Collecting Merit Badges

I find sitting to meditate that at the start I am always in the same state of mind: I am trying to gain something.

It is like I am always in primary school trying to get a merit badge.

Perhaps the star for getting to 10 breaths without mind wandering. Perhaps a best feeling of peace. Perhaps the best posture. Perhaps the best insight...

And that last one is the most revealing, because this insight here is key: we are supposed to be letting go. How silly a merit badge saying:

It is well acknowledged that all the other stars are perfectly valid, but ultimately we are seeking to let go and that means just opening our grasp and letting all this just go.

Now I resist saying "drop to the floor" because we are not going to smash the cup of tea we are drinking by dropping it on the floor. And we are not going to go homeless and live in a ditch (although we could) we are not dropping anything. We are just releasing our habitual fixed grip and becoming aware of how we are needing to grasp completely unnecessarily. Perhaps we can force that by living in a ditch or cave which may serve some purpose at a stage, by trying to force our hand open, but it just closes on new things so its only ever temporary. Can I have a badge for living in a cave for a year!

The most important badge we will get is the badge for letting go, but we won't even turn up to receive this badge as it is no longer seems relevant to us! It is a strange irony this.

To be exactly accurate if we are invited to an award ceremony we will turn up and accept the badge, why wouldn't we. But as they pin it on us, it is just being pinned on us like it was a carrot.

Another classic badge is:

Its my current opinion is that when you hear of people walking off the path this is the main cause. Alan Watts had a lot to say that is extremely learned and very interesting and thought provoking. In his own words he was a "disrupter" causing his listeners to let go of habitual thinking. All good you would think. But he himself grabbed hold of the whiskey bottle in later life and harmed his body so much he died from the effects of alcohol. So his body was like anyone body and it can get addicted to alcohol. Even a Buddha can get addicted to alcohol: they have a body after all. But the difference is that when we meet an alcoholic who is harming their body we probably wish to help them. So why would Alan Watts not wish to help his own body and avoid alcohol? He was still grasping too strongly, clearly not a demonstration liberated. So given all his work to liberate why did he not liberate? I suspect its that he thought he was a "Star Liberator" and confused this with actual liberation. Charles Manson the most notorious alternative guru of the 1960s I heard dabbled in yoga and meditation. Yet the collapse of it all in murder and crazy ideas of destructive revolution in many ways ended the 60s Hippie dream in the US. The path to liberation was not going to be very easy after all. More than anything I suspect he came to believe and wear a badge saying "star [something]" and this masked him from seeing the truth which is that he was one of the furthest and most in need of liberation. It is a shame however that when people fall they can taint "liberation" itself in the minds of others. But not respecting the path to liberation, and all the demons who conspire to cloud our view and mistake things is all part of the path itself!

===

Writing blogs!

So is there a risk of grasping in writing, thinking and recording progress?

Absolutely. For myself its multifaceted.

(1) After my Jhana? as a child I made a vow to never take a step that I could not lead other people over. It seemed wrong to attain wisdoms just for myself*.

(2) There is a fear of regression, that I want a record that I can always return to if I ever lose the way, and to record things I have tried that might be fruitless. "My Muse" would be great example of something fruitless. In a future life fancifully perhaps the internet will still exist and I could stumble on this blog or similar to warn myself.

(2.1)There is always that thought in my mind that someone may stumble across this and find it interesting or useful, and my greater wish is that someone reads it and points out the direction. I have very good teachers in fact I can ask for help, but somehow I no longer know what to ask them and have always liked feeling in the dark. But perhaps there is ego to this that I wish to liberate myself and own that liberation: uh ho if true how relevant this blog! They say Ehipassiko (come and see) and Buddha says check all dharma until you are sure it is true for yourself, but this must be extremely close to a particular dharma becoming "yours" which we can then grasp as we do anything perceived as "mine". How lame is modern propaganda that to try and get the populace on side the establishment just relabels thing as "yours".. "Your Election" etc. How manipulative and superficial.
(3) Happily I don't think there is any desire to wrap myself in this blog and own it or gain anything from it. But I can never be so sure as this is all very subtle and the things we are most sure of with deeper awareness we turn out to be fooling ourselves.

(4) In the same spirit as "The Monk and the Philosopher" by Jean-François Revel, Matthieu Ricard there is also great interest to try and unify Eastern and Western philosophy into a coherent whole. There are many issues in the West that after centuries are still unresolved like the relationship between Body/Mind and Self/Other and Freedom/Determinism. Kant referred to them as Antimonies, but later Dialectical thinking sort to resolve them in Aufheben. But these are fully attended to in Eastern philosophy and finding a link between Western approaches and Eastern would resolve them. There is considerable interest here to see if such a path exists. It is easy to think that Western Philosophy is just a wrong path set up by Plato. But many of the concerns of the West are mirrored by the East.

More generally though can you really write Dharma? Buddha always created Dharma teachings on the spot. "Thus have I heard" start the sutras because he spoke them to an assembly in response to questions, in many ways like Socrates they were not spoken to be recorded forever but to enlighten those in the then present conditions. And like Socrates speaking of Logos, Buddha is pointing to a "truth" that is only ever be present. It cannot be accessed in the Past or the Future which are just fabrications built on the Present. All things come back to the Present at root. SO this really suggests that Blogging is a waste of time. I certainly see many approaching Dharma from this Zen angle:

[End of Blog]

-------------------------------------------------

SO is there any harm tho in blogging as long as it doesn't encourage us to grasp more? A Blog or Vlog proclaiming that it has the ultimate "life hack" or the "key to life" is obviously just click bait. You are not going to read the truth. But you might be encouraged to see if for yourself or enquire for it.

But isn't that more grasping?

Ok interesting: perhaps yes. I think Western Philosophy is often sold like Chess. They teach you a few moves and then let you play. How about a starting question like "Are you free?" You go "well yes". The philosophy replies "but were you free to say "no"?". Okay I'm using SRH here to generate a contradiction. But you just need something that gets the victim thinking in a path and then leave them to it. This is actually encouraging grasping so is not Dharma. My own history is like this. I used to take pleasure in finding out things: in particular hearing again and again that a Blue Whale could grow to 30 metres and finding that spell bindingly amazing. But as I grew up I asked a new self-aware question: "are there any questions that can't be answered?" I was told "yes, for example some philosophical questions." And it was seeking to answer those that began the path I am still on. I remember the day clearly. But this was obviously not Dharma as it leads to more grasping. "My Muse" fits into this because I used to say to girls that I wanted them to stop me thinking. I was aware that seeking to frame everything in thought was a binding. But I only ended up swapping one grasping for another!

It is very unintuitive this letting go. And because Ego is so ready to step up and "help" we usually seek to do something to get us closer to letting go. Not realising ironically that the very act of stepping up to do something is grasping itself. This is why the meditator sits down and avoids action, observing instead the arising and decay of all things especially those originating "within" or--as best as discernible at our level of awareness--in the vicinity of Ego.

So while SRH is still an interest perhaps I should separate that concern from the issue of liberation and the actual blog goal of Life itself. Liberation does not mean we cannot do stuff, but it does mean we do not present stuff that leads to grasping as any part of the path.

I am not qualified to lead people to liberation. I am still seeking that myself so not correct to start a blog called liberation and there are plenty of others doing exactly that. But as a personal path I should just keep doing this but be mindful of that which leads to grasping and that which leads to letting go.