I am writing this book. It began as a journal to help me to make sense of events that were rapidly unfolding, taking on new dimension. One page turned to twenty. Twenty turned to two hundred. Two hundred grew to six. In the midst of all of this, its become massive undertaking of knowing how to manage all the information in a way that is easy to digest. Recently, I found myself changing the beginning of the book. Not in a significant way, but in a way that I realized would bring some clarity to a work that I was feeling wasn't clear enough. I realized that I had assumptions that weren't being communicated simply enough, a real problem for me sometimes. As I was doing this changing, some things emerged in a rather simple way that helped push the effort into a direction that made things seem very simple. All of these shifts can bring about other interesting events that are entirely synchronistic.
I wound up in the library. I was waiting for an appointment that was the next street over, and since I had a few minutes, I walked the aisles, pulled to one direction. Instead of assuming I knew what might be up, I dispelled any notion of what might be there for me, if anything. I tried looking for books in case this was an encounter that was going to actually involve a book. After doing this, I just told myself to stop any expectation and let whatever happened happen. My hand went to one book and pulled it off the shelf. Instead of looking through it, I just checked it out of the library and then quickly went to my meeting.
That was yesterday.
Today I cracked the book open. I looked at the introduction and saw that the author was a psychotherapist who was also into buddhism. The author was writing the book about desire and suffering. Howe he dealt with the issue I found amazing. He was writing about how Buddha was all about dealing with suffering, and how this is connected to desire. He quoted Freud, explaining that he believed there was an "unbridgeable gap" in the self that keeps us going for the things that ultimately wind up making us suffer. Desire naturally has a role to play. What I found, though, was entirely astonishing to me. There was seemingly no awareness of what it is that actually causes suffering. Desire was pointed to, yes, but it only went so far. It was as though the inquiry stopped short of actually dealing with WHY we suffer. Of course Buddha said its expectation that causes suffering, so that makes sense, yes, but hold on a minute. There is more. Why aren't these great minds able to get down to the core of this? What is this unbridgeable gap in their own perception and conceptulaizing abilities that is keeping them from getting into the real meat of all of this?
I sat there, reading, amazed. It was as though some bomb had gone off inside. These people really don't get it. They are talking all around it, yet aren't getting into it. They talk of the gap, but they don't consider what it is that is causing this gap. Freud didn't do it, and Buddha spoke only of expectation. WHAT CAUSES expectation? I knew the answer, and yet had this been hidden all this time before everyone? I considered maybe we weren't ready yet. Perhaps it was just a threshold we had not yet traversed. As I thought about all of this, the book I am writing came back into startling clarity. The difficulty I had been having with it for a while now involves this very aspect of what causes suffering. It isn't desire, and it isn't expectation alone. Expectation is only the outward appearance of the phenomenon of suffering. Something is deeper still that supports this expectation. What causes the expectation to begin with? Maybe this all sounds like a rhetorical argument, but really it isn't. There is a pearl buried right in front of us. Its time we pluck it from the sand. Perhaps we can begin to do something more material with it in our lives, and for those experiencing awakening, I think it offers a real benefit for a range of people. Without going into the gory details, it has to do with being overly materialistic. That is, our tendency to believe matter gives rise to consciousness instead of matter emerging FROM consciousness. When we can slip into the slipstream of this broader consciousness, what I call Waveform Awareness (which ties us neatly into the particle/wave duality in physics by the way), we stop thought and stop the usual forms of thinking and begin to be more like a sense organ in a still larger body. We begin to plumb the infinite. This is the essence of Awakening, of kundalini. From there comes all of the energy effects, the discomfort, the sense of blockage or bloating in the body which is really just the energy, beginning to understand this "new" world of energy, and how we are part of it in a vast and wonderful way.
This helped me to understand that not everything IS obvious to people. In fact, people can suffer as a result of this lack of awareness....and in a sense, books will only go so far. What we need are kind words, compassionate acts, and the knowing that we can all help in our own way in this field of understanding and life. We can help each other realize what we really already know. We can do this because we are all part of the other. We are each dreaming different parts of a still larger dream....one part reminding the other part of what it already knows what it is.
This has helped to move the work forward in a substantive way, and I hope that it resolves in the work in a way that will help us all be better able to conceive of this in a broader way....
I wound up in the library. I was waiting for an appointment that was the next street over, and since I had a few minutes, I walked the aisles, pulled to one direction. Instead of assuming I knew what might be up, I dispelled any notion of what might be there for me, if anything. I tried looking for books in case this was an encounter that was going to actually involve a book. After doing this, I just told myself to stop any expectation and let whatever happened happen. My hand went to one book and pulled it off the shelf. Instead of looking through it, I just checked it out of the library and then quickly went to my meeting.
That was yesterday.
Today I cracked the book open. I looked at the introduction and saw that the author was a psychotherapist who was also into buddhism. The author was writing the book about desire and suffering. Howe he dealt with the issue I found amazing. He was writing about how Buddha was all about dealing with suffering, and how this is connected to desire. He quoted Freud, explaining that he believed there was an "unbridgeable gap" in the self that keeps us going for the things that ultimately wind up making us suffer. Desire naturally has a role to play. What I found, though, was entirely astonishing to me. There was seemingly no awareness of what it is that actually causes suffering. Desire was pointed to, yes, but it only went so far. It was as though the inquiry stopped short of actually dealing with WHY we suffer. Of course Buddha said its expectation that causes suffering, so that makes sense, yes, but hold on a minute. There is more. Why aren't these great minds able to get down to the core of this? What is this unbridgeable gap in their own perception and conceptulaizing abilities that is keeping them from getting into the real meat of all of this?
I sat there, reading, amazed. It was as though some bomb had gone off inside. These people really don't get it. They are talking all around it, yet aren't getting into it. They talk of the gap, but they don't consider what it is that is causing this gap. Freud didn't do it, and Buddha spoke only of expectation. WHAT CAUSES expectation? I knew the answer, and yet had this been hidden all this time before everyone? I considered maybe we weren't ready yet. Perhaps it was just a threshold we had not yet traversed. As I thought about all of this, the book I am writing came back into startling clarity. The difficulty I had been having with it for a while now involves this very aspect of what causes suffering. It isn't desire, and it isn't expectation alone. Expectation is only the outward appearance of the phenomenon of suffering. Something is deeper still that supports this expectation. What causes the expectation to begin with? Maybe this all sounds like a rhetorical argument, but really it isn't. There is a pearl buried right in front of us. Its time we pluck it from the sand. Perhaps we can begin to do something more material with it in our lives, and for those experiencing awakening, I think it offers a real benefit for a range of people. Without going into the gory details, it has to do with being overly materialistic. That is, our tendency to believe matter gives rise to consciousness instead of matter emerging FROM consciousness. When we can slip into the slipstream of this broader consciousness, what I call Waveform Awareness (which ties us neatly into the particle/wave duality in physics by the way), we stop thought and stop the usual forms of thinking and begin to be more like a sense organ in a still larger body. We begin to plumb the infinite. This is the essence of Awakening, of kundalini. From there comes all of the energy effects, the discomfort, the sense of blockage or bloating in the body which is really just the energy, beginning to understand this "new" world of energy, and how we are part of it in a vast and wonderful way.
This helped me to understand that not everything IS obvious to people. In fact, people can suffer as a result of this lack of awareness....and in a sense, books will only go so far. What we need are kind words, compassionate acts, and the knowing that we can all help in our own way in this field of understanding and life. We can help each other realize what we really already know. We can do this because we are all part of the other. We are each dreaming different parts of a still larger dream....one part reminding the other part of what it already knows what it is.
This has helped to move the work forward in a substantive way, and I hope that it resolves in the work in a way that will help us all be better able to conceive of this in a broader way....
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