January 3, 2022 Monday, Private Session, Excerpt
On Meditation: Rescuing Starfish from the Ego Self vs Returning Them to the Sea from Pure Awareness and Oneness
A question was asked, in part, tying this into the ‘View, meditation and action” phases of Pure Awareness practice.
Aaron: Here I am, I’m walking on the beach, and the starfish have gotten tossed up— you know that story, the boy throwing them back.
I can be an ego, running up and down, throwing them back. That does help the starfish. But it’s also creating karma. They’re needing to be rescued and I’m the rescuer.
I rest in awareness, take the moments just to see the scene and my own deep intention to help as many starfish as I can, because the tide has left them far up on the beach and they’re dying. Resting in awareness, I am the dying starfish and they are me. There’s no rescue or rescuer.
It doesn’t mean I necessarily go slowly; I go lightning fast. But there’s no me putting them back in the water, just starfish returning. Starfish coming up; me and the tide and the starfish and the beach and the ocean, all one. This is the action phase.
The meditation phase was merely an interlude after the view, where I centered and rested in Awareness, seeing the non-duality of the whole situation and participants. Where that, let’s call it planning function of this mind and body, understood what needed to be done. Not my planning as rescuer, just, this mind and body have the capacity for action, for thought, and this planning function understood, “Starfish to go back to the sea.” No doer.
Are you with me so far?
Let’s take this to vipassana. I’ve come to the beach, and I see all the starfish there. The tide has left them. They’re dying. I know that I will create unwholesome karma for everything—for me, for the sea, for the starfish— if I rush out to rescue them.
So, I sit, vipassana, seeing my tension as an object. My need to rescue as an object. Seeing the suffering of the starfish, who do not want to die, who are afraid, as an object.
It only takes seconds, if you are an experienced vipassana practitioner, to watch all these movements coming up—impulses, thoughts—and stabilize in whatever might be the primary object. I think in that situation, my primary object would be simply the breath first, just to center myself, and then luminosity—for me; it might not be for you, but for me, it would have been luminosity. Seeing the light within the whole scene, which leads me into a place like the view of pure awareness, but it is not the view of pure awareness.
How does it differ? With the view of pure awareness, the sense of any separate objects completely dissolves. That would lead me into to the action phase.
With vipassana, breathing, present. Luminosity of everything. The deep awareness of suffering, and the deep pledge for this human being to alleviate suffering. But knowing, if I do it from me, I’m going to create more suffering.
Opening into access concentration, I’m able to see just one starfish lying on the beach. The whole process of how the tide deposited it there. Seeing the whole sequence of tide, starfish, human who can fling the starfish back. We’re all completely one with each other.
I cannot tie this in for you with your awareness meditation; it’s a different process. The action phase here of walking down the beach and throwing them back, I could probably do that better from a pure awareness standpoint.
In other words, I could get to more starfish quickly, resting in awareness, because vipassana, at this phase of vipassana, is not really suited to saving the starfish. It’s more suited to coming to the place of seeing how it all arose out of conditions. Seeing that the starfish are dying, and how that arose out of conditions. Seeing the possibility of the starfish not dying. Everything arising and passing away.
With vipassana, I would be more likely either to need to pull out of the vipassana and start tossing them back in the ocean, or from a very centered place that was aware of some bit of self, to toss them back into the ocean. Or I would move into a place of deep experience of the Unconditioned, which would paralyze me anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours. I wouldn’t be able to toss them back.
So, we could say the fruits of vipassana at that level, I would need to go through that experience of knowing the Unconditioned, resting in the Unconditioned. Probably something would come up in me that would remind me, “What about the starfish?” And right there, with the deep presence of the Unconditioned: yes, I choose to alleviate suffering, and therefore I am going to throw the starfish—therefore, this body is going to throw the starfish back— no “I”. So, I could throw them back in that way, but it would be much slower.