Big waves, small waves: no difference?

It's easy not to think too much on Maui. But my blogging addiction presses me toward a Church of the Churchless posting.

Where is my inspiration? In today, in the waves.

They were good sized today in Napili Bay, praise the wave gods. Whenever we come to Maui I religiously bring my boogie board on the airplane. Then I devotedly cart it down to the beach, every time we go, no matter how calm the ocean is.

You never know. You really don't. I've been fooled before. Nice waves can spring out of nowhere. Like satori.

This morning I was reading more of "Consciousness is All." An excerpt hit close to home. Our temporary home.

Imagine a drive-in movie theatre with a picture showing on its large white screen.

In the movie picture, a woman and man are standing on a tropical beach, gazing out over the ocean. There's a beautiful sunset and a boat is sailing by in the distance. As a large orange sun appears to drop below the horizon, the woman and man are talking about what a wonderful day they've had, expressing their emotions of happiness.

Now, Peter Dziuban's point is that all this wonderfulness is just images on a screen. The images aren't real. Only the screen is – the screen of consciousness.

For this example, all that is important is the screen, wholly apart from any picture projected, any movie projector, theatre, observers, or anything else.

Hmmmm. I like Consciousness is All as a philosophy. Oneness is so deliciously simple. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everything was the same thing, and nothing was different? Or…would it?

I can't deny my present reality, where some things sure seem to be a heck of a lot better than other things – regardless of whether they're ultimately real or not.

Since we got here my boogie board has been sitting on the sand. This morning the ocean changed. High pressure moved from the south to the north of the islands, doing something or other to the prevailing winds.

Whatever it was, the result was boogie boardable waves. Not great, but good.

And I felt so much better. More alive, because I love catching a wave and feeling the rush of being carried along by a force much more powerful than myself, yet under my control (sort of) if I can flow with it.

Big waves, small waves. A considerable difference, to me. Yet many mystic types would say, "All is one. Physical and mental sensations are passing phenomena, not part of unchangeable unity."

OK. I still prefer big waves to small waves (my wife feels exactly opposite, being a snorkeling fanatic, so we pray to different wave gods).

The Zen folks deal with this stuff somewhat similarly, or so my shallow understanding of Zen tells me. One school puts a big emphasis on keeping the mirror of the mind clear of dust. Another school says, what mirror, what dust?

There are two primary schools of Zen Buddhism. The Gradual School of Enlightenment is firmly rooted in the scripture of Indian Buddhism and the inheritor of that school of meditation. A verse from this tradition:

"This body is the Bodhi-tree
The soul is like a bright mirror.
Keep it clean at all times,
And let no dust gather upon it."

The School of Sudden Enlightenment created an entirely new phenomenon as expressed in an answering verse:

"The Bodhi is not a tree
The bright mirror is nowhere shining
As there is nothing,
Just where can the dust settle?"

and absorbed the Taoist approach to life. "The world is always held without effort. The moment there is effort, the world is beyond holding."

I guess I'm more of a Taoist than a mirror cleanser, or a movie screen devotee. I like reflections. I like images. Particularly when they're of stuff that I enjoy, such as large waves coming into Napili Bay.

Religions generally preach the merits of an other-worldly attitude. But all I know is this world, right here, right now. To deny my experiencing of it, my love of it, my enjoyment of it – senseless.

That said, I also can see how nice it would be if everything that I experienced was, well, nice. Because I didn't take it seriously and could enjoy it while it lasted – which, given the nature of the world, won't be for long.

Hawaiians are big on "hang loose." A good philosophy of life. There's got to be a way of melding an attraction for the screen, and enjoyment of what appears on it. Some movies are better than others, for sure.

But in the end there's "The End." Waves come, waves go. The ocean remains, though. I just want my boogie board to be out in big waves tomorrow.

Comments

[tAo]

I too prefer to not deny the images on the screen. Because, for me, those images are not separate from the screen. So I don't agree with either view. Neither school is right.

In my view, there is really no screen because the images are not apart from the screen. The phenomena (images) of life and the screen (consciousness) are not separate things. Life IS the images, and life IS also the consciousness wherein the images occur and are perceived and experienced.

So for me, there is no point in denying life, in denying the images in favor of the screen of consciousness, and no point in denying the consciousness (screen) in favor of the images.

Since they are actually one and the same, I prefer to live life to the fullest, so to speak... to enjoy the waves, to enjoy the senses, to enjoy whatever I enjoy, and to enjoy all of the content or 'images' of life as being none other than the consciousness itself.

That is what makes life life. To deny that is to deny the reality, to deny life.

To me there is no sense in denying the images, or in denying the screen. In fact, I don't even spilt them into two.

Life and the world IS IT, just as it is.

The wave IS the ocean, and the ocean IS the wave... and the surfer... the surfer is both together as one inseparable whole.

[Edward]

On the screen is a story about a book in which is described a screen with two people on a beach... what were we talking about?

One of the people at the beach prays for large waves, like the upper-case 'A' in the commenter's name. One of the people on the screen prays for small waves, the way the letter 'l' sounds in the word 'snorkle'.

And it seems that we all have these preferences, for less or more perturbation, and inside everyone, something like Obed's grandchild falls and cries.

tAo says, "Life and the world IS IT, just as it is." I think of it as the eternally created now.

To want the leaves to be more green, the rain less cold, the waves higher... desire is an energy, vital to life, but no more than that.

[Obed]

Hi Edward,
I like what you say.
I like the idea of an Awareness or a Now in which all things
appear but I would like to feel that this Awareness allows
in the Relative(daily living) state a certain fluidity or flexibilty.I am just not sure that this is
the case.

[tucson]

Obed states: "I would like to feel that this Awareness allows
in the Relative(daily living) state a certain fluidity or flexibilty.I am just not sure that this is
the case."

--I think it IS the case whether the screen contains an idylic scene or gastly images such as war. It is our reaction to these scenes which make them seem more or less fluid.

In other words, life is fluid but our interpretation may be otherwise.

There is no alternative to what is happening, no escape, nirvana or enlightenment. The grandchild will still be screaming and the bombs will still be dropping.

So, abandonment of a phenomenal center, the ficticious self that reacts, is the only 'solution'. However, such abandonment is not an act performed as an act of will by the entity we perceive as 'ourselves', the identified subject. Rather, it is a non-action where the 'screen' is left in control of phenomenal activity and free from interference by an imaginary 'self'.

[tAo]

As usual, Tucson has a way of taking the words right out of my mouth... or rather right out of my mind.

I might as well let Tucson do all the work and make all the comments from now on... and I'll just go on vacation with Brian. *wink*

...But then, what if Tucson decides to come on vacation as well? And then Edward... and then Roger... and then...?

We might end up with a situation like one of those Zen koans or Taoist macrobiotic pickles.

I mean, look what happened when Brian was out of the shop for just a few days - all kinds of Radha Soami hell broke loose.

We had an escaped untamed monkey like Sid leaving all kinds of RS rubbish all over the joint. And then we had me going around sweeping up and fumigating after Sid. Then we had Tucson trying to attract Sid's attention with some much better tasting bananas. And then we had Sid's zoo-keeper Tom trying to tell us that Sid wasn't really a monkey and that RS wasn't really a zoo. And then Brian had to exit his beautiful beach and miss a few choice waves in order to come back to the shop and close the door and shut Sid outside for awhile, because Sid was turning the shop upside-down, and Tom was turning it all around backwards.

So I hate to imagine what would happen to the shop - the Church, if everyone decided to go on vacation. It would be... absolutely Churchless.

But maybe we could get one of those Rent-a-Gurus to keep things in line, at least until Brian catches that one really BIG WAVE to enlightenment.

[Obed]

Hi tucson,
Thanks very much

[tAo]

It is a most interesting thing the way people will use different terms to say the same thing and then believe they are being contradicted by the other. I’ve always been amused by arguments about what cannot be defined due to the subjective experience of what is beyond the senses. I seldom can be attracted into these sorts of debates, primarily because it never leads to anything.

It was fun sometimes when I was younger and new experiences were part and parcel of my day. I realize now that I was just as often caught up in the vanity of my reasoning skills as much as I was sincere about understanding anything. It was just another way of playing ping pong. It’s always satisfying when you are ‘on’ and making those great moves. Sooner or later the games end and the paddles and the ball sit on the table; just two paddles and a ball, a net and a table with a few white lines.

When we strip away all of our self identification with our words and actions, what is left is what we should be looking at. All over the world people spend their lives remarking on the waves, calculating their measurements, predicting outcomes based on their measurements, buying and selling the information, betting on the outcome, theorizing on the movements and attributing meaning to them. But they’re just waves and they will go on behaving as they do for as long as there is a force to set them into motion.

People talk about the wind and make more wind. They talk about the currents and the tides. They speak of depth and coastlines. Along the way all sorts of understandings have come and sciences have emerged that make possible a greater use of the waves. It’s not the waves though. It’s the ocean and the waves are only a portion of the nature of the ocean. We see the waves but we don’t see the ocean. The waves are the part of the ocean that is shown to us but there is a lot more to it.

Life is the same thing. I could begin to talk now about how the fishes in the ocean are so much like the thoughts in our minds and how the behavior of the fish are very similar to the situations caused by our desires. Big fish eat little fish. Many little fish eat a big fish. Small things attach themselves to big fish and behave like parasites. The intricate ecology of coral reefs and the deep unseen conditions of the ocean’s deep are all worlds unto themselves and yet all of these worlds are in the same ocean. There are other oceans. The sky is an ocean and it has its own system of operations and organization. It too can remind us of ourselves. Then there is the land. There is the weather which comes forth from the interaction of the three and the effect of other influences… on and on it goes.

Our senses operate within limited bandwidths. We speculate what might lie beyond these information gathering and measuring devices. Science shows us that forces and things exist outside our operating bandwidth and individuals with awakened siddhis have told us about what they have seen. Mystics from many a different time and tradition have agreed upon the similarity of things and conditions that exist beyond ordinary bandwidths.

In many different cultures, separated by significant time and distance there have evolved similar symbols and architectures for similar purposes. Many professions are devoted to study of inexhaustible minutiae. What lies at the very heart of the smallest particle of matter? What penetrates all time and space? Something does, even science in its ponderous plodding way has told us that something does. What lies beyond the furthest distance of this universe? Is it some immense curve that doubles back, no matter what direction you go in? Does it just keep pressing outward forever? What is it pressing outward against? Is there something beyond that and that and that? Does the relative symmetry between what is found at the deepest within and the furthest without mean something? Does the distance between magnetized particles within matter reflect similar distances to the heavenly bodies?

There seems to be some kind of remarkable order to it all. People dispute this. They talk about chaos theory and all manner of things. It seems that matter moves in one direction toward unimaginable density turning into black holes. Obviously it also moves toward a lesser and lesser density beyond the senses. Is this permeated by something as dense and pervasive after another fashion? Is our world interpenetrated by worlds of increasingly finer substance? Would that explain Heaven and conversely… Hell?

Here we are in the mix. It appears that there may be technologies and laws of operation far beyond anything we have seen and it could be that they all adhere to laws of nature we have yet to discover. Each life decides the meaning of its life according to how much it understands… then the life is gone. Where did that life go?

It seems that a person could never acquire all of the knowledge that is available. They could never acquire all of the goods, or the land or the space. Something acts as a limiter and it could be that the limiter is there to point out the reality that by knowing just one simple thing all other knowledge and information is rendered secondary.

I have toyed with many sciences and religions; philosophies and practices both general and arcane. It’s possible that I have been doing this for much longer than this lifetime and the same may be true of you. Maybe I gained something by all of this probing and seeking. I am more gratified that I spent my time doing this than making money or becoming important in a temporary period of time. However, none of these things are important to me any more. They seem like highways ‘around’ something. All of these words and thoughts, all this speculation seems like waves on an enormous ocean. They don’t have much to do with what lies beneath. It seems that the deeper one goes into the ocean the less likely they are to speak; as its not so easy with your mouth full of water.

My words… your words… waves on the ocean. Waves can speak of the ocean and waves can speak only of waves. However deep or superficial they may be in their statements they are still both composed of water. Waves are some kind of temporary identity that the ocean takes to say one thing or another, millions of ways every minute of every day and the ocean has made itself into seven separate oceans that are all the same ocean.

Our lives are like a wave on the ocean. We rise from and fall back into the water. There are a million things we can talk about and do within the parameters of a wave among millions of waves but it is hard to imagine that it means anything. It’s more than this of course. I’m just painting a picture to try and make a point but I’ll fall short. I’m only a wave after all.

Everyone has a philosophy, one way or another. They have some passion or predisposition that orders the course of their ship in this ocean of time and the unending phenomena of the waves. I suspect that some ships are more seaworthy and it might just be because one is more able to sail under a particular set of sails.

What I have come to find is that all of the words and arguments and wonders of existence count for nothing in terms of personal effect as a wave upon an unfathomable ocean. Speaking only for myself, I have come to believe that everything is under control and that that control is conscious. If that is so then it indicates to me that whatever that might be it is quite conscious of who I am and where I am; from whence I am come and to where I am bound and that the best thing for me is to have an attitude of listening and a desire for cooperation with it.

I have discovered that the only problem I have is me when I am not listening and not cooperating and when I want more than I have which is everything already. This is not to say that one should not search and reach and study by whatever means one may possess. This is only to say that I suspect one will forever sail under a cloud of unknowing on an unpredictable sea.

Which only means that you can find me dining at the Captain’s table, since I have come to understand how profoundly little I know.

[tucson]

Nice write tAo. Missed this one earlier.

[poohbear]

Tao,
More than just a nice write. Very well articulated, and also good to meet the calm and considered part of your nature