Month: June 2012

I still grapple with Gautama the Buddha’s equating sickness, old age, and death with the five groups of grasping, but I think it does make sense in that my consciousness is not my own, not mine.

When consciousness takes place spontaneously with regard to the six senses, that awareness from moment to moment is free, is not conditioned in the place of occurrence by ignorance, desire, or becoming. “That being, this is so”, yet there is no doer, no sense of a do-er in control of that with respect to which consciousness takes place, no sense of a do-er in the placement of consciousness.

This is just the way I experience consciousness falling asleep, when I attend to my sense of location in space as I fall asleep. When I’m waking up, the breath in, the breath out has no length except in the free occurrence of mind.

Grasping after self, after a do-er in the five groups follows ignorance of the experience of consciousness taking place spontaneously, ignorance of the impact of consciousness, ignorance of the feeling that occurs as consciousness takes place. The sense of self connected with the do-er in the five groups knows old age, illness, and death as suffering, yet that sense of self is identically grasping in the five groups.

I think I am down to this, there’s a relationship between the ability to feel and the consciousness that takes place freely with regard to the six senses. That relationship is automatic in waking up and falling asleep, and anyone can find it there, if they have a need to find it.

I sit until a relationship between the ability to feel and the consciousness that takes place freely with regard to the six senses gets up. In the course of my experience with this kind of relationship, I have discovered that things that I’m not consciously aware of will sometimes get me up, things that are only on the edges of my awareness will sometimes get me up, and what I really believe will sometimes get me up out of a sitting. When it’s the latter, there’s no point in staying seated, even though my belief could change. If I truly believe I need to clean my desk, and I am set in motion behind it, I accept that being absorbed in cleaning the desk will follow.

I did reply to humbleone’s request for more description of the practice with a recap of the science of referred sensation, meaning that allopathic medicine uses the presence of numbness on the surface of the skin to locate pinched nerve exits along the sacrum and spine. I offered that in my experience, the ability to feel to the surface of the skin of the entire body is related to the ability of consciousness to occur freely in three dimensional space with respect to the senses, and in fact it’s my belief that as a part of natural well-being, the two respirations utilize the place of occurrence of consciousness to open feeling to the surface of the skin.

I don’t know if my recap and experience helped humbleone to find the movement of mind or not, but I know it helps me.

Here’s an interesting bit from Shunryu Suzuki’s lecture on Whole Body Zazen, from cuke.com:

“You may say that your mind is practicing zazen and ignore your body, the practice of your body. Sometimes when you think that you are doing zazen with an imperturbable mind, you ignore the body, but it is also necessary to have the opposite understanding at the same time. Your body is practicing zazen in imperturbability while your mind is moving.”

I think it’s easiest to experience letting go of the place of occurrence of consciousness as a part of falling asleep, and if you’ve ever trained yourself to recall dreams, you will probably catch sight of the mind that moves in the same manner one of these early mornings.