November 2018

A lot happened in November.  There were many aspects of practice coming forward.  In general, there was a greater focus on new kinds of integration & much conventional “success.”

Working with one of my mentors, I have begun to embrace the importance of ego development, which is evolving the conceptual mind into an expression of perceptual nonduality.  By rewatching an online series called Crash Course, on history, I discovered many moments of contemplation which seemed to be reordering my inner paradigms & belief systems. There is a particular sense of the overall patterning of human activity, the tendency for history to repeat itself, the tendency for apocalyptic attitudes in each generation, for humans to seek for good-bad things to grab onto rather than the inconvenient ambiguity of reality.  Alongside this, there is a greater sense of ease unfolding; seeing everyone as basically similar, all members of the human family in the animal kingdom (including myriad biological impulses), a stripping of encrusted layers of preconception of how I expect other people to be & greater space for the many varieties of people in all of their diversification.

Parallel to all of that, there is more acceptance of my own inner diversity.  Libido continued to be a struggle in this month. The basic pattern of strategizing on how to ‘get my needs met’ stayed.  It creeps into seemingly benign contemplation. I am aware that this focus is completely normal for males in their twenties & I do deeply accept this.  There were a couple days were a new exemplar seemed to be revealed, related to this. That did not last. There was also more journaling (also looking at one cartoonist’s work to spur the writing) & letting go of old structures, memories, value systems - guided by another mentor.  Seeing all of the gifts I have been given & how rich my life has become, but also how there are certain things I have deeply yearned for that have not been delivered - letting those things be washed away in the flow of this vast consciousness.

In a similar vein, the importance of service is becoming more obvious for me.  I had previously understood that generosity was useful to create space in the mind & service/gratitude were useful to help move forward these dharma teachings which have helped me so much.  But it also extends much farther than that. Service can be something which is vital, even if it does not create personal benefit or help specifically further Buddhist teachings. I am inspired by the Effective Altruism movement & their focus on the most efficient ways to save as many lives as possible on earth with one’s time & money.  I have pledged 10% of my income for one year to Giving What We Can program. This is a trial period but I would aspire to give more & take the lifetime pledge. I am also learning to code python & would like to learn to take any business skills I have, pair them with meditation & technical skills & work pro bono for non profits or other good causes.  More immediately, I started saying spiritual mind treatments for a few friends for health & spiritual progression & have seen great success within days in each instance. I have also been helping in other ways where I can, such as participating in a study on bipolar & meditative healing or submitting a short article on how stream entry helped heal me to a popular blog.  There seems to be a great momentum involved in this service orientation, like a reliable trade wind for a sailboat.

On a conventional level, I got promoted in November.  I have also stayed off of medication for months now & have had no insomnia.  This was my most consistent month ever for healthy habits, self care, housekeeping, etc.  Likely the healthiest I have ever been physically & there seems to be an emerging relationship with spiritual practice & the cleansing of the physical system.  For instance I had a weird kriya this month which involved the involuntary tensing of shallow chest muscles & my internal solar plexus. I have never felt these muscles & tendons move like that before & afterwards that area felt very relaxed & open.  I also decided to do less open journaling online, as I feel that there are aspects of my practice now which are likely to be confusing to some readers or at least difficult to explain in a daily journal format. A dharma friend pointed me to a speaker named Mitch Horowitz, who has inspired me to take a refreshed view on the New Thought/Mental Science tradition that I like.

In terms of meditation practice, I am mostly focused on off cushion mindfulness.  There is a clear process of the ego-activity becoming saturated with this mindfulness in every nook & cranny.  Effort is becoming enfolded into the ocean of presence. My body & attentional system are none other than arms & hands of this larger creature (to put it in fantastical terms).  There is a sense of riding a flow of some greater current that is out there. A sense of easeful flowing through the open doors of the sense apparatus which itself is also the flow is here each moment.  There are no sensations of center point in terms of attention. However, there is some geospatial referencing going on in me. I suspect that might drop away or change at some point, but not yet. Also, there are many faces of this oceanic presence.  Sometimes the way of seeing through causality chains is prominent, other times the blaring peace & quiet is most obvious, or the great sense of falling is at the fore, or the transparency of seeming solid reality, etc. These do seem to be different characteristics.  My work now is to fuse them all into one overtaste such that their basic emptiness is most prominent.