doc benway

Cutting through means opening to what is without the interference or distraction of conceptualization, analysis, and imputation. Even labels like none or one or non-dual are misleading. Or everything, every experience of life and death. The most important realizations are non-conceptual. Metaphors and similes sometimes help but, at the end of the day, we are on our own. A genuine experience of the absolute truth does not mean that the sense of self disappears. It is more like the sense of self expands dramatically. That sense of who I am becomes pervasive and unbounded in time or space. And yet I still see through these eyes and have my memories. I just don’t feel as limited or restricted in thought, feeling, and action. From this expanded sense of self, harm or threat to other living creatures is felt in a very personal and intimate way making it very difficult to intentionally harm others. At the same time, the coming and going of individual lives is seen to not diminish the continuity of Being which is unborn and undying, hence the ability to assimilate the simile of straw dogs with the experience of unconditional empathy and compassion. This is why people often describe fearlessness after NDE. Not sure any of that will help @S:C but that’s been my experience, fwiw, ymmv.

I would question whether what you describe is liberation, at least in the Buddhist sense. Liberation is the end of ignorance of our true nature. Even a small taste of that true nature gives birth to empathy and compassion of an indescribable degree.

The question of free will is related to the Two Truths of Buddhism for me. Each of us, as individuals, experience free will and, at the same time, free will does not exist in the way it appears to us. From the relative sense of being, there is the lived experience I can call free will which is very real and easy to validate for all of us. "I" experience thought and feeling which is followed by action, the two being linked by a lifetime of learning and conditioning. There appears to be a definite cause and effect relationship between the thought and action and this connection is what I feel as "me." From the absolute sense of being, thoughts come and go, actions come and go, and there is nothing in particular that can be identified as the local cause of those thoughts and actions, no meaningful separation or distinction between subject and object, actor and action, so the idea of free will becomes moot. This is also a lived experience, every bit as valid as the relative experience of me and my free will. The sense of an "I" who is the cause of thoughts and actions is just as ephemeral as any other thought, it comes and goes in relationship to circumstances. As has been alluded to earlier in the thread, there is a growing body of experimental evidence that what appears to be the "me" making decisions and taking action appears to be little more than an inner narrator that observes, describes, and takes responsibility for what is going on. This observation is consistent with advancing meditative experience and realization which is a wonderful mutual reinforcement for those of us interested in the relationship between science and spirituality.

There are many different teachings on emptiness. One error commonly encountered when taking a conceptual approach is to view or conflate emptiness with nihilism. To think emptiness means our lives are an illusion or not real. This is an error of nihilism. This is where meditation practice is so important. When we think about emptiness, there is a tendency to focus on the word’s connotation of absence, of nothingness, of a void. When we meditate we can feel the openness of calmly resting the mind and body. When that experience is not filled with a sense of me - thinking, worrying, judging; when there is just the naked experience of this present moment, this is what emptiness is indicating; and yet the experience of that moment, the vividness of NOW is certainly not nothingness - absolutely everything is there - all the senses and visions and sounds and feelings and infinite potential, and the experience is full and complete, just as it is. You really can’t add or subtract anything. That is the wholeness, the fullness of being and it is ever present when we are clear enough to notice. So I often interject a mention of the fullness of emptiness when it’s being discussed. Emptiness is fullness, eg form is emptiness and emptiness is form (Heart sutra).

Some random thoughts fwiw. Emptiness is not empty. Emptiness is full. Emptiness has the capacity to arise as anything whatsoever. In fact, that’s one reason why the abiding nature of being must be empty. One way I’ve found it helpful to think about it is with respect to how I experience my self and others. Each one of us is a composite of many different “selves" that are defined in relationship to others. For example, when dealing with my children, I am a father and I bring to that role physical, psychological, and emotional characteristics and actions that are determined by my upbringing, by my society, culture, teachers, family, friends, and so on. And there are many other identities - the father, the son, the lover, the professional, the musician, the addict, and the list goes on and on. The truth is "I am" no one of those things but I can be any of those things depending on circumstances and at some level I am all of those things and more. So is it possible to define who I am, what my “self” is, in isolation, without any relative relationship? There are exercises that can effectively negate any particular label or identity I may offer as “me." I’m not that sophisticated in this area but a few examples. I am not my name, that’s easy - I can change my name but I’m still me. I am not my profession, I can change jobs, retire, etc… but I am still me. I am not my body - this one is a little more challenging to negate. I can have a leg, or an arm amputated but “me” is still there. I could have heart, liver, kidney, and lung transplants - did a new me come with the new organs? No, I’m still “me." I am not my brain - this one is even trickier but one way to look at it is that my brain cannot exist in isolation. It needs the heart to pump blood, the lungs to oxygenate, sensory organs, nutrition, and so forth, so the brain itself is not me, it needs a lot of other supports. I am not my body, brain, and mind because I cannot exist independent of my environment - I need food, air, a place to stand, etc... And this same process applies to all of the identities, be they functional identities or physical entities, that I may refer to as “me." Modern biology, physics, social theory, psychology, and other disciplines already acknowledge the lack of independent, permanent identity and it is expressed in their theories and applications. For example, in biology it is well accepted that there is no such thing as an organism that exists independent of an environment, so organism-environment is accepted as a more precise description than either by itself. Relational quantum mechanics similarly acknowledges the relational nature between any observer and the system under observation. Luhmann’s social systems theory brings this into social systems, and so forth. So emptiness does not refer to absolute absence, it refers to the absence of something very specific - the inability to identify an unchanging and wholly independent essence or core that can be defined for a person or an object as its “self.". When we try to define such a “self” we find that it is connected to other things and cannot stand on its own. By inference, we can see that everything throughout time and space is interconnected in one way or another with everything else so that emptiness is equivalent to wholeness. In the Tibetan Bön tradition they represent this with something called thiglé nyagcig which essentially means a single sphere of light, referring to the interconnected wholeness of being.

I hear and feel you @old3bob It is a difficult time. I have been experiencing intense reactivity - anger, fear, disappointment, frustration, despair, and the list goes on. The emotions are more powerful and destabilizing than they have been in me in a very long time. They have shown me both strengths and vulnerabilities in myself and in my practice. I wonder if there would be a place here for a thread where we can share how the current events are affecting us emotionally, psychologically, and physically without getting into discussing the politics per se? Not sure it would work but perhaps it could in the Healing Bums area… I won’t start a thread yet but thought I’d float the idea. I deeply respect the willingness of the mod team to try and keep the board civil and balanced and I don’t want to create more work but it would be nice to be able to offer each other some support in dark times. I have an account at Substack since being introduced to the community by @liminal_luke. When I first joined it was a place where intellectuals would blog in fields like literature, philosophy, history, sciences, and so forth, and it was not very political. With the exodus of people from social media sites like X, Facebook, and the like, it has become a very active place for discussion of politics. It is a growing community fostering advocacy and resistance to current political and social trends, not only in the US but around the world. I mention this because you may find it worth checking out if are not familiar with it @old3bob. On the one hand, it can be a bit of a dark place to be and easy to get lost in the negativity, but on the other hand there is a lot of positivity, advocacy, and community building going on there and it is easy to find writings on many topics like art, literature, history, sciences, spirituality, and so forth. The contributions are far more substantive, with less argument and derision, than what is posted on other social media sites. I appreciate @liminal_luke’s message reminding and encouraging us to find and share beauty, and I’ll add kindness, in hard times. It is never more important and never more difficult than when times are tough. As things get darker and more threatening, I think it is important to try and maintain an open heart for each other, especially for those who may be trying to deconstruct and find a way back to the light. Now is the time for taking care of the body, spirit, and mind, as we will need our health, strength, and resilience to face what is here and what is coming. I’ve recently lost another friend and fellow practitioner, Sarah, to cancer and I’m just coming from a group practice in her memory. The reality of impermanence is vivid and alive in me at the moment. It is a reminder that what I have even, or perhaps especially, now is worth honoring and fighting for. Anyway, enough rambling. Warm regards to you all.

I recently watched Moonage Daydream. Good flick.