What is it like to be Enlightened? (963 words)

Its extremely common to think an enlightened being is beautiful, healthy, and mentally and physically untroubled.

But actually no none of this is true. An enlightened being faces the exact same world as an unenlightened being. They have karmas that create existences the same as anyone. Those karmas may manifest as physical and mental ailments as much as anyone. Buddha had headaches and gut pains his whole life. He died from a mesenteric infarction; an incredibly painful rupturing of the gut and resulting blood poisoning. His mother died in child birth so he never knew her, and he went through a lot of struggles both to finally arrive at enlightenment and afterwards also. There was nothing exceptional or unpainful about his life.

The enlightenment comes from not involving a self with these karmas. Good and bad things happen all the time in this world. They always have, they always will. But they are acute when they appear to happen to "us". As explored a lot over the last year this makes no sense. Things either happen or they don't; what is this "happening to me" thing that makes one event more important to "me" than another?

As explored the "self" does not inhabit us anywhere. Things are simply not like the way we think about them.

If we watch closely we can see that "self" trying to pounce on things all the time. Trying to make this mine, or not mine. I notice it with thoughts about the world. Something happens or we see someone do something or even just see someone and before we know it our "self" is trying to stamp its view of the world on the situation. It shouldn't be like this, I know how the world is. Our "self" tries to slip under the situation to say that "it knows reality better than reality" and this event or person is now a fraud. I had that today. A kid started crying on a rush hour train and I was tired and wanted quiet and I caught myself grasping that "quiet" and using it like a stick to beat up the situation that was now "wrong." Why bring kids on rush hour trains anyway etc etc. Actually it was quiet and now it wasn't. So what! It is just a sound and if you don't grasp it with a self, its a sound that isn't even happening to "you" it is just happening. Big deal, so what! And once freed from fighting an imposing reality with a fake version that you own, you can see it as it is. Obviously a kid crying is not an annoying noise really its a sign of distress, and if we access that distress as it is then we see the compassion in there and the wish for it to end. Not so "I" can have quiet, but so the person is no longer in distress. This is how dangerous the grasping to a self is, it can blind us to the suffering in the world and that can only actually make for more unwelcome karmas. If we thought we couldn't handle the noise of the kid when we were tired this time, think how much worse the distraction next time created by whatever karma we just caused by not letting go this time!

So an enlightened being is faced with the exact same troubles as an unenlightened being. The difference is just that these troubles are not in-bound on a "self" they are just where they are and they come and go in their own time. There is no "self" to get overwhelmed or burdened or under-pressure. Things are being thrown at "us" and pass straight through. In fact if there is no "us" in the room then there is no sense of them being thrown at anyone. They just pass through. That apparent "us" is simply a grasping, or an attachment. Its a simple as that.

Now this does avoid a whole load of effects that together make up what is called "suffering." Once we grasp and make things "ours" then there is a target for the world to attack. We start to gain and lose. We start to notice when things are going well or badly. The world now has an accountant adding everything up. There is no rest as we start to struggle to keep the balance. I need to work to make my life better. I am a bad or failed person and need to get better and improve. I have made a mistake that I want to cover up to protect the image of a perfect self. Or I don't want to accept the reality that I have made a mistake so I work frantically to reverse that. I end up living a lie some "self" image, and my life gets filled with unnecessary debt to this fake image and fake self. A crazy whirling world starts to grow out of this simple grasping. And before long that world starts to defend itself and become its own justification. I have worked so hard to achieve this that I can't quit now. I am so lucky to have this that I can't let it go. Even more crazy I have suffered so much for this that I don't want to let it go and realise the suffering was pointless! We don't even want to stop grasping and suffering!

SO the difference between an enlightened being and an unenlightened being cannot be measured by any phenomenon. It is simply that an unenlightened being doesn't habitually measure! They can, but they know when to stop measuring. It's not actually real. Peace and the Unmeasured: that is real. They can always let go when what they are doing leads to suffering.

Post-Cartesian Theatre - The Pitfall. & Meditation (1770 words)

Mario Kart 7 First Person mode. 

We are very familiar in novels, films and now games with First Person perspective where the world is presented as we would see it if we were there.

First off Daniel Dennett would say this is only possible because our actual experience of "first person" is itself just a novel, film or game that our brain creates. Thus making it easy to simulate. But that is a distraction.

The thing to notice when looking at that Mario Cart game play frame is that its a "film within a film." We can see what our character sees, as though sitting in a cart, but there is also the wider field of our own eyes. In my case--it as though--I am looking through eyes at a computer screen in which there is a first person image of someone sitting in a cart. I can chose to make that person me and sit in the cart and play the game as though I was in the cart. When we play a game we certainly ignore the fact that I really am looking at a computer screen. To make our reflexes sharp we just get into the virtual cart and play.

This is how easy it is to move our self around in our world. It is not so fixed.

Now in previous blogs I've smashed this up completely by noting that everything we can see both near and far must have been already been seen for us to be aware of it! You can't see something hasn't been seen yet! So that distant star sending its light out has already been seen and the light has already hit our retina for us to see it "over there".

When we think about this though we usually make the "first person mistake" of sitting in the "cart" of our body at the centre of the picture. We see the star as over there and the light travelling through space and entering our retina over here. I can see my nose and can work out where my eyes must be and into those comes the light from that distant star. I overlook that this has already happened for the star to even be there!

And now the big kahuna burger of a mistake I made when I was 19. If the star over there has already been seen then all this must be a model in my head. And if that is true then I am "inside" my head. And the real world is actually "outside" the universe! The known world exists as a simulation in a brain, and the "real world" is unknown, pre-experience, and lies outside the universe! A bit like The Matrix where the world we see is just a computer simulation and the real world is people in liquid pods.

The critical difference from Matrix is that in my scenario there is no waking up in the pod. You can't get outside your head any more than Mr Rochester can get out from the novel Jane Eyre. The outside true world is forever unknowable. This is worse than Plato who thought you could get outside the cave.

Ok this is a very complex mish-mash of mistakes and truths.

First off where things are impossible we can just ignore. If you can never get outside your head to see the real world lets ignore it. This is the move I failed to do as a kid. I got stuck into Noumena and Phenomena.

By definition you can never experience a noumenon because then it becomes a phenomenon. But because single noumenon present many phenomena we like to argue there are existing things behind the appearances. Basically Plato. Hegel is the genius here. He says that if all you have is phenomena then start there. So where are the noumena then? He says these are ideas. That is a very much more accurate description of reality than presenting it as made of "solid" but never-the-less unknowable noumena. And this was mistake #1 for me. There is the idea of a real world outside my head, but that is it.

And in fact if we just go to the phenomena and relegate all the complex ideas we completely clear up the mess in one simple move. Bravo Hegel! Shame that Anglo-American Philosophy so rejects him. But that might say more about America and Britain. They did after all destroy Europe!

So where are we with 1st person perspective now. It has dissolved! It is true that everything we see both near and far HAS BEEN SEEN already. There is no light moving around "inside our world" bringing information from the distant thing to us. Everything is already seen and sensed.

So what is the point of the 1st person ME that I can see at the centre of my world. I can see two arms typing at this keyboard and they are attached to a solid body sitting in a chair. And I can see the perspective of the world radiating out from the head on the shoulders of that body. And I can close one eye and then the other to show that the world is being seen by two eyes. And I can push the edge of one eye and create a distortion that upsets the whole view proving that everything I see is coming into the eye and is being seen there. And I can hold up a hand over my eye and block out the entire universe showing also that only light that enters the eye can be seen, and without it there is no world over there. That 1st person ME really is the centre of the world, I can see it and see how I am involved in seeing and making all this come to exist.

Yet we know that everything that we are sensing has already been sensed! How can this 1st person at the centre of the world be both central to observation, and yet be observing things that have already been sensed!

Let me say this again. I look at a computer screen that is "over there" and separate and distant from me. I can see what is written on the screen. Now if I close my eyes then the whole thing turns black. So I can deduce that light needs to come from the computer screen over there to my eye over here. And yet I can also deduce that the computer screen "over there" must have already been seen for it to be seen in the first place!

The problem is that this Me that I see here at the centre of the world is just an empty shell. It is like the blank space behind the Mario Cart in the picture above that anyone can step into. This is quite a shock but that thing at the centre of your world does not exist. It is empty!

Now before we get upset by this. Remember that there are only 2 things here. The Phenomena that we experience and the thoughts we have about them.

The phenomena never go. They are solid and always present. If you need a self still then be aware that the world that you currently sense is the result of your own sensations. The world out there is because of you.

But we shouldn't let thoughts be so important. These ideas are fleeting and not so important. That "self" that we have had at the centre of our world (except when we get into the cart and play Mario Cart it stops being at the centre and gets into a cart) is just a idea.

Some like Richard Dawkins like to put this that what we experience is brain simulation of the real world. I remember he used a VR headset once to persuade people that what they see is "in their heads." But this is just an idea and while it does illustrate that things are not as they seem it is not very helpful to solve the issue.

This is now SRH. The general problem once we start playing "Russian Dolls" is where do we stop?

Once we start putting things inside other things like "Worlds inside Heads" then we start an infinite regress. If Dawkins wants us to think the world is in our heads, then aren't our heads also inside our heads. Nothing has been explained. You don't explain anything but putting things inside other things.

Nothing is inside anything. There are just phenomena and there are ideas. Everything written here is stimulating ideas, but the phenomena are the black marks on white background of the screen and a couple of pictures.

And this leads directly to meditation and enlightenment.

When we meditate we are focusing just on the phenomena. We are supposed to be  taking our attention away from thoughts about those phenomena. Though its much better to have thoughts about the current phenomena. The one to steer away from is memories and imagination. Nimita they are called. Such phenomena are to be ignored as completely as possible and definitely any thoughts about them are not important.

The point of meditation is to see the phenomena as they are. Remember that all phenomena have already been sensed. There is nothing else for us to do. They are already as they are. I think sometimes we try to process phenomena with thoughts to make them how we want, we like the apparent gap between the world and us because we think we "can do something about it." In fact is, everything that appears to us has already been seen by us. There is no hiding.

And so in meditation we just open up and experience the world as it happens, as immediately and honest as we can. Absorb into it.

Once we do that we start to experience the world in ways we cannot even have dreamed of.

And most importantly the 1st person does become completely irrelevant and disappears. It really is nothing but an idea.

So what of those two words that are so banded around of Subject and Object. They really are not useful. But Object would be what lies out there (that really we have already sensed) and Subject would be the thoughts and decisions we make about it after we've processed it again! There are 2 stages here. Original sensation, and then a second go at it where we try to change it.

In meditation we just want the first process of things being sensed. That is where all the magic happens.

How can my experiences not be mine? (2105 words)

 A common model is the Cartesian Theatre named by Daniel Dennett, and this will do to start with.

You have a little copy of yourself, a homunculus, sitting inside your head looking at everything that is going on. Like a pilot looking out of the windows of your eyes.

Its a subtle misunderstanding of what is going on. It is true that we sit at the centre of the world due to perspective. A camera experiences this same central perspective due to how light enters the lens but no one thinks there is anyone sitting inside a camera. Yet the "inside" comes from this same perspective not from anything else. The consciousness that is aware of this is some thing else. But we aren't going to cover that here.

Firstly lets start with the homunculus sitting in their theatre looking at the sensory input and experiencing the outside world.

Now why does this homunculus think that this sensory input is "theirs"? If there was someone else in the cinema watching it all then they could share the experiences and we wouldn't think they were just mine.

Perhaps this issue becomes most poignant when our sensory data is numbingly bad pain. It becomes very important to our health that we see it for what it is.

If someone could enter the theatre and share our pain we would be saved from the worst part of pain that it makes us lonely and feel isolated from the people around us. We can feel envy or anger for people who do not have to suffer this. And we can get tired of the pain and just give up and want it gone leading to frustration and breakdown. If someone was with us experiencing it all, someone to hold our hand as we experience the pain together that would make the whole experience much more bearable.

And yet this miraculously is the actual situation! Sort of.

The point is that sitting in the chair in our cartesian theatre the pain is actually not ours, it is streaming in to us, but it is clearly "over there", it is not ours. The thing that makes it seem like ours is that only we are experiencing it.

But that is the uncanny thing. In this model we are necessarily the only one who can experience it. There are no doors no one else can enter. Necessarily. The doors are not only locked they don't exist.

If no one else can enter then why have the theatre at all? Only you can see the screen you may as well merge with the screen and get rid of the seats.

But we have established that we are also not the sensory data, it is over there and streaming in. We still feel that the world is happening to us.

How are both possible that we are not separate from the screen and at the same time the world seems to be over their and coming at us.

The answer was hinted above with the camera. The sense of "coming at us" is part of the experience! And the belief that it "belongs to us", or "is ours" is all part of the experience.

The experience itself is not ours.

Now this can only be clearly seen in jhana, States of complete concentration where we enter the screen of the cinema. Its often called subject and object merging, but I never found this description useful. Its more than the subject and the object explode from the screen creating the illusion of a difference between myself and the experience.

So in a nutshell with overwhelming pain the fact of the matter is that it is there, but its not happening to anyone. So we cannot actually be isolated in "our" pain, and we are not unlucky to be experiencing it, and its not unfair, and all those people who are not experiencing it are lucky, and we are sad. None of this is actually true. In the same way that there is no door for a second person can enter the theatre. In fact there are no doors for anyone to enter the theatre and experience the pain, not even us!!!!

This point was made before in previous posts. The existence of the pain IS THE OBSERVATION. You can't experience pain that hasn't been observed. But we make the mistake of "Naïve Realism" and think that the pain we see is real and lies outside us, and then it comes into contact with an observing self that then experiences it.

We can see our nose and body and we think the experience of things out there is still to happen to us. But to know about the things out there we must have already experienced them! That mountain far away must have already been experienced by us for it to get all the way over there! Things that have not been experienced simply are not there. So its pointless suggesting that the experience is happening over here in this body, when it must have already happened to be over there! This is the mistake.

Its like watching a cricket ball come towards us. We think the ball is "over there" and it comes ever closer and THEN it hits us. But light from the ball has already entered out eyes for us to see the ball. It is not "over there" really, it must in some way be in contact with us doe us to see it. What we "see" unfolding is a complex analysis of the situation made by our senses and brains already! We are effectively looking at a simulation of the ball. But that is the mistake, the "looking" lies in the creating the simulation in the first place. The looking is not a person sitting in a cinema looking at a screen, it is in making the film itself. We are the director and the film maker and the editor and by the time a final product exists the thing has already been seen. It is not then passed on to viewer! There is no point in showing it to a cinema going its already been seen.

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Now extremely important addendum. I speak about the rational side of enlightenment here. The Prajna. The seeing the world as it really is. But I invariably miss out the other half of this.

The removal of the person from the cinema and the presenting pain just as it is with no viewer is prajna and correct. But it is soulless. We might start to think that pain does not matter. But of course it is a very potent experience and a living thing is profoundly affected by pain. They may be able to let go of any personal involvement in the pain and not feel isolated, but it is still an actual intense experience.

What is missing from my account is compassion. The desire to help and fix pain is fundamental. Removing the personal aspect may seem to make suffering soulless. We all become stones. But quite the contrary it means that we approach pain the same regardless who or what is experiencing. By realising that no one is watching "my" pain frees me up to look at all pain the same! All pain becomes one pain, no longer fractured into "my" pain or "your" pain. Pain IS pain. This is the truth. When we are in pain we seek to fix that pain, not as a knee jerk reaction but as an acknowledgement that something is wrong for our body. We wish to help this body. And the same for any other body in need of help. Its is perfectly normal to seek to alleviate pain in any living thing. We do not need a huge metaphysics of souls an cinema goers being subjected to films. we can be quite normal and just see the world as it is. That is the true meaning of Prajna. Not the creating of more metaphysics but the liberation from layers of false view.

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So discussion of pain cannot exclude "sadism." How is it possible that the truth of pain can be reversed? Pain by definition is not pleasant. An ant faced with physical damage will not run towards destruction but will run away. The truth of pain is that we run away. Yet in the Colosseum in Rome the Romans put people deliberately in the path of pain and destruction. They rationalised this as giving them the opportunity to heroically fight for their freedom, but often things were so stacked against them it was nothing but a death sentence and a spectacle for the public.

So why would you place another person in the path of pain and destruction, and not respond to pain like you would if it was your own?

To get this mysterious situation you need live in a Cartesian Theatre. Inside your theatre you are "safe" and subjected only to the sensations that you get. With this view we become obsessed by what "our" cinema is playing. This is great when the film is good, but when the film is pain then "we" suffer. And we store that "unfairness" of suffering up as resentment. It means that when we see another suffering in "their" cinema there is a sense of justice and it makes more sense of all those times we have suffered alone in "our" cinema. The hardest people have suffered long and hard in their cinema, trapped before a wall playing only films of pain. That isolation and unfairness becomes a strong desire for justice and plays out as wanting others to suffer.

But as argued above its all a misunderstanding. There is no one separate and "watching" the film. The film IS the person. Usually the film is of someone experiencing something, and we identify with that person as "me" (e.g. watching a cricket ball flying towards the air to us) but we are not the person to whom the ball is flying, we are the actual experience itself. As said above: in the Cartesian Theatre view we are waiting for the ball to arrive because we see our self as the physical person standing in the field, when in actual fact we are fully engaged with the ball the whole time it is flying too! We are the whole film - otherwise how would "we" know the ball was coming? We are the person hearing the bat against ball, we are the person first seeing the ball, we are person waiting for the ball, we are the person that the ball arrives at! Yet in our mind the ball is over there and we are just the person standing waiting for it. Two quite different views of what is happening. The first absolutely correct, the second a story or myth used in daily life and this culture. Where did you play? I was a long off fielder. "Nice catch mate" people say etc. Ignoring the real complete event that actually unfolded.

Pain is pain it doesn't happen to anyone. Like no "one" actually catches a cricket ball. Ask any cricketer what they are thinking as they catch a ball. The very last thought is who is going to catch is. Or if they are thinking this they will probably drop the ball. To catch a ball you think about catching a ball. You spread yourself wide to be the person who sees the ball, who runs into position, who moves their hands in preparation, who judges where the ball we be, who grabs it in flight, feels the sting as it slaps into the hands, and who holds it like nothing else matters. They are all these things and all these people at once. Then they may look around at the recognition on other people and have the thought "wow I did it" "I am awesome" etc etc. Two quite different processes.

Likewise we can have pain without thinking who is having it. Indeed we never need to think about who is having it. Pain is just pain. Seen like this sadism cannot exist. It is just a mistake, or the dark shadow of years spent living a mistake. Forgiveness to let go of the wrongs done to us, humility to admit we need let go resentments, and compassion to wish an end to pain and suffering for our self and others. Complex and toxic mix is very easily possible, in fact its where most of us are to some extent. But in moments or peace more or less we can see where we are wrong.   

 

The Pitfall of Over Design (form before substance)

So there is a problem that needs a solution.

A specification is created for what the solution needs to achieve.

While the specification is being implemented it is noted that it is part of a more general solution.

The designer decides to implement the more general solution. If this is a software solution there may be many motivations to do this:

• produce code that can be reused in the future
• give flexibility for design changes
• general solutions may be more efficient and beautiful than specific

So the designer abstracts the solution. But in so doing they seemingly innocuously get drawn away from the original problem.

It seems harmless.

But unwittingly they are no longer bound by the solution, but by whatever motivated their decision to abstract.

Quickly the demands of the abstract solution take over from the actual problem that they set out to solve.

And the danger of this is that those concerns can amplify and become much greater than the original problem.

Quickly "form" can take over from "substance".

Another trivial and silly example might be someone who sets out to create a shopping list. They decide at some point that it would be better to organise the shopping list in terms of the isles at their super market. So they deviate to find a floor plan of the supermarket. Then they realise they may go to more than 1 shop, so they take floor plans of all the shops they may visit. And then decide that they may as well do this properly and do it for all possible supermarkets. Perhaps they sit down to start writing an app.

A week passes and the food shopping is still not done. They go hungry. The substance was food, the form was the structure into which getting food was forced. And the structure took over from the form.

The point of this blog is to identify the subtle error in abstracting problems away from their specific application.

It seems like a harmless and clever thing to do. But the moment we leave the concerns of the original motivation for a solution we lose the compass and the task can become unending and solutions become ever more abstract.

What then happens far more often than it should, is that the final beautiful abstract and general solution doesn't actually fit the specification. Some small detail was missed and this exception or boundary condition breaks the general solution.

You might think a general solution has more "solving power" than a specific. But often we get to the general solution by ignoring exceptions. Or we don't anticipate exceptions. So we make a net that is larger and casts far wider than we needed and then realise that the holes are too large for a particular type of fish we needed.

Stick to the original motivation for a solution will ensure that the right balance is found between general and exceptions.

However to enable future code use SOLID principles are useful. If we break even our specific solution into single responsibility functions we will find building a new solution in future much easier.

Where did I come from?

 The classic question that gets parents uneasy.

But the biological answer never really phases us because this is not the important answer.

In the West especially "I" refers to the spirit in the shell. The shell is interesting, we spend a fortune on cosmetics and grooming to make the shell look good. And health and medicine to make it well. And only when it fails do we appreciate how important it is.

But its all superficial to the "me" that really counts.

Long blog short. That "me" comes from mental activity. That is all it is! That is where I come from!

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Ok people protest but that mental activity is "my" mental activity. Well that is just mental activity itself.

West is the Land of Shadows

Never has no such nonsense ever been written about a war. Well that's not true, the West always fills the airwaves with a cacophony of complete nonsense when it goes to war.

Ukraine is the simplest situation ever, and it is exactly as Russia has laid out. When the West moved into Ukraine it tried to kick out Russia from the East of Ukraine and replace it with its own troops. Not unsurprisingly Russia resisted.

As a result obviously Russia never invaded Ukraine. The invaders are the West (as is the wide historical pattern). And Russia is simply defending its position from attack.

Now perhaps the Ukrainians unused to a government that consistently lies have been stupid enough to believe the fraud Zelenskyy. But war was a forgone conclusion the moment the West started militarising Ukraine. Whether they saw where Zelenskyy was taking Ukraine is down to them.

If Americans find Russia's resistance to US militarisation on their doorstep hard to understand perhaps they should have a look at the Cuba Missile crisis to help them understand. That crisis was not the same as Russia was defending Cuba from an actual attack by America. America attacked in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and then Russia moved in missiles. In Ukraine its the other wat around. America moved in missiles and then Russia attacked. America was the instigator of aggression in both cases. It always is.

The West is always the instigator of aggression. US has been at war continuously for its entire history. And the same for the UK. UK has invaded every country on Earth except Sweden and a few one man island sovereignties.

This is something people in the West don't get because they are lied to ever minute of ever day by their leaders. The West is the instigator of global aggression and always has been.

And so an incredibly simple situation like Ukraine is mangled by the western propaganda machine and complete garbage is pumped out of the media channels throughout the US Empire.

And if we think Ukraine is a load of nonsense, and we know Iraq was a load of nonsense, and Afghanistan, and 911 how much more was WW2! Literally everything ever written about WW2 in the West is a complete lie. Most from the pen of Churchill.

It really is the land of shadows here.

Mind, Brain and Illusions

 

Old lady, or young lady?

Its not the picture that matters here but what our mind does with it. Look one way and old lady, look another and young lady.

Obviously we are not getting the old or young lady "from" the picture because how could we decide. we are bringing the old lady and young lady "to" the picture. Plato discusses this in depth in the Theaetetus where he likens the mind to a clay tablet which can record impressions and when something matches an impression we get the experience.

Show this picture to people in the Amazonian jungle and they may not see either lady cos they are not familiar with the styles of clothing at all. The peasant woman, or the chic city girl. And maybe kids today may struggle as they may never have seen a peasant woman like that. 

Today we think about this happening in Neural Networks in the brain rather than clay tablets but the idea is the same. 

But there are 2 levels to this illusion. 1) is the visual illusion which can go either way. 2) is the interpretation of the illusion which can go many ways. Recently I got a slightly different view of it.  

I have been looking at illusions all my life, and thinking about reality and how it comes to be and only recently did I see clearly how important they are for uncovering the process of Mind. Usually we think like Plato and almost dismiss the magic of the illusion as a mechanical process in the brain. Big deal.

But if we go back and forget all the learning of brains and image recognition that force us into only 1 perspective of the illusion we can experience freshly the extraordinary experience of the picture changing before our eyes from a young woman into an old lady and back again. It is like the picture itself physically changes in from of our eyes. And it is a complete transparent process, there is no evidence anywhere of how it happens. How the images form is completely light and empty. There is some mental power required, we can "force" our way between the images but this is all happening not on the page but in our "Mind."

Now "Mind" is the central concept to Buddhism and I have wondered for a while exactly what it is. I suspect it is this. The ability to form the world and make it one way or the other. I am using Mind to change my interpretation of that illusion right now. It was boring material brains, neurons and clay tablets now it is something completely intangible, light and empty called Mind.

And so Buddha says this:

Well actually the word dharma has been mis-translated here. Replace "think" and "thought" with what is referred to here as Mind. Its that ability to switch between the old lady and the young lady, and to decide on what things are. When we look at this ability in its pure form like this it becomes incredibly profound.

The problem with Plato and Neural Networks is that we are using our Mind to decide on a particular interpretation of this experience. Our Mind can have such a fixed view of illusion (that its brain) that we don't see the infinite power of the mind at play.

If we just sit with this power we can see that everything that "exists" is really manifested by this power of the mind. Its far more than just old lady or young lady in that picture, but is at work throughout every aspect of our world. It is even manifesting here to make a sense of these words. This text is just another illusion! I have no idea if anyone will ever read this, I suppose I will come back again some time, and I have no idea what they will see in this "picture" of words I have painted.

This is the practice of meditation: to practice just being present and seeing "reality" as it is. That is NOT deciding whether the picture is an old lady or a young woman just examining the black marks on the page. And we can use the free "mind" that arises from that attention to just "reality" to really look at the processes that occur when we do suddenly see the old lady or the young woman. And we can examine the process that make these bizarre things arise. We can see that they are really illusions and we can see that there is not really an old lady or a young woman there.

"Pure Mind" they call this. A Mind free from deciding that can just look. Now isn't that an interesting thing that we can even observe how we make an illusion like the Old Lady come into existence! This is not "thinking" in any ordinary sense. This is even deciding, it is just allowing things to be as they are.

That is quite unusual for people in the West who are schooled from Day 1 to make things happen. We are encouraged to  actively engage with the world and make things happen, both physically and mentally. Look at me typing away here not just actively engaging with my mind but producing an account of it. The Mind is actually completely peaceful with no "activity" at all. Yet it is radiant like the Sun and it illuminates everything. But it does this effortlessly and without a single movement. It is this core stillness of Mind that enables things to move! How could the Old Lady emerge in a Mind that was 

itself busy manifesting.

That story of the Zen monk annoying a new recruit demanding to know Enlightenment by over filling their tea cup. How can you know enlightenment you stupid monk. You are already filled like this cup, how can I teach you, goes the exchange.

It is because the mind is empty that it has room to manifest the world. And this is that stage of staring at the black and white picture before deciding and just being there with it. And in that quiet space then activity happens and we get the old lady or the young lady. And we can work to push things one way or the other, and we can watch even the arising of desires to switch between. All this activity is not Mind it manifests in Pure Mind. And what is really profound to note is it is not us. We are watching it! It is not us! We may think "I'm seeing the Old Lady" but actually you can watch the arising of this illusion itself. Not just see the Old Lady but see the decision involved in making her come to exist. From the standpoint of a still mind we can see everything that happens as it happens. And we are none of it.

The Story of Me & Meditation

 Autobiographies are great vanity projects, but they reveal a fundamental possibility and reality. We can create a story about ourselves.

Without going into any details about what a story is, it is sufficient just to note that stories tend to have central characters. And when we watch a film or listen or read a story we don't need to be introduced to the idea that there is a central character. The very structure of story telling does this.

Many stories play with this starting of about some unknown person only to reveal that the main character is that person. Angel Heart being one. One that threw me a kid was Omen II where Damien must discover that he is the Devil. We know this from the start as the film is named after him, but he does not. Discovering you are the main character of a story you don't even know about must be incredibly troubling especially when that character is the ancient angel of light.

When we are born of course we are born into a story created by our parents and society. And in the West the process of becoming an "individual" is working out which parts of this story we want, and which we don't and whether we want to add anything else.

But none of this is reality. The very reason why stories are so innate and we love reading and watching them all day long in films and NEWS stories is because our brains are wired like this. Our brain is made to create stories. And people expect that of us. When we meet a friend the starting stages of the conversation are often to create some "story" about ourselves to fill the gap since we last saw them. And in anything other than a causal encounter we start telling the "story of me". We work hard on this story constructing it in stages during our life. Some is given to us by our parents, and some we make up.

People expect the character in our story to be "the good guy." We never read s story where we are the bad guy. Even in a story where the main character kills people, the story never rejects them.

But in reality our "story of me" can often reject us. Things don't go our way and we start to hate the main character in our film. And it can go the other way and we start to love the character in our film.

But neither of these are real. It is just stories.

The #1 distraction from meditation is this "story of me." True we can get consumed in other stoires, like we hear about something happening and we can't stop thinking about it. That can distract meditation too. But invariably because that happening somehow affects me. Suppose there is a murder near our house, or someone we know does something bad. Its not the murder or the bad thing, they happen all the time, its the "near me" that matters. So its part of the "story of me." "You'll' never guess, we say, but last week on the corner of our block..." and this is part of the "story of me."

When we meditate there is only one reality, the one that is present now. That is the sensations as they occur now, and all the mental events as they happen now. When something is happening it is real, it is tangible, we don't have to imagine it, it is there for us to experience. Now is the only meaning of Reality. Everything else is imagination and belief.

In anapanasati our reality is the breath and all the subtle components of that entity. We watch it all very closely and get interested in the minutiae of this profound real thing.

From the perspective of definite, tangible Reality we can see that all the story telling is imagination. And we can see easily how our brain naturally creates stories and put main characters in there. And then it is easy to see how the main character we call "me" is made, and also how transparent and unreal they are.

This is quite a revelation when you are brought up to defend, protect, and nurture this "me" as though it was real.

Now when we realise things like this its easy to chuck everything out, This is "nihilism" and we need be careful. Just because "me" is a fabrication of the mind, does not mean that everything previously associated with me goes in the bin. Our body is still real and we need look after it. But it is no longer belongs to the central character of a film.