You gotta be kidding me...

Have you ever found yourself thinking (or blurting out) these words? "You've gotta be kidding me?"

WHO's gotta be kidding you? The universe? Reality? Reality is not kidding you. You're in denial. Same with the undirected rhetorical question "are you serious?"

These thoughts are one baby step away from "this isn't happening." Would anyone doubt that this is, indeed, denial? A most painful kind of crazy?

The alternative is coming to terms with reality. Staring it straight in the face, accepting that this is happening, and courageously doing what needs to be done. The closer you get to doing this, and abandoning the denial, the more you'll be back in touch with the profound joy that suffuses every single moment.

That is what it means to live fully in the present. To be fully at ease with what's happening, no matter what it is. Even if you're going to take steps to improve things, the first step is coming to grips with things as they are now.

And this is what is meant by "acceptance." It's a radical kind of acceptance; one which can accommodate anything that reality throws at you. It's not a passive, meek, "mokay, guess I gotta live with it" thing.

And here's a little secret: it's tremendously hard to develop this most crucial life skill without practice. And not a half-hearted, once-in-a-while practice. This is what mindfulness is about, and why people practice it so deeply. Though I'm not exactly religious, I daresay this is also at the heart of some other traditions (though what concrete steps they offer to develop it, I'm not an expert in):

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And wisdom to know the difference

So don't resist reality. Doing so is crazy, and your life will free tremendously better when you stop.

Do nothing...

I love it when quotes from one tradition sound very much like those from another. A favorite of mine is this:

Do nothing, and everything is done -- Tao Te Ching

Now here's one from Lama Gendun Rinpoche:

Nothing to do, nothing to force, nothing to want--and everything happens by itself.

And now the Gita:

By nature are actions done in every way, and who sees the self as the nondoer, he truly sees.

 ...
One who sees action in inaction and inaction in action is intelligent amongst men. He acts in an integrated manner

Some thought experiments and questions

When you move (walk, fly, anything), does your experience move, or is there just a sequence of different experiences?

Where is the location of your experience? Is it in your brain?

Suppose you were to move your brain, slowly, from your head down to your toes (extending all attendant connecting structures, like the optic nerves, of course). Would the location of your experience change?

If the brain can move without experience moving, then was it really located in the brain? Or is that nonsense?

If experience doesn't have a location, then is it a physical thing?

Have you noticed that it always feels like right now? Even if you're in a dream where it's 1885, it feels like it is "now 1885." Is there anything you could do to a brain to make it no longer feel like now? If the brain causes all experience, shouldn't this be possible?

Now imagine you're in a long-running (say, as many years as your current age) dream. In that dream, people's heads aren't filled with brains, but jelly beans. The neuroscientists (jellyscientists) show that when jelly beans are poked in certain ways, people respond like so-and-so. They triumphantly declare victory over the mind-jelly bean dilemma.

Haven't they thus conclusively proven that mind takes place inside, and is caused by, jelly beans? Are they correct?

Or does experiencing happen without being located in time and space, and without any guarantees about its physical origin?

Simply remain...

Patrul Rinpoche says:

Some great meditators, both male and female, think they are not able to recognise the nature of the mind and so they become sad and many tears fall. There is no need for sorrow. There is no basis for not recognising. Simply remain on the one who thinks he is not able to recognise the nature of the mind.

Ramana Maharshi says:

M.: If the thinker is sought, the thoughts will disappear.

D.: Will they disappear of themselves? It looks so difficult.

M.: They will disappear because they are unreal. The idea of difficulty is itself an obstacle to realisation. It must be overcome. To remain as the Self is not difficult.

D.: But I do not understand. It is difficult.

M.: This thought of difficulty is the chief obstacle. A little practice will make you think differently.

D.: What is the practice?

M.: To find out the source of ‘I’.

Note: in my understanding, the Advaitin use of the word "Self" (note: not "self") is equivalent to what is called "nature of mind" in Mahamudra and Dzogchen.

"The being is the nought and the nought is the being..." -- Azriel of Gerona, Kabbala mystic

"Form is emptiness; emptiness is form" -- Heart Sutra (Buddhist) 

Steps

There are so many ways to go about breaking down the illusion of duality, but they're all primarily about deeply investigating experience. It's crucial that we be willing to let go of any deeply-held beliefs -- indeed, beliefs (often expressed unknowingly through ingrained habits) are all that's stopping us from seeing the truth clearly.

This also means that any teaching which helps us see things clearly can safely be discarded once things are seen clearly. The words never contained the truth. It is the seeing that matters.

With that in mind, here's one path someone could follow:

1) Change your perspective of the world. Instead of the world being made of things existing out there, see it as experiences happening in here.

If you're astute, you will have noticed three changes happening at once:

Things => Experiences
Existing => Happening
Out there => In here

If you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that you can never be sure that you've seen a thing. You've had the visual experience of a thing, for sure, but such experiences take place in dreams, too. Nothing about the visual (or tactile, or combined) experience of a thing can give you certainty about the supposed thing's existence. All you can be sure of is that the experience of that thing seems to be happening. And where do all experiences happen? In the mind, of course, not "out there" in the world.

Now keep in mind this doesn't mean that you should completely change your behavior in relationship to seeming things. The experience of kicking the visual experience of a rock will almost certainly result in the experience of pain! Such is often the case in nighttime dreams, too.

In fact, one way to think of this step is by treating the world as a dream. After all, you don't know that it's not a dream. And dreams can have rules, too.

2) Notice that there is no "in here."

What? We just got done seeing that all things are happening "in here"! Everything happens in the mind; in experience.

Well, if everything (that is, all experience) is happening "in here," then what's happening "out there"? There's nothing left to happen out there! In fact, where is this "out there" of which you speak? If you think you've found an experience happening "out there," check and see if what really just happened was that you experienced the thought of something happening out there. Is the thought of something the same thing as that thing? Of course not.

If that paragraph was confusing, go back and re-read it with the recognition you have from step 1: "thing" and "experience" are completely interchangeable. If no experience is happening "out there," then nothing is happening "out there." The experience of something happening "out there" is itself happening inside experience -- that is, "in here."

But if there's no outside to a thing, then what sense does it make for there to be an inside? To draw a parallel: if the universe contains everything, then it doesn't make sense to conceive of an "outside" to the universe. The entire notion of inside and outside doesn't make sense. So it is with experience. If it's all happening "in here," then the idea "in here" is extraneous.

3) See that "an experience" exists only as long as it is being experienced.

Pick a sound. That is, the experience of a sound. Did it happen to somebody? What was that experience-of-a-sound doing before anyone came along and experienced it? Was it sitting somewhere, waiting to be experienced? Or did it simply not exist in any meaningful sense before it was experienced? I think you'll agree that an experience is a non-entity until it is experienced. If not, go find an experience that isn't being experienced and tell me in what sense it is an experience.

4) Try to find who or what it is that is doing the experiencing.

Pick a sound again. Is there someone doing the experiencing of a sound? By the time it can be properly called an experience, we saw that it was already being experienced. Once this is so, does anyone need to come along and do anything? No.

You might argue that by this point, something is already doing the experiencing. Okay, what is this thing? Can you draw me a picture of it? What color is it? Or is there just this vague sense that there must be something there, doing the experiencing, even if we can't see it? Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the argument that there must be a God, since there "must be" something that created all this?

If you say it is the brain doing the experiencing, investigate that some more. Is it your experience that there's a brain over here, an experience over there, and the first is somehow doing the second? Or is that just another thought? If you had a long dream where our heads were filled with jelly beans, and in it, neuroscientists "proved" that jelly beans cause experience, wouldn't you be just as convinced of that fact? Did anyone ever really witness jelly beans having experiences? What about brains?

(Filling out the details for the rest could take a while, but I'll do it if anyone is interested.)

5) If nobody is doing experiencing, is anyone doing actions? Or are actions just experiences (of something being done, and a thought saying "I'm doing this")?

6) Where are experiences happening?

7) What are experiences made of?

After doing all this, what are you left with? The world is made up of experiences, which themselves are located nowhere and made of nothing. They're not happening to anyone, nor are they caused by anyone. Any thoughts denying any of the above are just more experiences, and any objection to that is itself an experience, ...

The more clearly this is seen, the less struggling there is against it. And the less struggling there is, the less suffering there is. What is suffering, after all, than struggling?

Reconciling, cont'd

In the last post, Maharshi talked about a point after which it is impossible to make effort. Presumably this is a point at which one is abiding deeply in rigpa. Meanwhile, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche has this to say:

In the beginning, when we start this training, the master will say, “Look into your mind! Look into your mind!” This watchfulness is necessary until you are used to it. Once that has happened you don’t need to look here or there. You have caught the ‘scent’ of the nature of mind. At that point, you do not need to struggle; the nature of mind is naturally awake.

So the question is: is there a specific point after which inversion should be abandoned? Is it just after one's first glimpse of rigpa? Or can both inversion and non-meditation be employed further?

Only one way to find out :)