Achariya Doug Duncan
Ottawa, May 2008
When it comes time to meditate, what is going to surface before you, over and over again, are your objects. Whether they are objects of pleasure or displeasure, to the ego it really doesn’t matter. The ego really doesn’t care whether it’s happy or miserable, as long as it’s present. It’s an extremely hard lesson to hear. You have the critical types that get their rant going—everybody’s got their rants, don’t they? But your rants don’t make you feel particularly good, do they? But you do it anyway. So why do you do it? Because it keeps you in the game. You don’t really know who you are minus your rants. You don’t really know who you are without your attachments. You don’t really know who you are without your pain or your pleasures; your views or what you are for and what you’re against. From the point of view of therapy, there are better or worse attitudes to certain things. It makes your life easier if you decide that all women are not goofuses and of course should be allowed to vote. But in terms of transcendence, whether you think women should vote or not is irrelevant because it’s about object constancy. In terms of transcendence, fixing and changing, controlling and manipulating and moving your objects around, back and forth, back and forth, is irrelevant. You’re going to be doing that your entire life — right up until the day you die. You are going to be moving the table from that window to there, and the painting from here to there. You’ll change from that activity to this activity and from that relationship to this relationship and that diet to this diet. From the point of view of self awareness, that’s fine. That’s what you are. You’re an ego embodied in a being, and that’s what it’s about. We don’treally care about that, except from a therapeutic point of view, which mainly is about getting along with others. Right? You tell me you’re tired of being miserable. No you’re not! You enjoy it. If you were really tired of being miserable, you’d just stop. But you can’t stop because your identity has been hard wired in somewhere along the line. In order to get through, you wired it in somewhere, or it got wired in somewhere. It doesn’t really matter whether they did it or you did, it did it, and it’s wired in, and there you go! So when it comes to meditation, all you’re really doing, other than the visualization and the mantra, is watching and observing the nature ofthe wiredness. And by giving you a mantra and visualization to do, what we are doing is trying to give you a counter balance strong enough to distract you from the hard wire to the object constancy long enough for you to see it.
(Transcribed and Edited by Susan Fisher – an excerpt from the 12 Manjushri retreat at The Barn, May 2008)
Auckland Sphere Group 