Colors blind the eye / Sounds deafen the ear

[Marblehead]

But then, eating too many pickles or too much chocolate is not good for your body.  (And if you are inspired to eat either and decide to eat none will cause inner conflict.)

[manitou]

Hi mostly_empty - However, when you get back to the reversion of the Dao to the void, does it not come down to the same thing?  That one could call it samsara because it reverts back to none other than thought?  Our thought?  I'm not seeing a huge distinction there.

 

I woke up out of a dream last night, and wrote down what a voice was telling me.  This could relate to what the misfortune is that we're speaking of.  The voice said  "Be one with the pain, realizing that it's not hurting us at all, but merely this shell that we must walk around in."

[manitou]

But then, eating too many pickles or too much chocolate is not good for your body.  (And if you are inspired to eat either and decide to eat none will cause inner conflict.)

 

 

LOL.  Can't have inner conflict on those darn Hershey bars, you know.  The pickles?  Eh.

[Brian]

 

But then, eating too many pickles or too much chocolate is not good for your body. (And if you are inspired to eat either and decide to eat none will cause inner conflict.)

'Specially if they are Aunt Bea's kerosene pickles!

[manitou]

Seems like Aunt Bea's kerosene pickles would cause inner conflict.

[steve]

I've probably read Mitchell's translation of the DDJ 20 times because it's so small and it carries well in my purse. I've never quite understood his Chapter 12; even his excellent footnotes at the back of the book never seemed to quite hit the mark for me.

 

Until today. For some reason, I saw things entirely opposite of how I had been interpreted them.

 

 

Ch. 12

 

Colors blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavors numb the taste.

thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

I feel a bit of the following - 

 the eye sees until it distinguishes itself from the color, in that distinction there is blindness...

 similar for the other senses and sense organs.

 

 

 

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

 

 

Any other interpretations?? I'd sure be interested to hear them...

We truly see the world when we look through the heart

Leave it as it is

As the clear sky...

 

This is a dzogchen teaching... 

[Jonesboy]

I think the next chapter really helps us understand what is the Dao and how we relate to it.

 

 

CHAPTER 14

 

Look, it can never be seen, for it has no form.

 

Listen, it can never be heard, it is beyond sound.

 

Grasp, it can never be held, it is intangible.

 

Although it can never be seen, heard or held, its spirit is always there.

 

For it is formed from nothing and so returns to nothing.

 

It is beyond description,

 

But it is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.

 

It has no beginning and no end, but it is great.

 

Stay with this (in your heart) the ancient Dao,

 

but move with the present.

 

Knowing the Dao is the ancient beginning of all things.

[manitou]

I feel a bit of the following - 

 the eye sees until it distinguishes itself from the color, in that distinction there is blindness...

 similar for the other senses and sense organs.

 

 

 

We truly see the world when we look through the heart

Leave it as it is

As the clear sky...

 

This is a dzogchen teaching... 

 

 

Wow, Steve.  Like the baby before it learns to smile.  To keep in mind the dream state of our being, to know that we are predominately......nothing.  To see the world before the name kicks in.  

 

Seems easy to say, impossible to do.  Unless one constantly remains in Awareness of the dream.

[manitou]

Stay with this (in your heart) the ancient Dao,

 

but move with the present.

 

Knowing the Dao is the ancient beginning of all things.

 

 

Thank you again for this, Jonesboy.  As I awakened this morning, I was meditating on these particular words, coming out of sleep.  Stay with this in your heart the ancient Dao, but move with the present. Knowing the Dao is the ancient beginning of all things.

 

This aligns quite nicely with what Steve was saying about the colorblindness.  To see the world through our hearts.  And how do we do this?  To love the Dao, to know that the Dao is at the center of all phenomena, and to expand this love from our hearts to all things, sentient and non-sentient.  To pick up a piece of trash in a park and go out of our way to throw it into a trash can, to love the illusion of the park.  This is one way.

 

To love all other sentient beings, knowing that they too are the Dao (again, I go back to the black spots in the eyes, the Awareness of all things - human, animal, insect).  To know that trees too nurture each other and have awareness, as do rocks.  The enlightenment of a rock is a crystal, the enlightenment of a plant is the flower or fruit.

 

And another way as well.  To be totally in the Now, to fixate our attention completely on what we are doing at any moment.  To lose ourselves in what we are doing and 'stopping time', as Castaneda would say.  To give ourselves over completely to the task, without mental meanderings.  Be here now.

 

To the small group reading this thread, I would like to posit a question.  I know that the Dao, through the I Am of myself, am the manifester of my body and my surroundings, my happenings, my circumstances.  I have recently manifested a RBB - right bundle blockage - in my heart, causing the electrical activity to take a circuitous route, an alternate route, to pump the blood through.  I have been kundalini active for about 10 years, and I know that heart arrhythmia can be a component of kundalini presence - although arrhythmia is something I've had since my PTSD breakdown in 1982.  One of the channels that is unable to receive electrical impulse in the heart, according to my looking into this, is the Channel of His - an odd name, and an even odder synchronicity.  Is there anyone here (Steve?) that has any comment on a right bundle blockage possibly being related to further kundalini experience?  Of course I'm having this looked into with Western medicine - I had to wear a halter monitor a few days ago, and I'm going for an echo and a stress test this week.  But I'm also looking for any clarity someone may have to offer on the level we understand.  What made me go to the doc in the first place was two events that I stoically passed off as heartburn - but felt like my heart was gripping into a fist and twisting.  The second event was accompanied by an event of syncope, which, if I had not been standing in the bathroom and caught myself on the counter, I would have hit the floor.  So I thought perhaps a doctor visit was in order.

[mostly_empty]

Hi mostly_empty - However, when you get back to the reversion of the Dao to the void, does it not come down to the same thing?  That one could call it samsara because it reverts back to none other than thought?  Our thought?  I'm not seeing a huge distinction there.

 

I woke up out of a dream last night, and wrote down what a voice was telling me.  This could relate to what the misfortune is that we're speaking of.  The voice said  "Be one with the pain, realizing that it's not hurting us at all, but merely this shell that we must walk around in."

 

Dear Manitou,

    Certainly not everyone makes the same distinction. That which I was encouraging to consider follows from what you might take to be the meaning of thought and reality. Samsara is a heavy wheel, periodic and the semblance of movement takes you nowhere you want to go. The wheel is the wheel of your thought... powered by your desires. Obviously, if you go along with this sort of thing you will consider it good to "surpass" your desires and replace your thought with wisdom.

   The 10,000 things revert to the Dao but there is a journey. We learn to ride life like a wave, the inner and outer transform because they are empty in themselves - but in no way does this mean it is all meaningless. But for a Daoist what is thought? If you have hun, po, shen ... all these characters... should you not be honouring each for what they bring? It is not "merely" thought and the relationship between thought and "you" is complex - but potentially life affirming. 

   Pain is for awakening, but it seems hardly like the best way! It is just what we get when we don't solve things in other ways. So it is very helpful and something to be appreciated, but I try not to indulge!!!!

[manitou]

Thanks for the distinction, mostly_empty.

 

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream....

 

I've gotten to the point, perhaps incorrectly, where I see all paths as one that meet within the metaphysics of it all.  All paths believe they have the answer.  And inside, we all do.  It is the clarifying process, the riding of the wave you speak of, and the removal of obstacles which inhibit our true understanding - our prior conditionings and judgments.  I do see Buddhism as perhaps the most comprehensive path, but certainly not the only correct one.  Atheism, Satanism, any of them....if followed to their terminus, I believe will take one to the same place.  There is no right or wrong.  Only choice contingent on conditioning.  And everybody is doing their best considering the hand they were given.

 

But that's only my view from the perch I sit on.

[mostly_empty]

Re RBB.

   I am generally leery about putting emotive/spriritual overlays on physical diagnoses.They do often make sense, but far more often after the fact. I am glad you are having a properly follow-up as there are dangers associated with this.

   However, it may be true that excessive sympathetic arousal for years on end might predispose you to this over time; thickening an atrial wall etc... Not clear whether the stress, the hypertension, or the forcing of the heart would necessarily be the causal agent since they each relate one to the other. 

   Echoing a comment I made in the other thread - have joy! It mat be unlikely that you will resolve what you perceive as kundalini energy without opening the heart. Balancing sympathetic and parasympathetic activation (as per HeartMath's coherence measure) will alter the functioning of your heart. There is no research about whether it is helpful for RBB! But plenty to show that long term unresolved stress is particularly unhelpful.

 

Take care!

[dwai]

I've probably read Mitchell's translation of the DDJ 20 times because it's so small and it carries well in my purse. I've never quite understood his Chapter 12; even his excellent footnotes at the back of the book never seemed to quite hit the mark for me.

 

Until today. For some reason, I saw things entirely opposite of how I had been interpreted them.

 

 

Ch. 12

 

Colors blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavors numb the taste.

thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

 

I had always taken this to mean that too many colors blind the eye, and Mitchell seems to bear this out in his comments (which I'll write at the end of my observations). But it occurred today that the colors we see are only those which are reflected, which are not absorbed by the object viewed. Black is black to us because the surface absorbs all other colors on the electromagnetic spectrum. Perhaps this does not refer to 'too many colors', or 'too many sounds'. Perhaps it refers more to the illusiveness of phenomena, in that it really isn't there anyway! When we realize that 99.99(9)% of an atom is void and the remaining .001% is infinitisimal particle (which may one day be proven not to be solid either; the Hadron collider actually shows that upon collision, some of the quarks actually go backward in time!), then it certainly all comes back to mind, doesn't it? I mean, we seem to think that we are 'hard shell' and various values in between, but we're predominately air. We are thought. Perhaps just all our communal perception. As I saw it today, color, sound, flavor, thoughts, and desires are an elimination of all other potential. Imagine the things we can't hear, see, taste - because our senses are so limited.

 

And desires withering the heart - how poignant this seems to me. To desire anything is certainly relative to all the other phenomena we are rejecting. To desire one particular person is to find all others not as desirable. It's a judgment call, a conclusion on our part. And with conclusion comes the closing of mind as to infinity and potential.

 

But the next part is the part that hit me the most.

 

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

 

I had always looked at this from the perspective of looking outward from the inside. But I realized the possibility today that it's just the opposite. What does trusting our inner vision really mean? I think it means that we know others if we know ourselves, and it is this that we can trust. If we know ourselves, truly know ourselves, then we know the macrocosm of other living beings. We have gotten down to the spaciousness within ourselves, the clarity of 'the sky', as Mitchell would put it. There are no clouds. His heart is not closed to any thing or any body; all is just phenomena that we realize is relative to the perception of every other being. There is no One Judgment, no One Truth. Just perception. Hopefully, if we are skilled, perception without coloration.

 

 

Mitchell's comments re: Ch. 12:

 

Colors blind the eye, etc.: We need space in order to see, silence in order to hear, sleep in order to carry on with our wakefulness. If the senses are too cluttered with objects, they lose their acuteness and will eventually decay.

 

Desires wither the heart: Once it has let go of desires the heart naturally overflows with love, like David's cup in Psalm 23.

 

His inner vision: There is no inside or outside for him. He reflects whatever appears, without judgment, whether it is a flower or a heap of garbage, a criminal or a saint. Whatever happens is all right. He treats his own anger or grief just as he would treat an angry child: with compassion. (I think he did an excellent job on this comment..)

 

Open as the sky: The sky holds sun, moon, stars, clouds, rain, snow, or pure azure. Because it doesn't care which of these appear, it has room for them all.

 

 

Any other interpretations?? I'd sure be interested to hear them...

We often discuss this as part of our Taiji practice. The way I understand this is as follows -

 

To get caught in the external aspect of sensory stimuli, we lose focus of that which underlies it all. So this aphorism is to warn the seeker to not get caught up in what are ephemeral phenomena. Instead of getting captivated by the senses and sensory stimuli, our job (as cultivators of Dao) is to seek that which gives us the "ability" to see, smell, hear, taste, feel and think.  That begets the question - "What gives one the ability to see, smell, taste, feel and think?", thereby setting us down a more nuanced path of inquiry.

Edited March 7, 2016 by dwai

[steve]

I can't really speak to any connection between kundalini and RBBB.

Anything that affects the heart muscle can affect the tissue that generates and conducts electrical activity in the heart.

The typical causes are heart attack, infection, hypertension, and pulmonary embolism in the Western paradigm.

[Jonesboy]

Hi Manitou,

 

I have found that heart openings can feel like you are about to experience a heart attack. I have found one can have pain on the right side, left side or the center of the chest. Chest pain with an opening is very common. Often you can even feel the pain in the back/lungs.

 

It is a sign of energy hitting on issues and of good things happening. I tend to focus/cradle the painful area or focus on letting go and let the energy flow through.

 

Now I say all this but please make sure it is not a real heart issue.

[Old River]

To go to the OP: thank you for sharing your thoughts.  This is the sense that I understand it too -- in making distinctions, we can get trapped by them-- and then we don't notice all the miraculous shadings in between.  Mistaking our labels for what occurs, we can easily become blind and deaf.  It reminds me of this story told by John Cage, here involving three tones in music: 

 

"The other day a pupil said, after trying to compose a melody using only three tones, 'I felt limited.'  Had she concerned herself with the three tones — her materials — she would not have felt limited, and since the materials are without feeling, there would not have been any limitation.  It was all in her mind, whereas it belonged in the materials."

 

I've had this chapter from the Daodejing on my mind too because lately I've been listening to some traditional Finnish music involving a five-string kantele -- you would think, "It's just five notes!" but there is an amazing amount of flowing variety that can come about in the right hands.  

[manitou]

I play keyboard by ear, in the past several years my music has gotten simpler, simpler, simpler.  But more beautiful, because there is now so much contrast in volume, and almost a vibrato that comes through the fingers when only one tone is held.  This started happening when becoming Kundalini active some years back.  It is eerily beautiful, as though from the ethers.  Same with the Native American flute.

 

It is the quality of the tone that seems to have the beauty, not the quantity or even the melody.

 

I just saw Madama Butterfly by Puccini, and one more time I got the tingling thrill at the moment the conductor raised his baton; the moment of supreme possibility within the silence, the potentiality, prior to the potential being tainted or constrained by a single note even being played.

 

Glad you're here, Old River.

Edited April 8, 2016 by manitou

[Old River]

I play keyboard by ear, in the past several years my music has gotten simpler, simpler, simpler.  But more beautiful, because there is now so much contrast in volume, and almost a vibrato that comes through the fingers when only one tone is held.  This started happening when becoming Kundalini active some years back.  It is eerily beautiful, as though from the ethers.  Same with the Native American flute.

 

It is the quality of the tone that seems to have the beauty, not the quantity or even the melody.

 

I just saw Madama Butterfly by Puccini, and one more time I got the tingling thrill at the moment the conductor raised his baton; the moment of supreme possibility within the silence, the potentiality, prior to the potential being tainted or constrained by a single note even being played.

 

Glad you're here, Old River.

 

My apologies, manitou, I just nowsaw your response (still getting used to the "View New Content" feature I suppose).  

 

The tonal color, even the presence or absence of a sound really does change everything.

 

What you wrote reminded me of what Arvo Part once said: "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.  This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comfort me.  I work with very few elements — with one voice, with two voices.  I build with the most primitive materials — with the triad, with one specific tonality..."

 

I also started off learning piano by ear-- it later posed a problem of unlearning "bad habits" when I later majored in music composition.  I never did unlearn the bad habits, but I hardly play music as I once did either.  But I've never stopped listening. There is nothing wrong with simplicity-- Erik Satie is a great example of "less is more" in music.  

 

The flute is an excellent meditative instrument too.  I used to play the shakuhachi, though I no longer have anything now but a guitar that gathers dust...  

[manitou]

Less is more.  Exactly.  I've been playing classically for over 60 years, but no more sheet music or classical.  Just this simple but hauntingly beautiful sound that comes out of my keyboard.  Also - I've started closing my eyes, placing my hands anywhere they want to go on the keyboard - some of it is wonderful, some is awful.  But I've been playing for so long that even the awful will gently morph into something with less dissonance and more resonance.  My hands are so used to keyboard patterns that order will come out of chaos.  But it seems that it works best if I have the structure of a familiar song in my mind, even though it comes out sounding nothing like that song at all - but it does give it the slightest of structure where I want it; and occasionally, if I wanted to, one could almost claim that it 'is' that particular song, because in places the patterns will be apparent to a discriminating ear.

 

I am doing a CD (vocal) with a wonderful producer that writes and plays piano music unlike anything you've ever heard.  What a talent he is.  I just suggested to him in an email today, in fact, that I do the closed-eye keyboard for a period of time, then let him do his magic on it, interposing where he wishes some strings or any of the wonderful synthesized sounds he can come up with.  If this comes out sounding like anything at all and we actually make it into an MP3 file, I'll shoot you over a copy.  But this won't happen until I get back to Ohio from Florida in a few weeks.  When spring finally decides to make an appearance.

 

always nice to talk to another musician.  A language all of its own.     You probably know this by now, but you can always hit the 'follow this topic' button at the top of the page to make sure you get advised via email on a thread you're participating in.  (Although for some reason mine doesn't work and I don't get notified).  Doppelgangers in my twitterbox.

Edited April 11, 2016 by manitou

[Old River]

Sounds wonderful, manitou -- please send it once you are happy with the recording -- I look forward to hearing it!