In this brief video, Terry suggests that our time calls for more than one kind of awakening, and more than one kind of role. Our time asks us to be a culture of sudden and gradual awakening, all teachers and students to one another, giving everything we have to helping each other find everything we are.
“Sudden” and “Gradual” Enlightenment
“Sudden” enlightenment needs the daily “gradual” practice to stabilize the experience in every moment.
Awakening, gradual or sudden?
Beautiful analysis of the “process” of awakening. I agree, it must be a tangible, body experience involving all the cells of the body to really “get it”; as that is where the memories and traumas are stored. Intellectual understanding is too often prized and can lead us down a “dry and thirsty” path longing for the actual or real sense of “freedom” inside the body and from the body that now has the opportunity to feel it’s inner capacity to actually fly. Thanks for this thought provoking presentation. Love You, Joan Morse
LHC
Terry, have you ever considered that there is nothing happening ? Your speaking like every thing else is disappearing as
quickly as it appears ? All particles have an accompaining anti particle that annihilate each other at the moment of appearance. That is always what is the nature of our experiencing is, the same as what the LHC demonstrates.
All our speaking is always late, never able to catch up to the moment of occurring. All we can do is make up word
constructs and attempt to pass them of as consequential through the use of memory.
There is no meaning in the Universe and it doesn’t mean anything that it does not mean anything. That we have choice and purpose are all word constructs that are used to ameroliate our inability to deal with existance devoid of meaning and purpose. The Universe is just doing its doing with indifference to our concerns or plight.
So, make up whatever, that is all we are all doing, there is no frame of reference, no referent for anything and no matter what you or any one else may say, all experiential moments have no duration. All that is available is to get a sense of the feeling tone of the ceaseless appearance/disappearance that our sense body is used to let us have the experience of experiencing.
There is no suffering in this, only WONDER.
Life Experience
Hi Frank. Is your comment your life experience? Is your life devoid of meaning and purpose? It is true that mind and words are experiencing the past, not the present moment. Resting in consciousness without labeling anything is as close as one can get in experiencing life and reality now.
How true – yeS I PRACTICED
How true – yeS I PRACTICED WITH THE SOTO SCHOOL (yASUTANI ROSHI) sudden school as well as the Chan Buddhism school , then the Nyingma tradition for the gradual approach and lately the Bon tradition which practices both approaches the gradual and immediate awakening. Years ago I also experienced the immediate enlightenment thru Muktananda’s teaching but could not sustain it and of course now I understand as Jeff so beautifully explains.
sudden and gradual approach, the north and south school…
The subject is known and has often been discussed in the 70th, 80th, 90th of the last century. I remind mainly Robert Aitkens attributions to the subject.
How is this differerent approach linked two “types” of spiritual seekers? Who is more inclined to the one, who more to the other kind of approach?
Is there a western equivalence?
I observed in the western cultural evolution since the “enlightenment” that in Europe there have always been 2 types of equivalent caliber and opposite approaches of artists who pushed forward a whole new step of devellopment in the arts: who opposed and fertilzed each other:
Raffaeallo/Mechelangelo-Leonardo da Vinci; Diderot/Voltaire; Corneille/Racine; Schiller/Goethe; Dostojewskij/Tolstoi; Th.Mann/Kafka; Celan/Ingeborg Bachmann….etc Osho and Krishnamurt apparently opposing intheir methods and whole outside presentation though deeplay connected in the inner
When the seeker has to go nowadays without the intimate relationship with a master but has to struggle “gradually on his own: who will give the decisive oush at the right time for the jump?
Sudden and Gradual
Dear Terry,
It’s so interesting when my own teacher has just made this very point. Sometimes I feel as though “yes!” got it, only for it to slip away, but never entirely. It just shows me I am still having trouble with some old afflictions, that I haven’t quite accepted as mine!
But I truly respect the service you give us.
Namaste,
Joseph
enlightment ans the new “we” culture
I wonder, in how far the concrete strive for realization in the western culture will be promoted or hindered by the so called “we” culture or how I perceive this: the “We” ideology like also the ideology of a so called higher “we”.
For artists and scientists the “new” WE never existed, they were always inanimua and together exploring; this so called new “we” movement is regressive while declaring itself being progressive. Why am I posting this here in this context? because of the urgency factor:
no repetition of the old, so long spread knowledge, but new esperiences and constructed experienced based ideas are needed for a wolrd on fire.
Life for most authentic seekers is just so difficult, ardous, I cannot her any more repetitions of the past…