Awareness ...

ALTHOUGH my father was a teacher, and seven from eleven children in my family are also ( women ) teachers, I never heard something like "Enjoy your life" ! As a child, I always learned to be a decent person, and a good student ! I always learned to do something Because of This or Because of That.!
When I grow up, I always learned fighting to survive !
What's wrong with my life ?
What's wrong with my Culture ? What's wrong with my Education ?
Why do I have to fight for my life, always ?
I never learned to do something because it is !



MY DAUGHTER is growing up here, in The Nederlands. But I believe she does also never learn to be aware of her life, to enjoy her life ...
Why ? From millions of years , the very big question of us, as thinking beeing, is always How to be happy ! War, fighting each others, slavery, ... were to satisfy the temporarily Relative Happiness of somebody , and at the same time the sources for the Unhappiness of many others... And even the creations of many (religious) desciplines is also an attempt to answer ...



WHILE THE BUDDHA's teaching from two and half thousand years ago is in a way of speaking How to be happy in a right way, it is still unheard from most of us ! This is unbelievable and it is for me still a mystery !
I never heard anything about my existence, or about "Enjoy my life ", or about the True Happiness until my Awakening ...
Why ? We do not go further into this question here, but in my view, this deserves many theses from different disciplines in science today.



DURING MY VISIT at my native village in Viet Nam, I was also to different Buddhist Temples several times.
At the first temple, I discovered a monk, sitting smoking on his heels and his eyes sinking in somewhere else, in the Imagination ...
At the second temple, I saw some monks just finishing a sesson of Mantra. Somebody taking immediately a cigarette. Some others are rushing to ... something else ... asif they are waiting for the end of the session since a very long time ...
And still at another temple, I found a pretty woman monk sitting with ... Open-leg and taking a snap against the temple's wall. Perhaps her pretty face takes a good make-up every day !



Did they learn ... nothing from their Master, The Buddha ? Did they never hear about "The Art of Mindfullness" ? How could you liberate yourself from money, power, pretty girl, Sex, name ... while you cannot stop Smoking, Making-up, drinking Bier, and sitting ... Open-leg ?
How could you liberate yourself from The Self ?...
Did they never hear anything about the famous "The Four Establisments of Mindfullness, or Awareness : body, feelings, mind, and objects of mind" ? ...



These Four Establisments of Awareness should be practised not only during praying or meditating but days and nights : The way we walk, the way we sit, the way we sleep, the way we eat, the way we think ... even in the toilet or taking a shower ...
It is clearly the powerful way to eliminate processes ...
So very sorry for His Teaching !
Perhaps Fermat's congestures and Ernstein's congestures in ... waste-bags is easier to understand because they have normally ... nothing to do with our daily lifes, than The Art of Mindfullness is unheard by ... Buddha's disciples ...



TODAY, MANY people are busy with the meaning of Awareness, i.e, they are quarreling about the definition of Awareness. For some people, it is the result of the so-called neurobiological events in our brain. Many others try to cut some parts of our brain, to see some reactions in our behaviour to find out where and what happen in our brain ...
Well, let see some pratical examples ! If we cut off the electric stream, then the computer (in it functionality ) cease to exist. Clearly without electric impuls there is no computer possible. Again, if we destroy the so-called Boot-sector from the harddisk, Window could also not be in working...
So Computer is an abstract understanding, with many different layers of abstractions, it depends where you look at it. You look at it in its functionality, or in the definition of Turing machine, or as a normal user ...
Awareness is also an abstract understanding. It depends also on how and where and when we are looking at.



THE POINT IS , the Creation, the Existence and the Working of our brain is far beyond the limit of our Perception. And the working of our brain ( i.e Operating System, in the language of Computer Science ) is much more complex than that from a computer System today, I believe. Perhaps The Buddha and many other Zen Masters could understand much more about the happenings within the Innerspace, but How to show That to others in the language of science today and whether they want to do that ( Big Name ? Ambition ? Money ? ..) are another questions ! ...



NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, I suddenly stop eating rice bowl.
From then on, I use dayly rice soup and bread only. Two months ago, I suddenly began eating rice bowl again together with rice soup and bread , but more and more with a decent way !
And last month, just opening the freezer's door, I suddenly realised something and stopped using Coke and Ice ! So, today I do no longer function as an automaton in the language of Computer Science, in the sense of taking a cigarette, using coffee , cooking rice every day, or using Coke ! ...
Clearly, like Smoking, Drinking coffee, Eating hot chilli, Eating rice ... the process of Using Coke in my life is ... dead ! And after the dead of a process, I become clearly stronger and stronger in my Awareness as a beeing ... That shows once again the Processness nature in the creation of our thinking beeing. Clearly, the essence of Buddha's teaching is ultimately to destroy the non-predefined processes, strengthening the Awareness and taking us out of the dark night of Duality.


But why is it easier to eliminate the process of Using Hot-Chili then Smoking, for example ?



WELL IN THE LANGUAGE of Processes, we could say something about this.
The main reason is the following : There is only One precondition for invoking Hotchili, that is, we need Hot Chili only during eating. So, when this precondition is somehow eliminated from our brain, Hot-Chili could no longer be invoked when eating and therefore it is ... dead !
On the contary, Smoking could be invoked by many different preconditions : when we wake up, when we are tired, after eating, when thinking, when speaking ... So, if we do no longer smoke when we wake up today, One precondition is eliminated but there are still many others and therefore Smoking is still not dead ! And as long as it is alive, new precondition could still be defined again ! That is, tomorrow we could take a cigarette again when we wake up !
As result of that, destroy Smoking is a constinuous process : all preconditions must be discarded from our brain one after another, and for Smoking it is a real fighting for its life ...



THIS ALSO shows that our brain is an adaptive system ! And this makes the system of processes in our brain a true dynamic system : Processes are created and distroyed continuously in our life. This adaptive behaviour makes us unique and so different of each other, it also makes the world today more and more colorful with many varieties, although is not always in our advantage !
So in the abstraction of Processes, Awareness in Buddha's teaching is the binding between predefined processes. How stronger it is, how weaker the noising-processes, how easier to eliminate them from our life, and how happier we are because our mental energy are not wasted for something ... nonsense ...
In fact, the practice of Awareness could enable us to build great power of concentration ...
Observe that, in the abstraction of processes, we do not care where they are in our brain : on the left, on the right, in short term memory, in long term memory ... More important is the Creation, the Existence , and the Elimination of them ...



IF, BEFORE we are to the freezer when thirsty, we know that Coke is delicious and we "decide" to take a glass of Coke, Is that then still not our Awareness, and we are stlll as an Automaton in the language of Computer Science ?
The answer is "YES", because when we feel thirsty, the process of Using Coke from the Inner Space is invoked and takes over our body-and-mind without delay . From then on, part of our brain is very busy with Coke and when we open the freezer's door, our hand takes automatically a Coke ! Observe also that, more powerful processes such as Love or Hate, for examples, could be invoked frequently without any visible precondition, that is, during working, sitting, and even sleeping ...



WE ALWAYS thought we decide something, but in Reality we do not decide anything ! They decided that , the Smoking decides to take a cigarette, the Using Coke decides to take a ... Coke !... And when it is eliminated from our brain, we do no longer busy with whether it is delicious or not, or it is more delicious with a slice of Lemon, or with some little Ice , or we feel sorry when there is no Coke to be found in our freezer today, or we need to take some Coke next time we are to Super Market ... That is, we do no longer busy with it a whole time, and Coke belongs then to the Past asif it never exists in our life ...

This does not mean we object Hot-chilli or Coke, or they are no longer delicious to us, ... On the contrary, because information are still there, in our memory, we do still know they are very delicious but without clinging or aversion, i.e. whether there are Hot-chilli or Coke in our meal is no longer the question .
That means the bindings between them and our existence are broken and they are back in their original places in our life just like a chair, a tree, a stone ...
Clearly, this is one of the main reason why many very simple people in very poor countries could still be very happy : Their brains are not busy with many things, days and nights ...




SO, FULL AWARENESS here exists only at the Present Moment, when we are in the holiest state of Being : The State of Full Awareness, no Future, no Past, without clinging to Feeling, Emotions, Ambition and Desires ...
It is also the moments we could fully enjoy Life, as It is ...
Observe that, when Thoughts cease to extist, The Four Establishments of Awareness become One : The Oness of Body and Mind ...

August, 2003 ©
Nguyen Sau Rieng


NOTES :

From my Practical experiences and also following The Buddha's teaching, this is The powerful way to eliminate processes. But how exactly the eliminations happen in the language of Parallell processing is at this moment still not very clear, because the system of different layers of processes is still unknown ...

The existence of God is not in question in Buddha's teaching. That is, Whether God exists or God does not exist, Suffering exists and we could liberate ourself from them !
He said once to a questioner : if you want to know something about God, find Him and ask him ! I cannot answer those questions because I am not ... God ! But if you want to be happy and liberate yourself from sufferings, I could show you The way ...
In fact, we could not find anywhere in Buddha's teaching a reference of ... God, i.e, his teaching is clearly based on observation and experience through practising ...
That is, his Teaching is nothing but Science ...

Some times ago, I discovered an effective method against R.S.I ( Repetitive Strain Injury) ... Ha Ha Ha ...