Everyman's WEEKLY Journal #81
©2014 Rev. David Seacord
August 5, 2014
"Wherefore art thou Now"…
Your/my wholeness is only in one place and nowhere else…here, now, within/inside. It is forever not to be found in any outer thing, or action, or personality, or event. None of that can possibly contain your/my wholeness. Why is that all that-- and all else that are 'sense phenomena'--- are self-obviously only the various semi-holographic contents WITHIN the wholeness.
Relatedly, the 3rd Zen Patriarch teaching says quite flatly: "To seek Mind with the 'discriminating mind' is the greatest of all mistakes." It further teaches: "Attachment cannot be limited. Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray."
Last week after leaving my parents Prairie City property in much improved shape and visiting some wonderful friends and selling some art, I timed my journey southward from Portland to Ashland, Oregon such that I could attend the regularly scheduled Friday evening talk at the Life of Learning Foundation in Merlin, where Guy Finley is the resident teacher. (He also teaches online via his YouTube channel, btw.) Guy's teaching that evening was simple and fundamental: Can you hold your focused witnessing awareness of your true Self steady and unbrokenly--- while at the same time being fully cognizant of the various sense objects in front of you? The answer is Yes, you can. Yes, it will be 'work' (especially at first), but it is clearly possible. It is only mental habituation that directs our mind to 'go to' things and attach to them fully, in the process called 'identification'. We all know this process… as in a movie theater, where we 'drop being ourselves' (for a while) and 'become the character' being portrayed.
What I am getting and suggesting (from my personal experience) is that this dropping of our Self-awareness and allowing our awareness 'to go to' outer sense objects or impressions fully is: 'to drop ourconsciousness' and to become attached or identified with something that is not the whole, but is rather only 'a part'. And, especially if we become so deeply identified with that 'part' to the point that we forget our way back to our Self-wholeness, we can become aimlessly lost. Thus, I am seeing that it is important to realize that there is never a time 'after enlightenment' that you/I can drop our attention off of our self-awareness of being. (Prasad once told me being awake was like being in a cage with a wild tiger about to pounce the second you go unconscious/back to sleep.) My seeing is that if we/you/I do that, our sense of self-containment and wholeness disappears and is lost in the inevitable confusions of chasing illusions---'the ten-thousand things'. All those things that make up the outer world have their own nature--- but they do not need us to fulfill them, nor do we need them to fulfill us. In fact, such fulfillment by outer things is impossible, as I am sure our own experience has taught us all many times. The Zen wisdom teaching is to 'just let them be', and Papaji taught 'do not touch them, or they will bite you'. As I see it, this 'do not touch them' teaching is the always present challenge of living 'in the world but not being of it', because the nature of being in the world is made up of our propensity of becoming easily attached to it and creating 'our identity' from it.
What really bites us then is: our own sense of 'I'-ness. What we feed grows, yes? Even though the i-sense is not the 'true' Self, if fed it can grow and thus seem true. Obviously (as we've all done it) it can even seem true enough to become completely lost in it. The antidote to this is to not feed 'i'-dentification. That is what resting in being 'the witness of the mind' is all about….
Ramana Maharshi's teaching of 'not this, not that' (neti, neti) in answer to the question 'who am I?' takes a being into 'the zone'… because if you/I can repeatedly see through the compulsion to identify and attach to the object of perception what happens is 'it passes by'. Only our 'I' grabbing it and calling it 'mine' causes it to stay. GangaJi recommends we do inquiry in order to for ourselves 'find out what remains'…. meaning AFTER letting everything phenomenal go its own way, what is still there/here? In other words, what is ALWAYS here and ALWAYS now?
As one of Guy Finley's student speakers said the other night: "Every I that I have believed in or thought I was has been false". In other words, when the Oneness is Present, there is no 'I' anywhere around. Clearly this is a pretty big catch-22, as it is our 'i'-sense that usually wanted to get enlightened in the first place, and most probably why we became 'spiritual' in the first place was in reality just to create another 'new, better, different' identity. Yes?
Like a donut being turned inside-out until it vanishes, so also is the true spiritual journey. I recommend that instead of collecting identities it is more useful to collect spiritual friendships. I am happy to encourage anyone interested to visit the teachings of any of the teachers I have mentioned in this or other journals, and I am especially happy to discover Guy Finley's YouTube channel, and offer it to you.
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For those interested in my personal summer progress report, I am now in Ashland Oregon housesitting for a week or so for my son and his roommates while they attend the biggest highlight of their year, a music festival in British Columbia call Shambhala. I'm caring for a chinchilla, a cat, two chickens, two dogs, a snake, and a garden. I've erected an EZup painting studio, and yesterday while working the backyard Santa Rosa plum tree gave me many beautiful fruit to eat, and the gazebo offered me a very sweet place to practice yoga. This evening I believe I will be going to the local u-pick peach orchard. It is time to paint, time to rest and be quiet, time to practice the music of life…letting go each moment, receiving the next as a gift and a blessing.
Many Blessing to you all.
Namaste & Sat Nam…
David
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Rev. David Seacord
Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag
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