The law is not shaken from the treetops By commandments gusting from heaven Blood paints history in a stillness and silence Which promises a different justice... Cool water rises from the soil Pale blue flowers awaken Forget-me-not Biographical story...
Once upon a time I was a student of anatomy. I used to have weekly classes in the morgue examining preserved specimens of parts of human bodies. One week an arm, the next week half a head...However much I tried to be scientific about it this was always a confronting, emotionally challenging experience. After every session all my colleagues went to the pub. I didn't drink and went alone back to my room to meditate. One of these days I spent a whole afternoon examining the hamstrings of a dead man's leg, playing with the different tissues to get the feel for their texture so that I could feel for the different structures under the skin of a live patient. This was my most intimate contact so far. I left the session feeling strange, disoriented. As I was walking along the street on my way home I felt my own legs underneath me and to my complete surprise a perfect image arose of the inside of one of my legs, like x-ray vision. I saw my hamstrings working bathed in the most sublime, cool light. For a moment I felt an enormous sense of lightness and freedom. I had never felt happier yet I knew not why. That moment changed my life. A part of me, a part that has grown and grown, has been looking for that sense of freedom ever since. Biographical story...
Many years ago as a layman I was travelling in the south of Chile. One full moon night I had a very powerful, lucid dream where I was kneeling down, sick and covered in warts and my Dhamma teacher at that time, Ajahn Sumedho, appeared and cured me with a great blast of light. The following morning I was walking along with my Chilean companion. I had a wart on my hand that had been there almost two years. I had a habit of scratching it but as I began to do this, remembering the dream of the night before, it immediately came off. I was completely stunned and stood there looking at my companion who began to smile. Before I could tell her about the dream she began to tell me how in the night she had taken some threads from my shirt and buried them in the ground, saying an ancient magic spell. She knew me and my scientific background and was pleased to be able to show me there may be more to life than I might have thought. But all I could think about was Ajahn Sumedho. Many years later as a monk I was able to tell Ajahn Sumedho the story. He laughed out laud and said, jokingly, "Yes Kalyano, at night I fly around the world curing people of their warts." I could not seem to get him to take the story seriously but the fact was that the dream and the period that followed had felt like some kind of deep healing and had, in addition, opened up my whole view of the world. It was one of the reasons I had ordained with him as a monk, for the magic. Colours gather light and gradually fade Gently into humble pastel shade Changing the very fabric of the mind Such are the denim devas Coming to save us In so many ways, even as far as uploading consciousness and achieving 'virtual immortality', man seems to be hoping to be saved by the computer. I would say the opposite could be true. Ultimately man's survival in more ways than one relies not on the computer but on doing what the computer cannot do. Firstly this is because in that way we are not made redundant by computers. Secondly, much deeper than this, because the impermanent, conditioned mind is like a computer programmed for survival. I would say that it is our own inner computer that binds us to an impermanent world. This can include binary feeling as data even though the inner computer does not feel. The mind and body become entangled through this encoding. Feeling, pleasant and unpleasant is the binary code of the body that locks our minds into associative spins between mind and matter. By contrast freedom lies in the great mysteries of consciousness and beauty. These two should be the focus of our efforts to avoid becoming trapped in an automatic world of binary thought and feeling. Here is all the wild, natural magic of the mind that emerges from emptiness and returns to emptiness in its pure acts of creativity. The mind that includes emptiness cannot be coded and drawn into the endless reactive stream of the conditioned mind. The mind can even become based in its perception of emptiness. This is freedom. Also, as a footnote, I think that if we consider the nature of mind in a deep way, not just on a superficial level as merely thought, computer analogies to human consciousness start to look fundamentally flawed. On a deeper level of information we cannot divide physical and mental processes. In a computer the software does not have a formative effect on the hardware so these are easy to divide. By contrast in biology the information contained within living organisms has a formative role in the development and control of the body. If we understand our minds to be like computers we are limiting their potential to form the very substance that carries the information. |
Categories
All
|