.

The premise of the thread is space for my thoughts and dialogue with others concering dharma in all forms, particularly being open to playing with dharmic ideas in unusual ways.

Continuation of old thread: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5715677

Starting anew due to length of previous one.

9.28

Very stressed at work & it will only get worse over the next few months before calming down again.  Having insomnia due to anxiety plus years of a sleep-aid med, up until about six months ago.  I learned from my teacher that, through the development of skills, I could eradicate all types of suffering.  Realizing now that I may have misinterpreted.  I can't have everything - sacrifices are still necessary.  More money, more work, more stress.  More money, frequently in an area with higher cost of living.  Less money, less work, less stress, less resources, more free time, frequently in area with lower cost of living (less fun, more isolated, lower quality of living?).  Similar breakdowns for other areas of life.

I don't think it is possible (at least for me) to have an intenisve job & no stress.  Something about this I am not seeing.  This dukkha aspect.  Not penetrating into the actuality of it.  This is the way things are.  Sacrfices, choices.  Perhaps I've thought I could have my cake & eat it too.  

Enhanced nondual perception makes things easier.  It's helped me get where I'm at.  I don't know if the goal is actually to change myself so much that I adapt to fast-paced job with no stress.  So for now it's: more work coupled with intermittent high stress & insomnia.  Nothing is permanent,  It won't always be exactly like this.  But this 'see-saw' effect of comprimise - I don't think I'm seeing that clearly on a day-to-day basis.  

More broadly I think this is says something about the eightfold path.  The implementation of it is built around the elimination of craving.  If one stops trying to change things, they will still need guidelines to make choices afterwards.  By this I mean the embodiment/integration path, whose order is wisdom -> morality -> concentration.  I kind of thought I could 'bargain with reality.'  Use dharma training to navigate a corporate world & more responsibility & just gain internal flexibility to compensate.  Maybe that is not how it works.  If I want to live in a city, I may need to take a job that will cause me more suffering.  Same for if I want to start strong in my career.  If I'm willing to sacrifice where I live and/or professional acceleration, I could probably do something slower paced.  

I must admit it makes me sad to realize this.  Can't have everything.  Not sure what I want to do.  I'm honestly really grateful for all of the dharma training though.  I'm not miserable by any means.  Just figuring things out.

Hi, Noah.

Thanks for starting a new thread on this topic.

I'm a product of the same dilemma you've just described. I have a couple of ideas on it from long experience: 

1) Business people have stress. It's an inevitable part of living according to external influences and pressures. Stress has both negative and positive effects, however. If used as a motivator it can help. If seen as a "bad" thing it can overwhelm. I suggest relaxing into stress and being accepting of it - unless you just cannot get there. Which leads me to...

2) You're thinking the right way about the choices you face. I applaud your self-awareness. My perception of this is it's something you've developed by really working at your practice in various ways. This is going to serve you well over your lifetime. I wish I had done what you've done at your age! I didn't get to it until I was 20 years older than you are. Good for you!

3) Jhanas -- they can help you get to sleep and they can give you a break from stress. They're a  great tool if used effectively, not just a sidetrack on the path.

+1 on the advice and on the complement on how fortunate to have done the hard work to be this aware in the 20s.

I find that if I sit before I go to sleep, even into a dreamy state, right up to the point where I'm really ready to crash into sleep, then during that sit a lot of the thoughts, worries, planning, etc. of the day will bubble up and off --- basically I'm letting many of the things that would otherwise wake me up with insomnia off gas before I sleep. 

That said, another thing I've gotten used to is there are simply times when I don't sleep well (often around full moons). I no longer make insomnia worse by feeling bad about it. Sometimes the frustration is worse the the missed sleep.

I remembered something else -- oddly enough it woke me out my sleep last night!

One thing I always say to newer employees is that "People will keep giving you work. They don't know everything you are working on and if you just smile and say okay, they won't know you are being overworked. You have limits to what you can do and you are getting paid only so much money. You need to decide when and how, but you will have to say no at a certain point. You have to let them know that you have reached the limit of what you can do. You can ask them for how to prioritize the tasks you have been given, but you need to let them know that you can't do it all. Ironically, people will respect you if you say no -- and they will intentionally or unintentionally walk all over you if you do not."

Sometimes we rehearse a few scenarios, all of which end with them saying different sentences containing the word "no".

Hope this helps someone. I wish I was told this early in my professional working life.

Even the Buddha didn't promise the end of all suffering while alive, and he suffered from various pains and stressors until his death. Just sayin'. 

Currently enjoying the audiobook of Great Disciples of the Buddha, which gives some nice details of the trials, tribulations and annoyances of some of the great early practitioners of the dharma.

Thanks Shargrol.  It's funny to hear you write this. I received this exact piece of advice from: my friend, my dhamma teacher & my work manager last week.  The trick appears to involve saying no or "pushing back" in tactful ways that get other people to do the work for you, shorten/simplify tasks, etc.  My overall goal seems to be do as little work as possible to not get fired & to remain on a path to get promoted eventually.  This is in the context that my job is not my passion & it is not directly a service profession. 

Thanks Chris.  I value your advice, I know you've had a lot of experience in both the meditative & business worlds.



I think it is my inexperience in business and/or level of dhamma training, but at this point what is working is lowering stress by thinking "what is the worst thing that could happen?" & making back-up plans in case I get fired (even though I am in good standing).  For whatever reason this is what works right now.  I could spend all day choicelessly accepting the fear, vipassanizing it & doing self-enquiry on it, but when the rubber hits the road, I need industrial-strength methods to get to point b.  (Not that this is what you were saying, just reflecting on the toolbox available.)




I do feel lucky to have this training when I reflect on it.  I intend to bring that gratitude more to the fore of my day to day mind.



In the interest of honesty - I can get into a 'decent' jhanic state when the conditions are right & sit in it for a long time.  However, the "soft" jhanic states that I have access to at any time (including when I am restless at night) do not knock me out :/

Daniel:
That's a fair callout.  I would say my goal is to get to a "good enough" point of automatic worldly functioning, open knowing & mood regulation.  Once I'm there maybe I'll decide to keep attempting to deepen the practice, or perhaps to coast, or perhaps some other option that I can't see right now.

Edit: I wanted to add that I have no reason to believe that this "good enough" point is not possible.  This is based off of the amount of transformation I have experienced in a little over 4 years.  At this rate I should be able to hit my 'price' within a few more years.

Thanks.  I will check this out.

10.6

*I wrote a bunch of stream of consciousness on different topics here.  Too lazy to organize.

"Not my problem" is my new best friend   Tentatively, I have solved my insomnia through this attitude.  The short explanation is that I stopped getting stressed out.  The long is that I have been processing the impressions of the day in my head as I go to sleep.  Having these vibrations bouncing around prevented me from sleep.  Realizing that most of these issues are actually unrelated to my personal responsibility to myself is a solve.

So, my responsibility is essentially to provide myself food, shelter, clothing & medicine, now & in the future.  It is also to ensure that I don't die from illness, injury, excess cold, excess heat, thirst or hunger.  I have no dependents as of now.  My job is simply a means to provide those things for myself.  

Sleep is more pressing to those survival needs than my job is.  Insomnia is bad for the brain, bad for the body.  When I let myself have insomnia because I am trying to accomplish more at my job or in my daily life, I am essentially moving too high on Maslow's heirarchy of needs.  The very mechanism through which I am attempting to accomplish the higher, career needs is undermining the lower, physical survival needs.

I started reading the Mr. Money Mustache blog, as well as some of Vinay Gupta's resilience stuff.  The idea for MMM is that if you can save/invest 25 times your living expenses for one year, you can retire & live off of the accrued interest from your investments.  The goal is to reduce your living expenses & increase your satisfaction with the money you do spend.  This is *remarkably* compatible with what I have learned from Dhammarato & with the teaching on renunciation in general. 

It has not been until recently that I would have been ready to hear something like this.  Learning to be happy through living off of less simply did not make sense to me before I cleared a ton of 'shit' out of my 'energy system' (or however you want to frame it).  But now, the very participation in the moment is inherently pleasurable or complete, so it makes perfect sense to simplify the contents & patterns of those moments.

Zooming out a little more, I see more parallels with what has happened with the seattle pragmatic group & with these resilience/independence strategies.  It is about removing centralization, heirarchy, monetization, consumerism, rigid rules & filters, while increasing efficiency, honesty, direct mechanisms, peer-contribution, mutual gains & individual independence.  I have noticed in a short time it is possible to facilitate quite a few different dharma groups in various cities & countries.  After a few short weeks, people begin to report progress in their practice. 

There is obvious benefit to a group of cheerleading dharma friends getting together to talk openly about practice, being technique/phenomenlogy driven, etc.  There is obvious benefit to learning to save enough to live off of indefinitely, learning to live a healthier lifestyle, etc.  Vinay Gupta has some cool stuff like hexayurts (a cheap, permanent, weather-proof structure that he claims can solve the world's housing crisis) & etherium (a type of block-chain currency that he helped create which is now fairly popular).  The interesting thing about these things is that they do not require governments or corporations to run.  People can bootstrap them to get them going.  They both relate to survival.  I see the formation of grassroots sanghas, as well as the connection between grassroots sanghas, as belonging to a similar vein: open source dharma for the entire world in a way that avoids common pitfalls (it doesn't cost money, there's no teacher).

In spite of all this newfound inspiration, I'm mostly just learning to let things be.  I don't need to do more, I need to do less.  It's not my job to save the world, it's my job to keep this mind-body going & that's about it.  The rest is just extra software programs I've installed over time.  Most of it's malware anyway.  Nothing to do, nowhere to go.  I can smell this vast static as I lay down on my pillow.  I smile & look at the demons of responsibility.  With one wink, they writhe in pain & die away.

Noah, I think you have the right idea - the combinatoin of practice and practical/behavioral strategies will help you a lot as you navigate your day. Silver bullets only work on werewolves.

Right lifestyle (or livelihood) is starting to make more sense.  My ignorance of it explains my pendulum-swing from excitement about career to dread of it within a few months.  

My teacher has previously made it clear to me that right lifestyle is about handling the four requisites correctly.  This includes the way one secures them (i.e. having an ethical job).  Money represents food, shelter, clothing & medicine in the future.  Therefore, proper handling of money is proper handling of the requisites.  The direct dealings with the requisites simply involves taking necessary amounts of things to sustain the body-mind.  

It seems sort of like burning a candle from both ends: stash money away to secure requisites in the future & use only a small, necessary amount of them in the present.  Planning for an early retirement fits perfectly here, which my teacher calls "planning your exit."  If there is excess money past that which is needed to sustain the body-mind till death, donating to effective-altruism causes is the obvious choice for it.

When I am at work, my time there represents the money that is going into my bank account.  That money represents the maintenance of me.  Other things also contribute to this maintenance.  Things like exercise, diet, disaster/emergency preparedness, car/home care, etc.  These habits mostly just help avoid unnecessary loss of resources.  

I have felt a bit angry these past couple of weeks.  This may be a reaction against feeling anxious, like an emotional see-saw.  This anger has made me feel detached from my job.  However, that is all emotionally driven.  It would be foolish for me to purposely leave my job at this time.  But it is also foolish for me let it stress me out.  It is true that I could find another job & pivot/adapt if my current one ended.  However, the accumulation of resouces it provides is pretty good.  So I should try to keep doing it.

This necessitates probably focusing on what works rather than what feels good.  Business is never going to make me feel good.  Business is dukkha.  Stop trying to "get a handle" or "get some certainty" about it.  

I'm thinking of a martial arts analogy.  I tend to be really OCD & process focused in my work.  When I have time, I can do a task really well.  When I don't have time, it drives me nuts.  I'm sort of like a karate-player in this way.  Karate is very focused on forms: performing one form again & again, one gradually builds up their spirit & hones a slew of other skills which would transfer to a fight (supposedly).  On the other end of the spectrum, you have pressure point fighting.  A system of pressure point fighting would be only based on preparing for & ending a real fight as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.  The perfection of the spirit is secondary to defending oneself using as little work as possible.  

Perhaps I need to be more of a pressure point fighter at work.  Meaning, spend as little time there as possible (stay within 40 hour work week), being maximally efficient & efficacious for the goals of the business & ultimately not allowing it to stress me out because I would be OK if I lost the job.  

Cool - I'm going to go with that.

Hey Noah,
What do you think about earning a living in doing things that are meaningful to you, that you enjoy and are passionate about?
Why do you think that the act of earning money necessarily has to be unpleasant?

Adrian

Sounds like a pipe dream :p

I have similar issues of getting stressed about work, something I've found helpful is trying to change my attitude to treat it like a game. You get better at games by relaxing and trying things out and trying to get in the zone and shrugging off failures. Work isn't necessarily any different if you approach it the right way. Something that helped me learn this is observing other people who seem to thrive on the parts of work I find stressful, and try to figure out what they're doing. The most productive, efficient people are often also the most fun to work with, they aren't the people frowning and stressing out and beating themselves up.

Thanks Adam.  I have found similar things to be helpful as well.  Solid pointers.

10.10

I think I may understand the underlying intention behind the precepts, at least for me.  Commonly, they are thought of as preparation for meditation.  They seem more to be a result of prolonged practice or a way of expressing the fruit of practice.  

I feel this delicious silence cutting into more & more of my day.  The pull towards stillness, physically & mentally.  This is permeating my consumption of food & water, my handling of the body, of my money, my living space, car, etc.  This responsible action allows the muscle of self in increasingly subtle forms to relax - the deep tissue & fascia of ego.  

The precepts, as well as guarding the sense doors, is a way to preserve & grow this silence, like watering a plant.  Communicating in ways which harm others disturbs this oasis.  I process other people's cues & then they bounce around in my head later.  I think as things are getting smaller in here I am more sensitive to these impressions, at least sometimes.  

10.16

Over the past couple weeks, it feels like I can now keep my head inside a turtle shell.  After bringing my attention back to the breath for awhile, that became a solid diversion.  As more pointed distractions arose, they would pull me away from the breath.  This degree of distraction actually gave me insomnia.  Purposefully detachment became necessary.  Reasoning at the level of the problem: "I'm not worried about x, because I would be fine without it due to y."  This seems to have cured the insomnia. 

Doing samatha practice at a friends house last weekend, I found that I suddenly could concentrate.  This hasn't abated.  It has developed into a sense that I can retract into a protective shell and abide there for as long as I need to.  Within it, thoughts, emotions & external perceptions do not disturb.  It feels quite practical as it allows me to abide seemingly indefinitely without engaging with any other stimuli.  I can imagine potential criticisms upon reading this of course.  That is okay.

I am not talking about the ability to have choiceless awareness of unpleasant sensations, or nondual perception of the defilements.  This is a fairly popular modality amongst advanced meditation practitioners.  For some reason they see it as the be-all-end-all, when really it is merely a useful counterbalance against overly-suppressive Western misinterpretation of classic Buddhism (see Than Geoff's Buddhist Romanticism for more on that).  I'm specifically speaking to having both a choicless, nondual surrender into the field and the ability to abide free of defilements simultaneously.  

Why even practise then, when probably the greatest meditation practioner in history still suffered? Life seems like a futile waking nightmare that leads nowhere if a way to cut suffering at the root doesn't actually exist.

It isn't true that post full awakening there is suffering.   Physical pain, sure, but what we call suffering, nope. 

10.17

Some pattern has continued.  It feels like an inner shelter.  It is different from my experience with the following things:

-nondual perception of hindrance
-equanimity/nonreactivity towards hindrance
-antidoting hindrance with attentional technique
-resting into jhanic factors to distract from hindrance

It feels like all of these things are facing toward the myriad appearances within the field.  This feels like I'm facing away from it.  It feels like I am maybe in a cozy attic or a storm shelter where everything is peaceful & quiet despite chaos raging outside.  I'm not specifically aware of the nature of the chaos in this state.

I can link many tensions I have developed to my inability to do this type of self soothing.  I suspect it is not spiritual, but rather very basic.  I had an experience related to this in a group spuds meditation tonight: I was repeatedly returning to the shelter sense; Creating more & more space around the thoughts raging on the surface (anxiety about work); Suddenly I had a realization that I have an anxiety disorder -- I felt like a scientist observing my own mind, only able to see from the outside the quality of my mind's dysfunction;  At noticing this, everything felt very physically solid for a moment & I knew in my bones that my thought patterns were not substantial, not physically solid. 

Edit: I think what is different (maybe) is that I may have reached a tipping point with my sila where the level of risk I feel in terms of basic things like money, health, career, relationships has dipped below a level where it is logical to continue worrying about them. 

10.19

I think I'm starting to have some sense of how the dhamma scales.  So the primary thrust of most discussion on pragmatic dharma message boards is what I would now call "thresholds of right mindfulness."  That is, after one gathers a certain amount of data from some sort of meditative/attentional technique, the structure of the mind shifts.  The process of reaching this shift is none other than the progress of insight.  The critical mass or threshold which marks a point-of-no-return is the so-called 'path.'  This threshold can occur in one cessation, a dramatic insight experience, or much more gradually.

I honestly think focusing only on this is a totally valid & helpful goal. I do not think it makes sense to generalize that there are a specific number of these shifts or a specific order in which they occur.  I do believe there is an end point to them.  I also don't think it makes sense to associate these with what is talked about in the pali canon as the stages of awakening - in terms of terminology or actual content of what occurs.  It is true that these thresholds of mindfulness are associated with improvements to thought, speech & behavior as well.  These 'package deals' are the stated goal of the 8fold path.  However, there is an unfortunate tendency for someone in pragmatic dharma forums to achieve a threshold of clinging-reduction (which is the same as mindfulness & perception as far as I'm concerned) and then use a term from the pali canon to label that result.  

What has happened for them is a legitimate transformation.  Once again, the stated goal of the 8fold path is to affect many, many of these transformations.  This does not mean that each one is a new level of nirvana.  There are many, many permanent, radically life-changing shifts before sotapanna.  This should not somehow belittle or lessen the significance of any one of them.  They are the very building blocks of happiness.  Sotapanna is a massive, permanent, total character-perception-behavior-emotional-lifestyle-intellectual reformation.  It is a synergy of many epiphanies that results in a specific algorithm which is none other than the uprooting of the first three fetters.

Having provided context for what a 'technical path' is vs what a traditional one is, in terms of the 8folds, I'd like to unpack the other folds.  It all starts with right mindfulness.  Regardless of how these 8 components were organized through history, I believe this is their functional order.  Mindfulness is first.  It is a data gathering process that results in perceptual shifts & also gradual improvements.  This all happens before any of the other folds.  What is confusing is that utilizing the other folds out of order can help one achieve the perceptual shifts.  This is why many people order the 3 trainings as sila, samadhi, prajna rather than prajna, sila, samadhi.

Once mindfulness is initiated, it is powered through Right Persistence (aka Right Effort) -- This persistence is what makes mindfulness actually work & form right view & the rest of the folds over time.

This data must then be filtered & utilized.  This is similar to analytics in business.  Mindfulness provides a database but doesn't necessarily tell you the story of the data.  The process of shaping the data into a story & also the resulting patterns is Right View.  Lots could be said about right view but does not really need to be said beyond this.  It is simply the understanding that both arises from & is applied to mindfulness - the nature of this understanding is sukkha or happiness.

Then comes Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action & Right Lifestyle.  These build on each other.  They operate on a spectrum from subtle to gross or from micro to macro.  They are none other than the process of dependent origination.  It's very simple.  Your thoughts become your words.  Your words your actions, your actions your life.  Each link in this chain must be intentionally informed by right view.  Meaning, the choice of how you conduct your inner & outer mind-body must be made using the observations from right view.  It is not enough to stop at mindfulness.  No matter how good you get at mindfulness, if you want to fulfill the total stated goal of these teachings, you will have to change the actual content of your thoughts, words, behaviors & daily life.  Sensory clarity, concentration & equanimity amidst unskillful living patterns is not enough.

Something very special happens when all of these previous steps gel.  It is a type of synergy that is hard to describe (ineffeble, if you will ;) ).  The mind & body align  towards the goal of right view & happiness.  The conscious & subconscious unify.  All expressions of one's inner & outer world are suffused with the atmosphere "taste" of happiness.  This does not, in any sense, mean that one becomes at all monolithic, sanitized, emotionally-limited, etc.  These are all misinterpretations of the 10 fetter model.  

This is a meta-way of being in the world.  It is a skill of learning skills.  A hyper adaptive mechanism at every level.  This is the true anatta realization - a way of operating, not just percieving or truly knowing.

to be continued (need to add relational, communal & societal levels in addition to finishing individual level)

I think there are some very interesting parallels between Mr. Money Mustache and pragmatic dharma / MCTB.  They both make a strong case that seemingly quite lofty goals are actually attainable by ordinary people provided that they're willing to put in a moderate amount of hard work, and that the hard work itself can be interesting and enjoyable.  They also both lay out a systematic and legible path to follow in which certain actions will lead to certain results, which for some people can be an empowering contrast to what they've been exposed to in popular financial and spiritual writing.  And for those of us who like a certain amount of legibility and systematicity, this all adds up to discovering new options for what kinds of lifestyles are possible.

I think where the story diverges for now is in the public reception to the two.  I ran across MMM a couple of years ago, and found myself surprised by how many of my friends also were very interested in it.  I think most of my surprise was how much people were willing to discuss it publically -- stuff touching on money, budgeting, etc. is the sort of thing that most people tend to politely avoid discussing since it's an emotionally sensitive topic.  But somehow Mr. Money Mustache does a surprisingly good job of shifting the emphasis from the taboo money side to the "interesting challenge side" so that people felt comfortable talking about it in public.  It's interesting to look at pragmatic dharma from that angle, since I think that even more good could come potentially come from awakening being taken seriously and discussed publicly. 

I personally haven't discussed my practice that much with friends or family for all the good reasons that come up whenever people have discussed evangelism here before, but maybe there are different ways to tell the story of pragmatic dharma that could allow it to enter the cultural mainstream.

@JP: Really interesting parallels & divergences.  Thanks for sharing.  I agree that talking about money can be emotionally sensitve, as can practice when you go to a mainstream meditation group.  For practice, I do think that there is a way to do it that is palletable & marketable.  You kinda have to "sell it" though...

10.30

I think that I need to push my philosophy on resource consumption further.  I was pretty damn wasteful up until maybe 3 months ago & that was usually because I was basically medicating myself or numbing my feelings through different excessive habits.  But now I don't need to numb my feelings anymore because I like my consciousness & its relation to this body & the habit patterns that have been formed  here.

Rather than thinking that living extravagently is normal or standard & that resisting that pattern is discipline or "extra", why not switch them around?  Basically, any time I am acting, speaking, using time, using money, consuming food, water or energy, sleeping, I am interacting with the world & using some sort of resource.  Given that there is a finite amount of these opportunities, it seems to make sense to use them cautiously.  

From that perspective, it seems really silly to drink a lot of alcohol (which causes me to lose at least a day of productivity), to waste a lot of time (which causes me to get backed up in my errands), to consume bad information sources, to not interact with others in an open & nourishing manner, to not exercise regularly, or to not prepare & consume food & water properly.  So why do I violate these things?  I think I have some lingering software programs which are telling me that it is cool to consume stuff.  Be powerful, be big, consume a lot.  That sort of thing.  Also telling me that it is cool to be tough & to have shitty conditions but to be able to get stuff done anyway.  I suspect some of this idealogy is decidedly american & masculine.  

For whatever reason, I seem to have learned that it's cool to make things harder for myself, but that I can learn to be so damn resilient that I will make them easier for myself on the front end & just plow through.  I've honestly taken this mindset into the dharma, believing that if I could become the toughest-10-fetter-arahant-gangster-alive then nothing could touch me.  But although I have become a lot more resilient (despite being nowhere near an arahant), the stronger tendency that is arising is a sense of intelligent design towards my life at all levels.

Take human interaction, as an example:  I have usually had a lot of friends in my life.  All the while, I have been gradually healing certain psychoemotional tensions.  What I've discovered is if I open my heart & remove the filters & masks I put on when I talk to other people, I can actually get a lot more 'nourishment' & connection than with my ego face on.  It's like having 5 conversations for the price of one.  

Food & money are big ones.  They interface with time.  Whenever I am not working, that is pretty much my time.  I usually think towards getting my errands done quickly so I can have as much free time to veg out as possible.  That is premised on the idea that I need vegging time to recover from the previous day of work/errands & charge up for the next day of work/errands.  But why do I need to have a negative relationship with work/errands?  With the proper training in the 8fold path, these things are none other than sources of happiness.  

So why not change it so that I emphasize the proper handling of resources (errands) as the same as free time?  Or just nix the concept of free time entirely.  Work vs play is definitely a false duality.  When done correctly, work becomes play.  The handling of resources is a game to be mastered.  Through & through, all the way to the bottom of the mind.  No need for holdouts of the subconscious still plugged into the morphogenetic field of consumerism.  

Through wise design, the need for vegging time goes down.  Something like that.

10.31

Tim Ferris talks about choosing your problems & says something along the lines of "if you don't have free time you aren't making decisions."  I am noticing that my paragon of practice is morphing away from one of complete resilience to tough conditions & towards one of utter willingness to accept limitation and therefore make things easy on myself for the future.  It is clear to me that there are a finite set of activities, that, when performed well, will maximize happiness in my life.  I do not believe that this set of activities is somehow separate from the noble eightfold path.

It includes things like successful career, money management, time management, diet/meal prep, exercise, a lot of nourishing & authentic human connection, sleep, self care & home care.  There are also a lot of other things that I don't have time for that are really healthy & encouraged.  For instance, at my current level of functioning, I don't possess the ability to do all of those things well AND volunteer in the community once a week AND spend a couple of hours in nature once a week.  There just isn't bandwidth for all of these activities to reoccur regularly.  That is perfectly OK.  I am grateful to have the ability to consciously choose what I am leaving off of the list.

There is one thing I sometimes hear in spiritual circles around this idea of accepting limitation, which I don't agree with: that is the idea of that non-remarkable or average conduct is perfectly acceptable when trying to cultivate a spiritual path.  I don't believe that one can continue to consume the same TV, media, food, social interaction, etc & just choicelessly accept all of it & that will lead to full fledged awakening.  Some people would take those lifestyle adjustments & place them as a precursor to wisdom or insight training.  I would actually place them as a product or embodiment of the realization after it has occurred.  In my opinion this is a crucial distinction.  

I don't believe that the amount of happiness I can experience is limited or at least less than 99% of all waking hours & eventually sleeping hours.  I do believe that the amount of material control or abundance is severly limited.  It is more about mindfully managing a finite amount of materiality (including time) than it is about generating more stuff. 

This all leads me to admit that I have come up against a wall: for the past 8 or so months (I'm not sure when actually) I have been off of a medication I previously used to regulate my sleep.  While I have been able to get quite a bit done in various areas of my life during this time, I have not been able to consistently sleep for an average of 8.5 hours per night.  Rather, my sleep has been fairly irregular.  I have tried (both methodically & randomly): binaural beats, sleep hypnosis, sleep hygeine, melatonin, benadryl, somatic descent meditation, metta/exemplar tantra meditation, breath medtiation, counting sheep, various types of self-talk/self-programming, amongst others.  Many if not most of these pursuits provided fruitful lessons that are applicable to other areas of life & even cool things like hypnogagia.  However, they have not resulted in consistent sleep pattern.

I have to accept that insomnia may not be under the control of self conditioning outside of medication at this time.  Insomnia is bad for the brain & body and stopping it is very high on my priority list.  Higher in fact, than not taking a medication for it or avoiding subtle, next day grogginess as a result.

Experience is ultimately disappointing.  Dukkha.

11.18

I'm experimenting with just allowing myself to feel my feelings.  Not subtly taking the witness, not mentally labelling them, not focusing specially on the non dual aspect of them, not bringing compassionate attention to them, not particularly being here-now in a hypersensory manner, not surrendering & opening my heart & allowing it all to flow -- just being with them in a moderate or mediocre everday way. 

Most of the experience I experience is fairly boring & dull.  I also notice there is giddiness, fear, confidence, agitation, anxiety, neutrality, excitement, inspiration, anger & rapture.  My baseline happens to be nondual & rapturous, which is not my fault -- I'm not trying to make it that way.  When I do this choiceless awareness stuff, I also have meditation events like cessation, jhanic aspects, some kind of "rigpa", the flow of kundalini, etc.  When I have these events, other thoughts & beliefs sometimes occur before & after, revealing how I contextualize this type of thing with the rest of my life.

Also, I notice the storyline that "noah is practicing to make his life better."  And although that storyline is totally necessary & valid, it is a storyline just like any other one like "joe shmoe wants to be a great father" or "jane doe is studying to become a champion at pinball."  

There is a need to control things.  It is not as if letting go is all that is necessary.  I hear people say that.  Ridiculous to me.  But it is a type of thing, 2 at the same time:

1.  Be at peace in heaven or hell

2.  Do actually "try", at the same time as being at peace, to optimize for heaven

3.  Be at peace with the effort in point #2, even though it contradicts with point #1.  Be at peace with the contradiction.

End of story.

11.22

Bring things into the light of awareness that have been hidden.  This part hurts.  Maintain a relaxed & open mind which contains that.

Act appropriately.  Antiodote as needed.  Return to the openness.  

Blend & balance surrender with control.  On one level, surrender is all that is necessary.  The path is all laid out before us.  This does not mean one is "done."  It is said that the full maturation of the 3rd thogal vision is halfway to the path of buddhahood.  This is something few ever reach.  Having learned a bit about the true 4 stages of Theravadan awakening, I can say with confidence that few ever reach even the first stage in that map.  So the path doesn't end. 

However, a certain type of striving does not need to be there.  There needs to be acknowledgement that what is happening is inevitable, total, always whole or integral.  Striving to escape or change this basic nature of experience is delusion.  

Striving to perfect the path which occurs within this completeness is not delusion.  That distinction is one I've frequently seen be overlooked.  I can't find the source for it, but I think Chogyam Trungpa said "You're already enlightened, but you could use a bit of work."  A confidence in the path, even an idealization of the stages, having big goals, this is not delusional striving.  As long as there is a basic connection with the natural quality of completeness of all timeless experience, this can be leaped over.  

I know the flavor of experience when practice gets too heavy on the control side.  It feels like I have to tighten my mind to perform appropriate action & keep it that way until it is time to sleep or rest.  It feels like I'm putting on a type of armor.  Honestly, to not do this feels impossible because each action is so tiring; so much resistance.  However, the 'view' demands the truth - that these sensations are empty upon arising.  They are none other than the lively display of potentiality blooming from the ground of being.  In other words, there is nothing here on this side to be hurt.  One peice of the field can not be hurting another - the formulation of struggle or resistance requires a static or independent part that is separate from interconnectedness.  

Confidence in this view, as well as the fact that I have a large portion of it stabilized already, is needed when approaching high degrees of resistance & using relative or mundane means to suppress them.  Especially when making the transition between relaxed openness & effortful methods.  That is the time when I am most likely to completely give up.  

11.23

Watching what comes up.  Not trying to change it.

Fear that I will develop physical health problems if I don't do diet & exercise.
Fear that I will develop money problems if I don't practice frugality.
This manifests as a slight blockage in the chest & throat area, as well as a cloud of black whisp on my inner screen near eye level.
I can disembed from these thoughts & sensations as not me.  
When I do this I am afraid I am overly manipulating.
I can disembed from that.
I return to the basic connection with the field of sensation as a whole, knowing this consciousness to be an emanation from it.
I wonder when I can stop surrendering.  
Within that wonder lies the same energy as all the rest.

It's interesting that I can really identify with the 'problem stuff' and the nuances of the type of neuroticism that arise. Perhaps it's a bipolar thing? I'm still unsure where I will ever be able to cure it or not, though I'm thinking it'll be mainly cured with a HUGE drop in suffering (as opposed to 80% which is close to what it seems now). I believe that mania is dependent upon conditions, and that depression is mostly dependent on the fatigue onset by the overactive brain. (Not mind, the mind is the one with the problem with it)

Just a quick comment for Dom Stone: there is nothing you can ever experience that is not dependent on conditions.

Thanks Chris. I was obviously too vague in that paragraph, and looking back, what I said was rather silly!

To correct myself:
I believe that mania is dependent on conditioned behaviour that is most likely settled from an early age, rather than the popular opinion that it simply triggers off spontaneously as if somebody slipped some drugs in their drink. There are popular medical opinions that I believe stem from a misunderstanding (or at least non-understanding) of its mechanism of action. All we know is from studies of behaviour and neuroimaging which can only tell us fairly basic things with regards to patterns and predicability, which tend to be more prominent in limited settings (Such as your average medicated manic depressive who sees the shrink once every 2 months, and who may never get the chance to practice the dhamma like we do).
It's common belief that bipolar is incurable and drugs with therapy is the only treatment. Unfortunately, if used in a long term setting, the drugs create dependence, and lessens a person's potential for independence provided they had the correct tools to work things out in a more holistic manner. further reinforcing the belief that it is incurable. This is damaging to the outer environment due to social stigma and people's lack of faith outside of a drugs program. I find this damaging for the patients psyche and motivation to seek out new neural pathways and more importantly, combat the addiction of kindling.(When manic thoughts lead to more manic thoughts as it generates what is perceived as pleasure, but is actually suffering in disguise. To see it as the suffering it is seriously reduces the likelihood of continuing to the point of total fatigue where the only option is a comedown. As the ego doesn't like not being able to do whatever it once could, it fixates on   an inverse mania kindling of misery. Due to neuroplasticity, as this behaviour is familiar, it becomes a more standard mental platform to experience the world. The neuroimaging fixates on this issue, putting an overemphasis on the materialism, which is one aspect only. Mindfulness training is good for creating awareness outside of these pathways and creates a lower signal to noise ratio in the brain, creating less stress and less tendancy to have an episode in future. Heredity is a common factor which is taken to be a direct cause for bipolar, though I believe it just creates predispositions for certain types of neuroprogramming.

Sorry for hijacking your thread Noah, but just felt like sharing and thought you might be interested!

10 Paramis

• Long-term determination leads to
• Momentary persistence leads to
• Wisdom (empirical knowledge of 3 c's in immediate experience) leads to
• Renunciation (inferential knowledge of 3 c's in all other levels of experience) leads to
• Equanimity (non-reactivity) leads to Forebearance of pain
• Generosity leads to Right Conduct leads to Honesty & Loving-Kindness

Explanation

• An overarching goal of practice results in
• Day-by-day repetition of technique results in
• Completing the progress of insight & gaining perceptual shifts which are the direct knowledge of emptiness 
• This direct knowledge is then applied (either automatically or purposefully) to belief structures which are the seeds of behavioral & emotional patterns, including negative ones.  Harmful behavioral & emotional patterns are not compatible with the direct knowledge of emptiness.  They reduce the inherent pleasure from the perceptual shift & go against the visceral lessons of interdependence.
• This observation of incompatibility leads to the need for equanimity in the face of all conditions.  Once gained, this equanimity powers the ability tolerate pain - forebearance.  This group of skills is necessary because of circumstances that are out of one's control.
• When the emptiness of one's attachments is recognized, the logical step is to no longer be attached.  From here, the appropriate response is to share one's resources - generosity.  
• The practice of generosity creates space in the mind-heart.  This space makes it easy to conduct oneself with discipline (meaning taste rather than preference).  
• With the refinement of conduct comes an openness in communication because one has nothing to hide - Honesty.
• Also with the refinement of conduct comes an openness of the heart - Loving-Kindness.

Notes

• Some people will naturally develop the rest of the chain after Wisdom because they automatically understand it's implications for the rest of life beyond the perceptual immediacy.
• Some people will need to consciously & intentionally cultivate Renunciation in order to apply the 3 c's to underlying belief structures which lead to behavioral & emotional patterns.  These are coarser-level manifestations which may seem to be bucketed into the separate training of "morality" but really are none other than the full fruit of Wisdom.  However, without Renunciation in place, there is  no bridge between the two & the trainings seems arbitrary.  
• Renunciation is the least attractive element of traditional Buddhism(s) to modern-western Buddhism(s).  Modern-western Buddhism(s) have attempted to create many alternatives to Renunciation, citing that we are lay people with complicated lives & that traditional Buddhism can be overly simplistic in its denial of the full spectrum of psychology.  This attempt to refute the importance of Renunciation does not acknowledge the pyschological sophistication in oft-underemphasized canons such as the Abhidharma.
• Mahayana is frequently invoked as an alternative to renunciation by the mushroom culture.  The idea of being 'Theravada in technique but Mahayana in attitude' can be heard in many talks on the Dharma Seed archives.
• There tends to be an emphasis on the Paramis of Honesty, Loving-Kindness, Conduct & Generosity because these are more easily aligned with Abrahamic value systems.  However, when these things are attempted without gaining the perceptual shifts & their renunciation add-ons in advance, they are a feedback loop of self-punishment & therefore samsara.
• When performed authentically, the perceptual shifts are the base for the rest of Buddhist training.  The fact that striving (Determination, Persistence) is necessary to complete the Progress of Insight & achieve perceptual shifts is suppressed in mushroom culture because such striving is predicted to be toxic for modern-western people.  
• The 10 fetter shifts are achieved through a balance of the Paramis.  The 10 fetter result is the true, intended fruit of the dharma.  Few people achieve even the first of the four stages of enlightenment because this balance is hard to do.  It involves going against many preconditioned aspects of human nature & modern life.

Things are changing
They can't be relied upon
Therefore, they aren't satisfying

Feelings based on things
are seeking satisfaction
by relying on a set "stance"
Therefore, they are based on the delusion
that things are permanent

Actions based on feelings are delusion
Actions should be based on the truth of what is observed
Which includes that there is no actor
However, even actions based on truth
are subject to impermanence
and can not be relied upon for satisfaction

The reason for right action 
is not satisfaction
The only reason for right action
is to encourage recognition of the truth of the basis of mind
Which is the same as expressing that basis of mind

The only thing which matters
in each element of the path
is recognizing that no satisfaction can be found in conditioned phenomena

Wonderful!

Jumping off the cliff - nothing to catch you, falling, falling... with the realization that there is no ground to stop you, that you will never hit anything permanent.

12.16.17

I think I understand an intermediate phase I must now begin, if I am ever going to accomplish my goals of a spiritual life.  Having solved a lot of my anger, agitation & anxiety, I have begun to notice a layer of depression that was not accessible before.  

The “high energy” negative emotions were drowning it out of view.  Now I’ve had my perceptual shifts, morality shifts & general growth.  Recently I did some study of the Manual of Insight which taught me certain things about the pervasiveness of the three marks of existence that I was missing.  Doing some systematic “disenchantment” meditations layered on top of the new view of the 3 c’s has worked really well.

Then these last couple weeks, I started noticing that I could target laziness, anxiety or sloppiness with my “disenchantment gun” but there was a deeper sound or wavelength humming there.  When I listened to it, I realized that beneath my basic avoidance of obligation, there is a layer of depression or non-inspiration.  A type of quicksand continuously sucking the energy from my body.

Immediately upon identifying it, I noticed a surge of natural inspiration.  I have begun to learn basic coding & applying that with success in my job.  I also have felt the drive to start looking up aspects of cooking & housekeeping that I have been ignoring.  I tend not to get into things unless I can understand their context & the underlying principles behind what it takes to do them well.  For instance, with cooking, there are the 3 types of heat, the 5 basic effects of heat, the 5 basic tastes, the major food groups, food prep/storage/cleanup, etc.  I don’t like cooking unless I really dig into these things & understand what makes food taste good.  Then from there, I can apply that understanding to the renunciation practices of spending less money, eating healthy & saving time.

Same with my job.  I never like to do things just because “that is the way things are.”  I always want to know why things are done & if they can be done better, let’s find out how.  This can be applied to all of the basic areas of life - interest & strategy rather than “just do it”, reliance on repetition or willpower.  

I think I might need to allow myself to get more deeply entrenched into samsara in order to eventually get out of it.  Develop a stronger self in order to eventually lose the self.  What are those principles that I am missing in terms of housekeeping, fashion, lifestyle, cooking, finance?  These things are interesting when they are looked at for the dynamics through which they are done well, rather than their mundane contents.  I tend not to separate art from science when it comes to this sort of thing - the principles are the aesthetic - what functionally works is also the creative expression of the thing.  I can’t get inspired by things that I plan to do in a mediocre manner, which I think is an aspect of character rather than unskillful ego.  

Perhaps I am only thinking of this now because I was too depressed before to notice.Also, I recently realized that the training in Dana & Sila are to reinforce the knowledge of the 3 C’s.  In other words, they have no inherent value from a dharmic context other than the fact that right conduct undermines one’s perception of its own validity: a self-destroying feedback mechanism, if you will.

Somehow, getting more into samsara -- more into doing mundane things in a quality way can be necessary to overcome a depressed avoidance of those things completely.  In this case, the danger of attachment to “nice things” is way less than the danger of attachment to avoiding having to do nice things.  So the performance of them in an inspired & vigorous manner is ultimately that which will lead to them being seen as impermanent, unreliable & unsatisfying.  

Sitting with self criticism vs 

undermining the very paradigm/value system which gave rise to that self criticism in the first place

Healing psychodynamic wounds vs

Going back to the memories of situations which gave rise to those wounds & reevaluating the validity of one's original judgements 

Very meta -- nice!

I care to assume that personal meditative transformation can be scaled & effective at societal levels.  I know it is popular in pragmatic dharma to be cyncical or skeptical about the power of meditation to do this.  That is ultimately silly to me.

However, for this to work, the idea of meditation as a way of taking a break needs to be understood as spiritual pre-school.  Then the idea of meditation as a way of just sitting with whatever comes up & letting go of control needs to be understood as spiritual kindergarden.  It is not until these things have been grokked at a bsic level that the real work of shaping one's life can begin.  Of course, these aspects continue to mature until one is completely finished with the path, but to assume that they are the be-all-end-all (which is happening right now with many practitioners that I come into contact with) is surprising, to say the least.

People whose primary practice for decades is to just observe nonjudgementally or to try to gain insight into surrender/choiceless awareness & be kind to themselves from the witness chair are being held back from graduating, year after year.  This makes me sad.  I believe that perceptual shifts can be scaled at a massive level somehow, some way.  Starting in the 1940's a man named U Ba Khin did this successfully with Burmese gov't employees.  It is good that meditation is happening in a variety of different settings now. 

U Ba Khin's student Goenka then created centers all around the world.  I'm sure there are a variety of problems with the Goenka centers but I suspect they do more good than harm overall.  Certainly with knowledge of the downsides of meditation & that recent tragedy of the person who committed suicide, there is a growing collective consciousness of the need for a balanced, informed-consent approach.  Also, I think Goenka centers promote the practice of morality/conduct, but I wonder if it is done in a realistic way.  I don't know.  I could imagine a type of teaching on virtue which is completely universalizable to people in different culture & that also explains how these actions *synergize* with formal meditation to wire in permanent traits.

The possibility of freedom in a tangible sense, in a predictable fashion (the maps), would be good to introduce.  It shouldn't be only the progress of insight map - that is too specific.  I think Shinzen has the right idea - it needs to be a general map of wiring in permanent traits at a variety of different levels, with many opportunities for insights & power ups along the way.

It should be communicated, again & again, that despite the language of maps, meditation is not the process of gaining anything, it is the process of losing things which block what has always been there.  There should be one sentence about surrender for every two sentences about progress.  

All of this teaching on contemplative practice needs to be contextualized into a larger network of altruistic projects that are occurring around the world.  Scaling deep practice that leads to personal transformation so that more people get that transformation.  Creating cultures & memes & using advertising to make this "cool" or "hip" or whatever.  Using social media & computer programming to embed this into the group muggle mind.  Then informing people that a good use of their time is effective altruism.  

Another peice of the puzzle is to save enough money to become financially independent, then to keep working, but to give the rest of the money away to causes *which actually work* or to give the rest of ones time away for the same thing.  This fits in with the teaching on spiritual practice in that contemplation is what leads to one being able to do this happily.  Without perceptual nonduality, psychotherapuetic healing, value system reorg & healthy habit formation, most people would not be able to do this happily.

So the simple formula is:

get enlightened
become financially independent (food, shelter, clothing, medicine)
help other people get food, shelter, clothing & medicine
help other people get enlightened

Wash, rinse, repeat

This is the iterative function that destroys samsara 

Edit:

Here's a good video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtWINl3C_7s

Formula for All of Life

[pragmatic dharma*]
[mr. money mustache]
[effective altruism]
[resilience planning**]

*By "pragmatic dharma" I mean the dedicated, hardcore practice leading to perceptual shifts, morality shifts & ultimately ten fetter shifts.  "Cosmopoesis", renunciation & release of basic striving are all subsumed within this meaning.  Things like finding one's life purpose, having deep interpersonal relationship, creative outlets and travel are also contained within this meaning.  Things like dealing with ones own disease, poverty & other personal disasters are also contained within this meaning.

**By "resilience planning" I mean the transformation of ones own life & broader communal structures into prevention of the 6 dangers (too hot, too cold, thirsty, hungry, illness, injury) & the promotion of the 4 requisites (food, shelter, clothing & medicine).  This is technically contained within effective altruism but it is a separate consideration of mine right now so I am including it separately.

1. Generosity (dana) - Create space in the mind to allow for virtue (sila), build the platform/paradigm for the rest of the path, an external training
2. Virtue (sila) - Abstain from causing harm in a variety of ways, an external training
3. Heaven (sagga) - The results of the previous two trainings are favorable outcomes in terms of the external world, the basis of the dhamma is training for favorable outcomes in a conventional sense
4. Drawbacks (adinava) - The drawbacks of senusality are highlighted, this is the beginning of the internal path of reworking motivation 
5. Renunciation (nekkhamma) - The beginning of being able to withdraw from sensuality & the external counterparts of this realization -- the internal corollary to generosity & virtue is realized
6. The 4 Noble Truths
   1. All conditioned phenomena are ultimately unsatisfactory
   2. The cause of this unsatisfactoriness is not understanding the unreliability & impermanence of all conditioned phenomena
   3. There is an end to unsatisfactoriness
   4. This path leadaing to this end is the eightfold path, which is the alignment of oneself & ones life to the truth nature of all conditioned phenomena
      
      1. Right View
      2. Right Intention
      3. Right Speech 
      4. Right Action
      5. Right Lifestyle
      6. Right Effort
      7. Right Mindfulness
      8. Right Concentration 

HMMMmmmm
That is very buddhist centric.
In what order did you actualy do the path? How many others that actually made progress of attainments have followed what order?
Just curious.
~D

Lol.  The order I did the path was a crap ton of noting for 2 years (the last 2 steps of right Mindfulness & concentration) then a mish mash of all those steps thrown into a blender (with a continued strong emphasis on those last 2 steps) for the past 2 & change.  This is the uber dogmatic traditional "6 fold gradual training " per the pali canon.

im not sure about others.  I think the most useful path is to get some solid POI completions & perceptual shifts down before trying to nail morality though.  Because a lot of ppl won't even want or need to do the morality path after the wisdom comes.  So as long as they're not being a bad person, why bother? 

Note to self to be patient in this process...

a little bit of saving
a little bit of diet
a little bit of exercise
a little bit of self care
a little bit of recreation & socializing
a little bit of housekeeping
a little bit of service
a little bit of study

keep curious & interested
keep a light touch
these things are not permanent
rather, these things are that which reinforces the truth of impermanence

keep at it

Notes about intimacy 

1.  I now detect a field of awareness-love as my baseline.

2.  Other people are interesting to listen to & observe because they are conscious, just like me.

3.  The only thing that matters when communicating is my wholesome intention.

4.  The details of how people react to my communication is not important.

5.  Self-love is a process that needs to operate continuously & subconsciously.  It is not a static, one-time epiphany.  It is necessary for intimacy with others.

6.  Living this way is a better version than what I was doing before.

1/4

I'm going to journal a bit about details of my sleep habits here, for the purposes of internal alignment on a strategy forward.

Sleep continues to be an obstacle, although my "floor" or "rock bottom" raises every month.  Meaning, I have higher functioning while lacking sleep now then I ever have in the past.  Also, notably there is no trace of survival stress in the sense of financial, health, career or logistical risk anywhere.

That said, the obstacle is insomnia.  I take either 1/4 or 1/2 of the lowest manufactured dose of a sleep med.  If I don't take it at all, I won't be able to sleep.  My need for either 1/4 or 1/2 fluctuates, depending on biological factors that are unbeknownst to me.   I use my bodily instinct the day of to tell which amount to take.  If I take 1/4 when I should have taken 1/2, I will either have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep & be sleep deprived the next day.  If I take 1/2 & don't get enough sleep, I have a severe "hang over" the next day & need to intake too much caffeine, which is somewhat physically uncomfortable in it's after effects.

Since I have had insomnia related to mood disorder for around 10 years, it would not surprise me if I have developed an aversion to falling asleep & being asleep.  I have been very successful at countering aversion lately.  Last month was the most I have ever enjoyed doing chores & found them inspiring.  

I am going to attempt to counter my aversion to sleep by fostering fun, excitement, inspiration & playfullness through dreaming.  I have some study about this under my belt, as well as several dharma friends who are heavily into dream practices.  Here are the two, low-effort steps I plan on implementing:

1.  Write down my dreams (or no dreams) each morning first thing

2.  Periodically look down at my hands & ask if I am in a dream right now

I am aware that there needs to be a willingness to engage with my imagination here: with whatever it throws at me.  "Suppression" has no place at this table.  Its time to make sleep great again

Noah:
 
As a newcomer to all this, I really appreciate your contributions to this and other forums.  You are, obviously, a big-hearted guy.

Try 2 glasses of red wine and a big plate of spaghetti at 10 pm.  Usually works a charm and if it doesn’t at least you’ve had a nice plate of pasta and some tasty wine.

Not great for the waistline though so you have to punish yourself earlier in the day with a hard workout, which may also help you sleep.

Sounds silly but try it if you haven’t.  It has worked for Italians for about 500 years....except the workout part.....

@Francis: Thanks!

1.18

Things are going well in a balanced sort of way.  I keep a stash of healthy food at home & work including chicken, fruits, veggies & nuts.  I've been doing a small amount of exercise every day & practicing better general self care.  My meditation projects in & out of the workplace are going.  Saving is working.  At work I'm feeling confident & taking on more responsibility without being a pushover.  And sleep happens nightly, although no lucid dreams yet.  I'm consuming a little bit of news daily & taking in other useful information like books on python, advanced excel & world news archives. 

A couple adjustments are: find a person to date regularly (although nothing serious), as this is a proximate cause for happiness, at least for me.  Raise the bar of what I consider "clean" in terms of my house, car & appearance to a higher level & keep it there.  Bring back more formal meditation practice.  

Other people may disagree, but this is the way I have been taught the eightfold path.  It is a delicate balancing act of combining the things which make you happy & are of service to others.  Also, it is centered around the synergistic effect these elements have when combined, as well as the momentum-building effect when they are properly sequenced (appropriate intention -> appropriate speech -> appropriate action -> appropriate lifestyle).

My current state is *similar* to what my desired outcome was 4.5 years ago, at the start of this path.  However, my goals then were to be impervious or bullet proof to any woes of the world.  Whereas the reality involves moreso being smart & cautious in my approach to life.  Not having no weakness, but understanding my weaknesses & working around them.  Changing habits to adapt to the needs of my body (i.e. get a lot of sleep) or changing my value system to adapt to the needs of my circumstance & temperament (i.e. changin my goals in dating & finance).  All of this has a deep synergy with my realization into the nature of mind (aka the perceptual shifts or the release of clinging or the knowledge of dependent origination --- all the same thing).  Appropriate operation of the mind & body which is in relative sync with the environment is all contained within the luminous displays arising from empty ground.

I don't expect this state of harmony to last in it's current form.  I know that I will need to adapt & pivot as things change in my life, perhaps dramatically - as life tends to go.  But adaptation gets easier each time one does it mindfully.  Therefore, I fully expect my perception of my life at the level of content to get progressively easier.

[quote=]

 My overall goal seems to be do as little work as possible to not get fired & to remain on a path to get promoted eventually.  This is in the context that my job is not my passion & it is not directly a service profession. 

aloha noah,

   In light of this statement, you definitely should find yourself something else to do.

   Do what you like, or do nothing. Don't waste your human creativity merely making money. Get into a direct service profession, or create art, or meditate; travel, or go to ground. Do science, or philosophy. Study the dhamma. Hunt for birds of a feather, and flock together. Associate with people who care, or who need care; be a person who cares. You'll never be proud of selling out, of not following your passion; you will always regret the waste of human potential involved in working for less than what you believe in. 

   In my personal view, life has three important aspects: who you live with, where you live, and what you do for a living. If you are happy with all three, life is golden. Two out of three ain't bad. One is enough to sustain you, but keep looking. If you have none of the three, you better jump out the window and run.


terry

Thanks!  I appreciate your point.  Yes I do lots of enjoyable things with my time, similar to what you describe.  Also, although my work isn't my passion, I enjoy it overall & it is a good outlet for my energy.

there is something the Buddha said about having enough food, shelter, clothing & medicine.  I think ones work intersects with that too.

"In my home town there are two brothers  
with contrary characters.
One is clever and eloquent,
the other foolish and silent.
The foolish one
seems to have all the time in the world.
The clever one
is always busy depleting his life.”

~ryokan

Good zen there.

(wink and smile)

terry

1.26

You have to be a healthy child before you can be a healthy adult.
This means having a loving metacognitive awareness stabilized.
This is essentially an attainment of the self-structure (not the traditional use of the term attainment, which refers to a realization of emptiness).  
This attainment is that which is with everything, no matter what, good or bad, through thick & thin.  
It is complete acceptance of the self, of others, of conditions as they are.  
This acceptance comes from the fact that all is within it, all manifestation is "the child" of it.

This condition is not a prerequisite for "awakening" as it is known in certain contexts.
Meaning, one can have a high degree of knowledge of emptiness, dependent origination, the ground of being, nonduality, etc. without having healed the self-structure sufficiently.
To meet this condition, one has to go back to the dark corners & face them not just enough to go through the progress of insight or just enough to develop certain behavioral capacities, but much more than that.
To the earliest sense of rejection, of danger, of uncertainty, of feeling unloved & worthless or physically awkward & uncomfortable or sad.
And meet this place with the same loving metacognition that one places on boredom, washing dishes, going to work, having sex, talking, looking at nature, being in jhana, nondual perception, feeling hatred, etc.
The loving metacognition is the ground of being which contains all of these things.

One thing that always confused me was people told me to "just accept" or "just investigate" these sensations.  "Don't be afraid to feel the bad stuff."  It isn't that simple.  There is a specific type of knowing which must occur & this quality only happens through a certain machine part of the self.  

It's interesting isn't it? People claim awakening or 4th path because they have a high >intellectual< understanding of emptiness, dependent origination, the ground of being, nonduality, etc. ...but it is really hard to say that they truly have knowledge (actual understanding) if they haven't seen how all of these things apply to their actual sense of self.

A parallel is people who intellectually know about psychological models but don't manifest actual mental heath. You can't really say they "know" psychology... basically they just know "about" it.

Unworthiness is basically a clinging to a victim identity in a very subtle sense. It is one of the most basic things we do to "fill emptiness" or "halt imperminance" and it is why dukka is right at the heart of the sense of a separate self. Basically, we use the non-verbal sense that "something is lacking" as an emotional filler for finding "nothing" when we seek "what/who am I?" and then we hold onto that subtle uneasiness as a constant which masks the ongoing sense of imperminance.

When I checked in with my teacher after my basic awakening, he basically ignored my statement. We talked a bit more over the next few months and he was indifferent if I hinted at it. About a half-year later, we met during a week long conference and he didn't seem to want to talk. We eventually went out for lunch and he didn't mention anything as we walked to the restaurant, talked about life in general etc.

I knew what he was doing and I was doing the same thing, because I really wanted to know for myself. 

Any doubt is going to be betrayed in the days, weeks, months after a so-called awakening. The >body< is going to let you know. It doesn't matter what you think or know or can experience. The body doesn't lie. The subtle emotional feelings of needing recognition for spiritual practice/attainment is a really good indicator that there is some sense of unworthiness that hasn't been seen, that the sense of separate self hasn't been seen as the paradoxical illusion it is, that there is more to actually understand, etc.

This is why false gurus are the lowest of the low -- they take the basic problem which practice is supposed to reveal, that's their one job, and then they use it as a form of manipulation and dependency. Any worthy interaction with a teacher should make you more and more self reliant, independent, and frankly indifferent to the teacher over time --- even though in a certain sense they are priceless.

I hope this is useful information for someone.

Hmm.. great points but what I'm saying is moreso the difference between someone who is psycho emotionally healthy without awakened awareness vs someone with awakened awareness & without psychoemotional health.  

Meaning someone can *grok* emptiness in their body & deeply/directly with their perception (not just intellectually) and STILL not have a metacognitive, loving background installed.  There are tons of people with authentic realizations & great yogic capacities that have been built on top of damaged attachment structures.  Meaning, they are walking around in a wonderous, non-clinging, non-dual field of perception with a deep bodily grokking of interconnectedness with mind & environment AND they still haven't gotten over the memories of early insults to self.  They are two seperate things as far as I can tell.  Healing the self structure & realizing emptiness are mostly separate but somewhat combined.  The classic model of the 10 fetters has to do with both, but moreso with healing the self structure after the spiritual knowledge has been subjectified.  

I suspect we're saying the same thing in different ways, except you are emphasizing more how these two axes are intertwined like DNA whereas I see them more in sequence.

Yeah, I think we're both emphasizing how essential healthy psychology is. And you're right, I guess "DNA intertwining" is kind of my emphasis... or maybe how one scaffolds the other. One aspect supports the other aspect and without the other it collapses.

Insight without sanity becomes conceptual and pathological. Sanity without insight is great (mental health is wonderful), but the human will probably stagnate on a middle level of adult development (and so they will have some odd kind of self-other hangups despite their sanity). 

Great conversation here guys, I experienced something very similar.  Before I got started on the path, at the end of high school, I had a glimpse of enlightenment experience - a moment of total perceptual unity - in which all my psycho/emotional baggage was (temporarily) cleared out, or perfected.  This led to me to belive that achieving enlightenment - the end all state of non-dual perception / insight - would simultaneously solve all my psycho/ emotional issues. 

On the path I focused entirely on achiving insight as I saw this as master key to any psycho/emotional locks.  Althought gaining insight / attainment did result in major psycho/emotional purification, even upon full enlightenment emotional imbalance persisted.  Ultimately I corrected this issue through a major, energy-balancing breakthrough achived through targeted qigong practices.  As a result, I do think psycho/emotional health and insight can be viewed as seperated yet inter-related tracks. 

The way this translates with qigong is that people naturally experience a range of physcho/emotional or energetic balance (The Master Key by Robert Peng has a great section on this), innately and seperable from degree of insight - insight in turn helps to purify our perception, or energy.  A more wholistic psycho/emotional approach applied in tandem with insight (qigong for example) can help round out our practice to reflect the greater necesary realities of insight and psychoemotioal development.  Ultimately however I think progress in insight does act as a kind of governing factor for progress in all these realms - the more we progress in insight, the greater our ability to create wholistic life balance. 

 The trick, in my view, is to see that it is all just mental fabrication caused by whatever nonsense reason you decide causes stuff - I choose newtonian physics.  In my experience, a voice in the mind in my own voice begins telling a story and the nervous system adds a soundtrack.  "something is terribly wrong!" cries the mind and the nerves in my right side fire to make it real and make it important.  

If I can sit through it equanimounously, it just goes away.   If I can sit through it in love, it is love.  This repeats millions of times until nothing more arises. 

In my view the whole emotional world is just a compound system of aversion and conditioning based on a whole slew of obviously false assumptions.  In my experience, you can transcend it if you make the effort and have a clear understanding of at least what isnt true.  It is really fucking hard. 

1.27

7 hours of practice today 

some notes

perfect parent figure = perceptual "ground" = emotional trust = attentional stability
touching a deep reservoir of self acceptance that I didn't know was possible
sense of well being & clear thinking
returning to the breath but in a way that does not reject fear
fear can be subtly pushed away while the "realization" is present
choiceless, nurturing, metacognitive embrace is the platform upon which "progress" occurs
2/3rd's self acceptance to 1/3rd self change is good ratio
Metacognitive love is not another "tool" - it is the primary principle which preceeds any other efforts on the path - all tools come from this place out of a compassion

2.1

Good "morality" (i.e. keeping of the precepts, proper handling of the four requisites, day-to-day moderation/discipline) happens because one is moving slower due to their being less pressure since samsara is seen as not worthy of creating a fuss about.  My mistake was to assume it happened because one was moving faster due to wiring in better habits which could keep up with all of the pressures of daily life.  The error in that is that it ignores the perspective of right view.  

One has to assume, at the level of mastery, that this perspective (and the conduct which unfolds from it) hold steady even in the face of extreme duress.  There may be an adaption/transitionary period when tragedy or emergency strikes but that would necessarily be a short time before the bodily habits & limbic system reactions adapted again to the view of emptiness.  Once again, this adaptation would be arising from a sense of lightnesss, ease & harmony - which in turn arises from not being in a rush/ not being engaged with the game.

A prerequisite for this level of mastery would be the emotional 'base' or 'ground' of trust.  Which means someone has gone back through their history, reviewed all of the large & small insults to self and forgiven all parties involved in those to restore basic sanity to those memories.  This means complete, not partial, psycho-emotional healing.  This would include insults to self around sex, romance, self-image, body-image & power.  Thus any person who has even performed an act of sexual misconduct was necessarily not at this level when they did it.  From this place, ones strings are no longer being pulled by the stealth ventriloquist of narcissism, codependence, etc - *at all* - not even a little bit.  Those places have not "gone away", but they are now inhabited by a loving metacognitive atmosphere which is toxic to the weeds of greed, hatred & delusion.

So there is no "pressure" here.  No "obligation" to do anything.  The burden has been dropped.  The crossbar lowered.  Etc.  

From that place, so-called "discpline" arises.  In the sense that meeting even complex situations with simplicity is the natural response when the mind-heart is not engaged with worldly affairs.  It is not about being a great or excellent or powerful or super skillful person.  It is just about not giving a shit so thoroughly that you're not in a rush to do anything & because you have no compulsions, you act with straightforward ease at all times.  However, not giving a shit without right view could lead to sociopathic apathy which is actually arising from damaged memory traces & not shedding light backward onto them.  So it is only detachment powered by the view which works.  

It should also be said that this mode of operation includes healthy attachment to one's internal family system & other people.  Meaning, a sense of investment in the happiness of friends, family & all of humanity/life.  This would include the relative sense of healthy attachment & also the ultimate sense.

2.14

I've come from a place where I was taking in information from everyone all the time & negatively interpreting it.  I gradually worked over to taking in information from everyone all the time & positive interpreting it.  Now I'm moving towards taking in very little feedback from other people but positively interpreting what I do (using it for growth).  

Up until now I haven't been a busy enough person to actually not have the time or energy for honoring all perspectives.  However, doing this 'honoring' can be crippling for a hyper-sensitive person, thus preventing high-level functioning (vicious circle).  I think having a serious job has broken that chain.

The highest goal remains to abolish all suffering & it's cause.  Meaning not just digging up the seed of tanha but also the root system, the trunk, branches, leaves & fruits.  This high goal has a host of secondary & tertiary goals which arise from it, which essentially make up the 8fold path.  These include: financial independence, effective altruism, minimalist, healthy, green living, community organizing/selfless service, samatha/vipassana/awareness meditation, bodywork/energy healing, skillful communication & relationships, healthy hobbies, etc.

At this time I am not concerned that this path leads to the classic image of arahantship or even the vaunted buddhahood, but rather that it is internally consisten with the illogic of my suffering patterns & externally consistent with resisting the pull of collective-manmade suffering & harmonizing with the natural world.  

On that note - so more specific details about what has been happening:

-There's not *enough time* to indulge in restlessness/sloth/gluttony/libido -The body is present & alert to these sensations as they arise & chooses repeatedly not to go down that pathway

-There's not *enough time* to listen to my inner critic's opinions on other's feedback (the only exceptions would probably be my parents, my work managers, my dharma teachers) - I've done a fairly thorough investigation (at this point) of the patterns of my life & am acting on them, to the best of my ability, to end suffering.

-Mainting this body in good shape, a quality appearance of this body, a clean living space, a clean car or desk area, etc., are of the highest importance.  There's not enough time to keep practicing disorder as I have been.  Keeping an objective view of these places as under my control, rather than allowing them to accidental expressions of hindrance is top priority. Vigilence & high standards are needed.  

-Being very selective & direct in my communication with others is important.  I can honestly say, at this point, that I want everyone to be happy.  I've never been so automatically benevolent in my life.  What comes out of that baseline will be more informed by what is efficacious in the context of the interaction, rather than by broadband bodhicitta.  

-Perceptually, with an increase to psycho-emotional detachment in the past 2 months or so, I just notice no center at any time, nor any searching for one in a subtle or gross way.  The world is blazing as it is, where it is, as it always was.  Nothing to do, nothing to change, just an interdependent spider web extending into a spherical void.

I feel like I'm inching closer to "sealing the deal" on 10 fetter stream entry (the real, hardcore thing) - a mode of being that is so fully devoted to happiness that a critical mass of the subconscious is irreversably zealous about it.  This is a thing which changes the entire value system & the basic conceptual understanding of what reality is (not just perceptual-nonverbal).  It changes the underwater judgement mechanism from which paradigms form & then give rise to automatic reactions.  Something to deeper than "I'm done" or "complete nonduality" or "I've gotten out of my own way" or "I've seen tanha & fully & no longer want to change things."  Not only not *needing* to change anything, but also living from that place such that it informs every deparment of the company.   

loving some of the statements in the last few posts:

"Good "morality" ...happens because one is moving slower due to their being less pressure..."

"A prerequisite for this level of mastery would be the emotional 'base' or 'ground' of trust. ...ones strings are no longer being pulled by the stealth ventriloquist of narcissism, codependence, etc "

"So there is no "pressure" here.  No "obligation" to do anything.  ... From that place, so-called "discpline" arises."

"What comes out of that baseline will be more informed by what is efficacious in the context of the interaction, rather than by broadband bodhicitta. "

"This is a thing which changes the entire value system & the basic conceptual understanding of what reality is (not just perceptual-nonverbal).  It changes the underwater judgement mechanism from which paradigms form & then give rise to automatic reactions. "

awesome stuff!!

Noah, your dedication is impressive!

Just moved into a new house share in Seattle.  My wonderful yuppie-muggle friend who was helping me move was super turned-off by the general "quality" of the place, while I was psyched to have found a place that is tolerable, at 2/3rds the price of a typical house share, in an awesome neighborhood that is a 20 minute bike ride or 30 minute bus from everything I do in the city (both North & South).

My "mustachianism" (the Mr. Money Mustache philosophy) is getting better, but could still be improved.  While I've got the car rolling now in terms of savings, I will definitely need to get more real-time savvy & into the nitty gritty in order to be able put more cash away.  *Warning* - I'm allowing myself to indulge in romanticism here for a moment: Acheiving financial independence is a key peice of the bodhisattvic mission.  This allows one, after doing so, to continue working part-time & shovel all the extra cash into the most effective charities in the world while spending the rest of ones time gaining skills to produce helpful shit to the world in a non-monetized fashion.  Examples could be computer programming, political lobbying, knowledge-sharing/training, community building, "service" in other forms. *End romantic spasm*

It's interesting to watch the 'post modern' definitions of money & dharma.  I've read a fair variety of articles & opinions on this now, with most saying that it's totally fine for a teacher to support themselves on the dharma.  I suppose this would be OK if a teacher opened their books & explained exactly how much they need for food-shelter-clothing-medicine-other stuff, but I don't see most of them doing that.  I guess beyond that we have to assume, based on a person's character (& as a result of their training) that they are utilizing the funds supplied to them in a reasonable manner. 

One thing that comes up is the idea that materialism is OK.  Like that its OK for a teacher of Buddhism to still have a desire for things beyond the basics.  Note: this criticism DOES NOT apply to desire for intimacy, desire to be in nature, desire for simply, healthy food, desire for clean, well-fitting clothing, desire for a safe living space -- but why would a Buddhist teacher need more than this?  Perhaps their teaching is only about "perceptual shifts:?  Perhaps its only about *reinterpreting* the content of one's life to eliminate all desire to change it (which may or may not actually shift the entire personality around)?  Perhaps its just not hitting all-quadrants-all-levels enough to actually dig in & uproot?

I don't know.  It's curious.

I think the situation changes a bit when potential teachers already have partners and families that they're helping to support, especially if they started practicing seriously after entering into those relationships or if their partners aren't highly attained themselves.  Even if such a potential teacher would personally be completely fine with starting over somewhere else with a much lower cost-of-living lifestyle, that's not necessarily something that their partner and/or children signed up for in the first place.  Likewise with opening their books -- I don't think a lot of partners in that kind of situation would really want their household income/spending/budget published on the Internet.  So even if a potential teacher has already done everything they can to reduce their impact and to live frugally, they could very well find themselves in the position of having to choose between continuing to work to support their family, charging money to teach the dharma, or separating from their family obligations to teach the dharma for free/cheap.  That trichotomy isn't necessarily exclusive or meant to foreclose creative possibilities like further reducing spending, publishing dharma books/videos that can scale without extra time expenditure, etc. -- but I think it does cover some of the real tradeoffs for householders with a limited amount of available time.  

It would be great if there were tons of highly-attained dharma teachers who could work for free or for just basic necessities.  But in their absence, it looks like most people turn to books and peer-to-peer arrangements like this forum.  It's great that we have all those, but it'd be even better if we had an expanding set of teachers who are able to able to help. And if we want more teachers, some tradeoffs are unavoidable, like some combination of encouraging/allowing people to teach even if they're not at MCTB 4th, allowing them to support themselves, and treating it as a legitimate occupation. 

Maybe it'd be different if dana was a better-established social institution here -- but I'm not really sure that it was all that different in effect, at least in Tibet.  My impression from reading Blazing Splendor was that generous rich benefactors somehow ended up having highly attained lamas spending a lot of time staying at their houses, discussing the dharma with them, performing tantric initiations, etc.  Keeping the transactions implicit rather than explicit was what was socially comfortable in Tibet, but I think the reverse is true here.

You may be in a somewhat unique position of having exposure to both mustachianism and the dharma before you've entered into any such commitments, since that allows you to ethically precommit to trying to live according to those standards.  That's great, and I think everyone would benefit from incorporating both into their lives as soon as they hear about them.  But people get into the dharma from a wide variety of life circumstances, and it might be worth considering both those circumstances and the likely effect of different social norm.

JP Lewicke:



Very good points!  And that's why I like to have these conversations in the sandbox space, to be able to say silly things & then learn from wiser perspectives. 

It's tough territory & there's probably no "right" answers, but understanding the increasing complexity involved & being able to make decisions within that is useful.  As is communicating about it.  So yeah, a teacher who already has a partner and/or children who didn't sign up for a lifetime of enlightened frugality.  There's definitely an ethical obligation there to consider those needs.  

I'll have to ponder this & perhaps will share more thoughts later... Granted, I don't necessarily want to write about things that have no connection with my actual situation!

To put a finer point on it - why would the behaviors and social norms surrounding the teaching of dharma that made sense 2,500 years ago make sense now? The support system no longer exists. It's not socially or culturally acceptable today to beg for alms in exchange for teaching. People who do beg aren't very well respected, either, though some do beg full time seem to be able to survive. So... dharma teachers have to live on something. They either have to have another vocation, limiting the time they have to teach, or charge enough for their teaching to be able to live.

Maybe a few rich people can step up and become dharma sugar daddies ( i.e.; patrons)  

Thoughts on Facilitating Meditation Practice & Discussion Groups

-Perception/marketing matters
-Old systems frequently won't work
        -1 teacher model (1 person sits at front, is primary source of truth)
        -1 method 
        -Secrecy (comes off as weird)
-Flexibility
       -Read audience to determine what presentation is needed (scientific vs sensitive-mushroom-culture vs practical, etc)  
       -Switch presentations as needed
       -Invite others to lead group, sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneously
       -Frame such that there is no group leader, only peer-led committee
-Use humor a lot, but not to avoid hard topics (which is what IMS people do)
-Know your own lens 
       -Ones lens is constructed based on age, lifestage, occupation, sociocultural/ethnic background, economic situation, other
                -Don't ever mansplain (unfortunately this seems to happen when "pragmatic dharma" discussions occur)
       -Don't shy from "owning" your lens but also try to imagine what other lenses on the practice could look like
       -Not everyone relates to sciency/pragmatic/linear/rational approach
       -However, happiness/effective practice is for everyone - everyone wants to be happy - brain change is necessary for happiness - meditation is brain change - meditation is for everyone (even if its not thought of as "meditation")
-Keep goals for a given session very general
-Introduce small amounts of gamification as appropriate
-Encourage positive, light-hearted feedback loops with practice/self-talk/perspective on practice
-Know the "culture" or context of your audience - offer a frame for the session that might relate to them - if it doesn't, pivot

Other thoughts?
        

maybe this, too?:

Know the venue -- not everything can be accomplished in group settings. Some understanding/diagnosing/practice recommendations take time to fit to a person's actual situation. The quick "oh you have problem X you need to do Y" is often a wild-ass-guess at best. Use group discussions to set up side discussions for later that can be more indepth and well-considered. 

Awesome , thanks 

3.8

-Being 'in touch' more with masculinity
-Choiceless-awareness/surrender-based practices can default the mind to it's protective/repressive mechanisms - AKA ignore powerful subconscious forces of creative/sexual energy
-Stabilizing nondual perception can also do this because the conscious bandwidth taken up by the immediacy of the sensory field is much greater than in dual perception, so less room for subconscious to express itself
-Changing ones intuitive-interpretation of reality (i.e. 'my relationship to sensation has changed) can also do this by creating a sense of allowing things to just flow & unfold as they are, when really, the way they are unfolding is already biased by passed conditioning to ignore certain things

-With this background in mind, I am doing some work now to specifically get back in touch with my own masculinity
-Specifically, feeling emotions in the torso & pelvis (gently encouraging those in the head & limbs to return to the center to be felt there)
-This work is taking place outside the frame of desperation to escape suffering (I feel like I've somewhat succeeded in that now)
-Masculinity (at this time) feels to me like the bodily sensations associated with the acknowledgement of my influence (not control) on peope & situations in the environment
-There is a sense of 'charge' that can occupy the torso broadly when this comes on - it also lights up the mind a certain way & creates a mood of excitement overall

-I believe there are some impressions I internalized as a child which caused me to suppress this energy because it was "unsafe" to express
-This 'emasculation' was catalyzed by the rise of mood disorder symptoms when I was 16 - These symptoms manifested as the exact opposite of my above definition: the bodily sensations associated with my awareness of an inability to reasonably influence the people & situations in my environment
-To allow this energy to do the unfolding that it wants, I am feeling into it more & letting it 'talk' to me (through journalling like this)

-One last point: 

If there is a strong desire to influence a situation or interaction towards a certain end, then that desire is part of the moment.  Therefore, 'just being natural' & 'just being in the moment' must necessarily include an acknowledgement of how I want that moment to unfold.  Said a more mathematical way, if 70% of my consciousness (attention) is taken by that desire but I only place 25% of my mindful metacognition (awareness) on it, there is likely some degree of suppression occuring.  Finally, if being aware of the desire causes less impetus for action towards accomplishing it, there may be some degree of suppression occuring.  

3.20

Getting out of the way of Noah's "authentic" self
Is not always a simple matter
For so-called choiceless awareness is already biased by the subconscious

Requiring new skills 
Brought about by seemingly contradictory perspectives
Which reflect the dynamic, oblong, irregular,
internal machinary
That wants different things at different times

Creativity
Sexuality
Order 
Dominion
Mastery
Movement
Stillness
Safety
Thrill
Dullness

There is no end point to the individuation of these streams
While this body draws breath

And in matters of relating to other sentient beings
No controlling them
No "progress" or ordered sequence or map
More like two bizarre clumps of space matter from different dimensions
With entirely different physical rule sets
Journeying through space

This does not mean that the 4 Noble Paths of the Buddha do not exist
That these internal streams can not become familiar enough
And brought into sufficient internal geometry
That it not only reflects in direct perception,
in visceral interpretation,
but also in behavioral reaction

Even in the most extreme of situations

Yes, I do still believe that those far shores exist & are to be persisted towards

But how could they be accomplished, 
without first becoming familiar with the raw, deep, fleshy shadow 
Deep inside that range of mountains
in a cavern long hidden from the sun
in a world that intersects with many other worlds

that most of the time, move out of sync,

Unlike gears in a clock?

3.25

An interesting mix of emotions is occurring.  I'm not trying to change any of it & it is unfolding naturally.  There is confidence (bordering on arrogance), deep fear, equanimity, mindfulness, terror, joy.  

There is the sense that my negative story lines are utterly invalid.  Based on my accomplishments in the past five years, they don't hold water (no real data backing them up).  So this is an odd time of transition when that is being recognized.

I don't particularly want them to go away, but I am interested in as real of a view I can get of the reality around me as possible (with the understanding that it will always be filtered).  I don't want to lose vulnerability.  If anything, I want to gain visibility into that & empowerment to express it.  However, the self- doubt & insecurity that lingers in my mind is bullshit.  I'm confident that there is plenty of raw emotion beneat that candy wrapper.  

Tonight I was having drinks with a friend & an attractive woman came up to our table & said to me "you're super handsome!"  She then turned & ordered a drink.  As we were walking out later, I engaged her in a fun dialogue.  This was oddly synchronous, given the themes I've been exploring lately in practice.  

This is a strange & diverse journey.  

First of all, very cool! Isn't strange how self-disempowering once had a feeling of being the safe and cautions path, but now it just seems ridiculous? And yet, dropping all the self-doubting/second-guessing does take time.

As far as possible dharma linkages goes... This stuff can be insights into the titan and god realms. A titan is powerful but envious/fearful of losing. A god "has it" but can't admit any vulnerability. Just for fun, you might want to experiment walking around as a titan and as a god. The titan wants to ACHIEVE. The god wants to MAINTAIN. Deep down a titan feels slightly INADEQUATE despite its power. A god keeps a constant feeling/thought of being SUPERIOR at all times, basically as a way of ignoring any possible counter-evidence.

So a titan's inner dialog is: I feel the twinge of being inadequate, therefore I must achieve something.

A god's inner dialog is: Only I and people like me are superior, so I have a right to do what maintains this.

Thanks , that makes a lot of sense.  I *think* I'm already doing that but without the realm labels.

Im allowing the full spectrum of feelings felt in the body, then applying a label to them, then giving them "voice" internally if they seem to want to say something.  Part of this study is actually about how I can be in multiple realms at once, or at least in a five minute span.  And not needing any greater consistency , but still using logic to challenge the voice that says "I can't do this" , when obviously I can.

(Agree, I think you are already doing this.)

3.27

Random Further Thoughts on Monetized Dharma Teaching

Expanding on previous posts about money & dharma, which have brought up fruitful in-person & text conversations.  People have pushed back in several different ways, about dharma teachers "opening their books".  One is that it is 'just plain unresonable'.  Another is that the dharma teacher's dependents might not be comfortable with having their finances published, even if the dharma teacher is.

Some thoughts on this...

-There are different levels of 'opening the books.'  It isn't just black or white.  It could be declaring the exact amount an individual or family unit needs in a year to survive.  It could be declaring a general range.  It could be declaring tiers (i.e. this is how much without vacation, with vacation, with extra gifts, etc).  I would think the lowest tier would be for a teacher to disclose how much they make each year on dharma teaching.  It may actually be 'unreasonable' to say that not even one of these tiers could be met, all because one's partner is a private person.  At that point, perhaps there should be a consideration of alternate forms of income.  

-There are other ways of providing the 4 requisites to a dharma teachers.  For instance, on his website Yuttadhommo Bhikku provides a means of supplying food gift cards or purchasing items on his Amazon wishlist (which is usually empty).  Why aren't more teachers doing this?  Simply because it is unconventional? 

-Also, it is not THAT hard to figure out, based on where an individual or family lives, what they need in a given year to survive.  Cost of living alone should be able to do this.  Beyond that, other major factors might be ownership of property vs renting, education for the kids (depending on private vs public school/ cost of university, etc) & unforseen medical costs.  Again, the question becomes - Why do they need this funding from their students?

-Privacy is an interesting topic.  The idea that someone can be "awakened" & be an extremely private person at the same time is a dialectic for me.  Some traits are clearly linked to greed, hatred & delusion, while others are merely expressions of individual character & upbringing, independent of the 3 poisons.  At first glance, it seems to me that the desire for privacy is the desire to 'protect' one's personal details, to 'shelter' onself, to create a 'safe' space within which one can function.  That, on the surface, seems like a type of self-protective mechanism.  However, I am sure people can unpack that in all kinds of different ways.  Sort of like how a Zen or Tibetan master of 40+ years could commit sexual misconduct on their students but they were actually expressing crazy wisdom.  (Those two sentences may represent an unfair comparison - I apologize in advance if they upset anyone).  

-Another thing that comes to mind is a meditation teacher vs a dharma teacher.  If someone only ever teaches meditation in a secular context & never goes into any philosophy behind it or how lifestyle integrates with it, then I suppose a conventional, modern payment model works.  I personally don't know any teachers like that, but I'm sure they exist.  However, the minute someone explains that meditation practice relieves stress in life & that allows us to do different things in life, to me, they are venturing into the "dharma" realm.  At that point, the question is - what makes someone a qualified teacher?  In most fields, it means they have the knowledge of the topic within them.  This topic is life experience, therefore I would assume they have the successful life experience of integrating meditation realizations with everything else.  Then the next question - Are meditation realizations the same as being an expert on Art History?  I would say "no", because there are implications on how those affect character, personality, worldview & behavior in the former (not in the latter).  And how do meditation realizations affect character?  Do they reduce the overall "sense" of self?  Do they reduce the need to protect oneself?  Related to that, do they reduce attachment around material things?  Do they increase skill in communication & managing relationships with loved ones & dependents, including finding ways to please those dependents that do not necessarily involve supplying more material things?  If the answer to any of these questions is "No", I would guide the questioner to ask what system the teacher trained in & what do the words of that system actually indicate that successful practice within it should lead to?


Edit: One more thing - If the standards I write above would mean that less people were making money teaching meditation, that might not be a bad thing.  The next question becomes one of scalability: How can we build tools & infrastructure to allow less teachers (the ones who are "up to snuff") to teach more students than what is currently being done or what has been done before?  Which goes down the tech rabbit hole. Weeeee...

Re: Monetizing the Dharma

Just thought I'd ask Noah, where does your basic idea that teachers should not be paid for dharma teaching come from?  The Pali Cannon?  I ask because it seems like you are making the assumption straight off that this should not happen, and I have to ask why.  The best argument I can think of is simply that dharma should be available to all.  If this is coming from more of a 'dharma is sacred and should be seperated from money' I think it deserves some more analysis. 

To use an example from my life - Robert Peng, a qigong teacher I highly respect and consider fully enlightened, charges a fair amount for his qigong programs (which are mostly all retreats to be fair).  This makes them somewhat cost prohibitive, but at the same time this is what he does for a living, and a man's got to eat.  Who am I to look at his books and say, "well you could probably downgrade your appartment, I think you should charge less". 

There seems to be a tradeoff here between the cost vs. benefit of having a teacher charge - it may be cost prohibitive for some students, but it may also allow the teacher to put more energy into teaching and to ultimately reach more students with higher quality teaching.  I suppose there also needs to be some trust that the cost is fair and worth it, and if we judge it isn't then vote with your dollar, so to speak.  I am super grateful Daniel Ingram provided MCTB for free, easy access and a lack of barriers definately boosted my practice, but I've also paid for transformative books and I'm still grateful they were out there; to go through a standard publisher and sell for a price may simply have been that teacher's best option.

I am with you on the benefits of freeness, if I ever started teaching I would probably go dana and possibly direct that fund to a worthy charity, but it's certainly a rich area for discussion.

T DC:

ya

What do the root Taoist texts say about money?  Did Taoist monks & nuns earn money back in the day or did they focus more on maintaining food, shelter, clothing & medicine?

How much does he have to eat?  If he's fully enlightened, does he have to eat more than what is required to maintain the body?  If so, why?  That would be interesting.

You are an intelligent, analytic human being with more access to basic information (cost of living data, pricing for food/shelter/clothing/medicine, strategies for the reduction of those items. etc) than any prior generation.  You can observe what it costs to live a decent lifestyle in a given area.  By "decent", I mean one in which you can connect with positive emotion to other human beings, put enough nutrients in your body, wear clean well-fitting clothing, have creative & sexual outlets, have fun hobbies that don't cost that much money, get out doors regularly, etc.  It's not that hard to actually judge someone's spending & be able to say "yeah, you probably could live with less square footage & pay exponentially less" or "yeah, you probably should sell your mortgage & go back to renting since home ownership isn't right for you since you aren't handy & your area has high housing prices."  

I have to add here that there seems to be a thought process among some folks who pick up Buddhism or Buddhist practices that is an interesting mapping of 2,500 year old social, economic and moral practices onto modern life. I'm not saying human nature has changed in 2,500 years because I doubt very much that it has. What has changed, however, is the construction of human society, the liberation of the individual, the Enlightenment (the 17th century European intellectual version, not the spiritual version), technology, and the organization of the economy and how human beings manage to get along financially, raise families and just plain survive.

It's fascinating. Not judging, just interested.

It is interesting.  Although, to be fair, there are plenty of modern peoples pointing out that most people simply suck with their money.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zms_oiHb7CY

Also, lots of non iron-age folks are waking up to the fact that their time & lifestyle can be designed way more efficiently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX3eJRwJqlc

And finally, there are all these super-modern TED talks about what happiness actually is.  

(plug TED talk relating to how money doesn't buy happiness)

So while ideas about actually saving money that you don't need to spend, intending on not wasting one's whole life doing mandatory work & how money doesn't buy happiness (except up to a point) may have a firm basis in the Pali Canon, I do think lots of people are also discovering this on their own or from other sources or at least taking it from the Buddha & adapting it easily to modern audiences.

The question is, how does this relate to dharma teachers?  It relates in the following way.  Dharma is about systematizing happiness & non-clinging throughout every aspect of one's life.  I don't know what "meditation teaching" is.  If the purpose of "meditation" is to improve one's life, it is dharma.  

The Buddha talked A LOT about handling 4 things: food, shelter, clothing & medicine. Modern people don't like these suttas, because they tell them how to live their life & modern people don't want to hear that shit from the Buddha.  Instead, modern people look at sexy suttas like the Anapanasati, the Bahiya or the Satipattana.  But it is all in there.  Happy to add sutta references by request (but lazy at the outset).

The suttas essentially contain the spirit of automated lifestyle design, super-saving/early retirement & where mundane happiness comes from already.  I would assume a dharma teacher would have some sense of or fluency with these things.  If not, perhaps we could sign them up for the next Tim Ferris seminar



Edit: One more thing regarding the suttas - Where basic human rights & freedoms contrast with the words of the Buddha (i.e. saying silly shit about women's ability to get enlightened, be ordained or cause men not to get enlightened), I choose human rights.  Also, if magical stuff is mentioned, I think it is right to take an agnostic atheist approach.  However, I don't think the same rules needs to apply for the handling of material stuff.  I'm just saying this because a typical point people make is that there are lots of things from the Suttas that don't even indirectly apply to us, which I disagree with.  I think the main things that don't apply would be magical stuff (rebirth, powers) & devaluing humans.

Yes, Noah, that's a great example of what I was just talking about. My perception is that people in the 21st century just aren't going to live the way the Buddha taught. It's pushing rope uphill to think they will. As it applies to dharma teachers, if I want to learn a skill - in this example meditation - I can either use the DIY method or work with a teacher who I believe can transfer that knowledge. I agree with you that dharma is, utlimately, about how we live our lives. That said, that kind of information has come to me in several different ways, only one of them being what I grok from my dharma practice. I didn't need a teacher to transfer that information. It seems to have come with the practice and my readings. I used a teacher to obtain practice and process information, not moral lessons (yet I would refuse to work with someone who I felt wasn't ethical).

I think modeling one's life after someone like Buddha is laudable. It's also a very romatic idea as applied to modern times. Modern human beings could probably use more romanticism and more shared morality. The lack of shared experience, reality and ethics is a major cause of the problems we have, IMHO. I'm just not sure we can mandate it. That feels wrong, too.

What is the system you use to determine which parts of the Suttas to adopt and which not to adopt?

I'm honestly confused about the implications of this sentence, I sense that there is something more profound being said...


Does this include anything that includes analysis and future intentions, things like psychology, leadership training, massage therapists, personal trainers, philosophers, lifestyle analysists, financial advisors, etc.?  (I'm just throwing those out as possible examples, I'm not arguing it either way.) 

I'm trying to understand where the dividing line is between things that improve one's life and things that don't? It seems like you have a distinction in your mind, but I don't quite get it. 

I am pretty sure that the buddha was teaching skillfull means to realize what he had realized and not revealing commandments from God, a la moses and mohammed.  

The question, I think, should be what is most effective and not what is right or wrong.  No? 

I'm with you there man, I have the ablity, but do I have the right?  That's really the question.  

My take on "what the dharma is all about" is that it can reveal to us how we construct reality, how perception works and on the bottom line how the mind mediates everything we know. The purpose of meditation is the same - to reveal these things. Meditation is a tool to use to find these realizations. There are other tools that other disciplines use to the same end. Meditation is thus really about finding out what happiness is, how it works, and why and how we can get hooked by it (cling to it), like every other object. Happiness is an object or a state at the end of the day, a specificf state, so it's by nature impermanent, not us, and leads to discomfort (suffering).

The dharma is about waking the f*ck up. That's what the Buddha said, I think the very first thing he is supposed to have said, after confronting Mara all night while sitting under that tree. So when he was asked: "What are you?" he responded with,  "I am awake."

JMHO

My "hermanuetic strategy" is learned from my teacher Dhammarato & in turn, the Buddhadasa lineage.  It involves multiple points but I've written about it a lot in the sandbox thread(s) & my 'new path' thread from awhile back.  

I am grateful to live in the "free" world

Shargrol:

The dividing line wouldn't be based around general improvements to one's life.  It would only be based on things which systematically increase happiness & non-clinging.  Another way of saying this would be things which are aligned with the view that everything changes & is worth letting go of.  Some activities work towards a goal of sustainable happiness based on letting-go, while others don't.  All of the things could be steps towards sustained happiness if they were practiced from the aforementioned understanding.  

Hey Noah,

Thanks for bringing up this interesting discussion!

The one question I have is the following:
Why is it ok for an advanced Dharma practitioner to charge money for an "ordinary" job, but not for Dharma teaching.
If I understood correctly, your argument is that an advanced Dharma practitioner will have reduced attachment and thus needs less money.
By this logic, not charging money for a service is a result of practicing the Dharma, rather than teaching the Dharma in specific, or am I getting something wrong?

Also, how do you reconcile the MrMoneyMustache stuff (e.g. investing in organizations that cause suffering) with the Dharma?