To me, "the world" is a low grade, petty samsara. The world is its own, small category or group or a kind of mentality. It doesn't fit everyone in it. In my eyes, if I'm looking at the "world class", it's low energy, petty, ignorant. A kind of dormant entertainment, unrealistic, not knowing its nature. That's how I view "the world" and not everybody is involved in that state.
Awakening is totally non-intellectual. You can, and should create your own program to apply your awakening to everyday conditions. Then you can better understand perfect effort in imperfect conditions. There is no need to dispose of your personality. You can keep being yourself with an understanding of awakening as you can always be yourself around your mother.
Anything can become a limbo, even meditation. One must have a realization to come to a stop. Claim your attention, create your day anew. Any master of their field will throw out their practice and begin again. With fresh eyes, fresh taste, fresh unknowing.
Awake is your natural state. When it is said sentient beings are sleeping, sleep is not a metaphor, sleep is a metaphysical state of unconscious activity.
This is why it's never a good time for thinking. Even though we must think. There's never a good time to think.
This is why the Tao and meditative paths are important. They reduce the retardation effect of our own evolution by encouraging us to live closer to our true nature. Of course we need experimentation to come to understanding. But we also need applied understanding to get closer to our true nature. Generally speaking, meditation calms the tide and waves that inevitably sweep us into our incessant agendas and allows us to rest in what we are truly and fundamentally. For example, slaughtering multitudes of animals a day, to feed our greed, when a lot of people can't even sow a seed to grow their own vegetables is a kind of retardation opposed to the Tao. As insufferable as our collective suffering is, you as an individual meditator, can really enhance your own life and the life of those around you. There are more primary schools now teaching lifestyle instead of politics which is a good step in the right direction.
That's basically the metaphor if you're up for the task. Most people don't even know they are being guided until they are out the door and free.
We're not perfect biological beings. We need at least 20 minutes to just sit, with good posture, holding ourselves upright, breathing and letting the activity of our mind be as it is. Meditation is a minor inconvenience for a payoff of a balanced state.
Dharma is not science nor religion nor a political agenda. Dharma is the material of being in the widest scope of the word. Dharma is the form which infuses our human potential with our best known standard of living. I am using the word Dharma, not in a Buddhist sense but for all human status. Dharma manifests regularly and naturally without most people having to know it directly. But to use the Dharma technically and directly has exponentially more benefits. And it becomes available through meditation and knowing your natural intelligence.
These are my simple understandings of the meditative paths:
Yoga means to treat energy with reverence. And don't waste your energy on trivial things.
Zen means to discover reality and not to hypnotise yourself about reality.
Tantra means always grow.
Buddhism means to know the mind but stay with the truth.
Tao means being, to go with life.
Now is a good day for your meditation practice. Look at the many statistics of evidence in science. Undeniable already. But for the masses not as much. Meditation is obviously the wise choice to lead a balanced life complemented with scientific reality. Statistics in suffering are obvious. Meditation is obviously to reduce suffering. Meditative views will be the net the world will eventually fall on to save themselves.
That's why you can drive by the endless suburbs of the same house, door over door. Everyone has the mind, but not everybody starts into reality through meditation. Even less people have insight. But everyone uses the mind or the Non-conscious Substratum. They just don't go beyond the mind too often.
"One thing is experience, another very different is living. Experience is an obstacle to life; whether pleasant or unpleasant, prevents its blossoming.
Experience is already caught in the net of time... in the past; it has become memory, which only comes alive in reaction to the present. Life is the present; it is not experience... The mind is experience, the known; it cannot be put into a state of living.. The mind only knows the continuity and cannot receive the new...
Experience must stop giving in to life."
Comments on living, Jiddu Krishnamurti
This is where all serious meditators get cut off from the ordinary philosophy of life, that life is about having experience. This is where the one who meditates is mostly not understood. This is where we would like others to understand the difference between experience and living but it is simply out of our control until someone has a feeling for meditation, which meditation is the beginning of living.
The whole point of these programs is to help others to make sense, emphasis on "make sense" here, of something specific and of something more nuanced than what they would ordinarily be able to spend time on with their busy/everyday schedules taking up most their time.
The first of the four symbols is Sex called the First Symbol. Whatever expression this symbol takes the root of this symbol is the cold nudity of body and mind.
The second symbol is Self-identification called the Second Symbol. This symbol takes endless forms of identification and is in constant conflict with one's natural abode.
The third symbol is Religion called the Third Symbol. These days the religion of choice is nationalism. The total expression of the religious symbol is endless sub-symbols.
The fourth symbol is Thought called the Fourth Symbol. Thought is the symbol that is most defended, addictive and controlled.
Before any of these symbols you have desirelessness where reality stands out as symbol-less and responsive to things as they are.
The definition of yourself would take two forms. Both the negative aspects and the positive aspects. If you could come up with the exact right definition of what you are, inspiration would still not arise in you. Inspiration arises from that which is silent, new, original, undefined by anyone, and by being the first one to process the event of your present experience. Nobody would be satisfied to define themselves in the negative and positive aspects as a set of rules laid out from someone else's past experience.
The mind's usefulness is not in thinking. The mind's usefulness is in its utter unity as faultless awareness. When we practice meditation, we need to assume a few components to realize "zero component mind." But this is just to help our monkey mind not to "zone out" and become more unconscious. Only in faultless awareness can we tackle the objective realities we face in a reasonable manner.
Meditation is mostly an inclusive practice. It strives, at least, to continue with compassion and understanding. Yet, because of the observing nature of meditation there are things that may become obvious to you, particularly about your relationship with yourself and the world that are not very obvious to the large majority of people. You, as the meditator, can go far in the discernment of the many aspects of the way things are. It's good for someone who has meditated for a while not to assume that what may be obvious to you is obvious to someone else. This is why we try to remain inclusive and remember the foundation of meditation is compassion and understanding.
Omnistasis arrives anywhere.
Omnistasis is understood as anything.
Omnistasis concerns all things.
In its positive form, Omnistasis is seamless, without boundaries, empty and useful.
In its gross form, Omnistasis is mindful, knowing of risk and aware of form as conditional.
Like a pendulum, Omnistasis can bounce from its positive forms to its gross forms.
In meditation, it rests in stillness, in the middle as a single state.
- Not being exploited.
- Not being exposed by your mind.
- The least amount of engagement in maya or illusion.
- Only allowing oneself through the direct openness of something opposed to allowing oneself in naivety, persuasion or to be forced into something.