Being with Being

As I thought about today’s session, I realized that I was a little bit nervous about being boring. Even though it’s expeditions into boredom, like, well, what if, what if today I’m actually boring? So setting that aside, I felt like — well, we never step exactly into the same river twice. That part of letting ourselves more fully soak in the monotony, soak in the unconditionedness of these underly...

Expeditions into Boredom Series Let's explore our personal frontiers of un-drama in the monotony of nature's flow. Over the course of an hour, how might I attain a depth of boredom that's a new personal record? What if we got really curious about what's ongoing, ever-present, and seemingly... boring?  Monotonous can feel boring. If I'm curious about boredom, can I actually...

Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org mackenziehawkins.substack.com

Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org mackenziehawkins.substack.com

Heraclitus is famous for the paraphrasing of "you can't step in the same river twice." All is flux. Everything is changing. And Aristotle found this view — everything is flux, everything is flow, everything is process — as quite concerning for the endeavor of what he cared so deeply about, which is coming to understand and know something about anything. If the very same river that y...

How can we talk about "no problem" — perhaps interpreted as no suffering, cessation of suffering as extra layers that we add on to the human experience — and not get into the very origin of Buddhism? What the Buddha taught, in his first rolling of the wheel of the Dharma, the Four Noble Truths. But does this have anything, really, to do with "no time"? I remember, in college, I...

Welcome to this ongoing exploration of no time, no problem. And today will be another day, another session of exploring a modern-day teacher, a modern spiritual teacher — Hameed Ali, founder of the Diamond Approach and author of The Unfolding Now, under the pen name of A. H. Almaas. This will be another interesting session for me personally, because this is another one of these books that I tried...

So today we are into the second meaning of No Time, No Problem, which is: Is there some way where, if there's not this sense of time, then for us as human beings, there's no problem? In the sense of freedom from suffering. Maybe of the kind of mental extra affliction, dukkha, dissatisfaction, that can be quite enmeshed in the sense of the past — memories of what's happened to us — a...

In the first half of this series, we did a big long detour into the physics, so that we could approach what various people say as beneficial and helpful — seeing them as options that can be consistent, rationally, with what we know from physics. And now we're bringing it a little bit closer to home. Where this exploration is headed is something I've never quite seen laid out: how much we...

So much of this series has been on the side of: is it really not a problem in physics if there is no such thing as this fundamental time dimension or even a background spacetime container in which change happens? It seems to me that wherever human beings go, and certainly human beings go into science, they bring shoulds with them. With science as this objective enterprise, it kind of makes sense t...

At some level there’s the mathematics that everyone agrees on and everyone can use. But what does this mean in terms of time and spacetime? Something I’d like to reflect on before we dive in is that there is this very human tendency—very, very human tendency—of wanting the universe, wanting reality to make sense to us, to be what we want it to be. We can want reality to be invariant. We can want w...

When we look at the clock and think it is telling us THE time, then there’s the time, this abstract time that’s passing us by, and then there’s this clock. We almost don’t even think of that as a relationship. It’s almost like the abstract time that’s passing us by is driving this clock. This poor clock. Maybe driving us all. But when physics is telling us how clocks behave, and how there’s not on...

So I'll begin with a passage where Dogen says: "Although you never measure the length or brevity of the twelve hours, their swiftness or slowness, you still call them the twelve hours. As evidence of their going and coming is obvious, you do not come to doubt them." I remember having those school schedules — you know, your day mapped out, blocked, A period, B period, C period, and i...

Today we’re actually going to start really slow. You might feel like this is the preliminary warm-up, and you can skip ahead if you’re super eager to get to the juiciness of time—because we’re actually not going to meditate or talk about time today. And the reason for that is that going into this exploration, I do think it is helpful to have some tools. And one of them is that as the perception of...

Typically, there are those things on one list of what is nice and pleasant and spiritual or “good meditation.” And then there’s the other list. And there’s a feeling that what we need is to take what’s over here and change it to what’s over there on the better list. When it doesn’t work, we can get caught in a layer deeper of distress. That hurts. We’re taking some aspect of ourselves, some aspect...

Patrul Rinpoche nails us with his list of the many flavors of doing in meditation — drawing the mind outward, inward, spacing out, chasing thoughts, blocking their arising, anticipating them like a cat anticipating a mouse, squeezing and staring intensely with concentration. So what direction is simply settling? It’s not a settling outward. Not a settling inward. Not a settling toward something ov...

What’s so truly amazing as a sentient being, a human being, is that the flows that make up us, the flows that help give rise to our own unique experiences and feelings and perceptions, and even mental activity and mind — are flows that carry content. And yet are also at the same time are pure flow of nature, unfolding altogether in nature in this fine-free-yet-together way. So the bit of a leap th...

What’s it like to simply settle into that there is space? To simply settle into that there is the flow of change? The space and the flow of change don’t need our tweaking. They don’t need our adjusting. It’s just the way of nature. And we can simply settle into it. Gradually we let our perception of this sense of the flow of nature, our own inner feel of it, begin to become finer and finer. And th...

Once we get the feel of laying down to the ground, “the ground” can become many things. It doesn’t have to just stay as the most obvious thing, the ground. Our torso acts like the ground upon which our shoulders rest. Whatever layer of our spine we pick, one vertebra lays down upon the one beneath. We could put that sense of ground throughout our body. And as we begin to feel the sense of ground a...

In this opening session we explore what these two words, “simply settle,” can mean at the most tangible level — hands simply settling into the support of a lap, body simply settling into the support of the earth. And what it’s like when we notice the absurdity of our own language around it. How do you allow your hands to be heavy? They have the weight that they have. Nothing to do. Nothing even to...

I'm feeling kind of feisty today. Take it all with a grain of salt. But one thing I do feel feisty about is this idea that mystery -- and a realm of unknowing -- is in danger. That it's fragile. That if we know too much, or science says something too definitively, this deeper mystery of existence and being is somehow under threat. Yeah, I think that it's not. And I also can relate t...

Today we will be getting into another level of juicy. This is where some people really, really go to town -- with quantum mechanics, interpretations around consciousness. There's even someone who tends to make claims that if there wasn't consciousness, there wouldn't be a moon. Because of quantum. Interesting, interesting. We return to the double slit experiment -- and this time to...

So that was kind of the sexy science, the fancy physics experiments. And today, with a glorious thud, we're going to go into some of the most well-established -- you could have a yawn already -- the most well-established, long-standing, across all the domains of physics, including good old Newtonian physics. Not just all this, no, no, no, spooky quantum. It's really mundane, established,...

Quantum physics had its 100th anniversary -- and do we know what it actually means any more than 100 years ago? Open question for sure. But part of this exploration is actually inquiring into the effects that a scientific story, scientific knowledge, scientific models have on us. Master Park, who is a physicist as well as a Tai Chi master, always says physics is a story. And so this is not to be d...

Our perception is a map -- it's always a map -- and it can be informed by our understanding, it can be tinted by our expectations. Some of what this exploration is about is to see what it's like to actually feel what we feel, rather than what we think we feel. And thrown into this whole mix is the way that physics -- especially sometimes quantum physics, quantum mechanics -- is used in s...