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Metta
July 17th, 2011 | No Comments »
Metta = the cultivation of loving kindness is a really sound foundation practice if you are looking for happiness. Who does not want to be happy? Where does that wish reside? It is inside, in our being, more specifically, we look inside the centre of the chest, in the area of the heart.
Two blogs, written by Tatatao members and contributors, provide succinct accounts of the various obstacles encountered before the wish to be happy was recognised as authentic. This is a key point, that it is possible to find authenticity in our own mind and body, we do not have to look elsewhere. It is not a feeling which is based on conditions, on material acquisition or attainment, it is inherent, the wish to be happy is within, we all have it, yet there is great value in finding it and working with it in the way that is proposed by the ancient method of metta bavana as taught by Gotama Buddha.
Authenticity begins to provide a measure or a benchmark for other sensations, ideas and experiences. What does real mean? What is the effect of producing something and what is the effect of just discovering what there is?
Finding out for yourself is realization. I wish to be happy, so do you. But beyond the concept, the idea that we agree with, for it to have real value, we must become accustomed to the feeling of this vibration and recognise that it resides within with no need for anything to be produced.
This is how the Buddha taught metta bavana – the cultivation of loving kindness. He looked – and he had great capacity to look, in all directions, in all worlds – and he found no one who he wished to be more happy than himself. He found a benchmark, a measure which he was certain everyone would be able to find. If you look, that wish for happiness, in all likelihood that authentic feeling will begin with recognizing your own wish for happiness.
Every person will encounter different obstacles. Imagining yourself happy is not the same as finding the innate wish for happiness. This is real, this is basic, and it is common to all beings. So the first stage is to truly and authentically connect with what brings us to the point where we begin to experience the potential bliss of loving kindness.
This part of the process, if it is correctly approached, leads us to establish important bases in meditation: knowing where to look, knowing what to look for, patience while what we are seeking appears, allowing the mind and the body to settle so that the clouds of confusion, restlessness and agitation fall away naturally. Then we can begin to see, to feel.
Why loving kindness? Why not just happiness? Happiness can be conditional, it can be what we want to do rather than loving kindness, which is what supports our experience of the bliss of this state.
It does not stop there. To be in a state of bliss because you have encountered the wish to be happy does not achieve much beyond recognising what is already there. Remember, it is not producing bliss, it is connecting with the wish to be happy, feeling the vibration that arises and then developing it in accordance with the method taught for over 2,500 years.
Bliss based on our own happiness can lead us to acts that might prejudice others. If my happiness is disturbed because of the actions of a neighbour and I resent that action, the authentic experience dissolves into conflict – you are disturbing my happiness, you are hindering my bliss.
So we must move on, see how deep is this loving kindness that we can feel towards ourselves with relative ease. Once we have established the authentic vibration when it is first encountered and adjudged as authentic, it has yet to be really developed and to mature. How do we mature this into something non-personal and further reaching?
The Buddha taught that in order for the practice to begin to work as a purification meditation, as a meditation that can really transform our lives and the lives of others, we must see how deep this wish for happiness goes.
The next step is to bring to mind a teacher or a respected person and to feel loving kindness towards that person.
When you move from yourself to your teacher, you should not encounter any change in the vibration. The vibration should feel just as strong. This is especially so when the teacher in your mind – the person that you see in your heart as happy – is the person who has introduced you to this mediation.
Your mind is gradually sharpened as it listens and feels acutely for any change in the vibration. It means that we must become really familiar with the vibration that is extant when seeing ourselves happy and then watch carefully to see if there is any change in the vibration when we move on to the teacher or respected person that we know and is still alive.
This is another step in authenticity. To really connect with the strong wish that another person be happy – as happy as you wish yourself to be – I think most people would agree, that this is the kind of love that some people experienced from their mothers, when children, particularly the only child.
The experience of loving kindness towards other beings brings us to the possibility of really changing the direction of our lives. Equal to our happiness is the happiness of another. For most people, this is a great revelation, that it is possible to sense that somewhere, the authenticity of the love we feel for ourselves and our own happiness, cannot be complete unless others are included in it.
All that a good teacher, even a great teacher can do is point out what is possible, point out what is there. Just pointing and supporting the process, that is the role of the teacher. The teacher cannot produce the wish to be happy for you. He or she might be able to support your feeling, your wish, but the individual must find it and be able to return to it by themselves. This is how we honour the teacher – simply by recognising what is being pointed to and acting in accordance with the instructions.
In the next blog, I’ll develop the practical method of metta. In the meantime, anyone can practice. The basic instructions are these and no more, nothing else need be added:
• Sit comfortably
• Pass time allowing your mind and body to settle naturally
• If there is too much distraction, just be aware of the breath, rising and falling, entering and leaving until the point comes where you feel settled, still as you feel you need to be before beginning metta
• Once settled, feel inside the centre of the chest
• Silently intone the words, ‘may I be happy’
• Feel for the corresponding vibration in the centre of the chest
• Do not try and produce happiness, just feel for the vibration or the feeling that arises when the words ‘may I be happy’ are silently intoned.
• The words need only be repeated as often as is necessary to connect.
• Now, begin to concentrate on this feeling, on this vibration in your chest.
• Do not worry if it is not clear – you are looking for an authentic experience – it may only be a glimpse. It may require patience. Come to the point where there is acceptance in the mind and in the body that patiently waiting, properly directed, what you are seeking will appear.
• It will appear.
• Once it is clear, once you have awareness in this vibration for a few minutes, bring to mind a respected person who is alive that you know, or your teacher.
• See and feel this person in the centre of your chest, happy. There is no need to generate a strong visualization, just feel and recognise the vibration, connected now to the wish for the happiness of another being
• If the vibration is not as strong as it was when seeing yourself happy, then return to you.
• Once the vibration is stable and clear, then move again to the teacher.
• You are not trying to force the wish for another being’s happiness. Just know the feeling for yourself and then see if it can be equally strong in relation to another.
• It is this process which purifies.
Walking blog 1
May 17th, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Walking blog 1
I’m going for a walk. About 200kms in seven days. No accommodation, food as we come across it, just feet, a companion and a cause. All three are equally important. I’ll tell you why.
First, the feet. No more needs to be said.
The companion. Two shortens the road. No more needs to be said.
The cause. Wake up!
Changing World Views
December 9th, 2010 | No Comments »
[Traduction au-dessous]
Finally the third phase of the hundred days has taken shape thanks to the considerable work of Peter Brissenden and Professor Rustle. They have made thousands of entries from participants accessible on the internet in a form that can accommodate the growing archives and materials of the Tatatao school.
It’s an honour to work with all of those who are returning and all of those who are entering the forum for the first time.
Any library can be daunting at first and the hundred days forum is no exception. Except there is this proviso, which is in any case implicit in any library – there is no need and no imperative to read everything.
The first point of entry is the eighty lessons and the twenty reviews: one hundred units of study in all. Each lesson is short and provides a point of practical contemplation, principles that emerge out of the heart essence and offer a point of reference for where an individual can usefully work.
Pointing to the Heart of the Mystery
September 14th, 2010 | No Comments »
Lao Tzu, Confucius and Buddhist Arhat
Gradually the Hundred Days work is being made more accessible for a broader range of people and with a more progressive and gradual approach.
Those who have participated in the Hundred Days over the last four years have provided a solid foundation that will make available to others many benefits of this study programme, which includes exchanges over the Internet as well as recommended annual meetings.
We need labels: we wish to say this teaching comes from here or from there. Essence teachings have no beginning, they have no source, but that is not the kind of answer you can give to your friends. Conveniently, we can say these teachings are Taoist. Specifically, there are two sources. One is Lao Tzu the other is the Golden Flower Secret.
Spring Blog 2010
April 9th, 2010 | No Comments »
The hundred days has received over seven thousand contributions from participants over the last three and a half years. the current programme is due to come to an end during august 2010, but plans are already in place to make this ground breaking practical course available to a larger and wider audience.
The initial group was begun in 2006 and was composed entirely of participants who were members of the existing Tatatao and Firehorse schools. The group had already displayed the energy to sustain a two year long course whose minimum requirements were to read and respond to weekly discourses or lessons that are called Taoist.
Bringing the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu into daily life
February 25th, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Lao Tzu
Ram’s compilation – lessons 1-4
One of the principal goals of the hundred days teachings is to bring the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu into daily life. Whatever you may have heard, read or believe about Lao Tzu, the teachings that are ascribed to the ancient one are as accessible and applicable today as they ever were.
It is no surprise that the first lesson lands very much in ordinary daily life conditions for almost all participants. Here are some of the areas of mundane life activity where the opportunity arose and arises to bring Lao Tzu’s teachings to mind and into practice:
‘at the airport on the way to France’ Peter
‘walking along Wood Green High Road…shopping’ Aila
‘in a large room full of fifty children…’ Estelle
‘I have just told my partner of 14 years that I have fallen in some kind of love with another man…’ Kim
‘I spent a lot of time at home arranging things…’ Vero Read the rest of this entry »
The Deepening Into Being Programme 2010
February 21st, 2010 | No Comments »
Feathered serpent
“We cannot see with our eyes closed, asleep, believing we are awake. If the nose smells anything it will let me know; if my ears hear anything they will let me know. But to deepen into being is to begin to awaken, to make a strong wish to SEE.”
One of the principal teachings that you will encounter in this body of work is the importance of action. Method and technique determine and to some extent dictate how you practise during the course of the programme. Everything resolves in two ways: through moving resolution [change]; or through ultimate resolution [stillness].
The methodology is Toltec – this is active. The activity implies ‘not doing’. That does not mean inactivity, it means doing what is not usually done.
One feature of modern Toltec teaching is that there are no boundaries: they exist for a Toltec only to be discovered and traversed; there is no cultural or spiritual bias. A Toltec will make use of all the spiritual traditions, all the lineages of the masters. The quest for freedom is beyond individual culture and beyond religious belief. There are specific Toltec lineages, but Toltecs do not seek to create or maintain them. The goal is freedom and Toltecs are men and women who over the ages have had recourse to teachings from the source, manifesting regardless of medium or culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Falling naturally into harmony
February 21st, 2010 | No Comments »
Winter’s reminder
Snow is no surprise in the mountains. When it comes, thick and constant as it has been, it brings deep silence. And then agitation! In a sequence that marked the dependence upon modern facilities, we lost the phone lines, the power, the water and then the heating. Without the distraction of communication beyond Tourné, there is only wood to chop and water to fetch from the river.
When you can turn adversity into advantage, you fall naturally into harmony. What can be done: do that, feeling with conviction that it does not have to be done. We cleared the fallen trees, collapsed and broken under the weight of snow, and freed the phone lines. When the telecom man came, he fixed it with a piece of string. Utter simplicity. We did not have to clear the trees, but it could be done and it brought us warmth from the activity – it will heat us next year with the wood.
Enforced stillness is winter’s reminder – this is a time to be silent, to be less active and to allow the root to nourish. And it is a reminder of the delicate balance between will and no will, or the benefits and burden of application. Read the rest of this entry »
