September 25, 2013 Wednesday Consciousness Class

Aaron: My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. I'll be brief. I want to hold the big picture, here. We've spent the past hour talking about the whole chain of dependent origination, the suffering that you move into when you get caught into the whole concept of a separate self, fix-it energy and so forth.

Barbara mentioned right effort. There does need to be effort to step aside from these long-held habitual tendencies, but that's very different than fixing them. There's nothing to fix, only recognition that this pattern has not worked.

Let's imagine that you have a house here on the shore of the marsh. The village is on the other side of the marsh. You can walk a mile around or you can take a little path that cuts through the marsh. There's deep mud on either side of an almost invisible path, shallow mud on the path so it is hard to discern the path. The path doesn't go straight, it winds. If you don't pay attention, you're going to step off the path. Suddenly you're up to your neck in mud. Then you get angry. “I should have watched where I was going!” You pull yourself back up on the path. You can't really brush the dirt off. You're filthy. You start to walk, but you're so agitated that you fall off the path on the other side, and again... --You've been there!

Your work is not, “I must stay on the path,” your work is, “I will be present because my highest intention is not to keep falling in the mud.” It comes from a place of loving kindness, not a place of rigidity and “get it right.” It's such a different intention.

What I would ask you in these next two weeks is to practice from your heart. Watch body tension as contraction, as a sign that there's an unbalanced effort, and let's invite balanced, openhearted effort. What is propelling this mindfulness? Is it fear, or is it love? Just because fear is there doesn't mean love isn't what's propelling effort. How are you relating to the fear? Just keep watching it until you're able to fall off the path into the mud, climb back up, set on your way again after a few deep breaths, and just note, “The intention is not to keep falling in the mud. It hurts me and it hurts others. I'm going to  be present until I make it to the other side. I'm going to stay here on the path now so I'll come through smelling sweet, uncaked with stinky mud.”

Let your effort be from this openhearted place. No right or wrong, no good or bad; just the intention as much as possible to rest in this spacious heart. That's all. Same instructions, same homework for these next two weeks, watching this whole chain. Do come back to, if any of you have read my book No Chain at All, to the title of that book. There's a chain, and there's not a chain. Watch where as soon as you think there's a chain, you think, “I have to fix it.” or get unstuck from the chain. Come back to the no-chain. Find the balance, the little bear. (at start of class Barbara did a demo of relative and ultimate realites with a little bear in a red cylinder) He can get lost in ultimate reality and he can get lost in relative reality. Can there be balance?

Just watch yourself. Watch where, I think it was M who talked about a hiding place. Watch what you habitually use as a hiding place. For some of you, relative reality, fix-it energy. For some of you, ultimate reality—“Ah, let's space out a bit.” Very pleasant, but you can't take out the garbage very well that way. Can you stay balanced between the two?

Are there any questions? (no) I will see many of you at this weekend's workshop. We'll follow much the same area, but working with relative and ultimate. Working with vipassana. Working with ordinary space-time and non-ordinary space-time, which is another way of talking about relative and ultimate, and how they go together. So I look forward to spending this weekend with a number of you. That's all. Let us end.