Setting the Standard

[deci belle]

Setting the Standard

 

Rising above one's ingrained sarcasm, indifference, apathy, intellectual conceits, self-satisfaction, guilt-trips and dualistic attitudes attributable to a lifetime's accretions of learned and inherited ignorance is accomplished by setting the standard by which to wrap up one's personal history for all time.

Just set the standard above the selfish reifications based on your limited view of your own life's perceived experiences and motivations.

It isn't a matter of condescension or condemning one's personally perceived indemnities and vulnerabilities in order to punish oneself or otherwise surpass them somehow. In transcending ego, there is no value judgement employed~ one simply arrives at a point of failing to posit circumstantial identities altogether by a process of refusing to entertain self-reflecting notions of thought and feeling at a subtle level of unbroken concentration over a very long period of time.

What happens is, the intellectualized rationalistic self-reifying habit-function defining one’s personality eventually craps out on its own. The personality doesn’t go away— but by self-refinement, just the apparatus seemingly needing to sustain it does. Ego has real jobs to do, and sustaining the false identity isn’t one of them. So instead of harboring destructively self-reifying anticipatory consciousness by waiting for this to happen, it’s like wearing out a shoe. The world already provides the abrasive means naturally. Self-refinement is just adapting to this all-pervasive abrasive quality of delusional conditionality to get the desired result, which is the elimination of habit-energy in one's life that continuously wastes pure energy potential on superfluous ego-antics. Eventually, over a long period of time, the habit-patterns perpetuating the delusional faculties drop off one by one by the enlightening process dealing with everyday ordinary situations effectively. It is by the authentic practice of enlightening activity adapting to conditions with selfless spiritual subtlety not relying on one's personal power that refinement of the human mentality comes about.

This enlightening process is the natural subtle capacity of self-refinement carried out by first learning to forget feelings by spiritual clarification. The basic inability to free oneself and to keep oneself free of cloying emotional consciousness is why one must learn how to maintain open sincerity. One immediately knows what is what without having to posit self-reifying (selfish) emotional postures relative to self and other. Stopping at sufficiency is essential to the development of authentic practice. When one gains insight, habit energy must be cut off deliberately, at first, or its momentum will naturally destroy that insight. This must be done over and over and over again at the precise instant that habit-energy appears in the aftermath of insight. It is accomplished simply by subtle observation. In noting the flow of conditioned thought and not following its stream unawares, the flow evaporates on the spot.

Second, on must learn to forget opinions. Opinions of self and other must be forgotten. An ancient saying is that it is easy to forget one’s body, but very difficult to forget one’s opinions. 

One day, after a long, long time, you just …forget to remember. (That sounds like the lyric of an old Country/Western tune~ heehee!!)

"Empty the mind and fill the belly.” This ancient taoist phrase means to empty the human mentality and see real potential. The process of self-refinement is getting rid of delusional consciousness and beckoning the real by sustaining open sincerity where feelings and opinions once crowded out naturally arising enlightening potential. When one learns to rest in the highest good of open sincere clarity, the real will alight naturally day by day.

The achievement of enlightening experience is none other than an instance of having forgotten your lifetime up to that point which has the beneficial result of severing the root of compulsive action. The compulsion to act is the tap-root of karmic existential identity (being bound to endless rounds of birth and death in this lifetime) from time immemorial and beyond.

Having the will to sustain a subtle consistency of psychological clarity and stillness over a long period of time arrives at the world-honored result. One spontaneous burst of inconceivable velocity cultivated by virtue of the unbending extreme limit held in an impersonal love so hopeless, death so open, and sincerity so world-shattering in scope that a spontaneously selfless movement extending beyond the blinds and bounds of conditioned awareness altogether is witnessed.

In its aftermath, after a long time of advanced practical application of self-refinement induced by re-orienting one's sustained psychological and intellectual fasting in the course of assessing objectively and responding impersonally to ordinary situations, one continues to forget to bring one's conditioned personal identity along for the ride. And in endless instances, endless transformations, one leaves it for all time with respect to the incremental exigencies of karmic evolutionary nature. Such is the life of buddhas and ignoramuses. All phenomenon and gradual practice leading to sudden realization of nonorigination and beyond unfathomable worlds are one singularity; a seamless continuum.

In a moment of having forgotten one's facetious identity for the first time, one's karmic debt of lifetimes of personal histories— is altogether forgotten along with all creation; in a trice, one's true original aware potential sees itself as having always been aglow without beginning. Here one surpasses in discovering the great matter of birth and death once and for all in the dim splendor of inherent Bright Virtue.

Experiencing the Unborn, one discovers living awareness as the heart of non-being on the verge of action in perpetuity. This is the limit of the limitless, neither stillness nor movement beyond conception. It is another universe within one's innermost true self. There is no thing. Selfless open aware potential in pervasive suffusion by beginningless readiness that has never moved …a quickened energy hovering in stillness above the primal organization and its sprouts of cyclic existential process. There is no knowledge. Awake selfless non-being, aware, miraculously aware.

In rising above habitual selfish views of one's ingrained sarcasm, indifference, apathy, intellectual conceits, self-satisfaction, guilt-trips and dualistic attitudes, one makes enlightenment the standard to die by.

In taoist spiritual alchemy, the basic sequence of developing and stabilizing the authentic unity of potential in terms of conditional evolution is a long process. In this post, I have established the first two stages of developmental practice as clarifying the body of awareness and reforming the psychological apparatus of the being that is going to die. These two steps, carried out in one's life with unbending intent, establish the basis of fundamental accord in reality, wherein one arrives at seeing potential by nonpsychological awareness, which is the same mind previously (pre)occupied as the errant human mentality of psychological pattern-awareness. The false and the true arrive at Suchness; there is no other mind. Enlightenment and delusion have never been separate. Mind is one.

The formal organizational overview of taoist spiritual alchemy is as follows: First, refine vitality into energy (the subject of this thread); second, refine energy into spirit; third, refine spirit into openness; fourth, shatter space and empty out openness; five, enter the Tao in reality.

 

 

ed note: Split last sentence in fourth paragraph; add a bit at end of the 5th; add quip in 7th; change "binds" to "blinds" in 10th; add "I" and last two lines in penultimate paragraph

Edited December 21, 2020 by deci belle

[Breakingthewall]

Enormous. Difficult to understand like all of your threads but direct, clean, poetic and strong. It needs many reads

[deci belle]

Ain't it the truth, Breakingthewall— I read it over and over myself. Though the comment is very much appreciated❤︎!!

Hongzhi (1091~1157), the third patriarch of Chan buddhism said, "Do not seek reality, just stop views." "Obviously there is no ego in the treasury of light of the vehicle of the unconditioned, no opinionated interpretations. Ego and opinions are different names of spirit heads and ghost faces. This is just the light alone, not setting up any opinions or views, from the idea of self and ego to the ideas of Buddhas and Dharma. Let us clearly hear transcendent wisdom being likened to an enormous mass of fire."

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"…not setting up any opinions or views, from the idea of self and ego to the ideas of Buddhas and Dharma."

Is it possible to assume that the Supreme Vehicle  "vehicle of the unconditioned" quoted above, is made up of parts that would apply differently to conditional specificities? Suchness is only in seeing  Suchness, no different than the scene playing out before your very eyes right now. "Adapting" to Suchness is just in seeing the essence of reality by virtue of delusion. What else would one see void of opinions and views? Delusion and enlightenment are none other than one's quality of seeing in terms of everyday ordinary situations. Ultimately, who's responsible?

For those interested, consider the fashionably thin volume, Cultivating the Empty Field by Hongzhi, translated by Daniel Leighton, North Point Press, ISBN 0-86547-475-3

I'll pile it on a little higher…

The Flower Ornament Scripture says, "This great light of the Lamplike Illuminate pervades the universe, without differentiating between mundane and sacred: thus "that Buddha has entered this hall" and the reception of "thus once I heard" is itself "having entered this hall". This is the same as saying reality is undifferentiated unity without clinging to extremes of ordinary and Absolute. It is also having penetrating Mind by Mind. Who else would it be? Who is reading these words? There is no other buddha. Mind is one.

"Because this one light extends throughout all time, if there were any attaining it, then it would have to be twofold."

The Scripture on the Miraculous Empowerment of Vairochana Attaining Buddhahood says, in the book on entering the state of mind of the method of mystical spells, "At that time the Blessed One said to the Thunderbolt Bearer, 'The will for enlightenment is the causal basis, great compassion is the root, skill in means is the ultimate."

Here, the will for enlightenment being the causal basis is in sincere open wonder seeing potential by awakening to the nonpsychological through gradual cessation of pattern-consciousness. Great compassion has nothing to do with good, bad, right or wrong or self and other; it is cutting all the way through all dualities in a single stroke. This is the meaning of ruthless compassion. As for "skill in means", this is the ultimate capacity for formless spiritual adaption to conditions. The causal basis, the root, and the ultimate do not depend on the sudden. Why? Enlightenment is already your own mind right now. By gradual and sudden being one continuum, awakening to one's potential, it doesn't matter; actualizing one's inherent enlightening function and expressing sincere open authentic practice is simply arriving at such qualities without relying on one's own power. That is all.

"O Master of the Secret, what is enlightenment? It means knowing your own mind as it really is. This is unexcelled complete perfect enlightement, in which there is nothing at all that can be attained. Why? Because the form of it is enlightement; it has no knowledge and no understanding. Why? Because enlightenment has no form. The formlessness of all things is called the form of space.“

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"The formlessness of all things is called the form of space" says delusion is none other than enlightenment. It doesn't say the formlessness of all things is things and space too— unless your relationship with reality is oriented to self and other, ie: things. In that case you can imagine things to be otherwise than things while still perpetuating your karmic bond with endless rounds of birth and death. That's not what enlightenment is. There is no thing. In seeing reality, it's just potential, which is not created. Prior to creation is Mind alone, and after creation is Mind only too. There's no thing. How wonderful is that?

I will end this buddhist scriptural account by adding that merely seeing your nature (seeing essence in terms of the Absolute) is not enough. Why would it be enough? Nothing was gained by it. Therefore the value of complete perfect enlightenment is in its application by virtue of everyday ordinary situations. This is why, in the fourth practical step of the taoist School of Complete Reality's spiritual alchemic praxis, one must then "shatter space and empty out openness." This means that once having witnessed the sudden (or any aspect of gradual authentic insight), one must then pass through it (that is, without positing self-reifying postures on top of experiential knowledge). Bodhidharma says to rinse off the soap of enlightenment. Dogen says one must remove all traces of enlightenment. Taoism says, once having used the real knowledge of nonpsychological awareness, one must then get rid of real knowledge (the taoist alchemic "medicine" symbolized by true lead). Only then is one accomplished, in terms of selfless (nonpsychological) adaption of enlightening qualities to realize formless mutual response by conditions through spontaneously sublimating oneself spiritually and physically, thereby to "plant lotuses in fire" and enter the Tao in reality. This is because potential is inherent in the situation, not the person.

 

 

 

ed note: remove word in 1st sentence; add Hongzhi's dates of historical existence in 2nd sentence; add quote marks in 3rd paragraph; add "the fashionably thin volume" in fourth paragraph; delete redundant quote in 5th; add last six paragraphs

Edited December 22, 2020 by deci belle