"The Psychology of Awakening" article @ Tricycle.com

I've been reading Welwood's book, Jackson. I highly recommend it!

From the Tricycle article Jackson linked us to:

"Yet along the way I also discovered something I was not prepared for: that spiritual realization is relatively easy compared with the much greater difficulty of actualizing it, integrating it fully into the fabric of one’s daily life. Realization[/b] is the movement from personality to being, the direct recognition of one’s ultimate nature, leading toward liberation from the conditioned self, while actualization refers to how we integrate that realization in all the situations of our life. When people have major spiritual openings, often during periods of intensive practice or retreat, they may imagine that everything has changed and that they will never be the same again. Indeed, spiritual work can open people up profoundly and help them live free of the compulsions of their conditioning for long stretches of time. But at some point after the retreat ends, when they encounter circumstances that trigger their emotional reactivity or their habitual tensions and defenses, they may find that their spiritual practice has hardly penetrated their conditioned personality, which remains mostly intact, generating the same tendencies it always has."

Bingo!

This is huge for me. This year has been about as ugly for me as a year could be, frought with personal crises, family issues, mental health issues for family members, and so on. It was clear through all that that my practice was helping... to some extent. But my practice did not cure any of this. It did not erase the innate fears, worries, anxieties and anger that have flowed through the mind as a result of these events.

So what good is my practice, you might ask?

Well, I only have one answer: it helps me to see my own crap. If I can see my "stuff" arising, if I am willing to face up to it and deal with it, I can use that insight to adjust to the reality of my situation. I can be honest with myself. I can know how mind works, the habits it has, the tricks it plays. I can use all of that knowledge and insight to work on being smarter, less reactive, more helpful and compassionate.

So I think at its best my practice has brought me wisdom. Visibility into the mind and how it works. It has not cured or otherwise ended my "stuff."

Yes, Jackson. I believe that integration of insights, especially the deeper ones, is a life's work. I do not believe there are any shortcuts

"How does one keep "Beginner's Mind?" -- Sheila

Excellent question! For me keeping beginner's mind is an ongoing struggle. An epic lifetime battle. It is best described as taking the realization from my sitting practice that every moment is new and fresh and different (and that what I think is the "same as always" is a mind-generated concept) and applying that to my ongoing existence, again on a moment to moment basis.

Needless to say, this is very,very difficult. What helps is that flash of insight, gained from my early vipassana practice, that the world is constructed and reconstructed by mind all the time. Everything I experience is mind interpreting external phenomena. Mind arranges sensate reality into concepts, models and maps. These things are not the underlying reality, as that is unknowable in a direct way.

If I know I'm always dealing with constructs I have a much better chance of seeing through them, more and more of the time.

Make sense?

Mike LaTorra - I love your coaching on bringing EVERYTHING into our practice.

"What I have wondered though is if the mind functions in a particular way or if our individual baseline "constructs" are all filtered by our life experiences. In other words, are there constructs that the brain creates or utilizes in such a way that there is a commonality to interpretation that is then colored by experience?"

Sheila, everything in your experience is constructed by mind. There is no other way to experience anything. If you sit really still for a while and watch what's going on you can actually observe this process as it happens. In Buddhism it's called "dependent origination." It's a multi-step process that starts when an object hits a sense organ (ear, eye, nose, touch, taste, mind).

So, in a round about answer to your question, your mind has a whole bunch of pre-conceived models (concepts, thoughts, images, names, maps) that it uses all the time to orient itself. These can appear to you as images, words, and other kinds of thoughts. Here's my personal canonical example: upon hearing the chirp of a bird I first detect the sound of the chirp as it arrives in mind. That is then named "chirp" or maybe "bird" and quickly thereafter an image is generated by mind - a very generic bird image. I then form a judgment about the experience - I like it, I don't like it, or it's neutral. All of this happens very, very quickly, in a matter on milliseconds.

That process is occurring all day long, second by second. Those common images and names and concepts and maps are generated by mind and form what we call "reality."

Helpful?

Did you start reading yet?

Wow. That's saying something.