of the essence of eye-source is itself the emptinesses of the essences of all twelve sources. Likewise, the emptiness of the essence of eye-constituent is itself the emptinesses of the essences of all eighteen constituents. Equally so are [the emptinesses of the essences of] the infinite categories of things due to the distinct divisions in things, spaces, times and references. For whatever is the emptiness of the essence of one thing, is itself the emptinesses of the essences of all things. In spite of the fact that jars and bowls for example are distinct, space is not distinct. While things such as form are distinct, insofar as they all lack of essential arising of the form etc., they are not distinct. By understanding the lack the essential arising of merely one phenomenon, one understands the lack of the essential arising of all phenomena.'

Since all phenomena are empty of any substance or essence, they are all dependently arisen and relational entities. Tsong khapa agrees.' Yet to endorse the claim that the ultimate nature of all phenomena is fundamentally the same does not, in Tsong khapa's view, make one a monist. While accepting this account of the ultimate nature of things, Tsongkhapa remains committed to a pluralistic view. "A pluralistic view of the world", as Kalupahana puts it, "is not incompatible with dependent arising (pratityasamputpada).


Pluralism in the context of dependent arising does not imply the existence of self-contradictory truths. It need not necessarily lead to a notion of an Absolute that transcends such self-contradictory truths. As far as Tsong khapa is concerned, the ultimate reality of, for instance, the table in front of my eyes, cannot be treated as simply identical with the ultimate reality pertaining to the chair that I am sitting on. The empty table cannot be the taken as identical with the empty chair since the emptiness of the table is constitutive, not only of the empty table, but of the empty conceptual-linguistic conventions imposed upon it as well. Those conventions belong exclusively to the ultimate truth of the table and are not present in the chair.

According to Tsong khapa, however, conceding this much does not prevent one from arguing for the universality of ultimate truth. Just as different objects occupy different spaces, and yet the space those objects occupy has the same 'non-obstructive' characteristic, so the ultimate realities of both table and chair are different, notwithstanding the fact that two ultimate realities have identical natures—they share 'the same taste'. Both of these emptinesses imply insubstantiality and essenceless in the negative sense, as well as dependently arisen and relational nature in the affirmative sense."
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Consciousness is Just the Appearing
Someone wrote:

Most practitioners think experiences are appearing TO their consciousness instead of seeing experiences are how their consciousness is appearing.

I wrote back:


Most practitioners think experiences are appearing TO or even WITHIN their consciousness instead of seeing consciousness is JUST the appearing.
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No Self, Therefore No Activity?
From a discussion in Dharma Connection - 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dharmaconnection/permalink/2108649265828945/

Kyle Dixon
Kyle DixonKyle and 12 others manage the membership and moderators, settings and posts for Dharma Connection. Although he got into trouble yesterday for being unable to exercise compassion and make an apology when he offended someone. He make a remark that struck a chord in regards to a loved one someone had lost, and they asked him to apologize. He refused.

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John Tan
John TanJohn and 12 others manage the membership and moderators, settings and posts for Dharma Connection. Can't understand him. This aside, recently he posted some extracts about selflessness written by Khenpo Tsulstrim Gyamtso:

"When we realize the selflessness of the individual, however, this whole process stops. The wrong views that have their root in the belief in self cease, then the mental afflictions cease, then karmic actions cease, and as a result of that, birth in samsara’s cycle of existence ceases."

"We can formulate the following logical reasoning: Karmic actions and results are mere appearances devoid of true existence, because no self, no actor, exists to perform them. This is a valid way to put things because if the self of the individual does not exist, there cannot be any action, and therefore there cannot be any result of any action either."

Would like to hear ur view Kyle, that because there is no-self, there is no action.

Frankly this is not inline with the experience and insight of anatta I have. I seriously cannot accept jax's "because there is no self, there is nothing to do". I resonate more with Buddhaghosa's ' Suffering as such exists, but no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer is found.'

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Kyle Dixon
Kyle DixonKyle and 12 others manage the membership and moderators, settings and posts for Dharma Connection. I was thinking about these comments from KTG just the other day because I saw Jax post them, they do seem off.

The only guess I have regarding the first quote is that he is referring to the complete realization of selflessness, not a mere recognition. It would not be right to think all of those processes cease upon initial recognition, but that is of course how Jax misinterpreted the excerpt. I don't have the text, but I can imagine there is more context that is missing.

As for the other quote, it isn't the best way to communicate the message in my opinion.

My view is that the self is imputed onto the action or afflicted activity. And the activity is the result of ignorance. First there is ignorance regarding the nature of appearance, and appearances are mistaken to be external, whereas mind is then internal. From there further grasping occurs which fortifies this split, and the alleged inner reference point is then treated as mine and myself, which leads to I-making in the form of imputation. That activity of imputation then further deepens the fallacious structure of self and other because activity unfolds based on the misconception of the self.

But the self is not the lynchpin. Ignorance is. Is the self and ignorance synonymous? I don't think so. Because ignorance is two fold in that it reifies the apparent inner dimension and external dimension. The self that karma is related to is the mind reified as self. We can recognize non-arising related to that substrate knower, and still perceive a substantial external dimension. Likewise we can recognize non-arising of objects in the external dimension and the inner substrate knower remains in tact. Then, we can also recognize the non-arising in different sensory gates at different times. For instance one can recognize the non-arising of sound yet visual perception remains afflicted, and vice versa.

So it isn't as simple as just negating the self and washing our hands of the massive nexus of afflictive processes. It is much more complex than that.

Is it true that the self is unreal and the activity base on the self is unreal? Sure. But KTG is sort of communicating this in a backwards fashion. Just because the self is unreal does not mean it is not constructed and based on a complex nexus of afflictive activity, that is then based in delusion. And that activity is habitual.

This is why Padmasambhava says my view is higher than the sky but my attention to karmic cause and effect is finer than flour.

The karmic cause and effect is the patterns of grasping that reinforces the inner and outer yings or dimensions.

KTG's message is true in a certain context, but is communicated recklessly. And of course the nuance of the issue are completely lost on you-know-who. I feel he has had some coarse insights into substantial non-dual states, maybe. But he has never really seen equipoise. This is my feeling.

The self does not create the fundamental afflictive activity. The fundamental afflictive activity gives rise to the self, and then both spin out of control from there. But one will not resolve the affliction by merely negating the self.

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Kyle Dixon
Kyle DixonKyle and 12 others manage the membership and moderators, settings and posts for Dharma Connection. Anatta equipoise is related to absence of time, and in this sense action is indeed negated. Also the threefold actor, action, acted upon is undone when the insight is twofold. Anatta in objects is related to unreality of space. But only Buddhas are in non-retroactive state of that nature.

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John Tan
John TanJohn and 12 others manage the membership and moderators, settings and posts for Dharma Connection. Yes Kyle, like u said it is not so straight forward and logical deduction can b slippery. Does freedom from subject/object duality necessarily frees one from "mine" attachment?

"First there is the ignorance regarding the nature appearance and appearances are mistaken to b external whereas mind is then internal. "

My view is this misapprehension is the result of ignorance but grasping need not arise. That is, I/others, subject/object are not the result of grasping but a non-recogntion. However when "mine" arises, that is grasping.
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Kyle Dixon
Kyle DixonKyle and 12 others manage the membership, moderators, settings, and posts for Dharma Connection. I agree that the feeling of subject-object precedes grasping and "mine."

In some systems there is actually a tiered model of ignorance for this very reason, and that simple non-recognition is treated as a different aspect of ignorance. That bare non-recognizing ignorance is sometimes illustrated in the example of the first instances when waking up from sleep where one is cognizing appearances, and those appearances are externalized, but self-identification has not arisen yet. I've had these moments extend to where I will wake up and it takes a few moments to even register where I am, yet bare cognizance is certainly functioning. Then imputation arises and recollection of person, place, time, plans, schedule etc., all unfold, which is held as a different type of ignorance.
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The water flows of itself and the flowers are naturally red
Realization of anatta presented in the commentary to the ninth oxherding picture in Zen:

https://terebess.hu/english/oxherding.html

Ten Ox-herding Pictures
Stage 9
RETURNING
TO THE SOURCE

Introduction

It is originally pure and clean without a speck of dust clinging.
He observes the flourishing and dying of form while remaining in the silence of no-action.
This is not the same as illusion; what need is there for striving or planning?
The water is blue and the mountains green; he sits and watches phenomena take form and decay.

Verse

Having come back to the origin and returned to the source, you see that you have expended efforts in vain.
What could be superior to becoming blind and deaf in this very moment?
Inside the hermitage, you do not see what is in front of the hermitage.
The water flows of itself and the flowers are naturally red.

How much time and pain it took to come to the eighth stage of "Person and Ox Both Forgotten"! Now you have reached at last the stage where you realize the fact of "Person is empty, so is the dharma," that is, the subject (person) and the object (dharma) are both totally empty. Since this is the fruit of extremely long and hard labor, you tend to stick to this stage and to cherish it endlessly - the last residue of enlightenment. If you succeed in washing it away by constant and persistent sitting, you come to a state of realization that the fact of "Person is empty, so is the dharma" is the essential state of human beings, signifying nothing special at all. Through this realization you return to your original starting point. This is the stage of "Returning to the source," where not a trace of such things as "Buddhism" or "Tathagata" is found anywhere. It is true that "the state after enlightenment is exactly the same as that of before enlightenment." It is the state of mind of "a leisurely person of the Way, who, having finished learning, has nothing more to do."

At this stage you can observe that all the highs and lows and vacillations of this world are, as they are, void of substance and are manifestations of the world of perfect stillness and non-being. Expressed in these terms it sounds as if there were two things - being and non-being. But in fact, being is non-being; the aspect of being is, as it is, non-being itself. There is no distinction between the two at all.

This proposition "Being is non-being" is a crude fact, not a temporary illusion or a dream. At this point you can realize and affirm that it has been entirely unnecessary to be consciously engaged in practicing the way or trying to attain enlightenment. This is a very important point: you start with the first stage of "Searching the Ox," and, spending many years in practice, you come at last to the ninth level of "Returning to the Source," and as a result of this entire process you can say that practice and enlightenment were unnecessary. It is totally wrong to maintain from the very beginning that practice and enlightenment are of no use. Such an attitude is called "inactive zen" [buji-zen] . Today, almost all Zen schools in Japan have degenerated to this "inactive zen." They maintain that just sitting is enough, not appreciating the experience of enlightenment or even ignoring it. On the other hand, you must bear in mind: No matter how strongly you argue that enlightenment is important, if it's nothing more than just propagating a conceptional zen or if you take pride in your experience (if it was an authentic experience), you are only mid-way. There is no other way than to sit and sit and sit, until you can very clearly say that practice and enlightenment were intrinsically unnecessary.

Let's now appreciate the verse by Master Kakuan:

Having come back to the origin and returned to the source,
you see that you have expended efforts in vain.

You are now back to your starting point. How much effort you needed for that! Occasionally you encouraged yourself washing your face with the ice-chilly basin water, or you sank into desperation listening to frogs croaking in the dusk outside, or you kept sitting in defiance of the pains in the legs or of unbearable fatigue. Many times you have felt, "Now, this time I've come to a true experience!" but soon that experience is covered with anxiety and discontent. How many times you have determined to stop doing zazen altogether!.

What could be superior to becoming blind and deaf
in this very moment?

Come to think of it now, why didn't I become like a blind and deaf person right away? "Blind and deaf" here means a state of mind where there is nothing to see and nothing to hear. When you see, there's only the seeing, and the subject that sees doesn't exist. When you hear, there's only the hearing, and the subject that hears doesn't exist. The objects which are seen or heard are, just as they are, without substance. But understanding the logic of this will not do. When this is realized as a fact, you become like a "blind and deaf" person.

Inside the hermitage,
you do not see what is in front of the hermitage.

The late YAMADA K�un Roshi comments that this line comes from a dialogue between Unmon [864-949] and Master Kemp� [dates unknown]: Unmon visited Master Kemp� and asked, "Why doesn't a person inside the hermitage know anything outside the hermitage?" To this, Kemp� burst out into laughter. The point is why the person inside the hermitage (subject) cannot see the things "in front of the hermitage" (object). That's because there isn't anything in front of the hermitage. You may say that there is only the subject, there being no object at all. Yet, in actual truth, that "subject" doesn't exist either.

The water flows of itself and the flowers are naturally red.

The water runs smoothly, the flowers are colored scarlet. This line seems to imply that there are only the objects and there's no subject at all. However, as a matter of fact, those objects do not exist at all. It's simply that the water is running smoothly, and flowers are scarlet. Everything is just as it is [tada korekore], and everything is void as it is now [arugamama no aritsubure]. The fact that there is no distinction between self and others simply continues without end - "The water flows of itself and the flowers are naturally red.".
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Daniel Ingram on What is Awakening, and would he trade it for anything else?
If someone talks about an experience he/she had and then lost it, that's not (the true, deep) awakening... As many teachers put it, it's the great samadhi without entry and exit.

John Tan: There is no entry and exit. Especially for no-self. Why is there no entry and exit?
Me (Soh): Anatta (no-self) is always so, not a stage to attain. So it's about realisation and shift of perception.
John Tan: Yes 👍


As John also used to say to someone else, "Insight that 'anatta' is a seal and not a stage must arise to further progress into the 'effortless' mode. That is, anatta is the ground of all experiences and has always been so, no I. In seeing, always only seen, in hearing always only sound and in thinking, always only thoughts. No effort required and never was there an 'I'."


---

Here's a description by Daniel Ingram of what is awakening, also an interesting comment about whether he would trade it for anything else. It's a good description which resonates with my experience.

“Since the topic has come up so often and been so bandied about so many times by so many people, let me state here what I mean by 4th path, regardless of what anyone else means by it. It has the following qualities:

1) Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher. This is immediately obvious just as color is to a man with good eyesight as the old saying goes. Thus, anything and everything simply and obviously manifest just where they are. No phenomena observe any others and never did or could.

2) Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all. Whatever effort or intent or anything like that that arises does so naturally, causally, inevitably, as it always actually did. This is immediately obvious, though not always the forefront of attention.

3) No cycles change or stages or states or anything else like that do anything to this direct comprehension of simple truths at all.

4) There is no deepening in it to do. The understanding stands on its own and holds up over cycles, moods, years, etc and doesn't change at all. I have nothing to add to my initial assessment of it from 9 years ago.

5) There is nothing subtle about it: anything and everything that arises exhibits these same qualities directly, clearly. When I was third path, particularly late in it, those things that didn't exhibit these qualities were exceedingly subtle, and trying to find the gaps in the thing was exceedingly difficult and took years and many cycles. I had periods from weeks to months where it felt done and then some subtle exception would show up and I would realize I was wrong yet again, so this is natural and understandable, and if someone claims 4th as I define it here and later says they got it wrong, have sympathy for them, as this territory is not easy and can easily fool people, as it did me many, many times over about 5 years or so. However, 4th, as I term it, ended that and 9 years later that same thing holds, which is a very long time in this business.

There are other aspects that may be of value to discuss at some other time, but those are a great place to start for those who wish to claim this. If you truly have those, then perhaps we can talk about a few other points that are less central and essential.

Now, how there can still be affect (though quite modified in many ways) when there is centerlessness and agencylessness, this is a mystery to the AF kids and to me as well, and that brings me to my next point: there seems to be areas of development depending on what you look for and aim for that may arise independently, and not everything seems to come as a package necessarily. Those things are what I looked for really hard for about 7 years, and that is what I found. Now I find that the interest in the unraveling of what drives that residual affect is arising, and so that investigation happens on its own also.

Perhaps people will find this helpful in some way.”

...

"Well, these debates go on and on and on.

A few simple points:

I still very much recommend my criteria as helpfully posted above. They have merit and value, and achieving those really shifts reality to something much better, having myself tried the before and after, I can tell you that from my point of view there is nothing more important that I achieved and attained than the total elimination of all sense of doer, watcher, controller, center point, observer, etc. True and total elimination of duality was a massive step up from the near total elimination of it: no comparison at all. It is hard to imagine that anyone else wouldn't value it the same way I do, but then tastes differ.

There are many axes of development: insight, concentration (and it has many axes within it), morality (an endless festival of axes to develop, including emotional and psychological health). Insight stands alone in that it is all basically towards one goal, and that goal does transform the relationship to all of the rest of it in ways that provide global improvement at the core sensate and paradigmatic levels of intrinsic processing. The rest are all also important, but nothing does what that does.

I really appreciate the chapter in Chögyam Trungpa's Journey Without Goal about the Five Buddha Families. This is a video of that chapter by the crazy old dead perverted but helpful genius himself: The Five Buddha Families

His embracing of the wide range of experience in all its human glory is so valuable, and that helped empower me to really take on everything that was going on in my experience. I still must warn against the limited emotional range models and what they can do to practice: beware becoming like those who follow those: so many complexities occur.

Is my emotional life transformed by my insights? Vastly transformed, no question.

Do I still manifest all the standard emotions: definitely, and some even more strongly than I did before.

Is there vastly less suffering in them as a result of their happening totally on their own just like qualities of space? Absolutely.

Is this anything like the disconnect feared by a poster above? Not in the least: there is no disconnection, because there is no longer any imagined thing to be disconnected.

The field lights up itself totally, without division, without restraint, without any barrier or gap, so disconnection is impossible. Does really honestly feeling what is going on help with emotional transformation more than models that imply that we shouldn't feel what we are feeling? I definitely think so.

Would I trade this for anything? Maybe world peace, but I would have to think about it. Until then, this totally rocks, and missing out on it would be barking crazy from my point of view.

Best wishes, and practice well,

Daniel"

---------

RE: Why is awakening so great?
6/29/20 7:32 AM as a reply to Brandon Dayton.
Brandon Dayton:
I like this description from Daniel Ingram, time stamped from when the description begins.
https://youtu.be/W3kHi0LLzJs#t=30m25s

Thanks Brandon! 

I transcribed a couple of questions whose phenomenological answers seemed very interesting for practice. If any fellow member finds an error in the transcription, please let me know. At 35:49 there are some words I couldn't understand.

MaxAnte: What are some of the actual, real world, tangible benefits of full Enlightenment?

Daniel Ingram: This kind of painful process that was literally sort like a ‘low grade headache’ (best way to explain it) stopped. That was just delightful, and in its place there’s a sense of synchrony. Synchrony just feels really nice. Everything synchronizes with itself. Before, everything feels out of phase. There is this that and then my knowing of it. There where this that and then this, and I was here and I was there. There was this always sense of jarring out-of-phaseness, which somehow experientially is just unpleasant. It’s suffering. It’s a fundamental type of suffering.

And when that stopped, the sense of synchrony and naturalness is substantially more delightful, just experientially. And that keeps on being substantially more delightful, moment after moment. It’s like a pleasure you don’t get a tolerance to. It’s a niceness that every moment is just as nice as the moment before, in that specific way.

That doesn’t mean that things can’t be unpleasant, but that quality is also there, even in very unpleasant things. So I’m not meaning to say there’s not the perception of pain or that everything is always nice. It isn’t. There’s still pain, but that quality of synchrony is simply delightful and is always happening. Actually, I’ve come to appreciate it more as time has gone on it. Continues to sort of be like ‘yeah’, almost like there’s like … as it sort of cascades through all other aspects of mind and situations and conditioning.

It’s fascinating to see some memory –I may not have had in 20 years– come up, and now it arises in this totally different space, where identity is nothing like the solid sticky thing it was before. And now it’s just a thought and space. That rewires something in the brain that now that memory –which might have been painful or complicated– is now arising in a space that is so much more clear and open. And in which thought, rather than being contracted into, is literally just this super wispy thing in this big echoey room that is so much nicer … Also, there will be meetings and I’m looking around like I’m the only person in the room full-time. I you’re the person who’s really in the room and everybody else isn’t in the meeting, that’s a real advantage!

MaxAnte: So, you think there are some actually real-world advantages here that you’re experiencing ongoingly?

Daniel Ingram: Sure, because people are constantly like “oh, I wasn’t really present for that … I wasn’t really into that”. Well, now the cool thing about being awake is that the holodeck no longer being filtered through the serial line that was constantly getting interrupted, and turning to the imagined holodeck –there was another holodeck– would tuned out the sort of consensus holodeck when it’s tuned to its internal holodeck … well, that’s not happening in that way. The default is now the consensus holodeck (as much as anything can be a consensus when we all have our own advantage points).

Speaking in relative terms, but ignoring all the ontological problems –I don’t want to go into that–, basically the room and being in the room (or the space or the field or wherever you are) is the default. Whereas before, tuning out was the default. Being lost in thought was the default. The default mode network being activated to-not-really-be-here was the default. Now the natural default is to be here. And by the way, if I really need to, I can check my calendar and perform a cognitive task that for some reason like to do that high level function I really kind of need to tune out the room a little bit, that can happen. But then the room is back as soon as that stops. Whereas before, it was the other way around. This is substantially better.

The other thing is the proportionality, which is a hard thing to explain. 99% of this room –even if I’m in pain somewhere– has no pain. And this is the vast experience, so the whole room is the experience evenly in some kind of way. Let’s say I have a pain in my knee: it’s no bigger than it is. In comparison to the volume of the space, it’s still really small. And the mind is also not doing that contracted exaggerating thing it used to do, where it would take the pain or make this big thing out of it and ignore all the areas that were neutral or even pleasant, that it becomes the sort of fixation. Whereas (now) even when I have pain in one place, most other places are neutral and or might even feel nice.

And so, also things that feel nice are much easier to perceive as I’m here. You can’t see me now because this is an audio, but I’m moving my hands around and like the coolness of the air on my fingers, it’s delightful. There’s something about the echo in the room that sounds kind of cool, like even that little click of your fingers, like it has a sort of nice little snap to it. There’s the glistening of the light on your hair, which is just naturally kind of cool when it’s just allowed to be itself, and that sort of childlike wondrous way of people perceiving things when they’re just in it, like you’re watching a beautiful sunset, you forget about the day and you’re just in the beautiful colors …

Well, everything has something of that to it in some way, because there’s the immediate sensate experience and it’s wrought on rock (35:49?) because we get everything kind of processed, but as raw as you can get with the human brain that receives everything kind of processed, and so there’s something really nice about that. The proportionality of though also. So emotions are mostly thoughts and then you get contracted into the thought rather than having it just be this wispy thing in space. And then because when you contract into the thought it then becomes a huge part of your world and then that distorts how much of a reaction you have to it. And then that costs a much greater release of all the stress chemicals if you’re having some unpleasant thought, because the brain is now taking that as a total world or whatever you get lost in the anger or whatever and then that creates a whole much bigger stress response and all these chemicals.

Well now it’s not that they aren’t stressors and things, but the thought arises in the room, is proportional, and in terms of experience the thoughts are really small wispy things most of the time. And then the stress chemicals that result from that, even if it’s really unpleasant thought, are vastly less because the experience of it wasn’t contracted into and the brain didn’t freak out that now this is a total world cut off from most of the room, which again is fine, and in fact pretty nice. So, it’s not that it made all bad emotions go away, but the relationship to it and the physiology of it is really different.

And the envelope of these things thus is a lot different, meaning the sort of attack, sustain and decay –the music synthesizer terms in terms of sound–. The attack is really fast because things are clear, but the release is also really fast because the thought arises and then it disappears. And the maybe some little stress chemical arises and then those bodily sensations hang out for a little bit, and then they disappear. But there’s nothing like the sort of feedback loop in the way that it used to be before, where this hurts and this cost of the thought and this thing and then that causes stress chemicals and they would loop and loop and loop… and this really exaggerated distorted way long after the thing had happened. And you’re just sitting there most of the room is fine, like why is the brain doing that? It’s just torturing itself, it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t benefit from that. And so the default now is to not do that, whereas before the default was to do that. So it’s not like some small sort of short versions of that can’t happen in extreme circumstances, but it’s vastly shorter and it’s vastly milder. So that’s better.

All of those things have been substantial upgrades … like unbelievable upgrades. Like I would give it all the stuff I lost getting this, I would give that again and more … many more times, to get this. This is such a benefit in terms of the actual living feel of it. I can’t even tell you.

Does it perform exactly like the old text said it would? No. Does it beat the crap out of what I had before? Absolutely yes. And the cool thing is this is reproducible and it’s based on really straight forward assumptions, just sensate clarity about intentions, mental impressions, thoughts in the room, experience, spotty mind, Six Sense Doors, and just noticing that clearly. That’s really straight forward and portable. And so that’s one of the supercool things about it. And it actually is reproducible. So people were able to do this, they were able to tell me how to do it and it’s like ‘yeah!’ so I like that. It satisfies the empiricist in me. It’s very egalitarian. Like here you are, here’s your senses, perceive them clearly. This can be yours.


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