The following is a very simplified and concise discussion of two items. One is the Buddhist doctrine of impermance or non-attachment, the perspective of the TetraSeed and its somatic manifestation.
Because of the simplicity and conciseness of this discussion, you may feel like its zipping by without your comprehending it. If that's the case, you have two options I can think of. One is to re-listen, and the second is to take the state of bewilderment that you may be experiencing and subject it to The Gold Key release without further attempts to understand. Then, you may return to this discourse with a much easier comprehension.
Non-Attachment
The cultivation of non-attachment goes with the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, which states that all experience is impermanent and that attachment is the primary cause of suffering, in life.
The expected reaction of someone exposed to this doctrine, who is serious about getting free of suffering, would be to seek non-attachment, to oppose attachment. This would be an error because it would involve suppressing attachment, would involve self-denial of desire, rather than releasing attachment. It then becomes attachment to non-attachment, or attachment to self-denial.
The significance of non-attachment, which more properly goes with the doctrine of impermanence than self-denial or opposition to attachment, is capacity for, and participation in, change. Change, not adherence to self-denial, is the opposite of attachment.
A way of better appreciating this difference, is to understand the four-part structure of individuated consciousness and of all experiencing: the TetraSeed.
The TetraSeed
composed of
ATTENTION:LOCATION | INTENTION:EXISTENCE | MEMORY:PERSISTENCE | IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE
may be regarded in terms of MATRIX and VALVE
or BODY and MOUTH.
THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF THE TETRASEED
The MATRIX:BODY consists of
ATTENTION:LOCATION | INTENTION:EXISTENCE | MEMORY:PERSISTENCE.
The MATRIX:BODY is the "body of condensation" or "body of consolidation".
What's condensed or consolidated is whatever has come in through the opening, the valve, the mouth, of IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE.
THE SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE ASPECTS
of the TETRASEED, INTEGRATED
Like a MOUTH, IMAGINATION opens to ingest and closes to permit digestion into MEMORY. Short-term MEMORY takes what is in the MOUTH of IMAGINATION and "chews it over" (analyzing and distinguishing finer features: DISINTEGRATION); long-term MEMORY swallows and digests. (INTEGRATION)
IMAGINATION and MEMORY are counterbalancing opposites the way taking in food and swallowing are counterbalancing opposites: You can't do both at the same time; it's one or the other, though one feeds into the other.
Actually, we never experience memories as memories. We always recall memories into existence by imagining them, just as we memorize something by repeatedly imagining it to ourselves. Memories, by themselves, are patterns that are unknown until we recall them by imagining them. (That's why memories are unreliable.)
ATTENTION and INTENTION are differently related than MEMORY and IMAGINATION. MEMORY and IMAGINATION trade off or alternate; ATTENTION and INTENTION synchronize and combine in the same moment.
Capturing, condensing and consolidating are INTEGRATION.
Something coming in through the opening of IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE always involves DISINTEGRATION. It always involves NEWNESS. (If it's not NEWNESS, it's PERSISTENCE, and if it's PERSISTENCE, it's MEMORY, not IMAGINATION). Newness always involves DISINTEGRATION of the status of memories that have persisted to make way for new INTEGRATION, an altered viewpoint.
INTEGRATION:DISINTEGRATION:INTEGRATION
and DISINTEGRATION
and INTEGRATION
and so on.
IMAGINATION is the mouth of the TetraSeed.
MEMORY is the digestive tract of the TetraSeed.
ATTENTION and INTENTION are the senses and MOVEMENT SYSTEM (e.g., muscles and bones).
ATTENTION and INTENTION are yang/outgoing.
IMAGINATION and MEMORY are yin/incoming.
Beware of taking non-attachment to the extreme -- meaning, overlooking the counterbalancing function of memory, persistence, endurance -- attachment. Extreme non-attachment is "spiritual by-passing" -- the action of avoiding the work of personal transformation in an idealistic effort to experience what is Transcendent/formless. The formless intuition "surfaces" when the disturbances of personal immaturity and/or maladjustment resolve with the awakening and balancing-integration of the four facet/flexpoint pairs of the TetraSeed.
Life involves both persistence (apparent permanence) and change (or the movement of impermanence). Each needs the other for a balance between DISINTEGRATION and INTEGRATION. Each has its place.
a final word on the MATRIX (CONSOLIDATED MEMORY)
and INCOMING NEWNESS (IMAGINATION):
Every experience, even now, consists of two aspects:
- CONSOLIDATED SUBSTANTIALITY
- QUALITIES or BEHAVIORS
You look at or listen to something, you feel "something is there". That's consolidated substantiality.
Then, there are the qualities of what is there, including all of its relationships with everything else.
Every possible experience has the same sense of "something" there-ness, or substantiality -- though the density of the substantiality varies.
Every possible experience has a different set of qualities, in the most ordinary sense.
The sense of something-there-ness is the sense of self-densification, the sense of attention to a memory or persistent "something" -- and the intention to have an experience of it, one way or the other -- all at once and in the same place. It's what is known as, "the self-contraction". It's a feeling. We experience everything by means of self-contraction. (It seems to me that that's what Adi Da meant, when he wrote, "The act of perception, itself, is the avoidance of relationship." ~~ The Knee of Listening by Franklin Jones/Adi Da Samraj)
That means that, with contemplation and practice to make one capable, every experience can be recognized as the feeling of consolidated ATTENTION, MEMORY, and INTENTION -- all in the same place as a single feeling, that singular "feel" of "consolidated something", which is self-contraction. (It seems to me that that's what Adi Da meant when he said that, at some point, one no longer needs to look into the garbage bag to see what one is throwing away; one just looks at the bag (the feeling of self-contraction) and recognizes, "Ah! Garbage!" ~~ Garbage and the Goddess, by Bubba Free John).
Recognizing self-contraction, sufficiently, as ATTENTION:PERSISTENCE:INTENTION, self-contraction can be released entirely independently of the qualities of the thing being released. It's a shift of perspective from ingesting incoming experience (getting involved with it) to recognizing self-contraction in any form of experience as a "self-activity" -- a self-activity that can be desisted from (stopped or ceased) merely in the noticing of "something there" -- without need for analysis, figuring out, identifying what something is or means, reasoning about it, wonderings about "right" and "wrong" and what to do about it. It's the very soul of non-attachment through intelligence, not through an idealistic cutting off of self from experience.
This is a radical (at the root) approach to experience. Instead of "taking a position" relative to some experience, we dissolve it (or release it). That capacity for release is the meaning of non-attachment. It's the release that is our capacity to change, to participate in an even or fair way with the flow of impermanence that allows incoming imagination (creativity) to flourish. It's "emptiness" or "space" -- like the capacity of a vessel -- whether or not the vessel happens to contain anything, at the moment. It's not the "non-attachment" of refusal or self-denial, of "cutting off of all attachments" (which is a way of being idealistically full of itself, enforcing an erroneous understanding of emptiness or of non-attachment.) It's non-attachment as capacity to change.
It is acceptance -- not as fatalism about fate, but as the "open mood" of the space where something limited once resided, space that can now accommodate something new. It's receptivity, the space liberated by dissolution of "remembered point-of-view" space where unknown newness is allowed to develop and emerge as the new memory of this very moment, of ever-new self as the expression of that very space, rather than of biased and unreliable, self-held memories. It is spontaneous and also allows the free functioning of memory and so retains its intelligence.
This "acceptance" has a very interesting behavior: When all four aspects of the TetraSeed, (i.e., all four operations/drives/intelligences) sufficiently and consciously come "on-line" and are balanced and integrated with each other, in the context of, or in terms of, any kind of experience, that experience becomes as if "transparent"; it loses its feeling of density, while retaining its functionality, even at a superior level. It becomes "transparent" to the formless Ground of Being that is its source and very substance.
Search on YouTube for keywords, "Adi Da point of view".
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