Greetings, Friendlies. :) As an extension on last week’s OG-awakening-as-recorded-in-the-Suttanipata, I’d like to highlight a sliver from Rob Burbea’s 2019 “Stream Entry – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“. [1] Burbea describes the entire body of Gotama’s teachings as “set within the cosmology of rebirth”. He invites us to suspend our current operating frame and submit, in […]
Tag: Awakening
Greetings, Friendlies. :) With all this talk of awakening, I should probably check with the OG; what do the suttas have to say about Gotama’s awakening? [1] I was surprised not to find a definitive list of all the mentions of G’s awakening in the Sutta and/or Vinaya Piṭaka. If you know of such a […]
Greetings, Friendlies. Shall we play a little What If? Hypothetically. We could then say that Watts’ mystic, an awakened being, is one who has become fully aware of, who dwells in, McGilchrist’s Right Hemisphere “context”, Right Hemisphere “view”. I mean… what if??? With friendliness!
Greetings, Friendlies! In The Tao of Philosophy [1] Watts says, “People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called ‘a mystical experience,’ or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening. …they discover that the real deep, deep self, that which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In Parts 1-5 we looked at framing and different articulations of subjective experiences of awakening. You won’t be surprised to know that I think all of these have neurobiological correlates related to hemisphere lateralization. That it is hemisphere lateralization that ties these diverse descriptions of awakening together. In The Master and His […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Writing this series I was reminded of a quote from Kitaro Nishida (which I got from Leigh Brasington and he thinks it’s from the book The Nothingness Beyond God but I haven’t gotten a copy from the library yet, so check your facts). Pure experience is the beginning of Zen. It is […]
Greetings, Friendlies! (Parts 1, 2, 3.) The sense I have, and I could be very wrong about this, is that between Watts and Buddhadāsa we have a range encompassing all the other versions of awakening I’ve heard. In Ingram’s list, for example, the Psychological Models and the Nothing to Do Schools fall into Buddhadāsa’s range. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1, Part 2.) Quick refresh: we are looking at subjective experiences of awakening. Last time Alan Watts’ This is It. This time Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone. Buddhadāsa speaks of a “Nibbāna instinct”, a drive egging us to find relief from the irritation of craving and aversion. [1] I think B […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1 here.) I’m going to offer three descriptions of awakening that fit on a sort of spectrum running from more common, everyday, temporary experiences, to (perhaps) the full monty. The descriptions come from Alan Watt’s This is It, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone, and a quote from Kitaro Nishida. We’ll start […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) We ended the Pile of Provisional Positions with a hypothesis that Gotama’s awakening had neurological correlates, specifically a shift from Left-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience to Right-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience. That’s great, and, it leans a little objective. What about the subjective experience of awakening? I don’t know how it goes for other folk, but for me, the first […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) It is my understanding reading the suttas that all this bhāvanā stuff, this eightfold path stuff, does in fact have a goal. Awakening. Bodhi-pattī. I have not, however, found a satisfyingly simple answer to the question, “What is awakening?” Some will say this is because there is not a satisfyingly simple answer […]
Greeting, Friendlies! Part of the tangle of ideas I spoke about in Part 1 comes from reading or hearing teachers or practitioners* use words in contexts such that I think they are referring to a territory near(ish) to Awakening. In this post I’d like to acknowledge these words and ask the hivemind what others might […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about Awakening. What is it? How does one get there? What does one “get” from it? Why do I want whatever it is? Are these even the right kinds of questions to be asking?
Dharma PhD 