Tag: radical impermanence

Islands in the Stream

If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers, progressively unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. Non-meditation.

The bardo teachings of Tibetan Buddhism identify six post-death transitional states: birth, death, meditation, dreams, dharmata and becoming. Likewise, there are six realms of being (gods, jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings) through which, according to karma, we continuously cycle during life. 

The intense experiences we have in life can be connected to one of the six realms, but surprisingly, they may also be connected to one of the six after-death states or bardos. Most accessible to us all in life, the experience of the six realms also contain bardo experiences. In other words, throughout life, we may become entranced or motivated by one of the dominant emotions of the six realms of being (anger/aggression, desire, ignorance, pride, envy or pleasure) and find ourselves encountering such circumstances which can only be considered bardos because of the imperative they present to us by their extreme nature.

The clearest way to describe this condition is to realize that each dominant emotional state of being contains the possibility of bardo experiences within it. We may cycle through realms by a lifetime or by the hour, but most likely we are in one or the other for limited periods except in the most extreme cases when we are truly stuck in a single realm to such an degree that there’s very limited possibility of ever escaping. The paranoia/envy of the jealous god realm (asuras) or the anger/aggression of the hell realm may well become prisons. But we may also be equally blinded by the pride of the human realm.

Each behavior type (realm) is like a station, a home base, a default field of awareness, our personal preoccupation with a way of comprehending our world. The experience of each station is not strictly limited to its intrinsic nature that one could never experience qualities or domains associated with other stations. Your station is determined by karma. Associated domains, the states we venture into away from our default domain, are more transient.  So while we may spend most of our time in one or another realm, we can still have affinities with others. Within our dominant realm, we can—and will–have any type of bardo experience.

The translation of the word bardo refers to being ‘in-between islands.’ These ‘islands’ (call them states of mind or emotions that drive our lives) appear as obstacles, predominant mind-states such as fear or aggression, compassion, or perhaps gross events, life-long dynamics or ‘karmic’ predispositions. Islands become obstacles when we get attached to them, set up residence and interpret the world through their narrow lens.

The steam or the river of consciousness is natural mind, a more awakened state. This is a state beyond bardos, existing in the gaps of experience. Since realization is regarded as an unchanging state of infinite space without origin or cessation, that awakened condition (of staying ‘in the stream’) implies an escape from all realms and all bardos. From that point of view, all identification with ego is an island we encounter in the stream. We are constantly running into and climbing about on these ‘islands,’ which are mere appearances in the flow of experience, sometimes for short periods and sometimes with a profoundly anchored grasping nature that makes it extremely difficult to escape…or ever return to the stream.

How we move through realms and bardo states implies we are perpetually jumping from one island to another and completely missing the stream because we are fundamentally misinterpreting our experience and perpetually grasping for antidotes to the flow of extreme emotional or psychic conditions.

If we take into consideration the Dzogchen view of a constantly refreshing arising and disappearance of phenomena, radical impermanence, then every arising of consensus reality is an island and every ‘gap’ between arisings is a ‘window of possibility,’ an opportunity to have an experience of true clarity, which would also be a bardo in that instant. The offer to awaken is always present. Entering that gap may be a momentary escape from a particular realm, but most likely, if karma has anything to say about it, any such ‘glimpse’ will stimulate an immediate descent into yet another antidote.

As markers of ego-identification, ‘islands’ are illusions. We can become entranced by the appearance of any island, such as personality, occupation, lifestyle, personal trauma, and cling to it, set up camp and live there-possibly our entire lives. We have experiences of pleasure and pain there, sometimes even misinterpreting what is pleasure and what is really pain. The way we relate to the islands is an indicator of the dominant realm we are operating in at the time, the way we are manifesting ego-based spiritual materialism. Being open to learning, such as in the human realm, distinguishes us from the animal realm, the jealous gods or the hell beings. But of course it’s all quite tricky. When pride and ego-driven indulgence and pursuit of peak experience and spiritual ‘attainment’ are the primary drivers, we, like religious fanatics, create our own brand of spiritual materialism and can easily imagine ourselves in the god realm. Another illusion.

Meanwhile, the river never stops flowing. Emptiness and impermanence are the only truths. The true nature of mind never changes, whether it is peeking through the gaps between every arising or in between our encounters with the ‘events’ of our lives, our karma or our perpetual wrestling match with ego. 

Although the bardos are primarily described as after-death experiences, the meaning of bardo impacts everyday existence. It’s may seem complicated to understand existence this way, but this view opens a window of possible understanding that was not there previously. The bardo of existence (bardo of everyday life), dreams, the stages of physical dissolution immediately following death, the bardo of dharmata (non-duality) with its many visions, benign or fearful, the transition to the bardo of becoming presaging rebirth, all of it is described as the post-death appearance of islands in the stream and identified primarily with one or another of the six realms.

Going more deeply into the meaning of bardo and in relating the bardos to the six realms is a radically different way of presenting the entire proposition. We begin to understand bardos are falsely regarded as transitions between “permanent” conditions like birth, life, death and rebirth. But no, everything we regard as solid, any demarcation we may identify in life, its beginning, middle or end and all the consciousness along the way, are no more solid than any post-death bardo we care to name. It is always a function of ego to reify any or every aspect of existence. Simply by identifying everything as bardo, it all becomes transitional. Every moment is bardo, infused with the shifting attention of ego trying to make something to latch onto where there is nothing, controlling or clinging to or reacting to the appearance of every island with its various seductive opportunities for the comfort and safety of ego indulgence. 

The Source

Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth
All is returned to you, beyond the cause
And effect: the oak tree
In the garden, chirp of crickets
Inside and out, aching knees
On a dusty mat. Without knowing it
We have wandered into a circle
Of wonder, where our confusion
Shines more
Outside the seeming errors and the search.
Wake up to your sleep
And sleep more wakefully!

—–Zachary Horvitz

From this view, the conception of the dream space of sleep is a metaphor of the waking space, a perpetual navigation of illusion in which, at least in sleep, the mind operates at subliminal levels, throwing images and stories before us and over which, if one seriously pursued dream yoga, one might eventually gain some control. The capacity to ‘awaken’ in the dream and even a capacity to write a new ‘story’ in the dream…or a new story of the dream is not only the story of dream yoga. It’s the reality of our waking condition.

The identity of the dream state, the waking meditative state, the post-meditative state and especially the immediate states upon physical death all present an identical opportunity: to cultivate a possible ‘awakening,’ a capacity to distinguish between illusion and reality, to recognize the activity of ‘mind’ for what it is and to meet every island appearing in the stream as an island without becoming transfixed. This is the context in which these interpretations of bardo imply–or verify, if you prefer– that every act, every moment in life, just as it is depicted in the after-death experience, is an opportunity to realize natural mind, a rehearsal for the post-death experience.

Those who are familiar with bardo teachings or practices or, for that matter, any meditative practice, may take a certain pride in accomplishment as we mark our progress. And we can attain a good deal of pleasure in the course of our practice. The pride of the human realm always sneaks in the side door whenever one believes one has arrived, when one imagines having achieved absorption or true equanimity, even for a moment. That is when one wishes to preserve it, to extend it, to own it or become it. But all of this is about hope and fear, and thus a form of spiritual materialism. In the extreme, this is the realm of the gods, who seek pleasures in every form, like notches on a belt. Sound familiar?

And at some point every edifice of attainment will dissolve into frustration and backsliding, becoming the opposite of pleasure and deconstruct into forms of ego-recrimination. All that attainment is impermanent! Damn! This is the bardo experience. This sort of confusion is identical to the character of post-death experience, perhaps the bardo of death, in which any hint of noticing the Nature of Mind, something that may already have arisen as part of our living practice, turns into such a striving that we instantly fall back into deeper confusion and even anger, the anger of the human realm or even something more toxic, the anger of a hell being. 

So there we are, cycling and recycling in the whirlpool of samsara, confronting our own karma, particularly acute at moments of being so neurotically lost, so swept along in one or the other realm that we become deaf and dumb–we can’t hear or obey anything except ego. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I identify my existence along an axis between the human and the hungry ghost realms. There is certainly a desire to learn, an openness to what is new and even a willingness to let go of the trappings of my ‘personal monastery of achievement.’ I am largely free of the single-minded pursuits of the god realm, the paranoia of the asuras, or the fanaticism and anger of the hell realm, but at times I sense a descent into the hungry ghost realm in which I fail to relinquish anything and nothing is ever quite enough. There is a striving for more, more of something perceived to be absent.

This a form of aggression—an act of aggression upon the self. “I am not enough. I do not have enough. I am not good enough.” Blah, blah, blah. This hungry aggression is fundamentally materialistic, also a powerful and deep and pervasive character of humanity. The evolutionary path of humanity is to realize and confront this aggression and to allow it to die. 

Aggression also operates in meditative practice. There are more different meditation practices than one may count. Many of them are beneficial in uncountable ways because they develop capacities which might otherwise never exist. But at the bottom of all practice, there must be a letting go of the striving, the need to manifest something, to fix something, to find something or even give up something. In life, you can be anything as long as you can also detach from being the one who believes in the need to be something. If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. Non-meditation.

Radical Impermanence

The tragic and glorious reality brought to us by the pandemic has been a daily encounter with impermanence, the poignant fragility of sentience and our exquisitely balanced interdependence with the natural world. The other dimension breaking into mass consciousness has been the fragility of conventional ‘modern’ life, from health care to food to energy and transportation. The stability of the economic system is deeply shaken, spurring an increasingly desperate autocratic ideology to prop it all up. Not only is life itself impermanent, but the way we live is also part of the illusion. As painful as it all may be, this is a healing moment.

The underlying violence of the financial system is starkly displayed. The matrix of global supply chains bringing us food, clothing, technology, information, energy, health and transportation is a house of cards, reminding us the way we understand the world requires overhaul. As if impending climate collapse isn’t sufficiently grave, COVID-19 has presented a similar diagnosis in an even more personal and immediate form: failure to act risks death. What could be more clear?

Over the past months, we’ve emerged from a dream and come crashing back to earth. ‘Progress’ has rarely mirrored our own frailty so clearly. No amount of Othering can disguise the fact that we are not other than the world itself. We are not exceptional. Life is an ongoing dynamic confluence of subjectivities between the human and the non-human. We live and die by its turning. Climate change has at least taught us that. We may have agency, but are not and have never been in control.

From our isolated redoubts, we witness the ongoing trauma of Business As Usual. The virus did not magically appear from nowhere; whatever its origin, it is Business as Usual. Yet it is also a liberating force, tearing the blinders from our eyes. Everything about our existence, individually and collectively, is about constructing temples of permanence. To paraphrase Bayo Akomolafe, by imposing the past upon the present, reassuring ourselves of what we already know, despite ever-increasing cost, we create Progress.

Strangely, in this light, progress is a conservative ideology and nearly all of us are caught in it. But conflating survival with permanence is deeply confused. By this definition, racism and sexism are progress; injustice is progress; inequality is progress; climate change, pollution, national boundaries and even war all sanctify permanence. All bow before the altar of progress. Our cities are monuments to atomized ritual devotion to money; our logistical frameworks & financial systems are all ordered and maintained on the presumption of permanence. The fossils fueling Progress come at increasing cost and decreasing benefit. The apparatus guaranteeing permanence requires increasing complexity… bringing increasing vulnerability. This what we are calling ‘normal.’

The increasingly deterministic ‘rules’ of modernity are etched deeply in our consciousness: who belongs, what roles are assigned, defining our relationship to the world. The exploitation, violence, expropriation, befouling of natural resources and the disenfranchisement at their heart are simply denied. The virus has undone those rules, cracking through the veneer of separation while revealing the true nature and depth of ongoing social and political dysfunction. The foundations of modern culture are shaken. Normal persists at a high spiritual cost, extracting meaning while channeling exclusionary ideologies, presuming superiority and mastery, even rationalizing mass death. Everything depends on our somnolent compliance.

We find ourselves squarely in the paradox of compassionate and generous impulses while remaining in anxiety about safety and scarcity. As the sword of impermanence comes slashing downward, slicing through our illusions, we see clearly the necessity and potency of standing for a planetary dialogue on the once cool, now overheated trauma from which we are awakening. In the face of mass de-compensation, we see the possibility of a new consensus arising.

Progress believes we can think our way out of this, as if we are here because of something we did. But, no. We are here because of what we are. The very fact that we think about problems is part of the problem. Our predicament is that we don’t know how to do otherwise. Thinking we are separate is how we got here. Do we now think we can think ourselves out of separation? Even ‘understanding’ is objectifying. There’s a time and place for all of that, but it hardly occurs to us that we can’t think outside the box. We are the box.

Engaging with impermanence, living it, is as close to thinking outside the box as we can get; seeing life as it truly is. A new freedom is immanent; in uncertainty and instability there is an enlivening of creativity, curiosity, spontaneity and new relations. In a field of continuously refreshing engagement, we aren’t compelled to impose the past upon the present; we are less inclined to sink into the quicksand of permanence. Imagining we can return to ‘normal’ is a profoundly false, desperate and ultimately doomed proposition—as if we should look away from what’s being exposed and reconstitute a façade without the substance required to ensure viability. Instead, everything is up for renegotiation now.

The lives we’ve lost become the fuel of our engagement. What the deceased have given us is immeasurable. They have cleared space for us to mourn, to explore fully our own discomfort, our deep unrest, the knowledge of work undone and the opportunity to see that work and to perform the tasks necessary to heal this world, our selves.

Borrowing from Vanessa Andreotti and Dani d’Emilia, we can reactivate our vital compass and return to genuine earth-centered experience; we can restore our capacity to feel ourselves as the metabolism of the earth while accepting vulnerability and discomfort as the desperation of our fragile egos. We can serve as guides, comforting each other as we navigate the agonies of throwing off our addictions and restoring our exiled capacities. Our strength comes from resting in the eye of the storm. Our grief becomes the fertilizer of creative imagination, inspiring and moving us to what is next.

With commitment and compassion, our actions will naturally arise and be naturally accomplished–though not without risk. We may imagine refuge in conceptual deliberation and meticulous formation of intent, but let us cultivate intimacy and seek guidance from non-conceptual sources, arising from the matrix of unmediated experience and universal relationship. May such actions awaken us from the prevailing architecture of causation.

The increasing velocity of change, radical impermanence, frees us from dependency on the archetypes of the dying paradigm. The coronavirus is a portal for healing. Let us move through it with enlightened action, spontaneously and freely arising according to generous and creative impulses. The more forcefully and deliberately we apply ourselves to preparing for the apocalypse, the more we release the weight of hope upon our labors, the more likely we are to delay that apocalypse. In denying hope lies the possibility of a future: the end of deifying progress, the false hope of returning to a world that is ending. Healing potential lies in expressing who we are without calculation, wholly and inclusively, entering a deeper field of impermanence, ever-renewing connection, expression, presence and engagement, with humor, humility and reverence.