More on Gradualism vs Atiyoga/Simultanist Practices

The Marginalian covers Sam Harris's take on the paradoxes and tensions between meditative practice styles, covered here in relation to Tibetan Buddhist traditions and their derivatives; regarding gradualism: 

"We wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present."

"[This approach] encourages confusion at the outset regarding the nature of the problem one is trying to solve."

From my experience I can say that the "doing of non-doing" is the more potent practice for me; this is what I've found: 

1. When one is engaged in surrendered meditation, one's normal self cannot take anything from the experience. When practicing the gradualist path, I was always susceptible to an increase of personal meaning. In other words, whilst one part of my mind was positively affected by say obtaining some insight or other, another aspect of ego was strengthened through an identification with the spiritual path: "I am progressing", "things are happening", "I'm doing well", etc. When one is resting as awareness, meditation becomes an act of  stripping away, instead of accumulation. The thought of "progress" for the ego is just another thought, which carries very little meaning.
2. It is free from ideology. When one is directing the mind towards an object understood intellectually  as positive, one is simultaneously rejecting other states and other objects understood as not-positive, these understandings arise only through ideology which pre-supposes a knowledge of what is good and bad. This in turn can arise from notions embedded from childhood. Traumatised and wounded individuals like me can easily fall into black and white thinking and are attracted to ideology. When the mind is simply "known", there is no interference from preference or self-directed control, everything is natural and there is the possibility of the unknown, unconscious or unexpected coming up into consciousness.
3. Surrendered meditation almost immediately becomes a physical practice, where trauma and other unconscious patterns reside. As a gradualist, I could use meditation as a way of escaping or Spiritually-Bypassing unwanted feelings and traumas. This led to a sense of my being "stuck". In surrender, there is no escaping as there is no control, whatever needs attention in the body comes into non-directed awareness, where it can find acceptance and release any tensions or information it contains.

This is not to detract from the paradox of having to navigate spiritual practice from the egoic state in the first instance. I would say however, ultimately, due to the very confusion Sam Harris is pointing to, that one will find out that the ego actually doesn't want to lose control and it doesn't really want to change, it will simply co-opt spiritual activity. Only the I AM that just is can step back from this knot.

Enter One - Sol Seppy

 Watching the series Dark on Netflix the lyrics from this poked through.

Inspired lyrics to say the least.

Let it sink into your atoms

Anna Brown transmits awakened energy.

 

Moving Water - Rumi

When you do things from your soul,

you feel a river moving in you,
a joy.

When actions come from another section,
the feeling disappears.

Don't let others lead you.

They may be blind or, worse, vultures.

Reach for the rope of God.

And what is that?

Putting aside self-will.

Because of willfulness people sit in jail,
the trapped bird's wings are tied,
fish sizzle in the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness.

You've seen a magistrate inflict visible punishment.

Now see the invisible.

If you could leave your selfishness,
you would see how you've been torturing your soul.

We are born and live inside black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is?

Don't insist on going where you think you want to go.

Ask the way to the spring.

Your living pieces will form a harmony.

There is a moving palace

that floats in the air

with balconies and clear water flowing through,

infinity everywhere,

yet contained under a single tent.

In Between Paths Part I

I'm writing this to capture my thoughts about the NKT and my experiences at one of it's centres. I have been connected to the centre since University and it was my second practical connection with Buddha-dharma, the first being an Insight meditation retreat in Sarnath led by Christopher Titmuss. It is the only practice I have taken on board deeply, having practised it for 12 years. Prior to it, I was doing Breathing meditation and loving-kindness practices, inspired mainly by the retreat in India and A Path with Heart.

When I first went to a general programme (GP) class my impressions were not good because I was not interested in the deities and gods that I saw depicted all over the leaflets and books they had out on the tables. However, the teachings were extremely clear and logical in a way that deeply appealed to me. To this day listening to a good NKT teacher tends to set me on the edge of my seat.

Having engaged in retreat in India, I soon visited the centre for what I assumed was their sitting session (as it was the most regular occurrence in the schedule) but Wishfulfilling Jewel is actually the Chanted Sadhana practice of Je Tsongkhapa and Dorje Shugden. I was a little discombobulated by the second part of the Sadhana as I had just finished reading the Dalai Lama's Autobiography, at the end of which, he warns against the Dorje Shugden practice and attempts to give some explanation of his position against it. I was somewhat troubled, but I noticed that after attending the puja, my meditations were more powerful. This made me override my misgivings somewhat and I continued to attend classes and started regular attendance at puja. Pretty soon I was told about Foundation Programme (FP) and I started attending on a Sunday Morning and enjoyed it immensely. I started on the second chapter of Joyful Path which is the second part of the Lamrim cycle. I'm aware that if we'd started with reliance on the Spiritual Guide, I probably would have left at that time as I still very much had my guard up.

When I was due to leave University and move back home, I was offered a place to live at the centre as a resident. The day before this happened I had just finished reading the Alchemist and the main message I had taken away from that book was the slightly scary "follow the omens in your life or they will cease to appear and your life will become meaningless". So I immediately agreed on the spot, then spent a few weeks worrying about what I had agreed to!

My experience of the centre was mainly very good, I was a little taken aback by some of the ways the teacher treated some people and I was intimidated by his presence and struggled to connect with him, apart from one occasion when he gave me a real gift of listening and I was moved to tears by the way he listened to me and the love he communicated whilst doing so; this experience is one of the things that got me interested in learning to be a counsellor. It was not long before I was invited to teach a GP class of my own. I agreed with a lot of misgivings about my ability. However, it turned out that teaching as a path was very powerful for me, it took a while but once I figured out how to set my intention properly before I began, I would say it enabled me to help a lot of people and I continued to teach for a couple of years. Then I had a hiatus from teaching and living at the centre for three years when I moved out with a girlfriend; a painful misadventure.

My way out of the relationship was to move back into the centre. By this time I was on my third NKT teacher who encouraged me a lot and allowed me to take on a lot of responsibilities. Having been away for so long I was enthusiastic and for a while taught two GPs, held a directorship and worked as Education Programme Co-ordinator at the centre. I quit my job and took on part-time work so I could give more time to the centre. I gave up one of the GPs but kept my other roles. Being so close to the goings on, I became very aware of the difficulties the teacher faced internally and externally. She and I did not have the most healthy of relationships, but I know that she cared for me. However, I repeatedly found myself and others in situations that seemed to be a product of the teacher's delusions and mistakes. It irks me to this day that, in the five years I was EPC we were not once visited by anyone in a senior position who was interested in the way things were being run or what was happening on a day to day basis. I was also studying counselling and the disparity in the ways the BACP requires and supports ethical conduct of counsellors vs the lack of support and supervision of NKT teachers was quite distressing. Steve at NKT central is a really great guy, but the support is reactive, not proactive as I believe it needs to be, after all, the NKT is caring for people's spiritual lives.

Things continued to trouble me and I found that there was noone I could talk to about it. It was so hard, I saw people being mistreated and misused in strange and difficult situations, our karma seemed to be that we were dealing with a lot of (conventional) mental health issues. At one point, a depression-prone resident was asked to leave the centre by text message, I was, and am, horrified by that. There are a number of horrible and difficult things I could detail, but its not worth it. I became aware through contact with people at festivals and online that burnout and mismanagement were not uncommon at other small centres and even some of the big ones.

The central tension I experienced was between my immense appreciation and connection to the teachings and the dysfunctional and problematic life I experienced at the centre. My approach to solving this was to try to fix things at the centre. I was only a Director at this point, I was instrumental in changing the contracts for residents to be more inline with the NKT's standard contracts. It is indicative of the lack of oversight the NKT head office has of its child centres that we were operating without any formal rules or the proper residential agreements for probably ten or more years. I'm still proud that my partner and I were able to put helpful processes and agreements in place in collaboration with head office for new residents that had a major impact on the atmosphere and quality of life within the centre. By this stage, things were still not ideal. The community was healthier, but the residents were not integrated and working well together. I wanted to solve these problems I was aware of until the centre felt whole. By now we were on our fourth teacher and she and I have an uneasy relationship (I can be a little outspoken, and I think she is wary of my influence). At one point she asked me to enlist the rest of the directors to find a new Admin director after we'd lost the fourth AD in my time being there. Having seen the difficulties previous ADs had faced and the amount of skill required to do that job well, the directors struggled to identify anyone in our community that could carry the role. The resident teacher wanted a person who was very new to the NKT and was to my mind in the romantic first stage of practice. I couldn't bear to see this person thrown to the wolves in the way we were being asked to. We asked my partner, a very mature Vipassana practitioner to step in and handle some of the responsibilities, she thrived in the role having shadowed and supported the previous two ADs at the centre. However, her involvement worried the RT I think because my partner was not practising Kadam Dharma and therefore not allowed to take on the kind of role we were asking her to. I was excluded from the meetings due to the obvious conflict of interest (which I had blindly brought onto myself). My relationship with the teacher from this episode deteriorated further and I stepped down as Director. With no influence on the path taken, a new AD was brought on whom I felt we were setting up to fail. I was so uncomfortable with what was happening that I stepped down and moved out. I did everything I practically could to improve things.

I reconnected deeply with the Kadampa teachings this year, culminating in the summer festival highest yoga tantra empowerments, which were the most powerful and moving I've ever experienced. I was lit up with faith and an intense connection to the tradition and teachings. However, since then I have had an equal and opposite experience. I realised that most of the people who have been in the NKT for a while are operating at a distance. That in a sense they are all survivors, who learned to maintain their spiritual life by not being too involved in the tradition. Simultaneously, I became aware through STTP teachings that there has been a concern within Tibetan Buddhism and Kadam Buddhism in particular, that we avoid the "dangerous heresy" of Hashang Mahayana's concept-less meditation. My suspicion is that this concern is really at the heart of the Dorje Shugden controversy. That we are seeing the tension between Chinese and Indian Buddhism that manifested in Tibet before the great debate was won, now manifesting on the streets of Europe and the US. This is not to say that I think that the Dalai Lama is right to act in the way that he has, he's over-reacting massively but I think he's basically right in his assessment of Gelug's having a superior and exclusive mindset. His best argument is actually hard to find but paraphrasing it goes something like this "Are you saying that before Je Rinpoche there were no enlightened beings in Tibet? This is nonsense so lets have none of this talk". It seems there is a long-standing suspicion that the Nyingmapa teachings are Hashang Dharma in disguise. These two insights have left me wiser, but less grounded in practice. I need to find my way.

Alan Watts - Whats wrong with our culture

This video has stuck with me for a long time, "Our success is a failure"... I wonder about what it must be like for young people as this fact becomes more and more impossible to ignore. An underlying unease that is only growing as time passes.

In one respect this gives me hope as change becomes more obviously required. But I fear for the mental health of the generations to come.

Christian Slater's rant at the end of Mr Robot has a similar theme.

"Is any of it real, I mean look at this, a world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind altering chemicals in the form of food. Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Cold isolated bubbles in the form of social networks..."

Each to their lineage?

One of the most important principles in Buddhism is for teachers to leave the meaning of Buddhist teachings unchanged for future generations. The presentation can be altered for students' karma as exemplified by Atisha's creation of the Lamrim, but you must keep it Buddhism. However, there is great disagreement over the meaning of the higher teachings on emptiness. The Buddha's approach to teaching is confusing, as he gave multiple and seemingly contradictory explanations of the nature of reality. These are widely understood to have been directed to the karma of his audience and to lead disciples on a graduated path of understanding which takes the student closer and closer to ultimate truth. I have posted previously about the disagreement between Je Tsongkhapa and Gorampa and there is general public rejection of Hashang Mahayana's concept-less meditation style amongst the four schools of Buddhism from Tibet. However, because the schools are different, there is inevitably some tension and criticism between them for example, the historic origin's of Dzogchen practice are elusive and its often criticised as being Hashang's Chan Dharma in disguise.

"Again, the emphasis is on non-conceptualization and the uselessness of any practice based on striving toward a goal."

Tension between these different approaches to attaining wisdom understanding reality appears to have been inherited from India and China.

"By the late 8th century tension developed between the different groups of foreign teachers and their Tibetan disciples, particularly between the Indians and the Chinese. While the Indian teachers taught a graduated path in which the tantric and sutric teachings were carefully laid out as steps to enlightenment, the Chinese taught a method they called Chan (their pronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyāna, meaning “contemplation”). Chan, the forerunner of Japanese Zen, emphasized the result rather than the path, and a straightforward concept-free meditation rather than the multitude of methods offered by the Indian teachers.

When the tension between the Indian and Chinese camps threatened to erupt into violence (in fact, some of the Chan disciples actually wounded themselves in protest and threatened suicide), the Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen called for the situation to be resolved in a formal debate."

The war of ideas must rage on.

So we have a situation where students of Tibetan Buddhism are taught and practise different methods and inherit different views. Within the gradualist path sorting through these views and attaining the correct generic image of emptiness is of paramount importance. Inevitably as part of this investigation, one must be able to dismiss incorrect paths or views. Indeed, three or more views that Buddha himself presented must be rejected! Not to mention understandings presented in other traditions. For the gradualist, at some point it can be rightly said that they will reject, for themselves, teachings that many other people involved in Buddhism are fervently and sincerely practising. In the situation, how does one avoid tension and dischord? Furthermore, as Stephan Batchelor pointed out, Bodhisattvas are concerned with the liberation of all living beings. It is very simple to understand what it might mean to someone with this concern when they feel they have recognised a false path.

All of these concerns can seemingly be dismissed when one contemplates the differing karma of disciples, however, in Tibet this is not what happened. Upon the loss of the Great debate to Kamalashila, Hashang was kicked out of Tibet!

Kongtrul's Rimé movement has gone someway to establishing a good deal of cooperation and sharing of teachings between the various traditions of Tibet. Dorje Shugden practitioners have commitments to follow one tradition purely which can seem on the surface to be sectarian and cult-like. However, it is actually a sentiment echoed throughout all lineages and teachings including within the Rimé tradition itself. You can find similar instructions in Jack Kornfield's teachings in A Path with Heart.

"taking the one seat describes two related aspects of spiritual work. Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and teacher among all of the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding...

If we do a little of one kind of practice and a little of another, the work we have done in one often doesn't continue to build as we change to the next. It is as if we were to dig many shallow wells instead of one deep one. In continually moving from one approach to another, we are never forced to face our own boredom, impatience, and fears. We are never brought face to face with ourselves. So we need to choose a way of practice that is deep and ancient and connected with our hearts, and then make a commitment to follow it as long as it takes to transform ourselves. This is the outward aspect of taking the one seat."

The NKT emphasises avoiding pick and mix Buddhism and a issues a challenge to "get out of Samsara" as quickly as possible, both of which seem to oppose the idea of studying the ideas of other traditions - as what is the intention behind doing this? If you want to help others get enlightened a quickly as you can, then you will be able to help all beings in accordance with their karma.