Dimensionally Barrett

Of late, a number of the great Tibetan older guard of teachers has passed, among whom are a couple I’ve had the honor of meeting and studying under/attending their teachings. These passings are reminders of the impermanence of phenomena and at the same time, the lessons of non-self/anatman/annata/བདག་མེད་, in a couple of ways.  One is that all phenomena is composite, each phenomenon the result of patternings of causes and conditions. No substantial self obtains from the impermanent, ever-shifting and metamorphosing of conditioned existence. Every Buddhist teacher I know - Tibetan and otherwise - stresses the transient,་insubstantial nature of the self. That said, and this is a doctrine that falls under scrutiny for reasons of suggesting otherwise, there is posited and particularly emphasized in Tibetan Mahayana, persistently existing mindstreams. Now, any good madhyamika is going to say that even that mindstream is subject to impermanence and therefore, the positing of such is a ...

Samantabhadra/Kuntuzangpo In my  previous post , I ended with this: "The absence of fear is the beginning of love." Briefly, and this will be brief: love is not sentiment, nor is it simpering, cloying "I wuv you" emotionality. Love is directly realizing fundamental Being. Each recognizing it in the Other and finding no-self/no-other. There is no "how" to this. Oh, certainly, there are practices like tong-len, meditating on the Beatitudes in the New Testament, reciting prayers and a myriad techniques for training thinking and perhaps developing reflexes to respond with a degree of calm instead of apprehension; but these are only momentary. Is there a switch to a continuous response to events that is only loving? Personally, I am not so sure in one context; in another, is there anything other than love at work? In what could be called the Immediate Context, it often seems that maintaining a continuous, compassionate response to (or better, b...

From the Peace Pagoda, Pokhara, Nepal. I don't have the wherewithal nor the desire to rain on other people's parades. But I question what goes on in the subjectivity of other people. I know that from my limited, tiny purview, at moments unbidden, a silence descends. I call it Presencing, purloining Heidegger and Jeanne de Salzmann unabashedly. It Presences when I'm walking in the middle of a busy street, sitting around a table with friends, and sometimes when I do expect it; during meditation or taijiquan or any number of movement practices. It's not true, then, that it always arrives "unbidden", but often, that's the case. It's not some "feeling" or some kind of "oceanic sensation" of absorption into the Cosmos. It's much, much more than that; it's so very ordinary. I don't particularly feel this has anything to do with "me"; I return to this point over and over again. The "me" or the ...