Lankavatara 2:IX:3-4
*transcript generated by AI
All right, so welcome.
Delightful practicing with you so far in our qigong and our longer than typical sit, but it’s good to stretch those out from time to time.
Um, anything that you’d like to pick up from our last conversation, um, which ended up with a, with a rather dramatic fashion, um, before we, before we pick up with where we left off in the long term.
Um, I mean, there’s, there’s a ton to unpack there, but, but very briefly, um, but yeah, I think it’s, it’s just a good reminder not to stick to any of the extremes, um, and to find yourself like, you know, always, you know, you know, that like razor sharp edge, you know, of the middle.
It’s like, how do we, how do we sneak our way in there?
So that was, that was, you know, in a very general way, it was kind of, um, more, I felt that that discussion took me afterwards.
So, yeah, well, good.
That’s a, that’s a good direction to be taken.
People always used to say, and this is, I mean, this wasn’t his original saying, but he was very fond of the middle way is like threading the eye of a needle.
And at the same time, caravans of camels can pass through.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lots of unpacking.
I love it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, you’re welcome.
Thank you.
And, uh, anything else that you want to pick up or related tangential inquiries about meditation, the style of practice, um, whatever, before we dig in, not at this moment.
Okay.
Well, if they come up, just let me know.
So last time we had gotten to the point in chapter two, section nine, where, um, the Buddha was going to start singing his praises of the Dharmakaya of the realm of the ocean wave storehouse consciousness.
And he starts by saying, let’s break down our experience of sight.
So we can kind of see how things work.
He said that that has four characteristics.
It arises due to four causes and conditions, right?
Due to the four causes and conditions, the eye consciousness involves evolves.
What for one’s own mind manifestations are gathered and received and ignorance spent quite a bit of time talking about different ways we can understand ignorance.
So that’s the first cause and condition.
The second, which I don’t believe we got to enroll is where we’ll pick up today.
Is that beginningless errors pass through the perfuming of forms, beginningless errors pass through the perfuming of forms and errors here, you know, in retrospect, as I’m with it today, this particular word shoe is, um, it’s almost more like contradictions.
It’s a, it’s a term that’s used for like, when somebody is one way to your face and then another way behind your back, or when, um, what they say and do isn’t in accord.
Right.
So it’s not just errors in the sense that it’s mistaken.
It’s like in coherences, things don’t quite line up.
It’s like our, we bring stuff from our perfuming and we super impose that on our sensory experience.
And we give it all this extra stuff that it doesn’t have on its own.
And that may or may not be, but often is incoherent to what’s actually happening in the moment.
Okay.
So this is obviously speaking towards a lot of it, you know, memory storehouse consciousness.
Is it, is it fair to say that this also goes back to ignorance?
It’s just like ignorance from the past.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that, and that’s where we were talking about how ignorance can, sometimes it means, you know, not seeing through.
And sometimes it seems to just refer to like the natural function of, of individuated experience.
And I think that’s kind of closer to the realm that we’re in right now, when it’s talking about this particular form of, of ignorance and then beginning this errors pass through the perfuming of forms.
Cause it’s not, it doesn’t seem to be indicating that there’s anything we can do about it.
It seems to be saying that this is how site works.
Yeah.
What do you do about something that’s beginningless?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that’s a really great question.
And a key phrase that I think is really critical for us to unpack.
So one of my teachings that I don’t really do in this context, it’s part of evolutionary sovereignty, which is a more syncretic paradigm is being, becoming tapestry.
And basically what we discover through the wisdom literature is that there’s like a being of becoming and the becoming returns to the B and the being that’s happening after the becoming is influenced by the becoming process.
Right?
So it’s kind of like saying if we, if we have an apple tree and it falls and apple seed hits the ground and it grows into an apple tree and it produces an apple, like the next apple that falls, like in a way it’s returning to being, it’s a seed returning to the earth, but it’s a different generation.
It’s been pollinated, potentially cross-pollinated with another type of apple.
It’s subtly different.
So the apple that grows in its apple tree that grows out of that seed, is its own becoming process based on its own being process.
And the whole function of its becoming will be a part of the next being moment.
Right?
And so what it’s saying is that we’re in the cyclical process and that’s beginningless, right?
Because no matter, you can’t, there’s no beginning or end to a circle.
And then it’s like, so a lot of times people psychologize this and they say, well, when can we know where our trauma really started?
Right?
Is it our birth trauma?
Right?
You know, is it our great, great, great grandfather’s trauma that we’re living out?
And I don’t think that’s what beginningless means.
And then sometimes people turn it into like a mythopoetic cosmology that just says like, oh, well, you can’t know, so fuck it.
You know?
So like, don’t worry about digging into it because you’ll never know because it’s beginningless.
And over the years, to me, it’s present in investigating the cycle and the wisdom traditions.
I think it really, all it’s saying is like, it’s just this perfuming, being, becoming, being, becoming, being, becoming thing happening all the time.
And it doesn’t matter where you are in that process.
Once you see it happening, you can be with it wherever it is in its process because it is being, becoming at the same time.
Right?
It is, if we go to a short enough duration of time, it is static and exactly what it is.
But in the very next instant, it has changed.
So it has become.
But then when we pause it, when we check that exact instant, it’s just being again.
Millions of times a minute.
Which I find very empowering because it says that, well, any time that I recognize anything that’s going on, I can interject something into the process.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In this case, the beginningless contradiction.
So beginningless perfumings, beginningless imputations, uh, automatically get connected to that direct experience, make meaning so fast.
We have to, um, yeah, it’s part of what happened.
Yeah.
So we’ve got one’s own minds.
Manifestations are gathered and received in ignorance.
Beginningless errors pass through the perfuming of forms or beginnings, contradictions or incoherencies or imputations.
And then, and then this is where it gets really interesting.
Consciousness is, I mean, not like it wasn’t interesting before, but I love this one.
Consciousness is individuating marks are conceptually fixed.
This is that reification thing.
Yeah.
We’re thirsty for things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We want to know, we want to name, we want to put in buckets.
We want to classify.
We want to take what we know and treat it like it’s real so that we have a stable foundation to operate from.
So we can feel like safe and in control.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s the illusion of control.
Like if I can name it, then I understand if I understand that then, you know, I’ve, I can, you know, I’ve now established it, you know, and so it’s no longer a threat in some way, you know, like it’s just this, like, it’s to pacify our own minds, you know, by labeling everything.
Yeah.
And then it’s, you know, in a way it’s kind of just a functional thing because it’s very useful, you know, to name a door and to know that a doorknob opens the door.
You know, when I see a door with a doorknob, it’s good to not have to like, reevaluate it every single time to figure out what’s going on with that thing in the wall.
Right.
Part of our superpower is pattern recognition.
Yeah.
And we mistake the pattern of process with the pattern of things.
And then that’s where we get sideways.
Yes.
Right.
Especially when it relates to our subject object experience.
Taking ourselves as a subject to an object.
That’s the one that seems to cause the most suffering.
When we take it too seriously.
And we kind of naturally let into the fourth causing condition, which is the desire to perceive many fold form characteristics.
So within these four causes and conditions, one of them is the very simple desire to experience.
And if we think back to section 58, is that what it was that I read?
It might have been 68.
The mother, right?
The mother in that section was.
Well, heck, if I can find it again.
Yeah, 58.
So the mother is the desire and joy together with the thirst to be reborn.
It’s like life is kind of fun.
So the mother of our experience is kind of that joy and desire and the multiplicity of things.
Killing that is part of liberation.
But it doesn’t mean not experiencing it.
It doesn’t mean ending it.
In a way, it means ending it so that you can have the yogic experience of unity with the sublime.
But then it’s like from that experience, then we recognize that that’s the process that’s happening.
And now we’ve seen through it, like we’ve used before with the gem and the colored paper.
And now we can now we’re not in darkness.
We’re not ignorant of the process anymore.
We come into being almost for experience.
And I get hypnotized by experience.
Yeah, exactly.
We forget.
Yeah, yeah.
Which, of course, has many parallels with things like the esoteric understanding of original sin and cleverness leading to nakedness and Christianity.
So it’s interesting sometimes to understand these parallel development mythologies that happen across cultures.
Yeah, I mean, in what way?
Just explain that a little bit more.
Oh, so when you get into the Hebrew.
I mean, like watching.
People’s expressions of that same function, you know, or their understandings or their ways to capture it or their experiences of it like that we’re talking about, like the multiplicity of that experience.
Yeah, just kind of how the same the same issue lies at the core of multiple religious traditions, basic perspective, you know, and for me, I think that’s always a fascinating clue for the for the essential threads, regardless of the the form that the religion takes overall or the language around it or the cultural baggage that goes with it.
I don’t know if I’m quite a perennialist that says that there’s only like one human wisdom tradition, although I’m probably pretty close to sitting in that camp.
I find it those things are the things that I end up kind of zeroing on because of the people in this time and place and the people in this time and place identified such similar characteristics through their through their meditative practice and their investigation of their human experience.
And they’re basically saying the exact same thing that seems worthwhile.
That seems worth investing.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, it’s it seems to me like the the deeper your practice becomes, at least like my experience, like and it seems to be other I mean, I’ve heard this iterated from other people as well.
Other masters as well.
Like it’s the.
It’s like they’re all pointing like they’re all pointing at the same thing.
You know, it’s just not all of them have like the proper context or some get off the ride early, you know, thinking they got to the end, you know, and you can kind of see it’s like, yeah, there are I can see what you’re pointing at, like and it lets you connect into that religion and like, you know, even like just eavesdrop on the teachings, you know, and in here and deeper, you know.
But, yeah, like it does, it is it does reinforce, you know, to hear this like individually, you know, materialize all over in different forms.
So, yeah, there is a bit of a backup, you know, that’s gone there.
But but, yeah, it’s just like, how do you explain the ineffable, you know, and so we all have our pathetic ways of doing it, you know, and some are better, and some have gone deeper, you know, but doesn’t necessarily mean like they’re not true, you know, it’s just like, yeah, like, you know, a for effort, you know, on your on your doctrine or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
And then trying and being sensitive enough to understand that, you know, everything was kind of created for a specific purpose.
And it probably does whatever its purpose is really, really well.
Right?
So then it’s like, well, what, what purpose is this serving?
And then how does it do that really well?
And then let’s take that nugget and see how that can enrich our practice.
You know, that’s, I think, really, a beautiful way to engage in cross or interfaith dialogue or cross examination of our practices.
Obviously, since this is the one that I chose to stick with, I think it’s the best, because, you know, why would I, why would I do this, right?
And arguably, we would say that non dual Mahayana, East Asian is the most is the deepest.
Right?
So when we look at like, taxonomies of religious forms, or or like integral theory that specifically tries to map like states of consciousness, and what people are describing, and, you know, give it a hierarchical structure and stuff like that, we find that to be kind of kind of true, is that non dual Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana, you know, those are pointing to the deepest states of human realization.
Anyway, it’s very tangential to our conversation, but I think it’s important because I think it all enriches our understanding of the material.
It sure does enriches the practice to their times, like it was like, just this last weekend, it was it was an Advaita Vedanta guided meditation that like, you know, really, like, for me, it’s been like, it’s especially effective at severing the attachment to thought and their way of describing thought as the expression of the essence, you know, just like, like, everyone’s got their, you know, their keys to the door, you know, and, and yeah, it’s like, you know, you have to universally buy in on every single word or every single teaching, you know, but like, they listen, because you never know, like, what, what does it for you, you know?
Yeah, and it’s really, yeah, so then, so then it’s just not getting confused.
Right?
Yeah.
They can be done.
I mean, Advaita Vedanta, what we’re doing here, very, very, very similar.
So that’s not a great source of confusion.
But there can be, you know, even there’s actually probably more confusion to be found within Buddhism than there is to be found between what we’re doing and what an Advaita Vedanta teacher would do.
Because they were both fundamentally working with nana yoga, but then you get, yeah, there’s like, trying to keep track of what each one is used, like, when they say the mind, you know, it’s like 100 different ways to use that word, you know?
Yeah, yeah, it can get pretty wild.
It can get confusing, but yeah, you just want to get wrapped up in it, just listen deeper.
Yeah.
Okay, so we’ve got to bring us back to the sutra here for just a little bit, because this, we went through four conditions, which is that we gather and receive our minds manifestations in a form of ignorance, which is basically in the context of subject object illusion.
Our perfuming impacts the way we understand the direct experience.
Then we take that imputed meaning and our direct experience together, and we have a reification of an object that we have a subject relationship to.
And in that there is an ongoing desire and joy in the multiplicity of form.
You know, it’s kind of like, why do we exist?
It’s because the all got bored and decided to make its own babies, you know?
That’s the thing.
So with this, on this basis, then he says, the Buddha says, Mahamati, these four types of causes and conditions are situated in a flowing stream.
And the alaya-vijnanas turning produces waves.
So it’s kind of, what I’m getting here is, it’s kind of saying that direct experience itself is just that being becoming loop.
And that’s just cyclically happening in kind of a flow of consciousness, that chitta, mind stream is just flowing.
And then it is the activity of the perfuming that comes out of the storehouse consciousness, that’s actually creating the individual waves of experience.
And that might be why when we have a strong concentration meditation practice, we feel as though everything gets really still and calm, but also at the same time, it’s not static.
I think that’s one of the great mistakes of a lot of language around meditation instruction is it emphasizes stillness and quiet.
And a lot of times that’s left to be understood as static, which is different.
It’s still dynamic.
It’s just so smooth that the dynamic nature of it doesn’t impact us in the same way.
Stealing the monkey.
Stealing the monkey?
Killing the monkey.
Killing the monkey.
Yeah.
That’s where the stillness is.
It’s like the stillness of the mind, but even the mind’s still going.
It’s just the monkey mind.
Yeah.
Run into all the windows and looking out the window.
Yeah.
Or like another great teaching.
Have you read about the ox herding pictures of the elephant?
Maybe not.
I don’t think so.
Okay.
Well, the elephant’s a little bit different, but there’s an ox herding, 10 pictures that come from the Zen tradition.
I think it actually came from Chan before it was Zen anyway.
But it shows this delightful process of finding out that you lost your mind, that your mind is represented by an ox, and then a search for your mind, and then getting a little whiff of it here and there, and then eventually finding your mind, and then having to go through a process of taming your mind, because your mind doesn’t want to walk on the path that you want it to walk on.
But then you actually get it to behave and start following you.
So then this ox becomes docile, so you can lead it down the path.
And then you can actually get on the ox and ride the ox.
Right?
So now the mind is serving us.
It’s not just that we’re controlling the mind, the mind is serving us.
That’s a big milestone in practice.
And then we find out that there actually never was an ox in the first place.
And then we come back to the marketplace and, and, you know, we’re the fat, happy Buddha.
So if you haven’t seen those pictures before, you should look them up, because I’m sure you would like them.
Yeah, that’s interesting.
I love that.
It also ties back into a little bit of last week too, you know, just like, in that being becoming processes, and in that recognition, it’s like, it is like the, it’s the intentional guiding, you know, like, that can get you there, you know?
It’s like, yeah, we have to find some way of being shown, you know, and until it’s been stabilized, you know, we have to keep at it.
Yeah.
That’s fine.
It’s like he said, we forget.
So it sounds like that’s, you know, we talked about earlier about like the analytical, I mean, it’s really just boiling down to like, okay, if you can understand the mechanics, and you can understand the storehouse consciousness, and how it functions, and how it feeds into, you know, site in this discussion, for example, like, it sounds like it’s just like the skillful gardening type stuff, like, you know, we’re bound, like, we’re all these residual impressions, like, you know, like an echo come back, you know, and some are delayed responses, and some are immediate responses.
And, you know, it’s just, but like, it seems that that storehouse is, I haven’t really taken it here yet, but maybe it’s a good question for you, then.
So does it seem more that it’s like, the, I don’t know, like, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to write words for stuff, but it’s called like the path to Buddhahood, or, you know, original nature and all that.
So it’s, is it is it a lack of purification, as the storehouse consciousness processes is working real time.
And it’s like, you get like 10 years behind you, you know, of, like, non entangled, you know, experience, you know, and that seemed to free us, you know, because we don’t are constantly being like, bombarded by, you know, those residual impressions, you know.
So like, if it’s, if it’s been if it’s purified on the way in and out, in a way, I don’t really know how to describe that.
But it seems like it’s like that.
That prevents future problems with the storehouse, I guess, or, or like, it’s like, when it does perfume, you know, how does it perfume, did it perfume purified?
Or did perfume, you know, confused or diluted, you know, because that’s how it came in.
And that’s how it was stored in the first place.
Yeah, so this is a great question.
Very profound question.
And it’s kind of at the center of our sociology, right?
So how does this end up delivering on the promise to liberate us from suffering?
Because that’s what the practice is all about.
We suffer.
So what is the end of suffering?
And, and I think there’s a couple things that are going on here.
One is, it’s not just understanding the mechanics, understanding the mechanics has a twofold process, because we understand what the mechanics are that we’re looking for, because we understand the description of the reality from the Buddha’s perspective.
Now, when we’re sitting in meditation, we know what we’re looking for.
So then when we have the direct experience that matches what the Buddha is describing to us as reality, then we can see it.
Otherwise, we would never see it because it’s so subtle.
So doing studies like this is preparing our mind to see, to know what to look for when we’re doing our meditation.
And then we have that direct experience.
And now we can begin to work with the mechanics.
Okay, and this gets more directly to your question.
The working with the mechanics has a couple different qualities.
One of them is that when we can see how we’re perfuming, we actually can like, change the perfume, we can we can call on different perfuming, or at the very least, we can recognize that we’re perfuming this event in this way.
And we’re taking this relationship to it.
And it’s inspiring this kind of activity.
And then we can, at the karmic level of thought, word and deed, intervene, we might we might still be having impulses to behave unskillfully.
But because we can see the mechanism that’s driving the unskillful behavior, we become detached from the identity that in that moment, and then we have freedom to choose a different karmic expression, which, which is kind of like what you’re saying is a purification.
Is this like the distinction between like, okay, so we, we perfume in now.
And changing it from a poison to a medicine, you know, like, I perfumed some afflictive emotion, you know, or some, some, something that reifies the self, you know, or, you know, has hatred buried in it somewhere or something like that.
But like, if I can notice the disturbance, then that then that becomes the medicine that becomes the teaching.
And so I can work with it that way.
But I feel like that’s still like, dealing with past, you know, like, the beginningless, you know, aspect of it, where it’s just like, all of this is kind of, it’s baked in, and not all of it was was taken in skillfully.
Yeah, like, if I’m experiencing, you know, more skillfully from seeing through, like, as the experience continues, like, then the that what gets stored at that point, then becomes, I guess, purified or cleaner or something like that.
So that when it perfumes, again, it perfumes, you know, less, just less distractive, or less confusing, or less diluting, you know, like, it came through clear the next time, I don’t know, something really limited on my language here.
But no, you’re doing great.
That’s pretty much the idea.
There’s a couple things that I want to touch on, though, around this topic, because they’re, they’re quite important.
And I think if you take them, and now it will be really helpful to you.
It took me a long, a lot of reading, I’m condensing a lot of experience into this piece here.
So hopefully, it doesn’t come out too garbled.
One of them is that remember, when I said that, that error, beginningless errors, isn’t really errors, it’s more like incoherence.
So purification is really about appropriateness.
And it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are some mental qualities that are bad, or negative, or inherently unskillful.
They, they can be deeply unpleasant to our personal sense of what we would like to be experiencing, but they might be exactly appropriate to the conditions.
Right.
And in that case, it’s still a pure perfuming.
Right.
And then it’s like, okay, so this thing is happening, and I find myself in a state of disgust about this experience.
And I’m personally disgusted.
Somehow, even though it’s appropriate to my circumstances to be disgusted by that, I can express that karmically in ways that are skillful or unskillful.
Right.
And that’s where we want to watch, right?
That’s because that becomes the future, future perfume, unskillful actions become perfuming that creates more unskillfulness.
And that’s the whole mind garden concept.
And, and we are, I for a long time was tempted to think that if I did this hard enough, long enough, then I could like, stop.
And it would just always come out beautifully every single time, and I’d have to stop thinking about it.
But Huineng, in his Platform Sutras, has a section, and I’m paraphrasing, but it basically says an ordinary being who’s awake is a Buddha, and a Buddha who goes to sleep is an ordinary being.
If in one moment, you manifest love and compassion and wisdom, you’re a Buddha.
And if in the next moment, you manifest greed, anger, or ignorance, you’re a demon.
So impermanence is fundamental, and that includes our Buddha, that includes our state.
Our state is constantly changing.
Every discrete moment is a moment that’s being perfumed that requires skillful action.
And you could be the most awake dude in the world and have been working on your liberation for years and have been cut from the 10 fetters for like months.
And then something happens that touches some deep conditioning that you didn’t even know that you had.
And then all of a sudden, bang, you’re doing this thing.
And you’re like, what the fuck was that?
And so in that sense, we’re constantly engaging in these discrete moments of the being becoming process.
And we want to fall in love with that, because otherwise it feels, to me anyway, until I fell in love with it, it felt very onerous.
Like I always had to be on guard, and oh my god, and like, I’ll never be done with this shit.
And oh, this is awful.
But then we just get to fall in love with showing up.
And that actually feels really, really good to just fall in love with like, living.
Sutra talks about exactly about this kind of like, whatever’s arising is appropriate, and the sense that whatever’s arising is exactly the structure that can arise, based on the seed and the perfume combination that’s happening.
So I just want to bring this in.
So it’s part of this particular conversation, since we touched on that says Mahamati, just like the eye consciousness, all sense capacities co-arise along with subtle dusts and gross form.
Indeed, they are all like this, just like a mirror manifesting all the different forms and appearances.
And this is our, when we look at non-possession, when we look at non-characteristic, right, those stages of perception, as illusion samadhi, what we’re getting at, one of the beautiful things that happens is we recognize that life is exactly the only way it can be, including our judgments of whether or not life as it is right now is any good or not.
And when we get that, and we recognize that our ability to be self-conscious is a pure mirror, showing us exactly the structure of what is, then we can recognize that when we are willing to look, we can see whatever we need to see.
Yeah.
It’s like, how could you, how could you understand or even really experience light without darkness?
Right.
So that being the coming process as part of that, like oscillation, you know, because there it’s, it’s, it’s also part of the, it’s also its own like duality, sort of like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The, the, the, if we, if we think of the yin-yang symbol, the tai chi, it’s a, it’s a monistic symbol.
It’s saying that all is one, but the mechanism by which all is one is in the interplay of opposing forces.
And that’s what the being becoming process we’ve been talking about is like, it’s, it’s all one and it’s, it’s mechanism is this being becoming opposing force.
Right.
Yeah.
Or how could you possibly be awake unless you were dreaming before?
Right.
Yeah.
It seems like I like appropriate, which reminds me of like understanding correct function as well.
But yeah, appropriate, like seems to be a good, like a good stepping stone.
Just try to like transcend right and wrong and good and bad.
And those types of judgments is such as you respond appropriately.
Yeah.
And appropriately is always changing to appropriately doesn’t stay fixed either.
Like, this is the way you respond to the situation.
Like, right.
You responded based on who you are, you know, all the, all the, all that’s from within here, you know.
Yeah.
It’s always different, but there’s still like a, I think I, I don’t remember which Sun master set up, but I think it, I think it was the one who started the, I can’t remember his name.
Anyway, it was like, there is no right and there is no wrong, but right is right.
And wrong is wrong.
I’ve always loved that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Correct function responding appropriately to the situation, you know, like it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s honoring this whole thing, you know.
Yeah.
Anything else is like to, you know, like a dismissive of it, you know, or fully embrace it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then realizing that it’s beginningless.
So it’s like, okay, well you did the only thing that you could do at that moment.
It was appropriate because structurally that was the only reaction that you knew you had available to you.
Then you go, well, did I like that one or not?
Did that, did that have the desired effect?
Or was that, is that the karma that I want to repeat again in the future?
And then you go yes or no.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’ve, I’ve found that, I found that part interesting too, because like it seemed times like, you know, if you can, if you can see this while you still have like, I don’t know, emptiness channeled it in some way, you know, then like it leads to an easier path of forgiveness.
Right.
You know, but then it’s not just like, you know, everything gets a hall pass either, you know, like there’s some balance where it’s like, you know, understanding that, like, well, I don’t know.
I almost feel like it’s like this, this whole thing seems to be this, like a natural inclination towards harmony, you know, because we’re all looking for happiness.
We’re doing it in a lot of unskillful ways, you know, but there is, but it’s like, yeah.
So if you’re ignoring it, then you’re ignoring, you know, like that inclination towards harmony.
It’s like, I, the way I think about it is like, you know, like Buddha and a band, you know, like, yeah, it might be like, you know, and then solo, you know, but it might be completely disruptive, you know, to the rest of the band, you know what I mean?
Like, if you’re just doing your own thing and then excusing it the whole time, you’re not listening and starting to dial and settle into everything that’s happening, you know.
There you go.
You got it.
Yeah.
We got it.
We got to play in the band.
Right.
Because we’re not, we’re not solos.
We’re never, we’re never alone.
We’re never disconnected.
Everything that’s happening is connected to everything else.
So we, harmony is our interdependence and our right function, our appropriateness within that tapestry.
Yeah.
Hard to believe it, but we’re already five past the top of the hour.
It always flies by.
It always flies by.
Yeah.
So.
That’s part of like, I remember like, when I went back and listened to last week’s, and then at some point along the way, it was like, well, then why are we here?
You know, why are we going through the sutra?
You know, and I just want to share this because like, I feel like this keeps coming up in different avenues.
I’ve heard this before, like, I mean, it’s all just kind of the chase.
Like it’s to me, to me, it’s like, I don’t know if it’s like, because it’s truth is enjoyment or something.
I don’t know, but it’s like, like, be personally, why am I here?
It’s like, cause I love this shit, you know, like, it’s my favorite thing in the world, you know?
So it makes it easy, you know?
And I remember like, like, you know, like in the yoga environments, I hear that as well.
You know, everything’s like practice, practice, you know, like it’s all like, everything’s hard work.
It’s like, well, it’s not really hard work if you’re enjoying it, you know, like, right.
Like, it’s like this play, you know, and then that’s where the Alan Watts, you know, play of energy stuff starts to ring in my head.
And it’s like, yeah, it’s life, life was play, you know?
And, and yeah, this is play.
It’s like, play for the mind, you know, until like, until like, it’s, I don’t know, I’m just exhausted, you know, like, I’ll have some fun, or almost.
It’s like the body, like with yoga, it’s just like, well, all right, let’s, let’s, let’s play with this body, you know, and like the embodiment practices.
So, so yeah, that’s, that’s fly by, like, why do this, like, and yeah, it’s like, and I, and then it makes me think like, well, why, why is this so enjoyable, you know?
And I don’t know, I think, like, I don’t know, I just, I don’t know.
I guess it’s inherited practice and talk about the stages and bliss shows up all the time, liberation, those are all nice things.
Maybe it’s just that, that inclination towards it, you know, but, but yeah.
Yeah.
All the things that you just said.
And I think there’s this, the fun thing about playfulness, I just got to say this, the fun thing about playfulness is remembering to play when you’re having a really bad time.
That’s still a game too.
Yeah.
Always on the playground.
Sometimes it gets pretty intense, but it’s still a playground.
Yeah.
All right, my friend.
Thank you.
Our Dharma discussion for today concludes.
Do you have anything for your closing check-in?
I think that was a good way to leave it for me.
And for me, eternally grateful and excited to be on the playground with you.
We will see you next week.
Yeah.
All right.
Take care.
Enjoy your afternoon.