Who AM I?

When Neo re-enters the matrix for the first time after he had been freed, on the way to see the oracle for the first time, he has the following dialogue with Trinity.

Neo: I have these memories from my life. None of them happened. What does that mean?
Trinity: That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

Similarly, when we take a closer look into our own experiences and see that all we can use as references to support our notion of existence, are only processes of relationship and interactions based by the stimuli from the environment perceived by our senses, we can see that none of them present inherent existence.

And as we saw, all the things we interact with are co-emergent with our own way of seeing them, we don't establish a connection with their substratum but with what we add to them in terms of meaning, to the dimensions we add to them.

Therefore, the questions that arise in our minds are: Who am I? Is there anything unchangeable, solid, permanent, in my experience of "I"? Can all those things I perceive with my senses tell me about my identity? Are they the definers of my identity, my ego?


More to come!

Cris

Is this Real?

Neo: This...this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Based on what we have been contemplating until now, how do you define real? If you look around you right now and see the objects around, the sounds, the smells, do any of them have an inherent existence? If you weren't there at this moment, would they still be recognized in such context? If they weren't there at this very moment, what would give you base to affirm you exist? Can you think, elaborate, or reason, about anything that you haven't experienced with your senses?

When we look at an object, when are we actually seeing? Is it at the moment the lights enter our eyes? Or is it when the light is decoded by the brain? If that's the case so is seeing (and the other senses) a mental activity? If so, what makes us capable to recognize things in common, and what makes us perceive different things in the same objects?

I guess this posting has been more of an encouragement to further contemplation than anything else!!!!

Have a great one everyone!!!

Cris

The Spoon Is Empty!

Hello folks, hope you all had a great holiday season.

Continuing with our line of contemplation, I would like to talk a bit about one of the most important texts in Mahayana Buddhism, The Heart Sutra, from the Prajna Paramitta literature. This is the essence of Buddhist texts which will explain emptiness.

In this Sutra we have the bodhisatva mahasatva Chenrezi, or Avalokitezvara, teaching about the emptiness of the five skhandas (aggregates). They are form, sensation, perception, mental formation and consciousness.

In the last posting when we saw that "There is no spoon", we contemplated the fact that the spoon is empty. In other words, when we say that the five skhandas are empty, we are saying that they do not have inherent existence. Lama Samten introduces here the concept of co-emergence in order to explain this better. As we have been seeing in the last postings, co-emergence refers to the fact that the "form" comes to existence when contemplated by the observer. And he too comes to exist as an observer on the dependence of "forms" to contemplate.
















When we deal with reality on our daily lives, we are not establishing a connection with the substratum of all things, being what they are made of, but with what they represent according to our views of them. As an example, when we look at a picture of someone we love, we have the same feeling as when we are face to face with that person. Even though the picture is only paper and ink, we establish with the picture the same sort of connection as with the person herself. "There is no spoon" means the same thing. If left alone in the kitchen, the spoon has no use, no existence by itself. But when someone grabs it in order to eat a bowl of soup or a dessert, the person (or the "observer") is adding meaning to the spoon in a context. Look around and contemplate the objects you have in your house. They all live in a dimension of meaning of your mind. They wouldn't be there simply by their own will.

Therefore we can see that there is a "magnetic" reality, and this is the reality that produces meaning and makes our energy flows from one direction to the other, that drives us and makes us appreciate things or not.

Have a great contemplation everyone!

Cris

There Is No Spoon? So There Is No Cube Either

The following is an extract from the movie "The Matrix"















Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

"The Matrix" trilogy is undoubtedly one of the richest movies in terms of philosophical contents. The scene above has everything to do with our recent contemplations.

When the Spoon Boy tells Neo that there is no spoon, he is saying the same thing that we have been contemplating in the Cube experience; that we co-emerge with the object. The object gains its meaning because of the observer and the observer only exists because of the objects. One is not independent from the other.

What is the spoon really? Are there spoon molecules? Perhaps, spoon atoms? Maybe spoon electrons and neutrons?

No, the spoon arises only because we recognize it as such. We, as observers, don't establish connections with its atoms, molecules and any other cognitive element, we don't think about those things when we hold a spoon. We establish a connection with the "form" which presents a meaning to us, a meaning that we add to it. And if we are adding meaning to it, we are co-emerging with the object.

Having said all that, we can conclude that "forms" come to exist based on the relationship we establish with them. We don't establish a relationship with the raw materials of the objects, but with their meanings, and these meanings are what we will call "forms".

More to come! Great contemplation everyone!

Cris

So? Why does the Cube matter?

As a result of the contemplation of the Cube Experience, we can see that the it appears because of an internal mental disposition. Object and observer co-emerge in the same experience, and that shows that we have an important role as creators of reality, opposed to being mere spectators of it. We tend to think there is a world out there governed by external rules, and we assume a passive role trying to adjust ourselves to this pre-existent reality.

This example shows us how we are creating the world we see, by adding meaning and dimensions according to our own internal world. Furthermore, our difficulty to switch between cubes voluntarily, shows how uncontrolled our minds can be, and how difficult it is to change between perspectives.

If we look to the vertex "A", we can see one cube, and if we look at the vertex "B" we can see another one. Though neither of them really exists, we can see two of them, and the switch between them can be in accord to our own will or simply involuntarily by the will of our uncontrolled mind. Therefore not only we create things, but we get stuck in what we created losing control of it.
















Following this line of reasoning, we can see that when we face a difficult situation in life, not only we forget that we are the ones who have created that situation we are experiencing, but we solidify it by victimizing ourselves. If only we had the ability to switch our view of reality and recognize the opportunities we have by looking in different directions, we could turn that situation all around.

When the Dalai Lama states that compassion is key to happiness, that is what he means, to have the ability to look at the same situation under different perspectives. Compassion is the key instrument that allows us to remove the focus of our consciousness from our ego and broaden our minds toward a wider reality with vast possibilities. If we look around and pay attention to how other people manage to cope with bigger problems in life, and at the same time, lead a more happy one, we can find strength and wisdom within ourselves to search for alternative routes instead of blaming the external circumstances.

When a person does something negative to us, it is difficult to see good qualities in that person. Our view gets frozen in only one perspective, this way we limit our perception of reality and create more suffering. This limitation of reality is what we call ignorance. And here is where meditation plays a key role, because it will enable us to practice compassion, by making us not so responsive to our impulses and therefore broaden our minds.

It is amazing how this simple example from Lama Samten can show so much.

Have a great contemplation everyone!!!

Cris

THE CUBE INITIATION - PART II

When we contemplate carefully the picture of the CUBE below, we see there is a dimension that has been added, we are looking at a 2D picture and we see a 3D one instead.

Then we can start wondering more about it. Has this dimension been added by the picture? Or it has been added by the observer? Or is it a combination of both? Is the picture separate from the observer? Or do they come to exist in the same experience, they co-emerge?

It's not difficult to see that the picture alone does not have that power of adding the third dimension, so there must be something else, maybe something within us. Is it our eyes maybe? Even though we see the picture through our eyes, we cannot assume that they are neutral about the object they are capturing, otherwise we wouldn't be able to switch between the Cubes without moving their position.

If we keep staring at the picture without moving our eyes, we can see that the cubes switch from time to time. With practice we can switch between the cubes at our own will without any eye movement at all. Therefore we see that it is not the eyes that add the third dimension to the drawing either.

So maybe it is something else. Is it the mind then? Well, here we can start wondering again. What is the mind? Is it our current flow of thoughts, plans and memories? Let's call this the ordinary mind, just for the sake of understanding. If we investigate a little deeper we see that everything we can think of are linked to the five senses. In other words, all of our thoughts are related to things that we have seen, smelled, tasted, heard and/or touched.

We can close our eyes and imagine a certain picture, a scene of a movie, a scene from your own life. We can even remember and reproduce in our minds the smells, sounds, textures and tastes we have ever experienced before. So we see that our minds are intimately connected with our senses, our senses are intimately connected with their objects, therefore, the ordinary mind is also intimately connected with the objects.

From there we can conclude that the ordinary mind alone would not be able to add the third dimension either. So, what can it? Following that line of reasoning we can conclude that us, the observers, do not come to exist without the objects. For us to exist we depend on the objects we perceive. However, the objects we perceive come to exist due to the abilities of our minds to create and add meanings to objects. Then both, observer and object come to exist in the same experience,they co-emerge, they exist together.

When we look at the drawing and see a cube, we can observe that there is an internal disposition which allows us to see the cube. There is this internal, subtle, "mark" that allows us to perceive the Cube. So the Cube is nothing but a reflexion of this internal disposition.

More to come! Have a great contemplation everyone!

Feel free to make comments, questions and so forth!



Cris

THE CUBE INITIATION - PART I

Hi there folks,


We are back on track after a while without posting. In the few last meditation meetings we've talked about the 12 links of inter-dependence origination and we saw that all our confusion starts with ignorance. But what kind of ignorance are we talking about here?


This ignorance we are referring to has nothing to do with a lack of studying of a certain subject, neither it refers to stupidity of some kind. It has to do with an erroneous perception of reality.


When we establish contact with the world through our physical senses we automatically interpret reality as being separate from us, therefore we see objects, events and phenomena as if they existed independently, as if they had an autonomous and intrinsic identity.


This automatic interpretation leads us to believe that our senses are neutral before the objects we establish contact with, and that they are accurate means for capturing reality. This view is the cause for the origination of ego and its consequences like desire for what is pleasant and aversion for what is not.




One of the best examples from Lama Samten to help us see how we are deceived by our senses is the Cube example. When you look at the picture below, what do you see?
























A cube?


How many cubes can you see?


Think carefully!!!


How many?


Two?

The next question would be, how can we see a cube, which is a 3D form in a flat 2D screen?

Where is the third dimension that allows us to see not only one, but two cubes? When we are looking at the picture we can shift from one cube to the other, what makes this shift possible?

I will let you guys contemplate it for a while and come back with more comments on the Cube example. There are so many topics for contemplation in this single picture!

Have a good exercise everyone!

Cris