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| Awakening and Yoga | ||||||||
a
center for Non-Dual or Integral Living Collective Awakening |
Spiritual Foundation: Pointing to the Absolute The Great Way is not difficult for those not attached to preferences. If you wish to know the truth, When the fundamental nature of things is not recognized Indeed, it is due to our grasping and rejecting Be serene and at one with things and erroneous views will disappear by themselves. **************** When movement stops, there is no movement— For the Realized mind at one with the Way and the Truth is confirmed in you. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no need to exert the mind. there is neither self nor other-than-self. To know this Reality directly This Dharma-truth has nothing to do with big or small, with time and space. but everywhere always right before your eyes. Don't waste your time in arguments and discussion Each thing reveals the One, the One manifests as all things. Words! Words! The Way is beyond Language, for in it there is no yesterday no tomorrow no today. excerpts from HsinHsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind, by Seng-ts'an. Third Zen Patriach, translated by Richard B. Clarke
The foundation spiritual perspective or view of this course is Non-Dual, also known by its Sanskrit word Advaita. Advaita literally means not two. Why not just say unity or oneness? Because the universal, fundamental perspective and experience of the human is that reality seems to consist of me, here, the subject, and the rest of the world, out there, as objects; subject and object making up a dualistic world. Our biology, physiology and perception reinforce this again and again to the point where it is accepted at a very unconscious level and never questioned. Similarly, our culture embodies duality in dividing the world into spirit, the realm of religion, of God, and matter, the realm of science; or to phrase it slightly differently, the Creator and Creation. So it is startling to hear the statement 'not two', directly confronting our fundamental assumptions about reality. This is the point of the advaita schools; to challenge the seemingly unchallengable, to shock us into a new mode of seeing and experiencing reality beyond the obvious. This view, integrating the apparent polarity or duality into a Unifying Wholeness, was first articulated in the Upanishads of Ancient India and later beautifully unfolded as Krishna's teachings to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. As Buddhism evolved out of the Vedantic tradition, the various schools of Buddhism developed their own non-dual teachings, as did the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the Non-Dual View section of our home study course, we will study Vedanta with an in depth look at the Bhagavad Gita and selected Upanishads; examine Zen and Dzog-chen, two Buddhist Non-Dual approaches to teaching, sometimes called direct path teachings, and more closely explore two very modern non-dual approaches, the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and the Big Mind/ Great Heart teaching of Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshii, combining Zen with modern psychotherapy. The Non-Dual View is a recognition that the Self, the "I" or "I Am", Buddha Nature, is the Totality of Being, is always Now, can never be localized or limited by form, nor is it 'something' that can ever arrive or appear in the future. It is the deepest truth of Now, of Being, of resting in Non-Dual Presence. These words and terms, and all subsequent words, of course, are only pointers, often possibly misleading, as the Non-Dual View is beyond words, beyond conceptualization, beyond all limitations.
Words! Words! The Way is beyond Language, for in it there is no yesterday no tomorrow no today. To use the Buddhist metaphor, words are a finger pointing at the moon. If you keep staring at the finger (get hung up on the words), you will never see the moon. Lao-tzu described this dilemma poetically at the beginning of the Tao Te Ching: The tao that can be told The unnamable is the eternally real Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Yet mystery and manifestations Darkness within darkness. There is only one obstacle to realizing this view; mind activity stuck with a small, limited sense of self and seeking fulfillment everywhere and anywhere but the here and now. Thoughts and beliefs of self inadequacy and incompleteness become my personal reality and color all of my perceptions and actions. Perhaps I am seeking the fullness of life in the future, missing the fullness of the present. Or maybe I live in the past and project previous experiences into the future, again missing this very moment now. This compulsive mental noise dominates the mind field of most humans and totally obscures the infinite depth of being that is always present. Meditation is the primary medicine to help heal this confusion, to remove this fundamental ignorance and later we will look in depth at some basic meditation practices.
****************************************** Vedanta The first Advaita teachings appear in the Upanishads, the wisdom section of the Vedas, the ancient scriptural texts of India, and continue to this day as Vedanta. Vedanta is not a philosophical school, as sometimes noted, but an independent means of knowledge about the nature of the non-dual "I". The subject matter of Vedanta is what is most desirable for the individual, the discovery of the truth of themselves, known in Sanskit as moksha or enlightnement. There is only one definitive teaching in Vedanta, Tat Tvam Asi. Known as the maha vakya, the great sentence, that you are, lays out the whole teaching in three words. That refers to wholeness, fullness, limitless existence and consciousness, the formless and the world of forms. Tvam is you, the student, the questioner, the subject. Asi is the equivalence, the equal sign in the equation. You are the Whole ! This equivalence is not obvious and the truth of these words has to be unfolded by the scriptures through the guidance of a realized teacher. Enlightenment does not require the addition of anything. Only the removal of ignorance, avidya, obscuring the Truth. Purnam adah, purnam idam, purnat purnam udacyate Purnasya, purnam adaya, purnam eva vashishyate
Completeness (Brahman, formless) is that, completeness (creation, the world of forms) is this from completeness, completeness (creation) comes forth. Completeness from completeness taken away completeness to completeness added, completeness alone remains. " Let all the Upanishads disappear from the face of the earth- I don't mind so long as this one verse remains."
This shanthipatha (prayer verse) beginning the Isavasyopanishad, the first text generally studied by new students to Vedanta, is a succinct and profound summary of the fundamental teaching of the Vedas, what we are calling the Non-Dual View: the seen and unseen, the known and unknown, all that is, ever was and ever will be is wholeness, fullness, completeness. Everything that arises as form arises out of this wholeness, is never separate from wholeness. Forms and the formless, the Creator and Creation are never two, but always whole and integral to each other. This foundation view of the nature of reality is an orienting teaching that allows the human to find a place and role in the functioning of the cosmos as a whole. It reveals an intimacy between the human and the natural world and a deep sense of harmony and order between the world of space and time and the infinite timeless presence of the Divine. There is no room for alienation, separation or fear to arise. And yet, the human experience seems to be in direct contradiction to this view. Life seems to be full of alienation, separation and fear, violence and suffering. How this can be so and how we might resolve this conflict is the story of all spiritual teaching and the fundamental story of all non-dual teaching. Throughout the course of human history, societies and individuals have struggled to integrate into their world view these two aspects of reality that appear to be fundamentally different in nature. From the philosophical point of view, there is reality that is seen, or known through the senses, idam or this; and the reality that is hidden from our ordinary means of perception, but known in the heart, adah or that. We may call these two philosophical realities the Creation and the Creator, the world of forms and the formless, the imminent and the transcendent, or to use the terms form the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy, prakriti and purusha. There also appears to be yet a third reality that must be included, or at least somehow integrated into the previous two. That is the I, the subject, the individual who contemplates these two philosophical realities. Where does the subject fit in to our scheme of reality? As we all subjectively experience reality in terms of self and other, our experiential point of view recognizes the duality in terms of a subject, I or me, and everything else, the not - I, including objects, gross (earth, rocks etc.) and subtle (heaven, ideas, concepts and beliefs). This duality is described in Sanskrit as atma and anatama. This point of view can lead to the conclusion that I am (quite obviously) not the Creator that I contemplate, but neither am I the creation that I can observe. Thus a trinity is born: God, the Universe and me. How do I fit into this world ? What is my role, my place here? As humans are thinking beings, we create models, beliefs and philosophies about the Divine (God, the formless), the world we see (creation), and about ourselves. In modern societies the imminent or creation has become the domain of science and the transcendent has become the domain of religion. Much confusion and misrepresentation arises as the two attempt to communicate, or articulate the other from their own half of the field. Such silliness as creationism and atheism are obvious manifestations. Coming back to making sense of the Purnam mantra, the obvious challenge is that I, the simple conscious being relating these two points of view can accept this, idam, the immanent, creation as other because that is my fundamental experience. But then, the philosophical adah, that, the Creator, the transcendent, experientially becomes me, the self. The notion that I am equivalent to the creator, the transcendent, is hard to swallow. The teachings of equivalence, that I am completeness, the whole, must be unfolded through teachings that eliminate the confusion and ignorance that obscure the deep truth of our wholeness from our awareness. This is awakening, freedom, moksha or enlightenment.
Dzogchen Dzogchen, the Natural Great Perfection teachings, first appeared in India somewhere around 200BCE and migrated to Tibet 900 years later. The Tibetan term Dzogchen corresponds to the Sanskrit term Mahasandhi, and is great and perfect because it is complete and perfect in itself, bypassing all cultural images, forms, philosophies, rituals and religious trappings. Dzogchen refers to the primordial state of the individual, our inherent Buddha nature, accessible to all at any time. For those of you who are ready, Lama Surya Das has just released an integrated book/cd, Natural Radiance, produced by Sounds True of Boulder Colorado, which has "not only written information about the practices, but also the direct energy and sound vibrations on a cd of the teachers voice giving personal guided practices, passed on by a living lama who received these instructions through the ancient, tried and true initiatory process of oral transmission." Zen Beginner's Mind "In the beginners mind there are many possibilities. In the experts there are few". Zen is another direct path Buddhist teaching, originating in China as Ch'an, from the Sanskrit word dhyana meaning meditation. For those interested in a history of the development and evolution of Zen can refer to "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts. What we are interested here is the essence of Zen, the Zen mind, so to speak, that is simultaneously quite ordinary and yet infinitely profound. A special transmission outside the scriptures No dependence on words or letters Seeing directly into the mind of man Realizing true nature, becoming Buddha (Attributed to Bodhidharma, the Indian master and 28th dharma descendent of the Buddha who brought Zen to China.) If you are trying to attain enlightenment, you are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion". Suzuki Roshii in Zen Mind, Beginer's Mind
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