After over a year off bike, I got back on this month. I don't know how I feel about it yet. It was slow going, mind you. Not just the riding, but even the getting on the bike. I took it slow; step-by-step. The first step was pulling my road bike out from the corner of the room where it lives and wet-wiping off the layer of dust and spider webs. That was depressing and discouraging. And that was it for that day. And my first forays were on my clunker, daily-use street bike going farther on the riverside bikeways than I have in over a year just to test my fitness.

There are several reasons for doing this. A trigger excuse was getting sick of a growing paunch and wanting to do something about it, but I don't think this my paunch has anything to do with being active or not. It probably has more to do with alcohol. It was just an excuse; a feeling that exercising would be working on the paunch, but it isn't. Hopefully it'll help tone the paunch.

Another reason may have elements of self-punishment for not carrying out my ultimate goal in this time. August of last year I was wanting to stop or get off the conveyor belt of daily routine that got me from day-to-day, and running or cycling was part of that. Over a year later, I'm still on the same conveyor belt, but it's occupied by other neurotic activity getting me from day-to-day that completely fills my time. Forcing more than an hour of exercise into the routine is really inconvenient and it's me telling myself if I insist on continuing being here, it's not going to be just all comfort and convenience and doing what I want.

It's, quite honestly, so stupid. It's totally neurotic. And working on neuroticism is my next mindfulness project after years and years of working on negativity and internal anger issues.

Twenty miles on every rideable day weather-wise is the goal and limit, although knowing myself I will probably extend it to 30 to 35 miles if I persist. Neurotic demands it. The question is whether the neurotic schedule of things that artificially completely fill my time will be overcome by the neurotic drive to uselessly go farther and faster.

20-mile Nanhu Br-Bailing Br loop:

I was watching a dharma talk by a Tibetan lama on YouTube and during the Q&A, someone asked whether the dream state produces karma. I quickly intuitively answered out loud, "no", and then the lama matter-of-factly responded, "oh yes" and I quickly changed my answer to "yes". Not just because he said yes, but once he said yes it was easy to realize yes and why. So much for intuition.

My error was in too closely aligning karma with action and there is no acting per se in the dream state. If you can't act, you can't produce karma. That's wrong. Karma is rather the mental impression of all experience. Karma creation is the mind being impressed (seeded) with stimulus and karma manifestation is the form the impression takes through action when causes and conditions arise for it to manifest (germinates). That can and does happen in the dream state.

That night I had a dream that put not too fine a point on it. I don't quite remember the dream; a situation including my mother being in town and calling to ask to meet earlier than we had agreed and suggesting what I could do to make it earlier and that not sitting too well with me. I woke up and was able to identify various emotional reactions in the dream indicative of how my mind is karmically impressed. 

I remember feeling pressured. I remember being anxious, stressed, resentful, resistant. Those aren't things I feel these days in the physical world, possibly/probably/obviously/definitely because I've engineered my life to avoid scenarios whereby those feelings would arise and challenge me. I can brush off external pressure and anxiety. I can fool myself into believing I don't get stressed or anxious anymore because of mindfulness practice, but in the dream, there they were.

The key about karma and transformation is, of course, how you react to and handle situations (stimulus) that arise. The usual way of living life is thinking we are simply separate, individual agents accepting reality as it's presented. We have our experience and our feelings and we accept them exactly at face value and we react to them and outside factors in the myriad ways we do, generally unmindful that karma is at work at every moment and with every thought and feeling.

Part of mindfulness practice trains the mind to pay close attention to every moment and thought and realize how we perceive and react is karma. Collectively they are not isolated or separate incidents, but part of a continuum having come from something in the past and lead to something in the future. It works on the subtlest levels. If you're thinking about something and change your mind, that's karma. What you were initially thinking about was already karma, but then something from the past made you change your mind. It didn't come out of the blue from absolutely nowhere, and what you changed your mind to may influence something in the future in ways you wouldn't notice. The idea of being able to change your mind is karma. If you're the kind of person who finds it hard to change your mind, that's also karma; that came from something. These small karma examples can be translated up to bigger things in our lives, personalities and psychologies.

Experience is important for transformation. Dreams qualify. My attitude in my present world and avoiding those situations may be totally fine and acceptable in working to change the karma in the future. It is also karma. Being neurotically avoidant isn't great, but I don't think that's necessarily what I'm doing. Not that I have a great argument against that. But it does allow me to work on cultivating attitudes and perspectives to deal with difficult interactions with people in the future, whether this life or further on. It's not like I'm not challenged at all, after all I am who I am and the challenge is always here. My situation allows me to mull over interactions and cultivate best courses of action instead of being thrown into them for reals and failing by reacting with anger and negativity.

The ideal is to become a person who doesn't automatically react to negative stimulus with anger and negativity. There are people who are like that, I shouldn't wonder, where such a reaction is totally foreign. That's a great way of being. It's a wonderful way of being to always be able to see the light side of situations and laugh things off; to not groan about how I've got the practice all wrong, but to laugh and make light of my errors and set me straight. At the very least in that dream, I felt those karmic seeds that I no doubt have, but I didn't react. I didn't snap in anger or say anything snide or sarcastic. I think I didn't say anything, which is a good neutral starting point.

There actually is a thread that runs through the last two posts. It doesn't tie them together, it's just there, hidden, noticeable only by me. The book I quoted, Dakini's Warm Breath, was a relatively recent purchase but I had seen it years ago in Eslite, a local chain of bookstores, when they carried a respectable selection of English language books. However, it was always shrinkwrapped so I couldn't sample it to see if it was any good. By the time I thought I might buy it anyway, it had disappeared from the shelves.

Part of how society has changed and passed me by and is no longer something familiar might be exemplified by changes in Eslite. I used to spend hours there. If bored, going there was always an option to pass time. It's different now; barely an afterthought as an option to pass time and more often than not passed as an option. For one, with only a mention of the decimation of its previously massive CD/DVD section, the English language religion and spirituality section has been severely trimmed down from what they had before. They used to have wall-sized bookshelves full, but now just a few shelves on a much smaller bookshelf. This applies to all of Taipei and life. What I'd be attracted to and familiar with isn't in demand anymore. What does exist now is boring to me.

Back to the book, perhaps it was strange that it reappeared on the shelves this year amid all the downsizing of shiny things that get my attention. I didn't know it before, but now I consider it an essential read for my learning and I'm going through it for the third time already. I wouldn't argue against the suggestion that it reappeared only when I was ready for it. When it reappeared, I didn't hesitate again, I bought it that day. My hesitation before was partly measured doubt about shelling out for a book I couldn't sample, but it may have also been partly intuition that I wasn't ready for it. After all, this time I still couldn't sample it and shelled out right away.

And at over US$30, it's not a cheap book, especially one with so many typos in it. I've probably mentioned before that a side effect of my prior job as a copy editor is that I, for most part, can't not see mistakes anymore. It's like a sub-conscious habit to look for them now. I don't think I ever noticed books having mistakes before, but now I often find at least one typo per book and it always makes my eyes roll (that's also probably a side-effect of copy editing). This book had 5 or 6 mistakes, 5 of them in a 30 page stretch, so it's possible that section was (not) edited by one person. My favorite mistake was "iconography" misspelled as "ironography". Someone really needs to develop a system of categorizing irony. 

I dabble in Vajrayana. I don't claim to practice it. I'll impose on myself from what I've read that if I don't have a guru, I'm not practicing Vajrayana and whatever "dabbling" I'm doing, I hope I'm respecting that. On the other hand, there are many books now expounding upon Vajrayana and its teachings. Perhaps they are just teasers to encourage people to find and follow a guru? I don't know, I've come across a lot of what seem to be substantive teachings.

But I get it, the personal touch of a guru (not the type in recent scandals reported). For even substantive teachings written in books, ideally a guru could go on at length about any, and teach how they should be practiced and even tailor specific instructions for an individual. But I haven't met any such guru and I don't think finding a teacher is something that's going to happen in my current lifetime.

Instead I'm going by my own intuition. And intuition vs. guru, I wouldn't bet on intuition, but it's all I've got. Anyway, according to the Mahamudra view of Vajrayana that I've read, whatever path I'm on and whatever I'm doing on it, that is my path. It might be flawed, it might not be ideal, but if I understand it as my path and treat it as such, I can still learn. A teacher might groan laugh in exasperation, "that's not what that teaching means". Well, then I'm just fucked, ain't I?

I'm currently re-reading a book that I bought . . . earlier this year or last year, I forget, and I latched onto a part regarding mandalas as an example of how intuition kicks in. Mandalas are 2-D or 3-D depictions of Buddha fields or worlds, very symmetrical and include representative characters in Buddhist mythology and various levels and positions of being. They aid in imagination and creating mental images of what's described in the literature.

The author writes:  . . . from an awakened perspective, all pain and confusion are merely the play of wisdom. And that play has a recognizable pattern called the mandala principle. If one can identify difficult situations as mandalas, then transformation of painful circumstances is possible. The mandala principle lies at the heart of Vajrayana Buddhism and is the sacred realm of the inner dakini. Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (2001), Judith Simmer-Brown, p. 118.

She writes that all pain and confusion are plays of wisdom, and that hearkens back to the title of a book I recently mentioned, Confusion Arises as Wisdom, which I only recently started to understand as the basic thesis statement of Mahamudra. She then ties that basic thesis of Mahamudra to the mandala principle and expresses its potential.

She goes on: From a Vajrayana perspective, we live in many mandalas at the same time: our career or livelihood, our leisure activities, our family, our spiritual community, our neighborhood, town, city, country. In Vajrayana, . . .  the most intimate mandala in which we live is our own personal one, in which all of these parts play a role, adding the dimensions of our physical bodies, health, and state of mind. In each of these mandalas, there is a similar dynamic in which we do not customarily acknowledge the sacredness of every part of our circumstances, and because of this we experience constant struggle and pain. Ibid., p. 119

My reaction to passages such as this is intuitive. It's not an intellectual processing regarding whether it makes sense or if I think it's right or wrong. It's an immediate almost emotional whoosh of all reality around me suddenly becoming a mandala, a matrix that I'm navigating through in furtherance of wisdom understanding. And it makes sense to me. Suddenly my world around me is one of those 2-D mandala depictions I have on my altar, and how I travel through it is very important, guided by mindfulness and wisdom and compassion.

The body is a mandala with all its biological systems functioning and metabolizing. Mental space is a mandala with all its neurotic processing and useless thoughts and judgments. K-pop obsession is a mandala that I have to figure out what it means and that I'm not just mindlessly wasting my time in enjoyment. Family relations are mandalas. Your lover is a mandala. Everywhere I go during the day is navigating the mandala and everyone I see is part of it. And the idea of space and position, inner and outer/center and fringe, is important in the mandala visualization. Wherever I might position myself in whichever layer of mandala, there's always the other interlocking and interconnected spaces and positions. Is this getting heady? I don't know. It's how intuition takes over.

Seeing the world as mandala makes it possible for Vajrayana practitioners to drop their habitual ways of relating to events and aspects of life and to engage directly. When this is done everything is accentuated, whether it is pleasurable or painful, and there is nowhere to go. The central seat of the mandala may be a throne, but it may also be a prison cell. When we feel the inescapability of our life circumstances true practice is finally possible. Ibid., p. 120.

Well I sure hope so. Anyway, that's how my intuition works.