3 doorways to freedom

Two streamings across the doorsill“…lets be bold and claim that there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi’s poetry: call them fana and baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine. Rumi’s poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction. A movement out, a movement in.

Fana is the steaming that moves from the human out into mystery. Fana is that dissolution before our commotion and mad night prayers become silence. Baqa goes the other way across the doorsill. The Arabic word means ‘a living within’. The absorbing work of this day, …a return from expansion… into pain and effort…the end of a frayed rope. You feel a tremendous intensity within limits.

By letting these two conditions, fana and baqa flow and exist simultaneously in his poetry, Rumi is saying they are one thing, the core of a true human being…where the secular and the sacred are always mingling, the mythic and the ordinary, dream vision and street life."
Coleman Barks ‘The Soul of Rumi’

I'm about to lead a retreat on Wabi Sabi and as a framework for the retreat i'm going to be using the 3 laksanas and the 3 vimoksas. In meditation i'll be connecting them with the 3 qualities of mind talked about by Rigdzin Shikpo as; openness, clarity and sensitivity. Then through looking for the wabi sabi aspect of things i hope we can get an inkling that everything around us is continually showing us reality.

We are not dealing with distinct properties of the conditioned, but rather than with so many ways of penetrating into its true nature.Bhante on the laksanas


the laksana - impermanent
We are constantly encountering profound revelations of impermanence, which are obscured by the characteristic of continuity.
Arising is the beginning of impermanence; decay it’s middle point, dissolution is its end.

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet do no suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood is firewood, which fully includes past and future. Ash is ash, which fully includes future and past. Dogen

the vimoksa - signlessness
Animitta - No words, concepts or thoughts apply, even the idea of those not applying doesn’t apply! The term Maya we know to mean illusion, yet it’s literal meaning is ‘to measure, to cut up’. Through concepts, even through perception, we cut up the pure flow that is reality. Really there is just this continuous process of ‘pure becoming’ out of which we create; table, firewood, ash.

in meditation - clarity
It’s a sense of being awake, knowingness and luminosity. We see the quality of our experience, we aware of the relationships and connections between things. Clarity and awareness are connected with a sense of the passing of time. Clarity is a mirror; it’s dynamic, it moves, though in a sense it is unchanging.

It’s a sword that instead of cutting into two, it cuts into one!

in wabi sabi - things are either devolving toward, or evolving from nothingness
In wabi sabi there is the suggestion of a natural process, we find expressions of time frozen.
Objects carry the signs of time passing; they are weathered, rusty, tarnished, warped or sun bleached.
They carry the signs of wear; cracks, bruises, dents and holes.
And the signs of love: patching, stitched, softened and worn with use.

The beauty of impermanence.


the laksana - painful
We think of pain as coming and going, that it is added on to our experience rather than ever present. We can see this in terms of our body, we continually change our posture having the notion that the postures bring us comfort, but all the time they bring us pain.
Dukkha is translated as Unsatisfactoriness, a gross or subtle searching, a restlessness.

At the base of the conditioned mind is wanting. This wanting takes many forms. It wants to be secure. It wants to be happy. It wants to survive. It wants to be loved. It also has specific wants.
The planning mind tries to assure satisfaction. Most thought is based on the satisfaction of desires. Therefore thought has its root in dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.
When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeking elsewhere… There are things that we want that may never come our way, or things we only get once in a while, or which don’t stay for long. There are also things we get and after we get them we don’t want them… Steven Levine

the vimoksa - wishlessness
Apranihita - the unbiased. When we really see that nothing is ultimately satisfying we give up, we give up our searching, the mind rests wherever it is, like a perfect sphere on a perfectly flat surface, going nowhere.

Ironically when we experience the depth of dissatisfaction in the wanting mind. There follows a great joy. Because when we see that no object of mind can in itself satisfy, then nothing that arises can draw us out and we begin to let go because there is nothing worth holding on to. The more we see how the mind wants, the more we see how wanting obscures the present moment. To realise there is nothing to hold on to that can offer lasting satisfaction shows us there is no where to go and nothing to have and nothing to be – and that’s freedom.
Steven Levine

in meditation - sensitivity
A responsiveness, compassionate, uninhibited, spontaneous and blissful; it is the heart of awakening.
There may be a sense of wellbeing and joy, on the other hand unhappiness and sorrow, but it is associated with awareness it feels ‘good’ to be more aware, no matter what we are feeling.

We shut off awareness, frightened by what we might find – but the nature of our being is good and carries within itself a sense of wellbeing. As long as we are aware, sensitivity is there and that is good in itself.Rigdzin Shikpo

in wabi sabi - coaxing beauty out of ugliness
The beauty in wabi sabi is not held by the object, but hidden in the experience. It is a dynamic between you and some thing in your world, the beauty is a state of consciousness
Wabi sabi is indifferent to conventional good taste, things might be misshapen, awkward, random, and the result of letting things happen by chance. Things wabi sabi may exhibit the effects of an accident, like a bowl glued back together, or scar.

The beauty of imperfection.


the laksana - insubstantial
Perception itself is a very subtle grasping the process happens very fast. The real nature of things is concealed beneath the appearances we ascribe to them. What we call ‘seeing’ is in fact an imagining. The self is such an imagining.

The Dhammapada says all conditioned things are impermanent and painful, whereas all things whatsoever are insubstantial. So the emptiness of the conditioned and the emptiness of the unconditioned resolve themselves into a third more profound kind of anatman – ‘tathata’ or thusness. I think there is a strong connection between tathata and wabi sabi.

the vimoksa - sunyata
Voidness - Really there is nothing to our experience, each sensation seems to be made up of other sensations and so on… There is nothing to get hold of and no one to get hold of it. But there IS experience.

Emptiness here, emptiness there, yet the infinite universe stands always before our eyes. Hsan Tsang
In the light of this mirror like wisdom things are freed from their ‘thingness’, their isolation, without being deprived of their form. Lama Govinda

in meditation - openness
Spaciousness, where nothing is fixed, both emptiness and fullness, a mysteriousness in which manifestations self arise and self liberate. This spaciousness is the basis of our being, a complete openness in which we can turn towards whatever arises without fear and where there is always space for something new to happen.

in wabi sabi - nothing can seem anymore important than anything else when the idea of not existing is
brought into the equation

There is an emptiness or nothingness lies behind everything, how are we to know this emptiness? Wabi-sabi shows it to us.
Things are vague, blurry, murky. Like morning mist, or old glass in windows.
Wabi sabi is where the fine line between being and not being is at it’s finest.
Simplicity is at the heart of wabi sabi, nothingness is the ultimate, this side of nothingness we have simplicity. We find it in the spaces between things.

The beauty of incompleteness.

Wabi Sabi Retreat – Coaxing Beauty out of Ugliness
Fri 13 Oct – Fri 20 Oct
for booking details go to www.tiratanaloka.org or use the tiratanaloka link opposite