(34) LIVING HERE: Todays’ Ripples in Time…
Nature is cosmic spirit in form
* Ripples – like this daily series of deliberately short statements which it seems we’re beginning to present here – make waves by perpetually building on themselves.
* Ripples are the movement of formless energy taking the form of vibrations; our body/mind experiences these ripples as sensations like seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting and thinking.
*Thoughts and feelings are our “Sixth sense”. They occur to our infant body as our brain, which is one of the slowest organs to develop, matures and gains its fuller functionality in time and circumstance.
* As infants, we sense our self nature in the same way as we sense our world.
* Change is simply the constant movement of waves of energy on the still waters of our changeless being.
* “When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die.
And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.”
~ Pema Chodron
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There is a kind of pop Buddhist psychology like Pema Chodra which boils everything down to- by facing our negative states, suffering is eliminated or lessened. Nothing wrong with that, as for as it goes, I suppose, but doesn’t that create a dualistic position in which we, a person, have negative states (bad) which we, the person, through an act of will and effort need to get rid of through the technique of meditation. Us against ourselves. The statement “we should open ourselves to everchanging reality” sounds nice, sounds grand, but what does that really mean when you come down it. It is not at all clear to me what it means to open to ever changing reality. Who is opening? How is it accomplished? Why does that eliminate suffering? Might it not increase suffering? Is suffering bad?