By opening your mind to nonduality you might live a more effective life
On Nonduality Street radio today, Dustin LindenSmith, stay at home dad, talked about mindfulness and parenting. Dustin wrote an article on the topic for Fall issue of Buddhadharma magazine.
Click on the link below to listen to the 25 minute show. (If the recording stops after a couple minutes just reload the page.)
http://nonduality.com/nondualitystreet_dustinlindensmith21september2010.mp3
Listen to the Hip Hop show on Nonduality Street radio: http://nonduality.com/nondualitystreet_hiphop7september2010.mp3
FREESTYLE: GATEWAY TO THE BEYOND WITHIN
JUSTIN MILES
They Were Having a Cipher
Six youths gather on a corner in any given city in the world. They form a circle and engage in a few seconds of discourse concerning what is about to happen. One opens the top to a 22 ounce of beer, pours some on the ground for “those who ain’t here,” drinks some and passes it to his comrades. Members of the neighborhood glance in from the outside and wonder what is about to occur. A concerned citizen thinks that they should call the police before a crime is committed, thinking, “There has been an increase in break-ins and thefts in the area lately, and someone has got to do something about these drug dealers.” All of a sudden one creates a rhythmic pattern using their mouth, hands, a foreign object, voice, or all of the above. The others begin to move their heads in unison, and one opens his mouth and begins to speak, juxtaposing his words over the rhythm. The neighbors calm a bit and watch out of curiosity what they are witnessing: six youths moving in unison to one rhythm, each expressing different emotions and thoughts through different styles. There is no fighting, drug dealing, or crime committed. The event lasts for two hours and then the circle disperses, promising to meet up the next day and do it again. The neighbors watching catch on to what just happened. “Oh, they were just rapping,” says one. A youth watching smiles and says, “Naw… they were having a cipher.”
Cipher:
1. Code, hidden meaning.
2. Nobody, a non-entity.
3. An enclosed circle of Hip-Hop practitioners and listeners, engaging in authentic discourse (Freestyling) with the aim of strengthening self-awareness, self-worth, knowledge of other practitioners and their styles, lyrical skill, or one’s connection to a creationary force, through
offering words of harmony (verbalizing a connection with group and creator),
awareness (verbalization of issues which cause difficulty within one’s life or issues that bring joy into one’s life),
actualization (verbalized plan of change or continuance),
alignment (verbalized understanding of one’s issues as being their own),
and synthesis (verbalized unity with creationary forces of change and continuance as to actualize new behavior or continue old behaviors);
sharing a message of personal importance with the congregation in order to increase another’s self-awareness, self-worth, knowledge of one’s self and style to another practitioner, and the collective’s ability to connect to a creationary force by maintaining harmony, balance, interconnectedness, and authenticity.
Creation within the Urban Placenta
To a Hip-Hopper the cipher (or cypher) represents the womb, an urban placenta that gives birth to emcees and beatboxers through the sharing of spiritual energies, transferred around and through a cosmic circle of combined rhythms. It is the training ground for those who aspire to reach the heights of the greatest emcees, a soapbox for the believers in a higher mode of expression and communication, a forum for those who wish to just enjoy in an individual-collective experience, or a combination of all three. The cipher embodies the sacred principles and dynamics of relationship found in and between all things, even if the practitioner is not cognizant of the subtle events taking place.
Think of Hip-Hop as being the binding energy of the cypher, existing between things and individuals. It is what helps Hip-Hoppers acknowledge each other and distinguish between authenticity and falseness of an individual, group, or their beliefs.
It is important to note that the description of this energy or force is not done for convention, but to describe an existing non-entity that would be associated or equitable with chi, prana, spirit, essence, the All, Ultimate Reality, Truth, etc. These words are used to describe an ever-present Reality that pervades all substance, but which could never be fully described.
To practitioners and listeners, Hip-Hop is that force which allows one to create, provides the atmosphere for creation to exist, and is the foundation for all creation of the music. It can be described as a feeling of elation, bliss, ecstasy, that one feels when one is in the environment that Hip-Hop is played, cultivated, or demonstrated.
~ ~ ~
This is an excerpt from an unpublished article. To hear more from this article please listen to the podcast:
http://nonduality.com/nondualitystreet_hiphop7september2010.mp3
Colin Drake was my guest on Nonduality Street radio:
nondualitystreet_colindrake31august2010.mp3
Here is a new article by Colin:
Awareness and the Brain
by Colin Drake
In reply to a recent article a critic wrote: ‘There cannot be any awareness unless there is one who is aware and, what/who is it that is aware? The brain of course! Before the brain existed & upon its death there was no & will be no awareness.’
This is the mind’s central argument against the realization that deeper than mind/body (which is experienced as a flow of thoughts/mental images/physical sensations) is pure awareness. (Further than that, this is what we are at this deepest level!) The argument goes that without the brain ‘we’ would not be aware (of anything), therefore upon its death there will be no awareness. This argument is based on a misunderstanding of the word ‘awareness’, which is quite understandable as I use this word in a very particular way. Which I hope will be made clear by the following excerpt from Beyond the Separate Self :
Before starting, we need to discuss the nature of awareness itself. It is obvious that we would not ‘know’ (be aware of) our own perceptions without awareness being present. This does not mean that we are always conscious of each one of them, as this is dictated by where we put our attention, or upon what we focus our mind. However, all sensations detected by the body, and thoughts/mental images occurring in the mind, appear in awareness, and we can readily become conscious of them by turning our attention to them. So awareness is like the screen on which all of our thoughts and sensations appear, and the mind becomes conscious of these by focusing on them. Take, for example, what happens when you open your eyes and look at a beautiful view: everything seen immediately appears in awareness, but for the mind to make anything of this it needs to focus upon certain elements of what is seen. ‘There is an amazing tree’, ‘wow look at that eagle’, ‘what a stunning sky’, etc. To be sure, you may just make a statement like ‘what a beautiful view’, but this does not in itself say much and is so self-evident as to be not worth saying!
The point is that the mind is a tool for problem-solving, information storing, retrieval and processing, and evaluating the data provided by our senses. It achieves this by focusing on specific sensations, thoughts or mental images that are present in awareness, and ‘processing’ these. In fact we only truly see ‘things as they are’ when they are not seen through the filter of the mind, and this occurs when what is encountered is able to ‘stop the mind’. For instance we have all had glimpses of this at various times in our lives, often when seeing a beautiful sunset, a waterfall or some other wonderful natural phenomenon. These may seem other-worldly or intensely vivid, until the mind kicks in with any evaluation when everything seems to return to ‘normal’. In fact nature is much more vivid and alive when directly perceived, and the more we identify with the ‘perceiver’, as awareness itself, the more frequently we see things ‘as they are’. (p.14-15)
So I differentiate between becoming ‘conscious’ of something, which means the mind ‘seeing’ it, which requires a brain, and awareness itself, which is the substratum in which these ‘things’ occur. So when there is no mind (brain) there is indeed no ‘consciousness’ of thoughts, mental images or sensations.
In fact one of the great values of having a sophisticated mind is that it can become ‘aware of awareness’. So a human birth is indeed fortunate for it gives us the opportunity to achieve what the Buddha calls ‘the first factor of enlightenment’ which is ‘awareness of awareness’. This is easy to see by sitting quietly and noticing how thoughts and sensations come and go, whilst ‘awareness’ is a constant conscious subjective presence.
However, even if you reject this concept of awareness, at the level of ‘becoming conscious of something’ it is easy to demonstrate that this does not necessarily require a brain; for all living things rely on awareness of their environment to exist and their behaviour is directly affected by this. This does show some ability to process incoming data and act (or react) according to this, but does not imply a ‘brain’ in the normal definition of the word [1] … At the level of living cells and above, this is self-evident, but it has been shown that even electrons change their behaviour when (aware of) being observed! Thus this awareness exists at a deeper level than body/mind (and matter/energy [2]) and at the deepest level we are this awareness! About this, Sogyal Rinpoche says, ‘In Tibetan we call it Rigpa, a primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant and always awake …. It is in fact the nature of everything’ [3].
My e-book Beyond the Separate Self aims to provide a simple framework in which one can directly investigate the nature one’s moment-to-moment experience which readily reveals ‘awareness of awareness’. This may be sampled and purchased for immediate download at http://nonduality.com/btss.htm
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[1]‘ Organ of soft nervous tissue contained in the skull’, or ‘intellectual capacity’ (OED)
[2] The theory of relativity, and string theory, show that matter and energy are synonymous.
[3] S. Rinpoche The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 1992, San Francisco p.47
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