Non-Abiding Awareness

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Kaccāni
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by Kaccāni »

Hmm. If i non-mind, I still mind.
Shush! I'm doing nose-picking practice!
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garudha
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by garudha »

Maybe you'd like to read the following, Tom, so here is a excerpt.
.
@ http://www.angelfire.com/az/rescon/SUFIMYSTIC.HTML
The greatest of all Sufi theosophical writers in Arabic was Ibn al-'Arabi (d.1240) who was born in Spain. He travelled to Tunis and Mecca and finally settled in Damascus. In his 500 books he teaches that all existence is but a manifestation of God, the one ultimate divine reality which is totally "other", an undifferentiated unity, but in whom the archtypes of all potential beings exist. This is the "unknown God" from whom emanates a hierarchy of divine beings (Names, Lords) the lowest of whom is the Lord of revelation and creation who is also called the First Intellect. The emanations are the mediating link between the unknowable, transcendent God and the created world. This teaching was the basis of the Sufi concept of the Unity of Being (Wahdat al-Wujud). The First Intellect, an emanation of the God was also called the "idea of Muhammad". He is the archtype through whom man was made. This emanation is incarnated in a Perfect Man in every generation - the perfect Sufi. This man most fully manifests the nature of God and he is the pole (Qutb, axis) around which the cosmos revolves. Ibn al-'Arabi saw himself as such a "pole" and he called himself the seal (the most perfect) of the saints.
@ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_ibn_al-Arabi
Ibn al-‘Arabi was particularly interested in questions of the human soul and the study and theory of knowledge.[25] He reflected upon, and wrote about the nature of the soul.[26] Ibn al-‘Arabi studied the Sufi argument that knowledge can only be achieved through purity of the soul, chastening of the heart, and an overall unity between the body and the heart, as well as removal from material motives. Ibn al-‘Arabi argues that this is an extreme position, and believes rather that there is no connection between knowledge a person acquires and any sacred or devout acts that his soul has performed.
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by DGA »

I'm having a difficult time tracking this discussion. And not only because the word "awareness" is used to mean more than one thing.

Friendly reminder to all: We're a Buddhist discussion board, not a comparative religion site. Thank you.

http://dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=109&t=12768" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by White Lotus »

[quoteHmm. If i non-mind, I still mind.][/quote]
if you empty emptiness you come back to mind. emptiness directly points towards seeing/awareness. awareness is empty. it is because the eyes and ears are empty that they see.

awareness and emptiness are one. form and emptiness are one.

perhaps the secret is not to be attached to that awareness or emptiness. that is true emptiness. detachment is true emptiness.

Pai Chang/Baizhang said the following:
To speak of the mirror awareness is still not really right; by way of the impure, discern the pure. If you say the immediate mirror awareness is correct, or that there is something else beyond the mirror awareness, this is all delusion. If you keep dwelling in the immediate mirror awareness, this too is the same as delusion; it is called the mistake of naturalism. [p33 The Extensive record, included within Thomas Cleary's "Sayings and Doing of Pai Chang" 1978 Center Publications [a wonderful book]
Letting go of knowledge in the midst of knowing is like the subtle within the subtle. This is the sphere of the enlightened ones, whence you really come to know; this is called the pinnacle of meditation, the king of meditation.[p43 Sayings and Doings of Pai Chang]
another clear pointer towards detachment is in the following Pai Chang quote:
In Mahayana, maha means "great" and "yana" means vehicle. If you hold fast to your own inherent knowing and awareness, you too will become a naturalistic heretic. Do not remain in your immediate mirror awareness, but do not seek enlightenment elsewhere. [p 63. Sayings and Doings of Pai Chang]
what is it?... it is not even emptiness, saying this you see true emptiness. seeing true emptiness you see what is right infront of you right now.
Right now, you have it if you have it. [p82 Sayings and Doings of Pai Chang]
Some quotes from the Ratnaguna:
In form, in feeling, will, perception and awareness. Nowhere in them they find a place to rest on. Without a home they wander, dharmas never hold them, nor do they grasp at them. The Jinas's Bodhi they are bound to gain. [p9. Ch I v.6 taken from "The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and its Verse Summary" Edward Conze 1973 : The Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita in Verse form - the Ratnaguna]
Sakra, King of Gods, asks the Jina: "Coursing in wisdom, how is the Bodhisattva 'engaged' in it?" "Who is 'joined' to not the least thing whatsoever, be it skanda, or element, He who is 'engaged' thus, that Bodhisattva is 'joined' [to Wisdom/Prajna] [Ch X p 27
The Bdhisattva who turns over, without putting his mind to it, does not fail, but he experiences the supreme Buddha enlightenment.[p42 Ch XVIII v. 8]
it is clear that along with awareness/emptiness there must be detachment from awareness and emptiness in order to find true emptiness, which cannot be seen, but can be known. this is it.

hope that's helpful. detachment is crucial for everday life if one is to find peace one must embrace the emptiness of detachment. detaching from all opposites, even knowledge and understanding, love and hate, emptiness and awareness, peace and comfort. one should have no likes or dislikes. if you cant help disliking something you will not be able to escape from liking things. no loving, no hating. this is true love. no emptiness, no awareness, this is true emptiness.

rgds, Tom.
in any matters of importance. dont rely on me. i may not know what i am talking about. take what i say as mere speculation. i am not ordained. nor do i have a formal training. i do believe though that if i am wrong on any point. there are those on this site who i hope will quickly point out my mistakes.
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Kaccāni
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by Kaccāni »

@Tom: I don't mind ;-)
Shush! I'm doing nose-picking practice!
White Lotus
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by White Lotus »

I appreciate your not ''minding''!

do you have a mind still? or are you mind?

best wishes, Tom.
in any matters of importance. dont rely on me. i may not know what i am talking about. take what i say as mere speculation. i am not ordained. nor do i have a formal training. i do believe though that if i am wrong on any point. there are those on this site who i hope will quickly point out my mistakes.
dgomez
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

Hi All,

Just need some clarification regarding the practice of non-abiding awareness: specifically when doing "practical" things.
Last edited by dgomez on Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

Astus wrote:Matt,

Identifying "present awareness" as the final meaning, as the true self is still grasping, abiding and the view of self. As Wuzhu of the Baotang school often said, "At the time of true no-thought, no-thought itself is not." Also, clinging to a pure consciousness as reality creates the duality of pure and non-pure, thought and no thought. Non-abiding is not abiding in some blank mind but not grasping appearances. That's what emptiness means, and that's why emptiness and dependent origination are not different. Referring to the Heart Sutra, the problem is not that there are aggregates, but identifying with any of them as real is the delusion creating suffering.
Hi Astus,

Is non-abiding awareness like this: its noticing your thoughts when they arise, and when you notice them they don't continue and the thought fades away. In other words, one does not go on to the process of thinking when the thought is noticed.

And while you are this, you trust your senses to do their thing: there is no concentration (fixed attention) on anything specific. So you are wide open.

If so, does one practice this only when sitting? It seems hard to do certain things without focused attention.

Being in a non-abiding state is ok for some actions: walking, doing manual chores, etc..

But it seems hard to do certain things without some concentration: like having a technical discussion, working on computers, or even like talking to someone in a noisy room?

I guess I can phrase it like this: how can one be in a non-abiding state when concentration is needed?

If you can answer by citing daily life examples, that would be great.

Thanks.
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

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Non-abiding awareness is no different from your present experience, just as it is. The mind can be in any state, it does not matter. What matters is the ideology you come up with for your situation, for your actions. It is not that you cannot have thoughts, you cannot theories about any and every thing. Just consider the volumes of teachings by the Buddha and Dharma teachers throughout the ages. Non-abiding awareness is not establishing oneself in any ultimate truth, in any final reality, in any definite self.

Dissatisfaction comes from the conviction that one's present situation should be something different, from hoping for something better and fearing something worse. Underlying that conviction is a set of values and preferences, an ideology of how things should be. Not abiding anywhere is to see that such ideologies are conceptual constructs, mental fabrications without ultimate value or essence.

When one has to do the dishes there are various ways to go about it. Feeling bored, annoyed, motivated or perhaps even elated. All of those feelings can occur depending on one's thoughts about doing the dishes. Then there is the idea that one should do them mindfully. As long as being mindful means the exclusion of feelings and thoughts, concentrating only on the present moment, failure is guaranteed. That is because there is still the concept that one should remain in a specific state, that something should last for ever. However, when one is mindful of whatever thoughts, feelings and sensory inputs come up, there is no wish for a specific state, something to be, something to become, then there is no abiding in an idealised concept.
1 Myriad dharmas are only mind.
Mind is unobtainable.
What is there to seek?

2 If the Buddha-Nature is seen,
there will be no seeing of a nature in any thing.

3 Neither cultivation nor seated meditation —
this is the pure Chan of Tathagata.

4 With sudden enlightenment to Tathagata Chan,
the six paramitas and myriad means
are complete within that essence.


1 Huangbo, T2012Ap381c1 2 Nirvana Sutra, T374p521b3; tr. Yamamoto 3 Mazu, X1321p3b23; tr. J. Jia 4 Yongjia, T2014p395c14; tr. from "The Sword of Wisdom"
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by LastLegend »

dgomez wrote:
Hi Astus,

Is non-abiding awareness like this: its noticing your thoughts when they arise, and when you notice them they don't continue and the thought fades away. In other words, one does not go on to the process of thinking when the thought is noticed.


And while you are this, you trust your senses to do their thing: there is no concentration (fixed attention) on anything specific. So you are wide open.

If so, does one practice this only when sitting? It seems hard to do certain things without focused attention.

Being in a non-abiding state is ok for some actions: walking, doing manual chores, etc..

But it seems hard to do certain things without some concentration: like having a technical discussion, working on computers, or even like talking to someone in a noisy room?

I guess I can phrase it like this: how can one be in a non-abiding state when concentration is needed?

If you can answer by citing daily life examples, that would be great.

Thanks.
It's probably beyond my scope of understanding because I am not there at "non-abiding awareness" as in a Buddha. But I would like to offer my opinion. This awareness is present, we recognize it, but don't make anything of it. Buddha's teaching is about removing attachment. Thus, we have to be careful when exerting too much efforts into meditation because that could just be another form of attachment/delusion. There are a few ways to approach this. In Lotus Sutra, Buddha gives an example of samsara/worldly existence as a burning house and encourages sentient beings to abandon it. This means stop grasping to the burning house but not literally abandon it or run away from it. It simply means end our attachment to it but not our activity within in. Examples of things we are very attached to are wealth, sex, fame, eating, and sleeping. These things and everything in samsara is impermanent, temporary establishment come together by causes and conditions, empty of inherent self. That's the meaning of emptiness or dependent origination. That's a good understanding of it. If we go further in analyzing it, we will get lost in making extreme views (I.e., this mind is eternal) about our mind and reality to hold them to be true to be attached to. Hold any view to be true/false is creating attachment to it. Extreme statements are really beyond our scope of understanding. To simply put, know what binds us and makes us suffer, and untie ourselves from it.
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by Dan74 »

I'd suggest you leave the non-abiding alone and look into seeing the original nature.

Once the original nature is seen (finding the Ox, in the 10 Ox-herding Pictures) (and pointers above, as well as most Dharma teachings, can be helpful in seeing it - like not attaching to expectations and ideas about how this should be, etc), and once the original nature is stabilised throughout the many activities (taming the Ox), then non-abiding may be looked into. This is miles ahead where most of us are (and of course, it's also right here but very obscured by entrenched habits), so internet instructions from other worldlings are of dubuous use (including mine).

_/|\_
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

Thanks for all of your replies.

@Astus

It seems to me that you are describing non-abidance as a state of complete acceptance to what is - or more correctly the complete awareness of what is? And this would include thoughts, emotions, and all the physical sensations in the present moment and what arises in the state of one's awareness.

So if non-abidance means to be in the state of total awareness and if the mind can be at any state - then the state of attention is a matter of choice and preference?

Furthermore - I feel that there are different kinds of attention. To put it on the analogy of eyesight:

- looking but not seeing - you look at something but do not see it because you were thinking of something else.

- squinting to see - like you focus on an object and concentrate on that. You ignore the background. Like trying to see the hands of a distant clock, you squint to see it and ignore all the other things in sight.

- seeing - where you are seeing an object but you don't ignore the background. You let the peripheral vision take in the background. This is like attending the one's action but being mindful of thoughts, emotions, and what's going on in the environment. You don't force them away but you just notice them

To continue on the example of washing dishes, if I am aware of my action and all the things that are arising - it seems that I can make a choice to "do" a "seeing" attention to my dish washing. Otherwise if I don't concentrate I am easily distracted.

Can it be said also that non-abidance would be a state where you notice distractions? This includes thoughts and emotions - so that you're attention is not pulled away from what you are doing?
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by LastLegend »

My opinion is if you go take a *[...] without attachment. Then you can get back to washing dishes without attachment. :smile:
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Reason: Inappropriate vulgar language :P
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by Astus »

Yes, there is awareness and there is acceptance. If by those words what is meant is on the one hand the primal awareness that is inherent in every experience, and on the other acceptance is the basic openness of the boundless consciousness that allows anything and everything to occur and also disappear as experience. It is not a special state to cultivate or discover but the original quality of life as it is. For example, hearing can happen because there is not a single sound that is constantly there, so all sounds can come and go without hindrance. You don't have to force hearing, you don't have to wish it, concentrate on it, there is simply hearing. Same goes for the other five senses. What brings us astray, what creates an abiding awareness is taking a mental image, a thought, as the ideal state we want to identify with. Like thinking of a single voice we want to hear and being agitated by all the other sounds. Again, it doesn't mean that one should not have any intention or direction. It is idealising a present, past or future state and holding to it as the truth, as a self that binds us and clouds our perception.

We can play with how we look at things, what kind of attention we cultivate, and we do that all the time. At the same time, attention is conditioned by our personality and our environment. When we are driven by an idea we forget to reflect on the situation, both inner and outer conditions, and go blindly. When we recognise our idea as an idea, as a mental figment, then we gain the freedom of awareness and see our situation.

"Can it be said also that non-abidance would be a state where you notice distractions? This includes thoughts and emotions - so that you're attention is not pulled away from what you are doing?"

That is just being attentive to one's present state. Non-abidance is just seeing oneself as one is, distracted or not. It does not limit one's mental functions.
1 Myriad dharmas are only mind.
Mind is unobtainable.
What is there to seek?

2 If the Buddha-Nature is seen,
there will be no seeing of a nature in any thing.

3 Neither cultivation nor seated meditation —
this is the pure Chan of Tathagata.

4 With sudden enlightenment to Tathagata Chan,
the six paramitas and myriad means
are complete within that essence.


1 Huangbo, T2012Ap381c1 2 Nirvana Sutra, T374p521b3; tr. Yamamoto 3 Mazu, X1321p3b23; tr. J. Jia 4 Yongjia, T2014p395c14; tr. from "The Sword of Wisdom"
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

Thank you very much for all your answers - appreciated.
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

What is the difference between "non abidance", " choiceless awareness", and "mindfulness"?
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Astus
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

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dgomez wrote:What is the difference between "non abidance", " choiceless awareness", and "mindfulness"?
It depends on the context, as always.
1 Myriad dharmas are only mind.
Mind is unobtainable.
What is there to seek?

2 If the Buddha-Nature is seen,
there will be no seeing of a nature in any thing.

3 Neither cultivation nor seated meditation —
this is the pure Chan of Tathagata.

4 With sudden enlightenment to Tathagata Chan,
the six paramitas and myriad means
are complete within that essence.


1 Huangbo, T2012Ap381c1 2 Nirvana Sutra, T374p521b3; tr. Yamamoto 3 Mazu, X1321p3b23; tr. J. Jia 4 Yongjia, T2014p395c14; tr. from "The Sword of Wisdom"
dgomez
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by dgomez »

It seems to me that non dwelling is included in choiceless awareness and choiceless awareness is the same as mindfulness and they involve the non dual watching of sensations - including thoughts - that arises.
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Astus
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by Astus »

dgomez wrote:It seems to me that non dwelling is included in choiceless awareness and choiceless awareness is the same as mindfulness and they involve the non dual watching of sensations - including thoughts - that arises.
One should not dwell on non-dwelling.

Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan (PDF)

Mindfulness or Mindlessness (video)
1 Myriad dharmas are only mind.
Mind is unobtainable.
What is there to seek?

2 If the Buddha-Nature is seen,
there will be no seeing of a nature in any thing.

3 Neither cultivation nor seated meditation —
this is the pure Chan of Tathagata.

4 With sudden enlightenment to Tathagata Chan,
the six paramitas and myriad means
are complete within that essence.


1 Huangbo, T2012Ap381c1 2 Nirvana Sutra, T374p521b3; tr. Yamamoto 3 Mazu, X1321p3b23; tr. J. Jia 4 Yongjia, T2014p395c14; tr. from "The Sword of Wisdom"
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Re: Non-Abiding Awareness

Post by srivijaya »

Nice thread Astus. Do your sources have anything to say about non-abiding awareness during sleep?
:namaste:
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