Friday, October 11, 2024

Goldstein quote



The courage of a warrior is both required and developed in the practice of meditation. It takes courage to sit with pain, without avoiding or masking it; just to sit and face it totally and overcome one's fear. It takes courage to probe and by that probing discover the deepest elements of the mind and body. It can be quite unsettling at first because many of our comfortable habits get over-turned. It takes a lot of courage to let go of everything that we've been holding on to for security. To let go, to experience the flow of impermanence. It takes courage to face and confront the basic and inherent insecurity of this mind-body process. To confront the fact that in every instant what we are is continually dissolving, vanishing; that there is no place to take a stand at all. It takes courage to die. To experience the death of the concept of self; to experience that death while we're living takes the courage and fearlessness of an impeccable warrior.

P68-69 The Experience of Insight by Joseph Goldstein



Thanissaro Bhikkhu The Meditator as Warrior YouTube 12 minutes

kukkucca, uddacca

“The fourth of the hindrances the Buddha mentions in the Satipatthana Sutta are the mind states of restlessness and worry. The Pali word for restlessness is uddacca, which means agitation, excitement, or distraction. It is sometimes translated as "shaking above," where the mind is not settled into the object but hovering around it. "Restlessness" —literally, without rest—expresses all these aspects. The Pali word for worry is kukkucca, which is the mind state of regret or anxiety. This refers to how we feel about not having done things that we should have done and about having done things that we shouldn't have. Although restlessness almost always accompanies worry, it is possible to have restlessness present without worry or regret.”


P153 Mindfulness by Joseph Goldstein.




Tuesday, October 08, 2024

Meditation support

I've been meditating with 3 fellows in Iran for a while now. 

I want to open it up to others who want support in meditation. It's 7 AM Eastern Standard Time, it's 2:30 PM in Iran. And it's 4 AM in California. It's noon in England, 12:00 PM. 

Please join us if you'd like to meditate, and we can chat after meditation if you want. The only trick is getting the link to you, the invite. So drop you email in the comments and I'll erase it once I see it, and then send you the link in the morning or even the google calendar invite.



You could probably ask me to meditate any time, and I'd do it.

Saturday, October 05, 2024

The Five Aggregates




The Five Aggregates by Mathieu Boisvert, teaches at University of Quebec in Montreal, starts like this with a forward by A.K. Warder:

In Buddhist philosophy, the theory of the five aggregates (pancakkhandha) of realities, or real occurrences known as "principles" (dhamma), is the analysis of what elsewhere is often called the "problem" of matter and mind. In Buddhism, to separate these would be to produce a dilemma like the familiar one of "body" and "soul" (are they the same or different?). But the resolution is different. Whereas the "soul," according to Buddhism, is a non-entity and the problem therefore meaningless, consciousness is as real as matter. The tradition emphasizes that consciousness is inseparably linked to matter: there can be no consciousness without a body; although there ·could be a body without consciousness, it would not be sentient.

Matter and consciousness are two of the "aggregates"; the other three link them, or rather show diem.·inseparably bound together in a living being. These are, to use Boisvert's translations, "sensation" (vedana, variously translated as "experience," "feeling," etc.), "recognition" (sanna or "perception") and "karmic activities" (sankhara, "forces," "volition," etc.). Sensation - being either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral - can occur only in a body which is conscious. Similarly, recognition occurs solely when consciousness is aware of sensations. The karmic activities, sometimes restricted to volition (cetana), were gradually elaborated to include about fifty principles, from "contact" (phassa, the combination of a sense organ, its object and consciousness), energy and greed.: to understanding, benevolence, compassion and attention.


We are all subject to death, we lost K today.




Friday, October 04, 2024

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah begins ten days of penitence culminating in Yom Kippur, as well as beginning the cycle of autumnal religious festivals running through Sukkot which end on Shemini Atzeret in Israel and Simchat Torah everywhere else. (Wikipedia)

They're selling flowers on a Wednesday:




Eating symbolic foods, such as apples dipped in honey, hoping to evoke a sweet new year, is an ancient tradition recorded in the Talmud.

Three books of account are opened on Rosh Hashanah, wherein the fate of the wicked, the righteous, and those of the intermediate class are recorded. The names of the righteous are immediately inscribed in the Book of Life and they are sealed "to live". The intermediate class is allowed a respite of ten days, until Yom Kippur, to reflect, repent, and become righteous; the wicked are "blotted out of the book of the living forever."

The best-known ritual of Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, a musical instrument made from an animal horn.

This is when I see the fellows down by the water praying: The ritual of tashlikh is performed on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah by most Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews (but not by Spanish and Portuguese Jews or some Yemenites, as well as those who follow the practices of the Vilna Gaon). Prayers are recited near natural flowing water, and one's sins are symbolically cast into the water. Many also have the custom to throw bread or pebbles into the water, to symbolize the "casting off" of sins.

The Hebrew common greeting on Rosh Hashanah is Shanah Tovah.




Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Disappearance of consciousness

 


So thinking a lot about what you do when you get big sky mind? You just keep going is the answer. 

What's after that? What do you try for there? You're going into deeper meditative states.

Reading today in Satipatthana sutta the phrase, "disappearance of consciousness."

With deep meditative states that's maybe a description of absorption and you just build a reservoir of deep and wide meditative experiences.

Monday, September 30, 2024