Over March and April, we'll explore the Noble Eightfold Path through interplaying. Interplay is my offering. It is awareness of multiple dimensions, simultaneously: cause and effect, harmony, and concomitant variation.
Think of interplay as more than interconnectedness. It's simultaneous feedback enabling everything to arise.
Taiun Elliston-roshi's design of the Internet of Buddhadharma is like a Dharma teething-ring for this practitioner, a kind of organic chemistry meets ethnography model evolving from his design background.
My memory of first seeing this construct transported me back to hours of hands-on experience with Tinker Toys (Hojo-san might prefer "Buckyballs") marveling at how different combinations play out from elemental relationships.
By observing the interplay below of color, shading, linkage and spheres, then the view of whole, parts, and connections, we tinker and life plays out.
Playfully look at the following combinations. (A) Clinging is to (B) Suffering as (C) Path (moving away) is to (D) Eight Unfolding Practicings. Finally within the unfolding we experience wisdom leading to exclaiming: View+Thought=Speech (where = canotes codependent origination).
If we in the moment are fully so, without thinking, awareness is all encompassing in-take of Right View. This is non-thinking-empty of formed thought...
Right Thought is like noticing pixels in the non-thinking (perception) offering relationships to the viewer, a kind of wave-in-the-water experience. A non-discriminating free flowing...
Expressing these codependent arisings, Right Speech alerts others to views and thoughts, and often surprises the one who listens to what they just said as clarity. This interplay of the three lessen suffering to ourselves and others...
Remember to schedule Dokusan for March.
Gassho,
Sangaku