MINDESSENCE The Polarity of Life and Death
Tony Caves
Chapter 2 The Basic Polarity Emptiness and form - Energy and physicality othing is what it seems to be! Yet everything is exactly what it is! Anon
The taboo topic This chapter brings us to very crux of the whole exploration in this book. In our lives we restrict ourselves to the limits of form and seek to avoid emptiness that is vast and unlimited. Our fear leads us to cling to form and rationality that give the illusion of order and permanence. However, in reality these are underpinned by the very emptiness and subjectivity we choose to ignore. Emptiness is the same as nonduality and non-physicality. Just as emptiness contains form, non-duality contains duality and subjectivity contains objectivity. Everything we experience is both empty and subjective. We create objectivity like a sort of comfort blanket because we cannot bear the idea that life actually has no boundaries. Our deepest self, Mindessence, our greatest treasure, is non-dual and non-physical. The above statements may appear bizarre and tantalizing, perhaps difficult to understand but addressing them is of the utmost importance if we are to wake up to our true condition. Emptiness and form If you ask any designer or architect they will tell you that everything about this place in which we find ourselves is based on form and space,( space is the same as emptiness). It is the arrangement of form within space and space counterpointed with form that give us our concepts of beauty and ugliness and, in fact, our whole concept of the universe. One cannot exist without the other. Take away the form and you will be unable to perceive the space as something definable. Take away the space and the form will disappear. We make them a binary system so that we can perceive things. But they are not really separate, they depend upon one another. They are linked and each contains the seed of the other so we should speak of spaceform. Polarities are spoken of in many different ways probably the most widely known these days is the Chinese version of Yin and Yang. However, all polarities spring from the basic polarity of emptiness and form that is expressed in Polarity Therapy as energy and physicality. In terms of bodywork Polarity Therapy works with three other polarities. The first of these is the positive/negative polarity from the head to the feet, the second is the female/male polarity from left to right of the body and the third is the present/past polarity from the front to the back of the body.
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Siddhartha the Buddha The best explanation we have concerning duality is found in Buddhism. Siddhartha was not a Buddhist. Buddhism is a by product of what others said he taught. The earlier teachings were dictated by Ananda his cousin and lifelong companion who was said to have an eidetic memory. The rest were actually written down centuries after he lived. Like Osho, Siddhartha the Buddha never wrote anything down himself. The Buddhist canon is all the work of later scholars based on memories of what Siddhartha was supposed to have said during his many talks to his followers over a period of forty years. In the case of Osho all his talks were either filmed or recorded so, although edited, they are straight from the horses mouth as it were. However, both of these men warned those close to them not to make a religion or dogma out of the truth they spoke. Of course, in the case of Siddhartha those sleepers who followed ignored this instruction and did just this, strengthening their false minds with grand titles, airs and graces. However, much less so in the case of Osho’s Sannyasin. Neither Osho nor Siddhartha regarded themselves as ‘spiritual teachers’ but merely people who had opened themselves to the truth about our existence. Due to their immense compassion they spoke about this opening and gave methods so that other people might also wake from the dream of suffering. It is interesting that Siddhartha lived in the east at the same time as Pythagoras existed in the west and that their teachings are remarkably similar. As already discussed, Pythagoras allegedly travelled in India so it is possible that they actually met one another! However, it must be acknowledged that Buddhism developed into a masculine based teaching that includes women usually on sufferance; whereas Pythagoreanism and the Sekhmet practices were from the very start a teaching for both women and men who were seen as equal although opposite, like two halves of the same coin, each needing the other for completion. Buddhist Vajrayana and Tantric practices echo this viewpoint. How things are: The truth of the Buddha Dharma Emptiness and form are most fully discussed in the Buddhist Sutras and form part of the Buddha Dharma. The truth of the Buddha Dharma (Teachings based upon what Siddhartha the Buddha is thought to have said) are unassailable. Buddhist teachings are systematic and self evident. They are often said to be scientific and are a complete and very advanced insight into the human condition that is experientially based and does not require any faith or belief. Buddhism also takes former religious ideas based in belief and rephrases them so that they are rational and scientific and appeal to the individual’s own powers of discernment. They are not the pronouncements of some God or other, so nothing is to be taken on trust, everything is debatable and each person is encouraged to work it out for themselves. It is reported that Siddhartha encouraged scepticism: ‘Do not believe, just because wise men say so. Do not believe, just because it has always been that way. Do not believe, just because others may believe so. 52
Examine and experience for yourself! Kalama Sutra of Siddhartha the Buddha The opening gambit Early translators steeped in Judeo/Christian, religious, God based ideas, called the foundation teachings, ‘The four noble truths and the eightfold noble path’ and this has seemed to stick. I have always found this translation very unattractive and rather pious in the Christian sense of that word. I much prefer the rendering of Ngakchang Rimpoche who refers to this truth as, ‘The Four Fundamental Certainties and the Way of Alignment’. This feels so much more accurate, realistic and free of religiosity. Instead of the word ‘right’ that has certain moral overtones, he uses the term ‘whole hearted’. I feel that this is a perfect description of what needs to be conveyed. The Four Fundamental Certainties and the Way of Alignment are the first step of the Buddhist teacher, a sort of hook, to get you into an inner scientific dialogue in which all your past and present conditioning is systematically destructured. These are not things to be learned or understood; they are things to do; action is required. These Certainties describe the ongoing condition of all beings. There are said to have been four messengers that led to this teaching coming about. These messengers were sickness, old age, death and a calm Meditating practitioner or Sannyasin. The First three messengers cause Dukkha, the message that everyone experiences suffering and the fourth messenger indicates Nirvana or liberation from Dukkha. Dukkha is sometimes translated as ‘bad wheel’ and I really like this translation. It gives me a picture of life as a sort of wobbly wheel. Although we are able to travel along we are all over the place and even when we go in a straight line for a time it won’t last and we will eventually wobble off in another direction. Nothing is certain and it is always a bumpy ride! The Four Fundamental Certainties and the Way of Alignment So, the first Certainty is called in Sanskrit Dukkha, that has been translated as suffering but really means an underlying general tediousness or unsatisfactoriness. It is not that existence is tedious or unsatisfactory of itself, it is our constant desire for it to be other than what it is that causes the problem. We attempt to repeat pleasurable experiences in an imaginary past, in a not yet experienced future. In this way we miss the moment; the only time in which we can truly experience anything. This is not something that only some people do, we all do it all of the time unless we become aware and wake up to the fact that our life is spent in a mental phantasy. Often we work really hard to achieve an end or acquire a possession and after a brief moment of euphoria we realize we have a compulsion to just move on to the next thing. This grasping after things, people and conditions underpins our existence and thus nothing is ever as we imagined it to be; our tedious, unsatisfactory life is just one thing after another...... The second Certainty arising from the first prompts us to question why our existence should be so unsatisfactory. We are led to discover the cause of this 53
experience to be the craving, (tanha: literally thirst) to maintain ourselves in an artificial condition that we consider safe. Craving and grasping roots us in greed, hatred and ignorance. We attempt to continually justify the idea that we are solid, separate, permanent, continuous and defined in opposition to the nagging worry that we can cease to exist at any moment. Any other approach like letting go, or trusting the moment, seems to be just too risky. This is the idea of referentiality, that if we do not cling to reference points we would somehow lose ourselves. It is all the props in life, family, possessions, job, house and car etc., that underpin our view of ourself. Of course in the real world we are not what we think we are, neither is it possible to lose ourselves because everything is interconnected and in this way we will always exist as part of the whole. In Buddhist teaching this is called dependent origination or conditioned co-production. However, we continue to limit ourselves to the three distracted tendencies of aversion, attraction and indifference. We are either attracted to people and things, we have an aversion for them, or we are indifferent to them according to the degree that they support or deny our notions of a separate self. Thus we bounce back and forth between dualistic extremes like the ball in a pinball machine. Understanding this brings us to the third Fundamental Certainty. The third Certainty is that the cessation (niroda) of craving and grasping leads to the ending of the unsatisfactory state of being. We can be liberated from constraints of our own making and from negative emotions such as greed, hatred and ignorance. Through the discovery of the cause of unsatisfactoriness we realize that it ceases when we give up the notion of a separate self with all that that entails. This leads to the wisdom of generosity and the insight of active compassion both for ourselves and all other beings, to whom we are inseparably connected. Thus we are led to the inescapable conclusion that things, people, events and ideas only ever exist in relation to one another. Interdependence and interconnectedness are the very nature of this place in which we find ourselves. We only ever exist in relation to everything else, to believe otherwise is to be in denial and enmeshed in delusion. Thus emptiness is nothing other than form and form is nothing other than emptiness because they are interdependent and interconnected. In the very same way energy is physicality and physicality is energy and the subjective is the very base of the objective. The fourth Certainty or way of alignment gives a set of eight systematic practices that enables us to experience this liberated state. Just knowing about it will not get us out of the trap. We must come to understand and integrate it into our whole being. This does not mean giving up on the physical world but actually being more alert but relaxed within every moment. We actually live more fully than we could ever have imagined. Total centred awareness is the key. The practice is based in a set of principles or guidelines that individuals may use to assess their behaviour in line with the above insights. These eight points in the Way of Alignment relate to the basic situations of life. The Way of Alignment comprises; whole hearted aware view, whole hearted aware intention, whole hearted aware communication, whole 54