|
Post by stardustpilgrim on Mar 9, 2016 7:41:21 GMT -5
This goes back to your Wiki quote post (two alternative uses). Right, you got that (according to the wiki) Soto Zendo's use it one way, Rinzai the other? Yes.
|
|
|
Post by Reefs on Mar 10, 2016 11:53:10 GMT -5
This excerpt from Iron Cow reminded me of ZD's distinction between nirvikalpa ("absolute") samadhi and a CC ("cosmic consciousness") experience, and as meditation is suggested as correlative to each, I thought this a good thread to place it in. Low also makes a distinction between these experiences and "awakening", which on the forum is referred to most commonly as "realization". It also brought to mind some of the dialog that's been had over the past year differentiating between mantra-based meditation and what I understand to be zazen, and between meditation in general, and prayer. The bolding is mine. "In terms of religious experience, the Bhakti path, or the way of divine loves, leads to enlightenment, and the Jnana path, or the way of knowing, leads to samadhi. The word enlightenment has been used somewhat indiscriminately in the West, which has tended to obscure the differences that it is important to perceive -- the difference between samadhi and enlightenment, and the difference between these two and awakening. The way of the Christian mystic, the way of divine love, is towards and encounter with the Other: a union as an act of love. It is a way along which it is assumed that God and man are of fundamentally different essence. Unity is acheived thorugh the grace of God. It is by His grace that the unbridgeable is bridged, and it was in the birth, life and death of Christ that this bridge was made known to man. Enlightenment takes the form of an encounter, and this encounter is the encounter with a presence which is interpreted as the presence of God, or Christ, or or the divine, but which is also oneself at the same time. 'The Father and I are one.' This encounter with the divine presence is often seen as an intense light:" (Albert Low, para's 35, 36 from Chapter 5 of "The Iron Cow of Zen", "The Center as Other")
He spends the next page and a half giving examples of this kind of experience, and then continues: "Enlightenment is the fruit of divine love: of yielding, even though momentarily, to the unknown center present but not specific. But with the way of Knowing there is no encounter with the Other, but instead a merging in samadhi. The word samadhi has for its roots sam and adhi. Sam means to combine, to mix or mingle. Adhi is smewhat more difficult to translate in that it means a pledge towards or a commitment; it also means conception (as when a woman conceives). It is an active term, whereas sam is a more reconciling term. Sam is an aspect of me-as-center and adhi is an aspect of me-as-periphery. Samadhi may be looked upon as a passive/active condition. 'How vast is the heaven of boundless samadhi!' There is no exalted state of the loving encounter with the Other: there is not the brilliance of the sun, but instead the serenity of the moon. 'How bright and transparent the moonlight of wisdom." There is coonless in the place of the heat of enlightenment. However, it is still an intensely active state, as the word samadhi implies. There is a light, a diffuse light, just as when the moon is full overhead, and therefore just out of sight. There is also vast darkness. The sun of enlightenment also shines out of darkness, but this darkness is a kind of opaqueness. With samadhi the darkness is transparent, vast, unobstructed. In enlightenment it is as though the two centers joined in an ecstatic dance without movement. In samadhi it is as though the two peripheries merge, something like the 'figure' and 'ground' both being simultaneously ground." (Albert Low, para's 44-47 from Chapter 5 of "The Iron Cow of Zen", "The Center as Other")
This is also relevant as it gets into the differences between the two approaches that Low uses to motivate his presentation about the two different types of experience: I don't know if Low has helped or hindered the discussion regarding the meaning of these words that are commonly used by mystics and meditators. Only someone who is familiar with the direct experiences or realizations to which these words point will have a framework of reference for what he's discussing. He is claiming that the word "enlightenment" points to the perception of the Infinite by and through a human being. It is an awakening experience that results in one (and usually more) realizations. Primarily, there is a realization that the cosmos is not what one has been conditioned to imagine. During this kind of event, selfhood is absent, and the Infinite somehow perceives Itself directly. People who have this kind of cosmic consciousness experience afterwards claim that it occurred through grace and they are humbled by it. Zen calls this sort of thing "seeing into one's true nature." There is overwhelming awe because the mind cannot comprehend the vastness of what is perceived nor the aliveness of it. It is truly mind boggling, and it has two major aspects. One aspect is the realization that all previous ideas about the nature of reality were false--that the cosmos is NOT a place of separate things and events interacting in ways that were previously imagined. Those conditioned ideas simply fall away because they are seen to be fundamentally untrue. The other aspect is the direct apprehension of something that is unimaginable--an absolutely unified field of being. This is certainly one kind of waking up from the dream of the consensus trance. However, most people who have these kinds of experiences afterwards think that the experiences happened to the person who they IMAGINE themselves to be. IOW, the illusion of conventional selfhood is NOT dispelled by the experience. They know that during the experience they weren't there (as separate entities), but afterwards, their old sense of identity almost always returns. They then pursue attempts to get back what they imagine "they," as individuals, lost. They feel as if they inhabited the Kingdom of God for a few moments, but then fell back to earth. Although Self-realization has not been attained, they at least know that the living truth is vast beyond comprehension, and they have a burning desire to return to a state of oneness with THAT--something that they now know is possible. Self-realization or THIS-realization, by contrast, is NOT an experience. It is a sudden seeing that the conventional sense of selfhood is an illusion. This is what many people call "enlightenment" and what Zen people call "satori." If a cosmic-consciousness experience is one kind of enlightenment, then SR/TR is a different kind of enlightenment, and it is lasting rather than transient. In most cases a CC experience does NOT free a body/mind from the spiritual search, but in almost all cases SR/TR results in lasting freedom and peace of mind. Clearly, a person who has had a CC experience is more enlightened about the nature of reality than someone who has not had such an experience, but a person who has attained SR/TR is more deeply enlightened than someone who has ONLY had a CC experience. SR/TR is not the end of the path, however, because there is no end to what can be discovered (and internalized), but it is the fundamental realization that frees a human being from the sense of having a conventional identity as a person. Most people who attain SR/TR realize that there is both a relative and an absolute perspective, but also realize that both the relative and the absolute are subsumed in pure being. After attaining SR/TR, people who are worthy of being called "sages" leave all ideas of attainment behind and abide free from attachments to ideation. Their lives are what might be called "a flow of being." I suspect that 99% of the people who experience nirvikalpa samadhi encounter that state as a result of meditation. FWIW, I've never heard of an adult who fell into that state accidentally, although some children have apparently experienced it. It is a deeply peaceful state of pure awareness without thought or perception, but I doubt that people who do not place a special value upon it, or do not have a strong meditative practice, will attempt to regularly enter that state. Probably the primary values of experiencing that state include (1) the realization that pure awareness without thought or perception is possible (2) the realization that pure awareness is primary to all else (3) the realization that sustained unity consciousness is possible, and (4) the realization that such deep states of psychological unity can lead to sustained states of waking unity consciousness during everyday life. It ought to be noted, however, that many people attain SR/TR who never experience NS. It is probably only valued in spiritual traditions, such as Zen, that emphasize a strong meditative practice. Finally, just a note on zazen. The word "zazen" is used in a general sense to describe any form of sitting meditation (mantra recitation, breath awareness, breath counting, pure listening, etc), but Zen people use the word specifically to refer to the practice of shika taza. Shikan taza is the practice of extreme alert attentiveness without any specific focus. It's equivalent to sitting in a dark forest at night surrounded by potentially dangerous animals and staying in a heightened sense of alertness. It is a difficult, if not impossible, activity for beginning meditators. That's an excellent post, ZD. Very clear. Especially the 'humbling' part hit the nail on the head. There's no way that mind could ever process this or that you would suffer from delusions of grandeur as a result of this. And you are absolutely right about CC and SR and how it changes one's fundamental understanding. I'd say it's very rare that you meet someone who has an actual reference for both. Mostly it's one or the other. What's your take on this?
|
|
|
Post by Reefs on Mar 10, 2016 12:02:54 GMT -5
You've mentioned in passing a possible third book. I'm confident in speaking for well over a majority of the past and current members of the forum on this. It would be a welcomed and significant cultural contribution. Personally, I've found the Japanese terminology to be the most well-formed, with kensho corresponding to your CC and Al's "enlightenment", and satori corresponding to his "awakening" and your TR. Not all the sources on the topic are as clear as you and he are on the distinction between the experiences associated with each of kensho and satori, on one hand, and the realization which doesn't come and go, on the other. Samadhi is perhaps the most significant of the triad in that it's the one that's available to anyone with the willingness to just do it. What I'd say from my own experiences and from learning the minds of others on this topic is that if there's an interest in it, to be open-minded as to what samadhi is and how to go about it, in that the instructions of peeps who've been there and done it already can be invaluable. If a peep is ever going to compare notes with others about it then that openness to listening and learning is more than just valuable, it's also indispensable. Laughter: if I can ever get finished with this last house construction project, maybe I'll do some more writing. I obviously have no idea what will happen next. ha ha. Yes, the only reason that I consider the concept of samadhi somewhat important is because of what it points to and implies. If it is pointed out to them, most people realize that there are periods of time when they get "lost" in some kind of activity. This is what some of us call "a unity-conscious state of mind." The most superficial examples of this are when people get lost in a movie or a football game. A slightly deeper state of Samadhi is what Zen people call "relative samadhi" or "everyday samadhi." Maybe someone gets into doing housework so deeply that reflection stops, or perhaps an artist creates a sculpture or a painting and becomes happily absorbed by the activity. Self reflection and roofbrain chatter stop for a while, and we might say that the person is in a state of UNselfconscious flow. During their happy state of absorption they don't know that they're happy because they don't think about it. Their housework or artwork is equivalent to how little children play--unencumbered by reflective self-centered thought. A deeper form of samadhi is what athletes call "being in the zone," and those states of unity consciousness are often recognized as profound after they come to an end. There is a mystical quality to them that is kind of mind-blowing. Looking back, people often feel as if some higher power took over during the activity and that time stood still for a while. A tennis player once said of this state, "I disappeared but the game continued without me." Athletes often say that they played far beyond their usual capability, and mountain climbers often say that they were mystified by what they saw and felt the body doing in "their" absence. Another deep state of samadhi is what Zen calls "Absolute Samadhi," and it is what Advaita sages call "nirvikalpa Samadhi." During that state there is pure awareness but no world, no thoughts, no perception. Ramana considered sahaja samadhi as the deepest state of unity because it is not transient, and because it can only occur after SR/TR. It is a flow of being, but there are no bells or whistles associated with it. It is everyday life lived without attachment to ideation and without the sense that there is a separate person doing anything. It is summed up by the phrase "The sage does nothing, but everything gets done." Flowers bloom in the Spring, and leaves fall in the Fall. A sage does whatever needs to be done, and afterwards does the next thing that needs to be done. Life is lived like a leaf wafted about on the wind. If someone objects to the distinction of samadhi as a pointer to unity-conscious states of mind, that's perfect, too. Some people will find it helpful and informative, and some won't. For those who get interested in the issue, a question may sooner or later arise, "How is it possible to stay in a unity-conscious state of mind all the time?" Or, "How can the usual sense of selfhood (which prevents the free flow of being) come to an end?" Or, "How is it possible to become enlightened?" All of these questions are pointing to the same thing--total freedom from the spiritual search. What you call relative samadhi is what they call flow experience in modern psychology (A-H call it alignment). There are different levels to flow, too. The deepest one comes with a loss of self. If you're interested, you can read some stuff on Csikszentmihalyi. He did some research on motivation and somehow stumbled into this flow/samadhi stuff. His research also shows that certain situations are conducive to the more shallow states of flow, i.e. flow experience can be created at will to a certain degree (or at least one can create the right environment so that your activity becomes 'flow-prone' - which is basically what the A-H teaching is all about).
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on Mar 10, 2016 13:34:45 GMT -5
Reefs: yes, what you wrote about "flow" is correct, and I'm familiar with Csikszentmihalyi (although it's been several years since I read his stuff). I wasn't, however, aware that A-H teaches about this, or that the word "alignment" referred to flow.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Apr 8, 2016 23:25:09 GMT -5
I wrote this in response to a private message from someone recently about self inquiry. I thought it might be of interest to post it here.
So can you easily locate the sense of "I am"? You put your attention there, but in an easy effortless way, an innocent way without concentration. Don't put any effort into it. If a thought comes, you let it come. You don't try to suppress the thought. You just let it appear and disappear. It has nothing to do with what you are. When you realize that you are not putting your attention on the I am sense then gently go back to it until another thought distracts you away from the I am. We should never worry about other thoughts. There is nothing you can do about it. So just go back to the source when you think about it. Sometimes you will be very quiet. Sometimes your mind will be full of thoughts. We don't mind. Whatever happens is okay. Effortless and innocence is the key. We don't mind if thoughts come. Just go back to the I am. It is an intention only. Just an idea to go back to source. That small idea is enough to take you back to the I am sense. Just abide there and don't mind if a thought comes. Let it come and then let it go and then a small intention will come back that you should put attention on the the I, the one who is the experiencer. Very gentle, very innocent with no effort, not concentration. It is enough to have this quiet intention. The mind wants to go there. You don't have to force it. If you want to get the cow out of the cow shed it is very difficult to pull it out, but if you offer it some grass, it will easily follow you. So it is with mind. It wants to experience a quieter state, a more subtle state of thinking. It will go there by itself just by having an innocent intention to go back to I am. Don't strain. It is better to do it frequently but for shorter periods. If you try and practice for a long time, you will start to put effort into it and it will become a strain. If this happens then stop and do some activity. We must always be innocent in this practice. You will never lose what you gain from this practice, even though we have doubts. Don't have expectations about it. If you have a good experience don't have an expectation that it will be the same the next time. We should never have an expectation or judge our progress by experiences, because we want to go beyond experience to what we are so we must abide with the I am and grace will open the gates to the unbounded when you are ready to enter. We put our faith and trust in the inner guru which can never be wrong. Just take it as it comes, with an innocent and effortless intention to know the source by going inwards. This is inquiry. This is sadhana.
|
|