Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Images of Integration,and#8221; Viveka explores the many, diverse faces of mindfulness practice and#8211; breaking down the ideological barriers that can so often divide when we try to figure out what, exactly, does constitute mindfulness meditationand#8230;
Dharmabyte from the full talk: and#8220;Mindfulness as Sadhanaand#8221; given at the Western Buddhist Order Convention 2005
[Music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [Music] In preparing for this talk, I just try to think of three images, or images of integration, or say that said something about integration. So I've got three images, the first two are not particularly traditional, and the third one is very traditional. And I'll just explore them as a way to explore integration. And then I'll talk a little bit about mindfulness per se. So we just listen to these images and see what we think or feel about them. The first is the image of a stream that has become silt it up, a lot of leaves and mud carried downstream has blocked the stream. So the water is stagnant and really just barely moving. It's listless, it's cloudy, and parts, it just swirls in slow circles. The second image is of an iceberg, or just the tip. The very tip is visible, and the great mass of it, almost all of it, is submerged invisible under what looks to be very cold water. And the third image is a vast, boundless ocean with waves constantly churning the surface. Okay, so we'll just go into each image one by one. So first the image of the stream that's stagnant or very slow moving, cloudy, in parts it flows and circles is circling back on itself. So this image came to mind as an image of a lack of integration. And so it kind of points out maybe what integration is or how we might experience it. So one aspect of integration is just energy moving, energy moving, a sort of freedom, sense of freedom, possibility, on obstruction. And the process of integration we can experience as that happening over time, that incrementally more and more energy in us is flowing, or we feel like a being in whom energy is more and more available and flowing. We feel more free in that sense. Energies that previously were not available because they were blocked or dissipated, just become available to us. So thinking about this, the first question that came to mind is, well why isn't our energy flowing then? Why don't we experience ourselves as a fully spontaneous expression? You know, totally fluid, responsive expression. And one of the main things I thought is that it's probably because we don't have something that's engaging us. There's not something significantly calling us out, calling that energy out to rouse us. And so I'm going to explore that for a little bit. When I was thinking about my own sort of history of integration, I remember somebody had forgotten about, which was when I was in university, and I was really a systems person. Because I was trained as an electrical engineer. Which means I have the capacity to endure a great amount of torture. I'm still alive. So it was an incredibly demanding, really, it was incredibly demanding intellectually, this course of study. And the first couple of years were okay because it had physics and really high level math, which is actually very close to the Dharma in terms of its alternate views of reality. So that was all right. And then we got into the engineering part, which I had no interest in. And I remember actually, we had these little lab stations with all these plugs. One day, this giant arc of electricity came out from the wall. It was like visible spark, and then my lab got on fire. So it wasn't really a very promising start for me. I mean, I think I was determined to finish, just to sort of prove to myself that I can meet the challenge. I think also, there were very few women, I think of a class of over 100 people, five women were in it. And we were all immigrants. This is really interesting. All over-achieving immigrant kids, you know, to prove it, but we could do it. But at the time, I felt an incredible split because it was so intellectually demanding. I just felt really, well, and also, I knew I didn't want to do it as my vocation. It was putting, you know, until 6 a.m. studying this topic that was really difficult. And I wasn't, clearly, wasn't going to do anything with it. And it definitely had the effect of making me feel like my emotional side was just, um, disturbingly undeveloped in comparison to this intellectual side. And I used to talk to my friends, all my friends were humanities majors who were having a great time relaxing. And I used to say, you know, I feel like this split, you know, the reason and the emotion. They just not connected. And what's interesting to me is, at some point, that stopped being the case. But I never really had to address it directly. I mean, I suppose I could have tried various forms of therapy or something to address that. But, um, Chinese people don't do therapy. [laughter] The secret, don't tell anyone. And, um, it just actually turned out to be completely unnecessary because what happened was I got really into the Dharma. So what happened was, I just woke up, I just, uh, I had so much shradha, so much faith and, um, feeling for the Dharma. But it just, it completely rectified the situation without ever having to address it directly. [music] We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
