Hi Folks. I have developed a new website where I will be posting all new writings from this point forward. Here is the link to the blog portion of that new site: johnastin.com.
I’m also compiling some of my older writings (a number of which have appeared on this blog over the past couple of years) into a soon to be released book, Searching for Rain in a Monsoon.
Hope you enjoy the new website!
Blessings,
John
1) Do a bunch of things (e.g., sit a certain way, watch your breath, repeat a mantra, etc.) to try to cultivate the flame of awareness so that it will burn brighter
2) Notice that no matter your experience, the fire of awareness is already lit and burning brightly. In fact, the whole world is on fire, a mighty blaze of knowing burning wildly out of control, its flames dancing as a million different sparks of experience.
3) Now, don’t merely notice this wild, fiery display that is always and already burning everything awake. Don’t keep yourself apart from its flames, watching them as if from some far off, distant place. No, see that you ARE this burning, that it is YOU who are on fire, and that no experience can ever extinguish this mighty flame.
Much if not most of the internal suffering we experience as human beings stems from our efforts to try and escape what is arising experientially. Our attempts to manipulate, control or rearrange our thoughts, feelings and sensations in order to find a sense of freedom, ease and well-being invariably ends up creating more tension and stress, a sense of being divided, alienated from ourselves and from life. It is, in a very real sense like waging war against ourselves, this effort to escape our own experience, this struggle with what is.
And yet what’s amazing is that we cannot actually pull it off for despite our best, most sincere efforts, we simply are not able to escape our present moment experience. We may try to keep experience at bay, try to shield or defend ourselves against the onslaught of life. But the reality is that no matter how hard we may try to barricade ourselves from our own experience, we never actually succeed in creating separation or distance. In the end, there really is no pulling ourselves out of or away from whatever is being thought, felt or sensed. There is no fleeing the here-and-now but only ever this unavoidable intimacy with what is.
September 11th among many other things can serve as a powerful reminder about the madness that can ensue when we hold to our points of view as if our lives depended on them… we can ask ourselves, “how many times have I (metaphorically speaking) been willing to fly airplanes into buildings or blow things up simply to prove the rightness of or defend my point of view as “true”?
The way I see it is there are only points of view, only perspectives – there is no completely perspective-free zone. That is a fantasy. The question is not, will we have points of view because we will – the question is how much are these transparent to us; how much grasping is there within the particular points of view we are necessarily adopting each moment of existence.
If we can’t laugh about our own perspective or point of view, no matter how seemingly true and enlightened it might appear to us, it’s probably a pretty good sign we have reified and are to some extent, identified with that point of view…
Which reminds me of the last two lines in Yogananda’s beautiful poem, Samadhi:
“And I, a little bubble of laughter
Become the sea of mirth itself.”
In my experience, the clearest teachings are those that help us to realize that all the descriptions we’ve applied to ourselves, our experience, and the world are, in the end, empty of substantiality – i.e., things, experiences, the self, the the world and so on are not as hard and fast, not as fixed and definable as our verbal renderings would make them out to be. This is the great liberation—to realize just how unlimited, unrestricted, indescribable, unknowable and wide-open experience actually is.
However, if we look at the history of almost every spiritual, teaching, it would seem that one if not the greatest challenges has been to apply this same experiential understanding and realization to the teachings themselves! For whenever a teaching fails to recognize that it’s own description (of the way things are) is necessarily partial and limited in so far as being incapable of adequately capturing or containing reality within in its conceptual framework, no matter how elegant or inspired that framework may be, we end up with dogma and rigidity, however subtle it may be.