Meditation Town Hall with guest host Lama Roger Walsh August 4, 2024

Weekly Free Meditation Town Hall with Lama Surya Das. Lama's Surya's guest host this week is his dear friend and colleague, Lama Roger Walsh. To register for this weekly Sunday offering, and view Lama Surya's other retreats and programs, or make a dana donation, please visit dzogchen.org

[@halcyon2864]

🙏 Ego is the source of all sufferings. May all living beings be happy 💜 💜💜
Namo Buddhaya 🙏 🙏🙏

[@fineasfrog]

Okay you two fellow sentient beings is the following depiction in words helpful so that we don't fall into putting the cart before the horse? If we just practice without the view that reality (or Tao -if you like that pointer) is "One-Whole", then our practice will be somewhat limited by our unexamined or unconsciousness view of reality. I put quotation marks around the words [One-Whole] because words are only a pointer. What is the view needed to make our practice more effective, more aligned with "what is"? Here is one suggestion: Reality appears, only appears, to be two as the "manifest and unmanifest" or "the seen and the unseen" or "form and formlessness", or as "the body and not body". We are not denying these appearances; rather we are bringing them into a greater more inclusive perspective. To do any "practice", it is very much helpful to establish a view of how the body ordinarily appears to us as a form when the reality is that this is "not necessarily so". We might consider that the body is a partial perception or partial knowing and in that sense it is "illusory" because we as of yet do not have the "whole picture" (whole context). This appearance of the body as a separate form is due to the limitation of our ordinary mode of perception. We need to remind ourselves the body only appears as a separate form; when in reality, it is more like a wave that is not separate from the ocean. Or the body is more like a peice of a holographic plate that when the reference beam is shined through it, it produces an image of the whole. What might it mean to say that in this respect "we are made in the image of the whole"? In reality the body is like the wave movement (life-energy, water of life) of the ocean and is not separate from it. This is similar to the Heart Sutra suggesting that "form is emptiness and emptiness is form". It is only our ordinary perception that sees these two as separate. We need but don't yet have the habit of remembering that the view of the manifest (all forms, the seen, the separate) and the unmanifest (the formless, unseen) is set up in us due to our mode of perception. That is to say the template of "in here" is me and "out there" is "not me" structures all our perceptions. This ordinary mode of perception is relative vision. We need, but have yet to establish, the habit of remembering when we need to that both form and formlessness are just appearances of "one undivided wholeness". Or better we can say it is the Tao. When this view is available when need be, we can now begin or re-begin our "practice". Now we our disposed to welcome all that arises as one-whole energy. In fact all thought-forms, feelings and particular sensations are arising, as it were, wishing to return to the Tao that they never in reality left. Rumi: "The ground of your being welcomes your compost and grows beauty." In this view the words of "practice" might be something like: Resting, allowing open awareness, with just a hint of a smile that smiles itself. Now let everything settle at its own rate, no matter how slowly, into and around the apparent outlines of the form of the body. We simply wait because we now know that what arises and seems to be the felt sense of impatience can now be seen as the energy to further feed our simple presence. The actual settling is sometimes referred to as "other" power because, we don't actually do it. Rather we simply allow it by being receptive to it as it settles into us. We let thoughts come yet we are not much interested in thoughts unless they are the result of insight that reflects the Whole. We let sensation appear as it will, we simply let it come upon us and through us knowing we are not separate from it. In a sense we allow it to fill us giving us and feeding us as a global sense of presence. If we open to it, we can discover the movement of breath enlivens the sensation both as the mass of the whole of sensation as presence and what appears to be the separate parts that seem more dominate and appear as waves. These so-called parts are just the flux of the whole and are not in fact separate from the whole as they first appear to be. We can say the breath as the flux of the whole constantly enlivens. What did Hakuin mean when he said (paraphrase) "The whole of the teachings is in this fathom long body"? The simple presence associated with the form of the felt sense of the body can be sensed as that in which the body arises. Or it can be sensed as that which "condenses itself in presence" to allow the perception of an apparently separate form. The body can be said to be the womb or matrix of all possibilities of Buddha nature. Isn't there a word in Buddhism that points to this?