letting go is compassion

I’ve been sharing my struggles with life with a few people lately. I needed the input, because I wasn’t getting “far enough” and through my issues. (Two of my core issues)

Here are a couple quotes from my journal after a discussion with my brother who made time for me to talk over the weekend. “Let go, not of the loving and the authentic awareness connection in openness, BUT of the issue, the knowing, the wanting other than what is. Return to tending, being with, and resting in presence.” “The seeing that my issue of lamenting non-authentic connection with “loved ones” is causing suffering for me and for others and causing non-connection with current loved ones is revelatory.”

Then, after thinking and understanding these things, some calm relflection allowed me to let go and realize that letting go in awareness is compassionate action. And, it was clear, and still is rather clear that this letting go IS compassion. Awareness is the truth of our being in existence, which is non-egotistic and non-dualistic and non-thinking. The simplicity of this calm and simple truth is so often unknown and unexperienced because we are not letting go of our “egocentric karmic conditioning,” as Cheri Huber puts it. And then it is also clear that there is nothing to gain when we let go. This isn’t about health or peace, this is about seeing that we are creating our own suffering and we can realize it’s cessation through the compassionate activity of letting go of the madness of all of it–ego, conditioning, thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, habits, consciousness, desires, avoidances, beliefs, ideas, et cetera. This is where Krishnamurti is so helpful in reiterating over and over that “the seeing is the doing.” When we see that we are causing our own suffering by not letting go, then letting go is compassionate activity.

Gratitude to all wise teachers, aware friends, and those who don’t quite understand, because learning abounds if we are open to the way things are.

attitude

How did I get this difficult attitude that is so harshly perfectionistic and critical of my own self? I know how, it was my defense mechanism in dealing with the harsh criticism and judgement that my father applied in his conditional parenting. I was smart, did quite well in school (and got some praise for that activity), and did what I was told to do (or else punishment). I’ve spent countless time relearning about my past and life such that I could arrive at and understand the answer to this question of how my ego conditioned self functions.

But the question for me nowadays is how do I move onward from the old habits that keep me in fearful avoidance of assumed and projected disapproval and punishment? Now that I am softer and more open to the subtleties of life, how do I flow with the energies and live fully, rather than resist, stress, depress, and struggle trying to make it through each torturous day of monotony?

I need an essential healthy attitude adjustment. I do not need a conditional repositioning of views and beliefs such that I can be what others may think is successful. That’s what I’ve been doing most of my life, trying to appease others’ expectations and act well, which drains me of all my good natural positive energy. I am watching this occur each evening I come home after working a job I just barely like (I consider myself lucky and am very grateful for this job at this time in my life, which isn’t an essentially good attitude). The FACT that my energy is so very drained each and every day is a massive warning.

Very deeply I actually, and even somewhat easily now, see the inherent essential goodness of all being. Of course, though, I like to call this The Great Emptiness of the Way, along with Zen Buddhists and Taoists. But each day, I get highly mired in the day-to-day muck of conditional existence. HAH! There! That is my attitude I must change if I am going to rest in deep presence and move from great emptiness in my life. I aspire to live this way more than anything else at all. I see this is my calling to live this way, though it’s manifestation and expression I do not know. I NEED to find the effortless effort of harmonizing with the Great Emptiness and Goodness of the Way things always and already are. My attitude (collection of beliefs, views, and thinking) needs to practically support harmony, not conditional living strategies that I learned in trying to appease parents, teachers, friends, etc.

TOWARDS THIS, I shall read a book I haven’t completely read yet. I will start the book over from the beginning. I acquired Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s first book, “Turning the Mind into an Ally” when I started meditating in 2003. As he is quoted on the back cover, “We can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it. This is a practice anyone can do.”

In my current practice of seeing myself as clearly as possible in order to move beyond the hard conditioned egotistic karmic aspect of my life, I am ready to embrace a thorough attitude adjustment that is harmonious with the Great Allowing Presence of the Way. Since I have experienced a great awakening in this vein at another time of my life (2005-6), I am already very aware that this can be the way in which I live my life. I am hungry for harmonious goodness and a warmly open attitude towards everything.

realistic apology

My ego conditioned mind self really liked you. I wanted to be with you for this lifetime, growing in intimacy and togetherness. I failed to decipher the difference between the ego-self and the very boundless soulful energetic Self. This led to a relapse into depression, getting caught up deeply in my own egotistic  issues and merging with the grandiose energy and awareness that cannot be claimed as ego nor harnessed for ego’s masked use. Actually, it/we can, but it’s not the same as freely flowing beyond suffering with the Way we are and everything is. We are not conditioned minds, yet that’s exactly how the mind thinks: linearly. We are bounded by our conditioned minds and bodily forms, though this itself is not the cause of suffering as our conditioned minds and aching bodies may try to trick us into believing. Our cause of suffering is wanting things to be other than it is due to the ignorance of our conditioned minds and restricted bodies. With awareness and paying attention in the normal functioning of both mind and body, awakening occurs naturally.

So, I am sorry I got so confused. It’s such an ordinary thing, because we are typically living ordinary lives in such conditioned reality. I want you. I want intimacy. I want deeper loving. I was(and still am) willing to practice with my conditioning and deficient body, but you weren’t(and still aren’t). I can’t continue using that fact against myself. I have apologized profusely for my ignorance and the troubles that I have caused. I am grateful beyond measure for all that I have experienced with you. Even though I was attached to “us” and “you,” I know, not in a conditioned way, that I love you. If I distorted this love, then I know my conditioned mind would be in control. NO.

This love experience will continue to grow within me like the roots of a tree, filling me up with awareness of life and the beauty of being. I am grounded in a profound understanding that awareness itself is the key that unlocks the conditioning of the mind and restrictions of the body. I pray for the strength to commit to this evolutionary path of awakening and to offer this to all who ask of me. I cannot force anyone to embrace awareness as I do, for this is a relative truth that harmonizes within my specific being with the energy of absolute universal existence.

wanted: relationship harmony

I awoke this morning to a disturbing dream of my father and me arguing. To describe briefly, I was living at home, my childhood home with my parents. We were sitting down to eat a simple breakfast together. I was rushing around getting my stuff together to visit a new client. As we were eating, I introduced a strange grater made from bamboo to add a condiment to the food we were eating. I asked if anyone else wanted to use it. My dad said sure. I wondered if I should ask if he knows how to use it, but decided not to. My dad proceeded to cut his food with the utensil, at which point I exclaimed in order for him to discontiue his action.  What ensued was an argument, the details of which I cannot remember well. The tone was not terribly harsh, though I felt very hurt as my father would not delve into deeper levels of talking and understanding in order to learn and bring forth mutual harmony in this difficult moment we were having. And, my highly emotional frustration grew in relation to deeply knowing that it is possible to bring relationship harmony into this situation, if we only both wanted to.

I feel I am at the point of isolation, due to the most intimate people in my life not wanting to bring harmony, communication, learning, and understanding into our relationships. This appears true not only with my father, but with a couple of my siblings, and even my ex-fiancee. Even though I too have gone through a period of my life where I ex-communicated someone I was dating, I do not understand why or how these very significant close people in my life continue to maintain their walls as if they are protected from something they fear. Do they fear learning, opening, changing, growing, harmony? No. They fear intimacy which erodes their beloved sense of ego-identification–whether they realize it or not. Thus, they close me out of their lives or parts of their lives. I’m left in my own awareness of the wall they are putting up in between us. Hence, suffering for both of us, though they believe it is beneficial for them to separate what is unseparable and live in maintained ignorance and dualistic thinking about this and that.

It doesn’t suffice for me that this exists as it does. This is suffering which doesn not need to exist, if we only just understood that healing and peace is possible in these relationships. I realize it, I continue practicing and nudging these people along, yet I seem to make very little progress in introducing non-dual awareness being with these people. I practice it myself to the best of my ability, but they don’t even seem to see the worthiness of my activity. I bring an interesting grater to the table, or concepts about the unseparated, impermanent, empty quality of reality, and what I receive is “get the fuck away from me,” stop talking about awareness,” or “I don’t want to work on us anymore.”

Herein lies my isolation. The very concepts that bring my conscious awareness to the reality of human existence appears to separate me from the people I love and want deep natural harmony with in this short lifetime. I do not know what to do next, for my words and actions appear to fail miserably to bring about deeper “being with.” Very sadly, these key people in my life with whom I desire an ever evolving closer relationship with, prefer to put up walls in front of me. Their ignorance and fear is causing me great frustration, even as my intention is deep harmonic resonance of being alive as we are. Ahh, but this active being requires conscious letting go, open sensitivity, willing flexibility, and intentional attention on being one with one another.

I don’t want to leave these key people in my life as they have walled me out of their lives! This doesn’t seem to be an egotistic desire, as much as an authentic sense of harmonizing with my own father, brother, and significant other. I suppose even uttering “my own …” is too egotistic, attached, and wanton. Actually it is very important for me to realize that I WANT something that their egos do not want; harmony. What do they want? Well, they’re focused on their own desires. My desire is to be very deeply present with people and nature in life. Why can’t the people who say they love me, love me too? I understand neither of us are perfect in this endeavor, but please don’t put up walls. Or, if you do still need to put up a wall, make it temporary and don’t shut me out so rigidly. I love you too and want flowers to grow and water to flow along the paths of our being together. If there is a wall, there will be no light nor movement. You will have stopped us from being one.

Now, I sit in solitude; quite sad, and slightly hopeful still. I know, without thinking, that harmony is the way of all being. Refreshingly, I may look to earth’s elements for solace in this journey where humans want no harmony as we do. Oneness of being is always present, empty, forever.

Your wall, and my walls too, exist when we cling to self/ego and do not faithfully trust in the greatness of the Way that is.

Walls and Vows

Walls are dividers. Physical walls offer us protection from that which exists on the other side. This may be quite necessary, as in building a home with insulated walls that protect us from environmental conditions like the wind, rain, and temperature. We also construct ideological walls in our psyche to protect us from cutural conditions. The physical and the mental, the internal and the external are dualistic distinctions, yet they are helpful for developing Right Understanding and the clarity of wise discernment.

I am not typically humble enough in my relationships with others. This is one of my remaining walls that I am deconstructing and unlearning. I learned this in order to protect myself and project an insincere confidence of coolness. The coolness has gotten me far, so to speak. Yet, it has also disabled me from connecting with others more deeply, something I know I desire to the depths of my being. It is original human nature to connect freely in the midst of all cause and conditions. We can say this takes love and compassion, though it also takes deconstruction of our walls. It is my egotistic self that denies an aspect of connection, which is my wall of arrogant coolness. People noticing my wall perceive me as righteous and indignant. I try to talk through the walls of others, meanwhile missing my own ignorance which causes a great problem and certain suffering.

What is fascinating is we don’t perceive our own walls as our unique problems that we need to address and debunk. My wall of knowledgeable arrogance and stylistic coolness traps me in ignorance, where I feel quite safe from the emptiness of existence. Now I know many people don’t even tread in this territory of “emptiness,” however, when understood as the universal order of existence, we may rest in presence rather than wall ourselves with what we know. I hope that makes sense. I’ll continue with my life example. When I say I want to connect with my brother and remain unable to see my own wall of arrogant knowledge, then I am the one who is ignorant and will remain ignorant until I wake up to my own walls. What is even more amazing to me is that I often talk with others about their walls that prevent connection within our relationship. They typically may agree that a wall exists in them as I have pointed out, yet have no desire to deconstruct the wall. The wall is there to protect them and they want the wall to maintain their egotistic structure they are working on. This is what I have been consistently ignorant of for most of my life–a deeply ingrained pattern, a wall of egotistic protection. I have been both comfortable with and unwilling to see that I have been very hypocritical in preserving my egotistic wall while trying to demand that others deconstruct theirs. I thought that in helping others see their wall, I was helping them.

Yet, even if this may be partly true, if we are not “ready” or “willing” to look at our own walls as impeding factors for fulfillingly free living, we will not see our walls as the problems. Our walls are always “the problem”, always the work that we need to do in opening to reality, in enlightening ourselves, in helping others. If I realize you have a wall in place, it is now my responsibility to respect you as you are, walls and all. In this realization and practice, I must be humble enough to ‘be with’ you without arrogantly calling attention to your walls that I sense and see, which is causes me to ignorantly and firmly erect my wall of arrogant indignation and cause suffering for both you and me. SO, heretofore, I take upon my second life vow to deconstruct my wall of hypocritical ignorant arrogant indignation and practice humble connection with others.

For the record, my first life vow is to always do my best.

over, under, around; always just this

For the most part, as I am depressed, I lose my mind, body, spirit, energy, time, consciousness, awareness to my ego’s control. But, since my ego saved my life through perceived and real struggles and threats in a troublesome childhood experience by receding into depression, passivity and following the wills and wishes of others as well as possible, now, my ego is largely in control.

I’m feeling like I am having a mental breakdown now. I can’t handle all the pressure that my ego-centric karmic conditioning is putting onto me. It’s ruined my adult life, not saved it. I don’t really know what “Self” is anymore, or how to be other than my egotistically controlled small self which is really just killing me slowly.

Why is this so? WHY? Why do I live with a sense of pure empty worthless meaninglessness as my core understanding of self? I see nothingness, even beauty is empty, and thus all life too. My ego has certainly integrated Zen Buddhist concepts and psychologically philosophical cultural views to keep me, whatever me is, from happiness. I’m not worthy of anything. I should be dead, I should have died, but I am still living without purpose, reason, or meaning. Others don’t seem to connect with me either, nor I with them in any profoundly deep ways. All my relationships seem insignificantly superficial, and, yes, thusly, meaningless. Ego returns to thinking that the nature of reality is ambiguity and emptiness, so stop trying to make meaning out of nothing. I can’t make meaning, it’s all impermanent and shifting like all things in nature. Meaning is, well, silly.

Thus, I return to my most recently created mantra, “infinite being is being with.” No meaning, no trying, nothing can get in the way of being with as long as I am living. But, as the ego understands it, this may be it’s greatest strategy yet for keeping me from any amount of happiness in this lifetime. Since “being with” is effortlessness, purity, and the truth of reality, my ego has seemingly found a way to give up all conditionality and be thoroughly unhappy in this unseparated existence. All existence naturally depresses and overwhelms me in it’s magnitude. I cry, being with this crushing feeling. I cry, realizing that my fiancee left me. I cry, knowing my current career is unsatisfactory. I cry, viewing no deep authentic human connection in my life.

So, I am amidst the abyss of loneliness and emptiness. It seems not to matter that anyone else exists, because they can’t connect with me, or vice versa. Life has been deconstructed into the essentials of reality (ambiguity, creativity, contingency, change – impermanence, nonseparation, emptiness) whereas, like any bit of unconscious matter, I too exist here and now, hard and cold. It’s amazing blood and breath still flow through me. But that’s all there is, a material maze of coexistence, truly infinitely unknowable and nonmeaningful. It is what it is, that’s how it is.