...How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I tell you, it - TopicsExpress



          

...How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I tell you, it looks like what you see out in front of you, because all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head...And so, for this reason, the great sixth patriarch, Huineng, in China, said it was a great mistake for those who are practicing Buddhist meditation to try to make their minds empty. And a lot of people tried to do that. They sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatsoever in their minds. Not only no thoughts, but no sense experiences, so theyd close their eyes, theyd plug up their ears, and generally go into sensory deprivation. Well, sensory deprivation, if you know how to handle it, can be quite interesting. Itll have the same sort of results as taking LSD or something like that, and there are special labs made nowadays where you can be sensorily deprived to an amazing degree. But if youre a good yogi this doesnt bother you at all, sends some people crazy. But if you dig this world, you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene. Also, especially, if they get you into a condition of weightlessness. Skin divers, going down below a certain number of feet--I dont know exactly how far it is--get a sense of weightlessness, and at the same time this deprives them of every sense of responsibility. They become alarmingly happy, and they have been known to simply take off their masks and offer them to a fish. And of course they then drown. So if you skin dive, you have to keep your eye on the time. You have to have a water watch or a friend whos got a string attached to you. If you go down that far, and at a certain specific time you know you have got to get back, however happy you feel, and however much inclined you feel to say Survival? Survival? Whatever the hells the point of that? And this is happening to the men who go out into space. They increasingly find that they have to have automatic controls to bring them back. Quite aside that they cant change in any way from the spaceship...Now isnt that interesting? Can you become weightless here? I said a little while ago that the person who really accepts transience begins to feel weightless. When Suzuki was asked what was it like to have experienced satori, enlightenment, he said its just like ordinary everyday experience, but about two inches off the ground. Juan-Za[?], the Taoist, once said It is easy enough to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground. Now why do you feel so heavy? It isnt just a matter of gravitation and weight. It is that you feel that you are carrying your body around. So there is a koan in Zen Buddhism, Who is it that carries this corpse around? Common speech expresses this all of the time: life is a drag. I feel like Im just dragging myself around. My body is a burden to me. To whom? To whom? Thats the question. You see, when there is no body left for whom the body can be a burden, then the body isnt a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is. ~Alan Watts...
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 02:20:12 +0000

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