(disclaimer: this thought was thrown down quickly and is hard to follow, if you read the whole thing you'll likely get the geist, but reading over it quickly with no time to edit I realize that there will be points where it's best you just pretend to get what I'm talking about and keep going, if you want to actually talk about these ideas some time, I'd love to)
I was just thinking about a thing that I'd kinda figured out before but needed to work through again. IN THE BEGINNING, there were really black and white ideas, Buddha is always Buddha and once you do the Buddha thing you're done, just one kind of thing which is amazing awesomeness and telling other people how to be amazing awesomeness and having most of them not get it most of the time. HOWEVER, some--and I'm joining the camp, have decided that actually really good enlightenment is being able to be fluid about your method of interacting, there might be a tendency to go from the rational thinking through mind to a more natural experience of reality in which some amount of Oneness is realized and the lines get all fuzzy and difficult to tease apart, and this is real groovy and seems closer to reality. HOWEVER, it is helpful in extending your impact on other people and accomplishing daily life tasks (that is if you aren't allowed to have this monk-hood thing)--to do that rational thought-separation from outside world--using your mind to make up FUTURES and plans to crank on specific leavers in certain ways...this is SOOO not BUDDHA right? it's what I was doing before I realized all that groovy stuff AND YET---no.
It doesn't seem hard on the surface to say no, obviously we've got stuff to do and we can't all just chop wood and carry water, we have to chop our life into organized-calendarized bits and carry complex mental constructs in tandem and this must be a part of our spirituality, because it is our reality. But when I look at it for more than half a moment I see that it requires A HUGE UPHEAVAL, we have to throw out perfection as...at least I...thought of it when I first started looking into spiritual stuff, and indeed still do fairly often, there is this awesomeness where you're so so so awesome that you're like these other people that were awesome and nothing talks about them doing mental gymnastics it was only about the awesome bits. And so, it requires a bit more reality than we might be ready to throw in. Where is this excessive amount of hope that I get from spirituality/religion if I've still got these relative things that I have to do that aren't even some glorious simplicity? I can't pray constantly? I can't experience my vibratory body all the time? Well shit, where is the nirvana in that? In some sense we have to find something beyond experience/feeling that isn't even mental and what the hell is that?
Something that is present both in meditation and in figuring out action plans for future events? That is not what I signed up for, I signed up to know bliss in some sort of constancy. Going from full on suffering to full on freedom.
I'm not giving up the possibility of full on freedom as some sort of possibility. But I'm starting to believe that if we truly update spirituality then our chopping of wood and carrying water need to be mental wood and water as well as the physical versions--we can't hide from the complexity which is the current state of our work. So, I have to switch off between future-mind and Now-mind and FURTHER THAN THAT--believe that a Buddha or Christ would too. They may be bliss but in this day and age (probably back then too), they needed to crunch the numbers now and again. To reintegrate what I just finished freeing myself from--if I thought I was regressing from rational to beyond-rational, I've definitely got to work with the fear of regression here, not only am I no longer thinking right, I'm now loosing that groovy now-ness feeling as an all-the-time goal to eventually be my only experience...now it is some sort of functional ability to adapt to my environment and use rational thought and self discipline when needed and then stop that wave and start the Now-ness function when it is more suited. ANOTHER RESPONSIBILITY--decide when each is needed. Most recently, I've been in the beyond thought sort of state of mind most of the time and thinking that I needed to try to get that in more and more, and now, ESPECIALLY now that I'm back in school, I've got to balance in rational thought of organizing notes and thinking about when I'm going to study and when I'm going to eat, and what I should eat, and how to grow my career in steps over time and balance things on an intellectual level. Part of me worries that I'm going backwards, part is worried I'll forget me, another part has been worried about the whole Now thing and is happy that I'm considering doing less of that and thinks I'll have a better memory for it.
One teacher would say it's a left-brain right-brain mode of operations and being able to switch between the two--that's something that genpo roshi from big mind big heart was talking about.
SO, now that that mind-growth has been thrown on to the screen, it's time to study pathology. Wish me well in my transition from the view of "more post-rational is better" to "let's learn to use rational time-locked thinking and modes of living as much as is necessary and make smooth transitions to meet life's demands".
Also before the path, wanted to make random note and I might as well here that I often think about a correlate between light and spirit. That is, light comes out not when the electron becomes charged up but when it is falling down, thus the possibility that you are changed and show outward signs of this change and get aha's possibly AFTER meditating and doing all of this work--all of that compassion and even the experiences themselves may lag behind the initial charging...thus we meditate even if we don't think or even feel like we're getting it.--a difficult idea, worth internal and external debate.
A later update: some good news, I sometimes have natural mindfulness whilst doing directed thinking, better than when I just allow my mind to do what it will--usually sing and wonder quietly to itself--so while I loose any sort of constancy in studying, I can have it in other aspects of rational directed thought.
P.S. I've been reading no boundary and I think the centaur chapter really talks well about these issues, heals the split, all are spontenous manifestations of the underlying One, and on top of that, I think some meditative traditions, like vipassana can egg on this view that spirit body can only be found when divorced from mind.
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