Mixing
By Michael Erlewine
As for dharma, I’m a bit automatic at this point, a living process that awaits input and just naturally works with it. Yet what does this do? How do I work with input?
It’s hard to find the words. Non-dual meditation itself refreshes, cleans up, and somehow makes everything more authentically palatable.
In a way it reminds me of gold plating something or powder-coating reality, galvanizing it, adding needed authenticity, and removing what obstructs — the key to liberation.
In brief, non-dual processes like Mahamudra and Dzogchen dip our words in eternity and they come out aligned, true reflections into the nature of the mind.
How that works I don’t exactly know, but it does. I have been doing it for years, every day and often much of the day.
If the non-duality (complete immersion) of Mahamudra or Dzogchen is the solvent that dissolves Samsara a piece at a time, turning it into or toward Nirvana (realization), then it just makes sense that we each learn how to invoke full immersion so that, as the poet wrote:
“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
We are not only searching for a way to dissolve samsara for ourselves, but everyone else around us is in the same boat.
Touch one, touch all
Bless those who, despite the endless reign of Samsara since the beginning of time (time being unborn), start right here and now to deconstruct Samsara, stone by stone, until Samsara dissolves and fades, and our liberation is secured.
And to do this we first must conflate duality, think, think, thinking, and our everyday world of subject and object, into full immersion in non-duality. Each moment of that immersion, or so the pith dharma teachings say, we no longer accumulate more karma, and we begin to unpack Samsara’s iron rule over us which has been there forever up until now
It’s not like we will ever be done with Samsara and then go to a better place. Nirvana is not somewhere else but right here. Samsara and Nirvana are connate, meaning they arise together at the same time. Always.
In other words, Nirvana or Enlightenment is just liberated Samsara, and all of this must happen here and now, right on the spot. And better today than tomorrow. It always must happen today and never tomorrow.
And so, while we each go round and round in circles and cycles, we are in Samsara. “Samsara” is taken from a Sanskrit word that means “wandering through,” which is what we are doing right now, wandering around and around with no end.
And we can’t wait for a tsunami of realization to sweep through our world and carry us away. That will never happen. It is up to each one of us to conflate and take apart Samsara’s dualistic grasp on us one brick at a time. It’s like the old game of Pick-Up-Sticks.
Get Michael Erlewine -- Archivist Popular Culture’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And this is very hard because at this point we are children of Samsara more than anything else, more than we know. We would have to realize the inner and true nature of our own mind for anything to change. And that is what those of us who meditate are trying to do. We have been working on it as best we can.
I have practiced long enough (some 60 years) so that now I automatically respond to whatever input I am given. What does that mean?
It means that I have an Aikido-like response to whatever I encounter, and I intuitively know what to do and do it, without thinking. To that degree I have been trained and have completed my basic dharma training.
That does not mean I am no longer learning but rather I am learning on the job, so to speak. My continued training is now life itself rather than more schooling, an natural response to life itself. I hope it is not distasteful that I am almost eager for engagement, ready to roll, so to speak.
And while I still have to always be aware, I do trust my dharma training to speak for itself, meaning my rough edges have been at least somewhat rounded off and I am less and less tempted to go off the reservation on a rant.
As for tempered steel, the continued immersion in non-duality, moment by moment, has forged a yidam or path that informs itself as I go along. I will forever be a little feral because of my upbringing, but not to a degree harmful to others. As to how this works:
My root teacher (Tsawi Lama) taught that a complete session of Mahamudra can be as long as it takes to raise a teacup and have a sip of tea.
And a moment of insight becomes a block of time, many minutes or longer, resting in Vipassana (Insight Meditation). It’s like skipping stones on Samsara, touching, touching, touching into the full immersion of Mahamudra (non-meditation) to the degree that immersion and the reflection of this immersion become one and the same. Seamless. And this is key.
As to how that came to be, all I know is that it took a lot of time and intention to arrive at, years, and I have told this story elsewhere. While I am immersed, that is non-dual meditation, in the middle of which living discursive thought takes place. It is not simple contemplation; this form of meditation involves the constant exchange of the non-dual with the dual, moving back and forth like the gentle churning action of one of those old washing machines.
Of course, describing the ineffable is beyond words, so any attempt on my part to do so will fall short. What I am trying to say though is that in these excursions beyond time into non-duality, within those chunks of many minutes each, there is mixing going on, mixing duality and non-duality, like washing a bit of samsara in the waters of Lethe and dissolving the karmic oscillates. It is liberation by degrees.
In this immersion of Vipassana (Insight Meditation), the duality of Samsara and the non-duality of Mahamudra or Dzogchen are mixed one with the other in that same immersion, until when time intervenes again, duality’s reflection reveals the words in a new light, and these same words or thoughts have now been engulfed by the waters of non-duality.
This, I believe, is how Samsara is gradually deconstructed. Samsara is hollowed out and fades into the background (is retired) as the reality of the nature of mind shines forth with each recursive immersion.
I apologize for my clumsy description, and I wish those who know better than I do will step forth and find the words for us. This is how I see progress can incrementally be made (and is) that will eventually sideline Samsara.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here is the link: SpiritGrooves.net.
As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
