Day 2 High Altitude Retreat -A story, Clinging, Bhava and Dying

Meditation Hints from the Colorado Division of Wildlife by Ken Boykin. My husband and I spent last summer at my family's cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park. In town one day, I picked up a pamphlet on living in bear country and suggestions for what to do if you meet a bear. Sounded a lot like meditation instructions.

Substituting thought for bear, here are some helpful hints from the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Colorado today, so you'll just see they just switched a couple of words out: Colorado today has become home to thoughts since the earliest ancestors evolved in North America. Today, increasing numbers of people routinely live and play in thought country.

Learning about thoughts and being aware of their habits will help you fully appreciate these unique animals and the habitat in which they live. What to do if you meet a thought. There are no definite rules about what to do if you meet a thought. Thought attacks are rare compared to the number of close encounters. However, if you do meet a thought, before it has time to leave the area, here are some suggestions.

Remember, every situation is different with respect to the thought, the terrain, the people, and their activity. Stay calm. If you see a thought and it hasn't seen you, calmly back out of the area. Stop. Back away slowly, facing the thought, giving the thought plenty of room to escape. Wild thoughts rarely attack people unless they feel threatened or provoked.

Speak softly. This may reassure the thought that no harm is meant to it. If a thought stands upright or moves closer and may be trying to detect smells in the air, this isn't a sign of aggression. Once a thought identifies you, it may leave the area or try to intimidate you by charging to within a few feet before it withdraws.

Don't run or make any sudden movements. Running is likely to prompt the thought to give chase, and you can't outrun a thought. Don't run or make any sudden movements. Running is likely to prompt the thought to give chase, and you can't outrun a thought. I just read that one, didn't I? If you have a potentially life-threatening situation with a thought, or if an injury occurs, please contact the Division of Wildlife Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Share this with a friend or a neighbor. I would say, I mean, it's kind of like when there's something that bugs you about the world and you're trying to change it instead of accepting it. But I think it's also confusing to me, because sometimes I should be trying to change stuff. Okay, please. My job, if I never try to change anything at work, I need to show activity, so I think I'm also a little confused by that. I might just be confused, hence I'm asking a question. - Okay. No, because I want you to look at it with me. So, if we look at craving and clinging,

So craving is, I like this, I don't like this. That's the general understanding. But you could say that about anything. I like the color red. Does that mean I'm craving red? - No, it's like a preference. - It's a preference. - It's okay. Okay. I don't like American food. I know it's a shock, but you don't. Thank you. Is that a preference? Yes, that's a preference. Okay. So where would the craving arise? Maybe it's, if it's a problem, like, if you're in America, almost all the food is American, and then you would just, you don't like it, and you have to eat it, because there's not a lot of options, and it just is fucking ruining your shit, you know, then you're having a bad time. That if you were kind of able to be the bigger man and just take a hit to your preference every once in a while

you then wouldn't be having such a bad time, kind of making it bad for you. Okay. So then where's the clinging there? If I don't like American food, that's my preference. Yeah. Now I have no choice but to eat American food and I'm having a hard time of it. I guess it's not accepting that you have no choice. Whose problem is this? Did you know that? Wait, so yeah, I think it's a point where you could have no control, but also, we're adults, right? We can DoorDash from anywhere. You never have to give up. You could just keep trying really hard, or just not eat, if you don't.

So then at some point you start to train up other things. You might feel like shit, or get really angry or something. And it might happen that if you stop eating, that may become your problem. So I think it's kind of like, you take your preference and you put your foot down, and that's clinging and craving. But also sometimes I think you shouldn't do it. One way of looking at it is craving is when things are out of control and you desire to control how things should be. When the mind has this sort of very stark, strong should, must, it has to be this way, there's strong identification there.

There's strong identity there. Now, that process of strong identity, what does it do? It clings, and how does it cling? It puts its foot down, right? It says, I want it like this because I hate American food, right? So it rationalizes why it craves or has aversion. It creates an association for why the mind doesn't like American food. I don't like American food because when I was five years old, this is whatever happened. And so I have a strong aversion to that, a strong association with it.

That's the fuel. So it kind of makes it, you, to have the preference? Yeah. Yeah. Right. It contributes to a view. Yeah. Yeah. And I know just what this feels like. When I'm in that state, all objects are a lot firmer. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And stuff feels smaller, my peripheral vision gets smaller. There's a bunch of stuff where I'm like, oh shit, I'm halfway triggered. I can tell the presence of that or the non-presence. Okay, but if the thoughts are strong in of themselves, can we say that that's clinging?

So I'm going to point you out to something. Okay. You can say that there are two types of thoughts. Okay. There is the passive thought and there's the active thought. Okay. The passive thought is like the green of the grass. You can't change it. It will be whatever it is. The sun will always seemingly rise in the east and set on the west, so that's a passive thought. It's just something that comes. An active thought is: I look at this thought and I want to do something with this thought. So an active thought is my intention to do something with it. Thoughts themselves, in the passive sense, are sense experiences.

You're seeing me, that's just a passive experience. You're hearing my voice, that's a passive experience. You're reflecting on what is being said. Your mind is perceiving and contemplating, yes, and stuffing a hot dog down your mouth. And so when you look at that thought and then you have other ideas about that thought, you take ownership of that thought, you identify with that thought. That's the active form. But is there clinging in there, or is it just a process? It depends if you start trying to put your attention in the thoughts and shift them or change them, to shift thoughts themselves or shift reality, to look at your perceptions of the thoughts.

Okay, here's a statement, all right? Just listen to this statement. Everything that you can perceive, everything that you can observe, everything that you can experience is not you. Just take that axiom. Everything that you can perceive, observe, and experience is not you. - Can you observe your thoughts? - Yeah. - Can you observe clinging? - I think yes, yeah. - You think yes. - Yeah.

Yes. - Can you observe craving? - Yes. - Yes. So they're not you. Yeah. Also they can go. Yes. So when you're in meditation and thoughts arise and they seem very sticky, why are they so sticky? They, well, let's say because there's some foot that's been put down somewhere. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some clinging. Okay. So the clinging comes from? Probably comes, I mean, from ignorance, right? No, no. Don't give me a textbook answer. The clinging, I feel like it comes from an emotion you didn't feel. Okay. A lot of times you kind of have to basically grieve. Yeah. That you didn't, I skip over grieving. Right. Yeah, I like to think of myself.

So we can think of clinging as a result of suppression? As an ungrieved grief. Yeah. Yeah. But isn't it also a preference? Oh, what is it? Clinging? It can be when the preference becomes the only thing that the mind wants to orient around. See, the thing is, when you're meditating, we consider thoughts as enemies. But if we look at it from the perspective that thoughts are just sense experiences, yeah, you can't, okay, you can close your eyes and you can stop looking at me, fine. You can cover your ears and stop trying to listen to my voice. But when it comes to thoughts, they come and go. They're just impersonal. Yeah. So what is it that makes them personal?

I think, I mean, if you start to try and fight them, then all of a sudden you become active, right? Yeah. So there's definitely bad as a trap, so you're trying to fight them. I mean, I think my question... No, no, I'm not talking about you specifically. Let's say a person is trying to fight them. Yeah. Why would they try to fight them? Okay. Yeah, that could be one reason. When you're meditating, we have been taught that when we meditate our mind needs to be quiet and our mind needs to be spacious, and so when we have that idea in mind, all thoughts are seen as distractions. And so we look at that and we identify with this axiom that, in order for us to meditate, our mind needs to be free of all thoughts. So there is this implicit idea that thoughts are the enemy.

Yeah, that's not how I typically practice. I mean, I feel like I'm probably 98th percentile of meditators in terms of how likely I like to go down thought and explore them. Because I feel like I'm kind of... a lot of people say they think too much, but I noticed that I feel like I underthink. And then when I sat down to meditate, when I first started, I started to meditate and then I followed my thoughts, and I solved a bunch of problems in my life that the answers were just sitting there waiting for me to figure out. Like, oh, I need to move that shelf. And then was this doing meditation? Yeah, I was like, I clearly need to let these things have some amount of gas, because they do. Like, I'm going to solve a bunch of them just by thinking through them.

And that's been great. So I think I'm less prone to that particular trap of, I need to be totally silent. But definitely it's like in the vibes. But should I go back to my original question, which was, what's with the fading of perception? What's with the fading of perception? Yeah, it's the idea that eventually your sense base was closed due to the fading of perception, or am I misunderstanding? So perception, when you think of perception, it's the mind that labels what this is. Oh, when Buddhists say perception, they actually mean cognition. Yeah. It's not the fading of sense inputs. No, no. Okay, let's look at it this way. Do you recall the Bhaiya sutta? It's the one that I always quote. Anybody remember the Bhaiya sutta?

In the seeing there's only the seen. In the hearing there's only the heard. In the sensing there's only the sensed. In the cognizing there's only the cognized. When, Baya, there is no you in that, then there is no you defined by that. When there is no you defined by that, then there is no you neither here nor there or in between the two.

The sense of separation with experience, as I am the experiencer of the experience, that's the ignorance that gives rise to the seed of I, me, mine. So ignorance, for practical purposes, is the lack of mindfulness. I'm not aware. In this moment the mind is incapable of seeing that it is not true. It is a process that is happening. In the seeing there's only the seen. And so when that separation is there, then the mind identifies and says, I don't like this, or I like this.

And then from all of that, as you said, the clinging is the glue. It's the association, it's the trauma, it's the rationalizing of why I like something or why I don't like something. And so now I put my foot down and I say, this is what I want, this is what I don't want. And then the bhava is my personality, where it's like I'm given a series of choices, and my mind will incline to a specific choice most of the time, because it's used to doing that.

Those are the habitual tendencies. So the library of habitual tendencies are the ones that come up based on that glue, based on that clinging. The bhava is all the history that came to create that bhava. Right. The formations come up, the sankharas. And that's the limiting factor. We all have that, the limiters that are in the bhava. Yeah. Your bhava is not my bhava. Right. It's not my. It's the potential of it coming up. Yeah.

So the moment, yeah, sorry. Bhava is habitual tendencies, or we could say becoming, the process of being, the process of becoming into something. So the moment we become separate from the feeling, the moment there is the sense of, I am feeling this, the mind is screwed. And the process goes on and... I did that with my mother, sitting there.

Watching my father pass away is a very interesting thing, because you're looking at monitors. You're constantly looking at the oxygen level, you're constantly looking at the heart rate, you're constantly looking at the blood pressure, as if you're a doctor. But you just want to make sure that he has enough oxygen and he's stable. And you see this with people who are with their loved ones.

And then there comes this point where sometimes a person wants to die alone. They don't want their family with them. They don't want their friends around. So they'll go when their friends are distracted or their family is in the other room. And that's what happened. I was making myself a cup of rooibos tea and my mother was doing something and my sister was doing something. And the doctor saw what was going on, and then there was, you could see a decline in all of the stats.

And it was like, he just went. And then in that moment, there's this very, very different kind of silence. It could be because you've been hearing the monitors all this time, but then the monitors stop, and it's this very, very, like, heavy silence. And the moment that last breath goes, the moment the life force leaves, it's like there's a connection between this existence and other existences. You can actually feel into that. And you can feel it live in the moment. Yeah. And I was watching my mother, and her breathing was getting more and more shallow, and I felt it when she got, and it was remarkably tangible.