The Grateful Dead - A Follow Up

I received a great question on my Grateful Dead post that I'd like to follow up on here.

Could you clarify what you mean 'The more dead you are in life, the more alive you’ll be after death', is this related to cessation and/or no self? Do you have any fear of death? What is best to emphasize in practice to achieve this?

Yes, it’s definitely related to cessation and no self. But just about any practice should be a good preparation for death if you develop it to an industrial strength level of "CC&E". 

Sometimes it's useful to distinguish death in the sense of no longer existing, from death in the sense of going through the dying process. Noting Gone would probably be a good preparation for death in the sense of no longer existing. Noting Gone leads to an appreciation of the paradoxical richness of Nothing. A life of noting Gone is a life of intimacy with the richness of death. That's what I meant by the somewhat enigmatic claim: "the more dead you are during life, the more alive you'll be after death." 

Regarding, preparation for the dying process, familiarity with restful states and familiarity with expansion and contraction can be helpful. Basically, when a baby comes into the world, it does so through the peristalsis of its mother's womb. That peristalsis represents the expansion and contraction that pervades of all of nature. When we pass out of existence, those same polar forces grind away the somethingness of self and world. If things go well, you’ll re-identify with those forces, and become your formless parent—thus, in a sense, “sidestepping” your personal demise. Not everyone is fortunate enough to experience the dying process that way. On the other hand, almost anyone can experience the dying process in terms of ever-deepening states of pleasant rest: visual rest (darkness or bright light), auditory rest (mental talk gets wiped away, the ear defocuses), and body rest (you're so exhausted that you don't want to move even a tiny bit. This can induce a continuous and profound global relaxation). When I'm asked to guide someone through the dying process, I typically have them focus on See Rest, Hear Rest, Feel Rest, and it almost always works. Of course, I'm usually working with people who already have a meditation practice, but not inevitably. I've also had success using rest states to facilitate the passing of non-meditators.

Am I afraid of death? All I can say is this: I have no doubt that if I had not done all those decades of practice, I would be quite concerned on a daily basis with the prospect of my own mortality (I turned 72 a few days ago). That doesn't seem to be happening much. To be honest, I have no idea of what my reaction will be when the end comes. However I am quite confident that some part of me will know exactly what to do, regardless of what may arise. 

The Grateful Dead

I’ll be turning 70 in just 2 months—yipes! And I’m definitely noticing a gradual change in the tenor of my life. In former decades, it was all about births and weddings and exciting possibilities. Now it seems to be about funerals and hospital visits and wondering when my first major health crisis will hit. If this sounds like a bummer, it should. But actually, it’s not such a big problem because I have a practice.

The mind and body eventually deteriorate but apparently one’s practice just continues to grow ever stronger and clearer. My mind seems to be declining in a linear fashion, whereas “my mindful” seems to be growing exponentially.

For me, that practice provides direct contact with the forces of life (Expansion) and death (Contraction). There are two sides to this:

Formless Doing

(Expansion and Contraction gush out and gather in simultaneously)

 and

Formless Rest

(Expansion and Contraction mutually cancel out into Gone). 

Being formless, these experiences are a kind of death but a good kind of death…a death in the service of life.

Goethe (following in the tradition of Heraclitus) describes it in his Holy Longing poem:

Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet:
Das Lebendge will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
                     . . .
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt. 

Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde. 

                  ---

Tell it to no one but the wise
For most will mock it right away
The truly living do I prize
Those who long in flame to die.
                   . . .
Distance cannot slow your flight
Spellbound through the air you're borne
Til at last mad for the light
You are a butterfly, then…gone. 

And until you know of this:
How to grow through death
You're just another troubled guest
On the gloomy earth. 

Once you know of this, it very much changes how you think about your own physical death. I recently found myself summarizing this change with the laconic (and perhaps to some enigmatic) sentence:

The more dead you are in life, 

the more alive you’ll be after death. 

(Understanding that dead here refers to the enlivening death you experience when you melt in the formless Fountain of Youth.).

These phrases translate nicely into Chinese (read the right column first):

Looks a bit like something you might see in the neiye.

The Dharma Wheel -- A New Translation

For New Years 2012, I posted my poem entitled "The Dharma Wheel." I recently came up with a new translation that rhymes in English.

Dealing With Anxiety: Part I

A colleague of mine, Jeff Warren, has written an interesting article on the “nondual scene”. You can check it out here. This inspired me to organize some thoughts I’ve been kicking around for a while.

As a kid growing up in LA, I had the great privilege to attend both American public school and Japanese ethnic school. (Over a half a century later, the Japanese school I attended still exists; check it out here.) At Japanese School, I was a member of the Kendo club. My kendo senseis were incredible—mostly old-time Japanese military types—in a sense, modern-day samurai.

During a club event, someone gifted me a hachimaki (headband) with three very simple kanji calligraphed on it. I could read the kanji and understood what each meant individually. But I couldn’t figure out what they meant collectively. I queried several native Japanese speakers but no one was able to give me a decent explanation. The three characters were:

   入 meaning “enter.”

不 meaning “not.”

 二 meaning “two.”

Later in life, when I got involved in academic Buddhist studies, I finally found the locus classicus for the phrase. It appears in the Chinese translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra. It’s an exhortation to “enter nonduality.” Within the context of sword fighting, that would mean to enter in a state where there’s no separation between you and your opponent.

To “enter nonduality” is equivalent to eliminating separation, but it’s hard to get a tangible sense of how one would go about eliminating separation for real. It’s easy enough to intellectually accept the notion of non-otherness or to be emotionally moved by it. But those ideas and emotions will pretty much evaporate as soon as “other” breaks into your house, or deeply betrays you, or harms a loved one. So how do we tangibly go about the endeavor of achieving industrial strength nondual awareness—the kind that doesn’t evaporate when things happen in the real world?

Here’s one idea.

Consider fear. When there’s separateness, there’s suffering due to fear. Is this true in reverse? Is it the case that when suffering due to fear goes away, so does separateness? Apparently so. And, conveniently, working through the sensory experience of fear is a very tangible endeavor—one brings concentration, clarity, and equanimity to the body sensations of fear until they break up into a flowing energy. In other words, when mindfulness passes a certain critical threshold, the fear “particle” reveals its wave nature. It is precisely at that point that separateness goes away, revealing the primordial oneness that was always there.

So working with the fear family of emotions (fear, anxiety, nervousness, angst, worry, phobia, etc.) represents a tangible way to go about the enterprise of achieving nondual awareness.  (For specifics, check out Chapter 1 The Way of Thoughts and Emotions in the manual and this video playlist on working with emotions from the Shinzen Interviews Youtube Channel. )

Now let’s look a little deeper. I think it’s useful to distinguish two levels of nondual awareness:

NONDUAL   l        versus       NONDUAL   II

Nondual I is the non-separateness of inside and outside I just described. It comes about when we experience oneness of Self and Scene. (In this context, Self means the inner world of Mental Image, Mental Talk, and Emotional Body Sensations. Scene means the outer world of Physical Sights, Physical Sounds, and Physical Body Sensations. See manual pp. 21-34.)

Nondual II comes about when one experiences the oneness of Self/Scene with their Source. The Self/Scene is the world of sensory form. The Source is Pure Consciousness devoid of form.

Above I described one possible way to make Nondual I a tangible enterprise. But how about Nondual II? How can we get to the state where Form and Emptiness are one? One way to make that endeavor tangible involves working with the “Two Doings”—Expansion and Contraction (see “What is Mindfulness?” pp. 40-46):

Each of the trillion somethings of daily life is directly touched by the Two Doings that mold it in real time. But those Two Doings continuously come from and return to the One Nothing. Thus, the Two Doings represent an unsevered umbilicus that connects the myriad momentary forms with the One Timeless Source.

To experience this connection consistently in daily life is to achieve Nondual II.

For more specifics, check out:

• Expansion-Contraction video playlist
• Five Ways to Know Yourself manual, pp. 56-62, 153-159
• The Absolute Witness video 
• Nondual Awareness video

Mathematics for Mystics: Welcome to my Geek Out

I’ve recently been having some cool email exchanges with a professionally-trained mathematician, Newcomb Greenleaf. He now teaches in the Individualized BA program at Goddard College, and is on the board of the Yoga Science Foundation.

Just for the fun of it, I’m including a few excerpts here.

I said:

Here are some thoughts on category theory but, first, a big disclaimer:  I am a total dilettante amateur in mathematics. No formal training whatsoever--or, rather, my formal training ended at Venice High School, where I flunked beginning algebra three times in a row (much to the chagrin of my parents!). I only know what I've picked up on my own through books and the Internet. I'm also acutely aware of how easy it is to "see the Virgin Mary in your danish", i.e., see what you want to see in science and math results. Newton thought the attractive power of universal gravity was a reflection of God's love (so by that logic, is dark energy proof of God's hate?). Maupertuis was convinced that the Principle of Least Action, proved God's existence. (Voltaire wrote a parody of him called Doctor Akakia.) Even Leibniz, who by all accounts was probably one of the most versatile western intellects of all time, believed that mod-2 arithmetic demonstrated how God could make something (1) out of nothing (0). These guys represent the cream of professionals, and I'm just a dilettante amateur! So having stated all of this by way of caveat, here are the parts of category theory that seem to resonate with Buddhism and my personal meditation experience. 

Connection is a huge theme in Buddhism. It's elaborated philosophically in the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda. The slogan is "This being that is." Indeed in the Mahayana formulation, there aren't even entities--just connections. As you know, category theory is all about arrows--different flavors of arrows connected in various ways. Paralleling Mahayana, it's even theoretically possible to do away with the objects themselves. So, in a sense, both Buddhist philosophy and category theory seem to say "it's arrows all the way down."   

Moving on to a different theme, in the way I like to formulate impermanence, binary contrast is very important--different ways in which self-cancelling polarities can mold experience. In my system, this is formulated in terms of expansion-contraction (check out more about this here, here, and p. 56 on here...). One important class of categories are "pointed categories" or "categories with a zero object". The arrows in these categories all start from zero and return to zero--which sounds an awful lot like  how I experience consciousness working). I talk a bit about the history of zero in my article Algorithm and Emptiness--here's the link. I also talk about related issues on pp. 151-159 and pp. 173-183 in my Five Ways manual. 

So to the extent that category theory generalizes group theory, the theme of mutually cancelling polarities is a major theme, and that maps on to my meditative experience rather nicely. Category theory then goes on to generalize invertibility itself with the notion of adjoint functors. Although the language is just coincidental, I love phrases like "forgetful functor" and "free functor." In contemplative practice, we first forget our specific identity, which then frees us up to assume arbitrary identities. Once again, I'm very aware that the language used here is merely coincidental, but I do find it amusing.  

Moving on, at the most universal level, arrows can always be reversed. There's this incredibly beautiful duality principle that pervades every facet of category theory. Pythagoras, Lao-Tzu, Hegel, and Marx would all be pleased. 

Newcomb responded:

I felt privileged to allow the elegance of your mathematics to enhance the punch of the dharma. Tangibly, they have inspired me to re-examine my understanding of the foundations of math in categorical terms.  I've had to recall my rather checkered history with categories. In graduate school I was good friends with Peter Freyd, whose thesis became the first book about category theory, which up 'til then was treated in the context of algebra or geometry or topology.  It's called Abelian Categories, and I find that it's still in print. I learned to think categorically I recall Peter's excitement and particularly his emphasis that, "We used to think that category theory just did away with the elements.  Now we see that it also does away with the objects." and it's nice to see that insight again.  

To which I responded: 

I'm totally awestruck/starstruck that you were good friends with Peter Freyd.