Be here now

A friend of mine found this series of short videos about exploring being present, now-ness, and other such topics very helpful. I listened to parts of a couple and think they are nice little simple inquiry exercises in plain English. Might be helpful for others:

peterdziuban.com/video/

Thanks, Ona. Just took "time" to watch the first video. One thing I'm curious about is dependent origination--thought I understood that, but with this deconstruction of time it's apparent that I don't.

i don't think these things are meant to be dogmas or fixed concepts on which to stake a claim, but rather exercises that play with aspects of experience that may be prominent or available for different people at different stages of development.

From my perspective the dependent origination and 'time is an illusion' perspectives are in logical contradiction (or else are 'two truths' - DO on the everyday experience level and time-as-illusion on the transcendent level).

The Pali canon, where DO was first laid out wouldn't've had any truck with the 'time is an illusion' argument, or nonduality as such, and the 'present moment' stuff doesn't appear there much if at all, to my knowledge - it was only the later Mahayana who started to get into the nonndual and deconstruct DO as empty (there's some cool Tibetan texts that do this, using logic to prove that a cause cannot have a relationship to an effect, or whatever the case may be).

Personally I'm fluffy enough now that I don't mind logical contradictions like that - I like Ona's perspective, holding different truths at the same time/different perspectives (and no necessary final truth of one or another).

I thought dependent origination avoided the need for the concept of time by making the origination dependent (?), i.e. causes and conditions mutuality arise (??)

On a less cerebral level, I get a chuckle out of the way this guy will let loose with some zinger, something to the effect that the future doesn't exist, and then break out in a mischievous little smile, like a 10-year-old boy who has just gotten away with something . .

Those sorts of videos are meant to be listened to as if they are guided meditations, not listened to like a lecture from a professor. Because yes, it's not about intellectual concepts, but about being led into direct experience.

I don't want to watch all the videos. Which are the best ones?

Chris Marti wrote: This is the kind of thing that leads to a lot of intellectualizing and philosophizing. And, of course, those would be the most difficult and least effective way to approach the issue. Experience! That's the key. How do you perceive the experience of DO and the experience of time?

Look deep!

I tend to think that the intellectualizing and philosophising is not only interesting, but important (and with effects), because it completely informs both how we practice (what actual practices and paths we follow), how we understand the experiences we have in practice, and how we convey or discuss them (there is no 'no-lens' or 'view from nowhere' through which to understand practice experiences). My observation in Western dharma teaching is that we're often given that injunction, but actually in a societal sense most Westerners' problem isn't that they intellectualize without practicing - because the place of dharma in our society (to do with Western stereotypes of Eastern religions) is that people come to dharma looking to not have to think in the abstract.

Interesting little aside on my understanding of DO...

I had read about dependent origination, and it always seemed like there was something missing, something that I just couldn't quite grasp. So, I read more and more article, read suttas, talked with people, but still really struggled. I could explain it quite well, but there was still something missing.

One day I was reading Thinassaro Bhikku's "The Shape of Suffering" and suddenly it all clicked for me. It turns out that I had intuitively grasped, grokked, gotten, understood DO years and years before with my psychoanalytic work. I hadn't made the connection to the Buddhist explanations, though, and so had built these large, elaborate mental models of what I thought it was (and I could explain it well, and I sounded like I understood it), but had never connected the abstract mental model to what I intuitively understood!

There was an almost audible click in my head when the two things connected.

The intellectualizing thing is a common evasive tactic in practice, though. Yes, it's perfectly wonderful and fine, and a great ability of the human mind and has its place. But you could start an awards show for people who respond to a teaching by starting a long intellectual argument about the exact meaning of the words, whether or not this or that really is the same as the other, and so forth. Lovely cocktail conversation, but NOT practice. It's as if you were standing at the top of the hill with your ski instructor, and when he demonstrated how to bend your knees and lower your center of gravity you started a discussion about the mechanics of the knee joint, which top skiers bend their knees this or that way, and theories about knee injuries. You will understand how much bend and how to balance yourself over your bent knees when you experiment with your body, try it out, fall down a few times, and finally develop a feel for just how much and when and where. The discussion is just an avoidance mechanism because you are afraid you might fall down the first few times and embarrass yourself.

(That said, one reason it's so common is because that's how we tend to operate - and in time one tends to stop doing it so much, as we gain more confidence in throwing ourselves into the unknown.)

I dunno, maybe it depends what the circles are like that one moves in - I don't think I've ever come across anyone who thinks that intellectualizing and philosophizing can take the place of practice, but it's like such a person is a straw man that I frequently hear teachers warn against (as a side note, philosophising doesn't necessarily have to be about logic or 'grasping' something; indeed that paradigm is basically what all of continental philosophy tries to deconstruct and which has some interesting crossovers with Eastern contemplative thought).

I think also, when 'don't philosophise, practice' is a response to a specific discussion, there's an implicit idea there that the two can't coexist or are somehow in a zero-sum game. But personally I like to discuss on this kind of level, and also consider/discuss how it may relate to my personal practice or experience - but which one comes up in any given conversation just depends on the conversation in question. So I don't see discussing something in a philosophical or intellectual way as a danger. My own experience of the assumptions, patterns and identities that cause suffering is that they're not logical, or on the 'philosophical/logical' level of consciousness, in any case...

andy wrote: Interesting little aside on my understanding of DO...

I had read about dependent origination, and it always seemed like there was something missing, something that I just couldn't quite grasp. So, I read more and more article, read suttas, talked with people, but still really struggled. I could explain it quite well, but there was still something missing..

==
I read a lot about DO and understood it conceptually but it stopped there with concepts floating around in my head that meant nothing to my life. Then I started experientially exploring DO from its other side,emptiness and something clicked.

jackhat1 wrote:

jackhat1 wrote: .
Then I started experientially exploring DO from its other side,emptiness and something clicked.

That sounds interesting, jackhat1. Is there a thread somewhere where you explain more in detail what you mean (don't want to hijack this thread, but I'm interested in learning more).

Lost and Found wrote:

jackhat1 wrote:

jackhat1 wrote: .
Then I started experientially exploring DO from its other side,emptiness and something clicked.

That sounds interesting, jackhat1. Is there a thread somewhere where you explain more in detail what you mean (don't want to hijack this thread, but I'm interested in learning more).

Thanks for asking this. In trying to respond I am finding I am having a hard time putting my response in words. Here is what I came up with. I could experientially see some specific examples of Dependent Origination (DO) such as the Cycle of DO and the 4NT’s. I could conceptually understand DO as when this changes that changes, this being related to that, etc., but couldn’t experience it as phenomena arising in my mind. Then I started emptiness/shikantaza,non-dual and self-inquiry practices. Then at times I could experience the emptiness of phenomena (transient, not ultimately satisfactory and not-self). This emptiness experience to me was the same as I conceptually understood DO.

I need to think about this some more.