The Rainbow

I am a rainbow
Sitting here, meditating on this cloud
Contemplating the Dharma and my journey through it.
I see 3 attachments or cravings that travel with me on this journey today.
The rain, that gives me a beautiful shimmering wall to cast my colours on to.
The sun, that warms me and projects through me to bring these colour to life.
But the tightest attachment of them all is love. This sits deep in my crimson, beating heart
The desire to love and the desire to be loved.
By many and by one.
So I travel on this journey, understanding these attachments. They are part of me at the moment
For promotion, I am not yet ready.

Sorry we couldn't be there this evening folks. We are busy moving house!

Andy and Denise.

7 years in Letchworth!

Dear all,

In a few days, the Thursday class will have existed for 7 years! For this occasion, we will have a Celebration Party Thursday 29th May 7.30pm.

During 7 years, many people have been introduced to meditation and come into contact with the Dharma, hopefully with a beneficial effect on their lives. Part of the evening will be dedicated to rejoicing in the benefits and positive influence meditation and the Dharma has, and had, on those who come, and have come, to the class over the years:

May they all be well! May they all be happy!

After the meditation, there will be an opportunity for those who wish to say a few words of rejoicing during the evening, followed by a little party.

Please bring some nibbles or drinks to share!

Best wishes,
Jayamuni

Every Breath You Take - The Struggle of the Dharma

“As Buddhists, we capture and celebrate the most intimate nature of the present moment”. To me, this is the essence of the Dharma in my study at the moment. This article explores some of the reasons for this and, in a way, serves as a ‘diary entry’ for my experience at the moment.
I’m a big fan of the 80’s group the Police and particularly the song ‘Every breath you take’. The song itself, doesn’t have a very optimistic history as it was written by Sting during the collapse of his first marriage
However, I do like the song and it cropped up in my meditations the other day and therefore contributed to my thoughts here. I was contemplating the phrase above that I use to describe the Buddhist approach. I came up with this phrase during a discussion at our drop in centre in Letchworth. “As Buddhists, we capture and celebrate the most intimate nature of the present moment”. Although I practise the Metta Bhavana I find the Mindfulness of breathing the most important meditation for me at the moment. Also, in my practise of Tai Chi, this phrase is key. Tai Chi is fundamentally a mindfulness exercise and unless I keep myself squarely in the moment, I find my Tai Chi unsatisfactory somehow.
When do I make progress? – in meditation or afterwards?
My meditation practise is to rise at 3.00am. I find this time beautifully quiet with most other people asleep and the house calm. It almost feels like a mini retreat each night. Also, there is less opportunity for my mind to raise any guilty feelings towards all the things I should be doing while I am meditating. After all, at 3.00am, if I wasn’t meditating, I would be sleeping! I find the time extremely fruitful and although I have a long way to travel on my meditation journey I find it relatively easy to slip into a calm state. I enjoy the concentrated peace and quiet it gives me. But where does that get me. Yes, I am relaxed, calm and concentrated but what does that mean in terms of progress. Actually, I believe that progress isn’t really made on the cushion. I’m no expert on the sutta’s and the formal teaching of the Dharma so I can only go with what I feel here. But I do feel that my progress is made during the day following the meditation. When I have a calm, concentrated meditation, I find that in general, from the moment I open my eyes, I am more mindful and that in general this follows through the day. For me this is a very positive thing. Buddhism has a reputation for requiring heavy renunciation. The impression can be given that the only real way to make progress is to lock yourself away in a cave or forest retreat for months on end.

I find this a very pessimistic view given our modern life, a way of life which is not going to change. The world we live in today is not going to get quieter, less stressful and less loaded with potential conflict. So, I have a desire to find a way to make progress in the dharma here, in our modern, busy world.
Some of my work is in London. London is very busy, noisy place and the journey in is far from easy. I used to dislike the journey intensely and was never happy in London. Coming from a life where I spent much of my time living in quiet, rural villages and towns I find London exceptionally noisy and smelly. However, my practise of the Dharma has radically changed my perspective. I enjoy the journey in. The train is still packed and the people still avoid each others eyes and hide in their newspapers. But now, I no longer feel hostile and defensive. Actually, I experience metta on that train. I sit quietly and experience the people
The Journey, The Struggle
This is mindfulness in everyday life. In our noisy, busy world. I sometimes wonder if progress in the Dharma is tougher now than it was in the Buddha’s day. The tests on us are more blatant and obvious. Mara is a great deal more challenging to us when we walk around and are assailed with unskilful images all the time. So we have to be even more concentrated in this situation. Paying attention to our constantly changing mind-state as we pass through our day. The breath is now a great friend to me in practising this. An emotional hook. Helping me to stay mindful by constantly drawing me back.
For me, this Dharma journey is critically important. Working in London I see some incredibly aggressive and unskilful behaviour going on. Even in the office environment I see lying and aggression. It is here that the challenge becomes a very real experience. No longer just some sort of academic exercise. That office environment seems to draw me in to unskilful behaviour. Customer deliveries, late for delivery and the company requiring me to refrain from admitting responsibility, to ‘spin’ the message. This hits me at the core. ‘Right Speech’. Not just refraining from untruths, my understanding of the Dharma teaches me to measure my progress by the depth of my truthfulness. So my core belief knocks up against the requirements of my work and I have to reconcile this.
In a way this is hard, but it is also fortunate. The very nature of this busy working environment highlights the importance of the Dharma for me. I experience directly what a lack of right speech can do. My organisations’ Karma is visible.
In this way, my time on the cushion becomes even more important. Staying mindful and battling against Mara in the office and on the streets is hard work. At 3.00am in the morning, each day, I go on retreat. Just for 45 minutes I sit and watch my breath and experience peace and calm. This allows me to really see the nature of my daily life, to really understand the hectic nature of it. The unskilful actions that take place become more obvious. This time is a window on the truth of my day. It shows me how I am acting, the effects on my karma are palpable, tangible. Sometimes this is a hard journey but worthwhile. I feel more connected with life now. Less cloudy and uncertain.
But this is a massive journey. The Dharma, to me, is a very experiential journey. It isn’t just a journey of faith. It is direct experience that takes me forward.
There is something else that is different in our modern world I believe, and I experience during mindful moments in my day. Our level of knowledge of the world. Our knowledge is incredible. Modern teaching methods mean we have a deep knowledge of science and nature that I’m sure was not available in the Bhudda’s day. The observation I made when I was considering this was related to dependence arising. I was walking through a forest, considering the nature of the forest with the perspective of dependent arising. In a forest, plants and trees die, rot and new life springs. Water is constantly re-cycled. Creatures feed on the forest and other creatures feed on each other. “The flowers and seeds of tomorrow are in the seeds of today” in so many ways. It is a massively complex system. But despite all its complexity, we understand it to an extent because of our education. We learnt this level of science in the primary school classroom. So we are able to rationalise the dependent arising in a forest with science and it no longer scares us. BUT, we don’t feel it in a deep experiential way. I believe the Bhudda did. I believe that he understood the nature of the forest because he experienced it at a very intimate level. Possibly because he had experienced his own interconnection with it. This is fascinating to me because the Buddha understood the nature of the forest, possibly to a deeper level than us, without access to the science we have today. This is insight. And I wonder if our huge encyclopaedic knowledge actually gives us an additional hindrance, a wall to break through to insight, that the Buddha didn’t have. We are used to studying and learning in our particularly scholarly, scientific way. But I think that this may get in the way of our path to insight. Because as soon as we see something, we categorise, we theorise and we understand, to a limited extent, based on our existing knowledge. So, to get past this, we have to let go to an even greater extent, and see behind our own acquired knowledge. We have to start feeling the truth. This is a tall order.

Life is not TiVo™

If you watch TV, no doubt you will have experienced the situation of watching your favourite television show and the phone rings or the microwave pings. You get up to attend to this interruption and of course, miss several minutes of the show. To alleviate us from this tragedy, a few years ago some clever people invented TiVo which allows you to pause and replay live television – just hit the red button when the phone rings, hit it again upon your return and you won’t have missed a second. Since then, devices like this are a common fixture in many households. *

Reality, on the other hand, cannot be paused or replayed; it moves on relentlessly, with or without us, day by day, second by second, moment by moment. We can choose whether we want to be a part of it or hang back and let it drift passed us. Either way, reality isn’t gonna stop and wait for us to catch up.

Check this out: our life, our reality, our experience is composed of literally millions of tiny moments every second, and every one of those moments is unique. When it’s gone, it’s gone. We will never, ever experience a moment like the one that just flew past. This is why life is so fascinating – it is constantly changing, constantly unique, constantly beautiful. Life is the ultimate reality show – you are immersed in it 24/7 and you can’t turn it off, you can’t pause it, you certainly can’t replay it. Blink and you’ve missed a bit. Permanently.

Meditation helps us to see those moments, to experience life fully. When we sit on the cushion, we begin to notice reality exactly as it is, right now. No television, no phone, no internet, no conversation, nothing. Nothing! And of course, everything. Everything comes flooding in and reality hits us upside our head big time; we experience reality so fully, so completely that it overwhelms us, overwhelms us to the point where that itch on our nose becomes the most important thing in the world, or moving our aching foot dominates our thoughts, or the silence becomes so deafening that we scream out for the bell to sound. Reality is nothing. What we call something is just our experience, our interpretation, of nothing. Reality is just a moment, this moment, this unique moment, this beautiful moment.

Don’t blink!


-----------------------------
* A couple of years ago, I bought one to replace our ageing video recorder. In all that time, I have recorded precisely one television program, and even that I managed to bugger up!

A weekend retreat on Mindfulness

Cambridge Buddhist centre Open Weekend retreat Friday 27th June 2008 to Sun 29th June in Suffolk.

"With Mindfulness strive on". These are last words of guidance and encouragement from the Buddha, before his passing away. During the weekend we will not only develop mindfulness in very supportive conditions but also explore ways to bring more mindfulness into our daily lives. We will look at different aspects of mindfulness and explore its mysterious transformative power.

This retreat will be lead by Jayamuni and Rob as one alternative to our Spring Retreat in Buckden Towers this year.

For details and booking contact the Cambridge Buddhist Centre
www.cambridgebuddhistcentre.com

info@cambridgebuddhistcentre.com
38 Newmarket Road, Cambridge UK CB5 8DT 01223 577553

Cost: £95/ £65 conc

Guilt

Why be guilty

Our guilt reflects an attachment, a desire to be perfect.

Instead we should embrace our imperfections and understand them.

Then, rather than eliminating them we can let them go.

In this way, our imperfections help us travel forwards.

After all. To appreciate the relief of putting down a burden, you have to carry the burden for some time first!

This morning

This morning, as I sat on the cushion, I became aware of someone whistling and I thought it annoying.

Then I realised it was a bird singing outside my window, and I thought it beautiful.

Whistling and birdsong. Both annoying and beautiful. I invite them in and let them go.

This morning, I just sat on the cushion.

Reincarnation Zen Style

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, "Is there life after death?". The Zen master says, "How should I know?". The guy replies indignantly, "Because you're a Zen master!". "Yes," says the Zen master, "but not a dead one."
 

Time on the cushion

I sit on the cushion and hear the rain on the window.
That same rain will fall long after I'm gone.
So why am I here?
I am here for the skillful and the unskillful. It is my choice which.
Every 1/64th of a finger snap.
Every lifetime.

Andy Spragg, www-re-vitalise.co.uk