Interdependence and Cause and Effect

Meagain, i took white feathers post out of context a little in order to express my own opinion. If you read his original post i don't think that is the sentiment he's expressing at all.

As for me, this all seems a little mathematical for me, I am attracted to the 'flow' or even 'non-sense' of buddhism if you understand my meaning. Of course logic and mathematics probably do govern the universe but i lost the ability to think that way when I quit university. Have fun debating these issues!

 

If it is a beautiful day outside, the birds are singing, and all is right with the world, do we ask why it is a beautiful day?

No, we usually want to know the cause of something when something bad happens to us. So we worry and work ourselves into mental anxiety, we brood, we get angry, we curse, we throw things, we get depressed, we obsess over it. That is the waste of time and energy, the making the mind think more and more, where we lose sleep, where our health suffers.

The old story is that a king was given a ring by a Buddhist monk. He was told to only read it seemed as if life could not get any worse. When he ultimately opened it, it read "This too shall pass."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality You can also read on Determinism and Fatalism.

The problem with causality is that we usually experience the effect then look for the cause. We're looking for blame.

So let's say that you're driving down the road and get a flat tire. You could just accept it as a flat tire or you could try to figure out why you got the flat tire; was it because of a piece of glass or a nail?, was it because it didn't have enough air pressure in it?, was it because you hit a pot hole?, was it because it was defective? Worrying about it will not fix the immediate problem: you need to get a good tire on there in its place. You look in the trunk and the spare has no aire in it. What is the cause then? Now that flat tire has really got you railed (worked up). Now it takes on monumental proportions. Now you're stuck and have no way to get home. What will you do? And you think, and you think, and you think, and you think. The mind is constantly engaged, your hormones are raging and you look for something to blame someone else with.

That is a waste of time and mental energy. Your anger is stopping you from seeing any other possibilities. You have an immediate problem and are busy thinking instead of getting busy finding a solution. You missed the opportunity to witness anger forming in yourself and having done so you could have short circuited it. You could have felt your body changing and you could have decided not to allow it to do so. (Just like desire - you become aware of a thought trigger, you know where it will lead you, you can decide not to allow yourself to be 'tempted'. If you do decide to allow the act, the 'act' is now done through awareness, not through unawareness.)

Sometimes things happen without our understanding, usually death. There is a time for mourning (and you can mourn with full awareness) and there is a time to "let it go". If you are selfish, where the person is not mourned but rather their absence (meaning that you are sad for yourself) then that is suffering.

If we want an effect to occur and set a cause into motion, that is violence, that is wanting Life to go according to our dictates. Now anytime Life doesn't follow our script we are bound to suffer because we will keep getting madder and madder. We have lost our awareness. We may even see it coming but will feel powerless to affect change. Now we know that suffering is coming and when it comes we suffer all the more.

 

That is something that you will have to see and experience for yourself. Some call it Witnessing, the Witness, the Watcher.

When you are going to sleep, do you see what you are thinking about? As you wake up, just as you become conscious, can you see that the last thought you had before you went to sleep, and which "stopped" in mid sentence, is now continuing exactly where it left off?

Practice watching what is on your mind as you fall asleep. You might want to look at the centre of your eyelids, without moving your eyes. Just keep watching the centre of your eyeballs. You might be able to soon detect sparks of light, little lightenings even. They turn to dust. And even though you know that it is dark, you sense light, it becomes brighter. (Those are all your thoughts, your thought energies). Soon they may even look like planets. And in each planet you might see a picture. You might feel the affects of gravity as you "fly" between them. Should you see a planet that it's picture looks good, you might decide to visit it. You should find that that is a dream. That the dream that you will have is what was pictured.

Now when you first start to wake up, see what your mind is thinking. See it starting to think before you become aware (identified) with the thought. You should see the thought in many pieces, and in between these pieces will be other pieces which belong to another thought. And in between these two streams, between these two thoughts, you might perceive other pieces of another thought. Watch them. They will eventually become concrete thoughts, changing from wisps of ideas into words. You now will probably realise that one thought was from the past (continuing into the present), one thought is the present (like the sound of the alarm clock), and one thought is of the future (having to get up, shower, shave, comb, put the kettle on, dress, etc.)

Many times I will see my thoughts thinking and I want to go to sleep. So I just ignore them, I don't get identified with them, I just go to sleep. The mind is still thinking, but all I am feeling is the coolness of the bed sheets, how relaxing it feels, how wonderful darkness feels. I know that I have to go to sleep. I know that my body needs rest. I know that my mind keeps thinking. So I decide to go to sleep and let the body get its rest. I can't be bothered with thinking.

Most nights I am asleep within a minute or two, mostly before 60 seconds pass. I turn off the light, I settle my body, I follow my breath, I sleep. On a good night it takes no more than 4 breaths to fall fully asleep. Then my mission is to awake before the alarm goes off. I stretch in bed as I awaken. Then the alarm goes off a minute later.

It doesn't always happen, though. I usually have to be relaxed. If I am "worked up" I will have problems falling asleep because my mind keeps coming back to what is troubling me. Then it is best if I just get out of bed and take a nice warm-hot shower. I get out and remake the whole bed. I fluff the pillow. And I try again... I follow my breath, in, out, in,-the turning point of the breath-,out, the turning point of the breath, in...

I used to feel my body "shifting gears" as my body went into different sleep rates, Alpha, Beta, etc. But I no longer go to sleep on my back. So I no longer detect it, I just go to sleep. If I keep watching my mind, I see the thinking fading away from myself.

I really can't describe it any better. You will have to see what happens with you as you watch your mind.

I suggest Watching before going to sleep because you are relaxed and you know that you have slept before. Since you know that you have slept before then chances are good that you will sleep tonight. (Not that you are now in cause-effect, just that you know the effect and don't have to worry about the cause. Sleep happens by itself.)

Try it each and every night for the next 30 days. Just watch the tips of your eyeballs and see if you see anything. If you watch your eyeballs you probably won't be able to see what you are thinking. You are thinking about things but you are also watching the tips of your eye lids. When you start to see sparks of light you will not be thinking, you will just see the sparks of light. The sparks of light will get bigger and bigger until it becomes bright. You might even be able to think that you see the sparks of light. That is the Witness. You'll just know it when you experience it. Then you'll know that you are separate from your thinking. You'll see your consciousness as separate from your thinking, you'll see the thinking process for what it is - a process, separate from that which is thought (or consciousness). That is dis-identification.

 

You don't. You have to be aware of the act before it happens. You just have to be aware.

You have to be aware before the feelings came into being. You have to see the thought kernel which caused the feelings to start to arise. You have to see the feelings forming. Then you must decide whether to allow it to continue or to not continue.

It is not the same becasue you have felt others love you but you haven't felt others murder you. You know evil and you know good. You know that if you hurt others it is evil. But maybe you haven't figured out that if you hurt yourself it is also evil. What then does it mean to love yourself? If you know what it means to love yourself then it should be really easy to love others.

You can feel love, but you cannot feel murder. Murder is of the mind, love is of the heart. When you are in love time stops, thinking stops. I have yet to hear the same said for murder. If you die, time stops. But if you murder time does not stop; it stops for the other person, but not for you.

(This is the most simplistic of explainations. If you can witness yourself murdering there is no way that you can murder.)

 

To me, what arises as thoughts is the only thing that can be conscious.
I say this even if I experienced instants without thinking and understood I was creating thoughts by determination of what I experienced in the past.
I will try to focus on what you said about sleep, but it has been a while I didn't did such things, too bored :-(
(not of getting no results...)

I'm glad for you it is so easy for you to fall asleep!
Peace

 

Then there was last night...

Those three responses took a lot out of me.

So it took me a few minutes to fall asleep as the monkey mind went amok. I hate it when I am not in bed by my scheduled time, or earlier.

So, maybe, just maybe, I can fall asleep easily because my life is very boring. As I told my brother, "Boring is good." My motto is, "Thinking hurts."

Then you have to question thinking itself, find out what consciousness is. Is it just the left part of the brain, isolated from the animalistic right side? The Zennists ask, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" to denote that consciousness which does not have to think.

But then we are back at the primary question: is the Witness, witnessing, also a thought process? Or, "How can the Witness be witnessed?" If one can be conscious of witnessing, is that also not a thought rocess?, even if it is the most rudimentary type? I tend to think that it is unlike being in a Tantric love state where there is no thought, just feeling, because one is aware of one's non-thoughts while witnessing, whereas with a sexual partner one is not aware of one's non-thoughts. One is an isolation, the other is an union.

But to say that when one is witnessing one's non-thoughts that one is unconscious or not conscious would not be correct, either, because one is fully conscious of not-thinking. We only have the comforting words of the Enlightened one when they say that in their Enlightened state they turn off their thinking minds when 'it' isn't needed, and turn on thinking when it is needed to speak to others, open doors, put on pants, etc. I tend to think that if one can put on their pants without thinking (which many of us have done out of habit, say walking out of the house without a belt or with our flys open) then surely the same could be done when one is Enlightened, that putting on pants take an abstract thought type of process.

 

I won't say that logic coverns the Universe because one tend a mind to be logical. I will say that there seems to be an Order in the Universe even when we may perceive it as Chaos. For example, a hurricane can be chaotic at "ground zero," but it is very lovely from Outer Space.

The Universe could very well be dictated by cause-effect, by determinism, by casuality, by fatality. But as Consciousness itself we are self-determinate, so we pose infinite possibilities of randomness within the Universe. My position is that if everything has a cause then we can never truly figure out that cause because everything which preceeded it is based on a prior cause, all the way back to the Big Bang. We can only try to perceive a direct cause-effect, isolated cause-effects within our lives. But each cause-effect is supposed to be connected, not isolated, like pearls on a necklace. So if anything happens today, blame it on the Big Bang and be over with it. Why waste time sweating the small causes when the main cause is just being born? We are subject to physical laws because we exist within a physical Universe.

 

Thank you for taking time to answer me.
As you said there should be time spend on defining consciousness

As I hear it, the only difference between animals and humans is that we human are aware of our own existence as a finished time. And actually it is this difference I call consciousness.
What about you?

 

Isn't the difference the dissociative use of symbols?

 

Well, the difference between humans and animals could be discussed for hours, without finding any true answers, or any answers that fits to everybody. I just hope my post brought White Feather where I wanted to.
Peace

 

A mosh pit isn't violent if blood is spilled in love.

 

http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/resources/mountemptiness.html