The 𝙊𝙣𝙚 and Only Pain

All of us, from the bottom up, ants to divine beings, are facing their own death. This one realization, if truly embedded in our feeling level, is enough to bring on oceans of tears--and yet, we sometimes act with unnecessary cruelty toward each other. This one realization is enough to bring on oceans of blood-tears. It is no wonder tears and tear are of a kind. 

(Certainly needs editing) Subjectivity, Consciousness, Awareness, and the Mirror

Here is a story about a mirror and how we may see life occurring.

It's like a mirror tain, what is put before it, it reflects. In our case, as human beings, our structural configurations dictate some of what goes into the mirror. Structure, along with the accumulated acts of body, speech, and mind--or so we have come to believe--flesh out the images that are placed before the mirror. The mirror then dutifully reflects back what is not only the expected but the novel as well. The novel may be seen as the prevailing conditions of present concerns, anticipations, circumstances, e.g., intention (as desire), lighting, mirror dust, etc., all due to accumulation. This is what we might call, in keeping with the Indian philosophical traditions, karma (action). Past actions plus prevailing conditions--we may draw a fine line between the two--constitute the image. So, the past and present conditions enter the mirror and become a self plus incarnate and meaning-laden circumstances.

The mirror is indifferent to all presentations. The processing of image production is fundamentally important to the intentional concerns only, manifesting as selves who live and die. This body of anonymous intentions driven from beneath us as desire to fill the mirror has no perceivable bottom, no perceivable beginning (an-adi for Sanskritists). Even to ask why life occurs is a question the source of which is on the side of history, i.e., the actions, not the mirror. We find ourselves on the receiving end of the reflection. We are the receiving end of the reflection. What goes in comes out as experience, or more correctly, experiencing. The concern-content has little to do with the mirror, although nothing incarnates, nothing lives, without it. It's a trick, a scam that manifests all the whos, whats, whys, wheres, and hows that history has given each one of us in the movement of living. Yes, it is always and fundamentally each one of us. We believe and live what the mirror reflects. We call this conscious living in meaningful circumstances.

We must, however, realize that we consciously receive and live much less than what goes in, in both human personal terms; it would be quite different for whales and so-called extraterrestrials, individual and species-specific. We are limited to the surface while the depths of history configure in silent and sentient emptiness (shunyata). Our senses of self, circumstances (the lived world) are a reduction of karma to the manageable limits of our historically imposed images. However, we can, with some effort and help, overcome some of the limitations. (This is a discussion, always, for another time.)

Now, as for our mirrors, yes they must be plural despite their common function considered by many to constitute a singularity. Mirrors are often relegated to becoming terms such as consciousness, divinity, sentience, and all sorts of images and estimations. In any case, it is unknowable, futile, and at times, dangerous to characterize with certainty. Oddly enough, the word certain is related to the word crisis--and, as history will testify, certainty has given rise to many. Our mirror only gives us what is put into it. We get nothing from it but life itself, and life is also what we put into it. What's to say? Not much at all. Keeping silent recognition and appreciation, like the mirror itself, allowing it to be present as much as possible, helps us navigate the many realities history lives to become. The mirror mocks it all but provides it nonetheless. Accommodating it is an essential ingredient for the minimization of life's challenges. Call that an epoché or bracketing ala Husserl's phenomenology or just plain meditation.       

Now we have a very basic understanding of the mirror metaphor. There are more subtleties that will be fleshed out as we proceed on this methodos, or way. What goes into the mirror--if you like, call the mirror consciousness or awareness--is both historical and structural. History here means actions of body, speech, and mind that have been constituted by a vast and incomprehensible network of causes that were, at one time or another, embodied in a human form, a universal form. (We will address this universality below.)     




   

Empathy as the Foundation of Compassion

I recommend this slide show very highly. Please pay close attention to the constitution of self/other as an embodied process. This is the key to self-other means of compassionate reduction of suffering. 




EMPATHY AND COMPASSION A Neurophenomenological Approach Evan Thompson.

On the Dangers of Translation

One of the most important texts of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhipathapradipam ("Path to Awakening") by Dipamkara Shrijnana Atisha, commonly referred to simply as Atisha (982-1054). In this text, a path to awakening is laid out in a wonderful format which, in my view, promotes a path of empathy. Here are two examples of a possible translation of verse 5 from this text. A well-known translator and long-time practitioner has translated this magnificent text for us--and has done a great service for doing so. 

Here I include his translation first and my corrected rendering of the same verse with a twist. I hope you appreciate the intent of this modification. It has great bearing on how one views and practices Buddhism. I have simply eliminated his interpolated material and kept the rest. His translation may serve, as I see it, to obscure the intent of the verse. It is based on presuppositions, that are axiomatic in our Western philosophical tradition. In fact, I find his interpolation to reflect a Cartesianism that hides in the background serving--in far too many instances of translated, taught, and practiced aspects of Buddhist and non-Buddhist Indian (as well as Chinese) traditions--to reinforce the underlying beliefs that keep human possibilities framed and locked inside of a noose of deleterious limitations as evidenced today in far too many problems from pollution to insane inclinations toward war. 

See if you agree. Husserl would have objected to his translation (interpolation) on the basis of his view of empathy within phenomenological intersubjectivity. 


5) Anyone who fully wishes to eliminate completely
All the sufferings of others
As (he or she would) the sufferings included
in his or her own mental continuum
Is someone of supreme motivation.

Anyone who fully wishes to eliminate completely
All the sufferings of others
As the sufferings included
in his or her own experience continuum
Is someone of supreme motivation.


I sincerely hope you find this challenging, interesting, and helpful. Buddhism needs your help. 

                                                        --Gene Kelly 14 February 2019

Use of the Words 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 and 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙧𝙚

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses and responses that simultaneously manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses.
We may legitimately speak of this momentum as living and those intentional impulses as desires. This may be interpreted as the intentional desire-driven momentum of past acts incarnating as a vector: Experience, in use here, is the pregnant present expecting the perfect child of fulfillment in the ardently anticipated future—the only future that may be said to incarnate sentience. This present is not graspable, attainable, nor fulfilling. It is soaked with disappointment, patent or latent, from its roots, arousing vectorial maturity, i.e., anticipation, aiming toward inevitable failure. It is marked by difficulty, a lack of inherent essence of all its phenomena, and ephemerality. Phenomena arise and simultaneously dissolve according to the intentional drives marred by the lack of fulfillment of their expectations.
--Gene Kelly, 12/2018
“...desire is the primal seed of experience,….”
--Rg Veda 10.129.4

Our time is up. Let's be serious about our lives for others. What others are to you is what you are to them. Please be kind. Compassion is the wisdom-filled wish for the well being of all others. 

In constituting ourselves we constitute others; in the constitution others, we constitute ourselves. Be kind and practice it to the end. Our salvation consists in the realization that all otherness--despite the inculcation, sanctification, legitimization, and legislation of the belief in an independently existing reality--is, in fact, granted its very being and sentience through our life as lived. 

Some thoughts--So what is Consciousness and Its Friends?

First and foremost, consciousness is an illusion. Talk of sentience, consciousness, awareness, and phenomena are all words of utility. Words are utilities. These words--and, by the way, there are no words either--are used, as tools in our toolbox. They are the means by which we, in our naivete or expertise, attempt to point back to some fictitious purified form of experience in which we are said to find freedom or some liberation from suffering or difficulty. So, let us set our record straight and declare that all of the entries that appear on this (my) blog are, in this sense, a practice of convenience with little to no pretense of reflecting something we may call, much to our detriment, reality. 

In anticipation of some objections, I will attempt to clarify what I likely did not say. Our saying is just that, saying. Whenever thought is used indexically, i.e., to point to, it necessarily lies. It cannot tell what has already taken place or what truly is a case in the completeness of experience, another vaunted word that allegedly points to the living that supposedly grounds our use of indexicals. We might say that our knowledge--after biting that famous fruit of the tree--banished us from Eden.

Now, with utmost urgency and certainty, we must declare that the possibility of a reduction or minimization of our difficulties is available to us when we come to a recognition that experience is a structured and meaningful movement. Throughout this blog, we have been attempting to index this movement as time.    


As always, much more needs to be said...eventually...

A Dangerous Narrative: "I am looking for happiness."

One of our, call it "epistemic," mistakes is to attribute sentience to our sense of self. To ascribe sentience, as such, to any phenomenon is an error that continues to support the erroneous notions of free will, substantial self-nature, and a denial of the conditioned nature of all phenomena. Sentience--or awareness, or whatever the most apt metaphor one uses at the time--is a distinct non-phenomenon that is a necessary aspect of all experience. One would not be wrong in saying that sentience is pure subjectivity. 

Allow me to add, that this "understanding" demonstrates the simple, yet often difficult to realize, fact that no one gets free nor does anyone get enlightened. It is simply, but not obviously, a matter of a sort of recognition that awareness has never been, nor will it ever be identified with appearances (phenomena). As such, awareness is and what remains the actual freedom that we paradoxically search or yearn for. One might even say that freedom is what is already the case for awareness, or pure subjectivity, and is not and cannot be an attribute of a person. The search for personal happiness is grounded in a misunderstanding of Buddhist or, dare I say, "authentic" spiritual teachings/teachers. Personhood, or selfhood, is a phenomenal and as such an ephemeral appearance only. Like sound or a candle flame, the so-called self or person is merely an apparition. This ephemerality of self-appearance is, in its appearing disappearing. If one cultivates a watchfulness regarding this phenomenon, one may detect the distinct nature of consciousness and realize that "it" has always abided in freedom. The biographical narratives, so prevalent in our cultural-historical reservoir (alaya-vijnana), have a tendency to "hook" consciousness making it appear that sentience belongs to the narratives. So, if the narratives declare that one is unhappy, miserable, suffering illnesses, etc. then the process of identification with phenomena leads to "personal" suffering instead of distinguishing the sky-like nature of awareness from the narratives and, surprisingly, the pain we suffer. (Of course this latter usually requires great skill and yogic practices that most of us have not cultivated. However, there are some few gifted who realize this constitutionally.) The "take-away" for us average folks is "Beware of Biography."