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Meditations

Paddy Murphy

Daniel Ingram in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, defines ‘awakening’ as:

…awakening is about understanding the fundamental nature of all sensate experiences, and what they happen to be is ultimately completely and utterly irrelevant to awakening. Thus, very awakened beings understand something fundamental about whatever arises or however their lives manifest, that is, its impermanence, emptiness, luminosity, groundlessness, or however they wish to describe it. However, they have no more knowledge about the specifics of the world than they have acquired in just the way that anyone else acquires knowledge about the specifics of the world. They can even have all sorts of psychological baggage to deal with, and this is probably the norm.’ page 116-117

 Well, I may as well start with something difficult to get my teeth into eh? Anyone who listens to the TASTA podcast will know that Tommie and I are taking on the mantel of the Baptist’s Head amazing twosome, Duncan Barford and Alan Chapman, and trying to plough our way to enlightenment on a fast track. Currently it’s very much a scatter-gun approach but we’re blind men in the dark and once we get to grips with finding the door and even the lightswitch for the room we’re in we’ll probably, maybe, become a little more organised. Or maybe we won’t. I don’t know. Does it matter? We’re playing it by ear at the minute. Sure, it’s nice to travel on the comfortable train and get to where you’re going but sometimes you just have to get on the next train that arrives. Let’s make a note Tommie, maybe we should try more 30-day challenges, like our Star Ruby thingy from a while ago.

 

Back to the quote above though. I’d said on the podcast before that this book really wasn’t singing to me at the beginning. And that’s on me, I just didn’t, and indeed, don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism. I had to put it down and thanks to both Tommie and a listener, can I namedrop D. here? Let’s leave it at D. in case he doesn’t want his name here, anyway, thanks to both I’ve been able to learn plenty more about it and going back to the book it feels like new eyes are on it and I’ve a bit more of a foundation to build upon.
from: https://bit.ly/38GR1ya

Awakening, for me, must be the end goal of all this magic(k), consciousness hacking, psycho-technology whatever you want to call it. Honestly, calling it magic still doesn’t sit well with me. Images of Paul Daniels and David Copperfield just flood my head when I see that. I’m into this because I think there’s a road to enlightenment/awakening/individuation or whatever you want to call it. Basically, I think you can be a pretty decent human if you get yourself in order and be a better man. That’s my goal here. Simple as that. But as usual the simple things are pretty difficult to get correct.

Awakening, as Ingram say above, is ultimately the understanding of our sensing of reality. The knowledge and realisation that everything, every single moment is temporary and our moods, feelings, wants, needs, whatever, are the same. Knowing, or learning, that every moment is sacred is mind-blowingly humbling because it’s in those moments that we appreciate our transience and by embracing that we get a fleeting touch with the eternal.
Does that make sense? By being alive right here, right now and seeing it, really seeing and experiencing it; that’s touching the surface of the waters of eternity, that great big Sea of Infinity.
For some reason though we’ve come to think of those who are ‘awake’ as somehow smarter, more intelligent than then rest of us. This is a mistake here according to Ingram. It’s that old thing about the teacher and the student. The teacher can only really learn to teach from his students as y’know, every student is different and must be taught in a different way so you can share what knowledge you have with them. And just because someone is enlightened/awake certainly doesn’t mean they’re any more intelligent than you, they’re just a bit more wise when it comes to knowing their place in this mad universe.

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