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Personally I like it that you include a little bit of yourself, your own spiritual autobiography when you write. These posts are my favorite.
A few thoughts of support for this blog:
First as a student of Sanskrit (which is a dead language rich with forgotten nuance) I find it helpful to understand some context on paravriti – the “turning away” or “turning back” or “revulsion” described in the Lanka per Suzuki’s translation. The term is often reified into this action of turning away – a reality that should not be confused with its description or depiction in words and thought. “No statement about the dharma is a statement about the dharma”. I find Vajragoni’s description above quite good really, and I am not quibbling with it except to provide a fuller context to allow suppleness of mind in the approach to what is meant, as a provisional understanding, and to avoid unnecessary thought-forms which might at first serve as a useful reference only later to become an obstacle to practice. So basically what I offer by this comment is the following countervailing gloss on the scripture and what is meant by paravriti, to provide an additional way to strike at ignorance which obscures this essential luminosity of the deathless unborn, and to help break reliance upon a single conceptual form of what is meant, i.e, turning back or away from, a term often used by the few of us who still practice these traditional Ch’an forms so invigorated by mystical Buddhism.
Vriti is an interesting word, rich in variant meanings. It is linked to our modern word in English, “vale” and what is meant can be a fence or enclosure, something very common to early civilization. On the other side of that fence, one might consider, is fear, danger, the dark and unknown wild. And what is that but a fear of non-being, a fear of loss, a fear of dissolution? Why else do we grasp to samsara, but this basic fear of the dark so to speak? We cling to fragile bits of flotsam in a flood of ignorance. This should not be overlooked, I think. As we know from the Buddhist literature, fear arises from ignorance; that is what we imagine reality to be as well as what we have not correctly perceived, directly, as to its essential nature, which is the substance of the meditation practice described op cit. I do not wish to get too specific about what is meant by anything beyond this vale because ultimately we are talking about phenomena themselves. The illusion of reality. That which comes from mind. And how people many thousands of years ago viewed their world and all phenomena is not really different – but in our world today, we are obscured as much by the “known” as by the “unknown” which troubled our ancestors. In a world without transportation, communications and so on, what was beyond one’s own village gate might appear to be quite literally beyond any understanding. Today even the most basic spiritual teaching may be beyond understanding, because of what is “known”, i.e. the faith in the ultimate existence of an objective world. This “vale” or “fence” can also refer to mountains or impassible geographic features which hedge in a valley. In short it is as far as one can go. Back then, maybe it was the edge of the village or curtain of mountains or some impassible barrier; today this barrier might be better understood as scientific materialism and spiritually destructive immersion in pleasure, distraction, and gratification. The ignorance is the same, it just takes a different, modern form.
So I think this context as going as far as one can go is just as meaningful as describing a “turning away”, which occurs at the limit of paravriti. I think it is important to consider that there is no turning away without going the ultimate distance, to go far as might be attained to grasp the nature of phenomena and this saha-world, in which all things, even the composition of self, are ultimately unfindable and lacking in any true substance, shifting through the fingers like sands, since nothing exists on its own and nothing can be said to be permanent, unmoving, and indestructible in this world of Mara. To pursue this with meditation, to chase these phantom realities into non-being one eventually goes as far as they can – which is really only as far as necessary to perceive reality on an entirely different basis, one of truth and not of falsehood. It seems to me that it is helpful to understand the limits of phenomena must be encountered for one’s own or it will not sink in. I think eventually at the limits of this practice it dawns on us that we simply cannot go any further on that path, because it is the path of birth and death. It ends rather tragically for us all. But the inward path, which illumes this fence or vale, is deathless, unending unmoving and indestructible, and it is this recognition I would contemplate as paravriti.
Interesting in terms of this “vale” identifier. For the ancient Daoists, there is a diagram known as the wu-chi. At the bottom of which is an “empty” circle which signifies “the mysterious gate”, or the Valley Spirit. Eva Wong goes on to describe this as the “gate” meaning “opening”, and “valley” referring to emptiness and void. “On the spiritual level, the Valley Spirit is consciousness emptied of sensations, emotions, and thoughts.” Hence, “going beyond the barriers” of conventional perception. [Eva Wong, “Cultivating Stillness, a Taoist Manual”]