Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
letting go even of watching oneself and simply being present, can
you talk about that?
RICHARD YOUNG: Yes. That comes from my own practice of
mindfulness over the years, and also of knowing people who are
practicing it. And it's an artificiality to be blunt, it's an artificial
way to live, but I think there's so much to gain from it, so much to
learn from it, that it's an important practice. But I think there
needs to be this rhythm, this breathing in, and this breathing out
where I am aware of my experience and that I am in my
experience. Now it is possible to be both, to be in it and to be
aware of it, but that's a pretty highly developed skill. Most of the
time for most of us it's one or the other, we can either be mindful
of what we're doing, or we're completely in what we are doing.
And I think there are moments when that's called for, for example
when I'm in therapy with somebody, I'm not sitting there
mindfully watching the experience, I am in that experience, I am
that experience. And I may be mindful about it later and observe
in retrospect what would happen and what went on, but
sometimes that mindful awareness just seems to give way to a
complete engagement with the moment.
TRIP: Here's another beautiful thing you wrote, you say, "As the
early Chan Zen masters taught, Buddha mind does not exist, and it
also does not exist [Laughter]. In other words the dualistic
characteristics shared by all objects whether physical or mental do
not apply to God, God is beyond all dualities which s how it can be
the source of all phenomenal objects. It cannot even properly be
called it, but it can be lived directly unselfconsciously and without
cognitive mediation. Ironically others will know we are living it
long before we do".
RICHARD YOUNG: Yes, I often use the illustration of a white
board to try and get at what I'm saying there. With a white board
it can manifest all colors of the spectrum, you can have every color
of dry marker you want, but there's one dry marker that you can't
use, and that would be a white one. So a white board which has
only one characteristic, it's whiteness, cannot manifest white. So
616