Re: Thoughts on thoughts
Posted:
Fri Jun 26, 2009 11:57 amby Zamurito
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I enjoy Blue Oyster Cult...am I a cultist now?
Heh...
The whole business of
asking peeps what they do, rather than telling them - Most get a lot from that. I remember my favorite teachers in school: they were the ones who let me discover things on my own, just as any good teacher does.
Yet, that last line is key: let 'm discover things on their own.
What seems to occur, mostly with the self-proclaimed wanna-be teachers, gurus and cultists, is that a question IS asked, but only to provide seperation, regardless of what is said, to then have them lambaste you with pages of their beliefs and opinions (always stated as Truth, of course,) to their perspective (which of course is always 'right.')
This just happened to me on another discussion group and was quite entertaining. Much of the response that was given I agreed with, yet, that really wasn't the issue. The issue was his belief is right, let me hammer this into you, regardless if I agreed with it or not, (and even though I did agree with much of what was being said, that was a mute point due to the fact that this individual is so self absorbed to an extent that it was all about him, and trying, oh so hard, to 'prove a point.')
This carries over to 'holding a conversation,' which of course very seldom occurs due to the fact that no-one is open to anything other than their precious beliefs (which of course are always the 'better' beliefs.)
Isn't it just simply amazing?
Re: Thoughts on thoughts
Posted:
Sat Jun 27, 2009 11:52 amby Zamurito
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Found this new lecture by Curtis Sensei relating to this discussion...Here it is...FWIW...
Include Everything
Taigi Competition Q & A
Kauai – May 30, 2009
C. Curtis
This morning I suggested the possibility of learning to use the word “and” instead of “but” more often in our language, and by so doing fundamentally altering our view of what’s happening in our life. This is just one of many ways we can find for minimizing the experience of polarity in our lives.
What was your experience of that? I am not really asking for an opinion of “good” or “bad”, but what did it feel like when we substituted the word “and” for the word “but” in our exercises this morning…to have our use of words include everything at each moment?
Student: For me it was a sense of confirmation of things that I already feel. It was an experience of connecting the dots. Like, “Why haven’t I been doing this already?
Yeah, you kind of knew that already. During class I asked someone who was watching in the back of the room, someone not related to Aikido training in any way, and he said, “Oh yeah, this makes perfect sense. Because this limitation is what we ourselves create and then proceed to experience in every day life.”
We feel that there is always something holding us back, always something thwarting us, whereas it is often ourselves who are culprit. We unconsciously create enemies right and left. Actually there are no polarities, no enemies inside or outside. That’s what I mean when I say there is no negative Ki. There is no negativity in the world of experience, unless you say there is. But often we set up a world of polarity, and then it is right there in front of us, and we wonder how the teacher can say there is no negative situation.
Words have power, and we must be very careful how we use words. That seeing of negativity is itself a patterned reaction, a conditioning. In reality, everything is what we call in Aikido, “plus.” Everything is full and complete already. So how can something be negative? What could possibly be missing from “complete?”
I always say to please practice Ki Breathing or Ki Meditation because this practice is the practice of constantly returning to the present moment, and seeing it for what it is. However, it is not just being in the present moment. It is being in the present moment with the capacity to be aware of everything just as it is, with no reaction of any kind. You may imagine that I am only pointing to being aware of “important” things. But I am talking about literally being aware of everything in our sense, thought, and emotional fields, all at once. For instance, is this fan behind me in your awareness right now? Was it before I mentioned it?
Students: No.
No, it wasn’t. Now you can hear the fan, now also the birds, and also if you notice, you can feel your body condition. But even as you experience those three things, your point of attention shifts from the fan to the birds to your body. However, awareness means including everything within your sensual field of awareness, everything in your thought world that arises now, and whatever emotion there is in this moment, ALL AT ONCE. That is all that your experience that your experience of life is made up of. And if you jump from one to the other to the other, it can be an overwhelming amount, because that can go on forever and never bring you here. So the practice is to build our capacity to be attentive to, to be aware of, everything in our field of awareness at once. That implies that we have to include and embrace everything. Because if we reject something in our awareness, like a thought or a feeling, then we are not taking every possibility into account.
Please be careful, because you might easily think what I am expressing right now is a belief system, and memorize it, then begin to depend upon it, and then even defend it against other belief systems, all this instead of just practicing it. We are talking here about the principle of the way things are, the way things work here for human beings. That’s why Tohei Sensei always said, “Don’t believe anything I say just on face value. I am not asking you to believe anything. Look and see. Do the work first. If you disagree tell me. I say it’s a correct principle of being human if no human ever says it’s not so? So he would always ask the classes, “Does anyone say that it would be good to not Extend Ki, to not be fully aware?”
You know what happens to you when you get upset with someone? It’s just like when the student was grabbing my hand this morning. If I am struggling with the hand, my whole field of awareness is shrunken down to this one little thing. When you are upset about someone, it works the same way. When you are struggling with emotions, you are thinking about that apparent cause, or that one incident, and you can’t think about anything else. Let’s say you’ve fallen in love. You’re obsessed. You can’t think about anything but her or him. Oh no. Right? So your whole field of awareness is collapsed right there. Probably the worst news I could get from a young student is, “Oh Sensei, I just met the most wonderful person!”
When we try to make this kind of practice into a set of rules, of “shoulds and should nots”, a belief system, then this is where the idea of “morals” comes from. However, true practice is actually amoral. It’s not immoral, it’s amoral. It is never a matter of a prescription for action. As an example, we all would say it is not a good idea to betray someone, wouldn’t we? Why? The reason is that when you do something like that, you then spend all of your time focusing on hiding your betrayal. Your world has shrunken down to that, so then how can you be present and aware? It simply doesn’t work for your practice. Life is never the story, the drama, the romance world that we make it out to be.
You might think that you need to make an exception to this and make rules in order to guide your children. “This is the way you have to be to succeed in this life.” Those of you that are parents, tell me how this works. Ultimately, it doesn’t work at all. Well, maybe some of puts some things off for a while, but ultimately all of us have to face the fact that we do not have that kind of control over our own lives, let alone anyone else’s. We work very hard and sincerely to care for our children, to be true to our spouses, and be upright in your work relationships, and all that sort of honorable connection is important in this world. But at the same time, are you actually practicing when you are doing this, or are you following a code of beliefs? It is very important why we do what we do. Again, following a system of belief always sets up polarities. Because there is always somebody within you who doesn’t want to follow. So this creates a war in your head. Instead true practice is to include everything, no matter what, without preference or prejudice. We accept and include everything that arises in our world of experience. We don’t have to agree with it, we don’t have to believe that. But it is what’s happening. This is what is meant by a “choice less existence.” It really comes down to our own willingness and capacity within our selves.
I’ll tell you a story. This group of students came to see a teacher. They wanted to train with him as they heard he was a very good teacher. So the teacher said “OK, let me ask you a couple of questions. Are you willing to put aside laziness and work hard?” And they all said, “Yes, we’re willing to do that.”
“Good. Are you willing to always take the lowest position and let someone else have the credit?” And they all said, “Oh yes, we’re willing.”
“Very good. Are you willing to go into the unknown, into an area that you don’t know anything about, completely outside of your comfort zone?” “Oh yes,” they all said, “we are willing to do that. Of course, we want to train with you.”
So the teacher said, “OK, very good. Thank you. Please come back next Tuesday. I want you to meet a group of students that’s been training with me for three years.”
So next Tuesday they came back, and the three‐year group was there. The teacher then says to the three‐year group, “Let me ask you a few questions. If you are willing to set aside laziness and work hard all the time, please stand up?” No one stood up.
“Interesting. If you are willing to take the more humble posture, and not have the most important position in a group and be in control and get all the credit, please stand up” Once again, no one stood up.
“Hmmm. If you would be willing to leave your comfort zone and enter into the unknown, please stand up?” For the third time, no one stood up.
The teacher then turned to the new group of students who were listening and said, “You see what will happen to you if you train with me for three years? You’ll be worse off than you are now.”
What’s the difference between those two groups, the ones that haven’t trained yet and the ones that have trained for three years? What does the older group know that the beginning group doesn’t yet know? I suggest that the members of the older group know themselves for what they really are. The new students really believe that they would choose the humble side, work hard, and risk entering into the unknown, but this is just a belief. It’s not actually true. They want to be seen by themselves and others as good boys and girls. They don’t want to be rejected by the teacher.
For instance, if I ask you, “Do you lie?” You would tell me “No Sensei.” But guess again. Actually we all lie all the time, to yourself and to others. The experienced group knows this because they have been training. Now they can at least begin to work on that problem. But if you don’t think there is problem, if you are not ready to admit and face that, then you can’t even begin to work on it. This, of course, is being in denial. You may think you are beyond this kind of thing because you go to church or because you train Aikido. “I’m a good guy. We believe in oneness.”
Student: Sensei, what do you do about liars anyway?
Are you one?
Student: Uh, I suppose once in a while.
Well that’s the only liar you can do anything about. You can’t do anything about other liars. What I mean is that it’s up to them, not you. Look, no one is simply just a liar, and that’s all. Everybody has all sorts of character traits in them, right? We act all sorts of different ways, depending upon different stimulus. I think you are talking about a liar that is maybe doing some damage in a company, or someone who is not responsible. Like I have an employee that works for me that I have caught lying a number of times about his hours. So that’s costly for the company. Is that the kind of liar you are talking about?
Student: Yes.
With my employee, there is the possibility that I can fire him. On the other hand, he is a very valuable employee because of his other characteristics. So instead of firing him, I say he’s a very valuable employee, and he lies.
We can’t really do anything to change anyone in the sense of making someone different than they are. We can either treat our world of experience with respect and embrace it, or we can reject it through judgment and attempt to control and intimidate it with our aggression. That’s often what employers do in cases like this, and it’s makes for a messy situation, and always produces more trouble for the company, ultimately. You’ve heard me say that bankruptcy only comes after many of these limited reactions to employees or clients. And usually someone else get’s blamed, often the employee. Bankruptcy comes when we forget that everything that comes to us is a gift, that each moment, each person, each experience, everything that we find here, is a gift. Value it. If I hear you say, “What do I do with a liar?”, then I suspect that the “liar” is probably someone that you are not fully valuing anyway. Try thinking of it this way: You value them AND now and then they lie.
Maybe this changes things a bit.
I was just telling some people last night about how Suzuki Sensei treated me when he first met me. I told him I was a vegetarian and he asked, “What’s that?” and I said that I ate vegetables. “You mean like lettuce?” he said. “Yeah”. So I came to the next party and here was a big bowl of lettuce at one end of the table and he said “Don’t you touch anything on this table. The lettuce is especially here just for you. Please eat all of it.” And it was a huge bowl of lettuce. He knew I also liked beer, so he encouraged me to drink lots of beer and eat lots of lettuce all night long.
Sensei’s method was to always give me more of whatever I was hung up on. Whatever little weird thing I had going, he would just give me more of it. I liked to put butter on my rice, from when I was young, and he found out about that. Then, when we were in a Japanese restaurant together in Honolulu once, he told the waitress, “Please bring this gentlemen some butter for his rice.” I said, “No, Sensei, I don’t need butter. I can eat the rice just like this.? “No,” he said, “you need butter. You said you like butter on your rice.” The waitress said that it was a Japanese restaurant and that they didn’t have any butter, so he made her go down the street to a store and buy butter so that I could have it on my rice. And of course then I had to use all the butter she brought on my rice and eat it all, in front of him.
He never said to me, “Butter on rice? No way, that’s not how we do it here.” He never said to me, “You should or shouldn’t do this or that.” I never heard that kind of thing from him. “Whatever you like, please do it. Enjoy!” he would say. And he would always give me much more of whatever it was I was attached to. This is what we call “illumination in surfeit”. You wake up only when you’ve had too much of a thing.
So Suzuki Sensei was a really good teacher in that way. You never felt like he was trying to control you. He was just giving you more and more of what you were already wanting. If something was bothering me and I made the mistake of saying something to him about it, then every time he saw me would ask me how that problem was going. Until finally I would get tired of hearing him ask me, and would be sorry I brought it up, and tell him there was really no problem. He never told me not to express my problems. He never gave me any codes that we had to live by. He never was like that. But you understood, by interacting with him and by the way he treated you, what you were clinging to, what you were not willing to let go of, and things that you didn’t see about that, or weren’t aware of.
We live in a world of limited awareness and therefore limited engagement. You can only engage with, enjoy, or be a part of and include in your life experience, that which you are aware of. So that ‘s why we don’t get upset with people. Because when we are upset, that’s all that we are aware of, and we have just excluded most of life from ourselves. You shrink your awareness down to a tiny thing. Our practice is to live life completely, to be aware completely.
Student: There are always a lot of things to get done for me in my busy life. So when I see that happening I remind myself to Keep One Point to help keep me unified and complete the work I have to do, get things done faster and more efficiently. And then often the work doesn’t actually get done the way I wanted it to. So then I ask myself “How come, since I’m Keeping One Point?”
Can anyone help him with this question?
Student: Well, I can only speak from my own experience on this. At some point I started to realize that the thought or impulse to “do”, to take care of something, comes only after the fact, after I have already received the message. In other words, in the case you mention, the “Keeping One Point” was a reaction.
Yes, the thought to do something about something is a reaction to a clear message, not a direct response to that mssage. It comes outside the flow of life. One Point is not something extra that we do to make ourselves more effective. You walk into a room and you see a pair of pants lying on the floor, and you think, “OK, I’ll put that away when I come home from work tonight.” What was the message you got there that made you say you would put it away later? The message was, “The pants are out of place.” And you reacted to that with the idea to do something about it, but later.
Basically, Suzuki Sensei taught me just to do what I was given to do without any thought about it. If he caught me thinking or hesitating, planning, he would say, “Hey, just do it.” This doesn’t mean that planning is always bad. There were many times when there were way too many things to do at any one time. For instance, if you are acting as otomo for the sensei, you can’t always do everything that you are given to do. You can’t fold the teacher’s hakama, help him change clothes, and arrange for dinner with the host all at the same time, even though all three of those are your responsibility. So you learn to form a otomo team ahead of time. I always had a big team of helpers, so that whatever came up could be attended to immediately. You usually can’t do a large job all by yourself and get the job done in a timely manner, so you hire a whole group. It’s not a problem. It’s only a problem when you are trying to do something that you can’t functionally do. Ask for help. Of course, this means that you have to share the credit as well. If you share the job, you have to share the credit. The less credit you are looking for, the bigger team of helpers you can have.
When you are at the point of saying, “Oh, I better Keep One Point to help myself” you are already past the message. It’s too late. One Point is already your previous condition, not something to put on in order to be effective in your well thought out actions.
Student: I wanted clarify what I heard you say this morning. You said, “Don’t suppress it, don’t express it, just access it?
That’s a good one. You could use that. The saying I have been using lately is “Don’t suppress it, don’t express, it just address it.” “Address it” really means to accept and embrace it. It’s not just accessing it, getting at it. Addressing it really means to completely experience it, to accept it, embrace it, make it part of you. Relative to the theme of this seminar today, “including everything”, we let it be a part of our world of experience. When we express it or when we suppress it we are trying to get rid of it, either out there on someone else or inside in some dark corner where it will stay and behave itself. But it always comes up again, comes back to bite, and the second time is always worse than the first. So handle each experience completely, as it arises.
Thank you.