Who seeks me by form,
Who seeks me by sound,
Perverted are his footsteps on the way;
For he cannot perceive the Tathagata.
The Diamond Sutra, The Buddha
There are a number of products out there that claim to work on the brain to produce deepened meditation or enlightenment. One came in my mailbox yesterday claiming Discover how to meditate deeper than a zen monk in just five minutes – without years of practice, or hours of boring meditation CDs – by using a secret shortcut you can’t find anywhere else. How do they promise to achieve this? Through sound. (more…)
Hypnosis comes from the greek word for sleep. James Braid who coined the term thought it was misleading and tried to change the name to monoideism. I think that both terms are suggestive. If you watch carefully you can see people moving in and out of hypnotic trance regularly as they internalise and follow a single train of thought, a memory, or perhaps a well worn fantasy.
When Hui Neng, commented that the mind of the ideal person rests nowhere, I think he was pointing clearly to being awake.
Imperturbable and serene the ideal man practises no virtue.
Self-possessed and dispassionate, he commits no sin.
Calm and silent, he gives up seeing and hearing.
Even and upright his mind abides nowhere.
As you know, Buddha means the one who as awakened. The problem is not matter but identification with it. That’s materialism, a resting of the mind within a conceptual framework. However the issue is any resting of the mind in any concept. To awaken from the sleep of identification with thought, even the concept of self, that’s being awake.
A while ago I did a list of values that I live by and highest on that list was freedom and reviewing that this new year I don’t think it’s changed, but then the question is how one sees freedom. Unlike some I do not search for it outwardly, but rather I search for it in my own mind. Why not? Victor Frankl, paid testament to this in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. And in this view I find what Bodhidharma points to very interesting. Here are few snippets from the Blood Stream Sermon.
“Beyond this mind you’ll never see another Buddha… Whoever sees his nature is a Buddha… And the Buddha is the person who’s free… At every moment, where language can’t go, that’s your mind… If you seek direct understanding, don’t hold on to any appearance whatsoever, and you’ll succeed… And this nature is the mind and this mind is the buddha.”
Another thought that sticks with me on this topic is the universe in which we live. While Einstein may have demonstrated that spatially it’s finite, yet continuing to expand, Stephen Hawkings finding, at least as I understand it is that temporally it’s both finite and infinite. This blows my mind in the same way the Diamond Sutra did in my mid twenties. To me Einstein’s view that energy is indestructible amounts to much the same thought, just from another point of view. What meaning does becoming have in such a context? Truly everything is just so. There is no start, yet there is a start. Perhaps we are just like that.
“Like a meteor, like darkness, as a flickering lamp,
An illusion, like hoar-frost, or a bubble,
Like clouds, a flash of lightening, or a dream;
So is all conditioned existence to be seen.”
“One should use one’s mind in such a way that it will be free from attachment.” – The Diamond Sutra.
The Method of No-Method: The Chan Practice of Silent Illumination