[1:06 PM, 9/26/2020] John Tan: Once u clearly see logically how reified constructs from conventions create confusions and mistake conventions as truly real existence, u will also understand how cause and effect based on agency and action cannot b established. However that does not deny vivid appearances and functionalities.  If u see that, then there is nothing to argue about so I cannot understand the y u like to keep engaging in idle talks.  Also what is the taste of these deconstructions in real-time?

Yesterday midnight was raining heavily. Sitting in meditation, hearing the sound of rainfall in anatta, raindrops tapping the window r like heartbeats. The vibration of the windows from the heavy wind vibrates

the body.  The temperature changes, it becomes colder...whether the I disappeared and become the "room" or there is no I and no room, all these become irrelevant.

Then an inner radiance energy embrace the entire body mind as if lighting the whole dark room...still with eyes close feeling the entire changing sensations from the sitting to standing position, the dynamic changing pattern of sensations seem so gradual yet so fast...then the touch of feet on the floor and the deep breath that pulses the palms... another deep breathe....the slowly eyes opens...

To others it is just simply sitting and standing; but how is one to convey the depth of these inner dimensions of anatta from these simple mundane activities -- hearing, sensing, touching, breathing, sitting and standing?
[1:20 PM, 9/26/2020] Soh Wei Yu: oic.. yeah thats like anatta actualization.. just like boundless presencing manifestation.. completely no sense of self, nor objects, but also no concept about anatta and emptiness.
[1:26 PM, 9/26/2020] John Tan: Question is how much quality time u engaged in practice and how much time u wasted in idle talk? 🤣

 Soh Wei Yu

The Original Pure Land
Padmasambhava is to be inseparable from the primordial nature.
His Copper-Colored Mountain buddhafield is the purity of your personal experience.
May everyone be born in this original pure land,
The uncontrived natural state of indivisible appearance and awareness.
CHOKGYUR LINGPA
(Jewels of Enlightenment: Wisdom Teachings from the Great Tibetan Masters
By Erik Pema Kunsang)
29 Comments
Comments

Mr. A
Sounds very Advaitic Soh
🙂

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Soh Wei Yu
Mr. A
That is dzogchen view, however dzogchen is different from Advaita as explained by the Dzogchen teacher Arcaya Malcolm Smith and his student Kyle Dixon:
https://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2020/08/acarya-malcolm-on-dzogchen-and-advaita.html
Acarya Malcolm on Dzogchen and Advaita Vedanta
AWAKENINGTOREALITY.BLOGSPOT.COM
Acarya Malcolm on Dzogchen and Advaita Vedanta
Acarya Malcolm on Dzogchen and Advaita Vedanta
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Mr. A
Soh
, excerpt from your reference provided above,
"This is a non-reductive system. Nothing is actually reifed as being established at the end of the path. Just an array of illusory appearances"… See More

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Soh Wei Yu
Mr. A
Illusory appearances do not “exist”. They are empty of extremes such as existence or non existence

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Mr. A
Soh
, yes....I am also talking of "illusory" appearances dear. Why would one use the word "illusory"?!

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Mr. A
Even in Advaita all phenomena neither exist nor not exist. They are called mithya (neither sat nor asat)

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Soh Wei Yu
Mr. A
No substrate is necessary.
Substrate implies a background. It is seen here that the sense of a background is erroneous. There is no background. Appearances are just vibrant transparent pellucid presencing. Even what you call I - even in the absence of five senses - is just another “foreground” manifestation mistaken into an ultimate background.
I will stop here because it is likely going to end up in a neverending debate

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Soh Wei Yu
You either realise it or do not

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Mr. A
Soh
you have grown wise. I agree, three thousand years have not resolved this. But just to let you know there are refutations to what you have stated too in Shankara's Upadeshasahasri.
At any rate. I ain't serious. Just enjoying some appearances 🙂

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Soh Wei Yu
Right now every manifestation is pellucid, vibrant, utterly alive, bright, transparent, boundless, presencing all and everywhere with no trace of self/Self/objects
Utter joy and bliss
Utter perfection and purity everywhere
Utter paradise
Eyes always wide opened all senses open and beaming with brilliance without the dichotomy of sense organs, sense object and sense consciousness
Energetic radiance in total exertion
Transcendence is in the ordinary, nirvana is samsara
What was realised as “I” is just the same luminous taste in all manifestation, except there is no background I. That background unchanging is simply a wrong view. “Who” no longer applies, it is a flawed enquiry, and no longer applies for the past ten years.

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Mr. A
Wait, wait, let me spoil some of your utter joy and bliss 🙂
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• John Tan

  All the 4 parts of his talks [The Silent Mind] are good.

  

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Soh Wei Yu
https://youtu.be/eIh6VRoTDY8
 
 
 
John Tan: What do u find lacking in Alan Watt's "The silent mind" talk?

He spoke of anatta, seeing DO, emptiness of mental constructs, effortlessness and spontaneity, in the flow but what is missing?  Or do u see anything missing?
 
[12:35 PM, 9/1/2020] Soh Wei Yu: Didnt describe intensity of luminosity?
[12:37 PM, 9/1/2020] John Tan: Yes.  Directness always have this clean, pure, pristine and transparent taste because there no imputation blocking.






On someone else:

[6:13 PM, 9/1/2020] John Tan: Possible but experience should b natural and spontaneous, no strain and no effort.

What appears is fully transparent, vivid, pure, clean and pristine as the layer that blocks dissapears.

Until each moment of experience is free from observer and observed, just natural spontaneous pellucid appearance in obviousness.

When we de-construct more and more, we will also notice the relationship between radiance energy and mental deconstructions.  The universe will reveal itself more and more as radiance of vibrational energies in  dance rather than "concrete things".
[6:16 PM, 9/1/2020] Soh Wei Yu: Oic..
[6:23 PM, 9/1/2020] John Tan: As for non-conceptuality, it is not a mind trying to free itself from symbols and language.  Rather it is the insight that sees through mental constructs (reifications) and conventionalities.  It is an unbinding process of freeing the mind from being blinded by the semantics of conventions (existence, physicality, cause and effect, production) that is more crucial.

Sent this to William Gaucher, who went through the earlier thusness stages and realised anatta recently and contacted me via the blog, after a discussion about fabrication and luminosity.

John tan said the following article is very good.

All Around, All at Once: Part 3: “Unfabricated”

Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge Osho-ajari

Dainen-ji, November 17, 2017

Each moment unfolds as a display of richness, of colours and forms and sounds, as a myriad of sensations. Sincere practice is allowing the whole bodymind to live as the brightness of seeing, the depth of sound, as ever-changing sensations, as the Luminosity of experiencing as a whole. And when we allow ourselves to do even a measure of this, there is a quality of questioning, of interest, of intimacy with everything that is being experienced. But to do this requires that we choose to stop following the congealing of attention into fabrications that lead to further contraction and inevitably, suffering.

Anzan Hoshin roshi says, in the series of classes on “The 8000 Line Prajnaparamita sutra”:

    Fear is the underlying mechanism of self-image, the attempt to reify reality in the most basic kind of way by simply freezing it and contracting. And the conventions of consensual experience or the experience of those who are unlearned, those who have not studied their experience, those who have not heard the Dharma, who have not practiced it, those whose lives are based on the understanding of a culture which is itself founded on contraction, will allow themselves to fall into that fear and will allow themselves to be held back by that fear from their own freedom.

What this points to is that we must wordlessly examine absolutely everything, taking nothing for granted: not who we think we are, not our memories, not what we think the body is, not what we think the mind is, not what our tendencies and habits tell us to do, not what our anger or fear is telling us to do. Any state you experience, any stance, any structure of attention you experience is not necessary. They are all recoil. They are all self-inflicted damage.

As the Roshi explained in Class 4 of the series “The Development of Buddhist Psychology:

    All conditioned existence gives rise to dukkha or unsatisfactoriness, suffering, contraction, confusion; that this suffering, this dukkha, is fueled by the mechanism of grasping, of trying to hold on to something when it cannot be held and by continually misunderstanding the nature of our experience.

“Dukkha” does not describe one particular kind of state and the "suffering" isn’t necessarily traumatic or dramatic. I mention this because sometimes students will describe a particular kind of state, such as boredom, as dukkha. For example, a student might describe a state of sinking mind, of disinterest, when what they really mean is boredom, and boredom is the result of stupidity klesa. In other words, boredom is a way of experiencing that is poisoned by a flattening of attention that you are fabricating, following, propagating. It is a kind of pouting that one is not being entertained. It is not as dramatic as the tantrums of anger or grasping. But it is still a childish tactic.

But dukkha refers to all  states which are the result of conditioned experience, and all states create suffering, unsatisfactoriness and bondage.

The roots of the Pali word "dukkha" are "jur" and "kha." "Bad" and "space". The root metaphor behind this is the hole in a wheel through which the axle passes being blocked. So the word means obstructed space.

We need to learn that the space of who we are, which is present as seeing and hearing and just the fact of experience is already open. When you are in a state, you think you have no choice about that, but the truth of the matter is that you are not choosing. You are following compulsion. Choose to actually practise and open attention and the axle will turn freely.

It’s easy to cultivate states when you are sitting - states of boredom, states of calm, states of quiet, states of euphoria, shiny, shiny states. But all of these are dead ends because whatever is experienced within the state can only be the product of the state. The context is narrowed to the kind of content that suits it. And this is why such states can seem so convincing, and so compelling. This is why you fixate on them. There is no one who is better at lying to you than you are, and the thing that’s convinced by the lie is the same thing that’s doing the lying. It’s not magic once you understand how the trick works. The states define who and what is imagined as a self but is really just a process of obstruction and fabrication.

    In Zen practice, however, what we are doing is attending openly, rather than fixating. You can’t ‘fix’ a state from inside of a state. You have to open around it and release it first. Anything you experience when attention is arranged in a structure (a state) is going to be biased and therefore cannot be true. Seeing these structures and learning to attend to them more and more openly with the whole of your experience is part of the many truths that zazen reveals. In the Class Six Outline in the series, “The Development of Buddhist Psychology”, the Roshi said,The Buddha has clearly seen that the root of dukkha was clinging to what  could not be clung to. This clinging was the result of conceiving of the impermanent and dynamic exertion of experience to be a collection of real and permanent objects and entities, believing that this clinging will bring pleasure and satisfaction whereas it results only in suffering and confusion, and that what is selfless and beyond the personal is self and personal. The succession of these moments of grasping and confusion he called “samsara”, the “flow”. He called the cessation of this useless struggle and strategic approach to experience “nibbana”, the “blowing out”. In many places throughout the early texts, we find the Buddha again and again asking students to give up their spiritual and secular strategies and just understand something so obvious that it is often missed.

This is why we ask students to sit according to a schedule, why the Roshi has said so often that “the schedule IS Buddha”. The dreaded committed sittings and the schedule you have promised to follow is important because you have to make choices that go beyond compulsion in order to do it. It is something in your life that will insist that you go further than your habits and tendencies dictate and can invite you into the world of the Buddhas. The world of the Buddhas is unfabricated and unborn and you arrive there by releasing yourself into it.

We sit zazen and we do this practice because moment after moment, we do not understand. Any snippets of understanding that come and go are not enough. We cannot afford to entertain ourselves with our states, our thoughts, our interpretations, our fabrications. These are all part of how we misunderstand and will not help us to clarify our understanding. We cannot afford to be lazy. So ‪this morning‬ and throughout this Dharma Assembly, please make the effort to really practise the richness of colours and forms and sounds, the nuance of sensations. Allow the whole bodymind to live as the brightness of seeing, the depth of sound, as ever-changing sensations, and as the Luminosity of experiencing as a whole, by opening all around, all at once.