Quote
From within our material forms, we already know that generally the experience of ourselves as no-thing and no-body is simply unbearable. We humans actually cannot stand this possibility—unless we wake up and realize that this transient and fluid state is our true home.
Mingyur Rinpoche, Yongey; Tworkov, Helen. In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying
To the ego, emptiness (in the sense of the Ground) can look like a kind of dissolution, a nihilism that can swallow all that we value concretely about the world. It isn’t - direct experience can show us the creative possibilities and vitality in that transient and fluid state.
Links
This Twitter thread on the jhanas misses the point — it’s not that the jhanas are a distraction, it’s that there are opportunity costs and better to do the practices that most directly aim toward awakening. If, as Nick says, jhana practices for a particular person will lead to all these side benefits (i.e. “path shifts”) that alone isn’t necessary reason to do them - it must be that it’s better to do them compared to other possible practices as an alternative.
Wonderful essay by Max Langenkamp on dissolving chronic pain. Chronic pain is empty too! And understanding how it’s constructed is a key to change.
Just came across this well-written essay on the nature of Views. It summarizes a lot about how Vajrayana works and goes over practices my teacher taught. One thing - if you haven’t heard the instructions before, I would recommend skipping over his specific examples (Ocean and Waves / Lion’s Gaze). In this day and age practices are no longer secret, but they are most psychoactive when you haven’t heard them before and when delivered in the proper set and setting, so it’s for your own benefit not to read them1.
Constructing Our Energy Bodies
Staying on the topic of transient fluid states… last week after I posted the article on the biology of the subtle body, a very experienced practitioner reached out to me and offered a very convincing perspective on the nature of subtle body phenomenon. They noted that there is a lot of variability across different systems that operationalize the subtle body each with their own mythos and map. One obvious example is chakras, the number and location of which vary across different traditions. So anyone who wants to talk about biological correlates immediately has to answer the hard question of which system to choose. A second point they made was from their own experience — they had practiced using the different systems and was able to obtain effects from all of them. It isn’t that there is a “right answer” - rather there is a potency that can be tapped into constructively utilizing any focal point along the body. Our entire bodies are alive continuously with subtle body energy and its effects are mediated by the strength of our concentration, and the resonance of the system with our own deepest subconscious2.
And they may not even make sense - they hit hardest when you’ve built up all the elements of the views.
The latter is why grounding our practices in our own conceptual idiom is crucial. Which is why I’ve been reading some of the papers on Platonic Tantra - to think about what the dharma of right here and right now looks like.