What is Going On?

 Given what many believe to be the case, narratives are what is usually the case.                

-- Yogi Ananda Viraj

       “What, me worry?”

                                            --Alfred E. Newman

I.

There are times when we do not recognize that we are worrying. You might even say that we are the worrying when we don't take note of it. We simply do not notice that worrying is the case. In a manner of speaking, worrying is what is going on, i.e., worrying is the experience or that which is the case. But noticing that worrying is or more accurately was going on could become the experience thus displacing the former occupant, the worrying. Noticing that worrying is the case is not worrying. It is seeing that worrying was the case. A space between the thoughts that were the worrying and noticing that worrying was occurring is also a temporal distance from the worrying, making the worrying an object, the past, and not the subject, the present. The worrier is now objectified and hence rendered, hopefully for more than a brief moment, a corpse.  A new subject or self is born that is--even if it is just for a split-second--an observant self that sees the former worrying. The worrying is now an object. The noticing always takes place in the present rendering the former moment spatially and temporally distant--a thing of the past. This, in Yogic and Buddhist circles, is what is termed "recollection" or "remembering," more often termed "mindfulness." (The Sanskrit word is smrti the Pali word is sati.)

 

What is going on is what is being experienced, i.e., what is being lived. Living is what is not what was.

II.

This is not to be dismissive of all of the folks that I meet and hear them worrying about the future in the present. Sure, it's good to plan, when you know what it is you are planning for. It's never good to worry unnecessarily. It is a form of suffering. Ask yourself what is actually going on? Then, look around you. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell, taste, touch, and feel? That is what is going on. What is going on is your experience. If it is being worried, that is what is going on. But if you notice the worrying it is no longer what is going on. It is a thing of the past. Its becoming a thing is no small thing. Turning worrying into an object is not worrying. It is seeing what was the case not what is the case. We do not see what is the case, we can only see what was the case. I do not utter a lie when I say that experience is not ours to have or hold. We, the many selves we live, are not experiencers. 

 

 

 

 

Further notes on experience...and your comments are welcome

            The Union of Sentience and Karma

In union with sentience, accumulated prior actions (karma) give rise to all the structures, contents, and meanings that constitute experience. The stream of sentience that flows from past to future in the evanescent present animates the bodies and worlds in which living feels, moves, and breathes. Like form and color, unified yet distinct, sentience and the sediment of past actions (karma) must be known as both unified and distinct. The mind that realizes this conscious momentum as living may be one wherein suffering can be attenuated and satisfaction be found.

Like a bottomless canyon--layers of sediment influencing subsequent layers, in turn influencing subsequent layers, impinged upon by the conditions present in each present providing novelty give rise to the ongoing accumulating formation of the canyon--the life of each sentient being is driven by the past toward the future in the present. Similar to the movement of the formation of a canyon, each of us lives a present laden with novel conditions as well as the contents, structures, and meanings constituted of the sediment of past actions while consciousness remains within and without animating the past into the future in the present. This is the vectorial, intentionally structured movement of conventional experience. This ordering of experience is no work of a free will but the work of a matrix of causes and conditions in which human life seeks a homeostasis of satisfaction, i.e., peace. Survival yes, but ultimately satisfaction in which survival plays the role of a necessary but never a sufficient condition.

Awareness, variously designated as consciousness, sentience, the knower, the seer, rigpa, Buddha, purusha, atma, nirguna-brahman, God, and more is one aspect of the union that gives rise to the ephemeral movement of experience. Awareness along with the accumulated actions (karma) of prior existences form a future-oriented and intentional vector that is experience itself. This desire-driven vector laden with impassible sentience has one aim, to provide experience for the sake of that very sentience. We find no satisfactory answers in metaphysical speculation with regard to the origin, goal, or meaning of experience other than the meaning found in the movement of the experience of the life of each sentient being’s life as that life is lived. There is no outside of this living union of phenomena and sentience. All of life, including alien life and speculation, is part of this life. There is no outside of experience. What appears in experience, i.e., phenomena, is what is. Each and every present moment of life is simultaneously decision-making, not by a free will but by that very movement of life itself. This is way too large and complicated a project for an agent that makes decisions. Decision-making relies upon far too many variables that constitute what is and what to do with it. This is the project of reality making not simple choice making.

It is on the basis of our own sentience that otherness is constituted.


Within the lives of each sentient being is one primary goal. We may disagree about that goal but the goal does not lie outside of those very disagreements. The disagreements prove the point. It is an unspeakable yet tangible and unique goal as it lives in each moment of vectorial living. It is never abandoned, even in its satisfaction. Sentience is always at rest. Desire never is. However, discovering sentience and taking its offer of refuge offers the possibility of accessing its peace. Sentience offers tranquility while the beginningless momentum of historically driven desire and its resultant adherence to its dictates is a life of...you tell me. 

𝘿𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙢𝙖-𝙈𝙚𝙜𝙝𝙖: The Heart Unleashed

There never was anything to renounce in the first place. The paths of Buddhism, Yoga, Samkhya, Taoism, and other Eastern practice-philosophies focus on a realization that time and space are a sentient and ephemeral movement that forswears the conventional reification of nouns and their supposed referential nature in the making of universes, social orders, nations, states, and identities of all kinds that sit in a supposed stasis as mechanisms for mass consumption and social control. 


When meditation unites time and space in one breath it forms the "Cloud of Dharma" or a simultaneous appearing/disappearing, an evanescent movement that is space/time itself in its becoming pervaded by and occurring within a pure, empty awareness or, if you prefer, consciousness. This ephemeral and holistic movement of spacetime is the Dharma-Megha, the cloud of knowledge, or the cloud of what is the case at any given moment. Its ephemerality denies what conceptual knowing would have us believe. Conceptual knowledge is filled with a language of things and their relationship to one another. What this boils down to is a relationship that holds between nouns, verbs, and other forms of speech that are the very stuff of our conventional world orders or cosmoi. Thoughts do not necessarily refer. Language is only conventionally referential. The insights gained via meditation (samadhi) may elicit a vision of what is always already the conscious case.

Spacetime exists as a sentient movement, phenomenologically speaking, of a first-impersonal evanescence that denies the often strangulate realities of our cultural constructs to release one into the sentient flow of life itself, in its very aliveness. Contemporary social orders constrain, control, and stultify consciousness into prescribed identities that facilitate control. The effectuation of the Dharma-Megha may be construed as breathing the "Breath of God," or the "Tao of Deconstruction," that both brings transcendence of the temporal and the release of time-space into the experience of their nonduality.   

Experience and Desire: some thoughts

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out as living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic vector seeking the fulfillment of intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction difficulty arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering.


Often, the intentions, desires, are seen to be fulfilling and a kinesthetic movement of pleasure arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of all experience. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience, in this sense of the term, admits to no such possibility.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of the consciousness of and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independent and objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or embodied memory process aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.*

If one takes language as in thought, speech, or text--or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering--of course, as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). Acceptance-attention will be discussed at a later date.


*The "until" is discussed in the Dharma-Megha blogpost.

The Wisdom of Anxiety

Have you ever experienced anxiety? I have. It is a dreadful condition. Uneasiness does not even come close to describing it. It is terror itself. Is this dreadful feeling understood? Somewhat. Here is my take on it. It’s a kind of rambling reflection on self and contingency. See if it is of any help both if you get anxiety or know someone who has it and think this take on it may be of some help. (I have also included, in an endnote, a “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” reference on social anxiety that you may also find helpful. )

I’m going to say something that I have yet to hear regarding anxiety. The self is anxiety. From my observation, there is not one hair’s breadth of difference to be found between self and anxiety. Where else and when else is anxiety felt? Looking directly at anxiety, when it is occurring, you may notice this actual identity between self and the feeling. The self feels anxious, yes, but the self is not separate from the feeling. Okay, let’s take a closer look at these seemingly outlandish remarks.

Upon very close observation, you will note that anxiety arises. This is no small matter. Anything that arises in our awareness is contingent. What is meant by contingent? That which is contingent is that which is dependent. Anxiety is dependent on causes and conditions. Let us say that a series of thoughts carrying the notion self in situations arise saying something like “This is not going to work out well,” or “I will look foolish,” or “I am feeling uneasy,” or any other series of thought or mind-narration that places the self in some sort of insecure situation, frightening uneasiness, and the narratives seem to come so fast that the self that appears to be the victim of these feelings aroused by the narratives is anxious. See what was just said, the victim, the self, is anxious. That is, the victim, the self is itself the anxiety. Why? What gave rise to this self that is anxiety? Contingency! When contingency is recognized, i.e., when dependency on causes and conditions is seen so clearly that nothing is certain, anxiety may result. Naturally, this is a self in insecurity, anxious, even fearful of what may happen without knowing what it is that may or can happen. There are simply far too many causes and conditions to settle upon. Contingency is like a raging sea with waves so high and rough that no solidity is possible. We feel so uneasy that we may even die or worse. Anxiety is seeing what is. It is actually a clear insight into what is, the insecurity of a matrix of causes and conditions that is far to complex to count on, to rely upon, to settle the feeling. Anxiety is an awakened mind, a mind that sees clearly what is always the case. The movement of life is far too complex for narrative thinking to comprehend, despite the culture of reason that we have been conditioned to believe that we can and should be able to figure it all out. Actually, more of us should become aware of contingency for the notion that we have life “under control,” we “have it all together,” or even “I’m sure about what will happen,” are narratives in denial of contingency. Each moment of life is contingent but we here, especially in Western culture , have been conditioned to believe that we are the agents of our actions, the self is the supreme doer of all actions, and the self “should” be secure in a reasoned approach to living. This is nonsense. Actions are not done by a self, despite what we have been led to believe. Through anxiety one may find that freedom lies in a sort of abandonment of self, of self-aseity, so that the notion that we should “have it all together,” and be “self-assured” in our feelings and doings is not a governing narrative freeing us to rely more on the contingency, the matrix of living itself, rather than on a fiction. We can and need to let go and realize that we are not ever in control. There is no one to be in control because the very self that we are at any given moment is impermanent and contingent and not solid and real.

Look at all of the problems that have arisen in the last few centuries as a result of peoples’ feelings and acting on this notion that they know what’s best, they are intelligent, they know how we should be, and how things should be for the better. This is the hubris of the self. The self is a foundation of enmity, pride, boastfulness, arrogance, violence, antagonisms, and so many more human problems. Wars begin with self and end with death.

These are simply some reflections on anxiety that may prove somewhat helpful to begin your own research and practice to deal with the nature of anxiety. More of us should realize the wisdom of anxiety. 

We do not suffer from "clinging" but...

Keep in mind, these are notes. 

We do not suffer as a result of clinging in the sense that there is a self that clings to intentions, i.e., desire. Those habits of clinging, or better, the habits that are clinging generate and configure conventional experience carrying the narratives and accompanying feelings that are the self-sense. Do we really believe that we wish to cling to feelings of frustration when circumstances either obstruct our intentional path or cling to the pleasure that arises when there is an apparent fulfillment of desires so that in future the frustration noted here is also fostered? Do you really believe that we consciously enter into such a bargain with experience? 

At any given moment the self--as the movement of a circumstantially and meaningfully situated self-sense inclusive of narrative and feeling-motion (kinestheses)--fosters other narratives that again say an ephemeral sense of a self into existence along with its correlative ephemeral circumstance. This motion may carry on for some time instituting itself as a habit doomed to eventual difficulty. This is a feedback loop that moves along with such ephemeral rapidity that it mostly goes unattended. Once open and simple attention is pointed in its direction the process may collapse and a pregnant pause may ensue that may open a door to actually witness this elusive and often tragic program. We humans are mere programming. We do, however, have one ace in the hole, awareness. Awareness, whether we conceptualize it as consciousness or some other sort of reality, is of no consequence. It is simply a living and breathing movement of witnessing what is going on. It has little to say about itself, in fact, it says nothing about itself. It is what it is whatever that is. 


There are habits of clinging, or shall we say, habits the ephemeral movement of which are themselves the carriers of who, what, when, where, why, how, and so on and on and on.

Who is the Other?

One of the most important aspects of interpersonal relations that goes unsaid and unexamined, except in fields like academic philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, and several more is the field of "intersubjectivity." We will, in the very near future, explore this topic from our vantage point and see the role an effective understanding of intersubjectivity may play in our effort to reduce or even eliminate some of life's difficulties.

What I hope to accomplish here is to create an exercise that opens us up to an envisioning of the other, sentient or not, that becomes grounded in the knowledge that it is our karma and consciousness that generate all experience. The following paragraph is a preliminary statement of what may become revealed through the performance of the exercise.

It is on the basis of our own sentience that otherness is constituted. In union with sentience, accumulated prior actions (karma) give rise to all the structures, contents, and meanings that constitute experience. The stream of sentience that flows from past to future in the evanescent present animates the bodies and worlds in which living feels, moves, and breathes. Like form and color, sentience and karma must be known as both unified and distinct. The mind that realizes this conscious momentum as living may be one wherein suffering can be attenuated. 

"What is going on here?" This is a question...update and edit

What is Going On?

       “What, me worry?”

                       --Alfred E. Newman

There are times when we do not recognize that we are worrying. You might even say that we are the worrying when we don't take note of it. We even say "I am worried" in a fully incarnate identification with worry. We simply do not notice that worrying is the case. In a manner of speaking, worrying is what is going on, i.e., worrying is the experience or that which is the case. But noticing that worrying is or more accurately was going on could become the experience thus displacing the former occupant, the worrying. Noticing that worrying is the case is not worrying. It is seeing that worrying was the case. A space between the thoughts that were the worrying and noticing that worrying was occurring is also a temporal distance from the worrying, making the worrying an object, the past, and not the subject, the present. The worrier is now objectified and hence rendered, hopefully for more than a brief moment, a corpse.  A new subject or self is born that is--even if it is just for a split-second--an observant self that sees the former worrying. The worrying is now an object. The noticing always takes place in the present rendering the former moment spatially and temporally distant--a thing of the past. This, in Yogic and Buddhist circles, is what is termed "recollection" or "remembering," more often termed "mindfulness." (The Sanskrit word is smrti the Pali word is sati.) More to come…

"Faith is taking the step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

On Faith

The above quotation, by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., happens to be an extremely effective perspective through which we may learn to relax and perhaps enjoy, at times, the movement of experience. All action, or karma, may be seen to imply faith. What Dr. King said is deeply profound and yet simple--once a basic understanding of the way in which experience moves and the manner in which experience is generated.

Action as karma, according to the Buddha is intentional. Karma, action in the Buddha's and now our sense of the term, aims toward the future in the present. Action is always about something--as the phenomenologists say--i.e., it is intentional. Often, this future is unspoken and even unconscious--like walking down a flight of stairs. No matter whether the act is one of body, speech, or mind action is not possible without faith. The question now becomes, "What is faith?" Or, as Wittgenstein advised, let's determine how we are using the word faith. A discussion of faith is one of our exercises that aims toward the alleviation of suffering. Let's give this some thought to bring faith to life in our everyday, i.e., profound, experience. Let's look directly at experience and determine if making our reliance on faith a truism is helpful in our quest to minimize our suffering.

I just stated that faith is something to be relied on. Yes, indeed it is. At first glance, this sounds quite absurd. Isn’t faith the act of reliance itself? Recall that we rely on the staircase being there for the fulfillment of our intention to ascend or descend a staircase. More often than not, we simply act in the faith of the stairs’ presence, as we say, “unconsciously.” In short order, we may find that our definition of what is conscious and what is not calls for some revision. (Remember, from some of our prior blog entries, it’s all about the narratives.) Is our reliance, our faith, on or in the presence of the remaining stairs conscious or unconscious? What do you think? Often, as when we know that a staircase is in need of repair, we may be quite conscious of the stairs above or below us; it may imply danger to ascend or descend. But what about in more normal conditions? The remaining stairs in our movement forward--and this applies across the board to mostly all actions--are not necessarily brought to consciousness, or thematically known, as they may simply be there for us in a modality of faith-full knowledge or a consciousness that is faith itself. The wonderful Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said that this type of consciousness might be called “the consciousness I (we) count on." We simply count on the stairs being there for our next step. But is consciousness or awareness present? It would seem that I am pressed to say “Yes, definitely." If we somehow lost consciousness regarding the remaining stairs we would cease to move forward. Yet, we do not normally apply the word consciousness to this kind of knowing. We do not often use the word in the sense of it operating at a more or less subliminal level. However, I think we would not want to admit that we lack consciousness of the remaining stairs but we must expand our usage of the word. I doubt that we would wish to say that our ascent or descent does not involve consciousness. So, let us use consciousness in a more inclusive sense to help us to realize that consciousness is not exclusive to thinking, or if you like, conscious thought, thematic thinking, or even so-called representational thinking. Now, having said that, we must move to this expanded use of the word consciousness.

Experience, History, and Embodiment: Meaning and Impermanence

Experience, i.e., reality, may be viewed as an evanescent, sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This vectorial or intentional movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated ephemeral circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out in and as the process of living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic (i.e. an historically sedimented) or intentionally constituted vector seeking the fulfillment of those intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction, difficulty often arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering--—and this is what we may refer to as conventional experience.

Often, the intentions are erroneously perceived as fulfilled and a movement of pleasurable feeling arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of these very feelings. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience admits to no such possibility.

This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest far too quickly to be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of, i.e., thought, and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independently existing objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills my intention eliciting pleasure-feeling or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven. It is in the nature of intentions to be reductive meaning they cannot possibly anticipate all of the prevailing causes and conditions that will be brought to bear in the eliciting of circumstances that arise with respect to their execution. Unforeseen conditions, e.g., weather, traffic, resistance from other sentient beings, etc., may arise that obstruct fulfillment and if they don't obstruct those unforeseen conditions are largely left unmanifest.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of and thus the intention-generated and reciprocally elicited situation s are all-too-often mistaken for an independently objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or memory aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.

If one takes language as in thought, speech, text, or bodily acts or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF, but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). More to come...

On Peace and Protection

Peace is the stillness that accompanies all of the mind-stories, even the negative ones. Peace is, more often than not, a tacit but omnipresent and silent-sentience inseparable from all appearances including thoughts--negative or positive--but distinguishable and available for all if we simply stay aware and view alluring and disturbing narratives for what they are in the present, just narratives. 

Awareness of this type weakens the grip of the deepest propaganda—ontological, epistemological, medical, economic, political--and opens the door to greater possibilities for all of us. Peace of mind is our most important asset and should be encouraged and protected. This is the role of virtue and other forms of ethical practice and perspectives. 

Acting from peace is synonymous with acting from an open and more informed intelligence, one that may be open to the possible and not bound by the dogmatic. Through peace of mind, dogmatism and sedimented views may be undermined and we may become available to the potential of innovation. It is in our best interest to guard the mind against habitually and culturally indoctrinated adherence to many habitually held narratives, that cause great pain and addiction to pleasures that, in the long-term, do us harm.

The depths of peace reveal formerly held depths to be superficial surfaces. Realities may turn into beliefs and, in turn, beliefs are seen as ideas and they turn into mere passing thoughts. 

Realities vanish and the Who becomes known as that which is aware and that which is aware is the light of lights that grants sentience. 

It is there, hidden in the depths of our subjectivity, a subject who will forever remain unidentifiable, unknowable, and free from limitation. Like form and color, the awareness that is peace and the evanescent dynamics of phenomena are inseparable but must be distinguishable for peace to become known and assimilated into personal, intersubjective, societal, and cultural norms. No need for effort, just take some time and gather the intent to watch steadily and over time without preference for a preferred appearance. Meditation may reveal what has always already been the case, the One that hides in the shadows cast by craving—the clinging to phenomena in the hope of finding stability, peace, and all that we, as human beings, wish for.

Authentic peace of mind will grant us all kindness, compassion, joy, and friendliness; these are the path from and to peace. However, it must be both encouraged and protected with virtue.

Repetition vs. Learning: It's all Karma (action)

Prior to reading this post, please take a look at this video and see how worlds are made, https://youtu.be/UsnGHRZu-s0

If you have ever observed the process of learning, very closely, extremely closely, you may have noticed that sounds, body, and hand movements, i.e., gestures are repeated over and over to help us learn. I am saying to you that the repeated acts (karma) of prayers, table manners, proper grammar, and much more are themselves learning. There is no one inside who learns. There is no fixed self or one who repeats the mantras of prayers or table manners and then learns. The repetition is the learning. Repeating is learning. Repetition sediments what we take to be words, sentences, mantras, prayers, i.e., the repeated, and we, upon reflection--or that's what we call this, reflection, simply another form of repetition--we believe something was learned.

This very same process gives us all of the components or items of our moment to moment realities, be they selves, chairs, other people, or anything else we plan on being there in our future. The worlds are made of mantras. I can assure you that learning is sedimentation. Ever watch how a path is cut through a dense forest? It is the repeated movements over the same or close to the same grounds. In fact, they become the same when repeated thus creating familiarity via repetition, a path is made when repetition of acts of body, speech, and mind take place. This is as true for physics as it is for table manners or swear words. Then, we follow the path without batting an eye. The same is true for the process we call learning. Even our sense of self, our precious self, is formed via repetition. This is the repetition of words, which are sounds that have become words via repetition, feelings, faces, others's sounds and judgments and all manner of repeated, not identically repeated but similar enough to provide memory with comfort and ease of travel, i.e., habits, that settle into incarnations of self-senses.

Words are sounds that have gained familiarity through repetitious patterns of vibration, mouthing acts, sound acts as facial recognition in others who repeat the patterns. We don't really learn anything. We repeat and become familiar. This applies as much to doors as to selves. Our sense of self is mere familiarity with innumerable micro-actions of body, speech, mind, perception, environments, and more. There are innumerable causes and conditions at many levels of subtlety most of which go unnoticed. There is simply no need to pay attention to the familiar. Once a group of repeaters has formed a community, of various types, is formed. Communities are repeaters. Karma (actions) forms all relations, persons, places, things, and actions.

This is not true, this is how you may watch your experience being made along with your worlds, as time moves toward a future built with all of the persons, places, or things that have a place in the sedimented mantras we count on each day, week, month, year, decade and more. You are not being asked to believe this but to see it, to feel it, to know it is what is occurring.

All of it brought about by desire, kama-loka, the "desire realm." 

States of Mind?

Life is living, perpetual motion. Does there ever appear to you to be a state in play in your experience? The word state is variously used to indicate a "condition" of something, be it person, place, or thing. A condition of something in the state in which that thing is found to be. It is a condition of the being of something or of something's being.

Does mental activity have a state? Commonly it is said that there are states of mind. I know we commonly say, "He is in some state," to indicate that someone is in a condition of some sort or he is in some place or another. But is there a state of affairs? Is there really a state or condition which simply is? Which is not in motion? Which is not in time? These are important questions to ask when it comes to experience. Please give this some thought because the next post or so will presuppose you have done so.

Thoughts are Not Feeling Neutral

Thinking as the activity of intention-generation is accompanied by both feeling and breathing. 

Obviously, breathing does not always accompany our thinking but in the originating activity of narratives, breathing was tied to the thinking. This results in a patterning of feeling/breathing that leaves an incarnate trace effect. Most acts leave patterned deposits. If a similar action is taken in the future, that action will, in turn, build on the prior act and so on and so on until a kind of breath/feeling takes root. Perhaps the metaphor of a sandpile on the beach may serve to make the point. We build a sizeable mound of sand on the beach and then proceed to pour buckets of water on the top of the mound. When the water is poured it naturally seeks its own level downward. In doing so, it will form rivulets in the mound. As we continue to pour these buckets of water on the top of the mound some of the rivulets will attract more of the water than others and consequently they will deepen attracting even more water than the others with future pours. In an earlier blog post, I used the example of the sedimentary rock layers of the Grand Canyon. It was, very importantly, noted that the foundation layers--it is layers all the way down, with no perceivable bottom in this semi-fictitious example--are still an influence to more current and even the presently forming layer. Influence from the remote bottom layers is still effectual when the patterning influence of foundational layers on all subsequent layers is taken into effect. Consequently, the actions taken by our ancestors are still influential as are our actions taken in the present. The present, inclusive of all sorts of conditions which are truly infinite in scope, gives rise to what we of finite perception consider to be novelty. No amount of calculation could possibly be inclusive enough to fathom the prevailing conditions of the present.

Our past lives, for it is only incarnate actions that can take place, are truly ours in this sense. For we are the inheritors of the past into the present toward the intentional future--the only future that may be said to truly exist. 

It should be noted... 

This movement gives rise to inclinations that, in accordance with their repetition and severity of impact, will generate similar acts in future. This is habit, the result of repetition. This is why practice works. Much like form and color, thinking, breathing, and feeling are not separable but they are distinguishable. Distinguishing this triune movement is not always evident. In fact, for most of us, it would take a good deal of practice, especially meditation practice, to access this type of subtle observation. Once gained, this skill proves helpful in attenuating unwanted habits, those that cause suffering are the most relevant to our concerns.

To be continued...

Immunity from the Virus-Narratives

Once narratives or stories or thoughts are repeated, sometimes ad nauseum, remind yourself that all narratives are felt narratives. Their repetition carves out feeling "channels" in which flow the breath along with those narratives. Repetition ensures that the narrative-feelings are sedimented as patterned and therefore they feel right, meaning they feel familiar and are held--by the uncritical eye--as being real. For corroboration, we can always appeal to our friends and family who themselves have probably been exposed to the virus-narratives along with you.

For a more neutral example of what I'm saying is hair. For those of us burdened with hair, the morning mirror check is often an important part of a start to our day. Often, we don't leave the house without it. How do we know when our hair is "right" for the start of the day? Is it exclusively an intellectual judgment? See for yourself. Doesn't it have to not only look right but feel right? Aren't we uncomfortable when it isn't? Our body says, "No, not yet." We have to feel comfortable with our hair prior to leaving. This is not simply an intellectual appraisal.

Now, there is nothing true or false about the morning hair is there? But, there is something it feels like to be right or wrong. Right?


All acts, be they of mind or body, have to feel justified. Don't believe it? Witness this for yourself. The basis of justification is feelings, it is, in the end, the body-feelings that decide. Feelings are of three kinds: pleasureable, painful, and neutral or indifferent. For the most part, feelings decide and thought justifies. 

More on Free Will (The following is subject to revision.)

These are scattered thoughts that I am working on in a continuation of my notes on free will. They are not definitive although some of them may be worth your consideration. See if they fit. 

Here it is. The statements are bold, no less. Read them. Ask yourself, "Why would anyone, this man, say these things?" This is a question that many would not bother asking.

However, once you read these assertions and fully observe first hand, the simple and direct truth of these assertions while the movement of decisions and actions i.e., living, is occurring, then everything will change.

What I actually do is enacted ahead of my reasons for doing it. Reasons are not what guides me, the alleged agent of my actions, in the mode of living of action. Reasons follow upon the enacting of the decision. 

We are not free agents and we do not have free will. 

In fact, why I do and what I do are decisions made without consulting me first. 

If you do observe this in its unfolding from unmanifest to manifest, from potentiality to actuality, it is yours and all of the implications that go with it and all of the implications will gradually become yours as well. This simple observation will be the beginning of the unfolding of these unsettling implications and this process will take as long as it takes.

However, the knowing necessary for doing is a form of unmanifest knowing. It is an unmanifest, silent sentience result-ing from prior acts. 

Do you observe this? Is this something true for you? It is comparable to attempting to see the ground beneath your feet. Decisions are made by the omniscient and sentient-silence of the unfolding of historical determinations or karma.

Coming soon..."The Fundamental Reality"

This is one of the most important things to learn for helpful navigation of living. Here goes:

*******

The Fundamental Reality is Experiencing: Being is Becoming

The implications of this realization, or position if you like, are, at once, staggering and dangerous. They are also awe-some and magnificent. The unfolding of some of the implications and the dangers of doing so will be the topic of this blog. Stop back soon, please. 

On Mannequins, Portraits and Karma: A Prelude to Ethics

Here we begin with a question put to your memory. Have you ever seen a portrait where the eyes of a person being portrayed seem to follow you? As you move from one side to another the eyes follow as if the person was actually looking at you, or so it seems. Some might even think it creepy. Now, have you ever been, say, in a store or a place where we might find a mannequin? Have you ever said "excuse me" to a mannequin? Have you ever perceived a mannequin as a living person, even if it was just for a split-second? How are two situations like this possible? What might this tell us about our human experience? What must be happening for that experience to occur? What might we learn about experience that will help us, at the very least, to minimize the difficulties that we face as sentient beings?

A look at these experiences may function as a heuristic opening a door to the realization that it is in and through our own experience that other living beings become what and who they are and bear the meanings they appear to embody. In a very immediate sense, sentience may be granted to a mannequin. It does happen that we may perceive an insentient mannequin as a sentient being, a person. Or we may perceive a painting as being haunted when its eyes appear to follow us as we move through a room.

The sentience-granting function of our own pure form of subjectivity, i.e., the manner in which we feel alive as the I-am sense, is immediately attributed as the sentient other or, as Edmund Husserl has said, "constitutes" the other, by our own sense of self-existence at that very moment. All others, in this sense, live through us. We are truly the "lights unto the world(s)." This process lives in each and every conscious moment of our existence. In one critical but obscured and forgotten sense, there is the experiential possibility of seeing that the sentient other--and this includes more than I will state here--is, in a very real sense, an embodiment of your own pure form of self or radical subjectivity.  


What the others are or become is granted or imputed by our own repertoire of beliefs and concepts that have been historically given by the past (incarnate) acts of others and our own contributions. This repertoire or storehouse of knowledge results from the prior incarnate acts--including experiences which are also acts in their own way--of sentient beings. This past lives within us and functions to constitute our present experience in our intention-filled acts toward an anticipated future. All acts are incarnate and remain with us in fractal-like sediment of a living past. In this sense, the past may be said to live in each act seeking fulfillment as intentional acts. This is what is called by Buddhists and Yogis karma. The past is alive constituting the present toward an anticipated future. These intentional acts not only constitute present circumstances but the living others in our experience. Who people or other sentient beings become (their what) is the doing of living past acts (karma) as incarnated in each and every circumstance we face.

At this point, it almost goes without saying that the circumstances we face result from past acts. We face these circumstances intentionally. Not as free agents willing what is but as embodiments of past acts that aim toward.  Our desires, i.e., intentionality, will organize the circumstances based on what either fulfills or thwarts the intentions. The future is an intended future that lives now as experience moves as time. Time, in this sense of the term, is synonymous with the ephemeral movement of experience structured by past actions of body, speech, and mind. Each moment is organized by the past toward an intended future and as an evanescent appearance and disappearance of phenomena--including the composition and dissolution of self-senses. These self-senses also incarnate ephemeral time ever appearing/disappearing. Selves are movements in dynamic meaningful circumstances organized within the appearing and disappearing intentional movements of experience or living. As the Buddha suggested, we may note five continually aggregating meaningful movements of perceptions, feelings, consciousnesses, intentions, and objectivities--intentionally structured ephemeral aggregations of experienced elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, rise and fall as meaningful and intentional experience. As time, as experience, this happens too fast for the conceptualization process to account for. It attempts in vain to picture or freeze into ideas or concepts that either take stock of ephemeral experience in their fabrication or unintentionally overlook the manner in which experience occurs, based on axiomatic historically driven presuppositions that give rise to deleterious outcomes, i.e., suffering. One of the major axioms in place is the notion that we are a self within a material universe that exists independently of its constituting and dynamic elements. We ignore karma at our peril, as should be evident by now.

A careful look at the conceptualization process itself reveals it to be one ephemeral element of the movement of experience as time. Concepts rise and fall in relation to circumstances and their ephemerality and their historical constitution are overlooked in favor of attending to them as referential. What they say about becomes more important than what they mean and are. The danger of the about is not seen as they perform well for the notions of self and world that they seem to refer to as a result of mistaken usages of their heredity.

Of course and as always this examination will remain incomplete for readers to make of it what they may. History, intentions (intentionality), prior acts will not only weigh in

This is an unedited version.