The Water Just Got Deeper...

"...reviewing the buddhist view of consciousness and feeling, including how consciousness forms, how it relates to feelings, and how thoughts and attitudes spring out of that process. The abhidharma or buddha’s teachings on this go into incredible detail.

The twelve nidanas, it turns out, describes how moment to moment our consciousness forms from nothing, reacts to the perceptions of phenomenon, forms a positive, negative, or neutral opinion of that phenomenon, then jumps to a conclusion about how things should be and habitualizes the result.

We also studied the five skandas, each a mental process which all combined make up what we typically consider self or ego. the formation of the skandas is part of the nidana cycle, the fourth nidana in fact, before sense perceptions start to make contact with the phenomenal world. the consciousness skanda is paramount, but is supported by the skandas of form, feeling, formation, and perception.

Form constructs distinct views of the world, feeling just provides a very basic positive, negative, or neutral opinion of things, perception processes what we perceive, and formation pigeon-holes things into categories for us.

The importance of these teachings is deep. When Pema teaches about ‘learning to stay’, this comes from the wisdom that the cycle of karma can only be interrupted between the seventh and eighth nidanas - between feeling and craving. Once we’ve gone from feeling to actually thirsting for something then we’ve continued a cycle that ends with a further strengthening of ego and solitification of our world view.

But if we can learn to rest in feeling (the seventh nidana) then we can interrupt the habituation of ego. In fact, that’s the only way we can work with it and stop the karmic momentum. By karmic momentum I mean the quality that our feelings lead us to action which then sows the seeds of future suffering - in this case the habituation and solidification of our ego-centric view of the world.

Trungpa rinpoche also gave an interesting teaching on the skandas and enlightenment. He taught that the skandas in an enlightened being are still there. what’s different is that they aren’t connected. Meditation cuts the tight connection between the skandas. Then he went further to say that it’s not really a connection that you’re severing. Really the skandas are just crammed together by our speed.

We hate to experience space, our world feels unsolid in space. so we keep our mind running quickly so we don’t notice that there is a small gap between each skanda. so meditation lets us slow down, and then increase the gap between the skandas or in other words so we can see the large expanse of space which is already between them".

Real Life. Real Strange. Really.

Okay, true story. The other day my wife is at the subway station and overhears someone firmly, emphatically say "No, here's how it goes. The inside story? 'We, you?'...do not exist". She turns around to see a nine year old boy saying this to his little brother.