An ornament of the space of your being
January 23rd, 2024
Your meditation practice addresses the question of how well you can live with thinking, neither suppressing thought nor being lost in it, so that your thinking mind does not drive you away from being fully present. If nothing interferes with your experience of the fullness of being, then thinking becomes an ornament of the space of your being and does not obscure or separate you from your natural state.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Awakening the Sacred Body: Tibetan Yogas of Breath and Movement.
Thoughts are not an enemy - it is a common misconception that a goal of practice is to eliminate thought or that the fruit of practice is a thoughtless state. I believe in an old Michael Taft podcast he describes the experience of thoughts as a bubbly effervescence, and that as practice progresses, one gains the ability to pick up conceptual mind when needed and then put it down again when not. A knife is useful, but I wouldn’t want it permanently attached to my hand.
Links
Speaking of which, there is a online discussion of Vajrayana practices and rational work at the Evolving Ground sangha, which I highly recommend. One of the best online communities of practice1.
I enjoyed this (all over the place) article in Harper’s about weightlifting. It may seem far afield of this substack’s topic, but the fruits of our practice are as much in the body as in the mental (as if those are separate). As the saying goes, enlightenment can be found in the body. There’s also this quote:
I experience a sensation I think of as “opening up.” I receive new eyes. When blood flows into your muscles it changes your eyes—like wearing glasses. It starts in your blood and stretches out over the world, where everything remains the same, but different. It’s as if each color contains a deeper, richer layer of itself, invisible during the rote machinery of life—working on my laptop, making food, driving my car—which only gets revealed when blood makes muscle thick and full. Before, I saw colors, but now I can actually see; before, I could breathe, but now I can actually breathe. Anxiety disappears; stress disappears; the stories that I tell myself in language disappear. I experience something like pure phenomenological Life.
and this
“There are some truths in this world,” Mishima wrote, “that one cannot see unless one unbends one’s posture.”2
Good essay on “non-meditation” as an end-goal of the practice. You might also talk about it in terms of “everything is meditation”, but this is a good framing, particularly around non-doing. There’s also a nice discussion of freshness. On that note…
What’s Fresh?
A friend and reader asked me the other day what I meant by freshness. Just this - freshness can be a fruit of the practice - it’s the experience of “newness”, and can be related to an experience of “suchness” (Tathata). It can feel like this — you are in a familiar environment, and yet it can feel utterly new and unfamiliar. Your eye is drawn to details you hadn’t noticed before and did not remember. It’s like seeing the thing for the very first time. Objects can take on a certain kind of vividness or extreme clarity (another aspect). Suchess refers to a kind of pre-conceptual experience; it can almost feel like you are seeing a more bare or real version of reality. Of course, we can’t make the mistake of reifying this, or grasping after it — still a mental construction.
n.b. I am in no way affiliated with them, have not taken any of their classes, and mostly just lurk on their Discord.