We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present
One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about nonduality of self and other, but he still didn__ quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind__ll the unwanted parts of himself__e didn__ know how to get rid of them. So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying, ____ not going away and it looks like you__e not either, so let__ just live here together._ At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said, __h, this one is particularly vicious._ (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that__ all we__e got.) He didn__ know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, __ust eat me up if you want to._ Then that demon left too.
Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living
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One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about nonduality of self and other, but he still didn__ quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind__ll the unwanted parts of himself__e didn__ know how to get rid of them. So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying, ____ not going away and it looks like you__e not either, so let__ just live here together._ At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said, __h, this one is particularly vicious._ (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that__ all we__e got.) He didn__ know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, __ust eat me up if you want to._ Then that demon left too.
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Consciousness is naturally shamanic.
We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow "become" who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth.Reality is...there's no "becoming".It's actually all an "un-becoming", only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.
To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as __ub-conciousness_ or __upra-consciousness_ is not correct. The word __eyond_ is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no __eyond_, no __nderneath_, no __pon_ in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.
Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
Consider this:1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?And here's a bonus question:2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?