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Rabbi Yitzak of Akko, who lived in Israel at the time just before the flowering of Safetian Kabbalah, told the story of a vagrant who saw a beautiful princess coming out of the bathhouse one day. He sighed a deep sigh and said, “Would that I could do with her as I liked.” “That will come to pass in the graveyard, but not here,” the princess said. She meant to brush him off, of course, but he rejoiced, because he thought she was telling him to meet her at the graveyard for an assignation. So he went right to the graveyard to wait for her, and there he devoted all of his thoughts to her, thinking of her beauty. And he waited there many days. After a while, because of his intense longing and his intense concentration, his soul separated from all things sensual, including the woman herself, and he communed with God. Afterward, he became a perfect servant and holy man of God, and his blessings were beneficial to all passersby. Our impulses, even what seem to be our basest impulses, are divine in origin.
Lew, Alan. One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi .
This pairs nicely with the practice tip below - desire is not something to be eradicated; like every shadow part, desire can (and should) be harnessed for the benefit of all beings. Every part of you can be a teacher.
Links
The new Romantic age - Interesting analysis that posits a larger backlash against technological structures and definitions of meaning and posits people are moving toward a new kind of spirituality. A question I wonder is whether this wave can be harnessed to truly move people toward a higher consciousness — previous waves (e.g. the 60s and 70s) arguably degenerated into cults, abuse, and a culture of narcissism. That being said, a lot of great teachers came out of that era too, and it planted the seeds for many true spiritual transformations. It’s complicated!
Review paper on the biological basis for chakras / subtle body. Someone who is smarter about biology than me: please tell me how well supported this is!
Interesting breathwork practice — tried it and noticed some subtle field brightening, tingling and grounding into my body. No idea what’s supposed to happen - I think some vagus nerve settling? Maybe I was too calm already :) Curious to hear other self-reports.
Practice Tip - Don’t go chasing waterfalls
People often say that attachment to state or outcome is a hindrance to progress in contemplative practice, that one should avoid various kinds of subtle grasping. Of course, the truth is more nuanced - the initial impetus to practice often comes from attachment to state — states of bliss, states of non-suffering, for example. So those subtle attachments are only to be dispelled later on as one makes progress. But there’s a more subtle kind of attachment to state I want to call attention to - and that is the framing of the goal of practice as some kind of state. People think about awakening as a kind of state, consisting of things like boundless compassion, joy, non-conceptual stillness, freshness, non-locality, etc. But awakening is not a state — it’s a perspective1. That perspective can cause lots of these wonderful states to arise, but they are adornments, only. Their absence is not necessarily a tell that one is “out of it” - awakening is not state dependent, and true freedom is about not being state bound. This is one reason why my teacher would strongly advise against practicing the jhanas for example. I see a lot of people on Twitter obsessed with them as the goal of practice, and I think this is a big mistake2.
It’s a View. Another promissory note that I will write a lot more about views in the future.
Should no one ever jhana? No advice is universal. There are circumstances where it could make sense. For example, if one has a subtle belief that doing jhanas could ruin your practice or undermine awakening, then it may make sense to practice them in order to show that, in fact, nothing can sully awakening. There could be other valid reasons too.