What is the process of everyday life practice, this part of the path often named right livelihood?
I find this interesting as there are many potential positions to take on this.
We can take the directing the mind to this present moment. Intending to bare witness to our lives from moment to moment as we would upon the cushion when we develop a traditional mindfulness practice. As our practice matures over time we may find that we tend to become a bit more spacious in our directing which allows us to feel the effects of the different contexts we pass through in our lives and our relationship to them. I have found myself that as awareness matures there comes a point where I kind of just live life directing my attention from daily task to task,person to person, yet there is a openness and investigative attitude that seems to have its own momentum. This takes down the barriers created through different self views relieving the pressure of having to be a particular way( a good Buddhist who never swears, and is NICE all the time).
So that is about quality of intending and the directing of attention, but what about our actual day to day choices? This is where to me renunciation comes into right livelihood. I have found since leaving the monastery, that I have become good friends with Google. Google is a kind of neutral space(apart from the companies own agendas) where you can follow wholesome or unwholesome tendencies. Contemplating how to live a harmless life(or at least as harmless as I can) I find in this day and age we can research our needs and desires. In terms of this I mean researching diet, clothing, medicine and whatever takes our fancy. Finding out where these things our made, is the process of them being made, grown, one that is beneficial to the environment/ context they come from. I could get all idealistic and spout of about organic foods e.t.c but I will try not too.
Products which seem to create the least harm in their growing and production process unfortunately tend to be more expensive. This I feel is the hard crunch in daily life practice and right livelihood, need versus desire. Can my let go of having our plasmas,having a 1000 channels to watch, driving our cars(everywhere),buying new shoes when the old ones are fine e.t.c and directing our money towards products that are beneficial to the environment and the communities that make/grow these products . Is it possible to take the letting go from the cushion into everything ? If we gave up some comforts could we afford to live more harmlessly? Not just lay Buddhists or spiritual persons of any inclination, could monastics express a preference for wholesome products? I remember when I was a monk another monk tried this and I thought it was wrong, as my view was to receive what is given and did not want to stress people to spend more money on environmentally friendly products. But now having been exposed to more information I realise that what he was suggesting would be a good idea,I feel he was coming from an attachment as he was into environmental issues and this was part of his drive in learning meditation was to find balance as he found himself getting angry around these issues. Yet through expressing a preference for products that don't damage the environment the monastics could be supporting the process of renunciation and generosity in the lay community, helping to take the lay support away from dependence on rights and rituals and bringing food and other requisites as a merit building activity to one of investigation and integration involving the arousal of energy to create a community that is intending and creating less harm. With today's technology it is hard to claim ignorance about the way we live and its effects on this planet as a whole.
I am not perfect in the above, I find I buy a product only to find out later it has been tested on animals or made in some sweatshop in Asia.I am intending to live harmlessly and have made many changes to my life to make my life more harmless, this to me is the Bodhisattva path. As my desires wane, as I grow to understand their drives, and I attune to my needs as a human being I feel I will become more harmless.
Happy travelling.
Thursday 23 May 2013
Thursday 16 May 2013
Middle Way
What do we notice when we sit?
Myself when I sit I am aware of different polarities in my experience.
On the one hand there seems to be chaos, a swirling, sometimes rapidly changing, sometimes slowly changing, sometimes a combination of both. A virtual tornado of sensory experience.
During most daily activities I have a focus of attention to get tasks done, be it at work, at home attending to family, doing the shopping. During this times I am aware of chaos as a background experience, a felt experience of vulnerability. This task orientated mindset has in the past been part of my meditation practice, my early years of practice it was very much direct and attain. Then having to deal with some emotional eruptions as I did not have the strength or willpower to control my experience 24/7. These moments when emotion and chaos would dare to raise their head into my experience I found I would begin to become more human. People actually liked me more when I was human. So control seems to me to be part of this polar set in my experience.
I guess my question to myself is, what is the middle way here?
I have been seeking this for a long time, and recently began practising re-collective awareness as taught by Jason Siff. With this approach I open to my thoughts/emotions as they arise, drifting with what is arising, aware of drifting, allowing this conditioned process the space to arise,revealing itself. Not jumping in to to calm, label,or analyze. By not intending to interfere with the process arising which would suggest some kind of judgement on the experience, yet just intending to open to it, which I find reveals the qualities in the intention. By doing this chaos begins to reveal its conditioning factors, opening to the different conditions arising develops a responsive development of wholesome qualities needed to be able open to these conditions. Rather than me thinking I should be contemplating now, or attending with loving kindness e.t.c I trust that awareness will intuitively give rise to appropriate relational qualities.These qualities may need time to mature and so may at first be hard to recognise. I have found that occasionally I direct my attention with some intention, this is when what I am opening to is about to drift on to a different topic yet I feel it would be beneficial to stay a little longer with what is in my awareness. So I give a gentle nudge to my attention so it stays there a little longer.
To me this feels like the middle way, not going crazy through thinking that chaos is taking over and then reacting by intending to control experience. Then relating to life/meditation in a habitual way of relating from some aspect of controlling. By not directing attention with intention, but opening attention up rather than directing it seems to slowly dissolve the boundaries internally. There seems to be less holding life at bay and more allowing life to arise dependant on the conditions present. There is a continuity of experience, which naturally becomes relaxing, this relaxation gives rise to potential calm states and insight into this conditioned process. I find as awareness matures chaos seems to mutate into a steady stream of conditions rather than being felt as a rushing current that is the condition that arises in the relation to controlling experience.
Myself when I sit I am aware of different polarities in my experience.
On the one hand there seems to be chaos, a swirling, sometimes rapidly changing, sometimes slowly changing, sometimes a combination of both. A virtual tornado of sensory experience.
During most daily activities I have a focus of attention to get tasks done, be it at work, at home attending to family, doing the shopping. During this times I am aware of chaos as a background experience, a felt experience of vulnerability. This task orientated mindset has in the past been part of my meditation practice, my early years of practice it was very much direct and attain. Then having to deal with some emotional eruptions as I did not have the strength or willpower to control my experience 24/7. These moments when emotion and chaos would dare to raise their head into my experience I found I would begin to become more human. People actually liked me more when I was human. So control seems to me to be part of this polar set in my experience.
I guess my question to myself is, what is the middle way here?
I have been seeking this for a long time, and recently began practising re-collective awareness as taught by Jason Siff. With this approach I open to my thoughts/emotions as they arise, drifting with what is arising, aware of drifting, allowing this conditioned process the space to arise,revealing itself. Not jumping in to to calm, label,or analyze. By not intending to interfere with the process arising which would suggest some kind of judgement on the experience, yet just intending to open to it, which I find reveals the qualities in the intention. By doing this chaos begins to reveal its conditioning factors, opening to the different conditions arising develops a responsive development of wholesome qualities needed to be able open to these conditions. Rather than me thinking I should be contemplating now, or attending with loving kindness e.t.c I trust that awareness will intuitively give rise to appropriate relational qualities.These qualities may need time to mature and so may at first be hard to recognise. I have found that occasionally I direct my attention with some intention, this is when what I am opening to is about to drift on to a different topic yet I feel it would be beneficial to stay a little longer with what is in my awareness. So I give a gentle nudge to my attention so it stays there a little longer.
To me this feels like the middle way, not going crazy through thinking that chaos is taking over and then reacting by intending to control experience. Then relating to life/meditation in a habitual way of relating from some aspect of controlling. By not directing attention with intention, but opening attention up rather than directing it seems to slowly dissolve the boundaries internally. There seems to be less holding life at bay and more allowing life to arise dependant on the conditions present. There is a continuity of experience, which naturally becomes relaxing, this relaxation gives rise to potential calm states and insight into this conditioned process. I find as awareness matures chaos seems to mutate into a steady stream of conditions rather than being felt as a rushing current that is the condition that arises in the relation to controlling experience.
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