vacuuming to Andrew Cohen

I had to take a break from my vacuuming to write down some of the ideas that are tumbling around in my head right now. While vacuuming, I'm listening to another Andrew Cohen tape (I can't help it, fireceremony), and he just answered one my life's biggest questions in about one paragraph. He answered it just as I would have asked it only months ago, and he answered it totally directly.

He was describing the process one needs to follow in order to live in constant nondual awareness. He said that there are two aspects to this: 1) you have to become aware of the nondual absolute, but that 2) you also have to make your physical manifestation be a direct reflection of this awareness. He then went on to describe the process inherent to accomplishing these feats, wherein you focus on developing the right relationship to thought. You begin by becoming aware of your relationship to thought (i.e. contemplation); you continue by removing your relationship to thought (here, I assume he means florid objective witness such as the state attained in deep meditation); and you continue by assuming the right relationship to thought (samadhi?).

This ties in nicely with what Jerry and I were talking about over our sugarless pumpkin cheesecake last Tuesday. He was talking about 'natural commitment,' and how each of us in life has these certain natural commitments that we fulfill. This seems to be a way to describe how one 'lives nondually,' as it were: we can maintain a right relationship to the manifest world simply by fulfulling our life's natural commitments. No more, no less. And the simpler our commitments, the more liberated we feel.

A yearning for more complicated plans and structures and meanings and reasons in life is just fodder for the mind and the ego. Life isn't nearly as complex as our minds make it out to be. As sentient beings, we all have the wherewithal to make it simpler.

okay, so here's something I've never said before

So, after I ran around the highway loop near my house, which is about 3.5 km, and which used to take me about a half-hour or more but which only took 20 minutes today, I was just starting to feel like I was warmed up, and totally ready to keep running! So I did -- I went on a different 3 km loop and then ran all the way up to our front door, still not really tired even at the end. I don't know what has come over me, but that's the first time I've ever run for that long and then said, "I want to go farther." What a great feeling.

I also ran with Riker, the black dog, and he was a fantastic running companion and general pace-setter.

From today's DailyDharma

"According to Buddhist theory, there are some things that belong to the subtle consciousness, or subtle mind, that are independent from the body, from the brain. There is no assertion in Buddhism that there is a 'thing' called a soul or a 'thing' called consciousness, some 'thing' that exists independently of the brain. There is no such 'thing' existing independently of the brain or being dependent upon the brain. But rather, consciousness is understood as a multifaceted matrix of events. Some of them are utterly dependent of the brain, and at the other end of the spectrum, some of them are completely independent of the brain. There is no thing that is the mind or the soul."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from the book, Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism, published by Snow Lion Publications.