Mon, 31 Aug 2009
Wu Wei
The next stanza in Ganges Mahamudra is really difficult to explain well, but I'll do my best.
When, through remaining in an ongoing state of non-meditation, non-attainment is attained, mahamudra is attained. These worldly affairs are the useless causes of suffering. Look at the ultimate essential meaning [that realizes] the futility of deliberate action!
From the Buddhist perspective, attainment is seeing the non-existence of the ego. But when you see this, you see that there's really not much to see. It's not look everything dissolves into pure energy or similar nonsense. Here's a story about the pholosopher Wittgenstein that makes the point. Someone once told Wittgenstein that it was not surpising that people believed for so long that the sun went around the Earth, because that's how it looks. Wittgenstein esked, then how would things look if it looked like the Earth went around the Sun? Of course, both look exactly the same. In the same way, the experience of ego and the experience of non-ego are the same. Only the understanding is different. So attainment is non-attainment.
Non-meditation means dropping any deliberate attempt to meditate. When starting to meditate, some effort is needed. But if we treat meditation as something we do, there is a stain to our practice, because in our minds doing is inevitably tied up with ego. So to see the falseness of ego, one needs to let go of deliberate meditation. It's difficult to explain how non-meditation can be a kind of meditation, The sentence itself is contradictory. To start with, it's best to end a period of deliberate concentration with a short period of just sitting and not doing anything.
