Of all the Buddhist principles of transformation of consciousness, impermanence, for me, is most illusive and yet always present. The teaching says that just to see totally that all things are impermanent is enough. I can intellectually grasp this, and Aristotle was probably onto it as he described God as the unmoved mover. In order to see change, one must not be changing. Change can’t see change. Read More…
Posted under meditation help
This post was written by ed on November 26, 2008
This morning Tilly (my wife) and I went to a funeral home to get some wood given for the set of the play she is directing, and I stopped by one of the viewing rooms where two bodies lay. It’s been awhile since I’ve stood next to a dead body, and I was sturck deeply by the utter and absolute stillness.
When confronting death, the mind pulls back in awe, speechless, and falls to its knees, unable to think. Amid the noise and excitement of the election, the stillness of death suddenly centered me and it felt like a black hole around which all our noise circles and is pulled in slowly like water going down the drain. I recognized this stillness of the dead as the stillness that supports my thinking mind; I knew this stillness as perhaps the autumn leaves know the ground; I knew this stillness as my pond fish must know the water; and I knew this stillness as my source and my home. I knew this stillness as God.
Posted under current events
This post was written by ed on November 5, 2008
As I sit along my river of noise (Blackstone’s Main Street) this morning I remember the bridal shoot I did yesterday so far out in the country that not a single car or truck could be heard. You just spill out of the car into the silence. Most people live in that great field of stillness here in Southside as the roads with traffic are like single threads on a queen size quilt.
And yet I don’t regret or fight the noise on my street, complaining in my mind every time a car passes or I have to pause my conversation while a truck gets by the house. I accept the noise.
There is physical noise and there is mental noise. Complaining in the mind is far more bothersome than the noise of traffic and lawn mowers. But most of us don’t even notice the noise in the mind because we are so used to it, just like I’m used to the noise on the street.
But trying to stop the noise in the mind is like trying to stop the traffic on the street. Thoughts and cars just won’t listen to you. You can’t make a bargain with the mind, because even making a bargain is just more noise. This is why the noise keeps growing in the mind. We try to fight noise with noise, thought with more thought. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just say, “Stop it!” And suddenly—as if if the mind never thought that was possible—it would just have this strange look on its face and shut up.
“Why, I didn’t know I could do that,” the mind would say with a bright expression of discovery. “Oh, that thought is just more noise” it would suddenly say “….oh, and so is that…and that…and…….” The reason we can’t find silence in the mind is because we want to talk about silence as if it were a place to arrive at. “Am I there yet?” We want to be conscious of silence, and being conscious requires a thinking subject….which is just a bunch of noise. Just stop it!
Posted under meditation help
This post was written by ed on June 25, 2008
