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May 22nd, 2018
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  1. Let’s say that you are meditating, and you become aware that you have a pain in your leg. You pay close attention to this pain, get a very clear sense of its shape, watch how its intensity may vary, let your awareness sort of float and circulate within it. At some point, you notice that sensation begins to soften a little and becomes more like a jellyfish, sort of puffing out here and pulling in there, like a two-dimensional surface that is waving in and out.
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  3. Then, as you penetrate more deeply into that, you realize that each time something puffs up or wells up, inside that welling up are small vibrations. The welling up is nothing but a whole bunch of tiny vibrations. Then those vibrations die down, that whole region of the sensation subsides, and this brings an insight. You get a very clear perception that two scales of impermanence are happening simultaneously: a stately undulatory movement, and within each undulation a more rapid vibratory movement.
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  5. As you pay even closer attention, you start to notice something that is quite subtle. When the upwelling takes place, there are actually two oppositely directed movements, one pushing out and one pulling in, and they arise at exactly the same time and with more or less equal strength—simultaneous and equal expansion and contraction. As these oppositely directed forces move, one at the core of the arising pulling in and one at the perimeter pushing out, they produce vibrations in between them. The vibrations come about because of the polarization of these two forces.
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  7. You can experience this quite tangibly in something as ordinary as your smile. If you really pay attention to what it feels like when you smile, you can feel the muscles contracting, while at the same time the quality of pleasure around the smile is expanding and spreading. You can feel a contractive core in the smile and an expansive perimeter simultaneously.
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  9. You can also detect this concurrent expansion-contraction in your breath. When you breathe in, the chest expands, but at the same time, the intercostal muscles are contracting. You can feel the expansion of your chest in terms of its volume, while all round there is a contraction of the muscles. When you breathe out, the chest collapses or contracts in volume, but you can feel it is expanding in the sense that all the muscles relax and stretch. You can actually feel those polarizations of expansion and contraction going on in everyday experiences like the breath and your smile. It’s not something esoteric or remote; it’s everywhere and in everything.
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  11. You can observe it in your thinking, too. When your mind is scattered, you sense your thoughts going in many directions at once. That scattering is expansive. At the same time, you feel an urge to somehow gather them together, to find the central point of those thoughts. This urge to “get to the point” is contractive. So thought is born in between the gushing and gathering of space.
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  13. Zen people say that the ordinary mind is the way, the ordinary mind is the Tao. What is the ordinary mind? The ordinary mind is constantly scattered in many directions and cannot hold a center. We think this monkey-mind experience is awful. People feel tormented by this ceaseless turning of the mind. But when you look beneath surface appearances, the scattering can be interpreted as space effortlessly spreading, and the inability to hold a center could be looked upon as contraction gobbling up the solid ground beneath you.
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  15. We are so preoccupied with determining the specific meaning of thought that we suffer because we can’t look at it in terms of its universal movement. Because we somehow feel we have to extract meaning from this motion, we suffer. But if we are willing to just let the mind scatter and pull in at the same time, letting go of any need to make meaning, we reframe the situation. It’s just another spontaneous space fountain, gushing and gathering. This puts us in contact with the universal meaning that underlies the meaning of every thought. It’s the meaning of a flower, the meaning of a galaxy.
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  17. If you stay with that experience, you will notice that, at some point, the part that was pushing out isn’t pushing out anymore, and the part that was pulling in isn’t pulling in anymore. It’s as if they commingle—the positive and the negative, the plus and the minus, the expansive and contractive—and mutually cancel, and that is when all the waves and little wavelets die away. They flatline, and in that cancellation is an experience of absolute rest—nirodha, a moment of nirvana, the peace of God’s own heaven.
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  19. Then suddenly you become aware that the forces are pulling apart again. Expansion is pulling out; contraction is pulling in. Once again, vibration is born in between the two. This vibration came from the flatline breaking up. The canceled state of the universe has again polarized into a contrast of expansion and contraction, and absolute rest disappeared for a moment—it broke up its two halves: plus and minus, efflux and reflux.
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  21. Continue to observe. Once again, the half that is pushing out stops pushing out, and the half that is pulling in stops pulling in. The two come together, and there is another moment of earth-shattering tranquility, what in the Christian tradition is called the peace that passeth understanding.
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  23. And you come to realize that every experience is just another cycle of bliss. Even the sense of a material body experiencing pain goes away, and it is replaced by this rhythm of polarizing, vibrating, neutralizing peace, polarizing, vibrating, neutralizing peace, over and over again. It’s effortless effervescence alternating with earthshaking peace. That’s what the pain really was all along! This leads to a major shift in your understanding. Eventually, you switch from identifying with the content of experience to identifying with the contour of experience.
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  25. When you start to meditate, it seems like your mind and body are the abiding background, and within them, you are having various sensory experiences. But at some point, a striking figure-ground reversal takes place. Your mind and body become a transient figure, and the field of impermanence becomes the abiding ground. For a moment, you shift from identifying with the mind and body, which are the product of that field, to identifying with the field itself. For a period of time you un-become the product of impermanence, and you re-identify with impermanence itself. Impermanence viewed this way could also be called spirit or even soul.
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  27. That is a profound change in your fundamental perspective of things. It seems as if you are participating in the activity of the Source. You become the Source; you realize that you are the Source. You realize that you are not your mind and body, you are the Source of your mind and body, which is also the Source of all minds and all bodies.
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  29. You probably began meditation practice by learning to hold one thing, the in- and out-breath of your body, for example. Hopefully, at some point, you will experience being held by the Source of all things, the in- and out-breath of the universe.
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  31. When you have a complete thought—meaning that you pay close attention from beginning to end, allowing the thought to demonstrate its Flow qualities—that thought contains all the meanings in the universe. That may sound extreme, but since everything comes about through a polarization of expansion and contraction, any particular thing that you experience in these terms is linked to all things. The expansion and contraction in your thought is no different than the expansion and contraction that makes atoms vibrate, that makes stars pulsate. There are two forces that drive a star: the force of self-gravity that pulls the star inward, and the force of thermal pressure pushing outward. In between those two forces, the star lives its life, fusing new atomic elements into existence with each cycle of expansion and contraction.
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  33. As long as stars expand and contract, then you also will be expanding and contracting, because you too are this fundamental movement of the universe. The whole universe—your inner and outer sensory experience—comes from the Source and returns to the Source, moment by moment. Although your mind and body will someday pass away, once you have had this experience of returning to the Source, you’ll identify somewhat less with that mind and body. Even though you are just a separate individual—who has certain thoughts and feelings, certain goals, certain bad habits, and certain desires—you realize that you are also none other than the activity of the entire universe.
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  35. As long as the fundamental forces of the universe act, as long as there is affirmation and negation, as long as anything breathes, as long as Zero polarizes and neutralizes, as long as matter and antimatter come out of nothing and return to nothing, the real you continues to live.
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