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clinging to comfort
Frankly, I find it helpful to accept the fact that the mind is supposed to wander! That way you can stop contending - perhaps the most important step on the way. Once you stop contending, you can find the way that matches your nature best.
In the end, the only thing that works is paying attention to what you are doing. Not anything in particular ("Breath, the particular area being stretched, chakra, overall body, whatever" ), but rather everything in general. This is not particularly possible when you are contending with yourself. Your focus then becomes one of contending with yourself. Ironically, expecting (desiring) your mind not to wander never works. Only letting go 'works'.
In other words, [chref=43]That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action. The teaching that uses no words, the benefit of resorting to no action, these are beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the world.[/chref]
Again, fully accept than a wandering mind is a natural mind; you don't want to go up against mother nature do you? If you don't contend, you can better cooperate with the way things are. [chref=68]This is known as matching the sublimity of heaven[/chref]. What more could you ask for? Furthermore, as a bonus, you will find in your yoga [chref=45]great perfection[/chref].
Oh, and forget the 'chakra' business. Names complicate the simple. i.e., [chref=32]Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names One ought to know that it is time to stop.[/chref] Focus on what you are feeling and drop the labels. For example, rather than think about focusing on breathing, feel yourself doing it, and watch that feeling. Same applies to everything you sensually experience. Chakra, like so many labels we conjure up is not based in the reality of experience; rather it is more an artifact of the human analytical mind. This is a common 'by-path' that is best not trod if you want to experience [chref=56]mysterious sameness[/chref].
A long answer for a short question, but once the fingers start tapping it and the mind start pondering, it takes on a momentum of its own. Hope it helps some Chris.
In the end, the only thing that works is paying attention to what you are doing. Not anything in particular ("Breath, the particular area being stretched, chakra, overall body, whatever" ), but rather everything in general. This is not particularly possible when you are contending with yourself. Your focus then becomes one of contending with yourself. Ironically, expecting (desiring) your mind not to wander never works. Only letting go 'works'.
In other words, [chref=43]That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action. The teaching that uses no words, the benefit of resorting to no action, these are beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the world.[/chref]
Again, fully accept than a wandering mind is a natural mind; you don't want to go up against mother nature do you? If you don't contend, you can better cooperate with the way things are. [chref=68]This is known as matching the sublimity of heaven[/chref]. What more could you ask for? Furthermore, as a bonus, you will find in your yoga [chref=45]great perfection[/chref].
Oh, and forget the 'chakra' business. Names complicate the simple. i.e., [chref=32]Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names One ought to know that it is time to stop.[/chref] Focus on what you are feeling and drop the labels. For example, rather than think about focusing on breathing, feel yourself doing it, and watch that feeling. Same applies to everything you sensually experience. Chakra, like so many labels we conjure up is not based in the reality of experience; rather it is more an artifact of the human analytical mind. This is a common 'by-path' that is best not trod if you want to experience [chref=56]mysterious sameness[/chref].
A long answer for a short question, but once the fingers start tapping it and the mind start pondering, it takes on a momentum of its own. Hope it helps some Chris.
Comments
The master does not cling to his/her own comfort.......I try my best to eat and sleep well and to maintain balance in my life. Currently I am involved in a extremely challenging two month portion of my education in a new city. The time constraints of modern life often make it difficult to maintain balance. I am sleeping little and finding it difficult to maintain a regular and healthy diet. This is creating some anxiety for me.
The master does not cling to comfort, yet one must try to maintain balance and a healthy body. I am thinking that I should try to eliminate the anxiety I'm feeling by realizing that I am doing my best and that this is an opportunity to lean not to cling to my comfort. There is a time for being busy and a time for being at rest. I am also finding that mild sleep deprivation can be a useful spiritual tool when it is a reality that one is facing. Thank you for your time.....I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
~Josh
You've gotta twang the string to get a note out of it.
And welcome.
That question of balance is a mysterious one. To paraphrase the chapter, ‘[chref=36]If you would have a thing balanced, you must first unbalance it[/chref]’. I guess you could say there is apparent balance and then there is meta balance – ‘the big picture’ of balance. Forgive me for one more paraphrasing, [chref=2]Thus unbalanced and balanced produce each other; The unbalanced and the balanced complement each other; [/chref] and so on.
It is easy, when we feel life’s suffering, to label a source for that suffering. You know, ‘the devil’, ‘desire’, ‘expectations’, ‘evil spirits’, ‘democrats’, ‘pollution’, ‘communists’, ‘republicans’ ... I suppose the list is endless. One more to add might be ‘unbalance’.
I suspect that [chref=32]naming[/chref] the source of our suffering doesn’t alleviate the suffering, but rather adds to it. It gives us a way to make a mountains out of a mole hills, or much bigger mountains out of a big ones. Ironically however, in our subjective experience, we feel it lessens the suffering and so continue to name 'it'. Or, on the other hand, such labeling may make no difference what so ever. Perhaps I’m just naming the labeling as the source of suffering. Who [chref=71]knows[/chref]? That’s why I always end up watching out for that subtler side of ‘reality’ [chref=56]known as mysterious sameness[/chref].
Life is two sided: up and down, young and old, foolish and wise, happy and sad (not to mention life and death). As far as I can make out, these two produce each other. Although we, and probably all life, are instinctively driven to want only one side – the pleasurable, and urgently seek to avoid the other side – the pain and suffering. How futile is that? What a superb [chref=65]hoodwink[/chref] Nature serves up on life. Oh well, time to go plant some tomatoes.
Tao as 'path' has pointed my attention to the messy balancing and unbalancing that goes into walking. As engineers trying to replicate our walking in robots are discovering, and as Carl’s comments on naming suggests, when you have to stop to name the challenges of any selected moment, or step, things start looking pretty chaotic real quickly.
While we've been walking pretty successfully in one form or another for some millions of years, it looks to me like our thoughts are still at the point where they assume they're being asked to 'solve the problem' of walking (and too many other problems) by freezing it into moments, and 'solving' all the balancing and imbalancing involved. The math there consistently remains at the edge of our abilities.
Next on our thoughts’ grand plan/promise is usually to generalize their sharp, reductive observations, promising to re-arrive at the step our bodies knew how to take in the first place.
As we find so often these days in engineering, the hot design path is to model the organic solution that already works. Here’s just this in a nice recent example: http://www.physorg.com/news130672678.html.
As an engineer myself I'm pretty familiar with such approaches to a problem, and the sort of products our thoughts do indeed come up with that way: more cartoons than breakthroughs, but ones that do work, and educate. Our professional cultures are also comfortable with maximizing our thoughts’ evaluations of their own solutions, by retroactively re-defining the target to ask for the solution we came up with. It helps with funding, and allows a place for playful discovery in a culture pretending to be above such things.
As a tao student I’m also always learning about the dualist haze in which we “suffer”, that is so often added to any human situation by the presumptive superiority of our logics’ abilities and defensive self-legitimacies. I think quite a bit of LaoTzu’s writing is about just that.
Such cartoons of solutions, aimed to conquer the thought-contrived challenge of a thought-tailored cartoon of a self-assigned problem, would be pretty much the "naming the source of our suffering” that you point out so well, Carl. Pretty consistent with some Buddhists’ understanding of the source of all suffering it would seem.
As you suggest, it serves a purpose, but that purpose is not to invent, generate or defend a balance we don’t have, but to help our thoughts accept and learn from some flow of balance and imbalance that our lives, bodies or existence are already quite good at.
In one of Red Pine's books he suggests that during the time LaoTzu was writing his thoughts at Loukuantai the old boy may have walked along a path up to a lake in the hills and back. (There was a statue at a lake there that celebrated those visits of mythic history.) I have to think part of those walks had him enjoying a giggling education as he tried to capture in words the natural flow of balance and imbalance that was his own walking along that mountain path.
I hope Jmelridge was able to keep the giggles to a minimum up on his wall, and can relax into his new, brief balances that fit him to his ongoing academic stresses.
A friend of mine said recently that i was very tolerant of some particular 'annoying' people.
I replied that surely the word 'tolerance' refers to when something is pressing all of your buttons making your teeth grit and your blood boil yet by using our 'free-will'
The master who isnt clinging to comfort has probably recently eaten relatively palatable food in a fairly non-threatening environment at an appropriate temperature. From this platform of comfort one might be able to [chref=38]not[/chref] cling to comfort/virtue/ideals etc..quite so much.
But put some itching powder on their cushion, or release a few lions and comfort sure seems like a better place to be. Naturally.
Perhaps because of our tribal instincts or the 'No! / Good boy' way that we learn about the world from our parents/carers we do tend to forget that some motorbikes in certain weather conditions can lean further when they go round corners... we only know how far we can lean when we fall off. Ouch !
Did you find 'Now' yet? It is elusive, perhaps no now even existent. Life: a river that flows and has no resting place. Time: a consciousness that flows and has no resting place until it's at light speed I suppose. Odd to think of the ultimate fast being the ultimate stillness. The circle closes and the end is the beginning in the end.
The master myth feels like a not so subtle offshoot from our innate primate alpha-male (or female) instinct. I'm in a correlation mood, so...
'yang'_______'yin'
leader______follower
performer___audience
male_______female
obvious____subtel
unique_____common
false_______true
And by leaning until we fall off we learn where too far is, i.e.,[chref=36]If you would have a thing shrink, You must first stretch it[/chref]. That is one of my favorite passages for it gives balanced context to all the screwy things I've done in my life... well, done and still do. Life's lessons never end do they? Well, that is until we 'graduate'.