quote:
Originally posted by Juliet
But, isn't the idea of the witness one of dispassion?
Great great question. it's something that knocked me off kilter for decades.
Non-attachment, emptiness, stillness, and dispassion are terms translated from Eastern languages where they were coined by Eastern folks whose culture is different from ours. We read those words, and we see a cold emptiness of space. And, indeed, there are plenty of western seekers who, misunderstanding, get very brittle and icy and robotic. You may have met this type; they're in many ashrams, seminars, yoga classes. The problems is exacerbated by the "style" we associate with yoga, which is natural fabrics, tinkly music, and dry dry sandalwood.
But that's a total misperception of what it all is. You've surely noticed by now that paradox is where it's all at, so hopefully this one won't irritate you, but will, instead, open you: Emptiness is full of love.
Emptiness IS love. The energy which animates you is love. The mantra is love. Kundalini is love. The building block is love. The empty insubstantiability of it all (akasha!) is nothing but a vast potential energy of love, a pre-orgasmic lurching forward toward an iminent, gushing, crashing yelp of total love.
Did you ever really knock yourself out to make something as a gift for someone else, took WAY more time and effort and consideration so that everything about it would be just absolutely rife with love and care, and have them not particularly notice? They just scarf down the soup, or carelessly throw the painting in a closet, or daydream while you kiss them, or mentally go through their shopping list while you play them a concerto, or they throw on the hand-woven sweater like they bought it at Walmart?
That's how God must feel. The dollop of transcendence you feel every great once in a while during sex or while enjoying great art or on a gorgeous day is just the tiniest glimpse of the intense, throbbing, endless love in which we are continuously bathed. We just never notice. In fact, to the contrary: we use every bit of energy in every moment of our lives to build defenses against it. We pile the furniture against the door, and then we sit and tearfully bemoan the emptiness of our lives and attend spiritual workshops to find that which we block.
So....what is the teaching of non-attachment about? It's about ceasing our thirst to find this love in specific things - to only let this love in via certain specific lenses (sex, plasma tv, power, fame, money, comfort, sensory stimulation, the usual stuff). Ease up on the grasping, and just melt into the gushing, crashing yelp of it all!
What is dispassion/detachment? It's about opting out of our mind's unending obsession with dividing the universe into stuff it wants more of and stuff it wants less of. And it's about failing to be enticed by the carrots which lead us through day to day life wherein we're always approaching yet never arrive. For example: watch closely when the train arrives, and those waiting on the platform await the door opening. They are living for the door opening, to a really alarming degree. They are slaves to the doors opening! They do not exist - life doesn't exist - until the doors open. Will they be happy when the doors open? No, they they'll be living for finding a seat. Then living for the train arriving. Then living for getting out of the station. Etc ad infinitum. We're never actually living. We're slaves, no better than dogs running on the track following the mechanical rabbit.
We will not get anywhere by becoming neutered emotionless cold-hearted brittle drones. We are on a path of discovering that we are steeping in throbbing cosmic love (in fact, we spend lots of time cautioning each other about the dangers of overdoing...i.e. overdosing on love!). It's anything but dry. In fact, Indian gurus warn their students gravely about dry sadhanas. The aforementioned dry joyless people spend their lives dryly practicing, without loosening any of the ties binding them (and they too are steeping in love, ARE love...it's all there is...even their illusion of dryness, resulting from delusional thinking and a whole lot of missing what's right in front of them, is an unthinkably beautiful and intrinsic part of the collaborative art project with which we're all engaged...you're always "in it"!).
If I could offer one word of advice, it's this: practice with feeling. Let (don't "make"..."LET") your bhakti blow the doors off. It's about joy. It's about love. It's about orgasm. It's just not so much about grasping for and recoiling from the stuff you love and hate, and other muckings around in the trivial details of day-to-day life. I exist in peace and happiness regardless of the state of the train doors on the platform. And a traffic jam's as good as a Caribbean vacation. It's all just stuff.
But you asked about witness. The witness has no flavor. It is not the flavor of love or battle OR "neutrality". The witness is the screen on which the flickering images of the movie play. We are entranced by the phantasmagorical images, but the screen is an unchanging mirror. The witness is not your point of view. It's not your interpretation. It's not the flavor of your inner or outer perspective or perception. It's way behind all those things. And, indeed, to reach a point where the mirroring is seen clearly - relatively undistorted - you need to be unpeeled from the grasping and recoiling...i.e. exhibit detachment and dispassion. But in the sense per above, not in the sense of binding your heart more tightly than ever. That's what got you into this mess!
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