christopher::: wrote:Goofaholix wrote:
Christopher liked something about the passage and wanted to discuss it, 5 pages later I'm not sure whether he's had that opportunity.
Actually, although we have gone off on side-tangents (occasionally) this conversation has been very helpful. But, yes, the question of Ajahn Sucitto's
meaning may still be worth examining, for some of us...
What is he advising us to do? How do we avoid a fracturing of experience, self-making? Is he describing a process that is purely Theravadan, a blending with the way Mahayanan traditions approach this, or simply an example of common ground?
This is what realization and liberation are all about, no? Developing a non-clinging mind, present, compassionate, non-reactive, free of fetters...
Was just listening to another dhamma talk where Ajahn Sucitto comes back to this topic. Here's a transcript of the first 2 minutes...
"Cultivation of great heart, there is depth and also breadth. Depth you might say is finding a sense of presence, anchoring, that's not through tension or holding on to a view or idea or a position. It's just feeling the presence, your own steadiness, your own wholeness, your own-
that which looks after you...
Your own sense of
sampajāna, awareness, that knows you're here, that which receives all these impressions that happens to you, that which comes through every day, no matter what. We ground ourselves in that. This is the ground, or the foundation. Without this everything goes out of balance.
We breathe into that, breathe out into that, take refuge in that.
Simplicity. Real simplicity..."
~Ajahn Sucitto
2008-11-09 Taking A Drive Down The Road Of Self 68:09
He does use a lot of Mahayanist, and perhaps new agish, sounding language, but when I examine this passage and the first one I understand him saying much the same as many of my other teachers.
Maybe I'm just filtering it through my own understanding but I don't see him defining doctrines or phenomena, but rather defining a process and a state of mind.
A mind that is grounded and stable and resting in a broad inclusive awareness, much like the sky where different objects arise and pass away within the sky but the sky remains the stable backdrop. So the mind allows whatever objects that arise and pass away to do so without clinging, without trying to make something happen, without the mind following or going out to seek the objects.
As soon as the mind starts going out to seek the objects, starts trying to make something happen then ones practice gets fractured, ones practice gets dualistic.
This is very similar to how one of my teachers Sayadaw U Tejaniya teaches the practice, though without the fluffy language that might offend some people.
Here he talks about being grounded in awareness, wheras in the first passage he talks about losing your groundedness through attachment to calm and attachment to ideas, and the fragmentation that follows those attachments.
Then at the end he talks about taking refuge in awareness.
This I think stands to reason, because what does Buddha mean? It means the one who knows, so taking refuge in the Buddha is taking refuge in knowing or awareness, well that's my take on it anyway.