Original Thoughts

[Portto]

Your examples are much better indeed, ZD!
The one with the cookie can be enjoyed by everybody, from children to adults.

Basic science is very well aware that boundaries and definitions are arbitrary. Applied science, which is more popular, tends to ignore this.

You could start with a simplified version of the "cookie experiment."

Bring a glass almost full of water, and add drops of water to it. Ask them if the drops cease to exist or not. If yes, when?

This example, although not as funny as the cookie one, should generate less side-thinking.
The one with the cookie could be better because it involves the self. How can the cookie become self?

[zendancer]

Porto: I like the idea of putting drops of water into a glass of water. That's a good one. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Kabir (translated by Stephen Mitchell in "The Enlightened Mind):

"I have been thinking of the difference between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water's still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up a word
"wave," do I have to distinguish it
from water?

There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes."

[ventura23]

For me enlightenment would be no self, and the process is some kind of unwinding leading up to that.

................................................................................................................. Hi Souly,


What is the scientific understanding of how one arrives at "no self"?
I don't see how science enters into it.

Louise

[karen]

When does hot become cool and then cold?

[someNOTHING!]

I was on a beach and had a chance to use the "jar of and ocean" pointer.

Dipping the jar into the ocean and holding it up to my friend's face, I simply asked, "When does the water stop being the ocean?" And then poured it back into the ocean.

Smiling.
_______________________________________________________

On another occasion, I was discussing some ideas with what I'd affectionately call a "freak pastor" (uses a Bible, but has such a heavy Buddhist/Sufi bent). He had asked me where I'd been on my last trip, and I'd replied India. Then he asked me why I had gone there again, so I told him I like walking around purely anonymously and somewhat unsure about how things work in certain situations, as well as disappearing into mountains/nature for weeks at a time. He mentioned, smiling, that as I walk, the world keeps spinning under my feet, and I actually don't go anywhere. So I playfully replied, as the reel of film keep spinning and things of the world seem to change, it's all the same light.

We both smiled.

_______________________________________________________

I was once working at an elementary school as a substitute teacher. That day I needed to discuss the universe as part of the science class,,,,oh darn. There were a couple of boys who seemed to be at odds with studying in general and continued to carry out their better plans of taking the substitute teacher to task (they didn't realize how out of their league they were with the grand-troublemaker himself as their teacher!! haha). So I decided to give them something to create questions, rather than the school's usual "giving them the answer" and info to stuff into their knowledge banks kind of routine. Talk about killing the creative buzz!! Haha...what about the mystery?!

So, I went up to the whiteboard and drew a really small dot and gave them a little comprehensible modified run down on what is generally understood as being how our universe began. They seemed to have a pretty good idea of that already, but then I got them to ponder the gravity of it all a bit more by making a list as a class of every THING they could think of. We then contemplated together on how everything/everybody in the room, outside, other countries, oceans, suns, stars, EVERYTHING came from that infinitesimally small something (Nothing? someNothing?) and has been exploding through as space/time for what they say is approximately 13 billion years (BTW, I was very proud of how I play-acted all of this!!). How everything that has happened, is happening, will happen is part of that one explosion....how could anything imaginable be separate from it? How it is ALL connected, regardless or where or what or how or why....ALL of it. How even the starlight we see is sometimes thousands and millions of years old, so the light's most recent source may not even exist anymore, but isn't it TOO just part of that seemingly original explosion playing out as our universe? Are our bodies made of the same stuff as the rest....how could it be any different?

Those boys never shut up once, but it was a great hour with very few answers! Haha ;D

[klaus]

Dec 2, 2009 21:55:59 GMT -5 karen said:

When does hot become cool and then cold?

When there is awareness.

[zendancer]

Klaus: No. Hot becomes cool and then cold only when there is imagination. Awareness does not make distinctions. If we stop imagining/thinking, hot and cold disappear. As Lightmystic said on the other thread, without thought everything (every thing) separate disappears. Aren't thoughts great? One thought and the universe comes into existence.

Karen: I love the hot/cool/cold example.

SomeNothing: Great examples. I'll have to borrow the big-bang thing, and the next time I go to the ocean, I'll remember to bring a jar just in case.........

[someNOTHING!]

Hi ZD-

Thanks for all the sincerity and play on the board. Really, great stuff. Still taking me some time to catch up!

BTW, nice to see another person appreciating Kabir. Read a good chunk of his stuff at various bus stands and train stations throughout parts of India...they often had little books of his at newsstands for like 20-50c,,,gotta love cheap Indian print!

Don't forget, river water works just as great,,,and then, if you want, you can still use the word "ocean" with a delayed wink!

Note: Made edit to previous post.

[zendancer]

Hi Louise: Science is a thought-based methodology that has proven to be very powerful over the last three hundred years. Without trying to duplicate Karl Popper's explication of the system (he was a philosopher who analyzed the method in detail), let's look at how science might be used in this regard. First, we look at whatever facts and claims that we are dealing with.

1. For thousands of years mystics have claimed that selfhood is an illusion and that most people don;t perceive the real world.
2. They, and thousands of other people, have claimed to have had mystical experiences of transcendence--experiences of unity consciousness in which selfhood disappeared.
3. Some folks in England have collected such accounts and listed the major antecedents of such experiences. Despair is number one. Meditation is number two. Being alone in nature is number three. Sex is number twenty-seven.

If we had no more information than this, we could logically conclude that sex, as an effective way of having a mystical experience, would be a poor choice of action. Despair also seems out of the question because it is not something that we can artificially make ourselves feel. If we had no more information than the above, a logical conclusion is that our best bet for having mystical experiences would be to spend time in either meditation or being alone in nature. By doing one or both of those things we would improve our odds. This is the kind of thinking that scientists use to decide what kind of experiments to perform.

What usually happens is that we read about people who have transcended selfhood and consider what happened to them and why. We form a theory about what worked for them, and we start experimenting to see if it will work for us. Sometimes spiritual teachers are very explicit and tell students exactly what to do, but because there are so many different pathways and explanations, it may seem confusing. As we continue to experiment and read, we modify our theory accordingly.

Today, because of websites like this, we're much luckier than in the past. We can read about lots of different pathways and form a more comprehensive theory about what needs to be done. In the past, people, due to their isolation and lack of mass media, were only exposed to one path (if at all) and one or two teachers (if they were lucky) who might not have been able to explain things very well.

Today, with the advantage of the internet, if we look at all the pathways that have resulted in people waking up, what do we find? here are some of the major pathways:

1. Mantra repetition (Tibetan tradition and others)
2. Self inquiry (Ramana Maharshi's "Who am I?" questioning)
3. Zazen (breath counting, breath awareness, shikan taza, koan study, etc)
4. Focusing upon direct sensory perception (Anonji's approach and others)
5. Stillness ("Be still and know that I am God" Psalms 46:10) ("Stop, and be still"--Poonjaji, Ganagji, and others)
6. Silence (Bernadette Roberts and others)
8. Intense focus upon a single activity (Tai Chi, martial arts, flower arranging, tea ceremony, Zen archery, etc)
9. Looking within (self investigation) ("the kingdom of God is within you")
6. Feeling the "I am" (Nisargadatta and his teacher)
7. Neti neti (not this, not this, not two)
8. The practice of loving kindness (Tibetan tradition and others)
9. The practice of devotion (numerous traditions)
10. Thought experiments and empirical experiments that reveal the nature of the common intellectual illusions (Osho, Gurdjieff, Rose, and others) (Osho and Socrates performed the same experiment of removing all personal volition and waiting to see how the body would respond absent a doer)

If we act like scientists, then we might consider all of these pathways and ask ourselves, "What is common to all of these pathways?" What pattern do we see? Every pathway does one thing; it takes us out of an intellectual mode of mind, cuts through thoughts, and focuses upon direct experience. On this website we don;t even have to theorize about this; it is explicitly stated by many people over and over. "Thoughts blind us to reality." No one has to believe this, and from a scientific point of view it is quite okay to remain skeptical. However, sooner or later we have to do something; we have to perform some experiments upon ourselves in order to test whether particular truth claims or our own theories about reality are correct.

Thoughts can often be so subtle that we don;t even realize the effect that they're having upon us. It takes a certain amount of silence just to realize how totally most of us live in our imagination. If we choose to start experimenting, however, then we are acting scientifically. We suspend our judgmentalness for a while and thereby enter the unknown. We perform our experiments, and then we test the empirical results against our theory.

On this board we have thirty or more people who are regularly posting statements. A small handful of those people are not attached to their thoughts at all. They think, but they are free of their thinking. Everybody else is attached to some degree to various thoughts they have. Many people on this board regularly think, "I am a very spiritual person," and they believe this idea. No one who is awake, however, ever thinks this kind of thought.

Your own posts, for example, show that you are strongly attached to several ideas. You don't like the idea that science might be a valid approach to things that you consider "spiritual." You think that flesh is inferior to a "higher mind." That's okay. Go with your gut. Forget science or a "fleshly" approach. You sense that silence and stillness is the way, and that will definitely work, so go with silence and stillness 100%. You can't go wrong because silence and stillness will take you out of your mind and lead you to the living truth. When you discover your oneness with the truth and Louise disappears, then you will look back, laugh, and say, "Oh yeah, now I see what that nasty stupid scientific-minded Zendancer was talking about." Until then I'll just keep waltzing and cha-cha-ing. (And remember, if someone makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, it is telling you something about the ideas to which you are attached) Wop a ditty doo wa wa.......

[lightmystic]

That's cool.

Dec 2, 2009 14:54:31 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Porto: You understand it and I understand it, but most people do not. I'm trying to find ways to illustrate that all boundaries are imaginary. For example, I might hold up a cookie in front of an audience, give it to someone to eat, and then ask the audience when the cookie ceased to be a cookie and became the person I gave it to? Did the cookie cease to be a cookie when it passed between the person's lips, when it got swallowed, etc. etc. I'm trying to find graphic illustrations that help people "feel" the illusory nature of boundaries. Conceptual habit patterns are so powerful that it often takes several examples to shake up the conventional outlook. Alan Watts had several good examples in some of his books. One that I remember was his illustration that cause and effect are illusory. He said to imagine a cat walking behind a picket fence were one slat is missing. First you see the head, then the legs, and eventually the tail. One might conclude that a head "causes" a tail because a tail always follows a head. When I first read that illustration thirty-five years ago, I couldn't quite understand what he was pointing to, but gradually several example like this helped me sense that there was something odd about the way I thought about cause and effect. In college I had a professor who one day explained that you can't have "good" without "bad," but I didn't get it at all. It takes a while to see through dualism and a lot longer to get totally free of it. I've noticed during the last fifteen years of teaching that if I spend a fair amount of time getting people to think about obvious illusions, they become "softened up" or more open to seeing through the less obvious illusions.

[ventura23]

[quote author=zendancer board=misc thread=456 post=3

Your own posts, for example, show that you are strongly attached to several ideas. You don't like the idea that science might be a valid approach to things that you consider "spiritual." You think that flesh is inferior to a "higher mind." That's okay. Go with your gut. Forget science or a "fleshly" approach. You sense that silence and stillness is the way, and that will definitely work, so go with silence and stillness 100%. You can't go wrong because silence and stillness will take you out of your mind and lead you to the living truth. When you discover your oneness with the truth and Louise disappears, then you will look back, laugh, and say, "Oh yeah, now I see what that nasty stupid scientific-minded Zendancer was talking about." Until then I'll just keep waltzing and cha-cha-ing. (And remember, if someone makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, it is telling you something about the ideas to which you are attached) Wop a ditty doo wa wa.......
.............................................................................................................Hi Zendancer
How can you tell when Zendancer disappears?
What have you inquired about yourself and seen your lower nature subside and newness rise?
I know very well about feelings and anger and discomfort, and I can see the causes underlying, but I simply watch it without falling into it most of the time. When a new one comes up I do nothing about it, but, feel the pain of it and the pain leads to the answer.
The path of self observation reveals much.
I see I have not disappeared, that thing inside is still alive and God keeps me aware of what is going on.

I am sorry, but I am not a reader so I read your long posts by quickly running through it and pick up on what I choose to respond to.

Thanks for your imput and your ideas. This is a personal path and what fits one does not fit all. Keep that in mind, you might learn from that.
I know what lies within, seen and experienced it at it's worse so for me I know I have overcome alot of my old nature that I have been programmed to believe is me, I know it is not and I do not assume that I have made it. There is a danger in thinking so.

Louise


[/quote]

[zendancer]

Louise: Who we are does not appear or disappear. I simply discovered that who I am is not limited to a particular body/mind. When this body/mind (that we can imagine as "Zendancer") dies, I will still be here. The same is true for you. Who we are never goes anywhere. The idea that we are things separate from anything else is the fundamental illusion. "What is" manifests "just like this." We can imagine "just like this" as "Louise" or "Zendancer," but those things are mental cartoons. There are not two here. It is oneness playing all the roles. The one looking out of this body's eyes is the same one looking out of your body's eyes.

Also, you might want to investigate this idea of there being a "lower nature" or "higher nature." What I'm pointing to has no boundaries anywhere. It's like the "hot, cool, cold" or "water/wave" illustrations. Where is the line between "higher" and "lower" or "east" and "west" or "good" and "bad?" No matter how hard we search, we'll never find a line anywhere. They exist only on the personal computer screens in our heads.

If we throw away every idea, only one brilliant unimaginable thing remains. THAT is who we are. Cheers.

[vacant]

If we throw away every idea, only one brilliant unimaginable thing remains. THAT is who we are.

I really want to throw away every idea, every concept, and in fact trying to spot them and cut them off is my principal form of meditation at the moment, my main practice. And following Bob Fergeson’s advice I apply myself to “stalking the I thought”, trying not to be fooled by it. But what’s one to do, there must still be plenty —certainly too much— attachment to false ideas, opinions and identities that I’m not aware of at all, or I would surely see what it is we talk about here more clearly. I whole-heartedly invite That to burn through the clouds.

Oh ZD, somehow it’s good to know it’s the same One who looks through ZD’s eyes as through Vacant’s. But I long to see it as clearly as you do. There’s something uncomfortable about longing, but then I’d rather that than oblivion!

[zendancer]

Vacant: Some people find stalking the "I" thought very effective, but I never had much luck with it. I tried many different forms of self-inquiry, but they all stayed too abstract and too distant for me. I had better luck with breath awareness, feeling the breath, silent listening, and being alone in nature. You might try listening to "universal sound," the background seashell roaring sound that you can hear when you become relatively silent (or any other sound for that matter).

You also might go for some walks, alone, in the woods, in a park, or by a river or ocean (if you live near water). I love to climb mountains, so I often go to a section of the Cumberland Trail near my home that isn't used by many people. I get a good physical workout (my favorite trail climbs fifteen hundred feet or more in less than two miles) and I enjoy looking at all of the rock formations, trees, plants, animals, etc. along the way. At the top there are several terrific overlooks, and on a clear day I can see the Smoky Mountains more than eighty miles away and hundreds of cows in the valley a thousand feet below me. I often sit on the rock ledges of the overlooks and watch the crows circling overhead or the changing shapes of the clouds. I may start hiking up the trail with a lot of thoughts on my mind, but they die away pretty quickly, and by the time I come back down the trail two hours later I am looking at plants, mosses, and lots of other stuff that most hikers probably never notice. If I'm lucky I'll see deer, wild turkeys, skunks rooting for grubs under the leaves, or other animals. It's a very pleasant way to end the day. If I lived near the ocean, I would walk there because the area near the surf is teeming with life and interesting activities.

You might put a note on the dashboard of your car to remind yourself to look and listen. What can you see or hear? If horns are honking, just hear the sounds without labeling anything. Look at the vehicles coming toward you so intensely that it cuts off your usual roofbrain chatter. Look at your hands on the steering wheel.

Stay focused upon "what is," and that habit will eventually cut through everything. Remember, too, that what you are looking for is always right in front of your eyes, but it isn't what you think it is. It is what your eyes are seeing when your brain isn't imagining anything. Trust your eyes. Let them see like the lens of a camera, without distinction. A camera does not see anything separate from anything else. A camera "sees" the truth. It doesn't see good or bad; it doesn't see tables or chairs; it only sees "what is," a unified field of being. Believe me, if you stay focused upon "what is," you will find what you are looking for. Cheers.

[klaus]

Zendancer,

Explain how imagination exists without awareness.

Does not thought and no-thought arise within awareness?

Empitness is Form.......